Tag Archive for: Search Engine Land

Why You Need To Promote Your Content Yourself

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Getting your posts out to the masses is one of the hardest parts of writing online. Just publishing them isn’t even close to enough. The good news is, it has never been easier to share on the internet thanks to socia media.

Promoting your content is absolutely a part of getting it in front of other people, and you have to do the promoting yourself. The easiest way to think about it is to ask yourself “why should anyone care about my content, if I don’t care enough to promote it?”

There is no shame in pushing your content in front of the eyes of others. Of course, there is a line where pushing it onto others can be a turn off, but its way better than toiling in obscurity.

Jordan Kasteler, columnist from Search Engine Land, has nine different methods he uses to promote his content online. It may seem weird to put your work out there in front of others at first, but its the only way to get your content out there. In a world where content marketing is a huge part of SEO, its important to get people sharing your work.

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What Do You Need To Know For SEO In 2013

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SEO changed so much, it is hard to predict what will be best for 2013. Just this past year, Google has issued so many changes that it has become pretty much a constant. Trying to pinpoint where we will be a year from now almost feels impossible.

Paul Bruemmer from Search Engine Land, however, believes he knows how to keep up with everything for the next year with just a few tactics that can help guide you. Some are timeless, such as always keeping up with the best SEO practices, specifically starting with the Google 2012 Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. When in doubt, Google usually has an answer for any SEO practice you should be focusing on.

Social Media is, of course, also going to be a strong driving force in SEO for the next year, as there are no signs of them losing popularity. Even with the ever-changing heirarchy of sites, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube are solid constants that can be leveraged increasingly to keep in touch with consumers.

Falling behind in SEO is dangerous for your career and your clients, and any good SEO knows to keep up. Brummer’s suggestions are by no means comprehensive, but if you are wanting to make sure you’re in a good place to take on the coming year, the article is a great start.

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Why Do Some SEOs Still Gather Data Manually?

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SEO relies on data. That’s a pretty simple fact. Still, for some reason, some SEOs still do all their research by hand and manually track their performance, usually by making Excel charts that seem to stretch for days. I honestly don’t completely understand how they put the time into even trying to do this, at this point in SEO. So for this article I won’t be answering the question posed in the title, but instead showing why manual data gathering doesn’t make sense anymore.

To do well in SEO, you require fresh and accurate data to base your decisions upon. If you spend all your time and effort doing data gathering by hand, how do you have the time to make solid judgments and strategies for your customers?

SEO, of course, did start out with that exact manual strategy, but the reason it isn’t anymore is because this very problem I’m talking about. There is simply too much data, and data gathering can be easily automated, so doing it by hand is a waste of time and resources.

But, for those few SEOs out there still doing things the old fasioned way, there are pleny of ways to get all of your data gathering automated quickly. Myles Anderson from Search Engine Land gathered a quite a few tools you could use to get started, as well as answering just about any question about local SEO tools anyone has had ever.

It is a comprehensive guide, so if you just need the tools, head straight for that section, but if you need more convincing or don’t understand how the tools work or their benefits, Anderson makes a strong case with his explanations.

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Facebook’s ‘Nearby’ Expands Reach

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I’ve always thought that the ‘Nearby’ feature of Facebook was fairly pointless. Evidently, the folks at Facebook agreed to an extent and have found a way to improve the feature and turn it into a “search and discovery tool”.

In addition to seeing where your friends have checked-in, you’ll be able to see businesses that are close to you, which actually makes the name ‘Nearby’ make much more sense.

If you’re a business owner, this is fantastic news as it creates a new way to bring in customers. ‘Nearby’ draws from the Facebook database, however, so you’ll not only need to have a page for your business, but you’ll also want to make sure it is updated and has an established audience.

This incarnation of ‘Nearby’ will start out solely as a mobile feature and, honestly, probably works better that way. Be sure to read Search Engine Land’s article on the subject to get specific advice from Facebook about how to maximize your page’s visibility through ‘Nearby’.

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Are Companies Abusing Google’s “Pirate Update”?

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While people have been fretting about Google penalizing innocent site holders, it appears outside groups have been abusing Google’s DMCA algorithm to try to get legal content about films taken offline.

For those who aren’t familiar with the DMCA related algorithm, known commonly as Google’s Pirate Update, it basically referenced valid DMCA takedown requests as part of a sites rankings. If a site has been frequently hit with valid takedown requests, its ranking is penalized.

However, TorrentFreak has uncovered that a company who has been issuing DMCA requests on behalf of multiple movie companies has been issuing requests for the removal of legal content such as listings for legal copies of the movie on Amazon and iTunes, as well as Wikipedia pages about several movies and television shows.

Most of these requests were ignored by Google, but it is a worrisome matter that these companies are clearly using DMCA requests without discretion, and these invalid  requests could plausibly be missed by algorithms sorting out the mess.

Search Engine Land posits that the motivation of the mysterious organization, known as “Yes It Is – No Piracy” could be to bump up their own pages of content for specific listings while lowering legitimate sites, but for now, the motive is unclear.

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You See Up To A Dozen Experiments Every Time You Use Google

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Google’s Chief Economist, Hal Varian, spoke during a Google Tech Talk on October 22, 2012, and he shared some interesting information about what you see every time you use Google, as Barry Schwartz reported for Search Engine Land.

“Any time you access Google, you probably are in a dozen or more experiments.” Google is always working to improve and refine how they record data. Google releases about 500 updates to search per year, and about another 500 on the ad side. To establish what changes are needed and what works best, they run these experiments, which come to about 5,000 different experiments in a year,

The video of the entire talk is below, and the relevant information starts around the 26 minute mark.

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Properly Evaluating Ad Channel Performance

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It’s easy to get caught taking metrics at face value and not really interpreting what they mean. Benny Blum, for Search Engine Land, makes a valuable point about how time affects how you value your channels’ performances. You have to be wary of making changes too soon and effectively destroying what would have eventually been a great platform.

Obviously, there are difficult choices to make about where to allocate your ad budget across options like PPC, email, social media and organic search. However, if you looking at your click and conversion rates over an optimal amount of time, you might be overreacting to perceived underperformance.

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Bing Publishes First Set of Webmaster Guidelines

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Bing published their first set of webmaster guidelines in the Help section of Bing’s Webmaster Tools to offer guidance on the best SEO practices for their search engine.

While not nearly as detailed as Google’s webmaster guidelines, hat is seemingly on purpose. According to Matt McGee at Search Engine Land, Bing aims these guidelines at “business owners” to help them “understand the broad strokes of search marketing.”

For more detailed information, look into Bing’s Webmaster FAQ’s.

 

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2012 Wrap-Up: The Big Shifts in Google SEO

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Well, it’s the time of year for wrap-up lists, yet again. For most industries, there aren’t too many big changes throughout a year. When discussing everything that happened in SEO however, there is certainly a lot to cover.

Tom Schmitz over at Search Engine Land has a detailed analysis of all of the important shift in Google SEO throughout 2012. There’s a lot there. Google has been very active in trying to fight webspam, and personalize search results for individuals. Panda alone has had 13 updates since November 18th, 2011.

If Google keeps this up, 2013 will be a busy year for SEO as well.

 

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Blogging and Local SEO: A Match Made in Heaven

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Many local businesses want a quick and easy way to boost their local rankings. The bad news is, there isn’t really a shortcut anyone can take to better local SEO. There isn’t any way to just make a one time change and suddenly be rocking the rankings.

The good news is, there is a simple method to improving rankings, it just requires consistent output of quality content or promotional activities. This usually equates to blogging, which takes consistent effort, but is highly rewarding.

Chris Silver Smith lists all of the reasons why starting to blog can seriously help local businesses at Search Engine Land.

 

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