Three Reasons You Shouldn’t Care About Rankings

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Anytime a new website owner starts looking for an SEO, they always want to get to that precious number one spot for searches on Google. It’s hard not to want it, especially when quite a few people don’t even scroll down the page when they search for something. However, you shouldn’t be measuring SEO success by rankings.

There are plenty of SEO metrics to measure site success with, and rank isn’t near as important as you might think. Nick Stamoulis pinpointed three reasons you shouldn’t be focused on rank when you start using an SEO service.

Search is Personalized – Search engines are getting more advanced with their searches, and Google has a huge amount of user data they can take advantage of to craft search results that are personalized for every user. If you manage to show up in the number one spot for one searcher, you likely won’t for another. Rankings aren’t a concrete list of sites anymore, but a fluid collection of sites based on what you have shown interest in before.

Rankings Fluctuate – Aside from the differences in search results from user to user, Google is constantly updated their algorithms and finding new content. The web is in a continuous state of change, and the rankings evolve to match this. While Google’s big algorithm changes may make drastic differences to results, the smaller continuous updates going on can change a couple rankings for any keyword every day. Search engines also favor brand new content, so sites that have slacked off start to fall down the rankings.

Ranking for the Wrong Term is Useless – No honest SEO company will promise to get you a specific ranking. Some markets are more competitive than others, and you can’t control what Google does. That doesn’t stop some less reputable SEO services out there from promising they can get you the number one rank. The problem is, they will get you the number one rank for a keyword no one is searching for. If no one is searching for it, no one will notice that your page is the first result.

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Google Explains “How Search Works”

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Google has been fighting spam with algorithms and manual penalties, but the best tool this whole time may have been information. Google has offered Webmaster Guidelines for ages now, but there has still been quite a bit of misinformation as to how exactly search works. Those who don’t spend their time reading tech and internet books, blogs, and websites probably don’t have any idea how search works.

As Search Engine Journal pointed out on Friday, Google has heightened their resolution towards open information with an infographic entitled How Search Works. The infographic is broad and won’t give a lot of new information towards exactly what search signals are being favored or what the best methods are (that’s what the Webmaster Guidelines are for after all) but the infographic will be very helpful to those who may not understand how Google handles indexing the entire internet.

What may be of some interest to SEOs and other internet professionals is the additional information Google released along with the unveil of How Search Works, including Search Quality Rating Guidelines, charts of what type of spam they have been removing, and how often Google gets Reconsideration Requests. Even when they don’t give a lot of specifics, any information directly from Google is always great for those of us trying to make our websites fit their requirements as well as possible.

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Should You Just Start Over?

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Trash BasketTwo years ago Google unleashed Panda onto the world, and SEO hasn’t been the same since, especially when it comes to link building. Hundreds of thousands of sites have been penalized and some have made their way back to where they were, but countless others have perished or are still trudging along trying to recover.

Some of those sites were mostly innocent and got in trouble for just being a little too unscrupulous or not quite knowing what they were doing with link building, but the wide majority of these sites hit by penalties were flagrantly engaging in cheating trying to get their site’s traffic up by gaining a massive quantity of low quality links instead of a respectable number of solid links.

Still, those penalized have had to try to find a way to get their site restored to its former traffic rates and search rankings, and after two years of toiling away, the question eventually arises: “Should I just give up and start over?” Well, Eric Ward gives a simple question to that. “Are you going to do things differently with the new site than you did with the old site? If not, then it really doesn’t matter.”

Most of the websites unable to reclaim their former “glory” are still struggling because they haven’t wised up. The only way to be able to consistently rank highly on Google and Bing is to run a quality site people will want to visit. You can use SEO to get you there, but you can’t fake a good site.

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What is SEO-Friendly URL Structure?

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Some people think that no matter what URL structure you have, search engines will be able to make complete sense of it and be able to index the site. While this is true, to an extent, they then use this idea to say that there is no such thing as SEO-friendly URL structure. Clearly, they missed part of the point of using “friendly” URL structure.

While making sure a site is crawlable and loads fast enough are important to an SEO, because they require both to do their jobs, SEO is more focused on getting people to the site, ranking that site as high as possible, and getting a solid ROI.

Web developers are the other people working on a site that are concerned with URL structure, but they are usually those thinking any URL structure will work. They have different focuses than SEOs and as long as the URL is indexable, they have been successful in that aspect. In other words, what web developers consider to be an alright URL structure may not work for the SEO working on the site.

There are a few simple rules to making a SEO-friendly URL structure. Firstly, the URLs should be straightforward, with absolutely as few redirects as possible. Making everything organized helps keep the site structure more cleaner and keep visitors from getting confused. You should also make the URLs meaningful. Keywords, or just in general some form of language, is better than seemingly nonsensical numbers and punctuation. Most importantly for SEOs, it is important to know which URLs are most important, and which need to be hidden from search engines.

Alesia Krush explains SEO-friendly URL Structure at Search Engine Journal, but most importantly she shows how you can achieve it on your site in just five easy steps.

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Determining If Your Backlink Source Is Worth The Effort

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All backlinks are not created equal. Everyone knows that. But, with the number of linking opportunities out there and the number of backlinks a site is expected to have, inexperienced SEOs tend to take a quantity over quality approach that can end in penalties from Google.

Vetting your backlink sources isn’t hard, but it takes a bit of extra time for sorting through the massive number of sources at your fingertips. Think of it as choosing sources for a paper you had to write in high school or college. You’re expected to have a certain number, but your grade, or in this case your site’s ranking and reputation, can be hurt if your sources aren’t reliable sources.

But, do not fear young SEOs. If qualifying your potential backlink sources still seems vague or daunting, Sujan Patel from Search Engine Journal created a list of seven questions you can ask of your link opportunities to ensure that you’re only spending your energy on links that will help your site. Having a ton of backlinks is counter-productive if none of them have any value.

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Warning Signs To Look For When Hiring an SEO

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High Voltage

For companies looking for an SEO, the process can be confusing. There is a lot of jargon that the uninitiated business owner likely doesn’t know, and the field is absolutely full of companies offering what initially look like the same thing. But, as they say, the devil is in the details.

There are certain things the uninformed local business owner can keep an eye out for to help the process. Stoney deGeyter knows these warning signs as well as anyone, as he writes about small business SEO all the time, and has seen more than a few SEOs offering questionable or outdated methods.

Some SEOs will advertise that they can get you ranked on a selection of websites like MSN, Ask.com, or AltaVista. The more search engines they can get you on, the better right? Nope. I personally have seen sites offering to get you on MSN rankings which is an immediate red flag considering MSN isn’t a search engine anymore. It changed to Bing years ago. Ask.com is the fourth most used search engine and it only pulls in around 3-percent of all searches. The point is, if they can’t get you on Google or Bing, they won’t actually be able to help you much.

Another misleading promise is to get your site the number one spot in the rankings, no matter what. If this was possible, SEO would be stunningly easy, but it is not possible and SEO is far too competitive and complex for any guarantee of this kind to be anything but a bluff. SEO companies have no direct control over where search engines rank sites. Our job isn’t to achieve a certain ranking, but to get your page ranking as high as possible over numerous keywords in a competitive market. A good SEO should certainly be able to raise your ratings, but you can’t expect to get the top ranking for “local restaurant” just because a company promised it.

One way to tell if an SEO is out of touch with the current SEO climate is to look to see if they advertise search engine or directory submission services. This went out of vogue in 1998, but there are still companies proclaiming their services as if they are useful. Aside from Pay-Per-Click, and Pay-To-Be-Included type results, the only way to get your site found is to design it to be found. There is a reason Google doesn’t have a submission option. They haven’t been needed in years.

There are tons of other warning signs to watch out for, and deGeyter shares four more in his article. Unfortunately, SEO has just enough bad eggs that uninformed local business owners are often taken advantage of with false promises or downright ineffective methods. Some are actively trying to pull one over on innocent business owners, some are just out of touch with current SEO, but either way they aren’t worth your dollar.

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Google Documents For All Your SEO Needs

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DocumentsOne of the best parts of the SEO online community is how happy everyone is to share their knowledge, tips, strategies, and tools for others to use. Maybe it is because some of the best SEO practices actually involve sharing information, and we all get into a habit of being genuinely happy to help others out, or maybe nearly everyone in SEO is just happy to share the knowledge, but for all SEO’s problems, lack of information isn’t one of them.

While blogs tend to be the go-to source for public sharing of information, there are also lots of documents passed around “behind the scenes” through Google Documents. It isn’t that they are secretive, but most of these documents are only found by those who directly ask experts for information, or those who explore some of the more technical minded blogs. Search Engine Journal isn’t where you would normally expect to find many of these documents, but Benjamin Beck shared some of the most helpful Google Docs that he has found while working in SEO.

One Google Doc by Annie Cushing is a well organized list for just about every tool out there for keyword research, SEO analysis, and numerous other areas of SEO you will ding helpful. Other documents, like the one from Stoked SEO help make link prospecting easier by scaling the prospecting on queries that have initial positive results. No matter what your needs are, there is likely a document in Beck’s list that will help.

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Get a Visual Perspective on Your Link Profile

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Visual Link ExplorerSometimes it helps to step back and get a more visual idea of your link profile, but until now the only way to do this was to export all of your links to Excel and create a bunch of charts. CognitiveSEO has released the Visual Link Explorer to make the whole process easier and let you see your link profile all at once in a visually comprehensive way. It can also be used to help easily explain a profile to clients or even help figure out why you were penalized by Google. You can view competitors backlinks to analyze them and stay ahead of your closest competition.

One of the things this visual tool is best at is showing the importance of deep links and homepage links. It is always hard to explain to clients why it is a bad idea to direct all links to the homepage, and the way the Visual Link Explorer depicts your links is perfectly suited for showing how building a deep link profile as well boosts you site’s overall authority.

Judging overall link quality is also made incredibly easy and quick. In this tool, the lowest-quality links are placed closer to the center of the clusters of dots while the best link are portrayed with larger dots further away from the center.

There are a ton of other ways you can use the Visual Link Explorer to analyze your link profile, and any SEO worth their salt understands the importance of a your profile. Kristi Hines has more ideas for how the tool can be used at Search Engine Journal, but needless to say, I think it is a must have.

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Google Isn’t Releasing Unnanounced Penguin Updates

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A recent Google Webmaster Hangout seems to have implied that Google is pushing out Penguin Updates without announcing them. Penguin has only been officially updated twice after its initial release, and the last update was in October 2012. In the video, John Meuller from Google makes it appear that Google has been updating Penguin on a regular basis but has not announced them all. The comments come at around the four minute mark in the video below.

When asked for clarification by Search Engine Land, Meuller says that he was referring to general “link analysis” refreshes, but does not include the Penguin algorithm. They also confirmed the last update was the one announced in October.

One of the reasons some questioned if Penguin was being refreshed is Panda, the update always mentioned in association with Penguin, has been updated on roughly a monthly basis. Google didn’t confirm another update is coming, but the updates have been coming steadily, and there are signs a new one should arrive in the next few days.

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The Best SEO Strategy For The New Google

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It is impossible to understate just how quickly SEO changes and how important it is to keep up. Strategies change, and search engines update countless times. Google’s Penguin and Panda updates are clearly the most talked about, but Google has had plenty of other updates with less catchy names throughout the last year, like the Knowledge Graph (okay, that one has a catchy name too).

Penguin and Panda changed the landscape of searching completely and strategies have had to adapt to them quickly, though SEOs not taking advantage of gray area SEO tactics like link buying were mostly unaffected. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have to follow the new guidelines as well.

Most of these guidelines are more broad however, but Don Pathak, writer for Search Engine Journal, tried to simplify and explain them, and in doing so came out with a few specific points.

Many writers, usually with vested interests, have argued that SEO success can’t be done with just great content, and it is true to an extent that the internet is competitive to the point where great content doesn’t quite get you to the top search result. However, Google has also made it very clear that it wants to favor the quality of content over SEO tactics. Keeping a site fresh and relevant will give you as much of a boost as any behind the scenes tweak can.

The new Google also favors locality, so if your business has a local presence in a marketplace, optimizing for that location will help customers find your service. You can get started by simply establishing a local profile on Google Places for Business, and encourage customers to give you reviews on the site.

SEO will likely always concern itself with the technical dealings behind the curtain of a website, but Google wants to give preference to those who operate valuable and well made websites, not those manipulating every loophole to get the market advantage. As with anything run mostly through algorithms, there will always be “hacks” or weaknesses, but rather than exploiting them as they open, it is better to just create a website with real value.

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