All posts in seo

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).

Lately, you might have noticed Google’s aggressive and frequent product announcements. With so much going on at Google during the past few weeks such as Google’s Penguin algorithm update, the Google Plus iPhone and Android app redesign, Google’s Knowledge Graph, Google acquiring Motorola Mobility, Google Maps being replaced by Google Plus Local and Google Shopping; it’s become so very hard to keep pace with the changes (or future changes) that are bound to affect SEO and SEM strategies in the near or distant future. Therefore, I thought I’d take a step back and use the Queen’s Jubilee weekend to gauge how all of this will shape your future SEM strategy. Google has always maintained that search is at the heart of everything they do. So it’s safe to assume that all of their major updates, will in some way have an impact on search.

Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, announced today on their official blog that they’ve closed the deal on their purchase of Motorola Mobility. Explaining Google’s decision to enter the mobile business, Page wrote “many users coming online today may never use a desktop machine, and the impact of that transition will be profound–as will the ability to just tap and pay with your phone. That’s why it’s a great time to be in the mobile business”.

He also went on to announce that current CEO, Sanjay Jha, will be stepping down from his position and thanked him for his efforts for “building the company and placing that big bet on Android”. He will be succeeded by “long time Googler Dennis Woodside” who according to Page helped increase their revenue in the U.S. from $10.8 billion to $17.5 billion in under three years as President of the Americas region.

Schema & Authorship: 1 Year Layer

  • Hresume in microformats http://t.co/SnqqVgph or schema job posting http://t.co/2yaFTRTf for positions, interesting!
  • Visit http://t.co/dxbvN0kT to find out when the next Google webmaster tools hangout is
  • Think of rich snippets as rich summaries, it must visible on the landing page.
  • Rich snippets are supposed to be short descriptions of the content on to the page, not a spam tactic
  • Google plus pages for publishers with rel=publishers to the publishers google plus page – ideal for Brands!
  • Authorship – use accurately for authors NOT publishers
  • Recommended tools: AWR and quixapp
  • Recommended tool: seo tools for excel – quickly pull data without being a developer
  • 21% CTR without rich snippet versus 26% CTR with rich snippet in one test
  • SERP Turkey is a b testing tool with SERPs
  • Copy the schema and chuck it into the rich snippet tool by google
  • Schema and micro formats enrich our SERPs (or pollute?)

The second day of SMX started with a panelist discussion on social shares, and top tips on how marketers are truly going to be influential.

Here are the top takeaways from the first morning session with more to follow later on today!

Social Shares | New Link Building from @LisaDMyers

  • Rel=Author one of the key factors of Link signals in years to come, mixing in the need of SEO & Social Media
  • If your not there already understand and begin to use Google +, as research has shown a direct correlation for companies having better SERPs because of using G+
  • The end game has not changed in terms of link building, in essence creativity is essential to build great links
  • Examples of short term Social SEO link building: post and publish blogs, articles, breaking news, infographics, competitions and interviews
  • Example of long term Social SEO link building: create a social community, developing a blog, writing white papers and making yourself seem a social authority
  • Understand your target market in making sure they will share your items, relevancy is key
  • Makes the most of what is happening now in the market

Making Waves Not Ripples: Effective Syndicatoin to Drive Social Sharing from @mrjamescarson

After a relatively long wait, Google announced today that they have launched an update to their Google Plus iPhone app. As I type this post, my phone seems to be taking its own time in downloading the update which gives me the impression that this particular update is a fairly significant one. In fact, Google seem to almost want the Google plus app to be part of your normal day to day experience by stressing that “we’re not interested in a mobile or social experience that’s just smaller. We’re embracing the sensor-rich smartphone (with its touchable screen and high-density display), and transforming Google+ into something more intimate, and more expressive”.

The most significant line in their announcement to me, was their justification for the iPhone app upgrade, “today’s new iPhone app is an important step in this direction—toward a simpler, more beautiful Google”. I’m not sure about you, but I feel this is probably the biggest hint Google has publicly dropped of their efforts in moving toward a more  ’social’ and a more ‘mobile-centric’ strategy for their future.

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