All posts by Tad Chef

SEO 2.0 living and working in Germany as a blog & SEO consultant. I'm blogging in English for SEO blogs around the world. My real name is Tadeusz Szewczyk but my friends who don't speak Polish - my mother tongue - call me Tad Chef or onreact.

ranking me ranking you*

SEO is a fast changing discipline.

What worked 5 or 10 years ago might be completely unnecessary these days or even bad for your site’s ranking.

Thus leading search industry publications publish the most probable Google ranking factors each year. Nonetheless many webmasters prefer to stick to the past or follow wrong advice from bloggers who just repeat SEO myths.

In recent years, Google has not only included lots of new media types into Universal search results; it has also added numerous ranking factors while rethinking many old ones.

I made a list of new or current ranking factors that get underestimated by webmasters and neglected because of this. At the same time, I included those often old school ranking factors webmasters tend to overestimate the power of. These may not work anymore, or may even hurt your site in Google’s search results.

 

google +1 button

Google +1 for websites is here for a few days, and while some people are still (or again) skeptical, there are quite a lot of webmasters who have adopted the + 1 button almost immediately. The SEO industry has been especially quick to include the buttons. I am among them, while I still don’t use the Facebook like.

I’m not going to shout hooray because Google finally released a button, but nonetheless I can see that it’s the best and the hitherto most important attempt by Google at entering the social media arena. Most others failed miserably and Google has learned some lessons it seems.

The ease of use, for instance, and the quick announcement that the +1 votes will count as a ranking factor, are good signs that +1 will still be here a year from now.

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Most of traditional SEO link building is still centered around the idea of actually building the links as if on a construction site. The idea or metaphor that links are like bricks and you can use them for building has been successfully contested recently by Ross Hudgens in his essay “Please exit the link building“.

It was an excellent write up, but in the end it failed to offer a solution that is not really about building links. The alternative to link building is of course getting links.

Getting links implies that you do not manually build the links like a house in the real world, but people from outside who you may not even know link to you.

This is of course the logical way to get links, and was the way the Internet worked even before link building was considered to be part of SEO.

Google have just rolled out a new tool called Google Correlate. It’s similar to Google Trends and Google Insights, but it takes the raw data and analyses it. As the name suggests, it’s looking for correlations – that is, whether the demand for a given keyword matches the popularity of any other keywords.

Sometimes the results are completely random, to the point of being ridiculous and far from useful for SEO. However, after a bit of testing, I’ve found out how you can use Google Correlate for keyword research.

Note that the tool is still a Google Labs project and US only, thus not really ready for prime time. On the other hand, it can already give you valuable information for your next US campaign.

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ROI or Return On Investment is on everyone’s lips these days. It’s become so widespread that you could call it a buzz word now. Although its meaning gets a bit diluted, I have to admit that I use it sometimes outside its strict sense myself.

Originally ROI meant the extra monetary return, while increasingly it may mean any value that you get back for something you invest in, be it time, effort or money.

With SEO, and especially social media, ROI has become very fuzzy.

Everyone wants it but it’s not so obvious, so more and more people come up with their own notion of how the actual ROI of SEO and social media might look, and how you can measure it.

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With the recent “Panda” Google quality update one of the key changes was that low quality content and links within it have been discounted by Google. It means that

not only so-called content farms got hit by the Panda update, but also sites which heavily relied on content farms for inbound links.

Perhaps the most obvious casualty was article marketing. If article marketing was  one of your key link building tactics prior to the Panda update, you finally have to adapt to modern link building and link baiting techniques that still work in 2011.

 

In this list I focused on common sense, widely used techniques, of which you’ll find plenty of examples on the Web. I didn’t want to be particularly creative and spectacular. So if you are Eric Ward or Michael Martinez you might not find anything new here.

For everybody else: check the list to find out whether you use all of them or at least those fitting best in your area, niche or industry.

anchor *

When it comes to link building one of the most important aspects of it is the optimisation of the actual link. Whether getting the link voluntarily or by contacting webmasters, you have to exert the utmost influence on the link itself. Unfortunately this is also a Catch 22.

When you start controlling the appearance of your link it stops being a natural link.

Thus Google can use filters on such a link to determine it’s ”manufactured”.

So there is a really volatile relationship between links being natural and useful for SEO. Most successful SEO techniques have been abused in the past by spammers so that Google tweaks its algo to curb overtly artificial link building.

In  recent weeks we have witnessed two overwhelming waves of news I’d like to call ‘news tsunamis‘. Like real tsunamis you have no choice, you can’t escape the news when you are in the nearby area. For this kind of news the whole planet is nearby.

Maybe some tribes in the Amazon jungle or a few monks in the Himalayas haven’t noticed the death of Osama Bin Laden and the royal wedding, but apart from those lucky few, we have all been drowned in these news waves.

While I was unable to escape the news, no matter how much I tried, I at least tried to reroute the hype induced into something useful: SEO.

My first urge was to catch up quickly and take advantage of the huge waves of traffic.

Instead, I decided to watch the waves of news and to follow the steps of others who have tried to use the energy of these waves to power their websites. Why? It doesn’t make much sense to get huge news traffic without planning what to do with it.

Bird tweeting*

There are numerous ways of using Twitter for everything from business to fun. The key to using Twitter effectively is the use of tools. Without tools, Twitter can be overwhelming and difficult to fathom. There are numerous tools that allow you to sift through this massive resource of latest news, links and gossip.

So what are the Twitter tools that really make a difference for advanced Twitter users?

I selected just the best of them: 30+ Twitter tools that are most useful right now. Most of these tools have been around for years so they have a sound business model. They simplify manifold tasks but have one thing in common: you must be aware of these tools if you’re serious about Twitter participation.

Everybody is talking about content farms as if they were the only type of sites hit by the latest large Google update. That’s a very limited viewpoint.

One of the most striking effects of the UK version of Google’s quality update dubbed Panda has been the huge losses by shopping search engines and review sites that focus on price comparison. Not all such services have lost though.

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