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As Danny Sullivan, founding editor of Search Engine Land Search once said, “search is the second most important thing we do on the web, after email. And it continues to reshape itself every few months.” And that's why you need to be on the ball when it comes to the fine art of SEO. To help you with this, over the following pages, we bring you the essential advice, tips, techniques and tutorials you need to boost your ranking and make your site or business move in the right direction.
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We cover everything from avoiding getting blacklisted to speeding up your site and getting the best out of Google Analytics. Read on to discover top search, marketing and social tips from industry leaders…
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Contents
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Contents Page 18
Page 8
Page 20
Getting started in SEO Contents
30 best new SEO tools Build the perfect toolkit for SEO
Localising content 8
Top SEO myths Ten SEO myths destroyed
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SEO tricks that get you backlisted
24
SEO for startups 18
20 best Drupal modules A SEO toolkit for Drupal
22
Blacklisted tricks
Search marketing trends Top five trends
Improve rankings and traffic
A primer on SEO for startups
26
The future of SEO 20
Discover what's next for SEO
30
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Features and insight Page 46
Page 56
Page 74 Contents
Get to the top of Google Bryson Meunier has the details
38
Reduce your bounce rate Keep your visitors longer
46
Google's Analytics guide The insider's guide to Analytics
50
Optimise for mobile Twelve mobile techniques
56
Master mobile navigation Content for mobile devices
62
Understand your audience Techniques to understand users
Page 50
70
Beat Google link penalties Top techniques to tackle penalties 74
Content strategy in-depth Sandi Wassmer's content series
78
Interview: Karen McGrane The content strategist in profile
Page 92
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Expert tutorials
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Contents
Serve faster web pages
Make sites load faster
Use Nginx to serve static content
98
How to make sites render faster
Page 98 112
10 top SEO tips
Improve page load times
Glenn Alan Jacobs Jacobs shares top tips 101
Use content delivery networks
Utilise structured data
Build a responsive site
Schema for ecommerce products 102
A simple responsive website
Boost page performance
Retrofit older sites
Provide a faster page load time
Use responsive techniques
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Become a web pro
Page 138
Page 146
Page 155
Search
Analytics
Marketing
Semantic search Optimising web pages
Inconsistent data? 134
15 post-Penguin tips Backlinking top tips
Blogging 146
What's the point? 135 135
Keywords driving sales Which keywords are best?
Aiming for data reliability
The purpose of web analytics analyti cs
Google's remarketing option
147
A powerful marketing tool
148
Ensuring successful CRO
Post-Penguin link building
Conversions are changing
'S' stands for success
Customer conversion journeys
Getting Gett ing the balance right
What does 'SEO' mean? A definition for SEO
151
Testing times
Techniques and opportunities opportunit ies
137 137
150
Using infographics
Remarketing 136
Your marketing secret weapon
149
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154
Google Adwords 138
Enhanced Campaigns analysis
155 155
Inbound marketing Why the term isn't relevant
139 139
Social
Don't game the system Optimising best practice
Good social content 140
Creating content to engage
SEO is the glue SEO in the web design process
Targeting the customer 142
The SoLoMo trend
Seven essential tools Conversational SEO
Page 159
Why it's not possible
158
Social data and search 144
Website migration Move sites with renewed ease
157 157
Speedy social marketing
Seven SEO tools for your toolbox 143
Less type, more talk
156
The rise of social search
159
Make content shareable 145
Spark audience engagement
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BEST BES T TOOL TOOLS S
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Getting started
30 best SEO tools
30 best SEO tools You’ve heard the saying, 'A poor craftsman blames his tools'. In our world, it’s more like 'really awesome tools make me look good to my clients', or similar. Making sure you use the best tools is critical to being thorough, competitive and exceptional at your craft, but staying up-to-date is pretty difficult. I’ve been working in the trenches of the SEO industry for 10 years, watching different tools come and go, all gaining in complexity and usefulness as time goes on. Our industry evolves extremely rapidly, as does your need to keep an eye on what’s out there to help you be more effective and agile, especially when carrying out essential, but often mundane, digital marketing tasks. Let’s take a look at what are new, useful or downright awesome tools in inbound marketing, focusing on some of the key stages of the SEO process: research, technical, link building and content marketing outreach. To write this feature, I enlisted the input of some good friends in my industry, and of course, my team of over 20 SEOs at Builtvisible (http:// builtvisible.com) who work with these tools all day, every day.
Keyword research and audience profiling Among the classic keyword research tools has always been the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Unfortunately, the Google Keyword Tool is due to close very soon. In its place, Google announced the Keyword Planner (http://netm.ag/adwordsbz92), which has most of the data available from the original keyword tool and more to come. If you’re looking for even more keyword ideas, try tools based on the Google Suggest API like Ubersuggest (http://ubersuggest.org). You'll get far by simply creating a list of keywords and prioritising them by search volume. Type in your keywords and see what appears in the Google autocomplete box to get an idea of how people are searching around those words. If you’re building a serious data set, the smart money is in combining different
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Keyword planning Google's Keyword Planner replaces its Keyword Tool
Searchmetrics The ability to calculate search volume based on traffic algorithms
data points for extra validation. Finding low competition, high volume keywords is every search marketer's Holy Grail. Moz’s Keyword Difficulty Tool (http://moz.com/tools/keyworddifficulty) can estimate search volumes and combines data aggregated from Bing rankings for keyword by location and Moz’s own link data source, Mozscape (http://moz.com/products/api). Bing Webmaster Tools (www.bing.com/toolbox/ webmaster) has a nifty keyword tool, showing your average ranking position, the number of clicks and impressions for that particular keyword. If you have an Adwords API key, you could consider extracting keyword search volumes via its API by working with your development team (or using an Excel Tool like our Adwords API Extension for Excel: http://builtvisible.com/seogadget-forexcel). SEMrush (www.semrush.com) have a powerful API and present search volumes as reported by Google. An article by Russ Jones
Bing tools A tool to show your average ranking position
(http://netm.ag/russ-bz92) found that SEMrush’s data had the lowest error rate (compared to its own index) and a high level of coverage. What about the new stuff? Keyword research can move slowly at times. Because there’s no direct return for your efforts (just because you’ve done some keyword research hardly means your traffic will grow), I suspect lower levels of investment find their way into this corner of the SEM universe. With that said, we’re excited about Grepwords (www.grepwords.com), currently in beta, as a newcomer to the keyword research tool space, as well as Searchmetrics ( http://suite.searchmetrics. com/auth/login), which calculates a search volume based on its own traffic algorithms.
Search engine visibility monitoring When it comes to your organic rankings, there are lots of interesting tools that are handy for
The data Sometimes you want to be able to see all of the data. There are plenty of tools available to help you on a daily basis
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a quick health check or larger scale monitoring challenges. If you’re working in multiple locations, and you’d just like a little data, small web apps like Search Latte (http://searchlatte.com) help you check rankings in different countries quickly. With that said, some of us want to see all of the data! We use a few tools for rank checking on a day-to-day basis. Getstat (http://getstat.com) is an excellent, enterprise-level keyword tracking platform, with detailed reports, clear data presentation and useful alerts service. It’s also able to collect ranking data at the regional level, which is really useful for tracking rankings by US state. Advanced Web Ranking (www. advancedwebranking.com) is a powerful solution for scheduled, localised ranking, link monitoring, keyword research. It’s also a powerful, site-c rawlbased search engine accessibility monitoring platform. Combined with proxy services like Trusted Proxies (www.trustedproxies.com), it ’s fast
Getting started
30 best SEO tools
Trusted Proxies Suitable for most in-house SME SEO teams and agencies, Trusted Proxies can be configured to run on a server
and scalable enough for most in-house SME SEO teams and agencies. Usefully, it can be configured to run on a server, with AWR clients connecting to a single data source across your network.
Technical SEO and search engine accessibility I’ve always thought Bing SEO Analyzer (http:// www.bing.com/toolbox/seo-analyzer) in Bing Webmaster Tools is a really good tool for quickly identifying on page issues, like malformed containers, missing H1 elements and the like. Its real power comes from a simple to interpret user interface, often lacking in so many 'technical' SEO tools. The tool visibly renders the web page you’re analysing, and highlights any issues it finds
during the analysis process. Moz’s PRO toolset (http://moz.com) comes with a deep site crawler (lovingly referred to by its team as Roger Mozbot). Approximately once a week, you receive an update to your crawl data, with a user interface that updates you on crawler discovered errors, warnings and notices. Moz have a very simple to use, visual interface that's ideal for newcomers to SEO. Its data export, API services, link analysis and social monitoring make for a well-rounded advanced SEO campaign solution. Export data from its tools includes advanced, technical SEO features like the contents of your X-Robots filed in your server header response. Hardcore! Lately, Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider (www. screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider) has become the
SEO Spider Screaming Frog's SEO Spider has become the 'go to' site crawler
'go to' site crawler. Able to highlight SEO accessibility issues, SEO Spider comes with powerful filtering to weed out specific issues, like missing Google Analytics tracking code. It also has a nifty sitemap generator. I’m very excited about the premium service, DeepCrawl (www.deepcrawl.co.uk). It’s a great deal more pricey than annual subscription tools like Screaming Frog, and free tools like IIS SEO Toolkit (http://netm.ag/iis-bz92). Follow the handy installation guidelines (http://netm.ag/guidelinesbz92), but has the capacity to crawl industrial-size websites with millions of pages. This is something the others simply can’t do. Log analysis has taught me more about SEO than any other single activity in the last
SEO Analyzer Bing's tool is great for quickly identifying page issues
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Ahrefs A new tool to the scene, this link data monitoring tool is fast and has a powerful API
decade. You learn so much about SEO simply by looking at the resources Googlebot requests on your website. On that note, we recommend you try the free edition of Splunk (www.splunk.com/download) with a recent log file export, to see what you can find.
Link analysis, monitoring and reporting Link analysis has always been a rapidly-evolving area of our industry. In light of Google’s very recent Penguin algorithm updates, that evolutionary rate of change has increased exponentially. Every day, Chrome extensions like Check My Links (http:// netm.ag/check-bz92) are extremely useful for broken link building and general on page link checking. The rather wonderful Scraper (http:// netm.ag/scraper-bz92) makes light work of fetching URLs in batches from web pages.
Redirect Path Cleverly logs each redirect step
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The Web Developer extension for Chrome and Firefox have been a long time staple of any SEO interested in technical health. Redirect Path ( http://netm.ag/redirect-bz92) from Ayima cleverly logs each redirect step taken when a URL is requested by the browser, frequently highlighting when SEO-unfriendly, multiple hops are mad, or worse, where 302 redirects are lurking in the chain. There are some well-known players in the link data industry. Majestic SEO (http://developersupport.majesticseo.com) and Moz’s Mozscape (http://moz.com/products/api) both have a vast reach into the link graph (our agency uses the API services offered by both companies for our in-house tools). Probably the most frequently used tool in-house at Builtvisible for fast link appraisal would be Open Site Explorer (www.opensiteexplorer.org). For really deep dive stuff we consolidate data from
all sources, including Google’s Webmaster Tools. If you’re an Excel junkie, managing all of these data sources gets a lot easier with Builtvisible’s own Links API Extension for Excel (http:// builtvisible.com/seogadget-api-available-links-apiextension). The Excel plug-in talks to API services from Majestic, Moz, Builtvisible’s own Links Contact API (http://netm.ag/links-bz92) and soon, the Ahrefs API (https://ahrefs.com/api). If you’re into deep SEO auditing with Excel, and you’d like a few new tools in Excel, install Niels Bosma’s SEO Tools for Excel ( http://nielsbosma.se/ projects/seotools). Relatively new to the link data scene are Ahrefs (https://ahrefs.com). The link data monitoring is extremely fast (new and lost link discovery seems to be a real strength for these guys). We rate the toolset in the 'hardcore' category for link data mining. It has a very powerful API, too.
Python Pyscape Pyscape (http://netm.ag/pyscape-bz92) solves the problem of getting data from the Mozscape API in bulk
Getting started
30 best SEO tools
Fresh Web Explorer The new darling of the real-time mentions monitoring scene, you can compare mentions of your favourite terms found on the internet up to four weeks ago
For the Python-minded, Benjamin Estes’s Pyscape (http://netm.ag/pyscape-bz92) is for you. It solves the problem of getting data from the Mozscape API in bulk. Anyone who can run a Python script in Google App Engine should be up and running with this in minutes. For those times when you think you may have been working with the wrong SEO agency, and your links could be to blame for a recent drop in your organic rankings, we’re excited about LinkRisk (http://linkrisk.com) as a fast and powerful link audit tool. It identifies suspect links that may need removal, and it’s a useful tool to base some of your outreach for link building on, too.
Social monitoring and metrics Social Crawlytics (https://socialcrawlytics.com) is a site-crawl-based competitive social analytics tool that (among other useful reports) provides pageby-page social metrics, author popularity and a breakdown of page level shares by social network via a solid UI or API interface. It’s free, which is nice! On the subject of social, my favourite tool on the web is Topsy (http://topsy.com). Topsy’s a powerful real-time social search engine, allowing you to search by URL or search term, delivering mentions by social profiles on Twitter and Google+. See the example search result for 'SEOgadget. com' here: http://netm.ag/topsyeg-bz92. Note the
ability to filter for 'influential only' results. The new darling of the real-time mentions monitoring scene is Fresh Web Explorer (http://freshwebexplorer. moz.com). You can compare mentions of your favourite terms found on the internet up to four weeks ago, export the data and combine it with other information from your tools. My favourite feature is the ability to find mentions of your site that don’t currently link. Very useful. l Richard Baxter is a regular contributor to the SEO and inbound marketing industry while running a busy, technology-based SEO and inbound marketing agency, Builtvisible (http://builtvisible.com).
Social Crawlytics A great site-crawl-based competitive social analytics tool that provides page-by-page social metrics – and it's free
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The top 10 SEO myths
Getting started
The top 10 SEO myths
The top 10 SEO myths Search marketing consultant Mark Buckingham destroys his top 10 favourite search engine optimisation myths Chances are, if you’re reading this, you’ve dabbled with SEO to varying levels of success; from minor frustration to Google gratification. Whatever your experience, myths still abound the oft-laboured carousel of search engine optimisation: at its best, a well planned, ongoing strategy in the pursuit of visibility and primed accessibility, underpinning, informing and complimenting exemplary design usability and content. At its worst, a dark art, misunderstood, an unwieldy afterthought, a quick fix that did you more harm than good. For truly effective SEO, working in tandem with good design, content creation and general business practice; look b eyond the dashboard for the route to success. Talking to leading experts in the search engine optimisation industry, such as Google's Matt Cutts and Search Engine Land's Matt McGee, let’s look at 10 of my personal p erennial favourite SEO myths.
1. Satisfaction, guaranteed Let’s start w ith the bedrock of search marketing: there is really no such thing as guaranteed rankings when it comes to organic, or natural search results. Any company or specialist proffering such should be treated warily; ask whether they’re referring specifically to organic search terms or paid search? Whilst is possible to speculate on long tail niche keywords searches, for all but the most niche key terms, results will vary and can take weeks, if not months. A good search marketer will set realistic expectations, using SEO to prime all areas of your website and content, rather than offer empty promises. There are one or two hundred fac tors that influence your ranking with the search engines – no company or individual can control all of these. SEO might be best achieved with great skill, but there are myriad external factors, dependent on the success of your products or services, not to mention a slice of luck, involved with determining whether or not you achieve good visibility on the internet mantelpiece. Search Engine Land’s (http://searchengineland.com) editor-in-chief, Matt McGee, says: “The only way to even possibly come close to guaranteeing rankings is if you’re doing it on the paid side and happen to have a term that you’re willing to bid high enough on and to get high enough clickthrough to sustain top spot. Also, personalisation comes into play: what you see might be different to what I see, so there’s absolutely no way to guarantee a number one ranking on Google”.
2. A high Google PageRank = high ranking Despite popular belief, Google PageRank does not equal your ranking. The idea that a high PR means you’re going to rank across the board for everything is a myth. “For certain keywords a lower PR page might outrank a higher PR page, but the rankings don’t specifically go in exact PR order,” says Matt McGee.
SEO land Search Engine Land is a new hub for everything related to SEO
Having a high PageRank is nice but it doesn’t automatically mean high rankings for everything, and it certainly doesn’t automatically mean you’re going to get tons of traffic and sales. McGee adds: “It’s still often seen as the number one factor in Google’s algorithm when it’s actually one of a couple of hundred fac tors. It’s a very visible symbol for a lot of webmasters and business owners, but the more time you spend in the search world, the sooner you realise it’s not the be-all and end-all.”
3. Endorsed by Google Put simply, if you’re dealing with a firm who make any allusion that they’re “endorsed” or “approved” by Google for optimisation purposes, it’s likely they’re a fraud. The reality is that Google does not endorse any SEO company. They do have Analytics and AdWords certification, so providers in these areas can take tests for accreditation. “Google d efinitely does not put their stamp of approval on any individual consultant or company,” affirms Matt McGee. Personally, I’m not opposed to the idea of some accreditation or regulatory standards, given this very subject matter, and unregulated nature of the search world, but I just can’t see it happening any time soon. Google’s Webmaster Guidelines (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769) and its beginners guide to SEO (http://netm.ag/starter-bz92), as well as various
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Beginner's guide Google’s SEO starter guide (http://netm.ag/starter-bz92) covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters could consider optimising
esteemed resources on the web, should be consulted when undertaking any SEO or hiring a professional, but many professionals cite that what they teach you is very vanilla. McGee adds: “It gets you in the door but it’s not always going to be everything that you need.”
4. Meta tag keywords matter A perennial favourite myth is probably the keywords meta tag. Google’s head of webspam and all-round search sage, Matt Cutts, says: “Google doesn’t use the keywords meta tag in our scoring at all. It’s just a waste of time to throw a lot of phrases into the keywords meta tag. It would be a better use of your effort to do things like speed up your website, because that can directly improve the usability of your site even independently of SEO.” Metatag descriptions, and certainly titles matter, but it’s true the keyword tag is generally completely redundant across the board. David Mihm, president of GetListed.org, agrees: “Can you help me optimise my meta keywords?’ This is probably the number one phrase I hear from small business owners who call and want me to help them with website optimisation. The fact is that no search engine uses them any more. Google, which rarely discloses ANYTHING important about its algorithm, formally declared it does not use meta keywords via its search quality guru Matt Cutts nearly two years ago. The two ‘metas’ that site owners should still worry about are including keywords in the
tag (extremely important for optimisation), and the meta description, which, although it does not seem to affect ranking, can be used to increase clickthrough rates from the search result pages.”<br />
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5. Cheat your way to the top Attempting to tricking Google, Bing, et al, and trying to manipulate search results is a bad idea, and even if you succeed, if and when the search engines discover your site’s deception, you risk your site will b e removed from the index, with p otentially disastrous business consequences. It’s arguable that Google et al might miss the odd page with a few sneaky invisible keywords; after all, this might be the work of an errant (but potentially well meaning) assistant and not your own work. But a trend or consistency<br />
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of black-hat SEO is likely to do you much m ore harm than good as the search engines get better and better at sniffing out sites, from dubious redirects to affiliate link farms, that simply don’t deserve to be there. The basic adage is, if it works for the user, it’s likely to have a place on Google; how far up you climb is dependent on myriad of factors, and those sites that cheat aren’t just risking their credibility, but usually reek of over-optimisation, which in some cases can be a by-product of a site that was never really designed to please its audience first and foremost. Being gung-ho in your quest for high rankings at the expense of your content is nearly always a futile process.<br />
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6. Keywords? Cram ‘em in The notion the keywords that every page needs a certain percentage of time to outrank the competition is a fallacy. Says Matt McGee: “I’ve always said you do have to use the keywords, you need to have pages that talk about the products and services you sell. There’s no perfect number: it’s not that if you mention the keyword seven times on this page I’m automatically going to rank well. It doesn’t work that way: there are so many other factors and a page that gets a lot of inbound links with the r ight anchor text can rank for terms that don’t even appear on the page. The notion that there’s a perfect percentage for keywords simply isn’t true. “ Furthermore, your copy should be persuasive, informative and punchy: you’ll only serve to limit your copy’s punch by simply clawing keywords into the text. Be verbose, create opportunities to talk about your company, products and niche verticals, but never, repetitive. David Mihm adds: “It’s a myth to say ‘I will optimise your website’s Keyword Density’. It is important to include keywords on your pages but there is no ‘magic number’ of times to use a keyword. Write your text for humans!”<br />
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7. Spending money on Google AdWords boosts your rankings The assumption that spending money on AdWords will s omehow engender you to Google and thus advantage your organic search listings is an understandable, but untrue, belief. Google has said so many t imes over the years, but the my th<br />
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Webspam head Google's head of webspam, Matt Cutts<br />
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Adwords myth Don't expect Google to boost rankings just because you bought Adwords<br />
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Check listings Moz's Getlisted.org (https://getlisted.org) checks your listings on Google, Bing, and other local search<br />
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“What really matters is the speed, depth and richness of the content you deliver" Mark Buckingham never seems to go away. It’s no mistake, however, to identify some correlation between targeted ad spend and your site’s organic coverage. Search expert Matt McGee, says: “I’ve seen studies over the years that suggest that when you have good visibility on both your paid and organic it increases clickthrough on your pages, and thus traf fic, increasing awareness, which leads more to links, etc, etc. “I certainly think there’s nothing wrong with spending money on AdWords. But it’s a definitely a myth that there’s a direct impact on your rankings.”<br />
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8. Land here Every page on your site should be treated as potential landing page; you can’t assume a visitor is going to land on your homepage or your products overview page. The idea that you have one special search landing page is not helpful. All pages are possible landing pages.<br />
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9. Set it and forget it It’s true that continually jostling for higher rankings, making incessant iterations and tweaking, doesn’t give you time to sit back and monitor the success of your hard work and can be a fruitless process. It’s also unadvisable to go to the other extreme and assume SEO is a ‘one off ’ project. Good SEO never really ends, like<br />
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a successful company wouldn’t settle with just one single marketing investment. If you think you’ve achieved all your SEO, I’ll bet you’re not making the most of your website and your offline marketing activit ies. There’s always more that can be done, and even if your rankings don’t immediately benefit, your site will. Even with limited resources, even adding or improving a single page every month is better than leaving a static site to flounder, which may, in time, be superseded by your competition and afforded less ‘currency’ by your users and engines alike.<br />
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10. Rankings aren’t the only fruit A lot of people come in to SEO thinking that the end goal is to get rankings; but the end goal is to make money. “If a number one ranking for a cer tain keyword isn’t making you money, it’s worthless. If a number three or number four ranking is getting you clicks, you’re converting your traffic into customers, then that ranking is much more valuable,” says Matt McGee. This is my favourite myth of all. Being on top is great, but, in my opinion, it isn’t the be-all and end-all and it won’t necessarily yield your site maximum conversions. Naturally you need prominence, but it’s the quality of the site and your content that also matters. I’d wager a site in fourth place on the first page, above the fold, that fulfils the visitors’ requirements is, by and large, going to be more successful than one that belies its pole posit ion through lacklustre content, relying more on inbound links and other good fortune to supplant its superior competition. What really matters is the speed, depth and richness of the content you deliver, and where your audience buys into it, you, your brand, services, or products, and how consistent that message is across the web and in the real world. SEO should be a laboured but fluid process, priming your good work and ensuring it’s tweaked, organically, for maximum accessibility; not just an afterthought. Good SEO is about putting your best foot forwards and continually developing the site to be simply as good as it can be. Place your visitors first, and the search engines will follow. Remember that rankings are a means to an end, they are not the end itself. l<br />
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The SEO Handbook 17<br />
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G e t t i n g s t a r t e d <br />
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Getting started<br />
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Search marketing trends<br />
<br />
Five search marketing trends Kelvin Newman, director at SiteVisibility, shares his top five trends for search marketing… It's been an interesting couple of years for the digital marketing industry: Facebook continued to rise despite a shakey initial public offering (IPO) and f ightback from Microsoft’s Bing. Let’s not forget the interesting new platform, Google+, which celebrated its first birthday in June 2012. While Google’s social network may be struggling to catch the public’s attention, it promises to be very influential in the future of search. The continued impact of Google’s Penguin and Panda updates have re-shaped the search and SEO industry. Brands of all shapes and sizes have had to learn how to adapt to more ‘white- hat’ tact ics to prevent being penalised by Google’s algorithm updates, which target webspam. Pleasingly, for most honest SEOs, the decrease in ranking for some sites has actually opened up opportunities for those who have played by the rules in the past. So with Penguins and Pandas aside, here’s what we think will shape the industry throughout the year and beyond:<br />
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1. Structured data Google and other search engines are pulling more structured data into search result pages. Therefore, it will be vit al for digital marketers to mark-up data in search-friendly ways, such as using schema.org, microformats, or microdata. The advantage of structured data is that it allows users to refine their searches using concepts rather than just individual keywords or phrases.<br />
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“The continued impact of Google's updates have re-shaped the search and SEO industry" Kelvin Newman<br />
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2. Social signals as a ranking factor Studies show that more widely shared content tends to rank better on search engines. At the moment most believe the relationship isn’t causal, but this may change in the future. Understanding the measurement of social signals is imperative. Ultimately, there are many reasons to embrace social media in your marketing endeavors: it makes sense to your business, not because it has significant ranking powers, but because it is vital for your SEO efforts.<br />
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3. Siri and APIs for discovery The methods by which people ‘discover’ content online is moving away from traditional search and navigation. Users are now finding content away from traditional search interfaces via apps on a great var iety of devices. The key will be giving these people the ability to access your database and eventually convert them into customers. APIs, of course, allow data from one site to flow outside of it through an app or a mashup with another internet service. All<br />
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Apple's Siri Voice recognition technology provides new ways to discover content online<br />
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businesses should have one and I expect this to be part of most digit al marketing strategies in the rest of 2013 and beyond.<br />
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4. Mobile search and responsive web design More and more searches are being completed on mobile devices. In fact, Google has stated its preferred mobile solution is responsive design, which re-orders and shapes the page for different size devices rather than serving different URLs. I suspect many businesses are clued up to this now and that most specs for site redesigns will include responsive layout.<br />
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5. Shifting line in ‘acceptable links’ Google isn’t the enemy; Google is the referee. Google has, rightly, been cracking down on manipulative link-building. As these parameters change, what was acceptable in the past may no longer valuable; you need to fully understand where your existing links are coming from and have a sensible risk assessment for the future. If the last 18 months is anything to go by, then we’re in for an eventful time. Some of the changes I discuss above seem very likely but those that will probably have the biggest impact w ill probably be Black Swans. These are events that have a major effect and are often inappropriately rationalised with the benefit of hindsight. There’s very little we can do to prepare for these events other than keep our eyes and ears open, and stay agile. l<br />
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THE ALL-NEW<br />
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G e t t i n g s t a r t e d <br />
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Getting started<br />
<br />
20 best Drupal modules for SEO<br />
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20 best Drupal modules for SEO Mark Roden, editor of WebCommune, assembles a comprehensive SEO toolkit for the Drupal CMS Drupal is the best CMS for search engine optimization (SEO). The community has contributed a ton of modules to ensure webmasters are adhering to best practices and are equipped for the future. In fact, the wealth of CMS tools provide users with the ability to control all elements of their campaign. Due to the impending final release of Drupal 8 at the time of writing, the following list of modules are mainly for Drupal 7. (Drupal typically only supports two versions, so it’s a safe bet to focus on the middle ground of 7 in the meantime). With the proper combination of modules, Drupal morphs into a flexible platform equipped for the ever-changing world of SEO.<br />
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1. SEO Compliance Checker This module (https://drupal.org/project/seo_checker) delivers feedback on the compliance of a preset series of user-defined rules. Upon creation or modification of nodes, the module will run a set of checks and display the results in a table. Tested elements include title attributes <a href rel="nofollow">, keyword density/usage, and alt <img> attributes.<br />
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2. SEO Checklist A vital download. This (https://drupal.org/project/seo_checklist) ensures you’ve dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s in your quest to be the best. The module doesn’t actually enforce any function, but does provide a comprehensive checklist for on-site SEO, marking off each as you complete it. This can prove to be highly valuable for those who aren’t so familiar with the logistics of SEO.<br />
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3. Page Title This module (https://drupal.org/project/page_title) provides the ability to control individual nodes, setting content in the <title> tag. It’s one of the single most important elements in a successful SEO campaign, and a vital module.<br />
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4. Path Redirect With Path Redirect (https://drupal.org/project/Path_Redirect), you can redirect URLs from one path to another path. Using this module is important for maintaining the integrity of your site, and preventing search engine crawls from resulting in error. Additionally, links existing on ex ternal sites are preserved, and won’t result in a 404.<br />
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5. Global Redirect Global Redirect (https://drupal.org/project/globalredirect) fixes duplicate URL bugs that tend to occur with clean URLs and the Pathauto module. Although aliases for URLs may appear different, they are in fact duplicate. With the Global Redirect module, a 301 redirect is created from the old node to the alias.<br />
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6. Metatag The concept of meta tags is still a source of comedy. A great deal of weight used to be put on them. Hysteria ensued. The importance has de creased, though use of the module can’t hurt for prov iding structured metadata. In reference to SEO, meta tags (https://drupal.org/project/metatag) include meta description tags and the meta keywords tag that search engines often pick up on.<br />
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7. Search 404 To ensure “Not all who wander are lost”, Search 404 p erforms a search on the keywords within a non-existing URL. The module does a great job of keeping visitors on your site using search engine keyword detection and expressionbased filtering from the URL. Search 4 04 (https://drupal.org/project/search404) is recommended to keep bounce rates down and user engagement up.<br />
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8. XML Sitemap XML Sitemap (https://drupal.org/project/xmlsitemap) generates a dynamic sitemap built for search engines, adhering to the spec ification of sitemaps.org. It enables you to configure content types, taxonomy terms and more for intelligent crawls from search engines.<br />
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9. Site Verification This module (https://drupal.org/project/site_verify) helps with the verification process of your website. Supported methods of verification include adding meta tags or uploading a file. Once initiated, a bi-directional check is initiated, and search engines can then verify that you are the site owner.<br />
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10. Google Authorship This is a standard for obtaining authorship information, and not quite a module. Implementing Google Authorship (https://plus.google.com/authorship) can<br />
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Getting started<br />
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SEO Checklist Great for beginner SEO, this provides a handy checklist for on-site SEO<br />
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“Search engines reward websites designed for best user experience" Mark Roden<br />
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provide great ranking signals for authors w ith high credibility. All you have to do is get the authors on your site to create Google+ profiles, then add a rel="author" attribute. Details on adding user names: http://netm.ag/rel-bz92.<br />
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11. Links Checker This module (https://drupal.org/project/linkchecker) extracts links from content when saved, providing reports on failed responses. Quality issues such as broken links can be a negat ive signal to search engines.<br />
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12. Taxonomy Title This module (https://drupal.org/project/taxonomy_title) enables administrators to update the H1 for taxonomy term pages. Keyword-rich and accurate heading tags (eg H1, H2, H3) provide structure that's indicated to have some SEO weight.<br />
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13. HTML Purifier This module (https://drupal.org/project/htmlpurifier) filters HTML to ensure rendered output is standards-compliant, removing all malicious code in the process. Without HTML Purifier, users leave themselves open for XSS attacks.<br />
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14. Menu Attributes The Menu At tributes (https://drupal.org/project/menu_attributes) module enables the administrator to target specific attributes, including id, name, class and styles. The module comes in handy when setting items to "nofollow", allowing for an effec tive linking strategy for your website.<br />
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20 best Drupal modules for SEO<br />
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Paths Use Pathauto and Sub-Pathauto to create new alias and keyword-rich paths for URLs<br />
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15. Footermap Search engines reward websites designed for the best user exper ience. Footermap (https://drupal.org/project/footermap) generates a site map block in the footer region to improve navigation. Use links sparingly and efficiently.<br />
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16. Pathauto The Pathauto module is (https://drupal.org/project/pathAuto) a staple of Drupal SEO, enabling keyword-rich paths for URLs. It ensures search engines and site visitors may gather information on content through URLs.<br />
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17. Sub-Pathauto Automatically creates a new alias for URLs based on, or extending, an existing alias, sub-p athauto (https://drupal.org/project/subpathauto) allows for further generation of user-friendly URLS.<br />
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18. Content Optimizer In tandem with Content Analysis, Content Optimizer (https://drupal.org/project/ contentoptimizer) provides statist ics and recommended act ions to boost search engine rankings. Consider it an integrated version of Google Analyt ics.<br />
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19. Site map The Site Map mo dule (https://drupal.org/project/site_map) will give site v isitors a complete view of the contents of your website, including blogs, categories, and more. Similar to XML sitemap, but more useful as an index page for the site. Drupal generates RSS feeds automatically.<br />
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20. Google Analytics Once you’ve created an account in Google Analytics, you can go ahead and download the Google Analytics module. From there, you’ll have access to key insights on traffic, page logist ics, and more. This is highly recommended for any SEO campaign. l Mike Roden is an editor at WebCommune (www.webcommune.com)<br />
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The SEO Handbook 21<br />
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d e t r a t s g n i t t e G<br />
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Getting started<br />
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Localising content<br />
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Localising content for better SEO Michelle Craw shows you how to improve rankings and increase traffic by localising online content For any business operating in or selling to multiple international territories, the ‘localisation’ of your online content is a crucial tool in your attempts to increase traffic, improve rankings and increase conversion rates. Google, which is still by far the most commonly used search engine in the western world, is constantly refining the algorithms that underpin its searches in order to provide high-quality, relevant, useful results for its users. Several recent Google updates have focused on providing web developers with the opportunity to provide ‘localised’ versions of the same website in different territories.<br />
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Mind your language For example, late in 2011, Google introduced a new markup tag – hreflang. This tag can be used to identify translated content on multinational sites, and helps search engines distinguish between language var iations. It enables webmasters not only to increase the quantity of web traffic, but more importantly the quality of that traffic. A common problem w ith many multinational sites is that largely identical content, for example in the case of a UK and US version, creates mass duplication across the site. The hreflang tag solves the issue multinational duplication by telling search engines, for example, that ‘this US version is essentially a copy of this UK version, intended for a different audience’. Successfully implementing this markup will help ensure that it’s the US version which performs for the US audience.<br />
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“Mobile device usage continues to grow"<br />
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Michelle Craw<br />
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Page views The data shows one third of UK page views were from mobiles and tablets<br />
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your site in a way that search engines can better use it. The type of r ich markup we always recommend, and is recommended by Google, is that found at schema. org (http://schema.org) – also known as microdata. Marking up your content with these tags provides users w ith additional information and makes your content look more interesting on the results page. Another example is how a few results for a popular rec ipe will show additional information in the search results, such as star ratings, reviews, cooking time, calorie information, which helps attract the attention of users.<br />
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Mobilise for success In April of this year, Google launched an addition to this markup, the x-default hreflang tag, which is intended for use on multinational sites that also have a global page or version of site. The tag ensures users in countries that do not have localised content are sent to a site’s ‘default’ version or page. Let’s presume ww w.example.com is our global version of our site, which also has versions localised to the UK, US and Canada. Adding this x-default hreflang tag to our global version of a site would ensures that users from say, Australia, would be sent to the global page. <link rel="alternate" href="http://uk.example.com/en" hreflang="en-uk"/> <link rel="alternate" href="http://us.example.com/en" hreflang="en-us"/> <link rel="alternate" href="http://ca.example.com/en" hreflang="en-ca"/> <link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en" hreflang="x-default"/><br />
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Rich snippets Enhanced search results listings – known among SEO practitioners as ‘rich snippets’ – can capture users’ attention and encourage them to click through from the search engine results page. There are multiple different types of r ich markup, and it’s becoming an increasingly important feature of SEO. Essentially, it’s a way to structure code on<br />
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As mobile device usage continues to grow across the world, international webmasters have to tailor their strategies to incorporate new means of searching. The image (shown above) from late last year shows statistics from a comScore UK Digital Future report. The data shows that almost one third of all UK web-based page views were from mobiles and tablets. We can see that this varies widely across countries, with the UK , the Netherlands and Russia being particularly low in this regard. There is an undeniable global trend in terms of users consuming content on the move, but the recent growth in tablets is particularly interesting. Last year Adobe released a research paper covering tablet sales and traffic to more than 300 brands across North America, Western Europe and Asia-Pacific. The paper predicted that tablet traffic would exceed smartphone traffic in 2013. Just two months ago, Adobe released its latest Digital Index, confirming its predictions. The report shows that just last month, for the first time tablets are now taking a greater share of page views than smartphones. This growth is particularly impressive, given the first iPad only launched in April 2010. The overall message is clear: the ever-increasing sophistication of online consumers means that, in the near future, only websites that use responsive design to deliver content optimised to a user’s particular location and device will deliver the desired results for brands. l<br />
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Getting started<br />
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Don't get blacklisted<br />
<br />
Google SEO tricks that will get you blacklisted Glenn Alan Jacobs, managing director of consultancy SpeedySEO, rounds up the top 10 SEO tips you should never follow… Black hats were used to identify the bad guys in old Wild West movies. When it comes to search engine optimisation (SEO), the term is also associated with unethical cowboys. The white hats were the good guys in Westerns, just as they are in SEO. Search Engine Law. The web has a sher iff. He’s big, he’s mean and he’s quick-on-the-draw. His name is Google and if he was a character in a Western he’d be played by John Wayne. Sheriff Google keeps the internet frontier safe for law-abiding cit izens and white hat content creators alike. While white hat websites work within the law, search engines are locked in an ever-escalating shoot-out with black hat practitioners. Internet users get caught in the crossfire on a regular basis; unable to differentiate between reputable sites and those with harmful, spam-filled content. This guide describes the best ways to get on sheriff Google’s bad side ...<br />
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Bad medicine 1) Keyword stuffing is bad medicine. Proper keyword use is not the concern of this article, so for now we’ll focus only on the improper kind. Keyword overuse leads to synonym underuse, and makes for content that’s inaccessible to the average human user. Though people might not be able to read your content, search engine robots still will. Oversaturated pages will get you penalised. The average safe density of keywords should be between two and eight per cent of your total word count. When creating copy you should think of your audience, not of your page ranking. 2) Hidden text is invisible to human eyes. Keywords or links can be camouflaged by colour-matching text to background leaving them unreadable to human visitors, but perfectly readable to search engine bots. More complex methods employ cascading style sheets (CSS) or layering to hide text beneath surface copy. Such text is also readable to a search engine<br />
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spider and not a human user. Black hat operatives attempt to fill their sites with hidden content for the express purpose of achieving higher rankings in search lists, regardless of whether their pages are relevant to a user’s initial search request. Google law basically states that you should build your website for users, not for search engines. Ignoring this advice by including hidden text or links is one of the quickest ways to get your site blacklist bound. 3) Doorway/gateway/bridge/portal pages are created specifically for search engine bots. They are designed to target particular keywords or phrases and will usually be extremely user-unfriendly and/or diffi cult to read. Because they are simple devices used to trick people towards actual websites, they rarely contain anything useful (other than any prominent CLICK HERE links through to the real destinations). Black hat webmasters create portal or bridge pages that bypass the need to click on a link completely, using fast meta refresh commands that whisk you to another site (without so much as a by-yourleave). For this reason, many search engines now refuse to accept pages that use fast meta refresh. 4) Cloaking can be achieved either through IP address delivery or agent delivery. As with people, bots are identified by their user agent or their IP addresses. Two sets of content are created, one delivered to the Google-bot, the other to human visitors. The bot is deceived by the fake pages (the content of which is usually saturated w ith targeted keywords) and grants the website a higher relevancy ranking. When the user clicks on what they perceive to be a promising link, they’re promptly forwarded to a browser page that’s nothing to do with their original search. 5) Mirror websites are two or more separate sites that use identical content, but employ different keywords and meta tags to obtain rankings on<br />
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d e t r a t s g n i t t e G<br />
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“When attached backlinks to blog or forum posts, you should always keep your content relevant" Glenn Alan Jacobs alternative searches. This technique violates the rules of many search engines, and will probably get one or all of your mirrored sites banned.<br />
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search engine rankings. The process is costly as well as time consuming and, if Google finds out, can lead to you getting your entire network dropped from the index (including the site that you’re optimising).<br />
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8) Backlink generation is a good thing. However, generating backlinks too quickly is a bad thing. A new website that suddenly surfaces with an inordinate number of backlinks looks suspicious, and spamming will be suspected by Google. Therefore, you should build backlinks at a natural pace to avoid incurring penalties. When attaching backlinks to blog or forum posts, you should always keep your content relevant and attempt to bring s omething to the conversation. If you don’t do this, you will be recognised as the spammer you are and rightfully punished.<br />
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6) Link farms, specifically free-for-all link farms (FFAs), are to be avoided like the plague. When Google inevitably identifies an FFA link farm as a 'bad neighbourhood', it will infect also any linked pages and eventually deflate their values. Link scheme participants obtain links from farm sites in exchange for fees or backlinks, but in either case it’s almost certainly an unsound investment.<br />
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9) Scraper sites are the online equivalent of a chop-shop. They are spam websites that steal existing content using web scraping, often to generate advertising revenue or to manipulate search engine ranks. Web scraping works in a similar way to web indexing, which is the process employed by most search engines to create ranking lists. Unscrupulous black hat webmasters use scr aping to gather content, before repackaging it for their own purposes. Using someone else’s content (even open content) can constitute copyright violation if you fail to adequately reference it.<br />
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7) Independent Backlinking Networks (IBLNs) are an entirely different kettle of fish. Black hatters with cash to burn and time to waste might choose to use IBLNs. A network of sites are set up solely to provide backlinks to the pages you wish to promote, in such a way as to increase your standing in<br />
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10) Phishing pages are (according to Google) “a page designed to look like another page in an attempt to steal users’ personal information”. The reasons why phishing will get you blacklisted should be obvious, so don’t even think about doing it. l<br />
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Bad neighbourhoods<br />
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25<br />
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Getting started<br />
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SEO for startups<br />
<br />
SEO for startups Tom Gullen presents a primer on SEO for startups, explains common mistakes and iterates the importance of accessibility SEO is an industry that sparks frequent heated debate and passionate responses. It’s an industry that is often misunderstood and even dismissed. Yet for startups a basic SEO foundation and understanding of it is likely to be of crucial importance, and can really help them on their path to success. So how do we go about beginning to optimise our startup’s website for search engines? Accessibility should be a primary concern for websites not only because it makes your website accessible for less able people, but also because a search crawler bot should be considered your least able user. Developing your website in a highly accessible manner comes with the additional benefit of mak ing your website highly accessible for search engine crawlers. Basic accessibility for websites isn’t difficult to achieve.<br />
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Page title<br />
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Accessibility and SEO Accessibility with dynamic content<br />
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As mentioned previously, we should consider search crawlers our least able users. Although a search crawler can render and fetch an image, understanding the content of the image for a computer is an extraordinarily complex problem. We need to let the crawler know more about the content of the image and we achieve this through use of the alt tag. The alt tag is used by user agents that can’t display images. It should be concise and describe the content of the image. If you have a photo of an oak tree in a park you might give it an alt tag of ‘Oak tree in Richmond Park’. Descriptively naming the image file also can have a positive effect, for example ‘oak-tree.jpg’ would be better than ‘myphoto.jpg’. Not only does the search engine now have a much better grasp of the content of the image, it also has a better idea about the content of your website in general. A well formatted image optimised for accessibility may look as follows:<br />
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Disabled JavaScript is not exclusively the domain of archaic browsers; plug-ins such as ‘NoScript’ (http://netm.ag/noscript-bz92) have millions of users. The Google crawler is able to execute some JavaScript when crawling. However, it’s a risky proposition to rely on this if your content is inaccessible to agents that have disabled JavaScript. When developing a website I firmly believe that ‘progressive enhancement’ is an essential principle that should be adhered to. If, for example, we are building an online store for music CDs, we would first build it without any JavaScript. A user will click on an artist and a new page will load. Once the site functions and displays perfectly in this manner, we can then add layers on top, such as dynamic content loading with Ajax. This has two advantages. If your JavaScript fails, there’s a good chance the site will still function and display properly – but most importantly you’ve created a highly accessible website. Although you’re using the latest new techniques you haven’t sacrificed accessibility in the process and as a result crawlers are free to roam your website.<br />
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Page titles are an extremely important part of your page, because they are very frequently relayed in search engine results and carr y weight in search engine ranking algorithms. It’s important to keep the title as concise and contextually rich as possible: 65 characters is a good rule of thumb. A frequent mistake is to incorrectly format the title by placing the name of the website at the start of the title tag. It’s highly recommended to place the website name at the end of the title – in a search engine result the name of the website is generally of little interest to the people searching and you may sacrifice a lot of your clickthrough rate for that page.<br />
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Correctly formatting images<br />
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<img src="images/oak-tree.jpg" alt="Oak Tree in Richmond Park" /> This is far more accessible and gives more clues to search crawlers than: <img src="images/dcm0000013.jpg" /><br />
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Formatting links properly If you are linking to a page on your website that goes into great depth about oak tree leaves, the worst way this could be linked to on your page is: If you want to read about Oak Leaves <a href="leaves.html" rel="nofollow">click here</a>.<br />
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Bad form(at) An example of a badly formatted page title. As the website name is presented first it can create less accessible search results<br />
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This is not only awful from a usability point of view, but also from an SEO point of view. One highly important part of a link’s anatomy is the text within the link – this provides a very strong clue to search crawlers about what the page being linked to is about. If you’ve ever heard of ‘Google Bombing’ this is the underlying reason why it works.<br />
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Getting started<br />
<br />
SEO for startups<br />
<br />
NoScript NoScript is a popular extension for Mozilla-based browsers that only allows JavaScript to be executed on websites the user chooses. When designing an accessible and SEO<br />
<br />
A better way to present the link would be as follows: Read more about <a href="oak-leaves.html" rel="nofollow">Oak Leaves</a>. This principle extends to hyperlinks on other websites that link back to you. A related website linking to your website in this way: Want to learn more about Oak Trees? <a href="http://www.oak-trees. com" rel="nofollow">Visit this site!</a> Is inferior to being linked to this way: Learn more about <a href=”http://www.oak-trees.com” rel="nofollow">Oak Trees</a>. In the second example search crawlers are being given a big hint to the content of the website being linked to. You obviously have limited control over how third party websites format the links. However, it’s important to keep<br />
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“Sitemaps have evolved and now are commonly used with XML" Tom Gullen<br />
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in mind as opportunities for suggestions to third party website owners may present themselves in the future.<br />
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Meta tags It’s common knowledge now that the meta Keywords tag should be considered redundant for SEO purposes. Not only is it a waste of markup, it also gives your competitors strong clues about the terms you are targeting! There are, however, other very useful meta tags which should be utilised on your website.<br />
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1 Description meta tag: The description meta tag should be a concise overview of the page. It is often displayed in search engine results, so not only is it important to design it as concisely and as descriptively as possible but also think about how appealing it is for a potential visitor to click on. Descriptions shouldn’t extend more than around 160 characters in length. 2 Canonical meta tag: The canonical meta tag is an important one that is often overlooked by web developers. To understand why we need the canonical meta tag we have to understand that search engines can treat pages with slight variations in their URLs as separate and distinct pages. As an example, take these two URLs:<br />
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http://www.example.com/shop/widget.html http://www.example.com/shop/widget.html?visitID=123 They could be treated as distinct URLs even though they display exactly the same content. This could impact on your site negatively, because you ideally want the search engines to only index the first URL and ignore the second. The canonical meta tag solves this issue: <link href="http://www.example.com/shop/widget.html" rel="canonical" /> Placing the canonical meta tag on the widget.html page lets crawlers know your preferred version of the page.<br />
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Sitemaps Sitemaps should be kept up to date and contain every URL you want to be indexed. You might not realise that some pages on your site are buried deeply in your website and hard to access – a search crawler may not explore that deeply. By listing every page on your s ite in a si temap you’ve made your site far more accessible to the search crawlers and you can be sure that the search engines will know about all your content. Sitemaps have evolved and now are commonly used w ith XML. T he XML schema for sitemaps comes with a few options such as the last modification date, how frequently this page is changed and it’s relative priority. If you are not completely confident in your usage of the more advanced attributes such as the change frequency and priority, it’s best to ignore them.<br />
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Sitemaps Sitemaps should be kept up to date and contain every URL you want to be indexed. Sitemaps.org provides guidelines on the protocol<br />
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The search engines are going to be intelligent enough to determine these values for themselves more often than not. The absolutely essential thing you need your sitemap to contain is a full directory of URLs on your website you wish to be indexed.<br />
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Common SEO mistakes Paying for link building Link building is the process of increasing the number of links on other sites to your website. One way this is gamed is to manufacture links to your website en masse in an effort to feign authority. It’s a quantity over quality methodology that may have been successful in Google’s earlier days, but as Google’s algorithms have intelligently evolved this methodology is offer ing increasingly diminishing returns. What happens when you pay an ‘SEO firm’ to link build for you? More often than not, it will spam other websites on your behalf with automated tools. It’s a selfish tactic – you’re receiving negligible (if any at all) benefits at the expense of honest webmasters’ time – they have to clean it up off their sites. Earlier this year Google released an algorithmic change named Penguin. The Penguin update’s intention is to devalue websites that engage in underhand tactics such as spam link building. A highly unethical tactic in the SEO world called ‘negative SEO’ has since come into the limelight since the Penguin update. Negative SEO is the act of engaging in black-hat SEO tactics on behalf of your competitors with the objective of getting them penalised. It’s unlikely your startup will be negatively SEO’d: it takes a concerted effort, money – and a distinct lack of ethics. However, if you’re paying for sustained link building campaign for your startup you’re running the risk of shooting yourself in the foot and being devalued by Google’s algorithms. Repairing the damage of a bad quality link building campaign can be extremely costly, difficult and time consuming. Paying for ‘Link Building Packages’ should be a huge turn off. There are negligible (if any at all) benefits, and a huge amount of downside. It’s often the hallmark of an unethical and poor quality SEO firm.<br />
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Keyword density Reading up on SEO you probably have come across words such as ‘keyword density’ referring to the percentage of words in a particular body of text that are relevant to the search terms you are interested in. The theor y is that if you hit a specific density of keywords in a body of text you will be ranked higher in search results. Keyword density is often presented as an oversimplification of numerical statistic called tf*idf. tf*idf reflects the importance of a word in a body of text or collection of bodies of text in a far more accurate way than rudimentary keyword density measurements. It's descr ibed mathematically probably isn’t the end of the story. It’s likely search engines have modified this statistic and weighted it differently in different cases to improve quality of returned results.<br />
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What conclusion should we draw from this as a new startup? You should probably ignore it all. When you’re writing content such as a new blog post you need to remind yourself of your objectives – you’re trying to write content that people will want to read. Text tuned to specific keyword densities has a potential large downside, which is that the text becomes increasingly obscure. A well written body of text will likely attract more good quality links and social shares, which in turn will increase the value of your website in search engine’s eyes. Don’t worry about keyword densities. Instead, worry about the quality of your writing.<br />
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Ignoring clickability of search engine results When designing your page’s title and meta descriptions, it’s easy to overengineer them specifically for the search engines. Remembering your actual end objective is to get real people to click on search results is important. If you’re ranked on the first page of a search result, the text extracted by the<br />
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“Playing by the rules is a sustainable, long term strategy" Tom Gullen<br />
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search engine in the result needs to be concise, descriptive and appealing for the visitor to click on. When designing these aspects of a page, which are likely to be relayed into the search engine result, it’s important to strike a balance between the benefit of potential increased rankings and the user friendliness and clickability of that content.<br />
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Play to the rules Following good quality SEO tactics that play by the rules (known as white-hat) are the safest bet for your long term strategy. It may be tempting at times to engage in black-hat tactics – certainly the arguments presented by the blackhats can be seductive and promise quick results – yet you are risking alienating what inevitably is going to be one of your major and free sources of traffic. Risking this channel of potential customers is not a price a startup should be willing to pay. Playing by the rules is a sustainable, long term strategy. And this should align itself perfectly with your ambitions as a new startup. l Tom Gullen is a founder of Scirra (www.scirra.com). Scirra is a startup that builds game creation tools<br />
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INSPIRATION THAT LASTS ALL YEAR 2 0 1 4<br />
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Features<br />
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ver the past decade year, I’ve worked as a developer, designer and search marketer. In my day-to-day role as CTO of Builtvisible, I spend my time working alongside the search agency side of the business, creating tools, educating the team on technology and design trends, and push for greater inventiveness and innovation in the content we produce as part of our clients’ marketing campaigns. However, I’m aware of the reputation that the industry has, of producing content purely for links and rankings rather than to give amazing experiences to engage users. It shouldn’t have to be like this though. Too many people think the best way to market their businesses is to buy the worst quality links from the lowest tra ffic sites on the web. So what’s the industry doing about it, and where does it go from here?<br />
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HOW DID IT COME TO THIS?<br />
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AUTHOR PETE WAILES<br />
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is the CTO at Builtvisible (builtvisible.com ), an international creative search marketing agency, and developer of the CSS library OpenDAWS ILLUSTRATION LINZIE HUNTER<br />
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is a Scottish illustrator and hand-lettering artist based in Peckham, South London. Her clients include: Time Magazine, The Guardian, Hallmark, VH1, Nike, BBC, Orange and Marks & Spencer www.linziehunter.co.uk <br />
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SEO as an industry begun as a group of technical people who watched the search engines and how they were operating, deconstructing how they worked and reverse engineering their technologies. Therefore, it’s no surprise that, with those people being more technically-inclined (and not marketers), the practice of SEO developed in a fairly uncreative manner. While it’s certainly been useful for t he web that it exi sts (much of what search engines do nowadays wouldn’t be possible without the better side of the SEO industry to ensure sites are properly crawlable, with semantically marked up data), it’s not all roses. Over the years, we’ve seen SEOs engage in a variety of tactics, some more effective t han others, in an attempt to game t he engines. Thankfully, these have slowly become less effective, although there’s still holes if you know where to look, or you’re willing to brute force them. The happy result of this though is that the industry has been slowly bent towards a different path, looking at more traditional marketing methodologies to create the content required to get a site to rank. This is an improvement as marketing based on more traditional principles, with an understanding of messaging, branding and targeting will deliver results that can be measured far more tangibly. Rather than evaluating work on quantity of links or on PageRank, we can talk about revenue, goal completions, customer lifetime value and s o on.<br />
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The challenge we now face is that as an industry, we lack a deep understanding of marketing. Not surprising, as most of the people who make up the industry don’t come from a marketing background. In part thanks to this, over the last three or four years we’ve seen a lot of cargo-cult creativity, with people copying tactics they’ve seen others employ. They’ve not understood though why those tactics worked, or what the strategic objectives of those campaigns were. One result of this has been proliferation and abuse of mediums and methods of content delivery, namely guest posts and infographics, both of which Google has now called out explicitly for abuse. If you read between the lines t hough, it’s not the practice of producing infographics, or of writi ng for publications that’s the issue - it’s when these are used as a method of creating links, rather than because they’re genuinely useful, or as a result of a desire to connect with a publications audience. So how do we up our game, as marketers, and produce better ideas, and work with designers and developers to produce seriously interesting content?<br />
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REDESIGN WITH SEO IN MIND During 2013, we decided to refresh the SEOgadget brand (now Builtvisible). In doing this,<br />
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we’ve followed the processes outlined here: ● Researching existing examples of agency sites<br />
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to understand what a good agency website looks like today ● Prototyping first, enabling stakeholders to<br />
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better understand the concepts ● Taking content concepts to external figures to<br />
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understand the impact and gain feedback ● Crafting new and legacy content, including<br />
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video and presentations ● Creating a complete demo site, functionally<br />
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accurate, but without all the final assets in place to allow for final revisions Below Followerwonk is<br />
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This process has saved weeks of time and refinement, as at every stage, something that truly represents the end product is being built around and showcased. It’s also allowed for a far more flexible creative process, as if we’ve required revisions, we’ve been able to make them in the browser and interact with those changes live. It’s also allowed us to adapt the design rapidly and sign off amends as the final content has been produced, where that content has necessitated changes that hadn’t been foreseen previously. The speed of change testing and revision development has therefore been roughly halved, versus the previous PSD to HTML, to final version method of development.<br />
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a social analytics tool for mining Twitter’s user graph<br />
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Well, the first thing to note is that it doesn’t have to be like this. As the digital industry in general has slowly started to acquire traditional marketing talent (and visa versa), we’re seeing it start to produce some truly compelling work. Pieces like Beats by Dr. Dre #showyourcolour (statigr.am/tag/showyourcolour ), The Feed by Getty Images (www.gettyimages.co.uk/ editorial/frontdoor/thefeed) and Rexona: DO MORE (domore.rexona.com/en-GB/adrenaline/home), not to mention more experimental design/content forms like the oft-cited Snow Fall by The New York Times (www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall), and Serengeti Lion by National Geographic (ngm. nationalgeographic.com/serengeti-lion/index.html) show real promise.<br />
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Further, there’s campaigns l ike Imaginate by Red Bull (imaginate.redbull.com) that couldn’t exist anywhere other than digital, which reach millions through really creative storytelling, combined with the inherent shareability that digital content can have. These show a wonderful understanding of the way that the consumer mindset works in 2014. However, while these have all won multiple prizes and serious awards, as well as huge traffic and mindshare for their clients/publications, each has areas where they fall short.<br />
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A regular check-up is required to make sure that content continues to perform These issues range from failures of cross-browser compatibility to a lack of specificity around the message, failing to ensure the content is findable from search engines and so on. Each would have been easily fi xable. If you’re creating something that’s tied to an event, acquire the domains around the main campaign terms. For #showyourcolour, that would’ve been showyourcolour.com and<br />
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showyourcolour.co.uk . Set up a microsite talki ng about<br />
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Above Serengeti Lion was<br />
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the project, linking to events, providing an official source for the campaign, and linking to the v arious domains where social activit y is happening. With content that’s less di fferentiated from the main site, host it in a subfolder rather than a subdomain. Combined with good copy and good internal architecture, you can ensure that the main campaign area outranks announcement pages and related pieces, avoiding the issue Getty Images has with The Feed, where the campaign ranks number two. Similarly, a regular check-up is required to make sure content continues performing. Snow Fall currently fails to render well on most modern mobile devices. Getting thi s fixed probably wouldn’t take that much development time. So how do we, as an industry, improve the situation, to deliver the right message, delivered to the right consumer, through the right medium, at the right time, whilst ticking all the right technical boxes too? The answer i s both simple, and at the same time, frustratingly complex. To quote Dieter Rams, “Good design is thorough down to the last detail.” Equally, our work must be designed and engineered to completion. Doing that is becoming increasingly harder. The technical and creative disc iplines involved in producing cutting edge digital work are only bifurcating further, leaving behind c reatives who don’t understand the technical sides of how search engines crawl, index and rank content, let alone the deeper technical issues involved in producing content at this scale. The technica l people who do<br />
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created over two years, and uses incredible video, audio and images to present compelling journalism<br />
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understand those things become less understanding of the language that creatives use to describe t he outputs they need, and how they work. Enter the SEO industry, which is perfectly placed to act as a third component to unify these two vital elements.<br />
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HOW SEO’S ROLE IS CHANGING<br />
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Above left MMM3000 (Saatchi & Saatchi working for Mattessons) gained huge social traction, but a lack of search consideration limited its success<br />
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Above right Thanks to CSS and JS frameworks, designers and developers can build rapid prototypes to better represent creative concepts to the client<br />
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At Builtvisible, we view t he SEO of today as a technical project manager. SEOs need to be specialised enough technically to be able to go through server log fi les and unpick how a site is crawled; they need to be able to work w ith developers on frontend code to implement markup, analytics tracking code and so on, as well as a host of other things besides. Equally though, today’s SEOs have to have a broad range of skills in order to be capable of working with designers and other creative production teams on commissioning and refining a variety of creative materials. Whilst they don’t do this work themselves, they absolutely need to be able to converse with those teams in the language that they use. That role is something we see other, more specia list professions struggle with. It’s understandable too, as they’re not as exposed constantly to all t he types of content that we encourage our people to seek out. A nd nor should they be; as specialists, they’d be less effective in their chosen discipline if they did. The result though is a lack the breadth of understanding wide to be able to ensure a consistently high quality of output, across such a broad range of material ty pes. It’s fair to say that we’re trying to make our staff<br />
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into a hybrid project manager/technical SEO. The closest analogous position in a traditional production role would be a ma rketing coordinator, although they tend to lack the specific technical depth we train our SEOs to have, and instead have a deeper knowledge of creative media and production, specialising in fewer areas.<br />
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MINING SOCIAL DATA TO INFORM PROTOTYPES Looking at the industry a moment, over last year or so we’ve seen the f uture of what SEO could become. Between the emergence of Universal Analytics, which allows for truly complete, campaign-oriented tracking, a much better understanding of outreach and PR and strong tech knowledge, the leading SEO agencies are starting to produce really compelling work. For two interesting demos of Universal Analytics, s earch YouTube for WeMo Switch Universal Analytics, and Measuring Dance Moves. At the core of this is the proliferation and manipulation of social data across the web. It’s become far easier to mine the socia l web to understand which content items and production houses are being featured most often by the main influencers and thought leaders in any g iven industry. Thanks to APIs from Twitter and its il k, and at-scale scraping technologies like 80legs and DeepCrawl, it’s possible to monitor topics cross the web. This enables brands to track in real time t he ways that consumers are talking about them and subjects they care about.<br />
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FURTHER READING The technical and creative industries are slowly having to adapt to ever increasing complexities in their respective areas online. With the more proliferation of technologies like SVG and WebGL, we’re seeing a shift from the web being a place where the code editor isn’t the only game in town. With sites like The Verge, Polygon, The Guardian, Airbnb and so on taking ever more creative approaches to their content, there’s a need developing for people with communication skills. However, the more things change, the more they stay the same. The content that’s being created still relies on the same marketing principles that content creators have been using forever. As a result, if I had to give everyone one recommendation, it’d be to check out the work of the best marketers of the 20th century, and what we’ve had of the 21st so far. Start analysing why those campaigns worked, what it was they were trying to do. Understand the purpose and the context of that content, what the message was and why it worked with the group it was<br />
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Turning to process now, let’s look at how this plays out in the real world. Armed with so cial data, search volumes and site analytics, the creative SEO team can then work to analyse what forms of content are resonating with the specific target market the client wishes to engage with, and what messages are getting across most effecti vely. This content can then be used in liais on with designers and developers to quickly prototype concepts for page layouts, complete with usable<br />
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Above Polygon’s<br />
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Xbox One review was timely, beautifully built, and nailed the targeting to a single group of passionate users: gamers<br />
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aimed at. I’d begin by reading Predatory Thinking by Dave Trott, Hegarty on Advertising: Turning Intelligence into Magic by John Hegarty, and Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy. Between those three, you’ll get a pretty solid foundation on the type of thinking and doing required to produce great marketing, whatever the medium.<br />
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The creative SEO team can then work to analyse what forms of content are resonating functionality that allows for a basic, but accurate demo. Those prototypes can be used to show the client the intended result. The process is starting to acquire the name ‘design in browser’, and in a world where designs have to be responsive, delivers a vastly simpler, quicker workflow. These mockups don’t necessarily need to use the correct data or content, but it does need to be a realistic representation of the end product, and obviously if the actual content required is ava ilable, that only makes t he representation closer to t he<br />
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final product. For example, if there’s supposed to be a chart, it can be rendered with Highcharts using template data, or if there w ill be a HTML5 video running in the background, a sample video will suffice to make the demo workable. The advantages of this are obvious; during the pitching and refinement process, the client, design and technical teams are all looking at and working with something that works as the user will finally see it. This vastly reduces the level of perceived change on the part of the client from the old Photoshop to production method of building work. After a basic prototype is realised and the c lient is happy with the basic concept, this can b e taken to influential individuals in the target community to garner their feedback, ideally around 3-5 at most (for ensuring a consistent tone for the piece, whatever it may be). This ensures that the people involved in the initial promotion and distribution feel a strong attachment to the work, as well as having a sense of ownership in the material itself. With a working, finalised prototype of the creative piece, the actual process of completing the design and finishing the project now becomes vastly simpler, as the constraints imposed by the visual design are in evidence in the system itself. Thus all the images, video, copy and other assets should be simpler to commission and add to the work. Also, during the final content production process, the creative media teams involved can play with the prototype to ensure t he best fit for their work in the piece it will end up in. This helps provide a framework for ensuring producers know where they have more creative freedom and scope flex ibility, and where they’re more constrained, reducing the time required for revisions and cutting room time.<br />
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BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER<br />
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Left Content pieces<br />
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like the Local Food Guide pieces from HouseTrip. com are fundamentally a search content play, but provide genuinely useful information<br />
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Now that the piece is built, it can seem that the job is finished. However, there’s a key component missing to all this at the moment, which we’ve seen time and time again: no dedicated area for marketing the content. Looking at two recent examples, firstly Every Shot Imaginable (www.youtube.com/user/ Everyshotimaginable) was launched with a YouTube channel, but without a dedicated area on the European Tour website for that content. As a result, the site doesn’t rank well for the names of its videos, or of the campaign. Nor was the campaign name particularly picked up on by t he target market. If it had set up a dedicated section on the site, talking about the campaign, it would have had a far more compelling place to drive traffic to. This would also have likely produced better social engagement, as they would have been able to tailor the copy<br />
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RESOURCES If you’re looking to get started with modern SEO best practice, here are a few blogs and journals to get you started:<br />
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BLOGS Moz Blog moz.com/blog Builtvisible Blog builtvisible.com/blog Search Engine Land searchengineland.com s e r u t a e F<br />
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If on the other hand you’d prefer a more lively environment to learn from and somewhere to network with people, try these events:<br />
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CONFERENCES MozCon moz.com/mozcon searchlove www.distilled.net/events Future of Web Design futureofwebdesign.com/london-2014 <br />
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specifically around the content, as well as being able to be more innovative with the interface, testing and improving the page over time, rather than relying on the generic videos page on their site. Secondly, the MMM3000 campaign (mattessons. outsideline.co.uk ) for Mattessons resulted in a Tumblr account outranking the Mattessons site for the key terms created specifically for t he campaign. Given<br />
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It’s all about paying attention to the details and knowing those things exist and matter the particularly tech-savvy nature of the group being targeted for this (gamers under 18), you can’t help but believe that this was a massive oversight. Furthermore, putting the content on a subdomain reduces the ability of the content to pass weight to the main domain. There’s 69,000 results in Google for the term ‘MMM3000’,all related to the campaign in question, from thousands of sites, all of which could have been engaged and brought in to link to the main site, where all the v ideos and information are hosted. Instead, they link to YouTube, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter and so on, creating less benefit<br />
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for the brand, and no search impact. Again, this wouldn’t be tricky to fix. Simply monitoring mentions of key phrases and following up with bloggers to ensure they linked to the right places would have yielded great search benefit, as well as also creating connections with the most engaged members of the audience. Having a diverse social presence is fantastic, but it needs to be managed and corralled to derive the most benefit. Going back to the beginning, it’s all about paying attention to the details, and knowing those things exist and matter. Through bearing in mind good site architecture, ensuring basic SEO essentials like title tags, server headers, page copy optimisation, ensuring pages are spiderable and so on, you can avoid 95 per cent of the most common issues.<br />
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Above The Telegraph’s UCAS Calculator currently ranks first for the UCAS calculator, as a result of strong domain authority and link weight<br />
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CONCLUSION In the SEO industry there exists an army of people who are passionate about creating amazing experiences for consumers, and who want to build amazing content for their clients, pushing to create great work. We believe that SEO has a chance to really help not just the agencies involved, but the consumers and brands too in enabling discovery and re-discovery of the great content produced. The search optimisation industry may not be perfect, but, at it’s best, it’s helping to develop better websites and create more engaging content for clients of all sizes. It’s not quite the industry we want yet, but we can see it from here. ●<br />
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Get to the top of Google! SEO is a shapeshifter: its current, grown-up incarnation is audiencedriven, engine and user-friendly. Bryson Meunier has the details<br />
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Words Bryson Meunier (@brysonmeunier) is director of SEO strategy at Resolution Media, and a primary architect of the agency’s natural search product and ClearTarget Digital Behavior Analysis www.resolutionmedia.com<br />
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Image Mike Brennan is art editor of .net www.twitter.com/mike_ brennan01<br />
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Sure, you know about SEO. You might not be an expert, per se, but you have a good understanding of the basics: title tags, clean URLs, text-based design and so on. Even if you’re more of an expert than most, just as often it’s what you don’t know about SEO that will hurt you. Many webmasters found this out the hard way in February 2011, when Google’s Panda update was released. Many of these same webmasters were hit again little more than a year later, when the search giant’s Penguin update followed – targeting low-quality, spammy link-building tactics. What they thought was SEO worked for a little while, and then turned out to be less than optimal. Sites were penalised; traffic and revenue lost, and so-called ‘SEOs’ fired. Since then there’s been a new tone in the SEO industry. Not all of us were creating lowquality content and links; but for many of those that were, these two updates were a wake-up call. And for those of us who have always been focused on high-quality, relevant content and<br />
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links, it was something like redemption. Our sites soared while so many fell. This is the new normal for SEO. Yes, there are still some who call themselves SEOs but focus on manipulative tactics with short term revenue goals; yet there are also many who are part of a large and growing industry of specialists in a highly complex discipline that requires marketing, technical, and research and communication skills. So just how big is SEO? Believe it or not, it’s bigger in the minds of Google searchers than web design. Once considered a subset of web design, searches for SEO now eclipse those of web design worldwide (see http://netm.ag/ trends-238). The total projected value of the North American search marketing industry (SEO and paid search) in 2013 is $26.8billion, according to industry trade organisation SEMPO (www. econsultancy.com/us/reports/sempo-state-ofsearch), and 13 per cent of companies have SEO budgets of half a million to more than three million a year (up from 8 per cent in 2011). As budgets increase, there’s more to<br />
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MOBILE ONLY<br />
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RESPONSIVE SPAMMERS<br />
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NO DEAD LINKS PLEASE<br />
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Features<br />
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F e a t u r e s <br />
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Get to the top of Google<br />
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RELEVANT CONTENT<br />
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Changing trends Google Trends data shows that the number of searches for “web design” has declined over time – to the point where it is now eclipsed by searches for “seo”<br />
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SEO mission control Google Webmasters has many valuable reports on crawling and indexing of content, as well as who links to you and what queries your site appears for<br />
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the title tags of the major pages so they included relevant keywords, and changed the copy in these pages when necessary to include popular relevant keywords. lFollowed Google’s image search best practices (http://netm.ag/imagesearch-238), and added structured markup to all images to ensure that the engines had as much information about what the images were relevant for as possible.<br />
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lose, and many companies have become more risk averse – forgoing the shady tactics they may have pursued in the past. In cutting out the garbage, we start to see what SEO is really good for (and has always been good for): connecting relevant content with relevant searchers, and making content discoverable through accessibility and marketing. For those of you who still think of SEOs as greasy algorithm-chasers in cheap suits or parents’ basements, consider the new reality.<br />
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Results<br />
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Engines are not enemies<br />
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lIn<br />
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When I started doing SEO in-house for a Fortune 50 corporation 10 years ago, there were many in the organisation who were a little nervous about what we were doing. Nothing was against the Google guidelines … because there were no such guidelines in existence. At that time there were a few books, but SEO was largely something that was spoken of covertly, and certainly never to search engines, which, it was thought, would likely think of it as manipulation. Today we know better. Google and Bing have both published extensive webmaster guidelines, and Google has even published a guide to SEO for beginners (http://netm.ag/seostarter-238).<br />
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Multimedia SEO case study Background: a client came to us looking to increase natural search traffic to its car imagesharing site.<br />
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Challenge: lImages were hidden behind JavaScript and<br />
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not indexed. lImages were hosted on another domain (a<br />
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common CDN) making it impossible to create image sitemaps. lTitle tags were branded, making it difficult for the engines to understand what keywords the site was relevant for. lMost common search phrases were not used in content. lAs a new site, there was a lack of authority.<br />
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Strategy: lRewrote the URLs so that they would appear<br />
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to the engines to be hosted on client’s site to get more content indexed. lMade images more accessible by adding noscript tags to the download page. lUsed sitemaps and image sitemaps to ensure that the engines were aware of our content and the structure of our site.<br />
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lChanged<br />
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the first four weeks after implementation, the number of images indexed went from 10,000 thumbnail images to 54,000 images. In six months, 403,000 images were indexed. lDoubled relevant organic search traffic in four weeks, taking organic traffic from 11 per cent to 22 per cent of the total visits. Organic search was 41 per cent of visits in six months. lClickthrough rate from organic search increased 460 per cent in the first four weeks. lMonthly organic visits grew 4198.61 per cent from 1,083 to 46,554 in six months. lIn a year, the site sat on Google page one for relevant high-volume terms such as ‘pictures of cars’ ‘pics of cars’ and ‘car wallpapers’.<br />
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o”<br />
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On the rise SEO can increase your traffic significantly if you do it correctly. In the case study shown above, organic traffic grew by more than 4,000 per cent in the first six months Way forward Detailed, integrated SEO plans can be crucial<br />
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Features<br />
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Get to the top of Google In-depth Danny Sullivan Company Search Engine Land Role Founding editor Web www. searchengineland.com<br />
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Big hitters Google offers more than 570 videos for webmasters, which, in four years, have had over 10 million views<br />
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In August 2011, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of webspam, released a video statement (http:// netm.ag/spam-238) saying that Google does not consider SEO by itself to be spam. This sentiment now appears in Google’s definition of search engine optimisation (http://netm.ag/seodef-238), in which it says: “Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners.” Still, because of a few spammers who call themselves SEOs, SEOs in general have the reputation of being charlatans, and have been portrayed as such on television shows such as The Good Wife and Dexter . “SEO has unfortunately got a bad rap, and it’s due mainly to questionable SEO practitioners who<br />
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practice. And our software, which bills monthly, has more than 18,000 subscribers as of today. If SEO were just snake oil, I strongly suspect folks would stop paying.” SEO, in its legitimate form, is now a more accepted part of the web design process, and in many organisations is finally getting a seat at the table when it comes to designing professional, search engine-friendly web sites.<br />
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A process, not a project In my decade-plus doing enterprise SEO, there have been many instances in which the SEO team is brought in after the website is already complete, and told to magically make it search engine friendly. This isn’t ideal. As Google says in<br />
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In cutting out the garbage we start to see what SEO is really good for: connecting relevant content with relevant searchers perpetuate the ‘snake oil’ stereotype by making customers believe there’s some magic ‘black box’ that ‘tricks’ the search engines,” says Gord Hotchkiss, chief strategy officer for Montrealbased Mediative (www.mediative.com) and regular columnist for Search Insider. Hotchkiss, and the other experts I reach out to for this article, explain that SEO is simply about getting relevant content indexed, and making sure it’s visible to the search engines. All of the veteran SEOs that I speak to understand why SEO still has the reputation in some circles of being snake oil. But they insist that it has, at this point, become much more mainstream and credible. Rand Fishkin, founder of Seattle-based SEO software company SEOMoz (www.seomoz.org), discusses with me a few of his favourite reasons for SEO being something other than snake oil, including that “SEOmoz itself has more than 2million monthly visits, nearly all from web marketers looking to learn more about the<br />
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its guide to SEO: “If you’re thinking about hiring an SEO, the earlier the better.” The really competitive sites that I’ve worked with over the years understand this, and integrate SEO into every stage of the planning process, from information architecture to content strategy to design, development, launch and post-launch. A lot of web designers and developers are hesitant about integrating SEO further into the process, because doing so effectively produces extra work. But the rewards can be great, reminds Vanessa Fox, founder and CEO of Nine by Blue and author of Marketing in the Age of Google. “Organisations are losing 1) tremendous insight into their customers and potential customers if they don’t take advantage of the free search data that’s available from the millions of searches we do each day; 2) the opportunity to reach a significantly larger audience through being visible in search results.” Would you put the Mona Lisa in a closet? Would you spend hours cooking<br />
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How would you convince doubters that SEO is a legitimate marketing strategy? SEO has been around for nearly two decades now and is recommended by Google, which even provides its own guide for it. The world’s largest search engine isn’t going to be pushing snake oil – it has every reason not to. The fact that it does is probably the best reason beyond all the many out there about why SEO is important. Ignore it, and you’re ignoring what the actual search engines you want to be listed in are telling you to do to improve your chances. Many designers see SEO as extra work and may add it at the end of the web design process if they’ve added it at all. Why should these people take SEO more seriously (if indeed they should)? If you build it, they don’t necessarily come. Creating a shiny, wonderful new website doesn’t matter if you’ve built it in a way to make it invisible to search engines. Designers often test to ensure their sites work well in different browsers like IE, Firefox and Chrome. Well, I’ve long written about search engines as being the most important browser of all, because everyone uses them to find sites. But if you’ve not designed your site for the unique things the search engine browser wants, people won’t locate them. A lot of software has been introduced in the past couple of years that seeks to automate aspects of the SEO process. Will SEO ever be completely automated? Software can’t automatically tell the type of content your readers are interested in, the type of words they’ll use to seek that content, create the quality content itself to serve them – and that’s just the foundational part of SEO. Tools are nice. But we’ve had tools for years to build houses, yet we haven’t completely automated house building. Never say never, but I think humans will long be involved in SEO. What would you say are some promising trends in SEO today and why? The use of more social data as a potential additional signal beyond looking at links to identify quality content is most promising to me. The greater use of structured data is also encouraging, as are the new possibilities opened up as people search on mobile devices and with mobile apps.<br />
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s e r u t a e F<br />
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Paul A checked in at Facebook<br />
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F e a t u r e s <br />
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On target Vanessa Fox of Nine by Blue (www.ninebyblue.com) created this searcher persona in order to connect audience goals with relevant content from the business<br />
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beef wellington, and as it emerges perfect from the oven throw it in the trash? Then why would you build a website without considering how it will be found? There’s another reason for making SEO a priority in the web design process, advises Hotchkiss – “it forces you to create a better website! Good SEO optimisation should be baked into your information architecture. It will force you to think about common content themes. It requires you to consider how all digital assets (such as videos and user-generated content) will be integrated into the overall user experience. It helps eliminate user experience dead ends such as gratuitious Flash interfaces and, my personal pet peeve, content locked in PDFs. It extends your perception of your online footprint beyond the bounds of your website, including things like social media. It will also instil a healthy rigour when it comes to thinking about how your site links together. Good SEO practices means a better user experience.” From my experience, more organisations than ever are learning these lessons, and are no longer<br />
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While SEO is constantly evolving, at the moment it seems focused on mobility, utility, the audience and automation thinking of SEO as a project, but as an ongoing process that ensures a website will be as visible in search as possible. This is good for web design because it gives it a larger audience, but also good for business.<br />
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It’s not just about links: emerging SEO trends While many commentators have claimed that SEO is dead since it began around 1997, the truth is that it doesn’t die; it evolves with the search engines. While SEO is constantly evolving, at the moment it seems focused on mobility, utility, the audience and automation, among other things. One of these trends is the dissolving distinction between SEO, user experience and<br />
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Readymade people Resolution Media’s ClearTarget Behavioral Analysis takes keyword research to another level by harnessing the power of big data and automation to create actionable searcher personas<br />
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content strategy. In one recent Webmaster Tools YouTube video (http://netm.ag/cutts -238), Matt Cutts even suggested that those looking to change the name might consider “searcher experience optimisation” to differentiate from the 'snake oil' variety of SEO. Some, such as Vanessa Fox, have suggested that SEO need not proceed as a separate activity from UX and content strategy: “I think that both disciplines should incorporate best practices from search rather than thinking of it as something tacked on later,” she says. “Particularly, the data available from search is extremely valuable. Also, understanding that many visitors begin with a major search engine and that any page of the site can therefore become the homepage<br />
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Get going Google’s SEO Starter Guide defines tactics to help search engines and webmasters display relevant content<br />
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NO DEAD LINKS PLEASE<br />
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Features<br />
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Get to the top of Google<br />
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In-depth Implementing optimised Facebook sharing Facebook’s Open Graph (the overarching name of the algorithm that handles third party content on Facebook) relies on a series of meta tags, which need to be present in the <head> section of every web page to guide how content should be displayed when shared. There are specific parameters that these meta tags need to adhere to in order to be activated in search results. There are essentially four lines of code that need to be present wherever there’s sharing functionality: – the title of your object as it should appear within the graph, for example ‘SEO Mentioned Again on The Good Wife’. l og:type – the type of your object, such as ‘article’. Depending on the type you specify, other properties may also be required. In the case of an article, additional information can be included in the graph*. l og:image – an image URL that should represent your object within the graph. These should be consistent with the article (for instance www.brysonmeunier.com/ wp-content/uploads/2012/10/seo-from-thegood-wife.jpg. l og:url – the canonical URL of your object that will be used as its permanent ID in the graph, such as www.brysonmeunier.com/seomentioned-again-on-the-good-wife. l og:title<br />
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Learning curve Blogs and Twitter help SEOs stay on-trend<br />
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of the site can shift how we look at both page design and content.” At the same time, Fox – and all of the other SEOs I asked – recognise that content strategy and usability, while essential for reputable SEO, need technical and other elements from SEO to be useful as a way of getting incremental search engine traffic. “When SEO is done the right way, usability and content is a huge part of the plan,” opines Eric Enge, founder and CEO of Massachusettsbased Stone Temple Consulting and co-author of The Art of SEO. “This is something that the snake-oil SEO people don’t worry about. For longterm success as a web publisher, the use must come first. However, for success as a business, you need to do more.” With this concentration on content strategy and usability comes a focus on the audience as well. For Hotchkiss, this is a shift from wordmatching to utility, and follows the search engines’ own evolution. “Today, good SEO is about making sure that when a prospect uses a word (or words) to search for something, you match that as best as possible,” he says. “But in the future, SEO will be about ensuring that when your prospect wants something, you deliver it. It may not be content. It may be a movie ticket, a hotel booking, a restaurant reservation or a downloaded TV show.”<br />
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*When these pieces of data are known or available publicly (note: never push information in an Open Graph tag that is not visible on the page in question – this could be flagged as a form of cloaking), include these pieces as part of the lines in the Facebook Meta Tag: - datetime – when the article was first published. l article:modified_time - datetime – when the article was last changed. l article:expiration_time - datetime – when the article is going out of date. l article:published_time<br />
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l article:author - profile array – the<br />
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writers<br />
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of the article<br />
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Live example For the example, this is what should be in the <head> section of the URL (this format should be included for all pages on the site; additions are in red). The content title and description should carry through to the Open Graph tags: <html prefix="og: http://ogp.me/ns#"> <head profile="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/ vocab"> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/ html; charset=utf-8" /> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://www. brysonmeunier.com/sites/all/themes/spirezen/ favicon.ico" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon" /> <meta content="SEO Mentioned Again on the Good Wife" about="/seo-mentioned-again-onthe-good-wife/" property="dc:title" /> <link rel="shortlink" href="/node/398" /> <link rel="canonical" href="/seo-mentionedagain-on-the-good-wife/" /> <title> SEO Mentioned Again on The Good Wife | BrysonMeunier.com <meta name="description" content="CBS Television show "The Good Wife" mentions SEO again in a fictional trial. Read more." /> <meta property="og:title" content=" SEOMentioned Again on The Good Wife " /> <meta property="og:description" content=" CBS Television show "The Good Wife" mentions SEO again in a fictional trial. Read more." <meta property="og:type" content="Article" /> <meta property="og:url" content=" http://www. brysonmeunier.com/seo-mentioned-again-onthe-good-wife/" " /> <meta property="og:image" content=" http:// www.brysonmeunier.com/wp-content/ uploads/2012/10/seo-from-the-good-wife.jpg" />
