How It Affects SEO?

Facebook has now become a trusted social networking website with its rich and varied content and style. For companies and marketing organizations, the most important benefit is the opportunity to place links to the company website in Facebook pages. The next is the placing of targeted keywords in the content on various strategic sections like ‘about’,’Info’and ‘Q & A’ sections. There should be a balance for the keywords because excessive key words often give negative results. The Q & A sections and chat features provide interactive conversations and give a live experience for the visitors.Facebook’s like button and share feature give a network of like mined people who will spread the business in a large scale.

The Facebook pages allow not only content but images and videos as well. This helps to educate the customers by providing enough information they seek. Getting quality inbound links from associated websites and blogs help a lot in driving traffic to the website. Using the static FBML application, a specific page can be created to the visitors to land on.

The more numbers of fans a website get, greater is the linking that website get. Therefore keeping more fans will help to dominate in SERP. Facebook has now grown to a large social networking application where people can interact, chat and express their feelings in a great way. For many small businesses a Facebook page is a second home page that describes the business goals, products or services and about its history, future plans and quality policies. Today Facebook can be accessed from mobile phones, tablets, ipods, blackberry and other similar devices.

Related posts:

1. Is Facebook Losing User Attention?
2. 9/10 People Like Brands on Facebook
3. Facebook Advertising – Find Managers

How to Get Google Plus Badge On Websites?

Creating a Google plus badge on websites and blogs is very easy. First we need to create a Google plus page with relevant text, images and videos. The page can be linked to your website by adding some codes to the header of the website template. Here are the steps in detail.

1. Create a Google plus page and note the long string of numbers in the address bar.

2. Go to Google plus page badge customization page and choose the type of badge you want.

3. Copy the code found below the page and paste it on your website.

5. The page button will be there just like the buttons for Facebook and Twitter.

How Google Plus is Going to Affect SEO?

The new Google plus one button will allow people to recommend websites and blogs to friends, family and colleagues. If the website gets more plus ones, the website will get more authority in the eyes of Google. As the page gets more authority than the competitors, naturally its ranking may go higher in the search results.

Some SEO experts still believe that Google plus is not going to make drastic changes in search results. The reason is that several other social networking components are already working much before and hence Google’s recent entity cannot make a substantial impact at present. The Facebook and Twitter are well established and their presence cannot be ignored very soon. Therefore an early prediction on the effect of Google plus on SEO is not possible now.

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2. The most shared post on the internet
3. 1 Week Google PageRank Jump

cufon vs @fontface

You don’t have to make your best looking fonts into an image, and you don’t have to use flash any more to make fonts look great.

50,000 likes in 24 hours – Who are the top Facebook gainers?

In 24 hours the Pillsbury Facebook page went from 30,000 likes to 80,000 likes. All sparked by a coupon for money off their frosting range. Target is experiencing an amazing growth in fans by offering 25 x $25 vouchers, resulting in over 500,000 fans this week.

PNG vs JPG

Both JPG and PNG are methods that describe how a program encodes an image file. Basically a JPG describes an image in blocks, and the greater the file size allowed, the smaller those blocks are. A PNG looks at each individual pixel and says there are 6 reds then 4 blues in a line etc.

iPhone Market Penetration

Some random stats on iPhone market penetration.

Australian Google Places Citations

Google Places is the new primary goal for SEO experts. There are a lot of things you can do to increase your chances of being listed high, such as making sure you claim your listing in the first place. However there is one thing that will make all the difference, and that is making sure you have your address and telephone number listed in as many places as possible.

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Modern marketing methods allow you to track your ROI at every step of a campaign. Long story short, if you are not optimising your campaign for ROI, then you are probably throwing money down the drain. Google Analytics, and a range of other tools, allow you to calculate where you are making your money and what caused that to happen. There are three things you need to do first before you can really start looking at your ROI on SEO.

1. Understand what the value of a sale is. If you are an ecommerce store, then that should be easy. If  you are a service provider, that might be a little harder to quantify, but you should know what your average sale value is.
2. Calculate what your profit margin is on an average sale
3. Set up Google Analytics Goals or Ecommerce tracking (if you can) and give your goal value your average sale value.

This now allows you to carry out a wide range of analysis using Google Analytics. Generally there are three key ways to improve your ROI on SEO;

1. Target keywords that generate more revenue
2. Reduce your targeting on keywords that generate low revenue or a high exit/bounce rate
3. Improve your landing pages and product offerings to encourage more people to buy

1. ROI on Keywords

The number one ranking for a keyword might not get you the most number of sales. 10k queries for a product you never sell is almost a waste of time and money. This metric will allow you to track the value of the keywords that you are getting searched. Setting it up is straight foward. In Google Analytics follow these steps;

1. Custom reporting
2. New custom report
3. Name: ROI on Keywords
4. Metric Group: Revenue or Goal Completions
5. Dimension Drilldown: Keyword
6. Save

This should leave you with a view something like the information at the very top of this page.

One thing to remember about this is that as Google is now moving users to secure browsing, you will not get a complete set of results for the keyword metric, as this is not carried across with SSL.
This will then allow you to see which keywords are generating the goal completions or the ecommerce conversions for you. Whilst we do not recommend focussing ONLY on these keywords (as other un-ranked words might also generate sales for you), this is a good start to calculating your ROI.

2. Landing Page ROI

1. Metric Group: Revenue or Goal Completions, and Pageviews
2. Dimension Drilldown: Landing Page

This will tell you which of the pages your customers have landed on before they completed a goal. This is probably the second most important metric after the keyword ROI. It will tell you if a page is ranking for you, generating pageviews, but not generating revenue. This then gives you three great options;

1. Fix/change pages that are not generating any revenue for you
2. Focus your SEO on pages that are generating revenue for you
3. Change the keywords you are optimising for poorly performing pages

Your best performing page will probably be your front page. After that you should be able to see your top performing internal pages by revenue and pageviews. On the image to the right we have sorted by pageviews, and you can see there are three poorly performing pages there with a good number of views.

3. Keyword Bounce Rate

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• The rank of a webpage is the sum of the value of links pointing at it. Just like recommendations.
• This is no longer the complete picture, but is still a base

The Main Factors in SEO

• On Page Factors
• Meta Tags (Title & Description)
• Image Tags
• Content
• Bold and h3 Tags
• Originality

The Main Factors in SEO

• Off Page Factors
• Trustworthiness of a domain
• Links (Authority)
• Website loading speed (affects 5% of websites)
• Competition for keywords
• Google’s Fickle Algorithm

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

Keywords

• The words that people are using to search for your services
• People use one word (plumber) or many words (Best Sydney Heritage Home Plumber)
• Understanding which words to aim for and which words people will actually use is an important part of the SEO process
• The main aim of selecting keywords is to be CONSISTENT, don’t overuse them in your website.

Selecting Keywords

• Use Google Keyword tool to find the most common keywords
• When thinking about which keywords to target think about these things;
• Your location is important
• When someone is ready to buy, they will put “buy…” at the start
• People doing research on a topic eventually buy

Long Tail Keywords

• 90% of visitors to websites use keywords outside of the top 100 most frequently used

AIDA in Keyword Selection

• Think about the keywords people use when they go through the buying cycle (Researching, Comparing, finding retailers, purchasing etc)
• Researchers use words like “best…” “cheapest”
• Comparison shoppers use brand names
• People about to buy look first for local and then for the cheapest vendors
• When someone is ready to purchase they will look for reviews on the retailer.

Meta Tags

• Used by websites to describe content
• Found at the very start of a web page (before a Browser gets to build how it looks)
• In old HTML they had to be manually put in
• Most systems, like WordPress, allow you to specify
• Google uses these (mostly) in its search pages

Image Tags

Content Quality

• What you have written about
• Is your content readable?
• Does it make sense
• Have you repeated yourself (negative points)
• For any good content, 250 words is the minimum amount before Google takes notice
• The volume (number of pages) of content is also an important factor

Bold and h3 Tags

• Bold tags make a word stand out, Google looks to see where you have put emphasis
• h3 Tags are used at the top of a document to give the page a visible title.

Originality

• Now even more important as Google is targeting duplicate content
• It is important to write in your own voice
• Don’t copy your competitors
• Don’t copy from other websites

Trustworthiness of a Domain

• This includes the following factors
• The age of the domain
• Where the website is hosted
• If the domain has been

Links

• Links coming from websites with high authority are the best way a website becomes highly ranked
• Links coming in from bad areas do nothing AT WORST. Poor incoming links will not harm you

Website Speed

• High speed websites indicate user experience
• Websites that load well and fast are more useful than those that don’t
• It is estimated this factor only affects 5% of websites, but that is likely to increase

Your Competition

• How well your competition ranks
• How many links they have
• How much content they have
• Their other ranking factors

Google’s Algorithm

• Google changes the fundamental structure of their algorithm a few times a year. They change the parts of the algorithm almost daily
• Over the years they have made changes that affect whole industries (gambling, pornography) and even targeted individual websites

10 Commandments of Google

• Thou shalt not link to bad guys (porn, malware, virus)
• Thou shalt not keyword Stuff (make content readable)
• Thou shalt not cloak pages
• Thou shalt not steal content
• Thou shalt not use hidden links
• Thou shalt create original content
• Thou shalt use meta tags
• Thou shalt use Robots.txt
• Thou shalt link sparingly
• Thou shalt provide a site-map

Things Google has targeted for punishment

• Duplicate content
• Blog spammers (comment spamming)
• Spammers in general (content, keywords, forums etc)
• Websites that offer the viewer poor quality experience

Tools to use

• Open Site Explorer
• Yahoo Site Explorer
• Google Webmaster tools
• SEO MOZ Toolbox

Tips For SEO

• Write as much good quality content about your industry as possible (blog)
• Start exchanging links with other quality sites (or use a managed link exchange like linkmarket.net)
• Guest blog/write articles for other websites that allow you to promote yourself
• Engage in an industry forum that allows signature links

Tips to Turbo SEO

• Hold competitions with high value prizes
• Sponsor sports clubs/sporting events with the clause that you get a link back from
• Write contentious blog posts that could gain industry attention
• Use PR (talk to you local papers/industry mags)
• Try to generate customer testimonial videos

What about highly competitive markets?

• Engage an external link and content builder (oDesk)
• Re-Write blog content (into smaller attention grabbing chunks) and syndicate it to article directories
• Use WordPress.com, Weebly.com, Blog.com to create supplementary blogs about your industry

A Link Wheel

What is a Link Wheel?

• Link wheels act as a template for building links back to your website
• You should only link in one direction (down to your website or across to your other “assets”)
• You need a high volume of links a the outer levels pointing in to a select few key websites you control

Things to keep in mind

• Use several browsers, and continuously clean the cookies/temp files off at least one. Google stores browsing information on your computer that influences the results only YOU see. If you want to see what the world sees you need a clean browser

What are “nofollow” links?

• A link can be given a nofollow attribute:

–   <a href=“…” rel=“nofollow”>text</a>

• This tells a search engine that the website cannot guarantee the quality of the webpage it is linking to
• Whilst this was an issue in the past, it is now understood that this attribute matters less.
• It is good to aim for links that don’t have this attribute, but it is not critical.

Should I buy links?

• Generally no. You can’t even offer people an incentive to link to you (discount etc).
• There are some instances (good directories etc) where paying an administration fee is relatively acceptable.

What about link directories?

• Good for small websites starting out on low time/money budgets
• Value is questionable for large scale link building exercise
• Some industries have a few select directories that are VERY good for traffic
• Some directories (like Yahoo) are worth spending the money on in highly competitive industries

What about article directories

• The value is highly questionable on their own (especially after the recent Google update)
• They are not bad if you use them to build a link wheel to your other blogs, and if you link to your author page (look up “Angela & Paul’s backlinks”)

What about blog commenting?

• Excellent way to engage in your industry
• Great way to build up a network
• Spam commenting is a massive no-no

How do customer reviews count?

• Yes, Google has said that positive reviews are good indication of the quality of a website
• Encourage your customers to write a review about your business
• The reviews can be left almost anywhere that is recognised as a review website.

Google Places

What about Local SEO?
(Google Places)

• One listing per physical location
• Use information as it would appear in the real world.
• Do NOT try to “SEO” your business name and business listing.
• Provide individual location phone number in place of a call center.
• If you have the chance to list your business in a small local area, do it. Do not try to go up against larger competitors in bigger areas.
• Local citations are king. Get your business and address listed in as many local places as possible.
• Good reviews will improve your position

What about Social Media

• Social media includes Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon
• They are great places to find what people are talking about in your industry
• Submit content that is only of interest/high value
• Submit content at your own risk (online communities can be policed vigorously)

What about Social Networking?

• Facebook, MySpace, YouTube etc are all good places to have another web page
• The value of links FROM these pages is questionable
• They are great for traffic
• They are great to have a second/third/fourth presence on a search page. Sometimes your Facebook page will rank number two to your website at number one.

SEO vs PPC

• PPC = Pay Per Click, Adwords advertising
• SEO is long term, tactical and relatively permenant
• SEO Takes time to build up but allows a very broad base. It is great for building a brand.
• PPC is tactical, shorter term, non-permenant. It is great for short term offers, events etc.

White Hat SEO

• White Hat SEO covers anything that is deemed “good” by Google (note this is an ever changing playing field)

Grey Hat SEO

• Mass duplication of content – not against the rules, creates links of questionable value, sometimes can be the only way to get thousands of links
• Creating fake forum users (where you can list a website)
• Social media, blog and forum spamming.

Black Hat SEO

• Anything that will get you blocked by Google.
• Cloaking links
• Faking content
• Misleading search engines as to your content
• Linking to malware
• Linking to bad websites

What is Sandboxing?

• Short term penalisation that Google has been speculated to impose on websites that build links or content too quickly. (or somehow break the myriad of Google rules)
• You can get into this by “Over Optimising”
• Sometimes the only thing to do to get out of it is to stop working on SEO and wait.

Pure Speculation

• Google has flagged that it will measure how long a person stays on a page as measure of the quality of that website
• The position of a link on a page may indicate intention/value. For instance a link in the body of a page will carry more value than that on a menu

How do you measure results?

• Majestic SEO
• Digital Point rank tracker
• Google Analytics

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1. What is a link farm?
2. A very brief outline of SEO
3. Finding your strongest link sources

We thought we would write a little post about our latest client Zahara Clothing, a Boutique clothing designer and retailer based in Sydney. They have sold fasthion designs since early 2000, and have since ventured into the online world, where you can see some of their stunning designs at their website. They have bought us on board to promote their website and to help them sell more fashion

products. Our work is going to first aim to make their website more search engine friendly, and make sure that all their meta tags and image tags are correctly aligned. After that we will be working on link building and web promotion to drive traffic to their website.

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1. Our New Wholesale Restaurant Supplies Client
2. New eCommerce SEO Client – The Cherry

This image above is an attempt to show that Google, and Users, are looking for information that would fit the top write of both quadrants. This position fits the ideal for pages that will be shared, viewed regularly and develop a following.

SEO copywriting is an artform that many so called SEO companies fail to master. The graph above shows the four extremes of any web article. On the one extreme you have uninteresting content, that lacks detail and is technically wrong or lacking in technical accuracy. This extreme is typified by many article marketing websites, where the content is borderline unreadable. The other extreme is interesting, factually correct original content, which is probably the holy grail of content. Websites that do this well feature highly in search terms for every day items like “iphone 4 review” etc.

The main purpose of the image above is to show how websites use original and interesting information to get links to their pages, increase traffic, become an authority and rank well for the keywords they choose.The only other metric that is missing from this table is “consistency”. Search engine crawlers look for consistent keyword placement within the text of an article, the title and the description tag.

The main goal of ANY copywriting is to interest and persuade the reader. Writing that “optimizes” a search but offers little useful information or only weak persuasion will end up not converting the customer, and is unlikely to get any natural inbound links. A good example of this is About.com and HowTo.com, which were recently punished in Google’s Panda update. These articles actually turn away from the site rather than generating sales.

What sets apart websites like Arstechnica.com is that they add detail and offer incite into the articles they are writing. They often add interesting opinion too. This makes the content not only stand out to search engines, but also to readers as well. Most normal news websites like SMH.com.au rarely add extra incite into international news. Only on local breaking stories, where they have active journalists on the ground, do they show where their strengths lie. Websites like Reddit and blog collections on WordPress.com fall somewhere in the middle. They may have interesting content, but the discussions on Reddit rarely warrant interest to anyone but memehunters. Blogs often have interesting content, but lack the technical detail and consistency that would place them high in search engines and high in people’s RSS feeds.

Another way of looking at good content is that you need to become a thought leader. Make your content interesting and technically correct, to stand out.

No related posts.

In a job market where there are plenty of candidates, a recruitment firm needs to make sure their online marketing targets clients. With the job market changing, and most firms starting to go direct through services like LinkedIn, there has never been a more important time to make sure you are maximising the leads generated through your website. Firstly, there are three things you should do with your website to make sure you are going to convert, before you start looking at SEO or online marketing

1. Make sure you have a page just for client companies that shows off how you are different. Talking about experience is a good thing, but also talking about some of the processes you go through to find the right candidate can help too.
2. Make sure you have testimonials and links to client websites already there. Some companies worry about competitors stealing their clients, but really you should expect your competitors to be looking to do this anyway, having a few client links isn’t going to change that fact.
3. Focus on one niche, or one geographical area. In our experience websites that focus on one or two core areas convert at a far higher rate than just “Sydney Recruitment Agency”. This will also give you your keywords that you can use to target with your SEO.

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When using Google Adwords, the key question for high traffic websites is, if I stop using Adwords, will I still get an equivelant level of traffic. In what Google are calling “Search Ads Pause Studies”, a group of researchers observed organic click volume in the absence of search ads. They compared 400 studies of Adwords advertisers to see what happens to traffic if you turn off Adword. Their meta-analysis showed that over 89% of the ads clicks are incremental, in the sense that the visits to the advertiser’s site would not have
occurred without the ad campaigns. Across all studies, regardless of search volume, they found that 97% of traffic was due to the Google Adwords campaigns.

The study is compelling, and it does show that SEO and Adwords can work hand in hand. However there were a few flaws. The main one is that search position was not accounted for. A high spend Adwords advertiser could be number one in paid results for thousands of keywords, a position which is hard to obtain with just organic search. This would result in a lot of traffic being attributed to paid results, and not much for organic positions. The second is that there was no balance for the size of the website that was being advertised. A large website with thousands of pages might have a comparable level of traffic in organic searches, however this does not fit a typical profile of Adwords advertisers. What is more likely is that these sites were small and had very low traffic for key search terms normally.

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2. Cost of Australian Adwords falls 10% in October
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1. Would you trust the information presented here?

2. Is this article written by an expert?

3. Does this article have obvious errors?

4. Does the article provide original content or information?

5. Does this article contain insightful analysis?

6. Would you consider bookmarking this page?

7. Are there excessive adverts on this page?

8. Would you expect to see the article in print?

Domain Level:

1. Would you give this site your credit card details?

2. Would you trust “professional” info from this site?

3. Would you recognize this site as an authority?

Based on these 11 questions, Will Critchlow from Distilled then showed how you could run a very quick survey to see what visitors to your site thought of your content.

As you can see, they are all questions that relate to the perception of the information being presented.

Related posts:

1. What is Google Panda? (AKA Farmer Update)
2. The Panda Fallout – Has Google Missed The Mark?
3. Lessons from Article Directories – Panda Proof Content