• Content Mapping at Scale
• Automated Core Web Vitals Reporting
• Influencer-PR SEO Integration Process
• Content Copy Priority Tracker
• Google Trends for Multiple Keywords

Right before the pandemic, I moved from Drum Agency (formerly BKV) to 360i. This involved moving from managing half a dozen SEO clients and a small SEO staff to managing a smaller number of SEO clients within a much larger, fuller staffed SEO practice – and only take on leadership responsibilities that I really love – SEO product development, marketing, evangelizing and a little mentoring on the side. This freed up time for me to dig deeper into client work and build solutions that I didn’t have time for in the past.

One challenge of working in an SEO agency is that you must spread your attention and efforts across multiple clients and limit the scope of work, while knowing you could dive deeper. SEO automation is one way to extend your scope within limited hours.

Like many other people, I also spent 2020 on a variety of self-taught DIY home improvement and repair pandemic projects. I got ambitious and dove into new areas of plumbing, electrical, and house exterior, often requiring a tall ladder ignoring any fears of height on a 2 story house or exploring the crawlspace beneath the house, including: applying exterior brick mortar wash, installing a dishwasher, repairing a bathroom faucet, installing window box planters on 2nd floor windows, disassembling and repairing a skylight, sawing apart old plumbing to replace a valve, replacing guts of a toilet, repairing a leaking bathtub, repairing motion lights hanging off the second floor roof and other less impressive sounding projects.

But the focus of this article is SEO automation tools that sprung up during 2020. Some of this was inspired by Hamlet Batista, who we sadly lost during the pandemic. He inspired me to begin learning Python, however these projects used Knime, Datastudio, Excel, Google Sheets, Screaming Frog, Node JS & Lighthouse-Batch, Windows Task Scheduler, Bat text files, and whatever data sources were used.

Content Mapping at Scale

Project: Perform Content Journey Stage Audit of Client and Competitors

Identify the journey stage of all content across multiple websites for a competitive view of performance and gaps at each stage: awareness, engagement, consideration, decision and retention.

• Problem: You may be tempted to look at URL directories and assume everything in that directory falls in a particular journey stage. That may work to an extent for some page types like products, services, about, and contact. However, resource areas and blogs are often the largest sections of pages and they contain a mix across many of the stages, especially awareness, engagement and consideration. Within a limited budget, it is not feasible to manually view and bucket each article in the correct journey stage.
• Solution: Use Screaming Frog custom search to identify text and calls-to-action that provide a signal that suggest a particular journey stage. This process was specific for each website. I had to manually review a sample of pages, blogs and resources in order to identify phrases like calls-to-actions that were indicative to a particular journey stage. Then in Excel, I reviewed pages and QA’ed where they fell in the journey stage. Finally an audit of content types let’s us see a view of audience, stage and content type to see what types perform best and where the gaps are.

Automated Core Web Vitals Reporting

Project: Capture Lighthouse Core Web Vital and Page Speed Reports in Weekly Batches

Perform weekly automated Lighthouse reports across a sample of pages across main website templates in order to diagnose issues, identify areas to focus, track improvements and monitor for new problems.

• Problem: Recurring reporting on Page Speed and Core Web Vitals across batches of pages was taking up valuable time.
• Solution: I began by running Lighthouse-Batch reports using Node.js in the command prompt, with all my configurations saved in a .bat file, like where to find the seed list of URLs and where to output the resulting JSON files. I then automated these using Windows Task Scheduler to run the .bat file on a weekly basis. Lastly, I used Knime to read the JSON files, transform the data and save it into G-sheets where it powers my DataStudio report. The only problem was that is used my own computer to run this process. Shout out to Tyson Nakayama for adapting the process on an Amazon Workspace, using the official Lighthouse API and saving the data to BigQuery in a dentsu managed data lake. Tyson and I also worked together to create reports that show which scripts are causing problems site-wide, not just at the page level.

Influencer-PR SEO Integration Process

Project: [details coming soon]

• Problem:
• Solution:

Content Copy Priority Tracker

Project: [details coming soon]

• Problem:
• Solution:

Google Trends for Multiple Keywords

Project: [details coming soon]

• Problem:
• Solution:

The post SEO Tools for Automation and Scale That I Built During the Pandemic appeared first on Blend SEO.

Study of 1.4 million queries by Perficient Digital (slightly more than the 7 query study by WSJ that has been refuted across the search industry) saw an increase in total rich answers, driven mainly around an increase in image carousels (a type of rich answer) appearing in search results.

Enable: Why you need to know…

Since 2015, Google has been increasing the presence of rich results that provide an answer to queries, reducing the need for users to click through within every step of their search journey. This growth in image search may point to Google’s move toward visual search, announced in May 2019.

Pause: I need to know more info….

Visual search can become a new direction for online shopping. Google is partnering on image search development with Target, Samsung, Volvo and Wayfair. Brands such as retailers with robust image SEO in place will be in a good position to take advantage of this trend.

Delete: Be cautious…

Image search traffic often does not convert and requires special setup to measure, as outlined by AJ Kohn. However, rich results such as image carousels only represent part of the user search journey. When we see stats like 50% of searches result in no click, it does not mean people stopped reading, researching and buying online. It simply means that for every click through to a publisher or brand, there was a preliminary search where the user ingested information from Google results that informed their next search.

The post Rich Answers Doubled: Enable, Pause or Delete this SEO News? appeared first on Blend SEO.

1. Google recommends using a 301 (or 302) redirect rule to enforce HTTPS – so don’t try to get away with a canonical. Check if you or your client is using a canonical tag, which is a much weaker signal.Also, from a user perspective it does not protect users who may land on the non-secure version of a page. Using a redirect rule ensures that users are always pushed to the secure version of your pages and unable to access non-secure pages.Cybersecurity awareness is becoming more widespread and your users may actually look for the HTTPS. If it’s not there, do you think they are more likely to try to edit the URL and add the S? Or just play it safe and hit the back button? Don’t take your chances. Enforce with 301 redirect.
2. Be sure to consider WWW and non-WWW versions of the website in the redirect rule used to enforce HTTPS. Check for older redirect rules used to enforce WWW. If those are left in place, a users who lands on any secure HTTPS non-www page could be redirected to the non-secure version with WWW inserted. Any old rules should be replaced with a set of rules to look for every variation of the website: HTTPS vs HTTP in combination with WWW vs non-WWW.
3. Your rule should attempt to enforce HTTPS and WWW in as few redirect hops as possible. The thinking here is that individual pages may already have more than one hop now — or in the future. Redirect rules usually get implemented before individual page redirect rules. So if Google stops following long chain redirects after the 4th or 5th hop, that last hop is probably the target page.  You can use Screaming Frog, DeepCrawl or Moz Crawl Test to find and address long redirect chains. But over the next year, a valuable page could be moved 3 times and get 3 redirect hops added to whatever rules are in place.It is better to have more rules and fewer hops. For example, use separate rules to look for HTTP WWW, HTTP non-WWW and HTTPS non-WWW so that each variation only uses one redirect hop to enforce HTTPS with WWW. Sometimes developers want to minimize what is in the htaccess file (or whatever file houses redirects) to keep the site speed up. However, the bulk is generally caused by having a lot of individual page redirects for old pages. Redirect rules are by nature efficient because one line of code is used for multiple URLs. You can make everyone happy by doing an exercise to look for long chains and loops as well as eliminate older blogs, press releases, etc. that do not perform well. Trimming the fat and killing these off is essentially the same thing as PageRank sculpting.

The post Top 3 SEO Mistakes When Migrating to Secure HTTPS appeared first on Blend SEO.

Google Search Console API

Pull 5000 Queries from Google Search Console

Go to Google Drive sheets and install https://searchanalyticsforsheets.com/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss

1. Open a spreadsheet
2. Add-ons > Search Analytics for Sheets > Open sidebar
3. Select client website
4. Select date range
5. Group By: Query
6. Results Sheet: Active sheet (or pick which tab to overwrite)

Backups

Backups can been enabled for all clients. These will eventually run out of Google Sheets line limit. When they do, a new Google spreadsheet must be created to continue the backups.

Client Monthly Excel Reports

• Copy data into GSC Data tab of monthly report
• Fill in the date column with the month and year the data covers

Setup Python for GSC API

If you want to use Python to create your own API, use https://moz.com/blog/how-to-get-search-console-data-api-python?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss

Keyword Research Tools

1. Keywords Everywhere (Chrome Extension)
   Adds search volume and CPC data for Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Ubersuggest, Answer The Public, Soovle, Keyword Shitter, Majestic & Moz.
2. Wordtracker Scout (Chrome Extension)
   Pulls keywords and data from a competitor page
3. Keyword Mixer
   http://www.keywordmixer.com/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
4. Quora or Yahoo Answers
5. LSI Graph – latent semantic indexing keyword generation tool
6. Google Trends and Google Correlate
7. UbberSuggest
8. AnswerThePublic.com
9. KeywordTool.io
10. Soovle.com
11. Keyword Shitter
12. Moz Keyword Explorer
13. Google Adwords

Chrome Extensions for SEO

1. Keywords Everywhere
2. MozBar
3. PageSpeed Insights
4. LastPass
5. Google Tag Assistant
6. CC – shows number of characters selected
7. Wordtracker Scout
8. Web Developer
9. Link Redirect Trace

Bookmarked Tools

1. Google Analytics
2. Google Webmaster Tools
3. Zemti
4. Tag Manager
5. Google My Business
6. Conductor
7. Majestic
8. Followerwonk
9. Google SERP Snippet Optimizer & Preview Tool by Predikkta
   This is the only Title and Description preview tool that is updated to the correct length for Google since it made listings a little longer in 2016
10. Brightedge
11. SEMrush
    Quickly get a starting list of keywords

SEO Apps

1. Screaming Frog
2. Excel add on – ASAP Utilities
3. A1 Sitemap Generator – and other A1 tools: I generally use ScreamingFrog now instead of these.

The post My Favorite SEO Tools for the Consulting Agency appeared first on Blend SEO.

As more and more businesses jump on the SEO bandwagon, the competition for search visibility continues to increase. Search marketers must not only acknowledge the latest trends, but adapt their practices accordingly.

There are four trends that continue to go underutilized by sites engaged in SEO and internet marketing. For this reason, leveraging these tactics in strategic fashion can lend to a competitive edge for increased search visibility.

1. Accelerated Mobile Pages

Today, more searches are made on mobile devices over desktop computers. And in a mobile-first world, speed matters. Nearly half of all visitors will abandon a site if it takes over three seconds to load.

As such, Google’s search algorithm favors responsive sites that are mobile-friendly. In fact, Google has emphasized the importance of mobile usability so much that it developed a new project called Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).

AMPs are minimalist versions of web pages designed specifically for mobile users. AMPs strip any “extra” information on web pages, dramatically improving load speed, and in some cases, how the content is absorbed. With mobile usability of paramount focus, Google gives more value to AMPs, and often ranks these pages higher in the organic search results on mobile devices.

If you have experimented with AMPs, now is the time. This relatively new trend is a big deal for SEO, and yet many search marketers are slow to adopt. Visit AMPproject.org for the latest news and support on Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).

2. Engaging Content

Back when content marketing emerged onto the SEO scene as all the rave, the common theme was to create easily-digestible, bite-sized pieces of content, and in high volumes. The outcome today is that the search results are overly saturated with fluff content, most of which is the same ideas redundantly spun into different words.

Search engine users are fed up with weak content that proliferates the web. This is probably why engagement metrics like time on site and bounce rate have become a part of Google’s search algorithm. Now, favor is given to engaging content that speaks volumes, but still in digestible formats.

When it comes to SEO and creating content that’s prone to high rankings, comprehensive articles, educational videos, and other forms of high-quality content win. Further supporting success is content that speaks to a specific audience, covers a precise topic, or relates to a very niche market.

So instead of banging-out run-of-the-mill blog posts every week, try investing in something a bit more purposeful. Such content marketing efforts can strike higher levels of engagement while serving as powerful assets for SEO.

3. “Schema” or Structured Data Markup

Using structured data markup, or Schema, is nothing new. In fact, it’s been over three years since it was considered SEO best practices. And yet, most sites on the web still fail to use it.

Essentially, Schema markup helps Google and other search engines interpret the content on a website. Schema uses special HTML tags to define specific pieces of content, such as an image, link, description, etc.

While there are WordPress plugins and other tools to help implement Schema, it can often require technical knowledge and effort. Nonetheless, it remains on the forefront of SEO trends, and offers an incredible opportunity for those not using it.

4. Reputation Means Everything

More and more Internet users are privy to using customer reviews to help base their decisions. Beyond make a purchase or calling a local store, a company’s reputation can dramatically impact SEO.

In both organic and local search (or Google My Business pages,) more 5-star reviews can significantly help increase click-through rates. And with reviews often a direct correlate of reputation, favorable businesses can also experience greater post-click conversions.

Social media platforms, as well as popular local directory sites like Yelp.com, have heightened the importance of online reputation. As such, implementing a review generation strategy is one of the most progressive SEO strategies.

Forward-thinking SEO companies and brick-and-mortars alike are putting the systems in place to motivate happy customers to leave a review. From creative, incentive-based programs to straight-up solicitation, there’s a reason why savvy marketers are getting reviews any way that they can. Online reputation means everything, especially in SEO.

Final Takeaways

While these are just a few SEO trends among many, they lend to some of the most prevalent missed opportunities. And unlike strategies like acquiring links, growing your social media following, and building authority, these strategies that can be executed almost immediately.

This article was contributed by Tyler Tafelsky, Senior SEO Specialist of Captivate Search Marketing, a search-first Internet marketing company based in Atlanta, Georgia.

Image by Christopher Dallarosa  

The post 4 New SEO Trends to Influence Search Visibility appeared first on Blend SEO.

Rich Snippets Give Way to Knowledge Graph

SEO rich snippets used to be all about microdata and schema markup. Rise of mobile usage and voice searched changed that. By 2016, Google has dialed down eye catching insertions.  Results are more compact, mobile friendly and uniform looking. Rise of voice search is prompting Google, Siri, Echo, and automobiles to try to simply provide answers. Video thumbnails, author snippets, and long lists of local results are now replaced with Answer Boxes, Tables, Lists, Organization Knowledge Panels, and 3-pack local results.

JSON-LD vs. Microdata

Not only does the Google SERP look less fancy, but the way to get there is less fancy too! We used to do all kinds of content markup tricks to trigger rich snippets – hiding microdata in NOSCRIPT tags, meta tags, etc. Now Google recommends JSON-LD for schema, which is completely invisible from the user and separate from the content. JSON-LD is great for local SEO and getting your organization information, like logo, social profiles, images, phone number, etc to appear in a nice big Google Knowledge Panel. These most often appear for brand searches or when there are very few nearby competitors on a non-brand search.

Google Answer Boxes, Tables and Lists

After the brand search low hanging fruit of local SEO and organization markup is complete, the next tactic should be content marketing. Brands now think of themselves as publishers. The idea is to engage users who are self guiding through the conversion funnel. Content must cover the complete audience across a full spectrum of user segments and phases within the user journey.

A golden opportunity in SEO for content marketing is to be featured in Google search in an answer box, table or list. These are prominent and drive traffic. No markup is needed for these. Just be sure the page provides both the simple and complete answer to your user. Use standard HTML to provide tables and lists.  Google will recreate these in search results.

Brightedge provides guidelines to help get into Google quick answers, but here are the highlights.

1. Be ranked in the top 5 positions in search results
2. Have at least 1,000+ links to your domain
3. Have 1,500 – 2,000 words on a page
4. Have a low bounce rate from search
5. Include your target question in H1
6. Answer the question in the first paragraph

Voice Search and the Future of SEO

This video from Rand Fishkin gives an easy to understand and logical look at voice search and/or conversational search’s affect on SEO. Basically as voice search grows, traditional typed searches will continue to grow. Very simple answers will be addressed with direct answers, while more complicated results will require a user to click through to a website. This further supports the idea behind ensuring your content illustrates both know simple and know complete.

The post How Voice Search Effects Google Knowledge Graph appeared first on Blend SEO.

If you are my new SEO client, one of the first things I include in your SEO plan is ensure we have good measurement and tracking in place. In fact, before signing on as a client, you may have seen line items in your SEO Proposal under New Client Onboarding for:

• Discovery
• Competitor Analysis
• Keyword Research
• Measurement Plan
• Tracking Plan
• Report Design

Most of these may sound self explanatory, except Measurement Plan and possibly Tracking Plan. Though you might guess the tracking plan has to do with a Google Analytics audit and setting up additional goals, segments, etc. that will be reflected in the reporting. But you may wonder, what is a measurement plan?

What is a Measurement Plan?

A measurement plan: identifies your business objectives and determines what you need to measure, technology used, implementation and refinement.

The point of a measurement plan is to make sure your digital efforts support the overall business objectives. 

5 Steps to Define Measurement Plan

Google provides a comprehensive measurement plan training video as part of its Google Analytics Individual Qualification training series.

1. Document business objectives
2. Identify strategies and tactics
3. Choose KPIs
4. Choose segments
5. Choose targets for KPIs

Here’s an example of what you might create for the first 4 steps. This uses a fictional outdoor sports store business.

Identify Strategies and Tactics

Common strategies for different types of businesses or websites often include selling products or services, collecting leads, generating engagement & frequent visitation, helping customers find information, and generating awareness, engagement & loyalty.

This graphic from Google shows a business type on the left and its associated strategy on the right. However, most businesses are doing a mix of efforts. So you might see the left column as your efforts and the strategy on the right.

Choose KPIs

KPI stands for Key Performance Indicators. These are commonly the metrics you find in Google Analytics. A metric is a number. This is where you might setup events and conversion goals. Events can be defined, like CTA button clicks, playing a video, social share clicks. Goals can be created based on events, page visits, or even triggered after a visitor views a certain number of pages.

Many SEO KPIs must be measured outside of Google Analytics. Keyword rankings, back-links, positive reviews and keywords that drive traffic must be measured in 3rd party paid tools. Google Search Console is free and can help with some of this. But realize, it does not help Google make money when your business gets organic visibility. Like most of the internet, Google search is a high quality free product that is paid via advertising. Most websites I have ever tracked get 50%+ traffic from “free” organic search. So to measure KPIs and optimize organic efforts, you need to go outside of Google’s free tools.

Choose Segments

Data segments let you break apart KPIs to help better optimize. Marketing channels and traffic sources are almost always my first go-t0 segments.

SEO is usually measured in Google Analytics by organic search traffic. But SEO includes content marketing and link building. Therefore, it will contribute to referral traffic and a little toward direct traffic. Direct traffic for the most part is a reflection of your branding efforts.

Because Google is a for-profit business, and GA is their free tool, the paid efforts are much easier to track. GA gives you default segments for paid search, display, email and social.

Google Analytics has recently improved its segment capabilities to include visitor data. You can now create segments for visitor activity going back 90 days.

Choose Targets for KPIs

Choosing targets are like setting your goals. This is not referring to GA conversion goals, but in the classic sense of goal setting.

I’m sure you’ve heard the advice:

Goals need to be obtainable, measurable (so you know if you obtain them), and set within a time limit.

You can use the same mindset in picking KPI targets.

To help you figure out your targets, you can look externally and internally.

• Externally: you can look at industry stats, competitors or use forecast tools to get an idea of how high you want to be
• Internally: you can look at your historic trends to get an idea of what growth is realistic

Use external tools to see how high you need to get to become a leader in your space. Forecast tools like Brightedge Search Opportunity Forecasting or Conductor Business Case Builder can model your positioning and revenue based on some assumptions. But these assumptions often make the forecast pretty high. For example, you have to plug in a conversion rate for the website. But not every keyword will convert. Many keywords you track may be intended to generate top of the funnel, awareness or consideration visits. These will probably later convert on brand terms. Therefore, temper your forecast with industry competitor data and your own historic data.

The post 5 Steps to Create a Digital Measurement Plan appeared first on Blend SEO.

Here’s a quick way to introduce the impact of local SEO on a CMO or marketing exec using something familiar – their brand.

Choose a Prospect to Pitch Local SEO

There are different reasons to pitch local SEO. You should pick a prospect who is greatly lacking in one or more areas, whether it be reviews, lack of map listings, lack of brand presence (or prominence as Google now refers to it), etc. This example works for all of them.

Perform a Variety of Brand Searches

Search just the brand. And search the brand plus modifiers. Depending on the brand, it may trigger a Knowledge Panel or it may simply display standard web search results.

Take screenshots of the results (BTW, my favorite screenshot tool is Snagit). Determine based on the listings and Knowledge Panels whether Google is inferring local search intent. You can spot local search intent when you see your city or region appear throughout the listings.

Highlight Results with Local Search Intent

Make a list of brand keywords that do not show local search intent and those that do show local intent. If there is already some brand presence, it will be easy to spot local brand searches by the Knowledge Panel and everything it includes (map, images, reviews, see inside, address, phone, etc.).

If they don’t have decent brand prominence, you may need to dig through results and find clues to show locality included in them. This is how to identify local search intent. I am in Atlanta. So when I search keywords that may have local search intent, Google is going to include local results – even in the regular web listings. So I’m going to look at the Knowledge Panel, as well as terms like Atlanta, Georgia, GA, and Peachtree (a common nickname in Georgia). Also I’m going to look for “Peachtree” because it’s a common nickname in Atlanta. Your region may have a nickname like lowcountry, capital, buckeye, bayou, tri-state, big apple, or mile high that clues you into a hidden local result.

Here are some of my searches.

BKV
No local intent.

• Knowledge panel from Wikipedia
• Brand social channels and reviews
• Brand PR & events
• Other organizations, products, technical terms with same initials

BKV atlanta
Yes: local intent…but with a heavy mix of other results on the brand

• Knowledge Panel with business info
• Job postings
• Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter
• News & events
• Articles

BKV agency
BKV marketing
BKV advertising
Yes: local intent (similar to above).

But the reason these have local intent is that Google recognizes the specific business and gives you the local info needed to find it.

SEO Analysis Conclusion:
This brand does not have enough local signals. The brand only search, BKV, does not give all the business details, photos, reviews. Google is not sure if you want the specific marketing agency in Atlanta without giving it more descriptive modifiers. However, the Wikipedia page, links, articles and PR does give it enough prominence to display a Knowledge Panel powered by Wikipedia.

As a disclaimer, I’m the director of SEO here, so I already know the progress and challenges we have, such as building customer reviews while most clients have NDA and cannot publicly say much about their marketing efforts, let alone give reviews for their agency.

This is key SEO insight to know, but it’s not your approach to the pitch.

Pitch a Brand Solution

Here’s what to present to the CMO or marketing executive.

• Provide your examples of brand search.
• Highlight all local elements you find.
• Highlight where it lacks local SEO elements (reviews, photos, see inside, biz info, etc.)

But keep all your examples and highlights BRAND oriented. Don’t talk about SEO. Thoroughly illustrate the problems with the brand online. Regardless of what marketing executives understand about SEO, they always care about their brand.

That’s the key to selling Local SEO. Sell the brand problem first.

Close the Sale

Then you know the rest. If you are in SEO, then you are a problem solver, and you can illustrate that you know how to solve this using your local SEO services. I call this approach Local “Brand Building” SEO.

The post Quickly Show Local SEO Value with Search Intent appeared first on Blend SEO.

These 4 easy tips will give you a mindset and attitude that will change how your supervisors thinks about you…regardless of your skill level and experience. If you are an entry-level SEO, you aren’t expected to have experience yet.

Here’s what your supervisor wants to see – Potential! But what does that look like? As an SEO Director, here are the things I look for…

1. Come in like you own the place.

Take the mindset that you run the accounts. This may sound like a run of the mill visualization technique. But they work, and especially if you take the right approach. An active approach.

Because when you start to think like an SEO manager or SEO director, your results will follow. And this type of stuff gets noticed by your supervisor – mainly because it removes some of their burden. It naturally puts you in their mind into the next higher role.

2. Take an SEO Management Overview

If your organization is using Basecamp or another task management software, you can often see all the projects, what phase or step they are at, who it is assigned to, and what the due date is.

Every morning, assess where we are with each client. Is anything missing from task lists? Is anything running behind? What is coming up next? If you own or run something, you’ll take this point of view. If you run the show, it will bother you if you haven’t checked in on each SEO account’s progress.

Here’s what to do if you see a project falling behind. You might be thinking, “I don’t want to overstep my bounds” and act as if I’m the boss. But the best bosses try to help their staff, not boss them around. Don’t go over to the person who is behind and tell them, “Hey you’re late on this task.” Rather go to your supervisor and say, “Hey, I noticed this task is behind. Is there anything I can do to help?” Even better, be specific and offer to help whoever is late on the task, “Is there anything I can do to help Joe with task XYZ?”

3. Q.A. Your Own Work…Please!

Checking your own work is a must, just to maintain your current position.

Some work looks like it was finished in a rush to get out the door. This is not the impression you want to make on your boss. This may not always be the case. Sometimes you may not understand the assignment, or get confused in getting code to work, or simply have a different point of view on something.

But sometimes there are typos, data from the previous month, or partially unfinished assignments in a deliverable. These are the kind errors that say, “I don’t care”. This may not be true, you may totally care, but simply overlooked something. Unfortunately, it looks like you didn’t read your own work. Your supervisor is ready to make some conclusions and send it out to the client – not proofread or redo the work for you, then send it out.

Again, approach each assignment like you are in charge. Once done, take a step back and look it over. Make sure it is ready for the client to read it. Does it all make sense? Even better, does it make a point? What will the client think about it?

4. Do Your Own SEO Training

Learning SEO on your own turns you into a more valuable asset. SEO directors love it when you take initiative. Not everyone does, and it flags you as someone to promote. With self training you can practically qualify yourself for the next pay level or position. This will drastically shorten the time you spend at your current level.

If you want to be an SEO expert, nothing is stopping you. Start reading through the learning center on Moz, and keep up with SEO news updates from Search Engine Land and/or Search Engine Watch. Take it a step further and buy a domain name, hosting and set up a personal website to practice what you learn. This gives you some real experience to go along with the education.

In combination these tips will keep you pointed in the right direction to a growing SEO career.

The post 4 Career Tips for Entry Level SEO: Think Like a Director appeared first on Blend SEO.

According to Google+ page for Freebase, the website and Freebase API  will be retired by June 30. So Facebook and similar sites will need to pull their data from somewhere else. The most likely place where websites will turn is Wikidata. Google is transferring its data from Freebase to Wikidata and will offer a new API to take over what is called “entity search” powered by Google’s Knowledge Graph.

But these dates are behind schedule according to the Wikidata calendar for Freebase. Primary sources tools were released April 1. But a new Google Knowledge Graph based API will not be launched until Q2 2015, leaving the Freebase website running until Q3. During this time, Google will work to release data from Freebase to the Wikidata community. Denny Vrandečić, previously the Wikidata founder and director is working for Google on the migration.

According to Bob Schmidt, the details of how Wikidata can be use for SEO and Knowledge Graph are buried in these areas.

Found it! After wading through 29 billion pages of the total CF of hell that is Wikipedia documentation on itself (Wikidata being no exception), here is the link that SEOs, web programmers and DBAs will want to review to understand Wikidata classes, properties and datatypes — in other words, the data schema for the database of “facts” about the world’s people, places and things and apparently the new home of the motherlode fueling Google’s and Yahoo’s knowledge graphs (dare we call it the DMOZ of data?):
https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-exports/miga/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss

For those not up to the technical challenges of learning the code for data schema to update the database directly, enlisting the help of a Wikipedia editor may be more feasible.

The post Δ Freebase, Hummingbird’s Left Brain Becomes Wikidata appeared first on Blend SEO.

But over the last few days, we have been seeing 3 line and even 4 line descriptions in SERPs.  Of course I searched around to see if anyone was already talking about it.  There’s very little out there yet.  Mary Soule, with Hall Internet Marketing posted her SEO research on what might trigger this. Her study looked for correlations with keyword density or link authority.  But she found no connection.

With Google’s latest algorithm focusing on mobile and user intent, and now publicly announcing an algorithm based mobile SEO penalty, my thought is to look at user intent or search intent.  Part of Google’s latest push has been to answer questions in the SERP so you don’t have to click through and leave the site.

Scenario: I know, I sometimes try to find answers to my questions by skimming the descriptions — I’m too lazy to click through or don’t want to wait for a page to load and read through it to find the answer.  If I do click through and don’t find the answer, I’ll hit the back button and take a second look at the description. This time I look for context that will help me find where on the page my answer is.

Mary Soule’s post noted that the longer descriptions pull the first part from the META description and the second part from the content of the page.  It’s easy to see how content from the page surrounding your search term can either answer your question or at least help you find the context of your answer.

Long Tail Queries Trigger Long Descriptions

My preliminary research suggests that long tail queries are more likely to trigger SERPS that include long descriptions. These tend to include forum results, long detailed blog posts or articles.  However, I don’t see a simple relationship between the length of a post and it’s likelihood to show a long description compared to other results in the SERP.

For example, a search for the 3 word phrase “descriptions in SERPs” triggered all traditional 2-line descriptions.  This 4 word query “descriptions in Google SERPs”, though “in” may be considered a stop-word, triggered all 2-line descriptions.  And some were the same results (however a 2 line version) that appeared as 4-line descriptions for this longer query “very line long descriptions in google SERP”.

Answer Box Results Also Appear as Long Descriptions

Another theory is that there is a connection with content that appears in Google Answers and it’s likelihood to display more description lines when it appears in regular web listings.  However, this may not be a cause and effect, but in my opinion more likely a coincidence due to an overlap in criteria for content to appear in either spot.

Both theories combined paint a picture about Google’s intention to better answer the needs of the searchers and fulfill their intent. A 4 word query may be more complicated and detail oriented.  Therefor, Google provides a detail oriented answer directly in the SERP.  If search intent is informational research, than Google can possibly provide an answer right in the SERP.  If the intent is transactional, Google will need to send you off to a shopping area that best suites you.  However, if you are researching products, like “which sports cars have 4 seats”, Google gives a handful of 3 or 4 line descriptions.  If you shorten it down to a more transactional search where you are describing a product, “sports cars with 4 seats”, you see all 2-line descriptions.  So it seems there is a mixture of results depending on how much the query skews toward research.  With this line of reasoning, there is no point for Google to give long descriptions for a transactional query.  It makes more sense to just send the user off to buy the product.

SEO Recommendations for Long META Descriptions

It may be worth while to experiment with longer descriptions. Since Google claims they do not affect rankings, and they more often appear jumbled & rearranged, why not? The place to do it that makes the most sense are the FAQs, detail pages, articles, blogs or anything that tends to give long answers for questions.  Historically this type of content lands a large volume of organic traffic across a wide range of long tail searches.

Let me know in the comments or tweet me about your results for long descriptions in SERPs.

The post 📊 4 Line Long Descriptions in Google SERPs appeared first on Blend SEO.

Here is my client’s question about H1 tags for SEO.

It turned out that there were loads of H1 tags in the headers added by the back-end team that were dinging us from an SEO perspective. Anyway, we just removed those tags in the global header which resolves this issue on thousands of pages.

Today however as I review this work I see that there are still many “<h1 class=“ tags on share.[client_website].com. Is H1 class a problem? Normally content classes should be immune to such things, but out of an abundance of caution I thought it might be a good idea to remove these as well. What do you think?

My Response Explains How H1 is used for SEO & Excessive H1 Tags

The class part of that tag is just for CSS styling purposes and has very little bearing on the bigger SEO concerns (unless you were using CSS to do something black hat, like stuffing an area with keyword spam and hiding it). If you are removing excessive H1, it doesn’t matter if it also has class=”name-of-the-class” or style=”whatever-styling-code” inside the H1 tag. By the way, your H1 tag will open with <h1 and close with >, and capitalization does not matter.

The idea behind removing excessive H1 is that a webpage is supposed to use H1 to code the main heading of text content, like a headline for an article. There is only supposed to be one H1 heading for each page. It is supposed to identify to the user what page they are on. It usually coordinates with the navigation that got them there and the title tag. Because those elements are used that way, search engines weight them highly in terms of understanding the theme of the page and what keywords the page should rank for. Back when basically all SEO was black-hat, people started using multiple H1 tags and stuffing them with keywords. In response, search engines started looking for excessive use of H1’s to help identify if a website is using keyword spam and should be penalized. But they also realize a lot of people are using multiple H1’s who aren’t trying to do anything black hat, but are just using an H1 several times on a page to identify different sections within the page (ideally, those would be tagged as H2). So you probably won’t get penalized unless you are accidentally doing something black hat.

My advice is not to get to hung up on how many H1 tags are used on a page, but at least make sure the first H1 tag has meaningful text.

You could definitely be leveraging your H1’s better.

Generally in a blog post, like this [URL omitted for client’s privacy], the title of the post would be the H1.

That webpage actually has six H1 tags, and this is what they each say…

1. Welcome
2. Your account has been created and you are signed in. Congratulations!
3. something went wrong
4. Your account has not been created
5. Archives
6. Add a Comment

How to Use H1 Tags for SEO

I recommend changing the template so that you have a post title using H1, followed by the author by-line using H2. So you would make the title of the post H1, move the name of the blog below the post title and make it an H2, and make the author name an H2. You can insert words in the template, like “by” and “in”, so the user understands the context and use CSS classes in the H2 to make sure they are styled the way you want them to look. It might look like this.

[Title of Post Omitted for Client’s Privacy]

By [author] in [name of blog]
Aug 22, 2014 7:55 AM

Or you could do the by-line as all one H2 tag using <span class=”name-of-CSS-class”> tags inside it to bold/color the author name and blog name. Your span tags would wrap around just the author and just the blog name inside the H2, which wraps around the entire by-line. And by the way, it’s nice to use a standard by-line because Google specifically looks for it and makes it clickable in search results if the author has a Google+ account (but that’s a whole other strategy we could talk about).

If you click the name of the blog and to view the full blog [blog name omitted for client privacy], I would make the name of the blog an H1 and the name of each post an H2. She only has one post, but others I saw show a long list of their posts listed, so there would be multiple H2’s that make sense for the page.

That just covers 2 pages within your blog template. I usually include steps in our SEO plans to review and give technical SEO recommendations like this for the architecture of each different part of a website (like forums, galleries, news, ecommerce, etc).

Thanks for the question, I love digging into this kind of stuff! Let me know if my response makes sense.

The post How are H1 Tags Used for SEO? Are Excessive H1’s Really Bad? appeared first on Blend SEO.

Update: This article was previously published on Yahoo Voices, but has been moved here to my blog because the Yahoo Contributor Network was closed as Yahoo re-organizes its business efforts.  This SearchEngineLand article alludes to closure due to Google’s Panda updates that target content farms, destroying the traffic.  I can verify that my article on blog tagging previously ranked #1 or page 1 in Google for a variety of relevant terms, but has dropped to page 2 since the last Panda update.  Since traffic is key to a publisher business model, I would guess the Yahoo Contributor Network, which is a user generated content platform that pays users, must not have been making enough profit from ad revenue.  This is likely one example of Marissa Mayer trimming the fat as promised when she became Yahoo CEO.

Tagging Posts Without a Strategy Can Damage Your SEO

The mantra “content is king” has remained true for as long as SEO has been practiced. A blog embodies this idea by providing a platform to publish an ongoing stream of fresh content. However, if approached wrong, a blog can bury rankings for an entire website.

Google’s Panda filter which has been running since February 2011, is designed to lower rankings of websites using crafty black hat spammer techniques to thinly spread a finite amount of content across many pages, creating the appearance of a large volume of content. For many years predating Panda, search engine webmaster guidelines warned about a very similar issue, the technical difficulty created by duplicate content often generated by a CMS (content management system). A blog is a CMS, and Panda is essentially penalizing duplicate content.

How NOT to Use Tags

If done wrong, tags can open up the door for duplicate content. Usually writers add tags to posts as an afterthought – sometimes with tons of tags and sometimes with none. They sometimes create multiple variations of the same tag for the same article, the way you might use meta keywords. For example, one post might be tagged with…

• consultant
• consultants
• consulting
• consult

Sometimes the same tags are reused for multiple posts, but often new ones are created for every new post. For example, one post may be tagged “ad agency”, and the next writer who publishes a post, instead of reusing the existing “ad agency” tag creates the tag “advertising agency”.

How Tagging Causes Thin Content

Because of the way tags are often used, there is a very high risk of creating duplicate content or thin content. Each tag has its own webpage, known in WordPress as a tag archive. And if there are multiple tags for each post that are not reused, you end up with multiple tag archives with the same content. Bloggers are told using a tag will help the post appear for that keyword. As a result, the common practice is to create as many different tags for each post that can describe the post. The result is duplicate content for each tag archive and risk of penalty. The common solution is to use an SEO plugin to place rel=”nofollow” code on tag links and to disallow tag archive URLs in the robots.txt file. This makes tag archive pages invisible to search engines. The risk of search engine penalty is eliminated, but so is any potential SEO benefit.

How to Use Blog Tags to Help SEO

The way to use tags to benefit SEO is to coordinate tags with categories based on rules. You need to establish a rule all authors will follow that prevents any tag archives from having the same posts as each other, or the same posts as a category. You want to reuse tags as much as possible. A way to achieve this is to use your categories to organize posts by one means and use tags to organize across a different pattern. For example, categories might organize posts by services provided and tags might organize by industry served. This will allow you to optimize for both service keywords and industry keywords with little overlap (assuming you don’t provide only certain services to certain industries). Another solution is to use categories as a top level navigation and tags as a lower level. For example, your categories might be dogs, cats, hamsters, etc. while the tags are the breeds of the animal, or maybe the color of their fur. Whatever system you use, the plan must be communicated to authors as well as the importance of reusing existing tags whenever possible.

The post How to Setup Blog Tags for SEO Amidst Stricter Search Engine Rules appeared first on Blend SEO.

Local Search Listings Appear in 2 Ways

This includes local listings that appear in the map insertion as well as regular website listings that only appear when the search is done from a location in the same city as the business.  To further explain the second type of listing, you can specify your location by selecting search tools button under the search bar and typing in a city and state.  This simulates you being in a different city and conducting a search.  For example search restaurant from two different cities and you will see local restaurants from whichever city on the map insertion as well as in the regular website listings.

Local SEO Algorithm Theories

Search Intent Shift

My initial theory for some keywords is based on shifting search intent, meaning that Google’s idea of what a person is seeking when using these keywords shifted to show more national results and fewer local results.

1. One way of checking this is to see if the 7 box map insertion is still displayed for keywords, or if it has been replaced with the 2 box or no map insertion at all.  I noticed for some keyword searches there is no map insertion where there was previously a 2 box.
2. Another way of checking if Google search intent changed is to perform a query and count the number of regular website listings that have a local city in the title or description.  This is how I decipher how much local search intent Google assigns a keyword. A client previously ranked in the local area with a regular website listing.  Now, when I check there are no local website listings.  To double check if search intent really changed and its not just something happening for listings in one city, I change my location under Google’s search tools to see if there are local website results appear for the same keyword when searched in other cities.

It turns out for one of the clients, shifting search intent did occur for the keywords that dropped rankings.  A next test to perform will be to ask someone in the city location to perform a search for the keyword from their mobile device.  Logical thinking would assume search intent on a mobile device would skew toward local results (this could be done with Brightedge, but its pretty costly once you start tracking local search engines and multiple devices).  If a mobile device search produces local results and our client is there, there’s a good chance they will pop back into desktop results if Google shifts search intent back for that term.  If local results appear and the client is still not there, we need to build some back links and local listing reviews.

Local Search Spam Filters

Some local SEOs believe the Google local listing SPAM filters are loosened (one part of the ranking algorithm) from time to time, allowing listings with black hat tactics to move up and generally shake up results.  The forum linked to above gives a great example of where an SEO consultant compared listings before and after the shake up.  She found a competitor take the top local listings that was not previously in the 7 pack at all.  Investigation showed the competitor had an obviously spammy local listing, violating several Google Places listing guidelines.  It is possible this explains some of the shifts for rankings where my clients moved out of the 7 pack featured on the search result page.

The post Why Google Local Listings Drop appeared first on Blend SEO.

• first, if they should even use schema.org?
• why they should do microdata?
• what parts of schema.org should they use?
• what is the benefit of having rich snippets?
• what does schema.org have to do with semantic search and Google Hummingbird?

It’s not just upper management or website owners who have questions about Schema.org. Chris Everett, an SEO consultant here in Atlanta with a high degree of technical knowledge recently asked my opinion on schema.org. So I’m writing this post to address both the business question on whether to invest in Schema.org structured data as well as the SEO practitioner questions on keyword strategy. I’ll go through a 4 step process to break down the opportunity into its basic building blocks, identify opportunities, assign measured ROI value and make a prioritized tier based budget.

Business & Marketing Strategy for Schema.org

Rich snippets have been around for a long time. It was one of the first areas I dove into as an SEO Research and Development Technician about 4 years ago at my previous SEO agency in Atlanta. At that time, rich snippets required structured data, a feed or an XML sitemap (which also acts essentially as a feed).  Microdata was the newest structured data markup, as search engines already supported rDFA and microformats. About a year and half later, Schema.org was established via joint effort by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to have one vocabulary and semantic markup language.

I’ve since reviewed $100K+ websites that had structured data as a website development requirement, but in reality only had blank tags. No one came back after the developer to fill in the content for the tags.  I’ve seen developers take their best stab at integrating schema.org across websites for major brand names, only to see no change in search results.  As much as I love and respect web developers (hey, at one point that was the direction my career could have gone), a decision for exactly what content to cover with schema.org microdata should be made by an SEO who is familiar with your business goals and what search engines are capable of using and where they are headed in the future.  It is possible to tag every little detail of your website.  But the best business decision requires you to know the limitations and opportunities in search engines for this technology so that you can invest just enough to use it to leverage visibility for your content that will achieve your business goals.

SEO Strategy for Schema.org and Rich Snippets

For the last 4 years, this has been my strategy for using rich snippets. It follows basic logic that will continue working for years to come.  However, at the end of this article I mention additional considerations to keep in mind for the future as semantic markup and semantic search become a focal point for Google in mobile device search experience. But regardless of who you are, when you decide to use microdata and schema.org markup, the end goal is to maximize visibility in search in a way that leads to marketing goals.  This often means brand awareness, demonstrating thought leadership, some degree of reputation management and of course lead generation.

1. All the Building Blocks: Know What Google Will Display as a Rich Snippet.
   Google Webmaster Tools Help provides a list for types of rich snippets supported by Google. Knowing this list is important. It’s like your tool belt, your art brushes or your building blocks.  Schema.org provides a HUGE list of vocabulary you can markup, starting from thing and drills down to the next level labeled action, class, broadcast service, creative work, event, intangible, medical entity, organization, person, place, product and property.  But not everything you markup with Schema.org will appear in Google. Webmaster Tools Help provides a lot of information and several pages about rich snippets that you can spend hours reading and clicking through. But this is the best page buried among the others to use as a starting place. It gives you all the choices of things that you would bother to mark up.  Because these are the only things that will appear as rich snippets.
   • Rich snippets – Breadcrumbs
   • Rich snippets – Events
   • Rich snippets – Music
   • Rich snippets – Organizations
   • Rich snippets – People
   • Rich snippets – Products
   • Rich snippets – Recipes
   • Rich snippets – Review ratings
   • Rich snippets – Reviews
   • Rich snippets – Software applications
   • Rich snippets – Videos: Facebook Share and RDFa
   • schema.org markup for videos
   • Supported software application types
     
2. Your Blocks: Take Stock of Website Assets That Can be Marked Up
   If you are familiar with your website content and what assets may be available (like videos, expert reviews, customer testimonials, or event calendars), matching them up with items on the list above should be pretty easy.  Breadcrumbs and organization can be done on practically every website.  Video is also pretty common.  Products used to be a good one until Google Shopping required paid-inclusion.  People may be useful for high profile executives, celebrities, actors, lawyers, doctors, politicians or anyone that appears elsewhere online and may be searched by your audience. Events are good if the site keeps updated listings for upcoming events.
   .
3. Which of Your Blocks Can Fit the Holes: Keyword Research for Rich Snippets
   Just because you code a page with proper microdata and test it with a Bing or Google rich snippet markup testing tool, it does not mean a rich snippet will appear in live search results.  Google tells you in the rich snippet testing tool that the appearance of rich snippets is not guaranteed, that it depends on the query.  Here’s what that means in English. Google tries to understand search intent for every keyword.  Based on your keyphrase searched, Google is trying to guess what task you are trying to accomplish. Are you looking for somewhere to go? You probably could use local map search results.  Do you need to know a definition, translation or basic information about a subject? The Knowledge Graph may answer your question directly. Do you want to learn how to do something? Videos may be most helpful.To figure out if you have a good chance for your rich snippets to appear, some SEO software like Brightedge will tell you which keywords trigger universal results.  However, I found it more accurate to manually check. But you only need to check keywords where you rank relatively high.  Just check keywords that rank on page 1 or 2 (and maybe page 3), and keep a column that shows which webpage  ranks for each keyword.  If you are doing this exercise for multiple types of rich snippets, it would be wise to keep a separate column for each type, since one keyword can trigger multiple types of rich snippets.  Keeping a column for search volume will help you prioritize later. The idea is to figure out what existing rankings you can boost traffic through by turning a plain listing into a rich snippet. You may also see an improvement in ranking position.NOTE: Go ahead and do breadcrumbs and organization.  Breadcrumbs are sitewide and can appear in all your listings.  The search engine listing will display your breadcrumb navigation between the title and description, giving the user multiple links to multiple pages of your website.  Organization tagging can go on every page or just on contact or about-us pages. Organization tagging should coordinate with your Local SEO efforts and Google+. Refer to this article on how to implement schema.org microdata for Organization.
   .
4. Picking Your Best Blocks: Determine Best Pages to Optimize with Microdata
   This step will help you keep your cost down and narrow your efforts to the best pages. You should have a list of keywords where you have page 1-3 visibility, that display rich snippets for assets you are considering optimizing with schema.org microdata tags. You should also have the search volume and ranking webpage for each keyword. It’s likely that the same pages ranks for several keywords. You can use an excel table to filter the data. Order by webpages and find the subtotal for keyword search volume of all the keywords that rank for each page.  You can do this individually for each type of rich snippet.  Now you have a measure for the return on investment of optimizing schema.org microdata for each page in terms of potential visibility based on search volume.

Budgeting for Schema.org Microdata Tagging for Rich Snippets

With the method above you can create a prioritized list of pages for implementing schema.org tagging, and a measure of potential return on investment for each page based on search volume of the tracked keywords for which each page currently ranks.  Now you have the flexibility of creating tiered estimated cost by implementing across sets of pages divided into whatever tiers make sense from your potential ROI determined in step 4.

Schema.org SEO and the Future of Semantic Search

Google’s search product is being geared toward mobile voice search and has been retooled with the Hummingbird algorithm. The more information Google can pull from your structured data and serve via rich snippets and Knowledge Graph, the more complete the experience becomes.  Google wants to answer questions right in the SERPs, often without the need for a user to click through to a different website. This means SEO must strive to coordinate and maximize brand exposure in SERPs.  Therefore, schema tags for Organization, People, etc. must coordinate with social media, local SEO, Wikipedia and online PR efforts for brand mentions.

For more information on the future of SEO in Google, see my contribution (heading #3) of this BKV article on 2014 media predictions.

The post 4 Step Schema.org SEO Strategy & ROI for Microdata, Rich Snippets & Semantic Search appeared first on Blend SEO.

Read my section (#3) entitled Mobile SEO Will Require You to Feed the Google Experience, for more ideas on the impact of mobile SEO on your overall visibility in Google Search.

The post 2014 Prediction: Mobile SEO and Site Development appeared first on Blend SEO.

Google’s Strategy for Business, Adwords and SEO

To unravel the misunderstandings, let’s take a step back. This may seem like basic stuff, but its essential to remember as we consider Google’s recent initiatives and PR.  Google was started as an idealistic company, but as it became a giant we’ve come to realize it’s decisions and PR are done in a way for it to make money.

Google sells Adwords advertising based on keyword bids.  Google also owns Motorola, sells the Nexus tablet and provides the Android operating system for mobile and tablet devices.  With this in mind, it is in Google’s best interest to provide an excellent search experience in order to continue selling Adwords and to provide an excellent product experience on its mobile and tablet devices being sold.

Google makes no money from people strictly in the business of SEO.  In fact, the very nature of SEO is to provide someone an advantage to boost visibility in Google without paying Google. Yet it recognizes there is an entire SEO industry that influences how the world creates websites. Instead of waging war on SEO, Google realized it can leverage it’s own voice to influence SEO practices and the way websites are made.  In this way Google can help maintain quality of listings that appear in the organic search product. Google certainly does not owe anything to SEO professionals. Any pointers Google provides on optimizing for its algorithm are to help improve Google’s search product experience.

Biggest Misunderstanding About Google Hummingbird

Hummingbird is Google Not Providing Keyword Data…Wrong!

Hummingbird is Google’s new ranking algorithm.  It decides what listings to display after a user submits a search query.  It was implemented live near the end of August.  Google stopped providing all keyword data September 25. These are two separate things. But to confuse the issues into one, Google announced Hummingbird on the same day they stopped keyword data.  To further confuse and blend the two issues, Google stated that the new direction of search is less keyword oriented. They were making an announcement about their algorithm, so they knew their audience was SEO’s. They urged SEO’s to focus less on keywords and more on website quality and user experience.  And on that day, all organic keyword data ended. This spawned many articles discussing the relationship of Hummingbird and keywords not provided. However, Google continues to provide keyword data and insights to Adwords customers for the keywords they purchase.  Google is certainly not telling Adwords customers to stop focusing on keywords.

Hummingbird is Made to Sell Phones and Tablets

Hummingbird is designed to help people on an Android device do a voice search that brings up a rich snippet for knowledge graph information (which often includes Wikipedia data) or vertical results like conversions, dictionary, maps, etc.  The idea being that you ask your Android device a question and Google can answer it.  And Hummingbird is only concerned with understanding the query (person asking a question…Google, how far is the moon? What movies has Tom Cruise been in?, How do I get home? Where can I get Thai food?).  Knowledge graph, rich snippets, vertical search are all separate initiatives for displaying the results. But these were all improved recently before Hummingbird was announced and were highlighted during the announcement.  This all just in time for the new Nexus 7 tablet, new Kindle Fire (runs on a modified version of Android) and whatever onslaught of devices are pushed during Christmas (Motorola is owned by Google) so that people have a cool Google/device experience on their new devices.

The post Don’t Let Google Hummingbird Fool You: Misconception & Truth appeared first on Blend SEO.

Background History of Site Migration and Animated Email

1. We migrated the blog from Expression Engine to WordPress in June.
2. We changed the directory structure and used the appropriate 301 redirect rule in the HTACCESS.
3. The rule did not work for all posts and redirected some URLs that should be errors to live posts.
4. The old structure allowed Google to double list every blog post under two different URLs.
5. To eliminate duplicate content, we used the robots.txt to disallow one version of the URLs.
   Disallow: /blog/comments/

SEO Research

Rankings Shuffled After Site Migration to WordPress

In particular we noticed rankings for animated email went from #4 to #67 to zilch.

Despite the 301 malfunctions, I found that http://www.bkv.com/blog/comments/animation-in-email-marketing/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss was 301 redirected to http://www.bkv.com/blog/animation-in-email-marketing/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss.

SEO Strategy and Theory

My theory is that Google did not have time to re-index the 301 redirected URLs before disallowing the page.

I have asked the developer to remove the disallow line and I will ping Google to re-index the old URL.

I have also place a link to both URL in this blog post.  That should be enough to get the page re-indexed and hopefully ranking in its old position.  Even though a month has passed, the blog was old in the first place to be ranking so highly.  I suspect it can rank page 1 again.  Let’s see…

The post Animated Email: SEO Experiment to Regain Page 1 appeared first on Blend SEO.

Do SEO consultants expect their clients to want more leads?

Is it a good thing if customers seek you out?

Apparently local SEO is too effective for driving leads to some small businesses.  Once Google picks up the signals for a brand, the boost to visibility across all locations in Google’s database can be annoying or overwhelming for small businesses or franchises.  This issue has been brought to me three times in the past year or so. I head the SEO department for a full service advertising agency with clients who are usually national consumer brands or a sizable B2B business.  Some clients have local branches or franchises that operate like a small business, and sometimes we help out a friend of a client or agency with a small business.

Google Places Service Area Only, No Address

The first time I received a complaint about local SEO was from a national brand client that does 100% of its business through locally owned franchise offices.  We used Google Places’ bulk listing and verification to optimize and maintain all the franchise local listings from the corporate level.  We also created local SEO signals on the client site using microdata and in the Neustar feed aggregater service. Shortly after the listings went live, the client notified us that a franchise which was run out of someone’s house had a person come to the door.  That local franchise owner wanted to limit his leads to phone calls only.  He was not prepared to have customers knocking on his door.  We then had to identify any franchises that did not want customers at their door and set the configuration on those so that there would be no address listed in Google.

Closed Location Won’t Remove From Google Maps

The second time local SEO brought unwanted leads was for a meal delivery service that also has pick-up locations around Atlanta. After we redesigned and optimized the website, we used the Neustar local business listing feed service to boost brand signals and point some links at each location.  Shortly after, Google started displaying many locations, including one that had previously closed.  We did everything we could in Google Places and even Google Map Maker to remove the closed location.  But Google kept listing it because an old listing with a review was still out there on an obscure business directory, creating a signal for that location.  The final effort was to request the directory listing be deleted.

Corporate Headquarters Doesn’t Deliver

The third time local SEO generated unwanted leads was for a client of a client which was a Pizza company.  The corporate headquarters kept receiving phone calls of people wanting to order pizza.  They wanted advice on how to remove the location from Google.  But this is where I draw the line. In this situation, my advice was to to leave the listing up and try to relabel it or make it obvious that it was corporate headquarters and not a restaurant. Removing the corporate office may reduce an overall SEO signal for your brand that helps your website and other locations rank higher.

Local SEO Signals Control Google Maps

Getting locations off Google maps can be hard once they are on.  Google collects data from multiple sources besides your Places dashboard when it chooses to display a listing… including government databases, review sites, Yellow Pages, business information aggregaters (Acxiom, InfoUSA, Neustar).  It’s easier to add info than it is to remove it, because you have to remove your footprint from multiple sources, which requires tracking down those sources, creating accounts, claiming the listing and sometimes making phone calls or emails requesting the listing be removed.  That’s why in the third example we recommended adding info to make that location more obvious that it is the corporate office, and not a pizza delivery restaurant.

The post Small Business Owners Complain Local SEO Generates Too Many Leads appeared first on Blend SEO.

Good or Bad SEO?

Avoid the SEO Money Drain

People want to pay for valuable results. A lot of SEO consultants slowly burn their clients and spread distrust & fear of shady SEO scammers. If you nickel & dime clients for requests that waste your time, you aren’t selling high value services. If you provide SEO consulting, it can be a challenge to decide how much to give away free up front, how much to reserve for paid SEO services and how many little answers to provide before charging. Some search engine optimization consultants charge business owners for SEO services and tasks that aren’t necessarily most important to turn around the business, but takes up their time. Ultimately, this type of pattern does not provide value for the money.  And of course there’s the scenario every SEO provider claims not to be… the devious SEO consultant doing blackhat tricks that cause penalties; the classic SEO scare tactic selling point. But they really are out there. And, I’ve noticed that the lower budget website owners who are struggling to make a profit seem to get taken advantage of the most. In either extreme, the consultant charges for SEO services or advice, creating hope for results until the business owner runs out of money or decides to stop paying for something that’s not doing any good.

Beware Free SEO Advice

The absolute worst scenario is when a website owner desperate to try anything gets a hold of half truths.  The business owner learns advice somewhere that is not applicable to him or her and ends up spending precious money to inadvertently destroy rankings and traffic.  Free SEO advise can be the most dangerous, because it often true and verifiable by Googling, but does not come with the full background story.  I spoke to a guy who sold exercise sand bags online.  He read or heard somewhere that blogging on WordPress is key to SEO.  But he didn’t realize it is not THE key to SEO.

There’s no single SEO silver bullet solution.  He had a website built from a Yahoo store that did OK for many years.  But something convinced him he needed to be on WordPress.  So he deleted the old website and started over with a new one developed on a WordPress platform.  His rankings and traffic immediately went to zero and he had no idea why.  He even blogged regularly.  But he had no idea that his old site back link profile was valuable and needed to be transferred to the new site.  He was link building by buying as many domains as he could and redirecting them to his website! He had no idea that he needed to write optimized blog posts in order to bring in any search traffic.  He didn’t understand how WordPress blogs are good for SEO, and he couldn’t get his new site in motion.  I looked at the competitors in his niche on page 1 and their backlink profiles were not stellar.  It wouldn’t be hard to get him on page 1 by salvaging his backlinks and training him on writing keyword optimized posts that cross link to the product pages.  By the second time I spoke with him, he had put out enough requests to hungry SEO’s who wanted what little money he had left to spend to turn around the website that he was completely on the defense and hung up on me like a telemarketer.  I really felt bad for the guy.  He had no clue what was good or bad advise.

Enjoy Free SEO Consulting

Sure, I give more free advice than paid SEO consultations.  But that’s partly because doing the SEO part is more fun than writing up estimates and billing people.  I do a thorough analysis and see what the issues are pretty quickly.  I’d rather just tell someone how to deal with it and teach them how to move forward.  I’ve been blessed with a great SEO career and I know that I don’t need to work a couple hundred bucks out of people whenever I have a chance.  I believe if you take a step of faith and give free SEO consulting instead of charging those who can’t afford it, God will work his magic and take care of your finances.

A recent client had been struggling to get results from his online business for the last 3 years. I took a look at the site he was trying to rank and compared a handful of KPIs as well as some basic observations with his competitors in SERPs.  There were a lot of deficiencies. He was flailing. I decided to offer a plan for paid SEO consulting services.  The plan is the strategy and estimate of work, which requires an analysis.  Writing up the analysis turned out to be the most time intensive part of the work.  And it was the part that was free.  A lot of SEO firms provide a free analysis that is basically an SEO report that is spit out directly from software, with no actionable items, no strategy, no thought, no insight.  But I look for…

• What are your editorial strengths that can be leveraged for SEO?
• Are there rich snippets you are not taking advantage of?
• Have you done any basic local SEO tactics?
• Do you have any technical issues that shoot yourself in the foot?
• Are you experiencing penalties or major crawling/indexing challenges?

I did a full SEO analysis and created a professional deliverable with observations, conclusions and steps to take with pricing for each phase of the work.  Here’s the reaction.

We are thinking that you sound like the first honest SEO person we have come across and agree with much of your analysis.

His partner went on to say…

I truly appreciate your efforts to date. The analysis you undertook, and the work needed for each of the three phases makes sense. And you presented the facts quite well. The back links with [competitor] were amazing, and your honesty for diagnosing the problems is again very much appreciated (as opposed to beating around the bush, which myself and Charlie had been through over and over and over again). You pin pointed facts that were problematic and that is what we were trying to find. Someone who could help and identify what it is that needs to be done as opposed to keeping the SEO process a deep dark mystery.

Black Hat SEO, White Hat SEO

Funny thing, the nature of SEO makes it a deep dark mystery.  How to get your website to rank in Google’s secret algorithm above other websites, who are also using SEO to rank above you.  People want a key to cheat the system.  By Google’s webmaster guidelines, any attempt to game the algorithm to obtain higher rankings is considered SPAM.  That means any attempt to rank higher is black hat.

But Google (and other search engines) have recognized and embraced the SEO community.  To be a white hat SEO, means to build your online properties with information in a way that supports the same goals for users that Google values. It means creating a valuable resource for users, so Google can be proud to feature your website in it’s listings.  It also means to create structured data around your brand that search engines can pull into their databases in order to serve up media rich results with enough contextual information that visitors don’t need to click anywhere else to get their answers. It means utilizing all of Google’s properties so you are feeding Google tons of data around your brand, so as to maximize your visibility Google can give your brand.

The post SEO Consultant Ethics: Transparent Search Engine Optimization is the Best Policy appeared first on Blend SEO.

Update 6/15/2013: I had the microdata code in source code for this page, so it could be read by crawlers and you could see it in the microdata testing tool. However, I discovered it caused a glitch in Google+ sharing. I have now removed the schema.org microdata code from the source code of this page because it caused Google+ sharing to pull in the business name instead of the name of the article. You can still see the example code and use copy & paste to test it in the microdata rich snippet testing tool.

Schema.org microdata for an address is generally used for SEO to trigger rich snippets to appear in search results or to increase your local SEO signals.  However, schema.org is not very well explained and it takes some time to dig through the schema hierarchy and documentation before it starts to make sense.  Even then, there is more flexibility in what Schema.org provides compared to what Google requires to trigger a rich snippet.  In other words, you can follow Schema.org rules perfectly, but still not have your rich snippets appear in search results.

Schema.org Microdata for Local SEO

For example, let’s say you have a local SEO client and you want to markup the NAP (name, address, phone) on the website with Schema.org microdata so it matches what you are listing in search engines and data feed providers.  Great idea, by the way, that covers number 3 and 7 of the top on-site local SEO ranking factors according to David Mihm’s survey.  And, I’ve found this to pretty much be a must if you plan to change the business name in anyway, like adding a keyword.  Otherwise, even if you verify your Google business listing via phone or mail, Google will still come back and say they do not support that location when you click the link to see the live listing.   So the plan is to use Schema.org for local SEO.

Which ItemType Works for Google Rich Snippets and Local SEO?

Looking at the schema hierarchy you can do either a Place, Organization, or any of the items under each.  Scroll to the end to see the full list for each.  Or you can just skip all that and use Local Business.  That is the only item Google supports.  Google, Yahoo, Yandex and Bing all claim to support Schema.org.  But they don’t support every word of it.  Look at Google’s structured data markup helper and you’ll see the only places or organizations supported are Restaurants and Local Businesses.

Schema.org Example for Local Business

Here is an example of Schema.org microdata code for a business with two locations.  I am using the same name for each location.  However, you could infuse more local SEO by adding a local modifier like city or state into the name for each location.  Like I work at BKV Atlanta, and Andrew works at BKV Kansas City.  You then would use the branchOf to list the Organization, which might be the business name without your local modifier.  Which in the case of me and Andrew would just be BKV.

Microdata Example

This example shown below would appear on this website that sells adult diapers.

<NOSCRIPT>
<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/LocalBusiness?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss">
<span itemprop="name">Adult Diaper Dispatcher Store</span> - 
<a href="http://www.diaperdispatcher.com/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss" itemprop="url">Adult Diapers</a> - Incontinence Products 
<span itemprop="telephone">1-877-221-0435</span>
<span itemprop="address" itemscope 
itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss"> -   
<span itemprop="streetAddress">9694 Poudre Canyon Hwy</span>,&nbsp;
<span itemprop="addressLocality">Bellvue</span>,&nbsp;
<span itemprop="addressRegion">CO</span><span itemprop="postalCode">80512</span>
</span>
</div>
<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/LocalBusiness?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss">
<span itemprop="name">Adult Diaper Dispatcher Store</span> - 
<a href="http://www.diaperdispatcher.com/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss" itemprop="url">Adult Diapers</a> -
<span itemprop="telephone" >(336) 496-8026</span> - 
<span itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss">
<span itemprop="streetAddress">308 Oakwood St</span>,
<span itemprop="addressLocality">High Point</span>,
<span itemprop="addressRegion">NC</span><span itemprop="postalCode">27262</span>
</span>
</div>
</NOSCRIPT>

To preview what Google reads from this code, go to the Google Rich Snippet Testing Tool and paste the code into the form.  You should see two Local Businesses with the same name and different phone numbers.  Their postal addresses, item 1 and item 2 are also different.

Possible Schema.org Places

Possible Schema.org Organizations

The post Schema.org Microdata Examples for Rich Snippets: Place, Organization or Local Business? appeared first on Blend SEO.

Search Engine Optimization consulting question:

On the [webpage being optimized], in the 4th paragraph beginning …

Only you know if it’s a good time …

You wanted us to make the remainder beginning “commit to …” a link to [a related webpage]. That portion that’s the link becomes a different size than the first part, and as it is now looks “clunky.”  Since you asked us to do that, we also added the right-hand column with the 4 buttons. The top button goes to the same destination.

Question – can we then remove that portion of Para #3 that’s a link and let the added button suffice?

Do the spiders find the links behind the buttons?

Search Engine Optimization consulting answer:

It would be ideal for SEO to keep the link.  We can provide the HTML code for style so it looks the way you want.

Here is the explanation for why…

Why Keyword Text Links Help SEO

Spiders do find the links behind the buttons, however, there is added value creating links using the words within paragraphs.  When those words link to another page, it tells the search engine what that page is about.  So when you make a text link that includes the keyword “business development” to your Registration page, it sends the signal to Google that your Registration page is about “business development”…and should rank when people search for that term.  The reason it is important to use links within paragraphs, is that the other words surrounding the link also are read by Google and it teaches Google that those nearby words are also related to the page where the link goes.  This helps you rank for a wider variety of keywords.

On another level, it also tells Google there is a connection between the two pages.  In this way, the optimization and content on one page adds a little more depth and optimization to the other page.  If we know that a group of pages on your website are related, we want to create a web work of links between those related pages.  This shows Google that you not only have one page relevant to a keyword search, but a group of pages, which makes you a better resource on the subject matter of that keyword, and therefore a better website to list in the rankings for that keyword.

SEO Means Helping Google Create a Better Experience

Google knows that if it sends a visitor to a webpage where there are links to related pages, if that visitor does not see what he wants right away, he is more likely to read and click around to find what he wants, compared to if Google sends that visitor to one page with very few links, if he doesn’t see what he wants, he’s more likely decide he is unsatisfied with where Google sent him and hit the back button – resulting in a dissatisfied Google experience.  In this way, interlinking within related pages, especially using links right in the main content area where people read, makes you more desirable for Google to rank in search results.

The post Search Engine Optimization Consultant Question: Do Text Links in Paragraphs Help SEO? appeared first on Blend SEO.

What are Advanced Persistent Threats?

Advanced persistent threats, or APTs are a term used to describe a funded organization with a goal to obtain secure data from a specific targeted party.  For example, this could be a funded terrorist group bent on breaking into and defiling the official website of another country.  Or it could be a factory of workers continually sending spam phishing emails  in order to steal financial records from a particular investment firm or steal electronic healthcare records from a hospital database.

What is FireEye?

FireEye Malware Protection System is an advanced family of email and web security appliances.  These appliances detect custom or new malware or viruses that anti-virus software does not yet recognize.  Known viruses are a cyber threat.  However, at some point, every virus was new, without an easy defense to recognize it and prevent intrusion.  Advanced threats are those that are newly developed and can get passed anti-virus software.  FireEye appliances go beyond known virus definitions to detect malware without signatures.  These appliances require highly trained people to administer, maintain and monitor them.

The post SEO Client Dell Teams with FireEye Against Advanced Persistent Threats appeared first on Blend SEO.

I was asked to contribute to a BKV internet marketing blog post.  This is supporting research and analysis of SEO areas of opportunity for 2013 based on trends in Google algorithm changes. At a concept level, core ideas in SEO have not changed since 2004, when I began my SEO career. But at a tactical level, new white-hat avenues appeared and will likely continue evolving and growing throughout 2013.

1. Core SEO Best Practices …Come Back
2. Local SEO
3. Social Media for SEO
4. Structured Data & Schema.org

1. Core SEO Best Practices …Come Back

Google’s original and ongoing challenge is to rank websites based on original, high quality, authoritative content. 2012 was Google’s first big attempt to algorithmically penalize “cheaters”, evident from algorithm changes:

• constant Panda updates
• Penguin updates
• automatic penalties for too many ads above the fold
• linkbuilding scheme/spam penalties
• boosts for trusted sources
• penalties for repeated copyright infringement
• devaluation for exact match domains used to game rankings
• page layout factors

My SEO Prediction: Google will continue honing its ranking algorithm and efforts to penalize websites using algorithm loophole tactics.  If you have not kept to SEO best practices, you’ll need to clean up your tactics in 2013 because 2012 was only Google’s first clumsy whack at enforcing penalties on the same essential webmaster guidelines that have been standing since the first half of the previous decade.

Remaining 3 SEO Areas…
Social Media for SEO, Local SEO and Structured Data

We can see specific SEO areas of opportunity in Google by looking at past & recent trends in Google algorithm change history while keeping in mind Google’s long term goal to organize the world’s information and make it easily accessible and useful.  Bare in mind what you already know about 2013 and future estimates for use of mobile devices and social communities.  Couple that with Google’s recent developments in Schema.org structured data technology, and we make some assumptions.  However, let’s take a closer look at the evidence so we can get a more specific picture of how social media SEO, local SEO and structured data can be leveraged moving forward.

2. Social Media for SEO

As we head into 2012, we see more and more social media tools showing up in Google Analytics, and some sites like Reddit, Meetup, Diigo and Google Plus (no surprise) are labeled as “hubs” that provide a data feed to Google.

My SEO Prediction: We are likely to see more social websites sharing data with Google, providing stronger Social Media SEO signals in 2013.

3. Local SEO

Closely related to social media and the biggest component in mobile search, local SEO provides Google authentication with the real world using manual human input via phone, mail and reviews.  Google rolled out several 2012 local based updates to the algorithm.

• Venice in February
• The 7-Pack in August
• Updates to how local results are calculated in March
• Updates to how local results are calculated in August/September.

My SEO Prediction: Local SEO importance will parallel 2013 growth in mobile device usage, and its authenticity signals will spill over into the general web results algorithm.

4. Structured Data & Schema.org

Knowledge Graph introduced in 2012 is a work in progress that showcases what Google can do with structured data. Microdata data tags using Schema.org vocabulary & definitions make it easy for search engines to interpret meaning for content.  You can wrap these tags around content on your webpages in order to label items in a way Google will understand and feed into their databases. You can insert “meta” tags within microdata, but Google asks  us to keep this to a minimum and in some places claim to only pay attention to tags that wrap visible content. Structured data tags are the SEO “tags” with the most potential.

My SEO Prediction:    Thanks to structured data, the new focus for SEO will be to figure out what content to make visible and wrap with microdata tags.  In my experience, I’ve come across many marketing people outside of SEO who wish to eliminate website content and push SEO into a little box of someone inserting keywords in meta tags that only appear in the code.  Schema.org now puts SEO back in a place that requires marketers to include SEO in the decisions about creating optimized visible content (which is where white hat SEO people have been saying they need to be all along).

The post Top 4 SEO Opportunities for 2013: Website, Social, Local, Structured Data appeared first on Blend SEO.

The new word for linkbuilding is content distribution or content marketing.  Social media sharing, guest blogging, file sharing, RSS feed, etc community or network sites have been popping up to take over the role of what was previously considered link farms.  These are essentially the same strategy as link farms, where people join the network and share each others’ content.  Except, instead of just providing outright anchor text links, like this “home sauna health benefits“, the idea is to be more vague about what you are gaining in search results and encourage a diverse sharing that builds more diverse backlink profiles and social signals for the participating members. The issue in the past was if the network was not diverse enough and had the same members linking to each other, your backlink profile grew, but had limited diversity.  Now that link farms are actively being penalized, the more incestuous networks are the easiest for Google to identify, making these not just a questionable benefit, but high risk.

Review of Content Distribution & Marketing Communities

This is a growing list of content distribution networks that I am trying out, so that I can give you my honest opinion and review.  Please feel free to leave comments on your own suggestions and reviews of content marketing websites.

Viral Buzz Content

Thumbs Up
I like this service because it is free and it encourages people to become active in a particular category so they can share their own content, browse other people’s content and share it.  With the simplicity of being a aggregate of content in your preferred categories, with social sharing enabled, the concept is solid.  To ensure high quality, your social channels (essentially Facebook and Twitter accounts) where you intend to share content are checked by the system to ensure they are high quality accounts that engage with a good size crowd.  My own personal Facebook and Twitter accounts actually did not make the grade.  I was somewhat shocked that I was not allowed to share content on my personal Facebook account.  I may consider myself a thought leader (LOL), though I don’t have a large following in my personal Facebook account populated mainly with personal friends.  Nonetheless, I am giving this network a try and have already posted this Google Plus SEO article in their member sharing section.

Join Viral Content Now!

My Blog Guest

Thumbs Up
This guest blogging network is similar to the Viral Buzz Content concept above, though a bit more advanced in that people are not just sharing published content, but unpublished, unique content that has not yet been seen.  Sort of like an elance bidding platform, website owners and writers are connected.  The terms of use for content is based on preferences of the writer and publisher.

Blog Engage

Thumbs Down
RSS feed syndication service that is paid, ranging from $9.99 per month to $99.99 per month.  The syndication lives on about 5 domains, ranging from PageRank 2-4.  Not very impressive for the homepage of a feed syndication.  The promotions I’ve read, try to sell you on the link building value of receiving high quantity links from 3 websites.  Sorry, but I’m not impressed.  I will not bother participating in this paid RSS syndication service.

Technorati

Thumbs Up
Essential RSS syndication.  Enough said.

Blog Catalog

Thumbs Medium :/
RSS syndication website that used to give do follow links to all members, then restricted it to a paid option, but now that it has gained enough traction, it relies solely on providing you visibility to its audience. I’m not totally convinced on the effectiveness of their reach, but its a free option worth the time to set it up.

Atlanta Bloggers

Thumbs up Great example of an individually managed RSS aggregator website in a niche area.  Anyone can submit their website blog RSS feed, but each is personally reviewed by the site owner for quality and relevance.  Those that are approved receive a followed links from the homepage using the RSS feed to populate the title of the most recent 10 posts.

The post Content Distribution & Content Marketing Communities: the evolved link farm? appeared first on Blend SEO.

Some hard learned real estate lessons spurred on the start of a new SEO project.  Experiences with unethical real estate agents really motivated us to put our Atlanta house for sale by owner.  Early this morning, I launched the blog with its first blog post into the wild.  I’m trying out SEO Ultimate as the WordPress SEO plugin.  It’s feature that sold me on trying it out was the rich snippet creator for places and reviews.

So far I wrote one nice long blog post of 1020 words.  I optimized for terms related to for sale by owner with modifiers such as Atlanta, house, home and buyers agent.  I plan to continue writing posts about the for sale by owner experience that people will find helpful who are considering the process.  This will be the link bait.  I also plan to make use of the places and review schema.org structured data and other bells and whistles in SEO Ultimate plugin.

As a future consideration, I’d like to re-skin the blog with a WordPress real estate template, put it on its own domain name, and open up the site for anyone to post their for sale by owner home.  I think free for sale by owner listings would be great link bait and a wonderful way to enable the site to grow and provide something really helpful for people who need to sell their home but can’t afford to pay realtor commissions.

The post For Sale By Owner Real Estate SEO Project appeared first on Blend SEO.

The challenge in link building is to find a good mix of easy to manage and long term effectiveness.  When I started SEO in 2004, the best links were the hardest ones to get.  It’s still true. Even in 2010 we knew best practices in link building was to go social, make real relationships and  build link-worthy content.  In 2011 and 2012, the online world got a slap in the face as Google actually began to enforce link building best practices via Panda and Penguin along with ranking penalties and webmaster tools messages about unnatural link profiles. By 2013, I expect there will be a general acceptance of the idea of creating an environment that will attract links without asking for them.  This of course, starting from zero, will take a long time and is not a doable solution for many businesses that must justify an SEO budget.  But how can you measure and claim the value provided without counting links you actually created one-by-one?

Guest Blog Link Building

Many older link building tactics are still worthwhile in building a natural back link profile.  These tactics can be performed in an accountable way where link building efforts can be directly associated to the resulting links.  A great example of this is the guest blog.  The guest blog is an ideal means of creating links.  It is a win-win solution.  You provide content for a website.  Your link is only published if the website owner feels the content is valuable and appropriate.  Not only does it eliminate the possibility of spam, you can build a mutual relationship through the exchange.

How to Submit a Guest Blog That Gets Published

The following is actual guest blog content submitted to my SEO blog.  This is a great example of how to make contact and provide content that gets published. Initial contact was made by Paul via my website contact form.  He said he wanted to submit a guest blog.  I’ve received requests for guest blogs in the past, however his was on topic, so I was interested.  He provided his website in the initial contact and was up front about working for a link building service.  He provided three blog titles, all of which sounded like good posts for my SEO blog.  Here is the actual contact form message he left me (last name & email omitted for privacy).

Example Guest Blog Content

I checked out his website, read through the services and gained an idea for the attitude and mindset of the services.  Everything looked on the up and up.  I responded to Paul’s email, saying the titles looked good, send me a post to see if I like it.  He sent the following post.  I agree with the following link building methods as being good for 2012 and pretty safe as a future proof solution, assuming you keep a good balance and go easy on article distribution (some people say avoid it altogether).  I let Paul know I’d like to write an intro for the post, which you have read up to this point.  So here is the post content Paul sent me.

5 Link Building Methods for 2012

While you may have heard the mantra “content is king” being repeated more often than usual in 2012, effective link building is still absolutely imperative when it comes to a successful internet marketing campaign. While fresh and interesting content is also extremely important, Google’s algorithm is still based primarily on links and thus link building is likely to be around for a long time to come. To help you sort through the cacophony of link building techniques out there (many of which will actually hurt you in the long run!), here are five excellent link building methods for 2012.

Vary your Anchor Text

Some of Google’s recent updates have heavily penalized sites who used the exact same anchor text during their link building campaigns. While this used to actually offer sites more of a boost, practicing this technique will get your website a one ticket to Google’s sandbox. Vary your anchor text by incorporating your keyword in various formats. For example, if your keyword is “tennis shoes”, use anchor text such as “best tennis shoes”, “tennis shoes for sale” etc. This will make your links look natural to Google’s bots.

Guest Blog

Guest blogging is currently one of the most effective link building techniques in 2012. Internet marketers are seeing excellent results by posting high-quality blog posts on relevant blogs within their niche. Don’t just post on every blog you can find; you will see much better results by finding blogs relative to your keyword, with a decent PR and good traffic.

Blog Commenting

Continuing with the trend of blog interaction, leaving value-added comments on relevant blogs is also an excellent link building method for 2012. Don’t leave spammy comments that are obviously there solely for a link; leaving high-quality comments will help you in the long run by not only earning the trust of the blog owner, but of the readers of your comment that will likely end up on your website after reading your comment. That said, be sure to include a link to your website in a non-invasive, natural looking way.

Utilize Social Media

Google has just recently been putting a high priority on what are known as “social signals”, or essentially a strong presence on the various social networks. Be sure that your website has an active Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and any other social media account that you can frequently add content to.

Article Publishing

A method that has been around for a while and still has excellent potential for search engine rankings, article writing is a great way to get a plethora of contextual and targeted backlinks. Make sure to vary your article at least a little bit between article directories, as submitting the exact same one can hurt you in the long run.

There you have it folks, five link building methods for 2012 that are sure to give you a boost in the search engine rankings. Now get out there and start building some links!

The post 5 Link Building Methods for 2012: Successful Guest Blogging appeared first on Blend SEO.

Search Engine Land’s Eric Enge and Greg Lee, Blend SEO at SEMPO Atlanta Linkbuilding Event

I met Eric Enge author for Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch at SEMPO Atlanta Presents Post Panda/Penguin Link Building.  The SEO presenters at this SEMPO Atlanta event revealed link building tactics and strategies they use and best practices moving forward.  Audience questions answered by the panel followed. My notes from the event, as well as Q&A are below.

Today’s Link Building Tactics:

Content Marketing and Relationship Building (Social Networking)

Overview: Erin Everhart from 352 Media opened up with her process of using social networks to build relationships with link providers.  Loren Baker from Blue Glass Interactive spoke next on the evolution of SEO link building from link exchange and directories to present content marketing. Eric Enge spoke last, revealing his success in the SEO industry via the same networking used to build links and traffic.

Here are my notes from the event…
(Disclaimer: Q&A and all other indications of what people said are paraphrased)

SEMPO Atlanta Presents Post Panda/Penguin Link Building

Erin Everhart

SEMPO Atlanta Post Panda/Penguin Link Building Panel

Search for people, not websites.  Find the influencer and establish a relationship. 1, 2, 3 step on opening up the relationship.  Follow on Twitter, Tweet a question about something they wrote. [At this point, hearing some familiar stuff, I got distracted by Cory Jaccino, sitting next to me who was sharing a few of his own linkbuilding ideas. Cory says – cross reference your contacts with a friend and use a tag team approach.  Introduce your contacts/friends to your partner who needs a link and he does the same.  Then I thought, why not expand it out.  Sounds like it could become a linkbuilding software or opt-in paid linkbuilding network – sounds spammy – ohhhh no.  But seriously, if its just based on networking among people, its not really a link farm and wouldn’t get flagged unless you overused it.  Anyway back to the presenter….] Reach out via facebook or Linkedin.  Email is not recommended, but at least use their name in the subject, keep it short.  Follow up afterward.

Loren Baker

Basic explanation of Penguin & Panda crack down on links from thin content.  Social mentions of your brand provides social proof around your brand.  Good links come from sites with

• Rich content
• High social engagement
• Large audiences

Evaluating Link Targets
Old link evaluation metrics are less important.

• Think audience potential over age
• If the link cant send you traffic, you probably don’t want it
• Is the site a hub?  Do people rely on it to get their info/news?

Look for metrics related to engagement

• Overall traffic (check alexa believe it or not?
• (check for bullet on slidershare)
• (check for bullet on slideshare)

Evaluating authorship

If google can tell a site has a real person behind it, there is more authority than a PageRank 7 site no one reads.  A real person who provides thought in their niche, that shares their content socially, and has comments is a better link prospect.

• Rel=author can help google determine authentic content and the links contained therin
• Author trust can flow through the content they create, establishing valuable links
• Obvious SERP visibility benefit

Content Marketing

• Great content builds your brand audience.
• Great content drives traffic and brand exposure in tandem with high value links
• Great content is highly shareable
  • Link bait
  • Infographics
  • Like, tweet, pin, stumble – social sharing buttons
  • Links generated from content marketing initiaibes are nearly always
    • Freely givn contextual and relevant
    • Lang lasting
    • Diverse
    • Crowd-source your inbound links
    • Use a variety of content mediums and topics to sculpt anchor text naturally

Make your content valuable

• Great content in tandem with publishers.  Work together and involve them as partners.
• Think about audiences of potencial publishers.  They may differ from your target audience.  Find commonalities.
• Add value for publishers. Make them look good.  Give them more than they give you.

Case study – Coca Cola

• Post on mashable – it spread across different sites
• Resulted in links to mashable post, links to website, links to service pages.

Eric Enge

• All anchor text links look bad
• Domain & brand links look, with a few anchor text looks natural

Synergy – blog shared on Google+, drives shares & links.  Get influencers to share your blog on Google+ to boost with their bigger, more diverse audience reach.  Reaching one influencer who has much higher trust yields more links, because people feel safer linking.

Create trust in one relationship – but don’t ignore others, or you look weird, not trustworthy.

Likelihood to share formula = share rate = …

Create impressions.  If a potential linker learns about you from several sources, they are more likely to link.

Relationship pyramid

Higher value = higher effot

1. 1 on 1
2. Meeting
3. Meetups
4. Blogging
5. Linkedin
6. Twitter
7. Facebook

Reach linkers by multiple channels.

Case study – jump on the opportunity as soon as it opens

• Went to SES, sat in the front row where Matt Cuts spoke (every conference for 2 straight years)
• First person to speak to him, prepared with a meaningful question that stands out.
• Rand Fishkin published post asking someone to try a project – Eric commented write away voluntaring
• Volunteer to write for Search Engine Watch when Danny Sullivan left.

Case Study – Kiss Metrics

• Guest posts on high authority sites
• Blog with good content
• Guest post on other sites 3-4 times a week.
• Allow other people to guest post on your blog, because writer will share it

Q&A: SEO Link Building

SEO Link Building Answers from SEMPO Panel of Experts

Are there any other tactics outside relationship building?

• Eric – They may lower the value of infographics in the future, but I will continue to use it, as well as video and other assets.
• Loren Baker – funny viral videos can obtain high visibility very fast and are cheap to make
• Erin – you can go viral in your industry

What if you are in a not so sexy b2b industry?  How can you publish exciting content for SEO link building?

• Eric – work your niche, find influencers in your industry
• Loren – speak to your audience, taking photos instagrams of people on turbine manufacturing line made interesting content .
• Erin – find the fun in your industry, create fun videos and have people come to you instead of you going to them.

How can you get social engagement and build content on a small budget?

• Eric – high school kids, college kids work hard cheap and bring creativity and imagination
• Loren – Put up an ad early in the season for interns. Bring on young people and maybe you’ll find the next superstar

How do you hire a good SEO expert when you’re a new company with a little SEO knowledge?

• Eric – no easy way to answer that.  Last time we hired, we used a recruiting firm.
• Erin – go to events.  Don’t poach other people’s employees, but there are usually lots of people in the industry looking for work.

C level people look for accountability.  How do you turn social marketing into valuable sellable service?

• Eric – measure the change in non-brand organic search traffic and measure revenue/leads, etc.
• Erin – know how much a conversion is before you sign up with them
• Loren – demo how competitors rank for calls to action used in the client’s collateral (DRTV, direct mail, etc) to show relationship between SEO and other marketing channels.

The post Eric Enge Speaks at Atlanta SEMPO SEO & Social Media Event on Link Building appeared first on Blend SEO.

How Good is the Data From Your Keyword Research Tool?

The most important thing for any keyword research tool is its database. No tool can possibly capture 100% of searches performed.  Any keyword tool that provides search volume must capture searches from users that in some way allow their searches to be tracked.  This may be a known panel of users, or users that install a browser toolbar or use a service that in the terms of use agreement (which no one reads) requires users to allow their searches to be tracked.  The fact is, since searches are captured from a limited number of users there is likely to be some skew or level of inaccuracy in the data collected compared to the much greater number of actual searches performed worldwide.  Bells and whistles aside, the quality of the keyword database defines the quality of the keyword research tool.

Example of Keyword Spam in Wordtracker

It appears to me that the Wordtracker database is capturing searches that include a substantial number of systematic searches, probably performed by a program on someone’s computer that is supplying data for Wordtracker’s keyword search volume database.  When researching keyword search volume on “IT security”, a terms I would expect would have a pretty decent volume, slight variations of the same 18 word phrase ranked above and below IT Security.  The variation in the 18 word phrase was only 2 letters.  If this were a common typo for what you would think would be a popular phrase, I could dismiss it.  But the keyword phrase is 18 words long!  And each variation was searched about 100 times!  The 2 letter variation makes it look like some kind of brute force hacking attempt.  Brute force hacking is when a program is used to guess a password by trying every possible character combination.  In this case, it appears like a program is attempting to fill a search form using character variations of a phrase copied from a login page.  Possibly a virus on one or more computers included in Wordtracker’s user database was attempting to hack into a login form on a page that also had an embedded search engine form.

Wordtracker Verses KeywordDiscovery

A glance at KeywordDiscovery results for IT security show absolutely no phrases similar to that spammy phrase found in Wordtracker.

The Right Mix of Keyword SEO Tools

I’m a regular user of Wordtracker and KeywordDiscovery SEO keyword research tools.  I use the paid version of Trellian Keyword Discovery and the free plugin for Wordtracker SEO Blogger.  I used to use the paid version of Wordtracker from 2004-2010.  I had access to Keyword Discovery, but never really got into it because the interface was not intuitive and hard to find your way around without clicking and trying everything. I switched to Keyword Discovery in 2010 when I worked as the search engine optimization research & development technician at Medium Blue, an SEO agency in Atlanta.  I basically switched at that point, because that was the keyword research tool they were using.  They had the enterprise package, allowing unlimited keyword lists. Even now as SEO manager at BKV (full service advertising agency in Atlanta), I am sticking with Keyword Discovery as my first choice.  However, I am training my team to continue using Wordtracker to inform their keyword research.  Wordtracker seems to pick up keywords that KeywordDiscovery does not.  The search volumes don’t compare apples to apples across Wordtracker and KeywordDiscovery, but you can still get an idea of relative search volume compared to other nearby terms.  Google’s Keyword tool can give a third opinion.  But here again, trust your gut when you see outrageous estimated search volume that looks too good to be true.  Google holds its data close and can provide anything it wants as an “estimate”.  Especially if it entices PPC customers to spend more money on keywords that Google says are going to be popular.  Therefore, I go to Keyword Discovery first, and look to Wordtracker and Google Keyword Tool to get ideas for expanding my list.  I then dump those keywords into Keyword Discovery, export search volumes as Excel and include a column for Google Keyword Tool monthly search volume.  This way I can look at both counts side by side and prioritize which keywords to target.

The post Wordtracker Keyword SEO Tool Spammed By Brute Force Hacker? appeared first on Blend SEO.

If you want to optimize your landing page, you already know the first thing Google Adwords Help tells us is to optimize the Landing Page Experience.  So, start with the easiest tactic that takes no resources other than a smart strategy and the SEO tool on this page.  Before you engage your creative team of writers, graphic designers and web developers, take 20 minutes to create a strategy to address this little known factor in landing page experience that anyone can do with no special skills.

Google Adwords Help has a sneaky way of telling us that duplicate content, something very familiar for SEO, is also a factor in your Adwords landing page quality score.  What we can determine from Google’s help is that Google first reads the content, using the Ads-Bot to crawl your landing page.  Next Google decides if your content is original, specifically original compared to other websites.

The opposite of original content is duplicate content.

Duplicate content has been in the forefront of SEO consulting from the beginning.  Now, Google has multiple bots like the mobile bot, smartphone bot and Ads-bot that crawl your content and your competitors content to allow Google to decipher and make decisions about your content.  SEO considers duplicate content within your website as well as between separate websites.  These are two separate issues with two levels of importance.  Duplicate content between pages of your website makes it hard for Google to crawl and rank your site, but it won’t make Google hate you.  Duplicate content between your site and another, will incur penalization.  This has been the crux of the Google Panda algorithm filter as well as manual penalties and past algorithms. And now it is a factor of Adwords Quality Score.

Check for Duplicate Content with Competitive Landing Pages

If you run simultaneous campaigns across multiple websites, duplicate content across these landing pages could be killing your quality score and forcing you to bid higher.  Check your pages for duplicate content.  Use this tool to compare content and see the degree of similarity a bot sees when crawling each page.

How much text similarity can you get away with?  Let’s find out together. Check your similarity and between two pages and check the score for each.  Leave a comment below for your overall text similarity and your scores for the pages.  Next, change up your copy and make a comment on your new similarity and how it affected your score.

The post Landing Page Duplicate Content Optimization Boosts Your Adwords Quality Score appeared first on Blend SEO.

Google Plus Rich Snippets in SERPs

Google Plus search results appear prominently, with color photos in the top right column ABOVE paid ads.  These are the search results in Google Plus for the search query entered into Google web search.  Since there is only a small community, you have a chance to jump in now, ahead of your competitors and start appearing at the top of Google Plus search results that are inserted into regular web search results.  Additionally, there is a Google Plus rich snippet including your profile image thumbnail, inserted inline with organic results that links to your Google Plus profile.

Personally, I feel Google is bribing SEOs and internet marketers to join its failed community by offering extremely valuable (yet free to Google) webpage real estate.  However, here’s how to enable your Google+ profile snippet in search results.

Enable Google Plus Author Rich Snippets for Your Content

Nevertheless, a Google+ Plus share button for blogs are required to keep up with the Jones’s.  You may still get an  advance on your competitors if you set up your Google Plus business page before them and get a head start on building some community interaction.  Additionally, you will need to be sure your rel=author and rel=me tags are in place on your blog so that Google can credit your content to your Google+ author profile.  The link on your post to your author bio must include rel="author".  A link to your Google profile page must be present on your author bio page.  The link to your Google profile must include rel="me".  On your Google profile, create a link under “Contributor to” section to your author bio page.  Use the Google rich snippet testing tool to verify all the links are in place.  Yoast has a great step by step for implementing the rel authorship tags on your blog.

Google Plus Share Button Code

UPDATE: Standard Google Plus button now provides share functionality.  No code updates required on your part if you already have a Google plus button.

Currently there is no Google Plus share button available for social share platforms like add-this or add-to-any.  There is however a hack out there that uses the mobile Google Plus share code that has been adopted for WordPress.  I used the hack and installed it into this blog.  After sharing, the thumbnail, snippet and link looks like this:

Feel free to test the button and share article all you want on Google Plus

I actually use WP Socializer plugin to pull in ShareThis along with other social sharing button code.  It uses short codes for the URL and title.  Here is the Google Plus button code the way I am using it as a custom button in WP Socializer.

<!–Google Share–>
<div style=”float:left; width: 65px;”>
<a href=”https://m.google.com/app/plus/x/?v=compose&content={title}&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss – {url}” onclick=”window.open(‘https://m.google.com/app/plus/x/?v=compose&content={title}&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss – {url}’,’gplusshare’,’width=450,height=300,left=’+(screen.availWidth/2-225)+’,top=’+(screen.availHeight/2-150)+”);return false;”><img src=”http://blendseo.com/design/wp-content/uploads/plus.png”?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss width=”55″ height=”22″ alt=”Share {title} on Google+” title=”Share {title} on Google+”></a></div>
<!–/Google Share –>

Alternatively, you can use this code to hard code the button into your template:

<a href=”https://m.google.com/app/plus/x/?v=compose&content=<?php&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss the_title(); ?> – <?php the_permalink(); ?>” onclick=”window.open(‘https://m.google.com/app/plus/x/?v=compose&content=<?php&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss the_title(); ?> – <?php the_permalink(); ?>’,’gplusshare’,’width=450,height=300,left=’+(screen.availWidth/2-225)+’,top=’+(screen.availHeight/2-150)+”);return false;”><img src=”http://path.to/plus.png”?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss width=”55″ height=”22″ alt=”Share <?php the_title(); ?> on Google+” title=”Share <?php the_title(); ?> on Google+”></a>

The original code came from here:

http://www.stateofsearch.com/share-on-google-plus-any-website/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss

Update: 2/27/2012…

Google Plus Profile Appearing in Search Results

Its been 3 days since sharing this post, and it now shows the Google Plus profile snippet with my thumbnail in search results.  I only have 3 people that have me in their circles (people following my Google Plus post feed from within their account) and 9 people in my circles (people who I follow).

The post Google Plus SEO: Enable Author Profile Snippet in SERPs appeared first on Blend SEO.

What’s Wrong with HTML 5, Microdata and Schema.org?

After reading the article, here are the main points Keery Dean makes against HTML 5 microdata tags using Schema.org vocabulary on your website.  People can simply go overboard and tag every possible thing on a webpage. This would cause code bloat and eventually nullify the effectiveness granted by search engines due to overuse.

Well, here’s the thing.  Overusing any type of tag is basically SPAM.

As website SEO professionals, we have to be sensible, practical and strategic.  Every SEO consultant should be able to spout off the known types of on-page SEO SPAM.  The oldest forms of SPAM mainly boil down to excessive use of keywords, A.K.A keyword stuffing.  The goal of over optimization of a website, being to game the search engine algorithm, tends to create poor user experience.  This is contrary to the search engine goal, which is to provide high quality user experience search results.  With the emergence of new technology, it is in our best interest to apply the principles of SEO best practices.  Microdata is a tool.  Use it when it makes sense.  Use it strategically, when needed.  Otherwise, as Kerry Dean points out, it becomes useless code bloat.

Strategic Use of Microdata and Schema.org for SEO

So far, my use of schema.org for website SEO and development has only been two fold:

1. an effort to label and specify something that I can’t get into Google otherwise
2. to create rich snippets based on what Google already includes in its Webmaster Guidelines

Local SEO

I made an attempt to get about a couple dozen Caribbean resorts accurately located in Google maps.  The problem is you can’t verify them, because Google doesn’t support business owner verification in those countries yet.  None of the feed providers like Localeze or Acxiom support these countries either. For the most part, the resorts in the Caribbean don’t even have street addresses.  They just have PO boxes.  Based on PO boxes, Google Maps tends to place the locations on the post office – which is generally inland, not on the beach where the resort is located.  So I set up unverified locations where you can recognize the buildings and resort logos in the pools from satellite view.  However, other Google map users would edit things and change what I put in, even though I know my information is correct because it came straight from the owner (or rather corporate or hotel managers on location).  The funny thing is, after fighting a little with the tide of other Google users moving things around, I noticed that Google Maps takes its cues for the location more from other online resources than from where Google Map Maker users place it.  Moving forward, my strategy is to use microdata tags with schema.org vocabulary, including longitude and latitude coordinates to indicate the resort location on the homepage for each resort.

Example of microdata marked up organization location that might appear in a footer under the copyright:

Rich Snippets

My other use of schema.org vocabulary purely overlaps with what Google already was supporting in the way of rich snippets.  Except now, if Google guidelines give a choice between microformats, search monkey, Hcard, etc and microdata… I go with microdata.  My goal for this is purely conversion.  Make the existing listing and big and full as possible.  It stands to reason, if you take up more visual space with your listing on the Google result page, you’ll get more clicks.  Just because it’s bigger.   I’m also in the process of experimenting with getting bullet point lists inserted in Google SERPs.

The post How to Use Schema.org and Microdata for Website SEO without SPAMMING appeared first on Blend SEO.

Google Panda Filter Strategy

I enjoy giving free SEO consultation and advice.  The following conversation string is copied out of emails between myself and the www.rocknrolltv.net?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss website owner who filled out the BlendSEO contact form because she abruptly lost rankings for her blog.  Per the website owner’s request, I have omitted her name throughout the conversation.

The unifying theme you can learn from this conversation is that rich, unique content is essential for organic search engine visibility.  Content is what the search engines rank.  If you have content, optimization is a matter of finessing and organizing the content.  As you read below, the ranking problem is due to her website being caught by the PANDA filter.  After comparing competitors and with an understanding of what  degree of thin or duplicate content trips the PANDA filter, the proposed solution is based on content.  There are some great SEO tips in there as well.

Website Owner:

Hello.

I’m interested in possibly hiring your services to help me with our site. We seem to be hitting some penalties with Google. Our site is a music news video show with affiliates. The affiliates give us coupon codes which we have to push. Several of the promo code pages have slipped drastically in the Google rankings and I’m not sure why. I used to be #6 or #7 for “4inkjets coupon code” .. now I am down around #80 or so. This has happened with a few important keywords to me and my income! Please let me know how you work and if you think this is fixable.

Thanks.

Greg at BlendSEO:

Hello [website owner]

You may have either been penalized by the Panda filter, or other competitive coupon websites may have popped up around you crowding you out of top rankings.  Do you have access to ranking and/or traffic data?  I see you have the Google Analytics code on your site.  Did you lose rankings and organic search traffic on a single day or gradually over time?  If on a single day, what date?  Panda filters were run in January and then approximately every 3-7 weeks afterward.  We are currently due for another one any day now.

My first impression is that you have a WordPress blog where the main theme of the content is centered around celebrity news.  The coupon code appears to be “thin” content compared to the news content.  The other sites ranking on page 1 of Google are completely themed about coupons/promo codes. One initiative of the Panda filter is to rank websites where the site as a whole is a quality resource for the search query.  You may have read that one goal for the Panda filter is to eliminate affiliate websites with “thin” content.  You don’t really fall in the category of a site with thin content, except in the area of coupon codes.  For example, there is a link in you navigation to a “Promo Codes” page that has no content (http://www.rocknrolltv.net/promo-codes?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss). There is not a real strong connection between printer ink, coupon codes and celebrities, but you may be able to gain back some rankings if you start blogging about coupon codes and building out that area of content.

Website Owner:

Hello Greg,

Wow. This is VERY informative. Thank you! I am formulating a plan of attack and repair now.

Yes, the loss in rankings happened suddenly. It happened twice which I thought was odd. My competitors with video shows and affiliates have also dropped so what you are saying in regards to thin content is making sense. Although these guys seem to be holding up better than the rest of us: www.emmaandpete.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss

But all of us have dropped from the top ten as there used to be a little gang of us battling it out. LOL. (all content producers for the same network!)

Good point on the promo codes page. I shall remedy that.

I do have another site or two that I could use just for the coupon codes. www.thesecouponswork.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss It is a little out of date but I could update all of the codes on there and build out the pages etc. And then blog regularly on it to keep things rolling etc etc.

Would you agree that the coupon site would be a better approach and in the meantime, remove dupe content and maybe… start blogging about coupons on the rock n roll tv site? Sort of a two pronged approach?

I appreciate your time with this and if you have time to answer. Great. If not, that’s cool too. It’s hard to figure this stuff out when you’re a video producer/musician first and trying to do SEO the best I can … second! ha ha!

Greg at BlendSEO:

I think the strategy looks good.

Emmaandpete.com has a good amount of content related to the coupons as “Emma’s Blog” (http://www.emmaandpete.com/emma?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss) seems to focus on it completely.  Also, “Pete’s blog” has tons of really long posts with tons of copy about whatever he seems to be interested in…as well as “Cooper Acres” also has tons of text about it.  All this text content makes for very rich content.  Videos are great for users who watch them, though they only provide as much search engine friendly content as an image.  Those sections of Emmaandpete.com appear to be categories that get pulled into the blog loop on the homepage.  With all that on-topic content mixed with other rich content, I’m not surprised they did NOT get penalized for thin content.

SEO Tip

A good rule of thumb for length of text on a post is 200 words.

Also, I notice each of your posts has a smattering of content about several different unrelated affiliates.  You might have better luck if each post only talks about one affiliate, and goes a little more in depth talking about that affiliate within the post.  Working the subject matter of one affiliate into a post should give that post a more unified and stronger theme of its subject matter.  Using a couple links from that tighter themed post back to your affiliate landing page will carry more weight than one link from a loosely related post that also links to several other unrelated landing pages.

Part of the Panda filter penalizes sites that have too many advertisements on one page.  I would suggest removing the horizontal banner below each post:

and the one midway down the homepage:

If you do this, and narrow your post content to one affiliate per post, I would not be surprised if you bounce back up the next time the Panda filter is run (it has been run about every 4-5 weeks).

Increase Relevance to Improve SEO

You can take the themes a step further by coming up with a way of categorizing your content so that only certain affiliates are pushed with certain types of rockers.  For example if you only push diamond promo codes in articles that mention Aerosmith.  Or if you don’t write about Aerosmith frequently you could choose some other way of categorizing the rockers like old school rockers, younger pop stars, older pop stars, etc. Then divide up the affiliates and assign them each to one of these categories.  When a post falls into a category, only mention those affiliates assigned to that category.  If you consistently associate affiliate content with a type of rocker content, Google will see the pattern and associate them together.  As long as you use a logical way to categorize the rockers, Google has probably seen that association before among all the web content in the world.

Another way of building an association between the affiliate content and the rocker content might be to take a literal connection.  For example, pushing the 4inkjets in a post about a rocker who has a lot of tattoos, pushing ice/diamonds in a post about a rocker that mentions their jewelry, push match.com in an article that discusses someone’s dating life, etc.

The more consistent you are in presenting the information, the more likely Google is to recognize a pattern in your content.  This will strengthen the relevance of your content around your rockers and affiliate related content.  Google’s goal is to serve up relevant content for search queries.  So keeping the affiliate keywords relevant to your main content will help your rank better for your affiliate content.

Attract Relevant Inbound Links

This consistency between your affiliate content and main content will also help leverage your inbound links.  My guess is that your posts naturally receive links because of the video content and rocker news content.  The strongest inbound links have meaningful anchor text related to your post content…and those links come from pages that are related to your post content.  Aligning your affiliate content with your rocker post content also aligns it with your most powerful inbound links.

Website Owner:

This is incredibly helpful, Greg.

WOW! Thank you so much for answering in great detail. You obviously know what you’re doing and everything you have written makes  alot of sense!

I will remove those ads.

What about the 4×4 squares on the side. Do you think maybe keeping two of them is okay? Does it matter if they link offsite to a ‘conversion’ page rather than in the site?

Greg at BlendSEO:

I see you removed 2 of them.  It is fine if they link off site, but you need to have rel=”nofollow” in the link code.  Not a huge deal, but Google can devalue your links if you allow ads to pass PageRank by not using the nofollow.  This is what you have….

<a href=”http://www.budget.com/roll”><img?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss src=”http://www.rocknrolltv.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/budget-coupon-code-125×125.gif”?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss alt=”Ad” /></a>

<a href=”http://www.avis.com/roll”><img?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss src=”http://www.rocknrolltv.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/avis-promo-code-125×125.gif”?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss alt=”Ad” /></a>

It should look like this….

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.budget.com/roll”><img?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss src=”http://www.rocknrolltv.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/budget-coupon-code-125×125.gif”?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss alt=”Ad” /></a>

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.avis.com/roll”><img?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss src=”http://www.rocknrolltv.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/avis-promo-code-125×125.gif”?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss alt=”Ad” /></a>

Website Owner:

My only other question for you is this.

Posts should be 200 words. Should I simply use my video script as the post so it is all the rock news? This would provide a post that is very appropriate for the site in terms of searchable terms and be over 200 words at the same time. Then… do what you said and align one affiliate with one rocker type thing and write about that as well.

Greg at BlendSEO:

Using the video script is a great way to do this.

Wow. This is really incredible. Thank you so much.

Okay. I was wrong. One last question. I assume I should not ‘go back’ and make changes to previous posts?

Greg at BlendSEO:

There’s nothing negative for SEO. It’s just your preference. I didn’t want to assume.

Another plan is to puff up the FAQ pages and other personal pages so Google knows we are ‘legit’. (I read that can help?)

Greg at BlendSEO:
Your FAQ, About Us and Contact Us look pretty thorough already, but more content can only help.

Thanks for the brilliant idea. I will implement it today and find a way to redo my categories to align them with affiliates. Very cool!

The post Free SEO Consultation Diagnosing PANDA Filter Penalization appeared first on Blend SEO.

SEO Tools, Strategies and Upcoming SEO Research

SEOmoz president Gillian Muessig, affectionately known as SEOmom, presented at the Online Marketing Summit July 19th, 2011.  The event was held in Alpharetta, GA at a venue called Roam Atlanta, in the metro Atlanta area, about 20 minutes north of midtown Atlanta, where Blend SEO consultancy is located.   Gillian Muessig revealed a glance at impressive and practical capabilities of SEOmoz software.  Gillian’s prepared presentation hit all the SEO strategy essentials.  She also gave insight on research performed by SEOmoz, keyword optimization strategies and answered questions about Google, Bing and Yahoo search engines.  After her presentation, Gillian Muessig caught me up on some of the current social marketing and SEO research her son Rand Fishkin is up to.

Here’s the question most failed internet businesses never asked.

Gillian Muessig, president of SEOmoz (an SEO software tools company), began her 2011 Online Marketing Summit presentation talking about this question.  Before investing in a website, a logo, website hosting, or even a business plan, you must research this question.  How hard will it be to rank on Google page 1 for my product/service? A sure way to failure is to jump into the game without researching your online competition…your would be competitors in search results.  Your competitors for search engine traffic may not be the same direct competitors with which your are familiar.  Whether considering a new website or just a new product line or service, competitive keyword research will help predict your level of success given your level of resources. For a glimpse of keyword competitors, SEOmoz offers the Keyword Difficulty Tool.

The Keyword Difficulty Tool is an SEO research tool that displays in depth results about your keyword phrases.  For each keyword phrase, it displays:

• A Keyword Difficulty score
• Google AdWords search volume
  • local
  • global
  • broad match
  • exact match
• Top 10 ranking pages with data for each
  • page authority
  • domain authority
  • PageRank
  • number of linking root domains
  • number of root domains linking to the root domain

These results are a brief overview of the more in depth information collected via the original SEOmoz Linkscape tool, which is currently provided within the more in depth Open Site Explorer SEO tool.

SEO Research for Keyword Strategies

Next, Gillian Muessig discussed keyword strategies.  For every single keyword, there are variations of phrases that contain that keyword.  To help narrow the focus on what keyword phrases to target, Gillian provided statistics on the length of keyword phrases.  She pulled out the Search Demand Curve chart, which may be old news to some, but a good basic strategy to keep in mind. Realistically speaking, Gillian explains it is impossible to optimize your content specifically for each of the various the long tail terms.  Therefore, target on the “Chunky Middle”.  These are the medium length phrases that may include a core keyword with a few popular modifiers.

To further support targeting the “chunky middle” keyword phrases, Gillian pulled out this chart. It supports targeting the 3 and 4 word phrases, because those are the ones that convert.  4 word keyword phrases are the most converting.

Before talking about blogging, SEOmoz president Gillian Muessig answered various questions, such as why Bing and Yahoo search results mirror each other so closely.  Her answer was that Bing purchased Yahoo’s search technology.

Blogging Fresh Content for SEO

As Gillian put it, freshness is the frequency at which content changes.  Gillian also through out this factoid many people don’t know.  PageRank is named after Google c0-founder Larry Page.  It determines how frequently a webpage is crawled.  Part of the factor for Google to decide how frequently to crawl your webpage depends on how frequently the content changes.  Ways to provide rich new content include blogging on your website, allowing commenting and user reviews.

Hot topics for your business blogging that get picked up and shared by other online resources include:

• money
• health
• family
• infographics
• video

She also suggests to comment on other articles using intelligent conversation invoking comments that link back to your pertinent content.  She warns to avoid making comment spam, comments of little value, or engaging in personal attacks.

Upcoming SEO Research from Rand Fishkin & SEOmoz

After the presentation, I had a chance to chat with Gillian Muessig and find out what Rand and the ‘Moz team will be working on next.  Gillian noted that as social media signals continue to increase in importance, SEOmoz is focusing more on integrating information about social media metrics into SEOmoz toolset.

For example, SEOmoz recently tested whether a page with lots of tweets and just one link was likely to rank better than that same page with plenty of good links from a variety of sources (in other words, following best practices) and just a couple of tweets.  the page with lots of tweets outranked the page with plenty of links.  (A link to these results coming soon)

SEOmoz is also working on helping marketers understand the various kinds of social media metrics and their relative value, including…

• the value of different twitterers
• the value of tweets
• keywords in tweets
• blog mentions

and other citations across social media platforms.  You can expect to see a variety of new work in the social arena from the mozPlex in the coming months.

The post Online Marketing Summit Featured SEO Software Company SEOmoz President & Co-Founder Gillian Muessig appeared first on Blend SEO.

How does web hosting affect SEO?

Avoid SEO web hosting issues.  See Blend SEO top 3 picks for hosting.

Web Hosting and SEO

SEO should be addressed during the planning stages of a website or blog.  A wrong decision on website design, server platform and hosting company can handicap your SEO efforts.  Many SEO hosting web design companies offer turn-key, all-in-one, one-stop-shop, too-good-to-be-true solutions for SEO, hosting and web design.  Many of these companies started out in one area and respond to customer demand in other areas by putting together a package to serve them all.

• Don’t expect SEO from a hosting company to be a full service, all encompassing SEO solution.
• Likewise, don’t expect an SEO or web design firm to provide top notch hosting.
• More likely they are reselling server space from a hosting company or else maintain an on-site local server.

My top 3 choices for web hosting…

Web hosting and web design affect SEO.  Plan to build and design your website on a Linux – Apache server environment.  The most common alternative to this is Windows IIs.  Windows web servers are innately problematic for SEO.

• They give flexibility in URL capitalization that allows for an infinite duplicate content issues.  These issues must later be addressed with canonicals, redirects or rewrites – depending on how the site is built.
• Some ASP applications that often run on Widnows IIs servers use forms and generate unnecessarily large web pages.
• If you are already on a Windows IIs machine, your SEO may be handicapped without you knowing it.

Search engines are evolving to adapt to variations in web server technology.  However, if starting out fresh, its a safe bet to choose a LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) web hosting environment.

Which Web Hosting Company is Best for SEO?

The main concerns in website hosting for SEO are reliability and speed.  And most importantly, speed.  Google uses webpage load speed as a ranking signal.  A hosting company that cannot serve your website quickly during high traffic hours, generally west coast afternoon to evening, can hamper your search engine rankings.

If your website is served with good speed, but goes down for an hour, half a day or even a day… as long as the search engine comes back the next day and finds everything back to normal, you won’t see any change in rankings.  This of course is relative – if you’re competing in a news space or social space where up to the second updates are critical, you better be sure your hosting does not fail you.  But for the majority of blogs, company websites, product line websites, etc, as long as your hosting company can for the most part keep your website up, you should be fine.

The better hosting companies have become very reliable and very good and keeping things running.  Hosting server maintenance is performed in ways that eliminates down time.  A good way to know if a hosting company is reliable is if you are able to call late at night and get intelligent answers and quick resolution for problems.

Top 3 Web Hosting Companies for SEO

GoDaddy.com

GoDaddy is the biggest player in hosting and domain name management.  Infrastructure behind this large company must lend to its reliability.  I have been using GoDaddy for domain names and hosting since 2002, however they have been doing it since 1997.  I use one deluxe web hosting account to handle a handful of moderate traffic websites.  Around 2009, I migrated my websites to their cloud hosting environment.  Load balancing in the cloud provides more reliable, faster hosting.  The customer login area where you find the control panels can be confusing. However, GoDaddy has always provided surprisingly great phone customer service even in the late, late night hours.  Just call them up, and ask them to walk you through whatever you are trying to do.

Bluehost.com

Bluehost only deals with hosting, and has been around since 1996, a little longer than GoDaddy.  Bluehost provides a C-Panel type of control panel – the preferred, most robust control panel for hosting.  Bluehost provides a cloud environment, appropriate for blogs and medium traffic websites.  Reliability is great – 24-7 phone customer service on par with GoDaddy.

Rackspace.com

Rackspace is another hosting-only company with a little more presence than Bluehost, though has been around since 1998.  The control panel is Plesk, which is very easy to use.  Rackspace also provides a cloud environment and 24-7 phone customer service.

I’ve had bad experiences with newer, smaller hosting companies.  The three hosting companies above have proved themselves over years and have the infrastructure to support reliable, fast up-time.  I confidently affiliate Blend SEO with GoDaddy, Bluehost and Rackspace.

The post Website Hosting and SEO appeared first on Blend SEO.

Does our website pass for a mobile website?

…since it looks the same on my Blackberry as it does on a PC?

We were discussing local search marketing, which overlaps with mobile search marketing.  I gave a pretty quick response since we were whispering under other people, but here are the main questions to answer when deciding if you need to invest in mobile website design…

• Does your website use Flash?
  • Flash does not render on iphones or ipad.  If your website degrades nicely with an image replacing a flash banner, that will pass for a mobile device.  If you turn off Flash in your  browser and it looks like crap, you probably need a mobile version.
• Can you read and navigate the website on a mobile phone?
  • His website showed everything, but you had to zoom in and pan around to read anything.
  • Are the buttons and points of action easy to read and use?

Mobile Website Verses Mobile Friendly Website

Think less about rendering technicalities and more about if the interface is mobile friendly.  A mobile friendly website will generally have less text and big buttons for the main points of action, in a horizontal row that you can scroll through – no zooming/panning needed.  Points of action (phone number, address, button for map/directions, etc) are all laid out on separate lines with enough space to put a finger on each one.

Example:  look at a Wikipedia article on your phone.  You’ll see a paragraph of intro text followed by buttons to read more from the various areas.  You don’t just scroll through the whole article in one page.  Content for background, history, resources, etc is replaced by a big button for each.

You can create a free mobile website using the tools in Bing Business Portal.  It is a template based mobile website, branded with Bing where you control the colors and content.  However the options are pretty limited.  At least it gives a basic start for a mobile website.

Mobile Website SEO Technical Issues

JavaScript can be used to detect the browser. If it is a mobile browser, JavaScript can redirect to the mobile website.  A link/button can also be provided for the user to switch between mobile and standard website.  We can avoid duplicate content by using canonical tags on the mobile site pointing to the standard site.  If you use a sub-domain, like http://mobile.website.com,?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss search engines are working on eliminating duplicate content issues between mobile and standard.

The post Mobile Website Design: Do I Need to Create Mobile Versions of My Website? appeared first on Blend SEO.

Paid Directories for SEO

Our M.B. SEO link builder was submitting a client website to directories and put together a registration document for paid directory submission so that the client can approve the costs before submission.  The SEO client (whose name has been removed) had these questions:

I am not familiar with site directory registration and optimization and have a question about the [client] document for approval.  Can you tell me why Bing and Google are not included on the directory listing?  Is it because they rely on these other directory/paid engines?

The question reveals the SEO client has some confusion between directories and search engines and how one affects the other.  Also, with the recent news about paid link penalties, other clients have been asking how paid directories are viewed by search engines.

The Difference Between Directories and Search Engines.

An internet directory, like a phone directory, simply provides a listing of websites with some information about each one.  Like a phone book, a user can browse a directory by categories to find different websites.Search engines, unlike directories crawl the world wide web to create a searchable list of all websites.  Directories rely on a person to submit the websites listed.  Search engines will crawl directories to find websites.  Listing your website in a directory is one way to help search engines find it.

Why are Bing and Google Not Listed Among the Directories?

The Yahoo directory is actually separate from the Yahoo search engine.  Neither Bing nor Google have a paid directory, like Yahoo does.  Google and Bing are search engines only. However, Bing, Google and Yahoo all have a searchable index of local business listings where you can submit your business, but that’s a different Blend-ER SEO Blog post.

Effect of Paid Directory Submission on Search Engines

These paid directories where we submit your website provide a valuable link to your website.  The directory listing and the link help verify the authenticity of your website to search engines.  The payment is for the directory to perform a manual review of your website to decide if it passes quality guidelines.  Search engines give more credit to listings in these directories than others that accept all submissions without a review process.  Matt Cutts, the head of Google Spam team describes this valuable distinction of selective paid link directories compared to paid text links in his blog.

The post How Do Paid Directories Affect SEO & Search Engine Rankings? appeared first on Blend SEO.

Free Mobile Website and Local Listings from Bing Business Portal

The tools for local search marketing are changing quickly as mobile search explodes and overlaps with social media marketing.  Smart phone, Android phone, iPhone, tablet PC, and iPad popularity is growing the market for local search.

Throughout this article, I explain the new features of the Bing Business Portal compared to Google and Yahoo products along with SEO tips to maximize its benefits. The big WOW about the new Bing Business Portal is that it not only gives merchants an easy place to list local business locations (enabling exposure to local and map search), the new product area helps you create a free mobile website, mirroring the products you load into the Bing shopping engine and your local listing information.  This mobile website has its own shortened URL you can share in Facebook, and a Facebook Like button built in (later in this article, I’ll share an SEO secret about Facebook likes).  You can even generate your mobile website’s QR code to download and print onto a window sticker or distribute throughout your area.  Using a few tricks to detect the browser and redirect, or just a simple link, this mobile website provided by Bing can be integrated into your main desktop website – or stand alone if it is your initial entry into internet marketing.

Bing Business Portal - mobile search marketing

Bing Local Business Listings Compared to Google and Yahoo

Bing has combined some really convenient features of Google and Yahoo that simplify your business’s launch into mobile search marketing, starting from square one.  You don’t need a website or a physical storefront (though you likely have one or the other), yet you can end up with a Facebook friendly mobile website, local map listings so you appear in map search results and product listings so you can appear in Bing shopping results.

Details

The Listings section starts with straight forward business Details tab similar to the Local Listing Center that was replaced, with a nice new interface.

Local Business Listing Details

Like Yahoo, you have a choice whether or not to display your business address.  This is great news for internet only businesses run from a private home or location without a storefront.  Like Google’s local listing process, you must first search for your business by phone number.  Either choose an existing listing to take over or create a new one.  Either way, you must verify ownership by phone or mail.

SEO TIP: This may not surprise you, but use keywords in the business name and in any other fields whenever possible.  Fill out as many fields as possible. Bing even tells you straight out in their Learn more infographic “…the more information you have added to your listing, the easier it will be to find your business online.”

Profile

Next tab is the Profile.  Like Google and Yahoo, you may choose categories (called Specialties in Bing) under which your business can be listed.  Bing lets you choose up to 5 specialties.  Unique to Bing, you may then use interactive sliders to prioritize the different areas. 

SEO TIP: if you don’t fit into 5 categories, try to find 5 that at least are related, especially if they contain any form of your core keywords.

Mobile

QR Code

Mobile, the next tab under Listings produces your FREE mobile website, as well as a QR Code.  The QR code is a bar code that people can scan with their mobile phone that will take them right to your mobile website.  It’s sort of like plastering your domain name on a sign, except there’s no need to remember the URL and type it into a browser.  The only downside to QR codes is that you can’t integrate a recognizable brand into it, like you do with a domain name.  Its an unrecognizable pattern of black and white boxes.  Now that would be something if you can customize your QR code to include your logo.  Let me know if you find out how to do that.  The upside for the QR code and its whole reason for existence is NO TYPING – one of the great enablers of mobile search.  On your way into a store, scan the QR code in the storefront window with your mobile device and the website pops right up.

You can start listing your categories and products here under the Mobile tab of the Listings section, but its probably easier to wait until you get to the Products section where you will fill out all the details.

Photos

Unlike Yahoo, you can upload up to 9 photos for your listing for free.  Yahoo used to let you upload 2 photos free and more for the paid listing.  Now, Yahoo reserves all photos for the paid listing.  Bing gives you 9 photos for your listing. 

SEO TIP: Use all 9 photos and don’t upload them.  Instead use the link option.  This lets you use photos hosted on your main website domain.  These each act as a link from an authority website (Bing).  They are not as powerful as anchor text links, but they are links from Bing.com nonetheless.

More Details

Bing Local Listing Details Influence SEO

The More Details tab lets you further optimize and fill in additional information using forms that you would recognize from Google local listings.  These include year established, company tagline, business description, languages spoken, hours of operation, payment types accepted, parking options, brands carried, professional associations and your marker location on the map. 

SEO TIP: Bing encourages users to fill out as many details as possible, since this is a way of optimizing your listing so that it can be accurately indexed in search results.

Publish

The last tab, Publish, gives you a preview of your local listing, links to your mobile site and a download for your QR code window sticker.  Also in this tab are tools to design the look of your mobile website.  The default colors are determined by the logo.  From there you can customize the colors and background texture.

Get Products in Bing Shopping Search Engine

The Products area is not as easy as you might expect.  Unlike Google Merchant there is currently no option for an RSS feed or spreadsheet.  Its up to you to painstakingly input each product and description into the fields.  Also, don’t get confused by what is intended as product categories and actual products.  The first step is to list your menu items or product categories, followed by sub-categories.  And be careful, this is still in BETA – I was not able to delete unused menu items.  Therefore I suggest editing the default menu items before creating new ones.  Once you fill in the title and description for the first menu item, it will be updated in the left column, where you can select that menu item to start adding its sub menu item, and then products for the sub menu item.  The point of entering this hierarchy is to create your navigable mobile website.

Free Mobile Website

Hands down the most exciting part of the Bing Business Portal, over Google or Yahoo is the promise of a free mobile website and its QR Code, compatible with Facebook, complete with like button.

SEO TIP: I’ve noticed a correlation between Facebook likes and rankings in Bing web search results.  Also, if your customers use the Facebook like function with location enabled, it creates a location specific search signal similar to the reviews you may see listed in your Google maps place page that are pulled from various websites that list your business name and address with associated reviews. Encourage your customers to Facebook like you.  Keep the QR code handy so they can scan it and hit the like button.  This could be as simple as a sign next to the register or tip jar: We accept and appreciate Facebook likes – just scan the bar code and hit the like button.

Why Buys

Bing Why Buys for SEO

Once you get past the product categories and into the products, you find name, price, description, photos and Why Buys.   In the Learn More area, Bing suggests using the Why Buys for search engine optimization (SEO).  Bing explains (in not these exact terms) that Why Buys are conversion messages about your product that help it appear in search results.  In a nutshell this is where you list your product benefits.

SEO TIP: In the WHY BUYS list the problems your potential customers are searching online to solve, as well as the variations of the product name or application.  This is the perfect example of combined conversion and SEO that must be compressed into ten concise statements.

As you build your product categories, products, descriptions and why buys, you are actually building the mobile website.  The seemingly unnecessary hierarchy  you are forced to provide for each product builds the categories and subcategories in your mobile website, allowing the user to drill down different areas to read more.  The mobile interface is limited to menu lists where you can select one item from a list of categories to see the sub categories, followed by  the list of products.  Select a product to see the name, description, price, photo and up to 10 reasons to buy.

Deals

Bing Local Listing Deals for SEO

Once you have the workings of an online store in mobile website format, you can set up deals.  The Deals area seems self explanatory.  List your sales.  A similar free feature like this is also available in Google places.  This is not the same thing as running a mobile pay per click ad.  The deals do not directly give you more prominence, however, this is an opportunity to grow your variety of keyword stemming to further optimize your listing.

People

The People tab is an area where you can manage account users for your Bing Business Portal.  Similar to the account management abilities in Google products.  Here you can add users and set their level of access, allowing your team members to input products, business locations, etc.

SEO and Marketing Conclusions about the New Bing Business Portal

Bing obviously wants to gain traffic.  Without going head to head with Google’s web search, Bing makes a move into mobile search as the Decision Engine.  Of course all these products still affect general web search performed at a desktop or laptop.  However, mobile and local signals not only influence web search results, but are often injected directly into web search results.  Bing put together some really great free tools that have otherwise been paid tools from Bing and Yahoo.  Certainly we can assume Bing is providing these free tools to merchants to encourage more use of the Bing online properties.  However that does not take away from the value they provide.  Admittedly by Bing, these new local SEO tools will help you in other search engines besides just Bing.  Your mobile site is created and branded by Bing, however it is still searchable in Google, Yahoo, Ask, etc.  The content you create in your local listing, the reviews you get, the Facebook likes and the mobile website are all crawled and followed by Google.  What’s good for one search engine is often good for them all.

The post Local and Mobile Search Marketing Services from New Bing Business Portal appeared first on Blend SEO.

Google, Bing and Yahoo cracked down hard on duplicate content starting December 2010.  Penalties hit hardest on February 24, 2011 in the Google Panda algorithm update.  Bing and Yahoo rankings followed suite.

How To: The SEO Tools and Process to Address Duplicate Content

Comparison SEO Tool

An SEO services client with which we work has developed multiple websites for different brands, but the client recycled the content.  Instead of writing 100% unique text for each website, paragraphs and sometimes whole pages were used universally across multiple websites.  They were getting away without noticeable revenue loss, so despite existing duplicate content penalties (though not actual penalties – more accurately wasting crawl budget and possibly dividing link juice) on interior entry pages, the client decided it was not a big enough priority to rewrite all the content … until now.

February search engine algorithm updates penalized entire websites that have pages similar to any other site that the search engine credits as the originator. Even if words are rearranged and the brand name is switched out, the Google algorithm is not fooled.  Google chooses one website as the originator and penalizes the others.

In late 2010, various rankings started to slip.  On February 24th, clients with duplicate or similar content across different websites saw a total drop off for #1 ranked keyword phrases.   Google guidelines for duplicate content indicate that the algorithm perceives these similar pages as  “deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic“.

By the way, these guidelines were [initially] updated March 20, 2011, less than a month after the [first] Panda algorithm update.

Systematic Process of Identifying and Addressing Duplicate Pages

If you are intimately familiar with your websites, like this search engine optimization consultant is, you already know which pages are similar and possibly causing duplicate content penalties. If you are an SEO agency taking on a new client with duplicate content issues, leaving it up to you to figure out where the duplicates are within their online properties, then you may need a few SEO tools to help identify possible duplicate pages.

UPDATES: Google Panda Filter Dates

• Panda Update 1.0: Feb. 24, 2011
• Panda Update 2.0: April 11, 2011 (about 7 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.1: May 10, 2011 (about  4 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.2: June 16, 2011 (about 5 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.3: July 23, 2011 (about 5 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.4: August 12, 2011 (about 3 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.5: September 28, 2011 (about 7 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.51: October 9, 2011 (minor filter update about 2 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.52: October 13, 2011 (minor filter update)
• Panda Update 3.0: October 19, 2011 (3 weeks later)
• Panda Update 3.1: November 18, 2011 (3 weeks later)
• Panda Update 3.2: January 18, 2012 (8 weeks later)
• Panda Update 3.3: February 28, 2012 (refresh to update index 6 weeks later)
• Panda Update 3.4: March 23, 2012 (refresh to update index 3.5 weeks later)
• Panda Update 3.5: April 19, 2012 (refresh to update index 4 weeks later)
• Panda Update 3.6: April 27, 2012 (refresh to update index 8 days later)
• This has become crazy to update.  Just check the SEOMoz Google Algorithm Change History.

To determine if your website fell victim to a Panda filter, check your traffic.  Panda “penalizes” your website by dropping your rankings, not just on pages with duplicate or thin content, but universally across your website – including your homepage.  If you were hit by the Panda Filter, you will see a significant traffic drop on one of the dates above.  Subsequently, if you address the issue, your traffic should be adjusted the next time the Panda filter runs.  Each time the filter runs, it updates the Google index.

Update: February and March 2012 updates were merely when the Panda Filter was run again in order to refresh the Google index, so that changes made to websites will be reflected in Google.  In other words, if you implemented fixes to get out of the Panda Filter before February 28 or March 23, you can check traffic at those dates to see if your fixes did the trick.

Identify Duplicate Content

This paid tool makes your process simple, but costs money. Copyscape is a tool for finding copyright and plagiarism offenders.  Since Google generally penalizes the copier and not the original author, plagiarism is not an SEO issue.  For this reason CopyScape is not a regular part of the SEO arsenal of tools.  Don’t ask me why as an SEO I even know about it, but I’ve known about it for years (guess that’s part of the multidisciplinary Blend SEO approach).

The process to identifying duplicate pages is, using the paid version called CopySentry, you can feed it your non-penalized website and let it find the duplicate content out there amidst your penalized websites.

Using free tools takes a little more time and effort.  Download and install A1 Sitemap Generator, a great sitemap generator program with a fully functional free 30 day trial.

1. Run a scan of your penalized website.  It will generate a list of pages of the website, ignoring those blocked by robots.txt, following any redirects or canonical tags – meaning you have a list of webpages that spiders crawl.
2. Among the sitemap output choices, you can create a text file list of page URLs with each URL on a separate line.
3. Paste this list into excel and start your search for duplicate content.  Use your intuition and Google to check blocks of text.  If a different website ranks number one for any block of text, that website is credited as the originator.  Mark this URL and the originator URL.

Test or Check Duplicate Content

Once you have a list of pages from your penalized website and their counterpart on the originator website, you will want to check their similarity.  Are they similar enough to require a rewrite?  Run the URLs through a webpage comparison or duplicate content checker tool.  After you go through several pages between two sites, you will eventually get a feel for where the cut-off is for rewrite verses no rewrite.  Any pages with similarity higher than your cut-off require a writer to take a look for the duplicate or similar language.  Similar content on the penalized website must be completely rewritten.

Update: Unfortunately, my favorite duplicate content diagnostic tool has been abandoned.

This first similarity tool is my favorite.  Some only give a single percentage, letting you wonder how much of that similarity is due to non-visible code.  This tool tells you, without inundating you with too much information.  There’s no captcha, so checking through your list is quick.  I embedded the form below, so you can try it here.

Duplicate Content Check

This next tool, embedded below simply gives you a single percentage.  Depending on the template between your penalized and originator websites, the number you get will seem pretty low.  My cut-off with this tool was about 10%.  Anything over 10%, required a copywriter to rewrite the page or at least a section of the page.

This comparison SEO tool by SEO Book compares the page titles, meta information, and common phrases occurring on different pages.

Here are several more alternatives you can try.

• http://www.webseoanalytics.com/free/seo-tools/duplicate-content-checker.php?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
• http://utext.rikuz.com/en/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
• http://www.seomastering.com/duplicate-page-finder.php?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
• http://www.seomastering.com/site-comparison.php?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
• http://www.seomastering.com/similar-text-checker.php?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss

The post SEO Tools & Process to Fix Google Panda Penalty appeared first on Blend SEO.

Blend starts with the end in mind.  A blended skill set of design and marketing contributes to SEO for a stronger, unified result.  Blend is SEO (search engine optimization) infused with design and marketing.  Our blog, the BlendER (ER = Everything Relevant), breaks down problems that are hard to chew into easily digestible servings.

Meaning Behind the Cute Words and Symbols?

The new business name and logo represent a blended approach to an end result.  A bit more organic than the old GLiD logo, Blend reveals aspects of synergy and growth.  The internet of yesterday, well, more like a few years ago…was pretty cut and dry.  If you got past the technical barriers, you were in.  Moving forward to the internet of yesterday – we were all captivated by web 2.0, and the community element. Blogs for individuals, blogs for companies, BLOGs for Everyone!  Search engine optimization became more organic as content provided by the community grew and search engines evolved.  Today, the elements of design and marketing are obviously essential components.  Technical internet expertise is required to keep up with quickly moving, influential search engines.  In addition, community involvement has blossomed into a mixture of social media.  Mobile web devices, local search and multinational internet presence demand focus to be divided and narrowed to human behavior at a single location.  With all this in mind, it starts with the marketing end goal.

GLiD has long been a solo act.  Since 1997, growth transformed Greg Lee I.D. through industrial design, identity, intelligent design, …and now the expansion involving collaboration with others behind the scenes coupled with intense SEO research and development pushes GLiD forward into Blend.  GLiD SEO and design services are now Blend SEO.

The post GLiD Design and Marketing Becomes Blend SEO. appeared first on Blend SEO.

Google Office in Atlanta

Google invited 150 search marketing professionals along with Bing, Yahoo, Razorfish and 360i into the Atlanta Google office for a mobile search marketing event.  Each of the major search engines sat side by side along with Razorfish to speak on upcoming trends in mobile search and to answer our questions from search engine optimization consultants, internet marketing companies, web designers, creative agencies and any company providing SEM and SEO services among the 150 first people to make it through the door in Atlanta.

I was one of those 150 people.

The event was simulcast from Google Atlanta to offices in New York and Boston.  Limited audiences were invited to attend the event in New York and Boston.  A live feed from each office was projected on the wall in the Atlanta office alongside the speaker presentation screen.  The speakers responded to questions from all three locations.

The mobile search marketing speaker panel consisted of:

• Bing: Director of Bing Mobile Product Management – Andy Chu
• Yahoo: Senior Director, Mobile Sales Strategies – Paul Cushman
• Google: Senior Account Executive (Mobile Ads Team) – Elliott Nix
• Razorfish: VP of Mobile – Paul Gelb

I showed up a little early to make sure I had plenty of time to explore the Google office.  The office in Atlanta is a satellite office for Google, and as you might imagine looks like a small version of the California office descriptions, decorated with big red, yellow, green and blue circles in the carpet, carved into the walls, in the ceiling and repeated playfully throughout the decor.

After networking for about an hour with other SEM and SEO agency, marketing and designer SEMPO Atlanta members we settled down for the presentations.  After introductions by various sponsors and SEMPO officials we got to the speaker presentations.  Razorfish went first, followed by Yahoo, Bing, then Google.

Whether intended or not, the reoccurring theme behind was how human behavior drives mobile search. Here’s a synopsis of their presentations.

Paul Gelb, Vice President of Mobile for Razorfish opened with entertaining examples of mobile search niches based on available search apps.  Search apps are catered to every behavior: shopping, finding restaurants, finding directions and even finding public restrooms (complete with user reviews and ratings on cleanliness), one of which provided by Charmin, the toilet paper brand. Paul Gelb relates that particular search apps are used based on human behaviors.

Yahoo Mobile Search Presenter

Next Paul Cushman, Senior Director of Mobile Sales Strategies for Yahoo presented.  Paul presented some fresh demographic information from Yahoo and insights on how to predict mobile search trends.

• The overall age is a younger demographic engaged in mobile search.
• The average number of keywords in a mobile query is shorter than on desktop.
• Day parting is shifted as mobile search volume starts earlier in the day and lasts longer into the night.
• iPads and entertainment related search increased as people search on iPads during TV watching

Paul Cushman presented a study of search volume during 2010 Academy Awards.  TV commercial breaks were tracked against mobile web user traffic.  Results show tendencies of “co-browsing”: spikes in mobile search traffic during commercial breaks.

An audience member asked how to persuade mobile paid search programs to prospects who are still new to the idea of mobile search.   Paul pointed out how search behaviors for mobile, unlike desktop, follow common sense.  In other words, think about how you search on your phone and the trends pretty much match.

• People search while in the bathroom, instead of using a magazine.
• People grab their phone before getting out of bed and search.
• People search products to read reviews while at store locations before making buying decisions.

These search trends are pretty easy to explain to customers, however it is new and if someone is not ready to shift funds into a new platform, than its probably not right for them yet.

Bing Mobile Search Presenter

Andy Chu, Director of Bing Mobile Product Management spoke next.  Andy provided data and case studies illustrating further opportunities in mobile search marketing.  Andy through out a few user statistics, skipping over those covered by Paul Cushman’s Yahoo presentation.  He did however mention the 18-20 year old demographic is growing fastest, up 65%.

Andy explores two types of search activity: task centric and local centric.

Task Centric Search:
Bing, a Microsoft brand maintains its market differentiators for search as visually organized, following task centric needs.  Task centric search sessions may last an hour.

Local Centric Search:
Local centric searches are geographic related and usually are infotainment related – learn about restaurants or movies in order to make a decision and find a location.

• It takes 21 steps to choose a restaurant
• Mobile searches have 1.5 times more typos than desktop
• 60% of adults rate alternate input as lead enabling experiences
• 70% of tasks are completed within 1 hour

Bing studies on money saving tasks indicate:

• 56% iPhone users compare prices
• 5.3% consumers reddem mobile coupons
• 39% of businesses intend to use mobile coupons

Bing opinion on search apps verses browsers:

Distribution of apps is a challenge.  Regardless of the platform, users are provided hundreds of apps to scroll through.  Most app descriptions lack meaningful content (hello, optimize your apps anyone?). Therefore the apps are not effectively searchable.

Question from the audience:

What are the values of a mobile site verses desktop site?  Do you really need a mobile site?

Answer from Andy Chu of Bing:

Yes. Mobile sites have more interaction and click through.

Google Mobile Search Presenter

Elliot Nix, Senior Account Executive  of Google’s Mobile Ads Team presented last.

• 35% of Android search is via voice
• A study in Japan showed a mobile device is always within 3 feet
• Mobile search occurs in the bathroom
• 1 in 5 adults check their mobile device before leaving bed in the morning
• 79% of retailers do not have a mobile site
• Google Analytics can track mobile app activity after the app is downloaded

The process for a mobile search strategy

1. Create a mobile site
2. Think mobile
3. Be discovered
4. Track (mobile independently)
5. Iterate

Audience Question: Does a slate or iPad device render desktop websites or is a 3rd version required after mobile?

Panel Answer: Most websites render fine on iPad, however flash is a problem.

Audience Question: How does +1 (plus one) affect search results?

Google Answer: +1 is a personal consumer tool, so it may affect organic search for that individual searching while logged into the account where +1 was used.

The original presentation can be found here:

• Paul Cushman, Yahoo:
  http://www.slideshare.net/sempoatlanta/sempo-mobile-yahoo?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
• Andy Chu, Bing:
  http://www.slideshare.net/sempoatlanta/sempo-mobile-bing?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
• Paul Gelb: Razorfish:
  http://www.slideshare.net/sempoatlanta/sempo-mobile-razorfish?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
• Google’s presentation is not available online, but they have provided the link below.
  http://www.google.com/events/thinkmobile2011/livestream.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss

Links courtesy of Benjamin Rudolf, President SEMPO Atlanta.

The post Mobile Search Marketing Event: Google, Bing, Yahoo and Razorfish Live Presentations appeared first on Blend SEO.

How you setup your blog is crucial for SEO.

1. Where To Install a Blog:
   – Subfolders?
   – Subdomains?
   – Separate Domains?
2. How to Integrate the Blog into the Main Website Architecture
3. Optimize Website Navigation Anchor Text
4. Optimize Blog Categories
5. What to Remove from the Blog

Steps 1 and 2 (concerning blog location and navigation) were discussed in a previous article on the 5 step process to setup your blog for SEO.  As a quick review of these two steps, the strategy for blog SEO is to integrate your blog within your main company website.  Typical blog architecture creates a strong web of interlinking.  Blogs also attract links from other blogs and directories.  The inbound links hit the web-like framework of interlinking and spread authority throughout the blog.  Search engines naturally view a blog as a tightly interlinked section of your website.  That is why, if you want your blog to benefit your main website, it must be actively interlinked.  That means, install it in a sub-folder of your main website, so link authority will count toward the domain, not toward a sub-domain or separate domain.

Step 3 is your first act of optimizing your blog using keywords.  Imagine if you were a s search engine starting at the top level of your website.  The first thing you read is the domain name.  Optimize it.  You might take a quick scan of the text near the top of the homepage, and then go right through the main navigation.  What do each of the links say in the navigation?  What is the file name of each page where they link?  The internet is too big to read every inch of every website, so you pull what information you can from a quick preview.  Using meaningful keywords in the main navigation anchor text and file names is only logical.  And its something every SEO consultant can agree upon.

This concept carries right into the next topic, optimizing blog categories.

Optimize Blog Categories

Approach SEO for your blog categories the same as you would for your main website categories.  Each category of your main website is located in your main navigation and is leg of themed content.  Your blog now stands as one of those legs.  Within it are its own legs.  Pick a theme for each category.  If you are writing for the reader, than you choose subjects that you know your readers are searching for.  Carefully choose relevant keyword rich categories as the legs for your blog.  These category names will appear in the category URLs and provide keyword rich anchor text in the blog-wide menu as well as other links throughout the template.  You will naturally gain a high percentage of anchor text keyword density on and pointing to URLs with those keywords.

What to Remove from the Blog

Typical items you find on the side of blogs include

• categories
• recent articles
• blog roll links
• calendars
• date archives
• author archives
• tags

… and I’m sure you can find more.  These devices provide blogs with their biggest strengths and biggest weaknesses.  For every article you post, your blog creates multiple views of it, each with a unique URL.  This is great for building up a large body of content, however, take it too far, and search engine bots get lost in duplicate content.

SEO for Categories and Recent Articles

The strategy here is to become aware of the URLs created by each device and trim down the duplicate content, leaving each URL looking as unique as possible, even though most content is reused.  We already talked about optimizing categories, so those can stay.  Recent articles links can also stay, since they simply link to the individual article URL – the same URL you get from the read-more link or article title link to read the individual article.  However, you need to consider limitation or removal for each of the other items.

Blog Roll SEO

Your blog roll links give a LOT of link juice away.  This might be a good place to link to your main website or other online properties where you have a vested interest.  Some bloggers fill this area with endless links out to other bloggers.  In doing so, you just have to consider how much link juice you want to hoard or trade.  And in the trade, though there may be a reciprocal link sending authority back to you, the visitors that click off to another website may never come back.  Therefore, my strategy in the blog roll is to keep it in the family (unless you have a really, really good resource you want to list).

Calendars and Date Archives

I like to completely eliminate calendars and date archives.  Calendars are a long known source of duplicate content.  If a client insists on having a calendar, its best to use a rel=nofollow in every link of the calendar and disallow it in the robots.txt.  The Robots Meta WordPress SEO plugin even gives you the option to disable calendars and date based archives.

Blog Author Archives

Author archives can go either way, depending on your situation.  For example, if you only have one author, that author archive will be an exact duplicate of the blog home page.  But if you have several authors contributing evenly, your blog content will be split between them.  A nice long description from each author will further contribute to making these pages unique.  Category pages can be treated similarly.  Create a reasonable number of categories and assign each post to just one category.  Give each category a unique description of 100 words or more to appear on the category view and every category page will appear unique from the others, with just a fraction duplicate content on the homepage.  For example, if you have 7 categories and you set your blog homepage to show the most recent 7 posts, 1/7th of your homepage will be pulled from each category (assuming you write posts in a rotation of categories).

Blog SEO Tags

Tags are nice to keep in the template because they create on-page keyword anchor text.  They in a way have replaced meta keywords.  Create a tag for every keyword relevant to the article.  Spam should be no temptation here since these appear visibly on the blog.  However, I don’t like robots indexing those tag pages, since blog themes are pretty tight and after a while, the same keywords are reused over and over.  This means the tag archives pretty much look the same from one tag to another (duplicate content).  For this reason, it’s a good idea to disallow tag pages using robots.txt.  The bot will still crawl the anchor text link on the page, follow the link, crawl the tag page, but won’t include it the tag page in the search index.

The post SEO for a Blog Accompanying a Company Website appeared first on Blend SEO.

I am changing my business name and the website domain name.  How do I keep search engine traffic?  What do I do for search engine optimization so that I don’t throw away my past SEO efforts?  How do I redirect traffic from other websites and marketing to the new website?

If you are in this situation, there are two things to consider:

1. people’s perception of the name change
2. technical aspects of the name change for search engines and internet traffic

Name Change Perception

At the very least, I expect you will inform your current and potential customers and  that the name will be changing before it happens.  For example, I plan to change my business name from GLiD to Blend.  The name change has been long overdue.

People may want to know why and what to expect?  Will services change under the new name?  Is management changing?  For example, GLiD will be changing to Blend.

For GLiD, the core services have evolved from industrial design, to graphic design, to search engine optimization and internet marketing.  GLiD initially was created for Greg Lee Industrial Design.  Keeping the same name, the acronym transitioned to Greg Lee I.D. (for identity) and later to Greg Lee Intelligent Design (encompassing identity, print and web development).  Since 2004, SEO and internet marketing slowly infused deeper into the services while providing extensive graphic design and website development while working in tandem with an influential internet marketer in Charleston, South Carolina.

The internet evolved and GLiD did too.  Learning from experts in internet marketing and SEO, GLiD knowledge base grew.  In January 2009, I moved the GLiD office to Atlanta, a hub for the internet marketing and SEO community.  By January 2010, I began serving as the search engine optimization research and development department for the Atlanta internet marketing firm, Medium Blue.  In summer of 2011, GLiD will transition to Blend, dropping industrial design to completely focus on SEO, website development and graphic design.

During the transition period, www.GLiD.us?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss will be co-branded with banners advertising the name change to Blend.  After the transition to Blend, there will still be prominent messages showing formerly GLiD, to address traffic from old links that promote GLiD.

Website Redirect for SEO and Traffic

OK, here’s the tricky part.  Even the experts get this wrong sometimes.  I watched a seasoned SEO webmaster use the wrong redirect and cause a business to disappear from search results.  On a day to day basis, I catch errors made by big name brands that create duplicate content and abandon thousands of back links when they attempt to switch domain names for a website.  To illustrate how to correctly make the switch, I will use the GLiD to Blend example.

The website www.GLiD.us?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss will switch to www.BlendSEO.com.?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss  This is the process to correctly redirect all your traffic, back links and search engine authority (i.e. Google PageRank) to the new domain name.  Most online articles tell you to 301 redirect www.GliD.us?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss to www.BlendSEO.com.?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss  This sounds simpler than it really is.

Many times, the web developer will create a 301 redirect from http://www.glid.us?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss to http://blendseo.com.?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss  The result is that the homepage of the old website redirects to the homepage of the new website, but all the interior pages are not affected.  This is WRONG!  Thousands of back links to interior pages still go to those pages on the old website.  Search engine results for interior pages still send traffic to the old website.  What is required is a global redirect.

Since this is only a domain name change, the website will remain the same except for the new domain name.  The files will continue to be hosted on the same server.

First, any internal links using absolute paths will need to be update to use relative paths.  Now, pointing the new domain www.BlendSEO.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss at the website will allow the homepage and any static pages to work.  As long as there are no back links using the new URL, search engines will not know about it yet.

Next to get the blog working, the settings will need to be changes to indicate the new absolute path to the blog.

Finally, a global rewrite rule must be added to the .htaccess file.  I will use a rewrite rule (which uses Follow SymLinks and RewriteEngine On), instead of a redirect (which only uses Rewrite Engine On) because both domain names will be pointed to the same set of files.  Using a typical 301 rewrite from every page of the website to the new domain in this situation would create an infinite loop any time the new domain is requested.   The rewrite rule will allow me to take any URL from www.glid.us?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss and rewrite it to the same path on www.blendseo.com.?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss  All links will continue to work when the new domain name is switched out.

The post Changing the Business Name and Website Domain Name appeared first on Blend SEO.

How the Demand Media Content Farm Works

If you are in the SEO business or work with a search engine optimization consultant, you’ve heard about the recent Google algorithm shift known as the Panda Algorithm update, Farmer update, or Content Farm update.

The big break on the story is in an interview between Cutts and Singhal of Google with Wired Magazine.

Here are the major take-aways as of now.

Little has been said about link farms.  The main issue seems to be your content, as apposed to your back links.  Scraper websites are those that automate content by republishing that which is already on other websites.  Content farms generate content with little value in order to capture search traffic.  Take a look at the info graphic about how the Demand Media content farm works [Image Source].

This is not a new issue.  Apparently, Google’s technology on how they filter, analyze and make decisions on duplicate content has changed.  As far as white-hat SEO, the rules are still the same.  The penalties just got a bit more serious.

Some of my SEO client sites, despite warnings about duplicate content still don’t realize they have significant duplicate content.  A new SEO business client who owns hundreds of domains was pointing different domains to the same webserver, serving the exact same website – same IP address and everything. Only the website domain credited as the originator will sustain rankings.

In other situations, the same text copy is used on several pages of a sister company websites under different brands.  It used to be that the duplicate pages from these re-branded websites would not rank.  Now the entire site is losing overall rankings.

This kind of thing means they are due for copy writing frenzy.  Find the offending pages – those that use the same copy from other sites and rewrite them as unique.

You can post your new page of copy on a live test bed site and check how similar it is to the other page using this tool.

[Update: March 31, 2011]

My update to this article, along with in depth background on the history of the biggest search engine algorithm changes was posted today on the Medium Blue blog.  I provide search engine optimization research and development for Medium Blue Search Engine Marketing.

The post Panda Content Farm Google Algorithm Update and Duplicate Content appeared first on Blend SEO.

The below table of Microsoft Core fonts is no longer freely available from Microsoft, but these free standard fonts are available here, completely legally thanks to the terms of Microsoft’s font license.

Thanks to Nick Shanks for hosting these fonts and sharing his knowledge on them.

The post Core Fonts for SEO Friendly Website Development appeared first on Blend SEO.

The usual answer is… 301 redirect the old website to the new website.

But How Exactly?

Here’s the problem that always happens.  They end up redirecting the homepage from the old website to the homepage of the new website.  But what about all the interior pages?  There may be hundreds of back links to interior pages that get completely wasted as soon as the old website is deleted.  If you are hosting on a Microsoft IIs server, you may be limited without installing ISAPI or some other rewrite module. However, if you are hosting on an Apache server, the .htaccess file gives you an extremely flexible means of handling redirects.

There are a few options to address redirects, depending on your situation for the old domain to new domain transition:

1. If the two sites are different, ideally, you would redirect each interior page of the old site to a relevant interior page of the new site.  In the .htaccess file of the old site, you would specify the old page (using a relative path) and the new page (using an absolute path).  Here is the code to redirect one page to another individual page.Redirect 301 /old-page http://new-domain.com/new-page?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
2. If you are just changing the domain name and keeping the same folder structure, you can just redirect every page of the old domain to the same path on the new domain.  Here’s the.htaccess code for that.Redirect 301 / http://newdomain.com/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
3. If  the sites are different and there is no way to identify relevant pages for a one to one page comparison or if comparing every page of each site is simply not feasible or cost effective, you can use a wildcard in the .htaccess to simply redirect all the interior pages of the old site to the homepage of the new domain and a separate line to 301 redirect the old website to the new domain.  Here is the code for that.

RewritEngine On
RewriteRule . http://www.newdomain.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss [R=301,L,NC]
Redirect 301 / http://www.newdomain.com/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss

.htaccess Redirect Best Practices

301 Redirect non-www to www

Generally any page of a website is accessible by typing the URL into your browser without “www” and with “www”.  For example http://website.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss and http://www.website.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss will serve the same page.  Any link to a non-www URL that a spider finds, will lead that spider to crawl the entire website using non-www for every page.  This assumes you are using relative paths in your navigation, which most CMS and web developers do.  The search engine is thus crawling your site twice, doubling the task for the crawler.  Now understand that search engine spiders have a limited crawl budget for each website.  Google uses PageRank to determine how deep to crawl your website.  If you look at crawl stats, you will see that your entire site does not get crawled each time the bot visits.  If the bot must crawl through two versions of your website, you basically doubled its work.  Later, the search engine algorithm will analyze the content, identify duplicate pages and determine which ones take priority over the others.

But why make extra work for the search engine?

If you want to optimize your website for search engines, than cut out this extra work for the crawler and algorithm.  Don’t let the crawler find the non-www version of your website.  The server URL rewrite that returns a 301 code will not allow the search engine crawler bot (or humans) to access any non-www URL pages of your website. This is an old standard SEO best practice for reducing duplicate content issues.

RewriteEngine On
 RewriteBase /
 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
 RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss [L,R=301]

.htaccess Language – Apache Server Configuration Directives

There is a lot more you can do with .htaccess code that will affect SEO.  The below SEO .htaccess tips and more in depth background for creating your own Apache server directives can be found at http://www.corz.org?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss.  Many  of these use regular expressions, or regexes that are explained very well at http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss.

Escaping:

\      char escape that particular char

For instance to specify special characters.. [].()\ etc.

Text:

.                 Any single character  (on its own = the entire URI)
[chars]       Character class: One of following chars
[^chars]      Character class: None of following chars
text1|text2    Alternative: text1 or text2 (i.e. “or”)

e.g. [^/] matches any character except /
(foo|bar)\.html matches foo.html and bar.html

Quantifiers:

?      0 or 1 of the preceding text
*      0 or N of the preceding text  (hungry)
+      1 or N of the preceding text

e.g. (.+)\.html? matches foo.htm and foo.html
(foo)?bar\.html matches bar.html and foobar.html

Grouping:

(text)     Grouping of text

Either to set the borders of an alternative or for making back references where the nthe group can be used on the target of a RewriteRule with $n

e.g.  ^(.*)\.html foo.php?bar=$1

Anchors:

^      Start of line anchor
$      End   of line anchor

An anchor explicitly states that the character right next to it MUST be either the very first character (“^”), or the very last character (“$”) of the URI string to match against the pattern, e.g..

^foo(.*)   matches foo and foobar but not eggfoo
(.*)l$   matches fool and cool, but not foo

The post Using .htaccess file for 301 redirects and URL rewrites appeared first on Blend SEO.

Do You want to maximize their SEO benefit?

Being raised with a thrifty mindset and borderline hoarding tendencies, I am compelled to use every website asset to further SEO success.  This article will reveal to you:

1. How to know if your landing pages are causing duplicate content for organic search engines
2. How to eliminate duplicate content penalties
3. How to reclaim unused back links
4. Long term strategy to build organic traffic using your paid search landing pages

Are Your Paid Search Landing Pages Causing Duplicate Content Penalties?

A lot of clients don’t realize that their PPC landing pages end up in the search engine index.  If your landing pages have nearly identical content as each other or other pages of your website, they will potentially cause duplicate content penalties without you realizing.  Your website will not completely drop out of the search results, but those individual pages will waste resources (link authority, PageRank, crawl budget) that should go into other areas.  And, Google will remember that your website has useless duplicate pages, which affects your website’s overall profile.  Over the years Google has told us to disallow, redirect and apply canonical links to those pages.  Depending on how you address duplicate pages can hold back your potential for Google PageRank and high search engine rankings.

Check Google for your landing pages by searching…

site:yourwebsite.com/landingpage.php

A lot of times I find duplicate versions of the same landing page in Google or Bing, the only difference being different strings in the URL.  The URL may have some random looking string at the end such as ?src=W4THMJHWWZRP. Because these have different URLs, the search engines assume they are supposed to be different pages. They may have identical content with only slight differences. Unfortunately, search engines are penalizing you for duplicate content in the organic results.  You can turn this around to your advantage!

So the first thing you’re probably wondering is how do these pages find their way into the Google or Bing index?  You don’t have any links to them, they are complete islands, pages hosted on your server with no links from any part of your website.  So how does Google find them?

Easy… someone else landed on the page from your PPC ad and created a link to the page.

Here’s the proof.  Once you find a page in a search index using the “site” search above, check that page for backlinks. Go to Yahoo Site Explorer and enter the URL for the page. Make sure you click “Inlinks” and chose the drop down “Except from this domain”.  Here you will see other websites that link to that landing page.

How to Eliminate Duplicate Content Penalties

Some people would say to use your robots.txt file to disallow search engines from listing those pages in their results.  For a long time, this has been the standard way of addressing duplicate content.  However, there is always the potential for other websites to link to your landing pages.  Even if you don’t see back links in Yahoo Site Explorer, there may still be back links not shown (search engines just refuse to show you everything they know and there’s nothing we can do about it), you need to plan on the possibility of people creating links in the future.  Using the robots.txt to disallow a page with potential back links does not let you take advantage of potential back links.

How to Regain Unused Back Links

Every back link you have is one more that your competitor may not.  With organic search engine optimization, there are so many factors not under your control.  With all the competing websites each with their individual approach to outrank you, the only way to maximize your success is to make the best use of everything under your control.  You can’t force other websites to link to you.  If they do link to you, take credit for them all.

Instead of using robots.txt to disallow pages with potential back links, use the canonical tag.  The canonical tag can point the back link PageRank to a page intended for organic search engine ranking.

Implementing the canonical tag is something you can do right away with very little effort.

1. First figure out which landing pages would be considered duplicate content.  If you use the same content and only change out a keyword or two, those should be considered duplicates.
2. Next choose a page to represent the duplicates.  This will be your organic landing page.  It may be a page already on your website that your PPC landing pages are patterned after.  Or if your paid landing pages are written differently from any of your organic website, it may be one of your paid landing pages.  You may end up with several groups of duplicate pages where each group has its own representative organic page.
3. Place the canonical tag in the head section of each duplicate landing page.  The canonical tag on each landing page will point to its organic representative. Code for the canonical tag looks like this:

With the canonical tags in place, all your actual and potential back link authority is transferring to preferred organic landing pages.

Strategy to Build Organic Traffic Using Paid Search Landing Pages

As you have time, page by page, you can build out these duplicate pages into powerful organic search landing pages.  We will assume duplicate landing pages are targeting different paid search campaigns.  Content for these pages are slightly different in that they aim to convert a different audience, whether it be based on keyword search, geographic area, time of day, etc.  Let’s assume you did a great landing web page design which may follow this example from John Saddington at Church Create.

Your headlines and content above the fold should be customized for the specific audience.  Since this is slightly different from an existing organic landing page, we will optimize this page to target a variation of that existing page.  We will turn this marginally different page into a completely different page without affecting is as a paid landing page.  The areas we have to work with include:

1. Title tag
2. Meta description tag
3. Content below the fold

Define the theme of this page and choose your targeted keyword phrase(s).  Create an optimized title tag and description.  Make your keyword phrase(s) prominent in the title.  Gear your description to convert your target audience, but be sure to include your keyword phrases here too.

Below your current content, write out 200 or more words of optimized content.  Keep the code for this text simple.  200-400 words of text should not add noticeable load time to the page.  Human visitors may or may not scroll down to read the text, but search engines will definitely read it.  This should be highly optimized with excellent information geared toward or even about the target audience.  This text can be used to further qualify the audience. Talk about their interests and problems.  Break the text apart into paragraphs with H2 coded sub-headings.

Once your content is complete, remove the canonical tag and add this page to your sitemap.  Create links to this page from other pages of the site.  If appropriate, link to this page from your navigation.

Enjoy free traffic on this paid search landing page.  By tackling these pages one by one, you can make transforming your paid landing pages into organic landing pages a long term strategy.

The post Landing Pages, Not Just For PPC. Hello SEO. appeared first on Blend SEO.

1. Common sense says to optimize everything you can. Title (company/organization), description, categories, additional details, and coupons, etc.  Anywhere you can enter data – optimize it (but don’t spam).
2. Reviews – this is another easy one.  The hard part is making it happen. Come up with a way to get customers to write reviews.  This could be a contest, discount, freebie, etc rewarding people who write reviews (good or bad – just keep it honest).OK, but where?You can check the topped rank sites to see where they have reviews that get pulled into their Google Place page. Provide a list for your customers of places where they can write reviews.  Obviously, they can do it right in Google on your Place page.  That’s always a good option.
3. Citations – this is anywhere your business location is mentioned.  There does not have to be a link.  Google reads content and remembers.  If you business is listed on websites for your local chamber of commerce, your local newspaper, your local  phone directory, these are all good spots where Google can find you.

The post Local SEO: 3 Ways to Boost Your Local Business Rankings appeared first on Blend SEO.

See the video demonstration below of Yahoo’s instant search product on AllTheWeb.

The post Google Instant Search Produced by Yahoo in 2005 appeared first on Blend SEO.

SEO copy software – The Death of Search Engine Optimization

Reciprocal link building became widespread by webmasters and SEOs in the 90’s and continues today.  Some people do it manually one link at a time, while others use automated programs to search prospects, contact them, check for the back link and publish the reciprocal link.  Some internet marketers sell reciprocal link building software while others sell against it. In some cases it will get you penalized by Google.  But in other cases, you can find websites that dominate their targeted keywords whose backlinks are filled with insestual reciprocal links. You may wonder…

• “If I trade links with someone who emailed me with a reciprocal link offer, will it hurt or help me?”
• “Can I use a reciprocal link building program without penalizing my website?”
• “I think its OK if they link to me, but should I link to them?”

To find out the answer to your questions, forget everything you ever heard or think you know about SEO.  Think about your own website visitors.  Why do your visitors go to your website?  Would someone on your website be interested in reading what is published on another website?  Remember the term “Surf the web”? For those of us who do, we would go to an interesting website, read a bit, see an enticing link and follow it.  Read some more there, until we either get bored with it and hit the back button, or come across another enticing link and read some more there.  Those were the days before link building…before the knowledge of link affects on search engines polluted the activities of webmasters.

Go back to the ideals of these pre-link building days.

Create links for your visitors and you will be rewarded for quality outbound and inbound links.

That is one of the goals of Google.  “No follow” code for links addressed some of the spam link building activities.  Google algorithm updates over the years have aimed at rewarding or penalizing visitor benefiting links and spammy links made just for the purpose of having one more link.

Reciprocal Link Directory: Good or Bad Idea?

Sometimes webmasters would publish a list of related references that they respected. However, unless the sole purpose of your website is to be directory, it makes no sense to create an index of outbound references about every subject thinkable.  DMOZ and Yahoo Directory already covered this.  If however your website directory is full of online resources that are pertinent to your website and valuable to your visitors, such as a list of local vendors for something you provide expertise, then that makes sense.

If a resource on your website is indeed valuable to your visitors, it is likely valuable to visitors of other similar websites… and it would make sense for those websites to link to your resource.  It would also make sense for you to link to it from prominent pages of your own website.  Search engines can read relevance in the language.  Search engines like Google know what words are related to others because they read content from all over the web and remember which words appear together (this is called a semantic relationship between keywords).  Search engines like Google determine the value of a directory (or any other web page) based on inbound links.  By linking out to other excellent resources, you can create a valuable resource.  This is the original idea behind a directory, and it still holds true, as long as you make it a good one for your particular visitors.

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