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Changes at SEOptimise


By On August 30, 2012 In seo With 3 Comments

Although I wouldn’t usually use the blog for this, I thought I’d give you a quick update on the recent changes here at SEOptimise.

As you may have heard, my co-founder, Kevin Gibbons has moved on to pastures new. I’m sure Kevin will make a great success of his new business, and it leaves SEOptimise in a strong position as it continues to forge forward under the key Oxford team.

SEOptimise was formed in 2007 when Kevin and I started to work together. We brought together different skill sets that complemented each other and enabled us to grow quickly from a couple of desks in my spare bedroom to offices in multiple locations, working with blue chip organisations.

Recently, I read an interesting blog post by Barry Adams titled “The Adversarial Relationship between Google and SEO“. He argues that Google’s not an SEO’s friend but rather an adversary and cited quite an interesting patent filing by Google titled ‘Ranking Documents’. If you’re an SEO I’d strongly suggest you take the time to read this document in full. Also, Bill Slawski provides an excellent analysis of how this new approach will affect a page’s rankings.

In layman’s terms, this patent document specifies how Google intends on making rank changes to its search engine results pages (SERPs). Instead of allowing the algorithm to use its ranking factors to decide how documents (or pages) are ranked, Google will randomly initiate a “transition” period between when a rank change happens.

Since Google released the Panda update in February last year, the importance of having high-quality content on your site has increased hugely.

In May 2011, Amit Singhal published a post aimed to help people build better quality websites. One of the most important points to take away from it was, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, having good-quality content. Here I’m going to go into detail over some of his points and explain what you really need to do if you want to rank well.

During a recent analysis of a website (blog with less than 50k visitors a week), we came across some interesting factors that led to us taking a different approach to investigation.

The Problem:

  • The site faced 20-40% drop in traffic corresponding with periods in roll outs of the Panda Algorithm.
  • The site saw a loss in rankings, but no consistency across them – some keywords moved down a few positions, while others went off the first 2-3 pages of the SERPs.
  • The site is a blog, and as a result most of the content written was original and unique, and written by a single person based on their research and experience.
  • The site has been in existence for over 6 years and attracts a lot of natural links – in fact no link building to the site has ever been carried out.

From the above, this doesn’t seem like your typical target for Panda, but the dates of the traffic drops were too much of a coincidence.

Content strategy has always been a valued part of SEO and, with Google’s recent updates, it’s become increasingly important. No matter what size your business is, having a regular flow of good quality content on your site is essential.

However, content does take time to produce and, when you’re a small business, it can be hard to find the time or people to produce regular content for your site.

There are several options for small businesses to make the most of their resources and create a site with a steady stream of relevant, useful content. We’ll go through some of them here in order to help those of you who are finding it difficult to know where to start.

Getting visitors to go through your blog and enjoy what you have written isn’t the easiest thing on the planet. It requires time, patience and a lot of practice. To see evidence of visitor engagement you should see signs of regular activity and so should the visitor.

Here is some simple advice which might help keep your visitors engaged with your site and encourage them to come back for more.

Your goals should be:

  1. Receiving relevant comments
  2. People linking to & sharing your content
  3. Repeat visitors to your blog
  4. Build relationships

The real aim is to keep your content interesting and be proactive. Here are some tips for achieving these goals:

Online reviews can be a divisive idea among marketers. Some welcome the user-generated keyword-rich content and increased transparency. Others argue that they have to be censored or you risk negative comments and even legal challenges.

So who’s right? This article takes a look at why you’d benefit from publishing reviews, what the risks are and how to mitigate them.

The rise and rise of UGC

UGC, or user-generated content is a fairly recent phenomenon of web marketing, and serves several of the major demands of SEO (at least in terms of how Google defines ‘optimised’ website content).

For a start, reviews are helpful to other visitors to your website – as long as they are honest. They offer an independent assessment of the quality of a product or service. No material written directly for marketing purposes can inspire that much trust.

Updating a page by posting a new review onto it shows Google (and other search engines) that the page and the website as a whole are still ‘alive’. Regularly updating a website is still one of the best ways to get it to the top of the search rankings.

On top of all of these things, like any text content added to your website, reviews contain plain, search-visible text; it may not be professionally keyworded or optimised, but it can still help you to rank higher for product names, and associated technical terms and phrases.

What are the risks?

One of the reasons why UGC is so popular is that it seems very low-risk – once you’ve added the capability to write reviews to your website, each user who posts their opinion is effectively providing you with search-visible content for free.

News stories, blog posts, dedicated product pages… Any SEO agency will tell you that you need compelling content on your site to boost your rankings.

But if you think your website already says everything you need it to then you might be a bit unsure about where you can add content, and how it will add value. Here’s a rundown of some of the main options so you can see which will work best for you:

Landing pages

Landing pages have been around since the very first days of search engine optimisation (SEO). At their most basic, they simply consist of a description of a particular product or service, using the relevant keywords in prominent places.

With significant research done by conversion rate optimisers (CROs), including test creation, design, and understanding buying psychology, we know that there is significant return on investment in allocating resources in developing fresh landing pages.

Many website owners allocate a significant chunk of their budget to online advertising which help drive traffic, but with little or no consideration as to where traffic is directed. Therefore, it is imperative that website owners allocate resources in developing the most effective landing pages, which get visitors to take desired actions once they’ve found your site. Also, it helps keep your website content fresh if you regularly update product listings and prices.

Websites that make their revenue purely from advertising don’t really have landing pages in the traditional sense. This is particularly true for news and entertainment websites, where static content doesn’t play a huge part in winning them traffic.

Since the introduction of the Penguin update and what some SEOs like to call the BLOOPER algorithm (Back Link Over Optimisation Penalty Exterminates Rankings), it has become more important than ever to ensure your site has as clean a link profile as possible. Historically, most sites would have at least a few dodgy links, but some may have more than others. This has meant that, sadly, a lot of businesses have been caught in the crossfire with Penguin updates. Part of the update appears to look at the type of sites linking to yours, the anchor text diversity of your profile, and the type of links. For example, an over optimised link profile biased to a number of links for certain anchors could trigger a penalty, so could a number of blog-roll links.

This means that the SEO industry needs to make sure it has an up-to-date link removal strategy in case disaster strikes. Below is outlined a brief strategy to get you started on this process. It will get you to consider the different levels of information you should be looking at, show you how to acquire the information you don’t have, and give you a few tips on some removal strategies and reconsideration requests.

Getting Started

The first thing to do is run an extract from all your available sources, such as:

It’s no secret that in today’s modern age, we’ve embraced a “search” based culture. Whether it’s a new artist you’ve heard of, a recipe you’ve read about, or even a news report you’ve just seen on TV; we’ve become more inclined to search about those subjects to find out more information to such a degree that our collective thoughts can actually correspond with what people actively search. As highlighted in the graph below, people tend to aggressively search for the keyword phrase “english premier league” during the month of August corresponding with the cut off date for player transfers:

 

In fact, you could even make educated guesses about who’s going to win a presidential election based on searches; the graph below are for the keyword phrases “Barack Obama” (blue line) and “John McCain” (red line).

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