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Searchlove London – Day 2 Recap

Gianluca Fiorelli

Search has changed and the area of expertise an SEO has gotten wider passing the years.
What was once a mostly only-technical profession, right now must open to topics and disciplines that are usually the gaming field of other disciplines or that especially focus on the once overlooked word of (Search) Marketing.
This wider complexity was well represented by the different nature of the speaker intervening at Searchlove and the topics they talked about.

Post from on State of Digital
Searchlove London – Day 2 Recap

bing Channel: Consumer Google Google: Business Issues Microsoft: Bing Microsoft: Business Issues Search Engine Land Uncategorized

Bing Really Doesn’t Want You To Search Google

Barry Schwartz

Go to Bing.com and search for [google], you may see Bing get a bit upset. In fact, when I search for Google at Bing, I get a big black box in the search box that says, “In blind tests, people preferred Bing to Google for the web’s top searches. See for yourself.” Here is a…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Channel: Local checkin services Foursquare Google Earth Google Maps Local Search Column local search engine optimization local search optimization local seo mapping massively multiplayer games massively multiplayer online games MMG MMO mobile apps mobile marketing Search Engine Land Search Engines: Location / Checkin Services Uncategorized

Ingress: Is Google’s AR Game A Stealth Local Data Effort?

Chris Silver Smith

I recently got a new Android phone and found a little card in the box advertising Ingress, the “massively multi-player location-based alternate reality game from Niantic Labs at Google.” Ingress had slipped past my notice despite Greg Sterling’s mention of it nearly a year ago….

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

bing ads next bing hero ads Bing Search Channel: SEM Microsoft Microsoft: Bing Ads Microsoft: Business Issues Search Engine Land SEM Industry Top News Uncategorized

Bing Ads Executives Share Plans To Make Bing A Better Ad Platform

Ginny Marvin

Earlier this year, there were questions about where Bing would stand after CEO Steve Ballmer unveiled Microsoft’s reorganization plan in July. It turns out the move has been a good one for the search engine. Microsoft chose to give Bing an enterprise-wide embrace. The company is now…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

digital Digital Marketing Digital Media display display advertising dsps Featured Post Marketing media buying Online Marketing

We Need To Talk About…. Demand Side Platforms

Annabel Hodges

In its former life, our illustrious blog always predominately focused on the specifics and search marketing. Since broadening our focus to the world of digital marketing, contributors and editors have been paving the way for greater insight across the spectrum of channels. A big area as yet relatively undiscussed is that of display advertising. This […]

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We Need To Talk About…. Demand Side Platforms

Be the Result that Google Wants to Rank

Kristina Kledzik

Posted by Kristina Kledzik

As SEOs, we’re the only type of online marketers who pay little to no attention to the people who actually visit our websites. PPC’ers watch visitors’ responses to ads via click through rates, social media managers converse with users directly, writers write for readers, and designers design for visitors. But SEOs give advice based on Google.

Google, like the rest of online marketers, is primarily concerned with the opinions of visitors to Google.com. Its goals is to deliver the most satisfying webpages as results to searchers (and possibly charge for those results through ever-more-subtle paid ads). Thus, we SEOs eventually have our effect on actual visitors, as our techniques to attract search engines allow our sites to rank well and get visits from actual humans.

Why don’t we just make changes for visitors so that Google will want to rank us well?

In the dawn of SEO, Google was stupid

When Google was first created, it couldn’t see nearly as much as it can now, and focusing on user experience alone could leave your site virtually unreadable to Google. I only started in this industry in 2010, and even then, SEOs had to focus on specific keyword usage, tagging, link building, and anchor text—all things that are virtually meaningless to visitors. But over the past few years, Google’s near-daily algorithm updates have made its crawler interpret webpages more and more like a human would.

Still, we continue to panic about every change Google makes. What are their next steps? Are they going to do something that will crush your site?

Here’s a hint: If we’re optimizing our sites for visitors, there’s little to no chance that a Google algorithm update will penalize us. That means that we’re on Google’s side: We’re trying to make our site better for visitors, which makes Google look good when visitors click through to our sites. Help them help us.

The good news is, if you’re a white hat SEO who keeps up on search engine trends, Google has probably led you into doing some good online marketing without even realizing it. To explain this a little more clearly, here’s a comparison of some of the top white-hat SEO strategies from 2010, when I started, and how you should handle them in 2013:

On-page keyword usage → content strategy

2010: The best way to rank #1 for a keyword was to use it in the <title>, the <h1>, maybe an <h2>, and a few times in the text (but no keyword stuffing! Google had figured that out, at least.)

2013: Google understands synonyms now, so you can use a keyword once and show that it’s highly relevant with other similar terms. Experts recommend using keyword groups (an idea that I had been hinting at for ages but didn’t think of concretely until I read Cyrus’s awesome post): Use a number of keywords that all mean approximately the same thing, so you can be relevant for all of them.

How to be even better with content strategy

Don’t focus so much on keywords with the most local searches a month, on average (Google Keyword Planner is so vague). Instead, use phrases that your current and potential customers use.

There are hundreds of easy, reliable, cheap online survey tools, so take your pick. Reach out to your email list and ask them to complete a survey that asks:

  • How they describe your products/services
  • What emotions they attribute to your products/services
  • Why they want/need your products/services
  • The ideal brand personality that would sell your products/services

Allow survey takers to write in the responses free-form, so they won’t be restricted to the words you think they’ll use.

Once you have the right keywords, work them into the copy in a way that speaks to them. This will take a great content strategy, something that I can’t describe to you briefly here. But these blog posts will get you on the right path:

How to Build a Content Marketing Strategy

Kill it in Content Creation by Knowing Your Customer Conversion Funnel

Avoiding Disaster: How to Prevent the 3 Most Common Content Marketing #Fails

On-page structure/tagging → design

2010: You had to mark up the important parts of a webpage with HTML tags: <h#>, <strong>, and <em>.

2013: Google can see where text will show up on a page, and how prominent it will be to visitors. You can’t just tag text to make it relevant to search engines, it has to be integrated into the design.

Design isn’t just a “nice to have.” It’s a necessary part of the online marketing world now, and it absolutely pays off. If you didn’t come to MozCon 2012, Jenny Lam’s presentation discusses how people are much more likely to trust attractive things. Google knows that design builds trust: Remember how Panda slapped websites covered in ads? As Google begins to understand how people interpret design better and better, having a good design will become a necessary part of both online marketing and SEO.

How to be even better with good design

PAY FOR GOOD DESIGN.

Many of you reading this blog are technical, possibly able to build a very solid HTML website. That does not make you a good web designer.

Go out there and find a good web designer. Your input will be to remind the designer you hired that good web design does include a lot of text, both for search engines and for visitors.

Resources:

9 Principles for Great Branding by Design

Designing for SEO

Link building → online public relations

2010: Google was already getting pretty good at devaluing links from crappy sites, but a good link network could still work, and it certainly hadn’t started penalizing you yet!

2013: Many sites have gone down because of Penguin alone, and others are still reeling from it. We can’t buy links anymore, yet almost all bloggers understand the value of a link and want to be paid for it.

At Distilled, we now do what we like to call “online PR,” where we focus on building relationships with bloggers and sites. The important thing is to focus on building a partnership where they rely on us as much as we rely on them. With a one-sided relationship, site owners are bound to take your link down or forget about you eventually, but when they look to you as a source of knowledge, and valuable to their readers, they’ll keep reaching out to you.

And that’s very much like—gasp—real PR!

How to get better with online PR

Don’t look for a link with DA [blank]. Look for a site that is genuinely a good match for what you or your client has to offer. Pitch the link or mention to the other site the way you would explain it if you weren’t you and just thought it was a good match. Be flexible, so you can build a long-term relationship and keep sharing things through that channel in the future.

Here are a few great resources to point you in the right direction for great outreach:

The Blogger Outreach Equation

8 Tips for Blogger Outreach

Why Link Building Strategies Fail

Anchor text manipulation → branding

2010: The strongest way to rank for a keyword was to get a link with that keyword in the anchor text. Ecommerce sites across the nation paid for links with their target keyword in it and slipped those links in unrelated articles.

2013: It occurred to Google that if you have a million links to your site for “slinkies” but no links to your site about your brand name, no one knew who you were. There’s just too much information out there, and too many scams. People feel more comfortable with brands, and are more likely to click on links to recognizable brands.

At the same time, Google realized that link profiles full of unbranded links were probably paid for, and that contributed to penalties.

Now, it’s better to focus on brand awareness than the specific anchor text to your page. The more people are talking about your brand, the more likely they’ll be to search for you specifically, and then you won’t even have to worry about competing for #1 position in SERPs, you’ll just be there!

How to get better with more brand awareness and loyalty

I think we’ve always known the value of branding. After all, why do so many Americans pay $2.50 for $0.05 worth of water, carbonation, sugar, and a bit of caffeine?

It’s just been easier to match your content with search terms than to get people to actually search for you. Building brand awareness and loyalty involves building relationships with people you don’t know yet, which is absolutely terrifying. It means you can try your hardest but fail, and have no idea why.

But, let’s look at this a different way. Competing in the world of online marketing without a brand means that you’re relying 100% on Google to continue to send you visitors. This is a very one-sided relationship. If Google changes things, or if your competitors get slightly better and edge you out of the first page of results, your business will collapse completely, and Google won’t even notice. No company should rely so heavily on another, especially not one that barely knows you exist. Building a brand is planning for the future, and protecting you against the whims of Google.

Instead, make your company into something you’re excited about, so it can excite your customers too. Put as much money into building your brand as you do other online marketing activities; it’ll pay off. Joanna Lord gave one of the best “how to” speeches on building brand loyalty at SearchLove this year: slideshare or video.

So, all this means SEO is dead, right?

NO.

For one thing, as smart as Google will get, it will always have its quirks, so technical SEO is here to stay.

For another, a big part of SEO is identifying and understanding your competitors for certain search terms, since that can be very different from your competitors in real life.

But, SEO alone can’t make your business. Even if, for some reason, it does right now, it won’t in the future. SEO is one aspect of good online marketing, but you have to be a great marketer overall to make it in the long run.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

SEO Book Uncategorized

Historical Revisionism

PeterD

A stopped clock is right two times a day.

There’s some amusing historical revisionism going on in SEO punditry world right now, which got me thinking about the history of SEO. I’d like to talk about some common themes of this historical revision, which goes along the lines of “what I predicted all those years ago came true – what a visionary I am! .” No naming names, as I don’t meant this to be anything personal – as the same theme has popped up in a number of places – just making some observations :)

See if you agree….

Divided We Fall

The SEO world has never been united. There are no industry standards and qualifications like you’d find in the professions, such as being a doctor, or lawyer or a builder. If you say you’re an SEO, then you’re an SEO.

Part of the reason for the lack of industry standard is that the search engines never came to the party. Sure, they talked at conferences, and still do. They offered webmasters helpful guidelines. They participated in search engine discussion forums. But this was mainly to do with risk management. Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.

In all these years, you won’t find one example of a representative from a major search engine saying “Hey, let’s all get together and form an SEO standard. It will help promote and legitimize the industry!”.

No, it has always been decrees from on high. “Don’t do this, don’t do that, and here are some things we’d like you to do”. Webmasters don’t get a say in it. They either do what the search engines say, or they go against them, but make no mistake, there was never any partnership, and the search engines didn’t seek one.

This didn’t stop some SEOs seeing it as a form of quasi-partnership, however.

Hey Partner

Some SEOs chose to align themselves with search engines and do their bidding. If the search engine reps said “do this”, they did it. If the search engines said “don’t do this”, they’d wrap themselves up in convoluted rhetorical knots pretending not to do it. This still goes on, of course.

In the early 2000’s, it turned, curiously, into a question of morality. There was “Ethical SEO”, although quite what it had to do with ethics remains unclear. Really, it was another way of saying “someone who follows the SEO guidelines”, presuming that whatever the search engines decree must be ethical, objectively good and have nothing to do self-interest. It’s strange how people kid themselves, sometimes.

What was even funnier was the search engine guidelines were kept deliberately vague and open to interpretation, which, of course, led to a lot of heated debate. Some people were “good” and some people were “bad”, even though the distinction was never clear. Sometimes it came down to where on the page someone puts a link. Or how many times someone repeats a keyword. And in what color.

It got funnier still when the search engines moved the goal posts, as they are prone to do. What was previously good – using ten keywords per page – suddenly became the height of evil, but using three was “good” and so all the arguments about who was good and who wasn’t could start afresh. It was the pot calling the kettle black, and I’m sure the search engines delighted in having the enemy warring amongst themselves over such trivial concerns. As far as the search engines were concerned, none of them were desirable, unless they became paying customers, or led paying customers to their door. Or perhaps that curious Google+ business.

It’s hard to keep up, sometimes.

Playing By The Rules

There’s nothing wrong with playing by the rules. It would have been nice to think there was a partnership, and so long as you followed the guidelines, high rankings would naturally follow, the bad actors would be relegated, and everyone would be happy.

But this has always been a fiction. A distortion of the environment SEOs were actually operating in.

Jason Calacanis, never one to miss an opportunity for controversy, fired some heat seekers at Google during his WebmasterWorld keynote address recently…..

Calacanis proceeded to describe Cutts and Google in terms like, “liar,” “evil,” and “a bad partner.” He cautioned the PubCon audience to not trust Google, and said they cooperate with partners until they learn the business and find a way to pick off the profits for themselves. The rant lasted a good five minutes….

He accused Google of doing many of the things SEOs are familiar with, like making abrupt algorithm changes without warning. They don’t consult, they just do it, and if people’s businesses get trashed as a result, then that’s just too bad. Now, if that’s a sting for someone who is already reasonable wealthy and successful like Calacanis, just imagine what it feels like for the much smaller web players who are just trying to make a living.

The search business is not a pleasant environment where all players have an input, and then standards, terms and play are generally agreed upon. It’s war. It’s characterized by a massive imbalance of power and wealth, and one party will use it to crush those who it determines stands in its way.

Of course, the ever pleasant Matt Cutts informs us it’s all about the users, and that’s a fair enough spin of the matter, too. There was, and is, a lot of junk in the SERPs, and Mahalo was not a partner of Google, so any expectation they’d have a say in what Google does is unfounded.

The take-away is that Google will set rules that work for Google, and if they happen to work for the webmaster community too, well that’s good, but only a fool would rely on it. Google care about their bottom line and their projects, not ours. If someone goes out of business due to Google’s behaviour, then that’s of no concern. Personally, I think the big technology companies do have a responsibility beyond themselves to society, because the amount of power they are now centralising means they’re not just any old company anymore, but great vortexes that can distort entire markets. For more on this idea, and where it’s all going, check out my review of “Who Owns The Future” by Jaron Lanier.

So, if you see SEO as a matter of playing by their rules, then fine, but keep in mind “those who can give you everything can also take everything away”. Those rules weren’t designed for your benefit.

Opportunity Cost

There was a massive opportunity cost by following so called ethical SEO during the 2000s.

For a long time, it was relatively easily to get high rankings by being grey. And if you got torched, you probably had many other sites with different link patterns good to go. This was against the webmaster guidelines, but given marketing could be characterized as war, one does not let the enemy define ones tactics. Some SEOs made millions doing it. Meanwhile, a lot of content-driven sites disappeared. That was, perhaps, my own “a stopped clock is right two times a day” moment. It’s not like I’m going to point you to all the stuff I’ve been wrong about, now is it :)

These days, a lot of SEO is about content and how that content is marketed, but more specifically it’s about the stature of the site on which that content appears. That’s the bit some pundits tend to gloss over. You can have great content, but that’s no guarantee of anything. You will likely remain invisible. However, put that exact same content on a Fortune 500 site, and that content will likely prosper. Ah, the rich get richer.

So, we can say SEO is about content, but that’s only half the picture. If you’re a small player, the content needs to appear in the right place, be very tightly targeted to your audiences needs so they don’t click back, and it should be pushed through various media channels.

Content, even from many of these “ethical SEOs”, used to be created for search engines in the hope of netting as many visitors as possible. These days, it’s probably a better strategy to get inside the audience’s heads and target it to their specific needs, as opposed to a keyword, then get that content out to wherever your audience happens to be. Unless, of course, you’re Fortune 500 or otherwise well connected, in which case you can just publish whatever you like and it will probably do well.

Fair? Not really, but no one ever said this game was fair.

Whatever Next?

Do I know what’s going to happen next? In ten years time? Nope. I could make a few guesses, and like many other pundits, some guesses will prove right, and some will be wrong, but that’s the nature of the future. It will soon make fools of us all.

Having said that, will you take a punt and tell us what you think will be the future of SEO? Does it have one? What will look like? If you’re right, then you can point back here in a few years time and say “Look, I told you so!”.

If you’re wrong, well, there’s always historical revisionism :)

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