SearchEngineLand.Com recently published an info-graphic of The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors.  It’s one of the best graphical descriptions of both the results and consequences of website optimization I’ve seen.  It focuses on all the things I talk about every month, SEO Fundamentals (HTML & Architecture), Content, Links, Social Signals and Authority (Trust).  The graphic speaks for itself, and is leading my team to create a few similar info-graphics to further explain how SEO really works.  For example, we get questions every day, about what a backlink really is.  After publishing a ton of content on backlinks and videos about how they work, we still get questions about backlinks.  We will post the info-graphic as soon as it is ready.

The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors

Another frequently asked question I, “do backlinks really work, or do they work like they use to?”  The answer is yes, Google was born on links, and unless they decide to turn into an all out social signals and recommendation engine, it will always use links to define website popularity.  The difference between links in 2012 and links in 2005 is website quality and relevance.  7 years ago it was very difficult to judge website quality, and relevance, and even harder to index the enormity of the web.  This is why changes to the Google Algorithm were annual.  These days changes can be weekly, and Google has the ability to index new pages within days.  Just type in “The Google Freshness Update” into Google and read about how Google is ranking new unique content above sites without fresh content.

Evergreen Your Content

Speaking of adding fresh content to your website, SearchRankings.Net has been working hard this month to build out a newsletter, update its social profiles and build out a new knowledgebase of SEO Answers to help visitors to our site.  We plan on rolling this out during the first quarter.  We will be testing all this new content and we are excited to see how it affects our overall PR, and our organic SearchRankings.  Stay tuned for new information being published more frequently at SearchRankings.Net

Search Engine Optimization has come a long way.  It was almost 13 years ago when ‘alpha.google.com’ first entered the World Wide Web.

Alpha.google.com

I don’t know if the term Search Engine Optimization or SEO even existed.  Search Engines were created and expanded by our need to find information.  More than a decade later, Search Engine Optimization is a requirement if you want to show up online.

The web is still wild; I wonder how many businesses had phone lines 100 years ago after the phone was first introduced.  Corporate websites didn’t really take off until the last 90’s so we aren’t even 20 years from the introduction of a corporate website.

Yellow Pages To Reviews

15 years ago, if you wanted to find a company to provide a service, you looked up the category in the Yellow Pages, and if it was 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM in most places you could call the company and ask questions.  Today we call that a Search Engine and the corporate information is now available 24 hours a day, seven days a week on the World Wide Web.  After you gathered your information, you might ask a friend or colleague who they use for whatever product or service you were interested in.  Today those are called Ratings and Reviews, often times submitted by people you may not know, but trust none the less.  You can reach out to your social network and ask the same question.  I was at a conference recently, and someone tweeted out a question about a book they were thinking about buying.  The author of the book saw the tweet come through and told the person to “Buy The Book!”  How’s that for marketing. Read the rest of this entry »

Here are a few interesting pieces of information for your review.

• There are approximately 1.2 billion active PC’s in the world today.

• There are approximately 3 billion active smart phones in the world today.

• The iPad is not a PC.

• Is your message, brand or website ready for a landscape dominated by new devices?

• Will your message get lost amongst all this change? How long can you wait?

I purchased my first iPad earlier this month, and I’ve been amazed at how different the iPad is from a typical laptop or tablet. I was recently at a presentation and heard the statistic about PC’s vs. Smart Phones. Let’s look at some of the ideas that have started to take shape this year, as well as a few that may be more prevalent next year.

The PC is definitely on the way out, new devices are being designed to provide a better user experience (thank you Steve Jobs R.I.P.), instead of more PC related functionality in a different form factor. We only had to wait 10 years for someone to get the whole tablet concept right. As devices improve, your business has to understand the new devices, and how they will change the way we work. More importantly you need to understand how the new devices are going to change the way people communicate, interact, shop, read, and watch TV and movies. I know it’s been said before; “this changes everything.” This time they may be right.

It’s not simply changing your PC based website to look better on a mobile device or platform, it’s understanding how your product, service or brand is going to be able to communicate with the “New Consumer”, in a more interactive and engaging way. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently read an outstanding white paper written by members of Omniture, and SearchMarketingNow about integrating the New Digital Team. I highly recommend this white paper, here is the link to the Omniture website, if you would like to download the white paper.

Here are a few of the highlights, as well as my own interpretation of the best practices for your marketing plan.

First, understanding your data is as important as dominating the search results. Second, the more you understand about all website traffic, the more reach or lift you will have with them. Most important, how all your teams communicate and then collaborate with each other, will play a significant factor in how successful your Search Marketing Campaigns will be.

Here are a few highlights from the white paper:

- It is now estimated that Paid Search, now represents the largest portion of online advertising budgets according to Internet Advertising Bureau. I guarantee all the SEO’s just perked up.

- It is estimated that SEO drives 75% of traffic, but only receives 15% of the marketing budget, whereas PPC (Pay Per Click) receives 80% of the budget, but only generates 25% of the the traffic.  I would argue that if you understood your data and your analytic’s, you could raise the qualified traffic from PPC.

- SEO is largely seen in most companies as an “IT Function”, whereas PPC is seen as a “Marketing Function”.  As long as there is outstanding communication between both departments, they can both be successful, but that’s not often the case.  That can leave both dollars and efficiency left on the table.  As the landscape continues to get more an more competitive, you will need to centralize your Search Marketing.

Much more from this beneficial white paper, but I will need to read through and analyze each section in order to pull from it the most beneficial information.  Please contact us, if you are interested in a quick review to determine if your Digital Team is integrated.

SearchRankings.Net has been spending a lot of time these days reviewing the data that our clients have been using to make decisions about business. We use data every day, data is everywhere, but what happens when the data you are looking at is wrong? Worse yet, the data you are looking at is wrong but you don’t know it.

Case in point, we were working with a client who was using a large Advertising Agency to run a SEM Campaign (SEM = Search Engine Marketing). One of the most important pieces of data this agency reported back to our client was the conversion rate, or rate at which traffic to the website converted into an actual sale. This campaign and the data that they were providing went on for months, and based on the reports, the data did not look too bad. After we had gone in and started to work on the Analytics Review and Audit we found that the Advertising Agency was reporting an “Add to Cart” as a converted sale. The problem with reporting the “Add to Cart” number was that in this case, 4 out 5 ‘Add to Carts” did NOT convert into an actual sale. So this Agency is reporting conversions 80% higher than they actually are. This is just one example of how bad data can affect decision making.

The only thing worse than bad data is no data, and in 99% of the clients we work with we can find examples of both within weeks. Data Driven Decisions are a lot like a really good testing plan for your site, software, product or service. It takes discipline to create, test, track and change direction based on what the data is telling you. If you can’t do this, or you don’t have the resources to do this, hire it out, it’s too important not to be part of your “Cost of doing business”. Often times in the course of working with our clients, we find that because we have site usability issues or conversion related obstacles, the qualified traffic we can send to the website is diminished by a poor conversion rate. How do we know this? The DATA tells us. What do we do when we find this out? Often times we pull back on some of our marketing efforts and focus on conversion issues. It’s just not cost effective to get a large number of people coming into your digital stores if we are not ready to turn them into buying customers, pull back your marketing spend and put it toward upgrading your site. Read the rest of this entry »

So you are thinking about updating or redesigning your current website. Search Engine Rankings should be factored in to your redesign project in order to maintain existing rankings and to optimize for the future. Here are a few things you should consider when you are in the planning phase of your website redesign.

Website Maps:
Compare your current website map (sitemap), with your new website map, and make sure the pages all match up. If you are keeping the same structure, just make sure to add any new pages or categories to the new sitemap. If you are making large scale changes to your website, make sure you use a 301 redirect on any page you will be changing the URL, page title or meta tag on. Let’s say for example you are cleaning up an older site, and the catalogue of products on the old site is cumbersome and hard to optimize for SEO. The new site will be much cleaner, but the URL structure is going to change. You will want to 301 redirect the old product page to the new product page in order to maintain the link structures you have already built up over time.

It’s unlikely that you will be able to contact 100 websites that may be linking to your content or product pages, but if you use a 301 redirect you won’t need to. A 301 redirect tells the server what page to deliver, and will maintain the benefit of the linking structures you already have in place. See the example below.

Old page URL: www.abc-company.com/10654/prod/bin/64/2011%05/cookware/sku=12895609

New page URL: www.abc-company.com/cookware/fryingpan.html

The new page is much easier to find, it’s easier to optimize for and ultimately it will rank better. Simply add a 301 redirect to the old page URL and you will get the benefit of the new page and structure, as well as the authority you have already built up on the links from the old website.

Important note, if you do not add 301 redirects on your old pages, Google may see both pages in the index for a while and show it as duplicate content. This will make it more difficult for the page and the site as a whole to rank well. Read the rest of this entry »

Growth has forced us to do a productivity audit at the SearchRankings.Net offices. Since this is not my first go around at growing a new tech company, I try to take advantage of rapid growth, and audit our processes and systems, before hiring staff. In the past we would “throw people” at all of our “growing pains”, typically that just added to the confusion, questions, and debate. As you grow and learn, you start to determine that there is a lot you can do with less, and if you really define what you do, and how you do it, the results are never as complicated as the people, tools and data may suggest.

I just finished another good article on SEOBook.Com called “What’s In Your SEO Toolbox?” It’s all about all the tools out there in the SEO space that will help you determine keywords, monitor links, and evaluate data at every level. Just like everything else if you want to get lost in all this data you can spend days, weeks and years doing it. Just like most of us can start working on the Email Inbox on a Monday morning, and not look up from it until the day is completely gone. Don’t get me wrong, I love tools, and data I can use to gain a competitive advantage, just don’t get lost in it.

If I can tell you how many pages you have indexed by Google, or the percentage of links you currently have pointing to a specific anchor text, or what your top competitors are doing based on an SEO_Audit, it might be interesting, but will it help you convert traffic? Never take your eye off the ball, and step one for staying focused is knowing what to focus on and work backwards from that. Read the rest of this entry »

A good content management program will also help both your PageRank (PR), and website authority. When your authority goes up, so will your rankings. You can do this with a blog, but you need to add new, relevant content to your website. If you have specialized knowledge in your industry, you should be able to add content relevant to your industry and rank for the content. In additional to helping with your rankings, it will help you qualify your products and services with your web site visitors.

The recent rash of Google updates have begun to validate an assumption I’ve held for quite a while.  Search Engines and Google in particular are going to go after website publishers who exist primarily to sell ad space, before they target websites who look to acquire links in order to increase rankings.  In other words, Google is going after the fuel line and not the vehicle.

This has always been my assumption, based on the volume of legitimate websites that engage in link building practices that may be in conflict with Google’s guide lines.  Many high quality websites with good SEO fundamentals, high quality content (frequently updated), and strong organic link structures participate in some form of text link ad exchange.  Whenever possible high quality websites will spend money on other high quality websites in order to gain an advantage in the Search Engine Results (SERPs).  Every once in a while you will see Google penalize a JC Penny, or Overstock.com for link building practices that become so egregious or public that they have to take a stand, but for the most part as long as the link building is relevant it goes on without a lot of issues.

That leaves the Search Engines left with an opportunity to go after website publishers that are in the business of creating content, links and PageRank for the purposes of selling links to other sites.  The algorithm can detect these sites faster than ever and as a consequence you are seeing a lot of fluctuation in the Search Engine Results.  Start clearing out the “low hanging fruit” and any website using links from these sites may also suffer. Read the rest of this entry »

I have been working in SEO, for many years my team and I have been learning, testing, tweaking and doing all we can to improve the exposure of the websites our clients so generously submit to our care and protection. I’ve also been fortunate enough to talk at many conferences and write for papers and websites about all things Optimization. This week I decided to look at optimization from a different perspective. How are YOU optimized, or how is your COMPANY optimized? Search Engine Optimization experts want to look at fundamentals, content and links. All of these things are important to the Search Engines based on the results they want to return to the users.

The smartest engineers in the world work every day to improve the systems that can identify websites with the best fundamentals, content and links. When the system finds them, it rewards them with great web page authority or PageRank (PR), and high SearchRankings. The result for the website is increased exposure to everyone looking for information, products and services on the topics within the website.

What if we spent the same amount of time “Optimizing Us”, as we do our websites? Would the result be increased authority, and exposure? Let’s do a simple comparison and see what we could focus on.

Website Fundamentals = Personal Character
Fundamentals are the structure and foundation your website is built on, and strong fundamentals always include website history and domain age. This means, you can’t fake time, age and experience, this is something you develop over the long run. If you did a quick check of the last year of your life, the last 5 years, 10 years of your life, your professional career, how much authority would you have? Could you walk away from what you have built and if you did how long before it would fall apart? If this last statement made you think “I can’t leave for a second”, your fundamentals are in trouble. I recently had back surgery, and I was out of commission for 2 weeks. I’ve been an entrepreneur for almost 20 years and in that time I’ve never even taken a vacation for that long, so the thought of being out of the picture, made me a little nervous. I humbly admit to not being missed, and nothing could have made me feel better. You can bet I’ve got a 2 week vacation coming up in my future!

If you have been in business or your career for 10 years or more, you know what the fundamentals are, if you haven’t been in your career for 10 years, ask someone who has. Do a quick check of your personal fundamentals and see if there aren’t a couple of areas you can improve on this year. Read a book about business or optimization, begin to investigate new technology, attend a good seminar, find some way to “wake up” just a little bit and improve your personal fundamentals. Now is the time. Read the rest of this entry »