Natural Search Blog » Best Practices

Good Practices SEO With A Tinge Of Creativity

Ravi — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 21:45:16 +0000

Search engine marketing is increasingly becoming popular with people from all walks of life and businesses of all hues adopting the web in a big way. The global recesssion has clearly thrust SEM into the spotlight as a great way to drive targeted traffic that is measurable and also making a huge difference to the bottomline of any company, the $ generated in revenue.

Search engine optimisation(SEO) and Pay per click (PPC) marketing are being accorded increasing importance as affordable means of tapping the market potential by reaching a targeted audience on the web compared to the traditional TV and/or newsprint advertising which are more expensive and the results are hard to measure. It is all the more imperative that SEO practitioners adopt more white hat creative methods to improve the visibility of their clients’ sites.

1) On page optimisation:
The search engine algorithms in place today are way more sophisticated than what it was a few years ago. This makes SEO such a dynamic field that SEO techniques which worked well no so long ago have lost their charm in the present.

With the incredible level of testing and research being done today by the likes of the amazing team at SEOmoz, the only on page factor worth its salt in terms of pure SEO value and ranking on the SERPs seems to be the title tag. The alt tag is making a comeback. The header tags have diminished in their SEO value and are now more useful to describe the information hierarchy on a page. Some of the other factors like well formed URLs and internal linking can help but to a certain extent.

All in all, in my opinion, I would conservatively attribute the impact of on page SEO factors to be between 30% and 35% when it comes to ranking well on the SERPs. The majority of the action clearly takes place outside the website and hence outside the sphere of influence of what a site webmaster can tweak on her site.

2) Top Quality Content:
Content is the currency of the web. The more unique it is and higher its value in disseminating valuable information, the more powerful it is and gets traded heavily on the web by being passed around.

Even top shelf companies who are a force to reckon with in their domain of business get so clouded in their vision of their industry that they either get too technical in their content delivery or just are not in tune with the demands of their market. Everything evolves in life and so do consumers as they search for products/services using search terms that are not technical or even colloquial.

All that needs to be done is to do a keyword research to find out what prospective customers are searching for. A look at Google Trends, Amazon and Twitter will also reveal what search terms are hot in a particular industry and pretty much the talk of the town at a given point of time.

The next thing to do would be to go to industry specific forums related to the keyword and read posts wherein users are asking questions related to the industry using these popular keywords. You must remember that not everyone who surfs the web is looking to buy a product/service. Everyone has some problem or the other and people are looking for solutions to solve their problems.

What starts off as a search for general information leads a user to looking for more specific information, then research and review of the products/services available and culminating in the purchase of the relevant product/service.

The content developer/webmaster can focus on topics that target these most searched keywords and develop content that provide solutions/advice to the pressing problems in that industry in sync with the targeted keywords.

Every piece of content written on the web does not have the propensity to go viral. Creating viral content is one of the most bandied terms on the web. It is not easy. You can get it right only after many attempts. So it is wise to dwell on topics that are popular in the present term (and relevant to your niche) and develop content towards that end.

You would be wise to avoid the curse of duplicate content within your site. This can arise due to two versions of the domain in existence, namely http://www.site.com and http://site.com You can also have the case of multiple distinct URLs leading to the same content. Canonicalization can help reduce this problem.

In the case of scrapers stealing your content and getting indexed first where they appear to be the original creator of content, I am sure Google would be able to find out over time as backlinks to your site’s content would be a strong signal for it to recognise the true owner.

If you post on your blog, the blog and ping feature should alert the bots straightaway. You would be well off tweeting the post/article on Twitter. Google scours the Twitter landscape for new content and is sure to pick up your tweet thus confirming the ownership of the content.

In my experience, I have found that personal experiences invoving trials and experiments in a particular niche that lead to well defined results seem to be quite popular and have a good chance of getting great link love. Readers on the web are discerning and can easily separate the chaff from the wheat. I have dwelt at length on unique content and its seo implications in a previous post.

3) Social Media:
Let us be honest about this. Social media is not suitable to all businesses selling products/services. It is very powerful tool to leverage in businesses like travel sites, music and video sites etc. Twitter is the darling of the cybermasses today and undoubtedly has captured the imagination of millions of users worldwide.

The general belief is that to sell products or services on Twitter, one must have lots of followers. This means the same person has to follow others in order to make the others follow her. She ends up with thousands of followers and in turn follows thousands. When she has a critical mass of followers, then she can promote her services/products. I totally disagree with this.

I bet you will agree with me that when you have thousands of followers, you will not have the time to read all the tweets and follow links. Your twitter screen will be utter pandemonium with messages trickling in every minute or so. If you are struggling to keep up with your tweets, imagine the plight of your followers. They are in the same boat as well. There is no focus and it is a virtual free for all. It is well nigh impossible to get any message through to your followers in this scenario.

Judicious use of social media involves building relationships. If you are in the field of manufacturing baby nappies, then there must be like minded people out there in the hundreds (and not millions) who will be interested in your product. You would be well off building a good laser focused community on Twitter or Facebook or any other popular social media platform to leverage your position as a domain leader in the baby nappies industry and then disseminate information and/or sell products/services to an interested community.

4) Backlink Profile:
At this point of time, links are a singular source of authoritative signals to the search engines. If your site has an impressive backlink profile as a result of hard work put in over the years by you, the website owner or due to outsourced link building efforts of an industrious SEO professional, it has a huge impact on your site’s ranking on the SERPs of all the major search engines as it is not easy for a site owner to manipulate this.

Again. all links created are not equal. This may sound cliche but it is very much true. The key today to a successful link building campaign is the the number of unique domains linking to your site. The higher the domain diversity, the more powerful is your site’s influence in the rankings on the SERPs.

It is equally important for a site to link to its other authoritative peer sites as this strengthens the notion of the site’s good neighborhood aspect. It is also natural to invite some spammy links in the process as a site owner does not have control over who links to her site.

Some of the other important factors to consider are:

Variation in anchor text of incoming links
Smattering of domains ranging from strong to weak provides for a natural linking landscape
Synergy in topicality of linking domains

In conclusion, the real time response of the web through social media and instantaneous response from users by way of blog comments etc gives anyone the opportunity to streamline the operations of their domain of buisness (niche) and helps them understand what their specific market is demanding which makes provision of what is required all the more easier.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search engine optimisation company that offers both natural search and paid search to its clients in New Zealand and Australia.

Unique Content And Its SEO Implications

Ravi — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 23:57:58 +0000

The world wide web is still dominated by content on websites though audio and video content have come to stay. There is no sign of textual content and its importance dissipating in the eyes of search engines in the future.

There is a crying need for unique quality content nowadays. Copywriters are in demand and I have come across cases where journalists in leading dailies and magazines have kicked their full time jobs and taken to writing content for the web. But the uniqueness of the content has come under the scrutiny of the major search engines.

What exactly is unique content?
In one of his Whiteboard Fridays, Rand talks about uniqueness of content and the way content can be categorised into 3 major types. He cites the example of a search in the travel industry which throws up very similar results on the top results in the SERPs.

Most of the content is from the same source of User Generated Content (UGC). From the user experience perspective, the content on the sites are almost the same leading to a stalemate. This is where fresh updated unique content can surcharge the user’s energies and rev up her interest in the product or service she is looking for.

By unique content, it is not just laying out content in correct grammatical form in a unique style to escape the content duplication filter of major search engines. It is the inherent value of the content itself and the ideas portrayed therein that makes the content unique.

If you are an expert in a certain industry and you have worked in the trenches and have a lot of knowledge of the inner workings of the industry, then the ideas expressed and the tone and quality of your content will show that you are indeed a domain expert.

This is most importantly recognised by other users who can clearly decipher you are indeed an expert. This is reflected by a spike in the visitors to your blog to read your posts and the increase in subscribers to your blog feed.

If you state clearly in your article or post that the content is free to be circulated provided there is a credit at the bottom through a link back to your site, the merit of your content will ensure that it gets circulated well and truly over the cybersphere.

It is common to find, especially in the field of affiliate marketing, site owners who have no clue of the specific niche the product is in, getting content creation outsourced to create an ebook or articles with its variations which in turn are used for promotion to gain inbound links and ultimately sales. The lower the costs of outsourcing, the more fluff that gets dished around the web.

Search engine algorithms today are superior in analysing the uniqueness of a given piece of content. They look at the navbar, the sidebar and footer links and the content itself to analyse its uniqueness. Gone are the days when a customised introduction and conclusion to an article made it unique. It is a lot harder now.

You can create all the content that you want but it is the search engines that determine its uniqueness and include it in their main index or banish it for lack of quality and the poor amount of inbound links it garners to have a low Pagerank threshold that prevents it from getting retained in the main index.

What kind of content should you adopt for your site?
When you have an idea for a website, that is when you have to determine the type of content that will suit your site. You cannot change horses midstream. Rand talks about the three widely prevalent types of content on the web today.

1) Editorial Content:
This refers to the content that is built by a human with a clear idea as the basis, then logic and reasoning that is initiated by a good introduction and great body copy that expresses the idea in lucid fashion and a healthy conclusion. The style and expression is unique to each writer. Good examples are a site owner blogging on her site coming up with unique content on a regular basis that keeps readers engaged and also garners great inbound editorial links from her industry peers and the linkerati in general. This type of content is ideal for smaller sites.

2) Machine Built Content:
If you have a burning ambition to domionate your niche or industry, then machine built content can be handy in satiating your desire. This involves collecting data from reliable sources and pushing them into a fixed well formatted content structure by way of an xml file and stored in databases. Content pages are generated on the fly in response to user clicks on the site.

The biggest problem here is the pattern that is obviously common to most machine built content sites. The on page factors like page titles and h# tags are unique on each page. But the content follows a fixed pattern with subtle changes in data as in case of statistical information. Most major travel sites employ this technique.

It is a scalable and saves time and money. But it does not make the cut when it comes to the search engines analysing it for its , you guessed it right, uniqueness. A content duplication filter can definitely prevent such a page from getting indexed.

From an SEO perspective, if the domain on which such content resides is a trusted mature domain with good standing, then it would not be a major issue. For newer sites (typically less than a year old) trying to establish themselves rapidly, it could be a major stumbling block.

3) User Generated Content (UGC):
This is the most valuable type of content any site owner could have on her site. But it does not come easy. It takes a lot of time and effort to build a bustling community and incentivize the contributors to make the content creation happen. Some of the popular examples are Wikipedia, Reddit and Digg.

This is a powerful and scalable technique but it is not easy to get a network of dedicated users scaling it up to the higher levels of content creation.

You can consider using content from each of the above mentioned categories or a nice blend of them to create unique content that can satisfy visitors to your site and keep them engrossed longer on your site pages. The amount of time spent by users on your site is certainly a factor the search engines could consider to determine the quality of your site content.

Most times, I hear site owners clamouring for links and/or aspiring for higher positions on the SERPs. One of the major factors that can propel a site to the top of the search engine summit is unique quality content. This arises from personal experiences of the blogger and the successful practice and implementation of the actual content that is being preached by her in her day to day blogging activities.

Once justice has been done to this crucial part, then it is only a matter of time before users identify the good quality advice offered on your site and the twittering and digging of your posts akin to the Web’s word of mouth propels your site into the limelight which is top rankings on the SERPs.

The number of inbound links from a variety of domains of different hues (domain diversity) and the naturally worded anchor text in the inbound links to your site are proof enough of the confirmation aspect of your post’s nature from unbiased external sources in the most natural form erasing any doubt about the duplication of content in the eyes of the search engines.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland seo consultancy offering both organic seo and paid search marketing services to their clients in both New Zealand and Australia.

Link Building Tactics That Influence Search Engine Ranking Factors

Ravi — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 23:09:54 +0000

Today’s post dwells on the discussion of link buillding tactics that influence search engine ranking factors in 2009. Link acquisition is a key component of the ranking algorithms. The number of external links pointing to your site and the anchor text contained therein can certainly propel your site to the top of the search results pages.

I will be discussing only the top 4 factors under each section with a mention of the value score allotted by the SEO professionals . This biennial survey by Rand Fishkin at SEOMoz picks the brains of the top 72 SEO professionals from all over the world and their collective wisdom is presented in this post.

I) Link Building Tactics For SEO:

1)Link Bait And Viral Content Creation: 67% Very High Value
Just as all links are not created equal, all content created on the web is certainly not equal. There are certain pieces of content that are so well researched and presented in an interesting fashion that most readers fancy and take a liking to. They end up distributing it across the cybersphere through social media networks and emails.

The virality aspect is in the nature of the content itself, be it a 400 word ingenious piece titled
“10 ways to [solve a specific problem faced by people world over]” or a catchy video that captures the imagination of users. A recent example that comes to mind is the babies skating around in their nappies in an advertisement for a French water brand.

All this results in a massive surge of backlinks to the site which published this piece of content. There is a huge spike in traffic to the original website. The search engines love the natural scheme in which the backlinks are generated. Users follow links to read/watch the content. It is a win-win situation for all.

2) Blogging And Engagement With The Blogosphere: 66% high value
The influence of blogging cannot be stressed enough in the cyberworld. It is an incredible way for a “domain expert” to share knowledge and get valuable feedback from readers in the form of comments. Blogging is a long term process and it takes time and effort for a blogger to establish a good relationship with her readers and fellow bloggers in her chosen niche.

The popularity of a blog can be ascertained from the number of readers subscribed to the RSS feed and the activity taking place on the blog itself by way of exchange of comments between the blogger and readers. Over time, the blogger earns the reputation of a respected authority in her domain and develops a loyal band of committed followers.

The high quality and originality of her blog posts will result in posts getting tweeted over Twitter and passed around other popular social media networks. Each mention of the post on the web is a vote for the source site as far as search engines are concerned. Atleast, a tweet on Twitter ensures that the post is indexed by Google which scours the Twitter landscape actively even if the traditional blog and ping service is not being used.

Being a guest blogger on other popular blogs in the same niche or participating in blog carnivals can bring lot more exposure and hence traffic to a niche blogger’s site.

3) Classic “Create Valuable Content” Strategies: 58% High Value
Content that is original and written in a polished style stands out amongst the fluff that floats around in the cyberworld. Most times, it is borne out of practical knowledge of the author in a particular niche. As the saying goes - “Knowledge borne out of experience is wisdom”, the same goes for content that is written based on experiences gleaned by the domain expert through day to day application of the techniques described therein.

4) Public Relations: 56% High Value
Press Release (PR) is the first thing that comes to mind when public relations is mentioned. This is a powerful tool that can generate great backlinks and mentions if executed correctly. Traditionally, press releases that are interesting and absorbing catch the eye of journalists covering that niche who in turn refer to it in the news column they author. The higher the status enjoyed by the newspaper, the wider the exposure gained by the press release.

Sadly, this powerful tool has not been wielded well as a many press releases end up being pretty much self hype harping on the virtues of the company and the owners rather than dwell on the important part - the uniqueness of the product or service offered.

Beyond press releases, Jessica Bowman states that public relation departments and agencies are not up to speed when it comes to maximising the opportunities for search engine rankings.

II) Factors Affecting Value Of An External Link:

1) Trust Of The Source Domain: 70% Very High Value
The trustrank concept is based on the fact that good and trusted sites are linked together at the core of the web and that spam pervades outside this central area of good neighborhood. It is based on a Stanford University research paper titled Combating Webspam With Trustrank

The search engines caluclate Trustrank as an iterative Pagerank type of metric that flows link juice from a bunch of trusted seed sites to determine if a domain is trustworthy or not.

Another way of looking at it is the number of hops the domain in question is away from the trusted seed site. If it is within a limited number of hops from the seed site, then it can be considered to be high in trust. My earlier post titled Relationship Between Trust and Link Building talks about this aspect at length.

If this cannot be determined algorithmically, there is a possibility that human reviewers could confirm this aspect by looking at the percentage of links to and from a domain that link to good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods.

2) Global Authority/Importance of Source Domain: 68% Very High Value
The authority of the source domain is an important criterion that adds more value to the quality of the link emanating from it. The domain authority is a hybrid combination of the quality of links coming into it, domain trust and age of the domain.

The quality of links is influenced by the links coming into a site from other powerful well trusted domains. The strengthening of the good neighborhood aspect is vital to the good ranking of the site in question on the SERPs.

3) Keyword Anchor Text Of The Link: 67% Very High Value
The words that form part of the clickable link is generally referred to as the anchor text. Typically, the anchor text confirms to the search engines the nature of a page with respect to its content and whether the link that describes the page in question really is representative of it.

Internal linking within a site gives a good idea of the nature of the content to search engines. But it is the anchor text in external links that really reinforces the initial confrimation of the search engines. If you have a great article on blue widgets, then the inbound links from external unbiased sources that have blue widgets as part of their anchor text provides a lot of value to the recipient site and goes a long way to help it get ranked well in the SERPs.

The context in which the link appears on a page is also vital. If it is an editorial link from an external site where the author writes about a certain topic and contextually links to an article on your site, it clearly shows Google that your article is a great benchmark in that particular niche and one that often gets referred to in other posts and articles on the web. Such natural links have the highest value in Google’s eyes and these links are equally hard to obtain.

4) Quantity of Pagerank Passed By The Link: 59% High Value
If a page has a Pagerank of 5 points and if there are 5 links going out from that page, then each link ideally gets 1 pagerank point (Pagerank of a page / number of links on that page), provided none of the links going out of that page are nofollowed.

If your site gets an editorial link on a highly trusted strong domain page with high Pagerank, the amount of link juice passed by that link to your site is quite high and your site gets the ultimate benefit from such a link. Such a high quality link can be considered equivalent to a few hundred links from mediocre sites.

From the observations of many seo gurus in the past, it is ideal to have 100 or less links typically on any given page in order to distribute the pagerank as fairly as possible from the home page to the category and sub-category pages.

Search engines nowadays tend to ignore the navbar and footer links to a large extent. It is clear that the position of the link on a given page is important to be considered in the link graph calculations of the site by the search engines.

Instead of using nofollow links, a site owner can design her site in such a way that the important parts of her site are given prominence in the site architecture hierarchy and page consolidation is done for less important areas of the site.

For a detailed account of all the link factors that influence search engine rankings, Rand’s post titled
Effectiveness of ilink building tactics for SEO is an illuminating read and can whet your appetite for more knowledge on the ubiquitous links that form the basis of the world wide web.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search engine marketing company that provides both seo services and pay per click services to its clients New Zealand and Australia wide.

10 Practical Actionable SEO Tips To Boost Your Website Visibility

Ravi — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 00:02:54 +0000

Today’s post covers ten practical actionable SEO techniques that can give your site a major boost and help it achieve better visibility in the major search engines. These observations are made by Whitespark, a SEOmoz member who attended the recent SEOMoz PRO Training series.

These tips are easy to implement and will suit a majority of the businesses on the web. With paid traffic getting more expensive with each passing day (and yet providing only 12% of traffic on the web), it is high time all website owners started ramping up their organic seo efforts. These tips will certainly help in improving a site’s natural search visibility which still accounts for 88% of the traffic on the web.

There are a few proprietary tools (created by SEOMoz) that are mentioned in the post. These tools do a great job of automating the mundane tasks thus saving valuable time and giving great results to help you plan your strategy. You have to be a paid PRO member to access these tools.

1) Request for a link in customer communications:
There are many opportunities arising in the course of a site owner communicating with a customer in the entire buying cycle. In your emails, you will be well advised to ask for a link in a courteous manner.

It could read - “If you have a website or blog, we would appreciate if you could link to us by copying this code Anchor text that suits your business.”
NOTE:
a) Vary the anchor text subtly in your emails
b) If possible, get links to your inner money pages

2) Use of Top Pages Tool To Identify Competitor’s Backlinks:
The Top Pages tool is a great way to see your competitor’s backlinks by just plugging in their site URL. The screenshot below helps you get an idea.

You can then create suitable linkbait that can attract links from those sites that are already linking to your competitor. Else, you can email the powerful domain owners and request for a link after you have referenced their site post or article on your own blog or your site. This will help answer the other domain owner’s question - “What is in it for me?” and thus incentivize her to link to your site.

3) Use Adwords Tool To Find Keywords That Have High Search Volume And Low Competition:
Many of us are prone to miss the obvious Adams in many things we do in life. This point is a classic example. In most cases, these money keywords are long tail keywords that can be optimised through on page factors and made to rank well in the major search engines.

A search for pet collar using the Adwords keyword tool results in the following screenshot:

The term

pet collar supplies

has a search volume of 49500 with limited advertiser competition. If your site is in the pet industry business, this will be a good keyword to target.

4) Use of Top Pages Tool To Find Linking Pages To Your Domain That Need A Redirect:
The Top Pages tool mentioned in (2) above is very useful to identify links from external sites to pages on your domain that are currently maybe showing a 404 Error or temporary redirects etc, whatever the case maybe.

You can then use 301 redirects to preserve and forward the inherent link juice on such pages to the latest updated versions on your site. I am reproducing a screenshot of the original post which clearly explains what I have written.

If you are the site owner, then the access to Google Webmaster Central will help you identify the 404 pages. It can be a problem if you are doing research for a potential client.

There is another instance where an entire domain has been 301 redirected to a new domain. If the old domain had pages with 404 errors, then a 301 redirect to them is still going to show up as 404 errors as far as Google is concerned. These are lost pages and will not show up in the Webmaster Tools when the new domain is analyzed.

But Top Pages tool does show up these lost pages. It is invaluable data to rectify the lost pages and gain their link juice by 301 ing them to the appropriate pages on the new domain.

5) Competitive Link Finder Tool To Build Your Site External Profile:
The new Competitive Link Finder tool released by SEOmoz is a powerful aid that helps you identify the linking sites that link to multiple competitors in your industry.

You have to plug in your site URL and atleast three of your competitor sites to get the best results. You can always email such domains that link to your industry competitors and get a link to your site as well.

6) Optimize Your Google Local Listings:
Google local listings are a huge asset for any business to be listed on the first page for the most representative search phrase of their industry. It is helpful if the business is physically located close to the city.

I have found that a good local backlink profile boosts a site on Google local search. This can be achieved by submitting to local directories and other businesses in the same local geographical location in which the business operates.

David Mihm is an authority on local search issues and his points at the SEOMoz Pro Conference are outlined below:
a) Claim your local listing on Google (even if you make a multiple submit). This is given more value by Google than a bulk upload that is susceptible to spam.

b) Use keywords in the business title when submitting a local listing. Avoid keyword stuffing the title.

c) Add custom categories that your business offers. This can be a helpful ranking factor. Use the maximum number of permitted custom categories.

d) Citations are the links of Google Local rankings. Get listed on Localeze, InfoUSA, Openlist.com, etc. Americans should check out this list of places to get citations

Others should check out David’s guides to citations in Canada, UK Citations, Citations in Australia and Continental Europe Citations

You can use the search engines to find even more citation sources:

yourcity, st blog
yourcity, st directory
yourindustry, st blog
yourindustry, st directory
yourindustry yourcity, st blog
yourindustry yourstate directory

7)Buyind paid advertisements on Google Content Network:
There is a tip on buying advertisements on sites listed on the Google Content Network. Sites listed there are maximising their revenue through Adsense and would be more open to paid link advertisements. It is each individual site owner’s call whether to adopt this strategy or not.

8. Increase Link Love By Becoming A Green Business:
If a business goes green online, it is a good way of attracting links from authoritative domains. There are many sites like Ethical Directory, EcoFirms.org, Guide Me Green etc willing to give your site a link provided it is a green one. This also reflects on a business owner’s willingness to be eco friendly. With global warming taking centerstage, this issue is all the more vital.

9) Work on Your Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO):
A good majority amongst us (especially in the SEO industry) are obsessed with rankings and traffic. Conversion of visitors into paid customers often takes a backseat. Ben Jesson’s CRO presentation provided a wealth of information and lot of food for thought.

You could make a good start by learning your customers’ needs once they land on your site. This can be done by implementing tools on your website from which you can learn what your customers are looking for.

Get some unbiased feedback from other folks who are not your friends or relatives. The more the site is torn to shreds, the better it is as an eye opener for you to take instant remedial action. A good list of tools for learning from your customers are:

GoogleTalk Chatback (I just added this to my site and it is super easy to implement)
Tell-a-Friend-King
Kampyle
iPerceptions 4Q
Distilled Reputation Monitor
CrazyEgg (I have used this, and it rocks)
SurveyMonkey
Ethnio
ClickTale
Google Website Optimizer

You would be well off checking these great Conversion rate optimization articles and sign up for the newsletter on their site.

10) Seth’s Marketing Opportunity Calculator:
To help you in your sales pitch efforts, it is worth your effort in taking a look at Seth’s Marketing Opportunity calulator. You can download his slides and spreadsheets at How to Win SEO Budget and Influence your CMO

Whitespark’s entire post titled 10 Valuable, Actionable, Take-Aways From the SEOmoz Pro Training Seminar is a great read on which this post is based.

My post titled Next Frontier In Search Marketing gives the traffic figures for seo and ppc.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search engine optimisation company offering both natural search and Auckland pay per click marketing services to their customers in New Zealand and Australia.

Search Engine Ranking Factors in 2009

Ravi — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 23:05:48 +0000

Recently, SEOmoz released a fantastic biennial search engine rankings report. Every two years, SEOmoz interviews the top 100 minds in the SEO industry. This time, they have gathered data from the top 72 SEO professionals to give a clear idea of how the search engines rank documents.

This aggregate data gives any SEO professional the key factors that Google uses when it comes to ranking sites on the SERPs. It is a thoroughly interesting read and will assist all SEO professionals be it a beginner or an advanced level practitioner.

The report is split into five sections namely The Overview, Ranking Factors, Link Building, Additional SEO Data and Contributors. We will consider the three top ranking factors, top three negative ranking and top three contentious factors under each of above sections.

I am listing only the importance figures and not the consensus figures. I am also writing only about the Overview and Ranking factors. I will reserve the rest of the sections for a later post.

Overview of Search Engine Ranking Factors

Top 3 Ranking Factors

1)Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links: 73% very high importance
This is the text in clickable links that are pointing to your site from external sources. It reinforces the confirmation of your page content to Google if the anchor text is appropriate and matches your internal anchor text on your site.

2)External Link Popularity: 71% very high importance
This refers to the quality/quantity of external links

3) Diversity of Link Sources: 67% very high importance
This is the number of links from several diverse root domains

Top 3 Negative Ranking Factors

1)Cloaking with Malicious/Manipulative Intent: 68% very high importance
If a site shows different content on the same page to humans and search engine bots, then it is cloaking in its basic form.

This is done by looking at the user agent. If the user agent is a bot, then a certain page is shown. If the user agent is a human, then a different version of the page is shown. If the intent is one of malice, then it is deception at its worst to fool the search engines.

2)Link Acquisition from Link Brokers/Sellers: 56% high importance
Since link acquisition has assumed gargantuan proportions with Pagerank adding fuel to fire, the notion of gaining inbound links at any cost is acknowledged by Google. There are numerous link brokers in the market today peddling links to anyone for a tidy sum. Google has been penalising paid links and advises that a nofollow be applied to such links. Else a message saying it is a paid link should be displayed to avoid a penalty.

3)Links From The Page to Webspam Sites: 51% moderate importance
Google definitely looks at the percentage of inbound links and outbound links to spam sites from a given page/site. If the proportion of links to spammy sites is quite high than the average benchmark (any good quality site is bound to gain inbound spammy links over time and Google factors this into its algorithms), then a penalty is there in the asking.

Search Engine Ranking Factors

On page (Keyword Specific) Ranking Factors

1)Keyword Used Anywhere In The Title Tag: 66% very high importance
This can lead to a tussle between the keyword and the company brand. If a brand is popular, it is then a good idea to put the brand ahead of the keyword.

2) Keyword Used as the First Word(s) of the Title Tag: 63% high importance
This really depends on the branding priorities for a business in question. If the site is owned by an affiliate marketer, then it is prudent to have the title starting off with the keyword.

3)Keyword Use in the Root Domain Name (e.g. keyword.com) 60% high importance
This is very useful in the event of external sites linking to a site using just the URL of the linked to site. The keyword present in the domain name enhances the keyword value in the anchor text.

On page (Non Keyword Specific) Ranking Factors

1)Unique Content on the Page: 65% very high importance
There is no doubt that the quality of content on a site plays a distinct part in being identified as unique by Google and is vital to the site getting ranked at the top of the SERPs for its niche.

2) Freshness of Content: 50% moderate importance
Regularly updated content keeps the bots paying regular visits to a site. The QDF (Query Deserves Freshness) component in Google’s algorithm helps a new site with fresh content rank ahead of the well established sites for a limited period of time before it settles down on page 3 or beyond. This gives new sites much needed exposure though for a limited time.

3) Use of Links on the Page that Point to Other URLs on this Domain: 41% low importance
The internal linking architecture of a site is vital to help search engines understand the more important and not so important pages. The use of appropriate anchor text also helps the bots analyse the reputation aspect of linking where the anchor text pointing to a page is really representative of the content on the page it points to.

Page-Specific Link Popularity Ranking Factors

1)Keyword-Focused Anchor Text from External Links: 73% very high importance
It is not always possible to have lot of control over the anchor text coming from external sources. Anything that is close to the perfect anchor text is an asset. Good quality content on a site is a huge asset in that it has a higher chance of getting linked to using appropriate anchor text.

2)External Link Popularity (quantity/quality of external links): 71% very high importance
The inbound links from well trusted authoritative sites are of high quality and certainly play a good part in the successful ranking of a site on the SERPs.

3)Diversity of Link Sources :67% very high importance
This refers to links from a diverse set of root domains to a site.

Sitewide Link Based Ranking Factors

1)Trustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Hops from Trusted Domains: 66% Very High Importance
If your site is linked to a trustworthy domain (seed domain) in as few hops as possible, your site is bound to gain in domain trust and integrity in the eyes of search engines.

2)Global Link Popularity of the Domain: 64% High Importance
This centers around iterative link popularity of a domain like PageRank measure. The number of inbound and outbound links for a domain in the entire web link graph reflects this measure.

3)Link Diversity of the Domain: 64% High Importance
This refers to the number of links from diverse root domains linking to pages on a domain.

Sitewide Non Link Based Ranking Factors

1)Site Architecture of the Domain: 52% Moderate Importance
An intelligent site architecture is a good way to reveal to the search engines which pages are important and the ones that are not so important. Ideally, spiders must be able to find the money pages within three clicks of the home page. I remember reading this statement - If content is king on the web, then the site architecture is his palace.

2)External Links to Reputed Trustworthy Sites/Pages: 37% low importance
It is important to maintain a good neighbourhood and that is determined by a site’s linking to good quality reputed sites with good domain trust.

3)Length of Domain Registration: 37% low importance
A domain that has existed for a long time and has not changed ownership is a mature domain and it carries a lot of weight. Google tends to favour content from such sites ahead of younger domains that have quality content. Moreover, if a domain is registered for a lengthy period of time, it could be an indicator to Google that the domain is going to be in for the long haul.

Social Media/Social Graph Based Ranking Factors

1)Delicious Data About the Domain or Page: 21% Very Minimal Importance
Delicious is a popular bookmarking service. There is no doubt that when a site gets bookmarked by a lot of users, it is certainly popular. Most of these links are nofollows. It is highly unlikely that these can influence search engine ranking algorithms.

2)StumbleUpon Data About the Domain or Page: 19% very minimal importance

3)Twitter Data About the Domain or Page: 17% very minimal importance
It is a fact that Twitter plays a huge part in the cannibalisation of the web link graph (as Rand uses it) with shortened URLs and hordes of users twittering these links back and forth. From my personal experience, I find that a tweet on content I publish really helps in getting spidered by the bots rapidly as the bots keep monitoring the Twitter landscape. It is a matter of great interest and remains to be seen if Twitter can directly influence search engine rankings in future.

Usage Data Ranking Factors

1)Historical Click-Through Rate from Search Results to the Exact Page/URL: 42% low importance

2)Historical Click-Through Rate from Search Results to Pages on this Domain: 39% low importance

3)Search Queries for the Domain Name or Associated Brand: 36% low importance

Though these are user based heuristics, it may not count for much in terms of impacting the rankings at this point of time. But the Google toolbar collects this information and can introduce them into its algorithms at any point of time (if it has not done so already).

The only problem is the qualitative aspect of data collected. If a user searches for something and finds what she is looking for on the page she lands on by clicking on the first result on the SERPs, then she hits the back button and goes on to search something else. The content is extremely relevant to what the user searched for though Analytics can show it as one with a high bounce rate. It will be hard to measure these finer aspects.

Negative Ranking Factors

1)Cloaking with Malicious/Manipulative Intent: 68% very high importance
This is definitely a no go zone when it comes to deceptive SEO. It is a surefire way to get a site banned from the search engines.

2)Link Acquisition from Known Link Brokers/Sellers: 56% high importance
Google penalises link trading very heavily. It would be advisable to use either a nofollow or clearly mention that it is a paid link. ALternatively, block the page pointed to by the paid link using robots.txt file.

3)Links from the Page to Web Spam Sites/Pages: 51% moderate importance
Discussed above

Factors Negatively Affecting the Value of an External Link

1)Domain Banned from Google’s Index for Web Spam: 70% very high importance

2)Domain’s Rankings Penalized in Google for Web Spam: 65% very high importance

3)Link is Determined to be “Paid” Rather than Editorially Given: 63% high importance

These factors have cropped up previously in this post. So it is a clear reminder to stay away from such practices.

Geo-Targeting Factors:

1)Country Code TLD of the Root Domain (e.g. .co.uk, .de, .fr, .com.au, etc.): 69% very high importance

2)Language of the Content Used on the Site: 63% high importance

3)Links from Other Domains Targeted to the Country/Region: 60% high importance

A domain extension matching the country in which the site does business in is a good heuristic to give Google an idea of the geo location. It would be ideal if the site is hosted in that particular country it is targeting.

Google can be given a better idea if the site administrartor can set the geo-targeting preference in the Webmasters Central console.

The language of the content used on the site is a good indicator. In saying this, Google itself has admitted that its IP based geotargeting is not accurate in a multilingual country like Switzerland where a German content site can be served to French speaking person. In such situations, it would be wise to give links to the various languages in which content is available and allow the user to make the appropriate language selection.

If the site is targeting Australia, then inbound links from other .com.au sites will be extremely beneficial and help Google rank the site more accurately in the country specific rankings.

I have highlighted these factors in a post titled Serving Content Based on IP Address and Cookies

For a thorough read of the original exhaustive report, visit SEOmoz and read through the post titled SEOmoz’s Biennial Ranking Factors 2009 Released

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland seo firm offering both organic seo and ppc services to their customers in New Zealand and Australia.

Quova Awarded Patent for Improved Geotargeting

Chris — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 15:35:22 +0000

Quova recently announced that they were awarded a patent for various methods which improve geotargeting accuracy and capability. My understanding is that Quova has been using these methods for quite some time already, prior to receiving the patent.

Here’s Quova’s description of the innovations:

“Quova’s newly added patent describes a method for determining the geographic location of an Internet user based upon combining trace routes, user registration information, host names with textual patterns that reveal geolocation information and Internet Service Provider (ISP) service area information. These trace routes describe the pathways by which data moves through the Internet. Each node or ‘hop’ in the trace route is identified by an IP address. These interconnected nodes can be used to recreate the topology of the Internet. Each geolocation can then be assigned to these IP addresses in order to determine the location of each node, up to and including the end user’s IP address and the geolocation of that end user.”

I previously have written about Quova in my extensive article, “Geolocation: Core To The Local Space & Key to Click-Fraud Detection“. My earlier description of them reads practically as an endorsement - something I very rarely do at all. But, I think what I wrote is pretty accurate, overall. Quova is considered pretty much best-in-class of the companies providing geolocation data mapping, because of their greater variety of geo data sources, their more sophisticated mapping methods, and because they actually submit to a third-party audit for data accuracy.

As I’ve described previously, there are quite a number of providers out there which try to associate endusers’ IP addresses with geographic location coordinates, but I’ve always been a really huge skeptic of the overall error rates associated with this type of data. In the past there were estimates that geolocation error rates could be anywhere from 50% to 85%! For marketers attempting to precisely target ads and content to geographically cohesive groups, such high error rates were far too high to be acceptable from my P.O.V. five years ago.

For all geolocation data companies, error rates increase as the geotargeting level becomes more precisely granular. In other words, most of these companies likely have very high accuracy for country-level geolocation capability, lesser for regional targeting such as state or province level, less than that precision for city-level, and lowest accuracy for ZIP-code or postal-code level targeting.

I’ve also been highly skeptical in the past because there’s a low ability to actually test how accurate a given company’s data may be — most testing is based on sample sets which I’ve suspected may be highly skewed towards more accurate geolocations. Anecdotal stories of erroneous geotargeting have come up repeatedly throughout the industry, while there are few ways of calculating actual error, and geolocation data companies reiterate unverifiable claims of accuracy rates.

However, innovations such as found in this patent awarded to Quova help in improving the stature of the whole industry, and really help to reassure marketers and security administrators that the data is solid. I can critique testing methodologies for auditing the data, but I get less strident about it when I can see that the methods by which the data was arrived at are improving and are far less prone to error rates.

Since increasing amounts of advertising targeting are being based upon geotargeting, and since so much of our security screening of PPC ads’ click-through results are being based upon geolocation data as a major component of analysis, I think it behooves companies to use very high-quality data. Quova’s historically high price tags have caused some to look for cheap and easy alternatives, but people should be very careful about the methods used by those other companies. In many, many cases, the cheaper alternatives equate with far less sophisticated methodologies, which also equate with higher error rates. And, auditing undoubtedly also adds overhead to the pricetag, but using data that has zero third-party checks will open companies to greater liability.

Most of the cheap companies are using only ARIN network data which has a lower accuracy level than if it was further enhanced by data from major ISPs and network tracerouting.

Except for the simplest applications which do not involve security and fraud analysis, I think that Quova’s industry-leading patents in geolocation make it so that other geodata companies’ products cannot realistically compete in this arena.

Google Image Search - Second Only To Web Search In Size

Ravi — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 00:47:08 +0000

This post is based on the interview between Eric Enge and Peter Linsley, Google’s Product Manager for Image Search. It reveals some interesting aspects of image search which is growing at an accelerated pace.

A recent survey by Hitwise in February 2009 shows Google Image Search as part of the troika of top web properties owned by Google in terms of traffic and revenue.

Peter’s responses to Eric’s questions are summarised as follows:

1) On Page Factors in Optimising Images:
In web search, the bots crawl structured data, have enough signals like title, headings and sub-headings, the body content, the backlinks and anchor text from external sources etc to size up the intent of the page.

An image search does not have such signals to rely upon. The bot can access the image source tag in the html and the alt text describing what the image both of which are the key determinants. The more clarity the alt tag content has, the better the intent conveyed to the crawlers.

Peter affirms that it is a very good practice to have a clear description of what the image is about in the alt text. For users who are vision impaired or who have images turned off, the alt text clearly conveys the message when the mouse is hovered over the image. It is a bonus if the same alt text is found elsewhere on the page content in the form of the title of the image or part of a caption.

From the crawler’s point of view, it can see the image tag and the alt text but these do not say much about the image itself. Naming parts of the image as in Flickr photos also does not help the crawlers as it is not machine readable.

If the title, description and caption of the image is obvious to the user, Peter says this is a huge help in helping his team figure out the text associated with that image and rank it appropriately.

File name is an important attribute that is analysed as it tags on to the image even if it is embedded many times on a page or if it is linked to by other sites. A meaningful file name helps though it is not a very strong signal in the ranking process.

A few issues related to file names are:

A lot of operating systems and web servers do not allow file names in other languages that cannot be represented in ASCII. People cannot use certain types of text when naming the file for the same reason.
Another problem from the human perspecitve is that users cannot do justice when naming the file in their respective language. So the search engines cannot assume that the filename is the best description of the image.

2) The Alt Text:
Peter says that if the image cannot be seen but one can perceive what it looks like, then the alt text should reflect that perception in words. The alt text becomes a replacement for the unseen image.

There is no hard and fast rule on the length of the alt text. It all boils down to how the user would feel about it. The alt text can be as detailed as describing all the details of the image. Peter mentions that having a title, caption and description for the image somewhere on the web page enables the crawlers to treat the image title with the same importance as the equivalent of the HTML page title for that page.

Eric poses a question about the association of caption text with the image by the crawler with an example of Charlie Chaplin dancing in the moonlight with the page content including title tag focused on the same topic. Peter confirms by saying that the association is important to the extent to which the image itself is very important to the page.

The close contextual matching of content to this image is a very strong signal. If the image was removed from that focused page, then it would lose a lot of its value in ranking terms. The key here is to think of it from the user’s perspective. If a user lands on the page on Chaplin and sees a large image of Charlie above the fold, the user can see the relevance straightaway.

If the page has six different sub topics and matching images for each sub topic as in the case of a blog about San Francisco with different posts about the place, Peter says the crawlers are pretty good at figuring out the different topics and the images relevant to each sub topic.

Having a permalink for each of the sub-topics is a big help. A canonical tag on each of the inner pages that contains the detailed post and relevant images also helps the crawlers know the canonical url for the image.

3) Matching An Image And Its Content:
There are a number of ways in which a crawler tries to figure out what an image is about, the content and how it matches the intent of a user search. Machines find it a problem to read what an image is and decipher what it represents.

Peter cites an example of an image showing a shark jumping over the Golden Gate bridge. To humans, the scenario is very obvious. The caption of the image says - Check this out. This does not make any sense to a crawler in figuring out what the image is about unless the pixels of the image are analysed. All the other factors discussed above do add to the confidence level of the image aiding the image search team in trying to figure out the image correctly.

4) Signals In Two Dimensional HTML World Vs Three Dimensional Image World:
Eric mentions the two dimensions of relevance and importance (in the form of backlinks) in the HTML world that are important signals on the page. But in image search, apart from the relevance and importance, the third factor of confidence comes into play.

Peter agrees wholeheartedly and says that unlike external links to a page that are counted as votes in web search, images are seldom linked that way. The search team has to consider the other signals to see if they are talking about the image and appropriately factor them into the algorithm.

5) Web Page Influencing the Ranking of Images:
Peter admits that a web page is certainly a signal in the ranking of images. In a nutshell, from the SEO perspective for image search, all the rules that apply to web serach apply equally in image search also. Being an authority on a certain topic and embellishing the page with unique content all provide signals that help the image as well.

So a page with great content and links from other sites to it and other positivbe external signals associated with it inherently passes on the benefits to images that reside on the page.

For images being above the fold or scattered on a page, Peter says that the user experience is a very important factor. If images add to the relevancy and usefulness of the user experience, then it is a vital factor in conjunction with other signals to return this page in the results. This relevance also proves to users that the results for an image search are very relevant to the user’s query and approved by Google to direct the user to the site.

The image search team try to return the best possible images for queries. It must be remembered that there are lots of sites with competing images that are relevant to the user queries.

6) Difference in Results Between Universal Search and Image Search:
Peter and his team realise that there is a subtle difference in intent of a search query made on web search and specifically on images.google.com for an image search. Users doing a specific image search are definitely looking for image results. It is not the case with universal search though relevant results from different verticals are presented on the SERPs. The intent may differ based on the web property the users perform a search.

7) Combating Spam in Image Search:
The image search inherits all the benefits of the work done by the Google web spam team. All the good practices that apply to web search pretty much apply to image search also.

8.Growth of Image Search and Related Technology:
Peter agrees that image search is a really hot and developing web property with incredible scope for the future. It could end up amassing trillions of images in time to come. It is a huge task indexing and organizing the unique images in the explosively growing image world. Each person’s view of the world is unique and it is reflected in the creation of images.

Peter asks a most interesting question - If someone is interested in seeing only an image, why should the search start with a text query? The solution to this has arrived in the form of the Similar Images launch, a Google Labs project where users can search for images based on existing images. The search is completely visual.

A query like Paris can return results on Paris Hilton, Paris in France, Paris in Texas and the Eiffel Tower in a good search engine. With Similar Images, you can start off with an image and take it as an additional query in your exploration along with the original text query. The image at that point is used as the next query.

With the fall in prices for good quality digital cameras and increasing quality of mobile phone cameras, taking pictures has never been easier and so very affordable. The technological advances in facial recognition software (an aspect of it is used in Google’s Picassa tool) is also helping the image search team in their quest to organize the image world to give it more purpose and a huge reach in the future.

The entire transcript of the interview on Google Image Search that forms the basis of this post makes an interesting read.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search engine optimisation company that offers great SEO services to its clients based in New Zealand and Australia.

Domain Diversity - Key Metric For Higher Google Rankings

Ravi — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 23:00:17 +0000

Domain diversity is an important SEO factor that is crucial for a site in order to rank well on the Google SERPs. This is achieved by the site gaining inbound links from a diverse set of domains. This is a daunting task as it is not easy to get inbound links. The best way to achieve this is for the site to contain top quality content that makes it a standout in the industry in which it operates.

Research done by the experts at SEOmoz indicated (above the 95% confidence level) that domain diversity is a key metric that helps a site achieve top rankings. The diversity here refers to the number of links coming from a variety of root domains to the site in question.

The links gained are all the more powerful when the anchor text in the link contains keyword phrases that aptly describe the nature of the page/site gaining the links. It is not easy to control this factor as the site linking in will not always choose anchor text that is appropriate to your site.

The other important factor here is the trust and authority of the domains linking in to your site. When you have a good quality site with lots of valuable content, you will attract links from a variety of domains. A percentage of such inbound links is bound to be spammy. Google looks at the ratio of percentage of such spammy links to the total number of inbound links to your site and has a threshold of acceptance for such aberrations.

The topical focus of the domains linking to your site is a big boost in the entrie scheme of things. Though Google has not professed to being semantically inclined in its algorithms, it is important to have relevant links to your site than totally irrelevant ones.

There are a variety of ways in which links can be built. A good post on gaining inbound links from diverse domains shows exactly that.

Consolidation of Links From Various Domains:
A great video post on microsites by Rand shows that it is better to concentrate your efforts of building content on a single domain on which your site resides rather than increasing the division of labour and hence dilution in focus by creating microsites and blogs.

Rand gives a clear example wherein a site owner has two distinct domains, one for her blog and one her actual site. Pictorially, it can be depicted as:

There are several inbound links coming into the site owner’s blog site. She has done all the hard work in publishing valuable content to attract these links from various domains with relevant anchor text. She now passes a link to her main site with the same anchor text directed at a specific money page on her site. This is deficient in two ways.

Firstly, the accumulated pagerank juice from all the inbound links are not transferred appropriately from the blog site to the parent site by means of a single link even though the anchor text is relevant to the landing page on her main site.

Secondly, Google sees just one domain (the mysiteblog.com) linking to the parent site (mysite.com). The inbound links to the blog site come from different domains. This is not going to help the owner rank well for the specific keyword phrase of her choice. A lot of hard work does not translate into actual results in this case.

An ideal scenario in this case would be to have the blog as part of the main domain. Even if the blog receives multitude of links from various domains, it is still part of the main site and it strengthens the domain diversity of the links now pointing to the site. It can be something like this:

To integrate the blog within the parent domain, all the posts on the blog site domain can be created afresh under a sub-folder called blog on the mysite.com domain under the same URLs and all the posts on the blog site can be permanently redirected to the new blog sub-folder.

The advantages of the new setup is that Google sees mysite.com domain to be the recepient of links from a variety of domains. The owner now needs to publish her content in only one place on her blog and cuts out duplication of work. In cases where site owners make posts on their blog and transfer the same content on to their main site, the problem of duplicate content is also eradicated.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search engine marketing company with a great track record of achieving clear cut results to boost the rankings and ROI of their client sites over the past 10 years using best practices in both organic seo and pay per click marketing. They serve clients in both New Zealand and Australia.

Natural Search Marketing is Just in Time Conversation

Brian R. Brown — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:34:40 +0000

I had the extreme pleasure of presenting to some of the biggest brands around at the 2009 Brandworks University. This year represented 19 years that Lindsay, Stone & Briggs has put on this annual branding conference. Brandworks is very unique in many ways as conferences go: attendance is mostly done by invitation, but attendees still pay a fee to attend; rather than elective presentations running simultaneously, there’s one block and presentations flow back-to-back and are formulated to relate to and support each other as well as the underlying theme; rather than a typical podium setup, presentations are done “in-the-round;” and it isn’t hard to find attendees who are able to claim 5, 10 or more years of attendance. Needless to say, if you ever get the opportunity to attend or are invited to speak, I highly recommend it.

This year’s talk was around the core theme of the “conversation economy” and how marketing, branding, and business in general is being shaped by and around conversations. Not surprising, there was a fair amount of talk around social media. Of course, my portion was to focus on natural search as part of this conversation, which thanks to blended search, crosses over and intersects all marketing channels. While my view on natural search hasn’t changed much over the years, preparing my presentation for the conference helped me frame it up with the exact message phrasing that I’ve been looking for - “just in time conversation.”

Just In Time Conversation

This description is excellent for natural search, and those who have been doing SEO for any amount of time have probably recognized this viewpoint. Natural search provides the opportunity to reach out and connect with a website’s target audience at the ideal time…when they are seeking what the site has to offer.

Of course you would think that presenting to some of the whose-who of brands would make this messaging old news. However, even today, this still couldn’t be further from the truth. A lot of brands have made great strides online, but there is still a lot of ground on the natural search marketing front to be gained.

In prepping for the conference, I had a chance to preview a list of some of the represented brands and took that as an opportunity to see how well they were doing already regarding SEO. To protect the guilty, I won’t call out any of these brands here. Many of the fundamentals that you’d expect these brands to have already addressed, many of which would be evident even through a 60-Second Website Audit, actually hadn’t been addressed: canonicalization, duplicate title tags, keyword cannibalization, generic anchor text, etc. Beyond some of the more technical issues, many of these sites could benefit greatly just through thin slicing natural search optimization tactics.

I can only hope that the presentation helped to start more of these big brands down the natural search marketing path. I certainly did what I could in the 45 minutes I was given to illustrate the point.

Natural Search Users, Please Stand Up

Early in the presentation, I invited the attendees to participate in a little poll by having them stand up based on their own personal interaction with various marketing vehicles. Specifically, I asked them to stand up if:

Within the last week, you…

Used a phonebook?

Acted on a billboard ad?

Acted on a magazine ad?

Acted on a radio ad?

Acted on a TV ad?

Used a search engine?

Clicked on a paid search result?

Clicked on a natural search result?

As you might imagine (and can see below), out of 300 plus attendees, the numbers grew gradually, from 2-3 for phonebook usage (which I was actually amazed that the number was that high), up to nearly everyone in the audience when I reached the “Used a search engine?” part of the poll. Presenting in-the-round also meant that it was very easy for all of the attendees to see how much search engine usage has become a part of their and everyone’s everyday life. Not surprising, those who clicked on a natural search result compared to a paid search result was far greater.

This of course was the first step…now to get marketers to question why they continue to put a disproportionate amount of their online spend toward paid search versus natural search, even when their own usage of search engines contradicts that logic. But just like natural search takes time, it takes time to turn this kind of thinking right side up.

For many companies, natural search marketing may itself be one of the most important just in time conversations they have this year, after all, it’s now July and the 2009 holiday season is just around the corner.

SEO Best Practices - Correlation Testing

Ravi — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 01:38:37 +0000

Hi everyone,
This post is about the latest correlation testing done by the great folks at SEOmoz in regards to search engine ranking factors. Presented below is a list of the best SEO practices with some startling revelations. It is not exhaustive but covers the crucial factors.

SEOmoz has been indexing the web with their killer app Linkscape and they have been analysing the data to arrive at solid results. Even though the SEO field has lots of grey areas, good evidence in the form of solid data proves that search engine optimisation can be a definitive science in certain areas rather than a skillful craft.

The search engine ranking factors that were analysed are outlined below:

1) Title Tag:
Best Practice:

Primary Keyword - Secondary Keywords | Brand
Or
Brand Name | Primary Keyword and Secondary Keywords

If the keyword targeted is in an extremely competitive industry, then it is good to put it at the beginning of the title. If the targeted keyword is not very competitive and if the branding can help attract clicks to the site on the SERPs, then the brand name can appear at the start of the title tag followed by the keyword phrase.

2) Usefulness of H1 tags:
The H1 tag is more useful to users than to search engines. This is a hard hitting result considering that H1 tag has been an important on page factor and search engines appear to weight it.

This test reveals that H1 is still important for informational hierarchy and semantic purposes which help users know the heading under which the content appears. But search engines do not give the H1 tag the same ranking weight than was originally estimated. It is still important to help the user identify the information heirarchy on a given page.

It could be that the use of CSS has led to h1 tags being formatted to make them look like something else than what they originally stand for - prominent headings.

3) Usefulness of Nofollow:
Using nofollow tag for internal pagerank sculpting to flow link juice is no longer recommended. It is good to use the nofollow tag for disabling spammers in potential user generated content.

4) Usefulness of Canonical Tag:
The canonical tag is still in its infancy and is best used to provide hint to the search engines for duplicate content. From public statements, it is also believed to deplete between 1% to 10% of link juice as in the case of 301 redirects.

For example if page A has 10 link points and it is redirected using 301 redirect to page B, then page B would receive between 1 and 9 link points.

Since the search engines are still testing the canonical tag, it would be wise not to rely too much on its functionality in these early days. It would be wise to adopt confirmed architectural solutions like the hash tag at the end of the URL of duplicate content to prevent it from being indexed by the search engines.

5) Use of Alt Text in Images:
The recommendation is clearly to include good relevant alt text with images on pages that are targeting competitive keywords. This is based on two reasons.

Firstly, the alt tag helps users with disabilities to understand what a page is about and also computers using semantics to make the information more useful. Secondly, the correlation data at hand proves the alt attribute is a far more important ranking factor than what was assumed.

In the past, excessive abuse of alt tag by stuffing keywords has almost convinced many SEOs to deny it any importance. But the latest tests show otherwise.

6) Use of Meta Keywords tag:
This has long been abused and has lost its relevance as a ranking factor. But the recommendation here is to use the meta keywords tag if the site owner is not worried about making her site’s use of keywords public. Moreover, Yahoo still considers it as one of the several factors that influence ranking on its SERPs. The data shows that Google and Bing still ignore the meta keywords tag.

7) Use of Parameter Driven URLs:
The recommendation is not to use them unless absolutely necessary (in the case where the CMS being used employs parameters). Even then, it should be restricted to a maximum of 2 parameters.

The spiders have found it hard to parse URLs with dynamic content and often encounter duplicate content. The correlation data reveals that pages with static URLs tend to rank higher on the SERPs.

8. Usefulness of Footer Links:
Footer links are to be used sparingly and a limit of 25 relevant navigational links is recommended. This number is not a hard limit. The intent behind the keywords chosen for such links is an important issue.

Google has been known to penalise sites with keyword stuffed footer links and this manipulation can be detected through its algorithms. The testing shows that only an excess of 25 footer links that looked spammy invited Google’s automated penalty.

9) Use of Javascript and Flash:
The use of Javascript and Flash in navigation that search engines follow to index pages on a site is not recommended.

The main reason proposed is that the way the search engines parse flash and javascript is still inferior when compared to html. It is a risk that can well be avoided. Navigation using Flash and Javascript code leads to lower search engine rankings.

10) Use of 301 Redirects:
The best way to redirect pages is using 301 redirects though there are inherent disadvantages. A 301 redirect depletes about 1% to 10% of link juice. This is far better than a javascript or 302 redirect which passes no juice at all. Meta refreshes appear to perform similarly to 301s but the search engines still prefer 301 redirects.

11) Blocking Content from Search Engines:
The Meta Robots tag (noindex, follow) is a better method to block pages from the bots than the robots.txt. The robots.txt is to be used sparingly only in cases where the meta robots tag cannot be employed.

The main reason behind this conclusion is that the use of robots.txt stops the spiders from seeing what is on the blocked page. But they know the existence of such blocked pages. This leads to results on the SERPs for such blocked pages as just the site URL with no title and description. It is also referred to as Partially Indexed Pages (PIP).

Another negative is the blocking of flowing of link juice that a blocked page may have accrued. The bots cannot see the links on the blocked page and cannot follow them. The link juice is not distributed via those links.

The use of noindex follow parameters with the meta robots tag helps the page from being indexed but allows the link juice to flow to other pages through the links on that page. This is highly recommended.

12) Google Search Wiki’s Effect on Rankings:
The search wiki does not have any influence on rankings. The recommendation is not to spend time or resources on search wiki.

Google Searchwiki allows a user to customise her search results by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. The user has to sign in to her Google account for this and she can only customise the way her search results appear after she is logged in, aka personal search.

13) Negative Links from Bad Neighbourhood:
The effect of links from bad neighbourhood to good neighbourhood is minimal provided the links are one way and not reciprocal.

Tests show that the search engines can easily identify the hubs in a particular industry and get to know the legitmiate resources. All good sites receive spammy links and this is a fact of life on the web. As long as the percentage of inbound spammy links is a small proportion of the total number of inbound links and the site is reasonably well linked to legitimate resource hubs for that industry, there is no cause for concern.

14) Relationship between Traffic and Rankings:
The user metrics to a given site do not determine the rankings of that site. Though traffic and rankings are highly correlated, one does not cause the other. The reason is that the popular websites get more links and this in turn causes higher rankings.

Search engines have tried metrics like time spent by user on a page for ranking results but this turned out to be a noisy signal. If the engines do not detect a user click on their SERPs, then that is a more trusted signal for them to improve their search results.

The recommendation suggests not to trust unique visitor counts (opposed to total visitors) as it can be a fundamental flaw of the web analytics software. It is much better to look at the traffic derived from the various sources and comparison of traffic from one month to the next.

The tests conducted do throw interesting light on several assumptions associated with some of the SEO best practices outlined above. The full SEOmoz post on SEO Best Practices is an interesting read along with the comments that follow it.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior pay per click marketing consultant at Netconcepts, a well established and highly trusted Auckland search marketing consultancy that endeavours to provide the best practice white hat SEO and Pay per click services.