Link building is never easy and is probably the most frustrating task an SEO has to undertake. There are many different tools and techniques designed to help you be a more effective link builder, however if you use them without a plan or in isolation of each other you’ll soon find that it just doesn’t work.

Whenever you start a link building campaign you have to seriously consider the signals you are presenting to Google, including velocity, anchor text, sources and content. What kind of link patterns would you associate with a natural profile? How would these links be developed and where would they come from?

It doesn’t take a genius, just some logical thought and application. Think about it, when an online source suddenly gains a lot of links, how does this normally happen? You can bet Google are thinking about what these signals might be and how they can develop their algorithm to benefit websites that display such signals.

I am not endorsing the ‘build it and they will come’ mentality, I am simply encouraging some thought around the ‘natural’ offsite signals that might occur when something does go viral and/or acquire a lot of strong quality links in a reasonable amount of time.

This post is slightly linked to one I wrote on YOUmoz (not yet published) which considers the amount of budget wasted on isolated link building techniques.

The Viral Content Myth

At Branded3 we spend a lot of time trying to understand what offsite signals give us the biggest impact, it’s not always easy, but one thing I constantly have an issue with is ‘viral’ content. What is it? Why does certain content just work?

With not far off a decade in the SEO industry I have come to some conclusions regarding viral content, and that is:

The success of viral or link worthy content is more dependent on the publisher, than the true quality or appeal of the content

I believe many work under the false assumption that if they create something really awesome everyone will come along and link to it. The truth is unless you get the right sources to talk about it, it is never going to get the links it deserves.

It’s all about trust, think about it…. If you see a tweet/stumble/Facebook share linking to what seems like an interesting title, are you more likely to share it if the source is a trusted one? My guess is that you would.

I see it all the time on this blog and others that I read, some of my poorest content does better than much better articles simply because the right person has got hold of it and shared it with their community. There is some great content on SEOmoz, however the author of the article will often be the determining factor of how well liked or linked to it is. The more popular the author is the more popular the content, regardless of the actual quality.

The bottom line is trust matters, and if you don’t have it then you need to find someone who does and reach out to them. It’s time consuming, disheartening and difficult to master, but it is an absolute necessity.

Knowing this will change the way you link build, it will change the way you execute your viral efforts.

So how do we apply this? I want to run through a typical link building process we use to develop what we believe are the best possible offsite signals.

Creating the Right Signals

Let’s first take a look at a process chart I put together, then I’ll take you through each step and the reasoning behind them.

This process is set up to create the signals Google pick up on if you were to create a viral piece of content on your site, and/or that same content was referenced by an authoritative source somewhere else on the web.

Social/Content Idea

We have already established one of the determining factors of well linked to content is the source or publisher, however the content that you create still needs to be of interest to your audience whether it’s an interesting statistic, infographic or contention opinion.

You need to decide not only what type of content will be successful through social channels, but what type of content is going to attract links. Sure social sharing is fast becoming an important signal but if you want the maximum impact on your rankings it has to appeal to the linkerati not just those who share on Twitter and Facebook.

That’s why infographics are so popular because they are republished all over the web, with a link Bingo

Sourcing the Publisher

I must stress at this point, if you are fortunate enough to be the authority, the voice that everyone listens to and links to, then you don’t have to worry about this step, whatever content you decide to go with can go on your own domain.

However, the majority of us aren’t fortunate enough to be the authority, or we have a business that is never going to be conceived as commercially unbiased. So for the majority we have to highlight the authority sources in our industry and reach out to them. If your industry is particularly niche, then look to local and national newspapers and reach out to journalists that write in relevant columns.

If you’re persistent there is always a way to find these authority sources, maybe you won’t be in a strong enough position to reach for the top sources, so start with some mid-level players and work your way up. If you have an adequately sized budget money always talks.

Getting the Content Live

The next few steps can be rolled up into one, and let’s face it, there’s not much to discuss around getting your content live, however there are a few tips I’d like you to consider:

1 – Agree on the content beforehand with the publisher, this will save you a lot of time rewriting and amending

2 – Use a quote from your company somewhere in the article if possible, others will no doubt write and refer back to the publisher, you want a reason for them to link back to you too

Once the content has gone live you need to seamlessly move into the next few phases.

Leverage Relationships

Any SEO or Link Builder should be continually developing relationships within the blogsphere and reaching out to bloggers of all sizes within the industry they are working in. When your content goes live on the ‘authority’ source you can then leverage these relationships to develop guaranteed discussion and links.

Either re write the story, or ask the blogger to write and comment on the source from their own perspective, obviously attributing the links in a way most beneficial to your cause.

It’s important that these posts go live within days of the main resource going live, freshness is key to getting the maximum benefit.

If you’re struggling for bloggers to help you try BLU.

Syndication

Now I know there are mixed feelings about this in the SEO community, however I personally believe creating ‘noise’ links through press releases and syndication can be beneficial as part of the complete strategy.

Whenever you get a link on a ‘top’ resource, that article will go on to be scraped, hundreds if not thousands of times. It will also be re-reported all over the web on websites differing in terms of quality.

Google knows this, don’t you think they will consider it when weighing up offsite signals? I do, in fact I have seen much better results from using this as part of the strategy.

How do I use it? Re write articles around the subject matter, link back to the main resource as well as the target page on your website and spread the content around the web using press/article distribution. Use differing anchor text in each article, you’re not trying to Google bomb your site, just helping to recreate what happens when something naturally gets spread around the web.

Creating Social Signals

We all know that the social graph is growing in strength in terms of its impact on rankings, nowhere near as strong as the link graph but we know it’s a factor none the less.

Just like with bloggers you need to be continually reaching out to people via social media, constantly expanding your circle of influence. Then when your grand link building plan goes live you can send it their way and hopefully rely on some very influential shares.

Due to the viral nature of some of this strategy it is important to monitor your Google alerts, and contact any sites that have failed to give you a link. I am of the opinion that once content has been crawled new links put in it don’t count half as much, however I still think it is worth the effort to drop a short email to all those who fail to add a link, especially if they are a potential source of traffic.

There are three key points I’d like people to get from this post:

1) Creating link worthy content is as much about the publisher as it is the quality of content, trust is everything

2) Don’t use link building techniques in isolation, one strategy alone is never going to give you the results you want

3) Try and make all this happen in the space of a week, it has to resemble links and content that have a viral nature

Oh and when my YOUmoz post finally does go live, please head over there and give it a thumbs up There are some pretty interesting stats in there.

As always I’d love to hear your thoughts and any strategies that you find work.

Before we get into this, Happy New Year! I hope it’s a prosperous one for all.

I wanted to start the New Year off talking about image search, mainly because I think it’s a massively underused method for driving search traffic. In the last year I have had the privilege of working on a few image focussed SEO campaigns and the results I’v seen are unreal.

How unreal?? 50 – 500,000 visits per month in 6 months? Oh yes.

Of course there is a major caveat to image search and that is some industries are particularly difficult, if not impossible to optimise for, however the ones that aren’t hold major riches.

So let’s begin by going over some basic optimisation advice, and then we can delve into a bit of strategy.

The Rules to Image Optimisation

Text, Text, Text

Yup, just like on page SEO your text must be optimised. Where?

> The file name
> Alt attribute
> Image Title
> Page Title
> Text around the image

You have probably read the above many times before so I am not going to bore you with the details, however there is one word of warning, don’t just stuff random keywords into these areas, not good.

Try and be as descriptive as possible and specific to the image, not just in your alt attribute but in every part of the page that matters.

Stick With JPG

Out of all the testing we did our JPG images always performed the best, this is probably due to the fact they are the most common and can be read by all browsers. Plus you can easily compress them reducing load time on image heavy pages.

We try and stick to between 1KB and 60KB for all our images, anything over 70KB tends to take too long to load and never performs as well.

First Past the Post! The Freshness Boost!

It has been mentioned a couple of times over the last couple of years, but in my opinion this is massive.

Even if you have a fairly new website you can still benefit from publishing fresh unique images, and you can rank not only on image search but within global search as well.

Make your images fresh, make them as unique as possible, and push them out on a fresh article, fully optimised and Bam! You’re onto a winner. You could also consider using tools like Google Trends to take advantage of search spikes, works very well.

Amount of Images on a Page

SEO’s in the past have advised against having too many images on a page, however in the last 12 months I have found the complete opposite, consistently the pages with the most images on have outperformed the ones with one or two on, massively outperformed.

Keep your images as clean as possible, reducing file sizes and if you’re using WordPress, super cache and lazy load are perfect plugins.

So my opinion, more is better.

A Quick Case Study

Now I am can’t give you the full details due to client confidentiality, however I can display the potential in terms of search traffic.

After taking advantage of some celebrity booms towards the end of last year we managed the following through image search alone on a fashion website;

[image of traffic spike]

This website only launched at the end of 2010, barely had 20 links and yet was capable of driving over 1 million visitors in 4 months, result!

Think of an Angle

Unless your aim is to drive up the amount you can charge for ads, you’re going to have to seriously consider the type of traffic you target.

Here are a few examples:

Clothing

I worked on a project with a clothes retailer, one of the first things we did was to roam the web for celebrities that were wearing their clothes or clothes that we’re similar. We would then Photoshop the images enough to make them unique and then publish them on the blog, fully optimised.

Result > Tons of search traffic for fashion tips around a particular celebrity, conversion rate? Around 0.3% not great but the traffic was easy to get.

Cosmetics

At the end of 2010 I worked with a cosmetics website, they had some great beauty and hair products but their image search was zero.

So, first things first, get the blog set up, begin writing tons of tips (with images) about hair and makeup techniques. You’d be surprised how much search there is in this area, obviously not as much as the celebrity space but enough to make a material difference to the online performance of this business.

Result > Drove an additional 10,000 visitors per month through image search, increased Twitter and Facebook following by over 1000% and continue to benefit the business in terms of conversions and revenue.

Don’t Forget The Links!

Think about it, if you are pushing out fresh, interesting content that is ranking highly in global and image search, the natural consequence is a lot of people finding your content and hey presto! Linking back to it.

Seriously, ranking highly on Google with interesting fresh content is one of the best link building techniques there is, in the last 12 months using these exact same techniques I have managed to secure links on sites like The Daily Mail, TMZ, The Huffington Post and even CNN!

If you are in an industry that lends itself to image search then you absolutely have to execute this, if you are a news website pumping out fresh material you need to seriously consider the value of image search. Over the course of 2011, out of 3 websites I worked with, we drove over 3 million unique visitors via image search, it’s a channel that needs giving a little more respect in my opinion.

Well that’s it, another year has come and gone, and what a year it’s been for all those involved in Search! Panda kills websites from February, Google removing our precious keyword data and the demise of Yahoo Site Explorer . Sounds pretty grim, however I personally think this year has been transformational from a Search point of view, a lot of the theories spoken of in 2010 have now been confirmed, social signals are playing a bigger role, Places optimisation becomes more important, Google + attempting to take on Facebook, the list really does go on.

In my opinion 2011 has created more opportunities within the industry, sure it’s pushed us out of our comfort zone, but that’s a good thing. As SEO’s we now have to become more focussed on page structure, content quality, click through rates, bounce rates, trust factors and developing a site into a brand not just building anchor text links.

Yes Google still has quite a way to go in terms of search quality but I think 2011 has seen positive changes in the SERP’s, changes that make the job an SEO more challenging and diverse.

So with all this in mind I thought it appropriate to put together a roundup of all the key elements that have made this year what it is, in my opinion.

Let me warn you before you continue, this is going to be a monster, I’m talking 3000 words +, please do not go any further without a warm drink and a few snacks.

The problem with detailing such a busy year is deciding where to start, so much has happened, however I’ll follow some advice from one of my favourite reads this year ‘Eat That Frog‘ and, well, eat that frog/panda!

The Panda Bomb!!

So, way back at the beginning of the year Google released a post about a new update that had rolled out across US sites.

If your traffic looked like this;

…You were no doubt hit by Panda and saw anywhere between a 15% – 60% drop in organic traffic from Google.

This update was designed to weed out sites with low quality pages, however what defines ‘low quality’ is still very much up for debate, but here are some general guidelines.

> Keep content as unique as possible

> Try to add value instead of rewriting the news

> Delete old content that adds no value

> Increase social signals and trust

> Focus on usability and page structure

> Minimise ads and affiliate links above the fold

The update soon hit the UK and the rest of Europe during April/May leaving many webmasters wondering what was going on, the confusion was based on a couple of simple misconceptions; many thought Panda was set to destroy websites with duplicate content, so article directories and scraper sites, right? The problem was this was hitting websites that were in no way duplications, not internally or externally, so what was going on? The second misconception was that this was set to hit on a page level, so if you had some poor pages somewhere on your site, then these would be dropped. However, Panda was based on a threshold, if your website tipped it then your whole site was hit, not just the crap scraped articles from 2005.

The truth is Google only wants to deliver the most relevant, most trusted, most authoritative results. Panda analyses pages based on the above guidelines and decides where domains should rank depending on how they meet these guidelines.

In May I wrote about City Visitor and how they had been badly hit by Panda, this was based on referrals some of our clients get from them:

City visitor is basically a directory with very little in terms of content, why would Google rank this when they believe they do a better job with their places listings?

My guess is this was tactical, but it gives some insight into what types of content Google considers to be ‘low quality’.

As SEO’s we need to understand these factors so we can best advise clients on how to structure the pages of their site, to convince them to invest in content and to help them design pages that will not only attract search traffic, but that also add value to the web as a whole.

The JC Penney Disaster!

Towards the beginning of the year someone thought it would be a good idea to ‘out’ JC Penney for link spam, the story went up on the New York Times, and the same day Google cracked them with a penalty across all page levels.

Now this was unlucky for JC Penney, had they been a smaller brand it wouldn’t have been front page news and Google would have unlikely taken any action, however this was a warning to all major brands out there who are actively utilising SEO as a marketing channel. It’s surprising how many brands are running the risk of being called out because they won’t give SEO the investment it needs, instead they pay peanuts and get a load of crap paid links.

The mistake JC Penney made was stupid, the links were in no way defensible, but the worst thing about the whole affair was that they paid an agency to go out there and do it!

Big brands need to take SEO seriously, invest in getting the right things implemented by the right people; short cuts simply aren’t acceptable when you are under the microscope.

Social Signals Really Work..

In late 2010 we found that tweets which linked through to pages seemed to give a ranking boost, we utilised it well to influence rankings over a number of core terms with nearly a 100% success rate. This year we are seeing more and more that socially active domains are able to rank much faster and much easier than sites that don’t. It’s still a very difficult thing to measure and allocating budget to it is a challenge, but building social referrals and mentions to the pages of your site is a sign of trust and does have a positive impact on your overall SEO strategy.

One thing we know for sure, Google wants to give weight to social and referral signals;

“Content recommended by friends and acquaintances is often more relevant than content from strangers. For example, a movie review from an expert is useful, but a movie review from a friend who shares your tastes can be even better. Because of this, +1′s from friends and contacts can be a useful signal to Google when determining the relevance of your page to a user’s query. This is just one of many signals Google may use to determine a page’s relevance and ranking, and we’re constantly tweaking and improving our algorithm to improve overall search quality. For +1′s, as with any new ranking signal, we are starting carefully and learning how those signals affect search quality.”

This statement is specifically referring to +1′s, however we have seen positive impacts from Stumble, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and other social sites.

How these signals work is still not fully understood, there was talk of a ‘socialrank’ around a year ago, however nothing more has been confirmed on the exact signals. Personally, in my opinion, social signals seem to be noise signals, it’s a quantity game, the more people recommend the better the results.

Having said that I do believe authority and relevance will work its way into the mix, how popular are the accounts pushing the content, how old are they, how well used are they?

This will have to be worked out before too much weight is given to social signals; otherwise it is too easily manipulated.

Google’s Social Push

The last section brings us on nicely to Google’s attack on the social space and using referral data to drive their rankings.

Back in June Google launched ‘Google Plus‘, a social platform looking to take on Facebook, with one subtle difference; Google understand that not every relationship is the same, you may choose to share things with family that you wouldn’t share with colleagues, for this reason Google promotes circles. Circles are made up of groups of people within your network that you can separate and share on different levels, a brilliant idea, although I believe a social network stands and falls on simplicity and this may hinder world domination.

Anyway, that’s enough of what Google + is, how is it going to affect our SEO efforts?

To be honest we are struggling to find any correlation between Google + shares and rankings at the moment. Google have said they will be slowly integrating the data into their algorithm but as yet I personally haven’t noticed a change in organic results. However, others have tried testing Google +1′s with some pretty compelling results.

I think there is quite a long way to go before Google are able to gauge enough information to drop the link graph, if they ever could at all. Google +1 sharing suffers the same problem as any other signal, it’s easily manipulated. 2012 will be interesting and no doubt Google + will become more and more important.

Googlebot Capability

SEO’s and javascript have never really mixed due to Google’s inability to successfully crawl and index content behind Ajax and javascript. However, Matt Cutts announced around a month ago, that Googlebot now has the ability to do this, and straight away Facebook and disqus comments were popping up in the SERP’s.

“Googlebots, or the spiders that crawl web pages, are now reading Facebook comments on websites just like any other text content and the more interesting part is that you can also search the text of these comments using regular Google search.”

Should we leave best practice and start dynamically inserting content with JS? Well there are some that think it’s not an issue anymore, however there are plenty that still consider good old html to be the best way to feed Google your content. As for me, I need to see a lot more evidence to consider abandoning best practices.

There was a good test carried out here which basically shows Google is capable of a lot more than we think, however this isn’t always displayed in the SERP’s, if at all.

Taking all this into account I think it is very important that we fully understand what Googlebot can and can’t do, and what information it is collecting and counting from our pages.

With 140+ thumbs up on SEOmoz you have probably read this already but if not, take some time out to read Mike King’s post on SEOmoz about the ‘Headless Browser, some great insight and ideas, also check out the comments, very good.

The key takeaway from the post was that we need to be more focussed on the user experience; Google has the ability to understand what our pages look like, how a user may interact with them and, as we have known for a while, what sits above the fold.

Due to the amount of rubbish in the SERP’s Google is not actively basing rankings on usability; however you can bet as Google gets more sophisticated and as the Panda algorithm develops, user experience is going to be a key factor.

Google Freshness

Freshness is massive at the minute in my opinion, but not because of the new results we’re seeing for certain terms, instead I think (and have done for 18 months now) that the freshness of pages we get links from has a massive impact on rankings.

I posted back in March about links in fresh content and then again about ‘FreshRank’.

Historically SEO’s have used PageRank, MozRank, Link Authority or some other link based metric to decide where to build links, this is dated in my opinion and the new formula should be a mix of domain authority and quality, fresh content. These two factors play a huge role in the rankings we have managed to achieve in the last couple of years.

I am pretty sure that Google is using a ‘freshness’ score to help decide how important links are, but the more important factor of fresh link building is that they seem to last!

Add social campaigns to your fresh link building campaign, plus a few pieces of viral content on top of that and you’ll almost have an unstoppable mix. Lazy SEO will almost always lose to this ..

New Google Analytics + Features

We got a brand new Analytics interface this year with some nifty new features to help us optimise our campaigns.

Mashable do a great job of breaking down the top 10 features, however there are a few that I particularly like.

Multi-Channel Funnels

Multi-channel funnels are a set of data to help you understand the conversion journey. Historically analytics packages have credited either the first or last interaction with the conversion, however a visitor may have hit your site multiple times through multiple channels in the course of a conversion, multi-channel funnels allows you to see all of this data!

Since the day it landed we have been collecting data to understand the full value of SEO, not just the first or last conversion value but any assists, quickly finding out that natural search is anywhere between 30 – 60% more effective at driving leads/sales.

Read more about it here.

Speed Reporting As Standard

In times gone by you would have to add a little extra code to get site speed data from analytics, with the new version it comes as standard.

Not only is this important for making sure your site is fully optimised but it is also excellent for auditing your site. You may be getting a high bounce rate on a certain page, or you may see a drop in conversions, in both cases speed maybe an issue and now it easily established.

Social Engagement

With so many businesses eager to get on board the social train its great to see Google coming up with a tool that helps us analyse social interactions.

Google analytics integrates with ShareThis and AddThis to itemise social activity, allowing you to see what content has been shared and how much, essential for optimising your social strategy.

Google Places

In my opinion many businesses are failing to unlock the full potential of Google places, either they are dismissing it or are too lazy to do a proper job of making it work. Over the past 12 months we have had significant success attracting location based traffic through Google Places, and with 53% of mobile searches having local intent it’s something you cannot afford to miss out on.

At the end of 2010 Google changed the layout of Google places giving it more prominence on first page results, since then they have been gradually optimising it, making it more and more important for local businesses to be listed. Google has no intention of rolling any of this back so we need to get on board and optimise.

There are a few basic elements of Places optimisation:

1 – Claim your business

2 – Name, Address and Phone Number must be accurate and match any citations

3 – Use relevant keywords within listing

4 – Build citations on relevant directories

5 – Get reviews on Google!

Some also claim that good on page optimisation on your main site and external links are still a factor, but the above are fundamental. You can read more about it in this great Google Places Guide.

Intellectual Page Selection

It used to be that whatever page you built links to, that page would rank, however towards the end of 2010 this changed and has been a consistent feature since.

Google will now take into account your internal site structure, specifically your internal anchor text to decide which pages should rank, you may have a load of links with the anchor text ‘floppy slippers’ to your homepage, but if you have a category page with the internal anchor text of ‘floppy slippers’ that is going to be the page that ranks.

I wrote about it here, back in April, you need to focus on creating relevant hubs on your site leaving your homepage to deal with all your brand anchor text.

Yahoo Site Explorer

Around 3 weeks ago Yahoo Site Explorer finally gave up the ghost….. A moment of silence please…….

Yahoo Site Explorer has been around since 2005 and although it wasn’t the most user-friendly of link tools, it was certainly the quickest to update and often gave great insights into competitor strategies.

It has been rolled up into Bing Webmaster Tools; however we’re still coming to terms with the loss and haven’t delved too deeply into Bing.

What Happened to Keyword Data!

In October Google decided they wanted to make life difficult for the SEO world by encrypting search sessions of anybody signed in to Google.com.

Apparently this was for privacy reasons … cough!BS! … but is proving a bit of nightmare since it rolled out. Across all the sites I work with the average amount of keyword data affected in 12%, that’s a lot of data for websites that get 100′s of thousands of visits every day.

As it stands we don’t know fully how this will impact but it is still rolling out and the percentages could get higher!

It’s The Industry To Be In!

I honestly believe the Search & Digital Marketing industry is the most exciting place to be in this day and age, it is fast moving and a constant challenge to keep up to date with, but the diversity appeals to me and to a lot of other people who move into the industry on a monthly basis.

The recent Search Benchmark report suggested companies are looking to increase their online spend over the next 12 months in SEO, Social and PPC.

Where else can you reach an audience as targeted as with search marketing?

This is just one of the very positive industry reports with another suggesting SEO is the marketing channel to rule them all!

32% of small businesses were asked ‘if they had to put all their budget and time into one channel, which would it be?’ the answer? S E O..

This all makes for a very exciting 2012, I know at Branded3 we’re seeing massive growth in SEO, Social Media and Online PR and as the market place becomes more educated so will the need for transparent quality services.

Anyway, I think I better leave it there, this blog post is taking its toll but I hope it makes up a little for the lack of content in 2011; I have plans to be a lot more active in 2012.

So, if I have missed anything important (which I’m sure I have) please add it in the comments with any relevant links, but for now it’s goodbye until 2012, hope everyone who celebrates it has a great Christmas and happy New Year! For those that don’t have a great holiday!

Until next year……

Wow, how could I forget rich snippets!!!! Please see the following, massively important;

Rich Snippets Everywhere

Google’s Take

Rich Snippet Must Read

Just heard the news that Interflora seem to have won their drawn out battle with Marks & Spencer over bidding on their brand name through Google Adwords.

You can read the full judgement here and Patrick’s thoughts on it over at Blogstorm.

From day one Interflora have been insistent about the fact M&S should not be allowed to piggyback on their brand and reading into the above judgement it seems the EU courts agree with them too. The High Court in London needs to uphold the decision (which they ‘almost’ always do), once this happens it will spell the end of brand bidding in the UK and Europe at least.

Personally I’m not a fan of brand bidding, companies work hard to establish themselves as authorities and to develop a trustworthy brand, why should others use ‘cheap’ tactics to piggyback?? Would be good to know everyone’s thoughts on this? In my experience brand bidding is extremely unprofitable and the only people that are ever going to benefit are Google.

You can read more on the Interflora blog, here is a snippet:

Interflora is delighted by the judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union which today ruled in their favour. This ruling will enable brand holders across Europe to deliver quality service and ensure that trade marks guarantee the origin of the goods bought by consumers online. Keyword advertising is a very powerful tool and so it is vital for consumer protection that internet search results take consumers immediately to the brands they were looking for.

This judgment goes much further than previous rulings by saying that the use by a competitor of a keyword identical to the trade mark in relation to identical goods or services has an adverse effect on the investment in the trade mark where that use substantially interferes with the brand’s reputation and its ability to attract and retain consumers. Further, a competitor may be construed as free-riding on a brand when that competitor uses the brand owner’s trade mark as a paid for keyword to deliver sponsored advertising along side natural search results. This is exactly what Interflora and other global brands have been arguing for many years.

However, Interflora acknowledges that the judgment of the Court of Justice needs to be applied by the High Court in the UK to determine the question of Marks & Spencer’s liability. This is expected in the course of 2012.

If you run an ecommerce site you will have no doubt been frustrated with Google in the past due to the small amount of data it’s been able to provide concerning your conversion funnel. Many will have turned to coremetrics or omniture, however Google have pulled their finger out and changed their attribution model and are giving much more data.

Google multi-channel funnels is a game changer in my opinion, I just want to flick through a few features but you can read more about it here and here

If you have ecommerce set up you will need to navigate to the new analytics view and click in the ‘my conversions’ drop down, select multi funnels and you’re on your way to analytics heaven.

Which Channel is assisting??

Most analytics systems credit conversions based on the first or last click within a session.

First click = PPC > Organic > PPC > Referral > Conversion (PPC Conversion)

Last click = Organic > PPC > Referral > Organic > Conversion (Organic Conversion)

So that’s how it usually works but what if you had the ability to see every player in this chain, every channel that was assisting in pushing conversions to your site? This is what Multi Channel Funnels does;

This pretty chart shows which channels assisted more often.

You can also break this down into source/medium, the chart above shows Google organic produces 8390 conversions from the last click, however it assists in another 6027! Just using the last click is seriously undervaluing the traffic.

But hey what about the first click, how did the visitor first find the site?

Again Google organic has 8849 last click conversions but 9724 on the first click!

Popular Conversion Paths

Again this is broken down nicely:

You can also see time lag between first interaction and conversion as well as path length in terms of clicks.

It’s all absolutely priceless and in terms of us SEO’s whether in house or in an agency it is a massive help in terms of proving the power of Google organic traffic.

Every ecommerce site I have looked at so far shows Google organic traffic is anywhere between 75% – 125% undervalued!

Happy days Seriously you need to read about this.

After reviewing some of clients traffic this morning we came across an interesting trend.

Most people in the SEO field understand how powerful links on City Visitor are but they also know how much traffic they can potentially drive, especially from local terms.

Now I have no qualms with the links, they still work well but it seems to me like they have been delivered a Panda Hammer.

This is a screen shot from one of our clients showing referring traffic from the domain;

By the look of this anyone paying for links or placements on an ongoing basis need to rethink how much they want to invest particularly those doing it for traffic alone, as an SEO boost the links still work well.

This is just one client so it is possible it could just relate to this niche, however we have links in 84 different locations so it’s definitely not a location based problem.

First Google Places, now Panda…….. ouch

First of all let me apologise for the lack of activity on here recently, life is pretty busy at the moment and despite having lots to say the blog has had to take a back seat, however over the last month a lot has happened in the world of search, therefore lots to talk about.

One thing we have been noticing recently is how effective hubs are at generating rankings for core keywords, hubs have always been used to increase relevance but very recently they seem to have been given a little more weight.

What Do I Mean By a Hub?

At one point in the not so distant past if you wanted to rank you would create a well optimised landing page and link build to it. Depending on how competitive the term was you could probably get a top 5 ranking within a few month.

A hub is creating the landing page but also creating 5 – 10 relevant pages linked to from the landing page all using variations of the main term. Creating hubs on your site needs to be a priority at the moment as sites that do it are benefiting from higher rankings and more traffic.

E.g.

If you wanted to target the keyword ‘dog clippers’ fly over to the Google keyword tool and see what kind of hubs you can create:

In terms of structure it might look something like this;

You can create multiple hubs on your domain targeting any areas relevant to your niche.

Where to Target Links

Around a year ago when you only had one landing page you would have built links into the one page with variations of the keywords, however I personally feel the best way to link build is by targeting all pages within the hub with the most relevant anchor text to that particular page.

How Could This Work On An E Commerce Site?

E Commerce sites tend to have thousands of products under one category, do they really need to link build to thousands of pages?

Of course not, it wouldn’t be scalable, however you could break some of your main categories into sub categories and link build that way, just how I have set out above.

Creating more variation in your on page optimisation as well as the anchor text will produce better results across the full keyword range and assist in increasing relevant traffic.

We’ve known since 2009 that Google fully supports the cross domain rel=canonical and more recently it has transpired that the canonical may be faster and more effective than a 301, the traditional way for SEO’s to point the right link juice at the right places.

Seriously, there are a number of ways this can be used to boost SEO efforts and deliver the right signals to the right pages.

Getting Social Signals To Boring Pages

If you run an ecommerce site selling ‘dog leads’ you are likely going to struggle to get any social attention, however now Twitter and Facebook links are part of the algo, and from what we are seeing a pretty significant factor, you really want to be leveraging this to boost your rankings, so what do you do?

Well, start by making sure you have a blog with all the usual social buttons, write a post, something catchy with lot’s of images, ’5 most expensive dog leads’… maybe.

Push this around your social power accounts, share it on Twitter, Facebook, Stumble etc…… Now this post has plenty of social POW, all helping it rank

But hold on, the page we really want to rank higher is our ‘Premium Leads’ range

So…. We simply use the canonical tag to pass on all that lovely social juice! The User get’s the quirky content but Google credits your premium range.

Now this could be considered a little bit ‘grey hat’ but you could put things in place to minimise any risk, ‘This post was written on the back of research by our Premium Leads department’… I think you know what I am getting at.

Building Links Before Products Hit

My fellow SEO and colleague at Branded3 gave a great presentation on getting the most out of SEO specifically for Ecommerce sites, part of the presentation focussed on building links to blog posts targeting products that you know are coming to the market place but not yet released.

When it comes to new product releases Google seem to have a ‘first past the post’ rule, if you get the best page up and linked to the quickest then you win in the long run.

So you optimise and link to the blog posts months before it is launched and then 301 once the actual product page is live! Geniuous and works well, trust me.

However the user loses that smashing post on the blog, well they do if you 301 but if the canonical works better, hey presto!

Manipulation

Of course this leaves the door wide open to manipulation and there are many who would consider the above, grey if not black hat, however the fact remains it works well and Google allow it, at least for now.

SEO’s have been buying canonical links for ages, however with this recent research you can bet it is going to become more and more common. Are Google going to start punishing sites that buy canonical links

I have had very little time to blog over the last couple of months, the industry seems to be booming even more so than a few years ago which means I am kept very busy!

Despite the lack of posts (other than quick news updates) there has been loads I want to talk about, Google continues to evolve and the rankings continue to keep fluctuating, due to this SEO’s are more often than not having to think outside the box.

So this post will be a bit of a round up but also my view on what it takes to be a ‘top ranked website with huge traffic’.

You see, there are a lot of people who rank well on Google, a few big keywords rank in the middle of the first page and their overall search traffic is respectable, however if they want to seriously increase traffic & rankings they need a strong search strategy that incorporates link building, social, PR, content and branding. Without this it is very difficult to take the top spot of the SERP’s and dominate longtail traffic.

Google Panda, E-commerce & Creating Great Content

Google Panda hasn’t rolled out in the UK yet, however as I mentioned in my last post we can see the impact when segmenting US Google traffic to a website, in many cases the impact has been pretty brutal and sites affected need to address the issues before it comes to the UK.

The issues are simple, Google has devalued sites with vast amounts of duplicate content that can be found across the web on multiple domains. Unfortunately this seems to be impacting e-commerce websites who’s product descriptions tend to be copied from a large data base and published across the web.

This is basically Google saying “we want better content at the top of the SERP’s’ and if e-commerce sites want to be top ranked sites they have to embrace this and figure out how to develop unique content across potentially thousands of products.

Social Signals

It’s just about common knowledge now that Google are incorporating social signals into their ranking algorithm and the recent launch of +1 sends a clear message that this is the direction they will continue to go down.

Again any site that wants to be a ‘top’ site needs to embrace this and adapt their SEO efforts accordingly.

Unique Domains Linking

This is a factor that has been around a long long time, however building unique domains isn’t something that happens overnight and if you want to be at the top you need to make it your business to know how you can develop your link profile quickly.

There was a time when building links too fast was seen as a negative signal and this still kind of applies to newer/thin sites, however once your site has a little authority and plenty of depth, then is the time to open the flood gates and attract links as quickly as you can.

Sure you could go out and buy a load of text links, it may get you on the first page but we’re not talking about first page we’re talking about being on top, maybe you can get on top with bought links in an industry that has very little or no competition, but in competitive industries I would save the money and spend it being more creative.

So if you’re trying to decide on what your strategy should look like in 2011 here are my recommendations;

Twitter Campaigns

After numerous tests I can fully confirm Tweets are a ranking signal, on more than 10 occasions now I have seen tweets that include a link to a page, boost the rankings of the target page, however you’re not just looking for 1 or 2 tweets you’re looking for hundreds if not thousands.

It may take a bit of time to do this but:

- competitions
- giveaways
- petitions

Are great ways to generate tons of tweets, competitions on twitter are becoming more and more popular and can generate a lot of activity, they are certainly my favourite way to leverage tweets.

Facebook Sharing

I blogged on the power of Facebook just before Christmas and still firmly believe this will play a big role in rankings moving forward, in fact Tom Critchlow recently published some correlation data on SEOmoz about how facebook shares correlate as well as linking domains to Google rankings. Now this only correlation but it gives an indication that they are important and could become more so.

- Make sure you have a presence on Facebook
- Interact and share
– Connect your blog to facebook to push out regular updates
- Have  like buttons on your pages (great for e commerce product pages)

I am almost certain this will become more of a factor during 2011 so probably best to get started now.

Press Releases

Yes good ol press releases, a link building tool used for years, the quality and impact of press releases has been brought into question many times, however if used in conjunction with other mass link building methods they can be quite effective.

- Come up with a unique press release idea
- Re write the release 10 – 15 times
– Get 10 – 14 bloggers on board to publish one of the copies, link to it and link back to your target site
- Make sure the press release has links to your site (optimised)
- Also throw in a bit of syndication just for good measure

Getting this right is almost like guaranteed viral activity and great for giving your whole domain a freshness boost.

Quality Content

As mentioned above, never has it been more important to create quality content than it is now, with Panda here and Google looking to rapidly clean up the SERP’s, creating useful content should be at the top of the agenda for any online business.

- Having a blog on the site is becoming more important
- User generated content is an excellent strategy for most commercial sites
- Making sure content is sharable

These are things the SEO community has been shouting about for a while and if you haven’t done it already now is the time to pick up the ball. Content that is unique, sharable, useful and diverse is going to help drive longtail traffic and result in higher rankings across your whole domain.

Another thing to consider in line with this is user behaviour, I am not sold on this but with the amount of data Google has makes it bound to play a role in the future;

- Bounce rates
- Page views
- social sharing

How users interact with content could be used as a sign of quality in the future, however I have so far seen no evidence of it yet.

Now if you are going to implement all of the above and try to be a ‘top ranked’ site you are going to need the budget for it, this stuff won’t come cheap. If you are a smaller business then I would suggest investing in the basics:

- blog posts
- articles
- badges
- content generation & social sharing

As your income starts to grow then reinvest in making your search campaign more creative and diverse.

Remember, in most industries you can develop decent traffic & rankings by doing the basics, however to be a top site and take your business to the next level you need to incorporate the bigger picture.

All the recent commentary surrounding Google’s most recent Farmer Update has been firmly focused on what content will and won’t be in Google’s index in the coming months.

Websites are already reporting drops in traffic and in indexed pages but to be honest how many pages an article site has indexed isn’t important to me, what is important is the links on those sites.

Just about every website on the net relies on links from content networks, whether they be from article directories, news websites and press release sites, sure those links aren’t the most powerful but my bet is the anchor text within them still passes a fair bit of weight.

A Few Coincidences?

After talking to a few fellow SEO’s I have come acrossome s interesting stories:-

A) 2 Niche webistes that solely rely on links from ezine articles & go articles dive bombed out of the SERP’s for keywords they have ranked for nearly 18 months.

B) A 6 month old blog linked to from 50 different blogs in 24 hours with the same anchor text didn’t see any increase in rank. All the blogs used to link from were typical low quality content driven blogs, before Christmas this would definitely have had an impact.

What Does This Mean?

The truth is I am not 100% sure yet, my gut feeling is a lot of these low quality blogs, news release sites and article directories will pass very little link weight moving forward. It’s too early to tell for definite but all the indications are pointing firmly at a devaluation of fresh links from low quality content networks.

If you were under the impression that these links never worked, you are wrong, I have achieved super quick rankings on decent keywords in less than a month using this exact method, as recent as December 2010.

I know the update hasn’t, or doesn’t seem to have hit the UK yet but I would be interested to hear any stories of devalued links.