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.

While everybody is talking about content farms right now, most people seem to overlook the far more important change that took place recently:  Google has incorporated social search results right into the regular ones.

Until now they displayed searches by your Twitter, FriendFeed or Google Buzz friends below the regular organic results. These changes are even more profound; I can’t explain them in a few short sentences. What’s clear though is that for power users who have a Google account, there has been another important layer of personalisation added.

The rankings differ significantly when logged in and out. For instance I see shared results for the keyword [seo] on #3 and #5, while they are usually #5 and #7 behind the Google News results. Compare the two screenshots below, the logged in version comes first.

Social search is not just Google though. Google is late to the party. There have been several first generation social search engines around since 2009 or earlier, but most of them haven’t survived or only offer a poor user experience and search quality. On the other hand there are plenty of new tools out there – not necessarily search engines as we know them – that offer unmatched social search capabilities.

 

Last but not least, Bing and Blekko offer Facebook search, which Google does not. So it’s time to dig deeper into search, both from an end user and an SEO specialist perspective. Thus I have compiled one of my infamous lists: 30 Social Search Tools & SEO Resources for Power Users.

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It’s 2011 and by now I expect most people to know what Twitter is and how it works. Still, many people who should know better commit unpleasant mistakes – or rather they ignore the Twitter netiquette. They do things that make me unfollow them.

I’m on Twitter for business and I expect to get valuable information from it, as well as some serious social networking with my industry peers. What I do not want is a lot of:

  • noise
  • low quality
  • off-topic content
  • ads
  • automated messages.

Sounds simple doesn’t it?

In the past week I had to unfollow people for a variety of reasons. This is a shame, but sometimes a readable Twitter timeline is more important than particular users who don’t care whether they steal my time, confuse and frustrate me.

speed*

Site speed has been the foremost discipline of website optimisation since even before SEO appeared. In the early days of the Internet, connections were so slow that people jokingly referred to the WWW as the world wide wait. I remember those days. I used to type in a URL and then take a book to read while it was loading.

I’ve been using a high speed connection (DSL) for a decade now and most people now do too. Nonetheless, some people are still using modems, while mobile Web use has emerged as an important part of Web traffic. Many people still pay by volume, and mobile connections are not usually really fast yet.

That’s not all though. Users with a fast connection tend to be very impatient. Waiting a few seconds for a loading page makes many users bounce (or flee) straight away. Thus in 2010 Google decided to take site speed into account as a direct ranking factor. Some SEO experts argue that it’s not a really important ranking signal, but the proof is rather anecdotal.

So at the end of the day you still need to optimise your website (or re-optimise it) for speed for a bunch of reasons. The good news is that there are plenty of ways to do so. I’ve listed 30 ways to optimise your site for speed below: I’ll start with the obvious ones which  many people nonetheless tend to forget these days, as they use fast connections themselves.

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For most people, SEO still is either a complete unknown, magic​ or the scapegoat for almost everything that doesn’t work on the Web.​ In particular, bloggers seeking attention, publicity and links love to leverage all the ignorance and prejudice​ and launch attacks on SEO as a whole again and again.

Recently, another popular blogger, who leads one of the most important technology blogs (which uses all kinds of SEO techniques​) did it again. This time it was not the average “SEO is rubbish” attack; it was a broader “search sucks” attack where of course not search engines themselves are guilty of being broken but the scapegoat: SEO.

question*

The hype of 2011 is Quora, the new Q&A site that attempts to become much better than Yahoo Answers by aiming at high quality replies.​ Everybody and his mum is on Quora it seems, especially SEO industry leaders like Rand Fishkin or Danny Sullivan. ​I’m not very active at Quora yet but I watch it closely. While at it, I collected so many resources and opinions that I wanted to share them with you.​ As usual in such cases, I have compiled one of my 30+ lists that you all love so dearly. So here it is: 33 Quora Q&A Resources to get actual ROI out using of it.

Before I throw the links at you, I’d like to summarize the most obvious current uses of Quora. You can:​​

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Web tools are useful when they don’t require a significant time investment to master them or use them. The best tools out there save time and make money at the same time. They don’t even have to deal with time and money like time management or micropayment tools do. They just have to make sure you reach your goals as fast as possible and that you finish the tasks you work on as quickly as possible.

Business tools in particular have to be time saving in order to make time for the actual business matters.

There are tools out there, such as Facebook, which require more time investment than others, and the ROI remains fuzzy. ​Today I want to focus on the kind of tools that are the exact opposite:  efficient. Check out the list of 30 efficient Web tools that save time and make money for power users below:

At the end of 2010, Google propelled local SEO to new heights by not only showing local results for search queries​ with a local ​modifier (e.g. [seo london]) but letting local results dominate such queries. Additionally, Google shows local results from Google Places by default, without users even adding a geographic signifier. So when you search for for [hotel] from London, you will be directed to hotels in London. This means that

there is a lot of opportunity, commotion and confusion in the SEO industry

and the webmaster community right now. Google seems to experiment a lot with these new local search results and it’s difficult to see a pattern sometimes.

Local SEO differs significantly from conventional organic SEO. First of all you have to register with Google by adding a Google Places profile, and then you have to get reviews aka citations from a set of trusted sites Google uses to rank local results. This is an almost completely new game and most people aren’t good at it yet. Furthermore, Google currently struggles to provide relevant results due to local business owners not yet wholly grasping what’s going on.

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Google’s latest algorithm update has been specifically targeting so-called ‘content farms’. Most people probably still don’t know what a content farm, is while some sites may already be affected negatively by this update.

So today I want to suggest ways to avoid being labelled as a content farm in order to stay afloat on Google.

A content farm is, generally speaking, a site geared towards search engine users​. In most cases, it has low quality content based either on automatic recycling (scraping) or low paid labor force. Either way, the content is quite well “optimized”​ so that it shows up above sites perceived as having a higher quality content.

I don’t want to debate here on whether a content farm ​is spam or has some value. I want to tell how you can make sure you don’t appear to have a content farm on your website.

link profile
SEOptimise link profile on Blekko.

Every site owner engaged in SEO has to strive for a natural link profile. Just as you want to have natural-sounding copy on your page without keyword stuffing and other antique spam techniques, so you want to have a link profile that does not look like one powered solely by artificial SEO.

A site having only

  • comment
  • directory
  • footer links

most probably from link exchanges does not have a healthy link profile, while a site having links of all kinds from all kinds of sources has. ​While it’s difficult to have a 100% natural link profile, where you don’t build links at all and get all your links from webmasters voluntarily without contacting them,​ you can still have a natural link profile.

Now here comes someone and asks me about nofollow and whether it is a ranking factor or signal.

Recently I  bookmarked a good entry level SEO glossary of current SEO terms. A few weeks ago I complained ​about some people still using obsolete and inaccurate SEO terms such as “keyword density”.

Additionally, I missed many new or important terms on this list which I read about and often use, but many people, on the Web at least, don’t. Thus I won’t assume that everybody knows them already. Instead I want to define here 30 (new) SEO terms you have to know in 2011.

Some of them have been around for years but have been largely ignored by the SEO industry. Others are well known by SEO practicioners but completely off the radar for the general public, it seems. Last but not least there are terms from adjacent industries we now have to deal with in SEO. It’s 2011 – we have flying cars by now! – so it’s time to adopt new terminology as well.​


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