SEO

Social Media Enhances and Complements SEO, like Yin and Yang

The argument that Social Media will ultimately kill SEO is an amusing one. Yes, Social Media will dramatically change SEO, in it fact already has changed  it forever; but Social Media will not replace SEO.  SEO and Social Media have a Yin Yang relationship – opposite forces that complement each other within a greater whole.  I think Social Media is the most exciting thing that has happened to SEO in many years and it will significantly improve the relevance and quality of search results. Social media, combined with the Google Panda Update, and eventually Google +1, have changed the landscape of search rankings.  The Panda update made great strides toward better rankings based on quality content, pushing down the rankings for content farms and junk content.  Google +1 will eventually reward highly regarded sites with quality content with higher rankings.  Social Media in a similar fashion will reward websites with quality blogs, great content and engagement via Social Media with higher search rankings, higher website traffic and greatly expanded exposure.  Panda, Google +1 and Social Media are paving the way to more democratic search results based on user likes and interests and much less influenced by those that game the system. So with that said it would appear that SEO is in fact on it’s way to extinction,but this is far from true.  Yes old school SEO of mindless link building is already on it’s way out and is only marginally effective today.  However, there is now a huge demand for Web 2.0 SEO utilizing best practices of website SEO combined with SMO (Social Media Optimization). Organizations still have a need, in fact now more than ever, for high quality SEO and thanks to these developments quality content and engagement will be rewarded and Spam will be ranked accordingly.  So how does Social Media figure into this and what is the Social Media and SEO Yin Yang Relationship? The purpose of SEO is to get your content found, BUT, the presumption and requirement is that someone is looking for that particular content in the first place.  If so, then SEO works beautifully.  SEO relies on people proactively searching for words associated with your product, service, or organization.  SEO is reactive to a proactive user. Social Media has evolved from personal chatter between close friends to sharing news, discussion, debate, and education across diverse groups.  Sharing and discussion is driving the viral affect of Social Media and this is the link between SEO and Social Media. There is a 24/7 discussion raging on Twitter, Google Plus, Facebook and LinkedIn about everything from politics, to music, news, movies, and products.  These discussions often share links to blogs, websites, Facebook Pages, and other posts and these posts are often re-shared and commented on.  Sharing and the viral affect of Social Media makes it proactive in the sense that the message/discussion is reaching people that weren’t necessarily looking for that in particular.  This is how Social Media is complementary to SEO.  Social Media actively reaches out to and engages users, while SEO relies on users to actively search for content. This is the Yin Yang relationship of SEO and Social Media and why the two are complementary to each other.   Social Media is now an essential be part of  a comprehensive digital marketing strategy along with a SEO campaign designed to work with and complement social media.  With Social Media becoming an essential element of a Digital Marketing Strategy and SEO campaign a new term has been coined to label SEO work specifically focused on Social Media and that is Social Media Optimization or SMO. To develop and implement a successful Digital Marketing Strategy today one must employ top notch SEO, with high quality content, and a lively and interesting SMO-Social Media campaign.  More on that in a future blog…

Read more

Reputation Repair & Management, Learn from the Worst and be the Best

Reputation repair and reputation management is a hot topic today as social media and blogs are exploding in popularity.  Social media is making it increasingly easier for an irate client, customer, or employee to smear your company name and make it very public.  In fact, without a great deal of skill it is fairly easy to create negative content via social media and blogs that will rank in Google or Bing searches such as Company Name Scam or Brand Name Scam.  On twitter the popular hashtags for this are #FAIL to indicate a company or brand has really screwed up or #LAME for a less offensive, but still stupid move. So how does one go about actually implementing a reputation repair campaign.  Below is our 7 Steps for Reputation Management, or How to Do Reputation Repair, but first let’s explore the issue and challenges. Google and Bing search engines are giant calculators, they run huge algorithms to analyze content and webpages to determine the credibility, authority, content quality, along with over 200 other factors to arrive at a search rank for specific keywords.  Thus a blog with Your Company Name Scam in it along with a few keywords will rank at the top of that search result in absence of any competing content.  Likewise, dozens of blogs with Your Company Name Scam will dominate the first and second page of search results, a potential disaster for your reputation!  Add websites like Ripoff Report and press releases or public records for litigation and it is easy enough to have an ugly page one for search results. The best way to learn how to conduct a great reputation management or reputation repair campaign is to look at some companies that have had severe image or reputation problems (many well earned by the way) to see how they turned this around. The simple answer is content, content, and more content, but successful implementation actually more complex than that.  The picture I choose for this post illustrates the point well, it is a matter of counteracting and displacing the negative content with your positive content. Content is absolutely vital and it is equally important that the content is published with the right keywords and on blogs or websites were the search engine spiders will find the content and index it.  There is a bit of art to selecting the right keywords, to borrow a phrase from George Orwell’s book it is “double speak”.  For example, to rank against Your Company Name Scam, you would write blogs with those negative keywords in the content, BUT in a positive context. To illustrate this I wrote a blog a couple of weeks ago titled “SEO Scams, You Need a New Website, Is this Really a Scam?”.  If you do a Google search for Esotech  Scam this turns up on page one in several other positions.  Thankfully no posts about other companies with similar names have any negative posts and this is all positive for our firm and it illustrates this point well. How to do Reputation Repair, 7 Steps for Reputation Management Research: Do Google and Bing searches for your organization name, brand names and key management.  List any keywords or phrases that need attention. Google and Bing search each name and phrase. Google and Bing search each name with scam, sucks, ripoff, etc. in search terms. Identify Keywords: Make a list of words and phrases that either are causing a problem or could cause one in the future. Offending Keywords: List all of the keywords and phrases that showed up in your research above. Be sure to list exactly how it showed up in search results and exactly what you searched for. Potentially Offensive or Harmful Words: List words that are likely choices or targets for complaints or a campaign against your brand or name. Develop Content Strategy: This is a very critical step. This is where you develop your content strategy to either combat and attack an existing problem or defend against potential attacks in the future. Use the research and keyword list from above to develop your content strategy. Identify blog topics and keywords. Identify article topics and keywords. Social media posts and content strategy to leverage the above. Implement Social Media and Blogging: With your research and keywords identified and your content strategy in place now it’t time to implement your campaign. Quality content is vital for a successful campaign, make sure you create quality content consistently to achieve the best results. Crisis Plan: Develop a crisis plan. What will you do if something goes wrong in your business? How will you respond? Who will respond? Monitor: Low Cost-free option: Set up Google Alerts for Your Company Name Scam, Sucks, Ripoff, #Fail, etc. and also the same for your personal name and key managers, and brand names. Paid Monitoring: You can use systems like Radian 6 to monitor chatter on social networks, blogs and new search results for your brand. These platforms offer a comprehensive solution to social media monitoring, however, they are not cheap and generally start at several hundred dollars per month for basic service. Be Proactive and Respond Promptly: Now that your campaign is in place and rolling it is vital that you respond to posts, comments and complaints promptly. It is also important to be proactive and act immediately if something happens and get out in front of the problem.  Don’t wait for the tsunami of complaints or jeers, be proactive and get in front of your clients, consumers, or constituents immediately.

Read more

How Web 2.0 Websites Connect with Social Networks

 How do you design a website or connect your existing website with social networks and social media? This seems easy enough, right? Add a few cute icons on the top right hand side of your website, maybe add a blog, and poof you are in Web 2.0 wonderland! I suppose you can leave it at that and many do just that and proudly proclaim they all over Web 2.0. But there is a lot more to it than adding a couple of cute icons and few links to social networks.   Connecting to Social Networks, Creating a Web 2.0 Website First let’s look at how  social networks and websites are interconnected in Web 2.0.  Note that I said “interconnected”, not just connected. Information flows between all of the various networks and websites and content is posted on each as well, thus they are interconnected, even entwined. It not enough to just connect your website to the various social networks.  To harness the full reach and power of Web 2.0 and social media you must have a presence on each of various networks or as Brian Solis put it, you must “engage”. The first obvious step is to set up your social network accounts and pages, and sadly this is as far as many go and why they consequently fail.  They create the pages and accounts, leave it on auto pilot, and wonder why nothing is happening. 7 Steps to Get Started on Web 2.0 Websites and Social Media  Set up your social network accounts: As a minimum a Facebook Page (not a profile, a Page), Twitter, LinkedIn (for your brand/business), and Blog. Branding: When setting up your accounts be consistent in the naming, e.g. use your brand name where ever possible and use it consistently. Update your Website: As a minimum add the links to your social media accounts. You should also update your website to include the Open Graph interface and the most popular Share and Like buttons for social media. Correct installation: Make sure your website links, shares, RSS, Like buttons work and work properly and it is a clean and compliant installation. If not you are wasting your time and money. Develop a Social Media strategy: Wow, here’s a concept, actually have a strategy and plan! I am being sarcastic again, but few have a Social Media strategy and plan. Invest: To be successful you must invest something even more valuable than money into the campaign, your time. Not the time of an intern or even a “expert” consultant, your time. Stick to it: Consistency is key, you have to stick to it. I have often said “blogging and Tweeting often feels like you are having a really interesting conversation with yourself”. By this I mean you will not get a lot of feedback early on and you just have to stick with it. People are listening, they just seldom give you any feedback and the silence is often deafening.

Read more

SEO Scams, You Need a New Website, is this really a Scam?

One of the most popular SEO scams to blog about is “you need a new website” to rank well.  In general I agree with the principle that a new website is not a requisite for good SEO or good search ranking performance.  However, we have run across many instances where the existing website is simply hopeless and it would be an SEO scam to take the clients money to optimize that website.  Bluntly, those websites just sucked and there was no saving them! So when do you need a new website and how can you tell if someone is scamming you for 1) you have to have a new website to rank well or 2) your website is fine send us money and we can get it ranking?  Either one could be a scam; how can you tell the difference? Do I need a New Website? 7 Reasons You need a new website. Age: if your website is over 2 years old the odds are it needs a refresh at a minimum and it may be less expensive to build a new website depending on the platform it was designed on.  If your website is over 2 years old it does not automatically mean you need a new website, however, from our experience it is usually more cost effective to develop a new website than to try to rework an old one. Flash:  If your website is done completely or largely in Flash and your homepage and key pages have all Flash you probably need a new website.  In a nutshell a Flash website is invisible to Google, Bing, and other search engines and will not rank well.  Yes you can add content to Flash websites, but our experience has been that in the end you will realize better results by developing a new website in HTML that is search engine friendly. CMS; Content Management System:  If you do not have a CMS where you can create and edit your own webpages you need a new website for this reason alone.  The benefits of being able to create and manage your own content are obvious.  With a good CMS you will be able to add content more frequently and on your own which will help your search results. Blog:  If you don’t have a blog you really should add one.  This does not require a website redesign, but may be an indication that your website is out of date. Open Graph Integration: Like and Share features and options:  Again, this can be added to any website and if your site does not have this it may be an indication that it is out of date. Website design and architecture:  This is one that only an experienced SEO technician or analyst or SEO savvy website designer can judge, but if the information architecture and website design practices are out of date it absolutely affects your search rankings and it is often easier to do a new design than to fix an poor one. How does it look:  Let’s face it, while I left this for last, one of the primary reasons most people decide to develop a new website is they are just tired of the old one and it looks dated.  This is much like deciding to remodel a house, there is no absolute need for it, it’s just time for a new look or an update. Make sure Your New Website Design Includes These Things SEO Analysis or Digital Marketing Strategy: Before you start to design your new website it is vital to clearly define your marketing goals, audience, demographic, targeted keywords etc.  An SEO analysis and information architecture is a minimum that should be done before embarking on a new website design and we highly recommend developing a complete Digital Marketing Strategy for larger campaigns, Wireframe and Design Comps:  We highly recommend that your website designer provide you with a Wireframe (essentially a line drawing sketch) first and once the basic outline concept is approved some Comps (composite drawings or renderings) of what the website will look like before you start the actual design. CMS, Content Management System:  As we mentioned above the benefits of a CMS are huge and your new website absolutely must have this feature. CMS Training:  Make sure your website design fees and services include training on your new CMS.  Most are fairly easy to use once you get the hang of it, but you want to make sure that you get trained on how to create new pages, edit pages, add pictures, create links, create blog posts, etc.  We use WordPress for nearly all of our website designs.  The WordPress CMS is very user friendly, well documented, SEO friendly, and one of the most popular platforms in use today. Content:  This may seem obivous, but it is often one of the things our clients struggle the most with.  It is absolutely, positively, a must to have great content on your website.  Your content must be relevant and comprehensive.  We recommend at least 300 words per section page or primary page. 301 redirects:  This is not part of the website design, but a critical part of the website launch and on going SEO.  A 301 redirect are much like an index for the search engines to redirect links and references from your old urls (website pages) to the pages.  If this is not done or not done correctly your new website will loose the benefit of the old website’s search rankings and your search results will actually drop in the short term.  This is a very important part of your website design and launch. Open Graph Interface & Social Media:  Make sure your new website will be compliant with and include the Open Graph Interface (Facebook Like and Share buttons that have now become a standard format) and that it links to your social media such as Facebook Page and Twitter. Blog:  Your new website should have a blog integrated into it with a link via the top navigation bar.  Your CMS should facilitate blog updates by multiple authors (WordPress supports this). eCommerce:  If you do eCommerce or are adding it make sure the new website will support payment processing and you obtain an SSL so you can securely process transactions without leaving your website. Dedicated Hosting:  This is always a debate.  We always recommend having a dedicated server for your B2B or B2C website.  Dedicated servers are more reliable and offer much faster load times which helps with SEO rankings.  If your website is a very small one or your are a very small business a virtual dedicated server may suffice.  We highly recommend that you pick a reliable host with a good reputation.  Some of the lowest price hosts have the worst reputations and this is well earned by down time, virus’, and service problems.  

Read more

Googles Caffeine – New Faster Search Engine Indexing

Google’s Caffeine indexing platform was just released yesterday. The web will now be indexed faster in a more “real-time” algorithmic process. Basically all the different qualifications that go into the search indexing formula will be piece-mealed in and compared to the the entire database in real time as opposed to building stack by stack of data over time in order to run the sort query and seeing major changes only pushed out after long periods of time and data analysis.*cough, wheeze, gasp* What does it mean for SEO? It means the possibility that a new site will be indexed faster. We may start to see rankings rise at a rapid pace as we tweak and influence our sites for performance and SEO “friendliness”. I am looking forward to seeing reports from the SEO field stating rapid changes instead of slow dreadful ones. Maybe now all those scam filled SEO companies won’t be able to promise results without a 6 months – 1 year contract.  

Read more

Destroying SEO – The New Invisible Text

Last month I noticed a website pop up on the first page of “health insurance” search term, hellzyea.com/health…I had never heard of this page and always tracking my competition, I investigated further. How the hell could a website with a name like that get ranked? They are a 1 page landing page website, tens of thousands of backlinks, with a pretty form and links to various competitors in what appears to be an “affiliate” network buy. Looking at Yahoo Site Explorer…they have 93,000 links. I was amazed. How did they do that? Even if you BOUGHT links, at $1.00 a link, 93k? Crazy! And it works! they are on the front page! What gives? I thought this was considered a blackhat spam tactic? Google shouldn’t allow this should they? I figured it was a fluke and ignored it, until three weeks later I see it sitting on the front page still, this time with a 2nd entry underneath it to another subdomain hellzyea.com/health-insurance, with 30,000 links! Just BELOW it is another Website soulpitchhustle.com/2010_01_18_health_insurance-online.html. with 52,000 links. 3 Spots on the front page for a search term that gets 9,000,000 searches a month! Today I found they were missing from the front page, however qp-58.com/index.html?page_id=health-insurance-rates is the same landing page on the 2nd page with 58,000 links A little investigation shows that these landing pages are on what seem to be legitimate sites, usually revolving the music industry, most of the base domain pages have a PR of 3 to 4, but every other article on the site looks nothing like the landing pages. These landing pages string together for various different insurance quotes within the same domain. Essentially, these are a small network of linked insurance landing pages jumping from domain to domain and garnering a massive amount of backlinks to piggy back from the base domain into the front page of Google. It interlinks with itself. All the ads go through NextInsure and the Listings provided by SureHits. The page source is weird, it has a TON of links in <li> that don’t seem to show on the front page. I am not sure what to make of this, though it looks like it is pushing links to other sites, including other affiliate landing pages even though they can’t be clicked. The entire top of the source code is full of these <li> hidden links. Upon further investigation I was right, they are text in CSS Div’s that are hidden or squished by CSS, showing only the landing page but throwing tons of spamming links in what appear to be valid lists on the page. What is going on here? I am concerned that this new invisible text tactic has to do with some kind of malicious network feeding itself links from various higher ranked sources that already have a bunch of links. The Google Web spam team cant possibly keep up with this either, especially if perhaps someone is spamming them with legitimate claims in order to prevent any detection. Ideas? Advice? Am I right? Wrong? Crazy? *Note: to see the proper links in Yahoo Site Explorer you must add “www.” to the links. Updates: Creating a running list of Websites with the same landing page: (without giving them more links =).) Hellz Yea www.hellzyea.com/health www.hellzyea.com/health-insurance Soul Pitch Hustle www.soulpitchhustle.com/2010_01_18_health_insurance-online.html Watchmen-Movie.org www.watchmen-movie.org/healthinsurance Quality Products qp-58.com/index.html?page_id=health-insurance-rates Also, currently doing an analysis of where they show up on Google on a Daily basis in regards to the health insurance market and keywords. Stay tuned for more info and please do comment.  

Read more

Web Analytics – Looking in the Mirror – Illusions and Maya

In a blog post by Michael Brewer of VitalOne Health, a researcher in the health insurance market, he mentions that ComScore claims that there is a large increase in online searches for Health Insurance. I’d like to pause for a minute on this topic and reflect on something that was brought to my attention recently, purely opinion of course, some would say backed by sound logic and experience with health insurance online market data. The industry is looking in a mirror, and creating numbers out of that vanity and constant concern about their online presence. Imagine the amount of people working in Health Insurance every day…sitting at their computers searching for theirs and their competitors websites. Constant queries flying across the internet to see what the next biggest player is doing in order to keep up with the technology. As technology improves, as web design becomes more creative and standardized, so does the need to keep up with the rest of the web. Companies are learning that to lag behind in online presence is detrimental to their business, but this creates this illusory effect of a growing industry. Its not that the American people are more interested in shopping for Health Insurance online, but American business is more interested in selling Health Insurance online. Mind you, the market is still great, and very very promising to health insurance companies, both established and new alike. Just don’t let these numbers fool you into delusions of grandeur. Non-specific analytics data from an ambiguous web where nothing can be truly tracked with any sort of concrete accuracy is the Maya of technology. The grand illusion that veils the truth and keeps us living in a world that is indeed not as it seems, no matter how hard we believe it to be so. If you must, take a percentage of that chunk of traffic and consider it the real value of all those searches. What’s the magic number (%)? It’s …  

Read more

ABC’s of SEO

Articles, blogs and content. These are the essential components of SEO. Without these in the proper combination you will not rank in any search engine. The larger your site the better, organization is key, critical. You must have a plan for growth…it must be robust, and you must follow it day by day. Authority on the internet refers not so much qualiry, but non spam appearing quantity. Make your site make sense. Link it properly. Articles bring in backlinks, house them somewhere, syndicate them, give them away for free! Blogs are the bread and butter to new site content, besides static content itself. Use your blog to link to your internal pages with proper anchor text. Content is where you lay the foundation for a proper link strategem. This is where the secret is. The is where relevancy is of utmost importance. Do it right the first time, stick to standards and patterns.  

Read more

SEO In House

In my experience, SEO in house is a must. There are a few critical things you need. PHP/mySQL, HTML/CSS, or equivalent Web Programmer. Someone able to code creative designs to look exactly as their pictures in both static and dynamic environments. Someone who knows open source CMS’s, dynamic data, databases and WC3 Compliance standards. Creative Designer. Someone whose sole job is to come up with creative pictures, and photographic/videographic content. This person works closely with the programmer. They must have an eye for the users perception of the website and be able to analyze the effects of his own designs based on testing methods. Content Writers. Content writers need to be proper professionals who are eager to do the work and maintain keyword integrity throughout all of their documents. they also should have experience in general marketing and preferably academic writing. The SEO Professional. The one who knows about everything, programming, creative design, content writing, marketing with the addition of SEO Best Practices and tactics. This is preferably you, the SEO Implementor reading this blog. You MUST delve into every field. You need to know how to work them, how to suggest answers to your team members questions. You bring everyones expertise together with your jack-of-all trades nature. With these 4 key components in house you are bound for success. Create the plan, test the landing pages, optimize the site and write the content. Get your site out there and known. This is not for the unskilled or weak minded. This is serious business. It is hard and tedious but the rewards can be tremendous. A 5th component that can help but is not required for pure SEO rankings and traffic, is the general marketing expert. The one who knows how to build your brand, pull a traditional lead, make a real-life news or business contact and play the role of affiliate manager. This is an important role for your businesses success but not key to SEO specifically.  

Read more