Seo Marketing
Dealing With Your Local Search Clients in 2011
Through her work with SEOs, Miriam Ellis has determined a short list of best practices which she believes to be instrumental to a clean, successful local search strategy which she outlines in this article. She offers her advice to SEO practitioners on providing the best guidance possible to clients who seek to improve their Local SEO performance in 2011.
The first step is to identify which type of client you are working with, of which there are three types:
1.The “Total Newbie” Client:
This type of client has little to no knowledge of SEO or Local Search practices and may know nothing about Local or SEO web hosting at all. They should be taught good SEO and Local practices but are desirable as clients since consultants start off with a “clean slate” and won’t have to do any cleaning up of past Local efforts.
2. The “Reluctant Novice” Client
These clients have some working knowledge of SEO practices and may have already implemented some strategy. The bad news is, oftentimes their decisions may not be the right ones for their business and corrections or overwrites may be necessary to get their campaign back on track.
3. The “Black Hat” Client
This client is speeding full throttle towards a campaign completely comprised of dubious Local practices. As a local consultant you must first find out why they believe this strategy to be a good one, then determine whether or not you can help the situation. This client’s attitude will bear a lot of weight on this determination.
Action Items:
Once you’ve developed rapport with your client and you’ve decided to work together, it’s up to you to determine which areas of their Local campaign need the most work. Some of the more common elements where Local goes off the tracks for small business owners are:
The Place Page Business Title, which should be the exact legal name of the business and nothing else.
Place Page Categories, of which the business should have less than five.
Business Description, the best use of which is still up for debate…keywords or no keywords?
Business Duplicates, which are determined by the type of business model.
Reviews, which are best left to legitimate reviewers and not paid review providers.
Poor On-Page Local SEO, which is determined by a full-page audit of the client’s site.
Copywriting, which may need to be outsourced in the page content cannot be written in-house.
Greedy Clients, which are, by definition a handful. Steer them clear of unscrupulous practices.
The Wrap Up:
Remember that we all use Local Search to make our lives easier. Gaming the system penalizes all of us, and it’s our responsibility as Local SEOs to help keep the infrastructure of the system on the up-and-up. The point of Local is to put e-commerce into the hands of small and large businesses alike, so help your clients understand what role they should play.
This article was summarized by Heather Hendrick
The Six Best New Tools for SEO This Year
Rand Fishkin, SEO extraordinaire, recently came out with a list of the tools he thinks are changing SEO right now. SEOHosting.net recaps Rand’s thoughts below:
Ontolo
Finally, a tool to help streamline the impossibly complex task of managing a linkbuilding campaign. Ontolo helps SEOs keep track of everything from .gov links to competitors profiles to backlink tracking. Their functionality includes some productivity hacks as well as some really useful sorting/filtering options. This tool’s really for professionals, but reviews have been great thus far.
Keyword Research Beta from SEOGadget
This tool allows SEO marketers to simply plug in keywords, link the whole thing back to Google Analytics then visualize the endless opportunities available. These opportunities include ranking patterns for untapped keywords and really offer marketers and seo hosting companies a way to determine a campaign’s potential.
Trunk.ly Offers Twitter Tracking (Say that three times fast)
This free gadget from BinaryPlex is super simple and easy to use. Basically, you plug the function into your Twitter feed and it displays for you a timeline of your Tweets and those of your friends, making networking and brand building simple. Looking back at old Tweets and discovering trends or possible blog content ideas are the core of Trunk.ly’s usefulness.
Markup.io Makes Screenshots Simple
Gone are the days of pasting screenshots to Photoshop, making notes, then saving the whole thing. Markup’s idea is basic: click on the bookmark, drag and drop shapes, comments, and other “markups” into your current screen view then save the whole thing as a screenshot. Brilliant.
Content Optimizer Leverages Keywords
Virante aims to make the Labs LDA tool more useful as it currently doesn’t offer suggestions to help make content more relevant to a particular query. The tool Virante built searches Google’s top keywords then makes recommendations for word substitutions and gives you a new LDA score to help determine the effectiveness of a block of content.
SERP Analysis Worksheets
Andrew Wright and Ben Huff took it upon themselves to improve an Excel data sheet presented by Fishkin to explain why top ranking keywords are, well, top ranking. Their graphs and charts make the data easier to read and are more algorithmically based, and SEO Moz hopes to have the whole thing turned into a useful web app by next year for use by web hosting and SEO companies alike.
Rand’s article summarized by Heather Hendrick
SEO Predictions 2011: Rand Fishkin’s Thoughts
In a recent article, SEO guru Rand Fishkin takes a look back at how his 2010 SEO predictions fared and prepared a new list for 2011 as well. Find the original article here: http://www.seowebhosting.net/seo-hosting-blog/7-predictions-for-seo-in-2011/
Overall, Rand’s past year predictions have been relatively accurate. With a couple of exceptions, he hit the nail on the head in saying that Google’s going to further hone it’s treatment of Tweets and predicting that Google’s dominance would continue to grow closer to 80% of market share through the year. He was less accurate in predicting that SEO spending would continue to rise dramatically and that Conversion Rate Optimization would soon be thrust to the forefront of the SEO industry.
Offering 7 new SEO predictions for 2011, Rand assumes that some trends in the industry will continue. His predictions are:
1. Someone will finally prove that clicks and number of visitors to a site improve the site’s organic rankings. Through search testing or even the engines themselves, we’ll all have confirmation that types of clicks and visitors affect the algorithmic method which will in turn affect the SEO hosting industry.
2. Google Maps will (finally!) incorporate some type of filtering and sorting system for data queries. In an attempt to keep up with Yelp’s superior review functions, Google’s going to have to add additional filters for features like price, proximity, etc.
3. “Social Search” will become an even more important player in SEO. This will come in the form of increased search results created by social networks and will almost certainly involve the big players like Twitter and Facebook.
4. Referral Strings will be used by Google to signal ranking strength to marketers. Google may even go so far as to start offering Google Analytics data to track these strings, but only if they make them more standardized than they are now.
5. Search will not be heavily impacted by Mobile Search and neither will SEO. Mobile will still be important but it won’t be a game changer. Instead, searching will continue to merge platforms and it’s all going to continue to fall under the SEO umbrella.
6. SEO software is about to take off. Once tools deemed “dreams” by SEO marketers, the functionality of products from companies like RavenTools and Search Metrics will start to be seen as a necessity. Search Marketers will have more software at their disposal than ever before as well as more options for SEO hosting products.
7. Someone will come up with a better, more general way to describe “SEO.” Rand himself says it best,
“…with the search engines expanding so far afield in the signals they consider and the verticals/media types they include, I have to face facts – SEO today calls for much more of a talented generalist than a pointed specialist. We need to be savvy about and good at so many facets of organic web marketing that to call us “SEOs” is less empowering and more limiting than in the past.”
These seven predictions make up Rand Fishkin’s guesses for where SEO is headed in 2011. He promises to check back in early 2012 to grade himself on how his predictions fared.
Google’s “Change Location” Put to the Test
Back in December, SEO Moz’s Dr. Pete and a few of his friends ran a small Local Search experiment to test the effectiveness of Google’s “Change Location” search feature. The point of the test was to determine if the results seen by an SEO marketer in one city matched those seen by someone in the city the search location had been “changed” to, see example below:
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The Test:
Three other marketers with seo hosting set up in various cities, namely Seattle, Portland, and Tampa helped Dr. Pete out with the test. Dr. Pete was in Chicago. One word queries were selected for each city, named below:
- Chicago – “pizza”
- Seattle – “coffee”
- Portland – “pubs”
- Tampa – “seafood”
Before running any searches, the marketers logged out of their Google accounts. They then ran each query separately from their own city and recorded the rankings of individual local listings. Also noted was whether each local result was a “Places” result or not.
The results are shown in the graph below:
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Surprisingly, all cities with the exception of Tampa seemed to match across the board. That is, when marketers changed their location to reflect a different city (other than Tampa), they had matching results to the marketer actually residing in that particular city. Though the Tampa results are difficult to explain, the marketer in Tampa was relatively far from the city center which may have skewed results.
The basic implications for SEO are that the functionality of the tool works. Basically, if you live in a city, you’re going to get matching results to someone who searches “from” your city using the Google tool. If you don’t, it’s difficult to say. The Change Location feature definitely has some usability for Local Search marketers out there, particularly if they’re working with a client with national locations.
One final note…
It appears that Google is now sometimes merging the Local result with an organic result (See Below), and the thought is that overall domain authority could be impacting the merge. It’s clear that Google is still changing and testing in the Local space and perhaps these merged results will see more screen time in the future.
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This SEO Moz post was summarized by Heather Hendrick
Ranking Signals Engines Should be Paying Attention To
Rand Fishkin of SEO Moz recently spoke about a few ranking signals that he’s giving second thoughts to. These signals have been brushed off by SEO consultants and SEO hosting blog writers in the past but potentially deserve a second look by engine search teams…
Brand and Domain Name Mentions:
What if those sources that the search engines classify as news are really sending ranking signals for potential keywords? It’s worth looking into the correlation of these two signals.
Trusted Sources Giving Out Nofollow Links:
Though these links are theoretically supposed to have little link juice value, the metrics show that the engines treat them as followed links or similarly. That is to say, engines can see who consistently links to good pages and therefore decide to give those pages better rankings.
Twitter and LinkedIn Profile Links:
Giving credence to the argument that social media links are growing in resonance, it follows that the users of these sites choose not to have “spammy”, useless links seen by those in their social or professional networks, so the general link pool here is relatively clean.
If Google Analytics Data Filtered by Traffic Patterns:
In theory, Google could sort sent/received traffic from a site to determine which sites are spammy and which are more legitimate. Spam sites tend to send out little traffic and don’t receive any from quality sites. This metric would be hard for marketers to game as it’s nearly impossible to get referral traffic from lots of unique, highly valuable site? The lists of overall domains could be sorted based on this data which is easily tracked in GA.
Mobile Visits, Interactions, and Check-Ins:
These are tough to track, but generally a site or business rarely gets clicks or activity from mobile users unless it’s highly interactive or useful, particularly in the age of mobile overload. This measurement would also be useful to filter spam and help accrue data for local rankings and seo hosting services.
Gmail Links and References:
In the same vein that Google delivers personalized ads to users based on the content of their Gmail emails, couldn’t the search team scrape data from sites mentioned in emails? They could deduce relevancy and legitimacy from the frequency of mentions.
Content That’s Good Enough to get Comments or User Generated Content:
Engines should assume that if people are participating and interacting around content on a site, it’s a high quality site in and of itself. Trackbacks, RSS feed comments, and overall uniqueness of content could be leveraged to help sort the quality from the spam.
Rich Media on the Site:
Generally, spammy sites don’t utilize a lot of great unique graphics, images, or photos. They won’t usually go to the trouble of making videos or podcasts or event building out Flash, and they certainly aren’t going to upload spreadsheets, PDFs or other Rich Media. Websites that deserve to be ranked higher generally have higher quality content and data since they’re managed by real people and this is a metric that could feasibly be quantified.
Rand’s post was summarized here by Heather Hendrick
Are you misusing Robots.txt?
Lindsay at SEO Moz explores the idea that many of the Internet’s best pages are being effectively blocked by robots.txt files and describes some of the more common flawed implementations of the strategy. Describing the history of robots.txt, Lindsay says, “The robots.txt protocol was established in 1994 as a way for webmasters to indicate which pages and directories should not be accessed by bots. To this day, respectable bots adhere to the entries in the file… but only to a point.”
What if…Your pages are still showing up in SERPs?
Though Google and other engines won’t index the content of a robots.txt file, they may still display the page itself in the index. See a couple of prominent examples below:
Ciscos’ Login Page
As you can see, Cisco’s page shows up for the search term “login” on Google. Since it’s a robots.txt file, it lacks a meta description as well as a text snippet in the description.
WordPress’ Next Blog Page
Shown below, WordPress’ Next Blog page is also indexed by Google but lacks a full SERP result. Clearly these examples show that robots.txt aren’t effective at keeping Google from indexing.
What if…Robots.txt blocks your inbound link juice?
When you use robots.txt to block indexing of your page’s content, you’re also signaling to Google that you don’t want any of the links on that page to pass any juice. Inbound links are also dead ended here, and you’re not using any of your links to the fullest potential and wasting any seo hosting products you’re using.
Here are a couple of the worst offenders of the robots.txt sort:
Digg.com
Digg blocked a page using robots.txt with an amazing 425,000 unique linking domains! Digg has since fixed the issue but Google has yet to catch up with their indexing, see below. A better solution would be to use NoIndex, like this:
<meta content=”noindex, follow”>
Blogger and Blogspot
These sites are losing juice between each other, and miraculously, they’re owned by Google! As Lindsay says,
“Blogger.com is the brand behind Google’s blogging platform, with subdomains hosted at ‘yourblog.blogspot.com’. The link juice blockage and robots.txt issue that arises here is that www.blogspot.com is entirely blocked with the robots.txt. As if that wasn’t enough, when you try to pull up the home page of Blogspot, you are 302 redirected to Blogger.com.”
A better way to do this is to implement a 301 redirect from Blogger.com to Blogspot.com and get rid of the robots.txt altogether.
Better Ideas:
Noindex
301 Redirect
Canonical Tag
Password Protection
Two issues that make robots.txt even less effective…
Bad Bots – who don’t adhere to the “rule” of noindexing
Competitors – who are digging through your blocked content to see what they can uncover
And here’s what Lindsay has to say about Non HTML and and System Content:
- It isn’t necessary to block .js and .css files in your robots.txt. The search engines won’t index them, but sometimes they like the ability to analyze them so it is good to keep access open.
- To restrict robot access to non-HTML documents like PDF files, you can use the x-robots tag in the HTTP Header. (Thanks to Bill Nordwall for pointing this out in the comments.)
- Images! Every website has background images or images used for styling that you don’t want to have indexed. Make sure these images are displayed through the CSS and not using the <img> tag as much as possible. This will keep them from being indexed, rather than having to disallow the “/style/images” folder from the robots.txt.
- A good way to determine whether the search engines are even trying to access your non-HTML files is to check your log files for bot activity.
Summarized by Heather Hendrick
Hands-On Tips For Link Building
Patty_Moogan at SEO Moz recently explored the difficulties SEO consultants have in setting up their clients to manage a link building program. A complex problem, many clients aren’t necessarily aware of what it takes or even where to start with such a strategy.
The first step: What are your resources and USPs?
Clients must first determine their Unique Selling Point (USP), i.e., what sets them apart from their competitors. Identifying these traits helps you identify quality links to pursue.
A good idea: don’t just use marketing materials to determine a USP. They should come from the overall company culture!
Some of the most commonly identified USPs are:
Influence – that is, staff who are well connected and may call on this network to help build a link portfolio
Products – if your site sells products like shampoo or cheap seo hosting, consider sending samples to bloggers or even donating them to gain news coverage
Discount Vouchers – yes, coupons work. If you can, use them often and responsibly.
Email Lists – email your clients to keep them interested, but only when you have something worth saying!
External Web Properties – does your company have a microsite? If not, consider using business pages on tools such as Facebook and Twitter
Existing Content – are you just sitting on great content that could be used as linkbait? If so, reuse it!
Environmentally Friendly or Charitable Causes – tout the good things your company does, it will gain coverage and get you links
Utilize Your Staff – if anyone has spare time, put them to work! There’s always something to be done in a link building campaign
Once you’ve identified your USPs, go out there and get links! First see who already inhabits the space you want. How do you do this? Google it!
Googling can open the door to guest blogging opportunities as well as white hat directories that can be utilized in a simple campaign.
When you’ve found your niche, all that’s left to do is get the links. First, identify some key players in the space you want to inhabit then utilize one of the tried and true techniques to get noticed:
Direct email: Seems spammy, but it works! Explain how you can help them and ask for what you want point blank.
Phone: Nothing works better than a human voice. You can get a quick answer and even quicker response.
Twitter: Basically, just interact with the people you’re “courting” on Twitter. Follow them, reTweet them and ask their opinions about things.
Commenting on blogs: Constructive, thoughtful blog comments, especially on an seo hosting blog, never go unnoticed. The same goes for spammy, obnoxious comment clutter.
Send others traffic: Webmasters use GA to track who’s sending them traffic…you won’t fly under the radar long with this tactic.
When one of these tactics works and you’ve got yourself in front of an influential site, start building a relationship. Keep in contact with the site owner in case you need to use them again or in the chance the link turns into some deeper business venture.
Bad Things Happen to SEO Overoptimizers
SEO genius Rand Fishkin over at SEO Moz has some thoughts about “overdoing” SEO, what it looks like, and how to avoid it.
Some of the more common over optimization techniques include:
Keyword stuffing in the meta, the content, and the title element of every page
Overly long and keyword rich URL strings that are hard to read
SEO Hosting based content that was never intended for readers
Backlink profiles without one single authority link
The difference between good and bad SEO is relatively slim, especially since best practices are hard to nail down. A bad but well intentioned SEO campaign probably looks like this:
- Notice analytics looking good and start optimizing meta tags with more keywords
- Nothing changes, so you start doing some casual, uninformed reading online
- Find some dubious resources, then make changes to the tags suggested and start adding keywords. Everywhere. In the meta, the content, and even in the footers.
- Seeing a non-related bump in metrics and assuming this means you’re an SEO genius and should repeat steps 1-3.
- Ultimately struggle with and give up entirely on SEO when nothing seems to work, never changing these bad habits or reversing the effects.
This doesn’t just hold for on-page optimization. People do not receive link spam nicely and have little tolerance for obviously spammy content. They will rip you and your site apart on social media sites which is very, very bad.
The engines don’t like it either. Over time, there has been a lot of documented research about Google changing titles and descriptions and even negatively altering rankings of sites that overoptimize, however innocently.
In the long run, sites who employ these strategies will not prosper, and Googles already started weeding out sites with perfect anchor text distribution and too much internal linking. Sites that host content specifically designed to pass link juice and not to perform for visitors will not fare well in a social media world. In addition, really good sites hardly ever link to sites with such obviously commercial intent. As backwards as it sounds, underoptimizing is no worse than overoptimizing.
Sizing up Your Online Competition
Over at SearchEngineGuide Stoney deGeyter had some thoughts about sizing up the competition, which we have summarized for you here.
Any good business owner sets up shop knowing full well who and what they are competing against. For some this may mean locally while for others the online space is where the battles are fought, so it’s important to know thy enemy.
The first step is obviously to determine who the industry leader is. Once that’s been established, you have to find out how they got there. Finally, know which keywords drive their business, which they rank for and exactly what kind of visitors they’re bringing in.
Sometimes the top ranking sites in your space aren’t actually in your space at all. This probably means that the keywords you think your clients are searching for are something different entirely, and the space you thought you’d conquer belongs to a whole different industry.
When you’ve established this pattern, start searching different keywords. For a while you may find the same problem but once you see some of your top competitors popping up you know you’ve hit keywords gold.
Now note what kind of sites you’re seeing. Are the competitors here pretty average with low technology sites? Or are they giants of the industry who have no intention of being passed anytime soon in the search rankings? Knowing this will help you carve a clear path for where you need to go and exactly what your limitations are.
If you’ve got the means to launch a full-scale SEO server attack against the big boys, do so! But don’t feel the need to wage a David and Goliath battle if your competition’s too far out of your league. It’s better to start on a smaller scale and reap the immediate, obvious benefits.
Once the groundwork is laid you can start building a foundation which you can leverage at a later point for increased rankings. The biggest difference is how fast you see those profits coming in!
Summarized here by Heather Hendrick
How to use FBML to make your Facebook business page unique
Stone Reuning recently discussed here the benefits of adding FBML to your business’ Facebook page. The article is summarized here…
What’s more important for a small business owner in the age of digital media than having a business profile page on Facebook? With Facebook eyeing an increased role in search, it doesn’t behoove any SMB not to have the giant on their radar screen.
A bland, boring Facebook profile is practically as useless as one that doesn’t exist at all, so many SMBs are wondering what they can do to make sure their page is optimized and personalized.
Unsurprisingly, Facebook has determined an internal need for their own markup language, Facebook Markup Language, known as FBML. A subset of HTML, the FBML language is accessed by first becoming an administrator of your business page. Once that’s done, add your page to the static FBML application. Once FBML is added to your profile, decide whether you want to access the function as a tab or as a box on your profile. Use the editing functions provided to give your FBML box a name.
Now customize!
Adding some pictures is a great way to start making a page unique. Photobucket is a great application though many use Flickr or even Facebook itself to store their photos. FBML accepts a maximum of 520 pixels. As Stone says, use the following code:
“<a href=”http://xxxxx” mce_href=”http://xxxxx” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://yyyyy” mce_src=”http://yyyyy” width=”##px” height=”##px” border=”0? alt=” “></a>
Place the target URL where you see the “xxxx” and the direct link to your uploaded Photobucket image where you see the “yyyy.” Place your images’ pixel height and width where you see the “##” symbol.”
Videos also work great, but remember, they too have a 520 pixel maximum.
“<fb:swf swfbgcolor=”000000″ imgstyle=”border-width:##px; border-color:white;” swfsrc=”http://www.youtube.com/v/xxxxx” imgsrc=”http://img.youtube.com/vi/xxxxx/2.jpg” width=”520? height=”400? />
The ‘xxxx’ you see is the video ID on YouTube, or the code you see after the equal sign in the following YouTube URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtFUX4ynYac”
Once your video is uploaded, feel free to adjust the swfbgcolor and imgstyle preferences.
If you like, set your FBML box as your default landing page. That way, each time you return to Facebook you’ll be ready to code immediately. Customization is as crucial on Facebook as it is in every other facet of the web.
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