All posts by Marcus Taylor

Marcus Taylor is head of social media at SEOptimise and has an interest in social networking psychology. Marcus has written a book on the topic and has spoken at leading industry events including SMX and SMM as well as writing for many blogs including State of Search, The Wall, and Social Media Club. You can also find Marcus on Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Last week at SMX London I presented the results from several experiments I’ve been running over the months on how important Facebook likes are for search. For a full write-up and explanation of my presentation you can read my blog post on State of Search, or if you’d just like to have a look through my presentation, here it is!

Today, Daniel Bianchini and I thought we’d create a video blog post discussing the difference between return on investment on social media and search engine optimisation. We hope this will be the first in a long line of video blogs by SEOptimise.

We hope you enjoy it and provide us with your valuable comments below about the video and chosen topic.

Transcript coming soon.

At SEOptimise, we’ve got 3 spare tickets to SMX Advanced London to give away to 3 lucky readers of our blog who are happy to share an embarrassing SEO-related confession in the comments below this post.


Kevin Gibbons speaking at SMX Advanced London 2010

Ever decided to turn down a family dinner event because you secretly wanted to stay in and optimise your title tags? Or perhaps you’ve gone on a relaxing holiday for a week but couldn’t resist checking in to an Internet Cafe to build some links? Or maybe you’re like me and you like to bring a Keyword Density Checker into drinking games at social occasions – we want to know your most embarrassing SEO stories!

The short answer, yes.

Recently I decided to run an experiment to find out how Google was treating social signals – so I set up a brand new domain (http://www.yogamatcompare.com) with 0 backlinks and started acquiring likes and tweets to the domain. Today, just a week after registering the domain, the site ranks for ‘Indian Yoga Mats’ ‘Cheap Yoga Mats’ ‘Yoga Mat Compare’ ‘Luxury Yoga Mats’ and many other keywords, still with not a single backlink (time stamped proof of 0 backlinks here, and here).

As it’s a Friday afternoon and we’re all winding down for the weekend, I thought it would be an appropriate time to reveal a lighthearted tale involving keyword density, penguins, and Sambuca that I recently admitted to the SEOptimise team – something terribly shameful…

A story of why keyword density is in fact not dead.

A few friends and I were playing the infamous ‘Happy Feet drinking game’ whereby each player is assigned a frequently mentioned word that whenever they hear whilst watching the film Happy Feet has to drink a shot. I was assigned the word ‘fish’ (which I wrongly assumed wouldn’t be mentioned very much).

You get penalised. You get a heap of traffic, and then get penalised.

While I am certainly no black-hat by any means, and do not advocate the techniques outlined in this post for long-term SEO projects, I love testing the theories and rumours that circulate in the SEO community about what link building works and what doesn’t. Regardless of how dodgy the rumours are,  it helps me build a bigger picture of  how Google treats link building.

 

So during the Christmas period a few months back I decided to set myself a challenge:  to see what would happen if I built a very large quantity of low quality links in a short period of time into a new domain, in order to gauge where Google draws the line with this type of link building and to understand better what pattern this kind of link building penalty might have. Call me crazy, but these things are good to test and they help you to understand what to do and what patterns to look for when something goes wrong unintentionally.

If you haven’t heard of ping.fm before, it’s a nice little service that allows you to add a heap of your social media and social bookmarking accounts and post updates to all of your added networks in one go, which can be done directly through the ping.fm site or with SMS, Email, instant messaging bots, or an automatic WordPress plugin.

Obviously this is a bit of a sensitive area as on one hand being able to update forty or so social bookmarking sites in one go sounds like a nice way of creating a lode of quick social media bookmark links automatically, which despite generally being no followed and from low authority profile pages can add up to have some quick win value, but on the other hand it’s just the kind of tool that if used unethically is going to eventually make social media unsociable. So how does an ethical seo use ping.fm?


When it comes to online video marketing, we often assume that the only hope of getting a substantial quantity of views is through some form of viral marketing, which don’t get me wrong is a brilliant tactic of gaining traffic to your video but with Google shifting further towards universal search results, optimising your video for search is something that certainly shouldn’t be underestimated or ignored, so how can you optimise your videos to perform better in search? Here are my top ten tips for optimising your videos for higher search rankings.

#1 Pick Descriptive Title Tags

Claiming a Twitter profile name seems to be the new domain squatting, so I thought it would be interesting to see how many top brands have claimed what would be their first choice Twitter handle.


Image credit: Flickr

So for example, Sky would presumably like to have claimed twitter.com/sky – but missed out on this to another user.

Since Google was first created, hackers have found ways to gain access to its databases to access private information, but not all hacking is malicious and dangerous like the movies and newspapers suggest – there are indeed some very useful and fun ‘hacks’ that anybody can do without an extensive knowledge of scripting codes or website security. The hacks mentioned below are for sensible use only.

  • Freely edit a Google Chrome web page (it won’t save your changes!)

Make a statement using javascript!Make a statement using javascript!

This also works in other browsers and can be fun if your friend or colleague has briefly left the room with his or her browser window left open – simply enter the following javascript code into the address bar of the browser and hit enter to allow full editing functionality over a web page’s content (no changes will be saved to that website so this hack is completely harmless.)

javascript: document.body.contentEditable = ‘true’; document.designMode = ‘on’; void 0.

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