Tag Archive for: Search Engine Journal

Despite everything that has changed in SEO over the years, keywords have always maintained their importance. A good SEO campaign can only be made from a foundation of the right keywords to work from. No matter how great the rest of your strategy is, it will be weakened by the wrong keywords, because they simply don’t have the potential for return that others do.

Selecting the right keywords can be an arduous task though. You have to gather data, and then analyze the massive amounts of information so that projections on returns can be made. Gathering all that data isn’t quick, and that means it is expensive.

Startups with limited budgets or without access to paid SEO tools just don’t have the resources to do the type of expansive data gathering that quality keyword selection requires. Or so it used to be. There are several free tools out there which can often do huge amounts of keyword research for you.

A single one of these tools may not be able to do the heavy lifting that the expensive top of the line programs offer, but by implementing a few of the free tools into your workflow you can cover almost all of the ground one expensive program would.

It will always take time and effort to analyze data for projections on return for specific keywords, but it is worth the effort. With just the three free tools Marc Purtell suggests over at Search Engine Journal, you will find you can more efficiently make informed decisions about your keyword selection, and soon you’ll be on your way to a better SEO campaign.

 

It can be hard to notice, but Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) are constantly changing. Sometimes it is a result of new algorithms or updates to Penguin or Panda, but often it is a result of Google’s non-stop tweaking of their formula. If you weren’t consistently studying and analyzing SERPs, you probably haven’t even noticed.

SearchMetrics does just that type of analyzing of SERPs, and they just released their study of last years result pages, and there are some interesting points for all search marketers wanting to know what Google is favoring in their results. The highlights of the study, as pointed out by Search Engine Journal, are:

  • A small decline in video integration
  • A significant increase in image integration
  • A sharp decline in shopping
  • A large increase in news integration

The decline in video integration is one of the most surprising, as I’ve heard more than one analyst predict video will be one of the most popular mediums for content marketing this year. If they’re predictions are true, video makers will have stiff competition getting their content onto the SERPs.

Similarly, eCommerce pages are on the rise, and the data suggests business owners should be considering paying into the Google Shopping network to have their products seen by more people.

On the other hand, the big increase in news shows big opportunities for content creators reporting on events and doing news worthy journalism.

SearchMetrics made an infographic to go along with the release of their study, which you can view below or here.

rsz_universal-search-in-the-google-serps

AdWords recently introduced a new feature capable of showing your ads to more users, while also delivering a highly targeted audience. It sounds too good to be true, but, as Jeremy Decker reports for Search Engine Journal, the ‘similar audience’ feature makes it a reality.

The new feature picks up where remarketing leaves off. Now, not only will prevous visitors of your site be shown your ads, but also other users who have a similar search history as those users. This means that those who may be interested in your product but have not yet found your site will be shown your message and, hopefully, driven to your site.

Everyone involved in SEO will tell you how drastically everything has changed this past year. They’ll emphasize how Penguin and Panda “changed everything” and they will be more than happy to talk about how dramatically linkbuilding strategies have been affected, but it seems like very few are talking about what these changes mean for SEO as a whole.

John Mihalik wrote about four strategic SEO trends that he sees as important for the rest of the year, but his predictions also work as a summary of where SEO is at right now. He misses a couple things that can’t be ignored like local SEO, but remembering these four trends Mihalik points out should be enough to give you a good idea of what SEO means for website owners today.

Quality is the New Standard – To be blunt, SEOs used to be able to take any site of almost any quality, and improve performance significantly with keyword stuffing, link buying, and all sorts of other borderline spammy tactics, but Google’s algorithm’s have advanced to unbelievable levels. With their complex set of metrics to evaluate sites by, Google can pretty confidently tell if a site is low quality, and there will be no way to bring a site out of the ether until the quality problem is solved.

Social is Important – Social signals are just now beginning to affect search results, but Google has made it more than clear they are implementing social signals into their algorithms and Facebook is working on improving their own search engine relying almost entirely on social data. Aside from questionable privacy practices, implementing social data into search makes sense. Interests, friend circles, location, and even internet habits can help search engines deliver results more tailored for individual people.

You Aren’t Mobile Friendly Yet? – At this point, any website without a responsive or mobile friendly version is beyond behind the times. More and more people are doing their searches on their phones and tablets. You can’t just throw together a low quality mobile portal either. Search engines look for the same quality signatures they do on desktop sites, and you won’t be getting any more traffic with a shoddy mobile page.

Knowledge Graph

The Knowledge Graph – Google’s knowledge graph, or that box of information in the top-right corner of your screen when you search for a celebrity or prominent brand, has been slowly becoming more common on SERPs over the past year. Mihalik also believes it offers an opportunity for brands to optimize their web presence and gain a little added performance for direct searches.

I question to efficiency or importance of the last one. The knowledge graph information does allow searchers to easily find concise information, but for a brand to appear on a SERP, the user has to search directly for that brand. If there is another company somewhere with the same name as yours, you could use the knowledge graph to gain a foot up on them, but otherwise I don’t see the knowledge graph becoming a cornerstone of SEO. Every other trend mentioned is pretty much a certainty at this point, however.

There are more than a few articles out there telling you the “right” way to do link building. Despite what they say, link building isn’t a uniform process for every website. If it was, it would probably be able to be totally automated at this point. There are more than a few wrong ways to do link building, but the right link building process for your site depends on a lot of different factors. Pratik Dholakiya explains why there will never be a single “right” link building strategy.

Repeatable Means Replaceable – An easily-explainable and easily accomplishable link building strategy sounds great, but it isn’t good in a competitive market. Any strategy simple enough to be easily copied, can be easily scaled. A smart, unique strategy will out-think your competition, but a repeatable strategy means it will be a competition of who can spend more on scaling.

Search Engines Don’t Stay The Same – There will never be a “one-size-fits-all” strategy for link building because the internet doesn’t sit still. Everything is constantly being made obsolete and reworked. In the past, link building was only about the number of links you could get. Now, search engines judge the quality of links, devalue paid links, automated links, press releases, and many other forms of old “standards.” Even if you find the perfect link building strategy for your site, it won’t work forever. It might even stop working next week.

Every Niche is Different – Link building inevitably relies on the creation and sharing of content. The better the content is, the more impact it will have on a site’s performance, and the quality of the links being generated. But, content comes in virtually endless forms, and different content is more appropriate for different industries. SEO loves long informative blog posts, lists, eBooks, infographics, and that type of thing, but long blog posts and videos don’t work as well on web design blogs. Restaurants looking for links won’t have any use for infographics, but photographs and social media will be essential for their market. You have to find what works for your specific website.

Even if you already know that link building isn’t easy or uniform, it is easy to fall into habits and using the same strategies over and over. Every website is different, and link building has to be tailored to each individual site, otherwise there will always be wasted potential.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.