This post is aimed at those in the SEO/Online Marketing Industry, if you have no interest in the industry you might find this a little dull, if you do read on

I have numerous requests now asking for a post along the lines of “a day in the life of an SEO consultant” or “a day in an SEO Agency”, obviously there is an increasing amount of interest in the Search Marketing industry and people want to know more about how it works.

I guess the main issue with writing a post like this is that every agency, every consultant and every in house team will differ in their approach to SEO and Online Marketing in general. The type of clients you service has a massive impact on the techniques you use and the resources available. Some clients literally just want to see a report every month, other clients want to be actively involved in the processes, and neither is wrong, just different.

So in this post I want to give you an honest insight into the processes and departments at Branded3, of course some things I can’t disclose in the interest of the company but I will try and give you the best insight possible into roles, processes and responsibilities.

Link Building

I think the best place to start is link building, the link building team are the back bone of any good SEO outfit, and these aren’t just spammers who get links here, there and everywhere. Our link building team are looking for ‘quality’ links and we have weekly meetings discussing link strategy and creative new ways to get links, if we wanted to just spam everywhere we could outsource it for a few hundred dollars, that’s not our aim and if you’re a serious SEO outfit you need to start producing quality.

When brainstorming link building for a particular client we consider the following sort of questions:-

- What does our client have to attract links?

- Does anything need creating in order to attract links?

- What types of websites are relevant to our clients’ product?

- What other products are relevant to our clients?

- What leverage is needed to acquire the links?

- What is the competition doing?

We try and get the whole SEO department involved in this process in an attempt to be as creative as possible, we have a select time each week to discuss the link building requirements of every client we service and tend to stumble upon new ideas every week.

Just a quick note on leverage……

I know after reading the above points some of you are going to be asking “hmmm, leverage = Paid links???”………. I am not going to turn this into a paid links debate but I will say this, If a link looks like a paid link it is going to be devalued whether money passed hands or not. So if you have a blogroll link that you got from a good friend and they have 20 other blogging friends that pass good anchor text, the chances are these will be classed as paid even though you never spent a dime.

So, with regards to leverage and link acquisition in general, all I will say is ‘be smart’.

Typically our links builders will perform the following tasks;

• Competition Analysis
• Viral Marketing Brainstorming and Implementation
• Create and maintain online relationships
• Source relevant links agreed upon in client meetings
• Report to Head of Search on rankings, link acquisitions and quality details

We have a very strict quality process with regards to acquiring links taking into account:

- Pagerank

- Moz Metrics

- Inbound Links

- Outbound Links

- Indexation

- Trust

- Relevance

These are obviously very broad but it gives you a good idea of what we look for in a typical link.

We tend to avoid using our link building team for acquiring directory links, article links or press releases, not because these types of links are worthless but because we can outsource them relatively easy whilst still having a say over the quality. We differentiate between premium links and ‘content/user generated links’ they all have a place but we prefer to use our internal resources to develop quality link acquisitions.

On Page Optimisation, Keyword Research and Site Auditing

I and Patrick are both firm believers in on page optimisation and the effects it can have on the traffic of any website.

We have an ‘on page team’ who constantly work on enhancing the content and general optimisation of our clients. The tasks we complete are varied but the main aim is to better target page keywords and to fill in any gaps with lucrative terms, what Patrick refers to as ‘gap analysis’.

A typical site audit involves the following;

• Keyword Research
• Page optimisation – completed on every page of a website
• Site Architecture
• URL Structuring
• Internal Linking
• Content Brainstorming

Some of these practices merge and every client has different needs with regards to content and on page issues, however when a new client relationship begins we always start with an audit making sure everything is in place ready for the link building to begin.

Our content team work extremely close with the Pay Per Click side of Branded3 ensuring the keywords we are targeting are the most profitable and that traffic potential is as accurate as possible, often even if we don’t take care of the PPC for a particular client we ask for access to their Adwords campaign.

Pay Per Click

At Branded3 we class ourselves as ‘natural search’ experts, however we also get involved in the search marketing side of things, our intention was clear when we launched ppcagencies.org.

Our aim with Search Engine Marketing is probably the same as every other agency, we are constantly looking to reduce costs and increase conversions producing the best possible ROI. We see PPC as an ongoing management task, much like SEO, removing unprofitable keywords, increasing ad copy and landing page relevancy and ensuring our clients ads are seen at the most profitable times in the most profitable locations.

We report and discuss on PPC activities weekly so we can quickly get on top of any account issues.

Our main platform is obviously Google Adwords, however, we do use Facebook and MSN ads with limited effect if I am honest.

The Many Meetings

Yes here at Branded3 Search we are no different to any other agency and have a diary full of meetings including;

- Client Updates and Reports

- Traffic and Conversion Analysis

- New Business Meetings

- Brainstorming and Planning

- One to One Consultant Meetings

- Team Meetings and Feedback

- Training and HR

It can seem like a lot of time spent discussing instead of doing but if carried out efficiently meetings are essential to the success of the business. They help us prioritise, plan and implement, often you will find that someone has a great idea about how we can improve a particular campaign but unless they have a formal procedure in which to put forward their ideas they will never do it. These meetings allow us to stay on top of the major goals for each client and encourage creativity on all levels.

A Typical Day

A typical day for anyone in the online marketing industry will depend on their position, the clients they work with and the type of work they do (agency/in house/consultants). I head the search team at Branded3 Search and will give you a little insight into what a typical day for consists of;

8.15am – I try and hit the office at this time, however some of my colleagues may beg to differ . I spend the first hour of every morning going through my check list of urgent tasks and emails; this is an attempt to prioritise for the day and to ensure I complete what I’ve set out to do. Often they will be quick fixes such as emailing a client or answering a client query, however sometimes they can be large tasks such as hunting down an indexation issue or dealing with a severe rankings drop, these have to be scheduled in to be completed that day or week depending on urgency.

10.00am – We have a meeting with each member of the team to discuss the clients they are dealing with and how the campaign is doing in general (usually a weekly meeting). We discuss things such as;

• Links
• Traffic
• Viral campaigns
• Brainstorm new ideas
• Set action points for the month

We also discuss any potential issues or requests from the clients that are outside the norm….

12.00am – Lunch time!!!! This is usually spend at my desk with Fish and Chips Thursday being the highlight of the week!!

1.00pm – After lunch I like get my hands dirty with the link building, highlighting those clients that need an extra push that particular month and going out there and trying to create some fruitful relationships. I think it is important for any Head of Search/SEO Manager to get involved in the day to day search work. Not only does this keep them skilled in the practice but also allows them to better understand the issues consultants and analysts may be facing in their roles.

2.30pm – I will now look back to my task list and begin to work down them, the ones in the afternoon are the more time consuming issues and they can vary from sorting out bad press, problem solving on page issues, brainstorming viral ideas, advising on new page set up, diving into Google Analytics, communicating with PR companies and agreeing new terms with link partners. These are just a few of the many tasks I could deal with, I think that’s why I love the industry so much, it gives you the chance to work with a different problem every week, particularly within an agency environment.

4.30pm – I like to spend the last 30 mins to an hour checking in campaign process and seeing what links we have managed to acquire that particular day. We don’t have link targets as such; however what I will say is that I would prefer to see 2 Quality links at the end of any one day rather than 10 low quality links.

5.00-30pm – At the end of every day I spend time making sure I am ready for the following day with tasks clearly defined and important contacts recorded in the diary.

Of course there are a multitude of other things I do and times when office hours extend beyond the norm, however this should give anyone who is thinking about entering the industry a broad enough overview.

I realise not everyone that reads this SEO wizz is in the industry but hope this has been interesting to those that are.

If there are any posts anyone would like to see on here, just let me know, always happy to look at putting any sort of content together.

With all the focus clearly on links and link building in the search engine optimisation field it easy to forget about the importance of focused keyword content and a clean site architecture.

On page optimisation often gets left behind in the online marketing discussions but thankfully Google have given a huge and in my opinion very effective reminder.

Google have recently released an SEO report card based on improving the optimisation of their product pages.

Within the report are some vital insights and reminders to us all about page optimisation and URL structure.

If you want to read the report please download it here: Google SEO Report Card

I thought it would be a good idea to run through some of the points within the report as they are useful to both bloggers and webmasters in general.

Title Tags

I know you have heard it all before but here are few things you may not have heard of:

• Only the first 60 characters of a title tag give any real ranking benefit
• Sometimes users click links based on brand, so use your brand name in the title tag
• Google wants you to use keywords users will search

I know the last point is a little lame, but there are still some ‘keep it natural’ fundamentalists out there. Just write it for users, don’t use keyword tools. Keep it natural.

News flash! Google wants you to use searched keywords. This is not writing for engines because who ultimately invents these terms?

Google go through the usual reminders about being descriptive and keeping the title tag accurate and to the point, but you’ve heard all that before.

As it’s only the first 60 characters that count it is important when writing blog posts to make your first 6 – 9 words as optimised as possible, or if you use thesis you can customise the title tag of each post.

Meta Descriptions/Keywords

Google made it official that META keywords don’t count at the end of last year, however they have now confirmed that the description is also a waste of time for ranking purposes. However, I and many other SEO’s always recommend using your main keywords in the description tag as they are bolded and this increases the chances of clicks.

Site links

These are the little links that appear below your main link in Google like so;

Please note that your site will only get these once Google trusts the domain and classes the info as authoritative

Google gives us some nice suggestions for optimising the type of site links we have appear in Google;

• Use a strong hierachial Structure
• Make use of descriptive anchor text
• Avoid deep directories

Let’s talk about each of these points a little;

Structure

This is fairly straight forward, if you want an important/relevant page to appear as a site link in Google then you need to link to the page from your strongest pages, normally this means your top level domain. An ecommerce site should look to optimise their best selling product pages in the site links.

If you still find low quality pages are being used as site links, you can remove them directly from webmaster tools.

Descriptive anchor text

I have been shouting about this for years but it always gets brushed under the carpet, probably because it has a low ranking value.

The fact is that internal descriptive anchor text may not pass link juice but still pass relevance. I spoke some months ago about using descriptive internal linking to create indented listings and proved it with my ‘bing seo‘ page.

Don’t go silly with these and stuff target keywords in but try to use them whenever appropriate, Google clearly clarifies that “read more” and “click here” links are worthless and this is something the search giants do not recommend.

Deep Directories

Very simple don’t bury your best content in a deep file.

/file1/file2/file3/file4/my-great-content/ – Never going to be a site link

301′s vs 302′s

Ok if you have ever got in the world of redirects you will know there are a few different ways to do it.

301 = Permanent Redirect

302 = Temporary Redirect

You should always try to use permanent redirects, if not and you use a temporary redirect Google will consider both URL’s to be of use and index both. This can provide a bad user experience and cause duplicate content issues.

There is a load more detail in the report including advice on;

Alt tags = Yes they are still important, keep it descriptive and keyword rich

Canonical = Use the rel=”canonical” link to help Google know your main URL’s and also make sure internal links point to the canonical URL, this helps stop duplicate URL issues and content from arising.

If you find 30 minutes you should definitely read through the report, very interesting.

I am an SEO at heart, I love the internet and Google and the way in which anyone, even those of us with limited means, can promote our products, services and even ourselves.

One of the key concepts of being successful online is understanding how to become authoritative in your given industry, how are you going to gain trust and convey your expertise.

The Main Problem

One of the main issues with today’s blogging world is duplicate information, blogs that simply publish the exact same news over and over and over again. No new angles, no new points of view, no unique news, research or scandal, simply rewrapped, duplicate content that you can read on hundreds of other sites.

Many people read authority blogs such as Copyblogger and Problogger and basically re-report the content from various posts.

If you want to stand out, if you want to be a better blogger and become an authority resource you cannot simply copy your way to the top.

Just to make myself totally clear on this point, many top bloggers have taken certain actions which have lead to their success, however I am specifically talking about their content, their articles and their news. Copying a success strategy is different to being one of the many online echoes.

You Don’t Need To Be Einstein To Build Trust and Authority

So you have an area of expertise, you offer services or a product, maybe you simply want to display your knowledge in a given area?

It is important to remember that you’re not going to do yourself any favours by making yourself sound smart, bare with me here.

I learnt a really important lesson at University through 2 separate experiences;

1) When I initially put an essay together I would try my best to make it as complex and professional as possible, using big words, complex theories and long winded paragraphs. My results were average to say the least and I was shocked considering the effort that had gone in. I later had a meeting with my tutor who explained that I was trying so hard to make my piece of work authoritative that I was missing out on some plain and simple principles, I changed my approach and attempted to make my work as straightforward and logical as possible, this did the trick and my grades started to increase.

2) As you will probably know you attend endless seminars at University and you always had your favourite teachers. Surprisingly the most popular teachers were not always the teachers with the most authority in a particular area; the best teachers were those who could convey complex principles in a simple way. Seminars that involved a tutor who had this skill were packed with students where as the others were made up of 4-5 students.

My point? Just because you have expertise in a given area your aim is not to baffle your readers with your extreme abilities and knowledge, visitors come to learn and most are not going to have such focused knowledge in your area of expertise, if you want to be an authority in a given area you have to learn to speak to the masses and not just the few people who are on the same level as you.

When was the last time you read blogs like Problogger and thought to yourself “wow that was deep, I’m confused”? Not very often I am imagining and that is because the articles generally speak to the masses. Do you think Problogger would have 100,000 subscribers if all the info was so complex only the top bloggers could really understand it?

Some More Points On Being An Authority

Never dismiss an idea for a post without thinking it through- Many times we have things on our mind that we dismiss, thinking “everybody knows this”, well sometimes they don’t, sometimes the things that seem simple to you are not so simple to others, so be open minded about your topics.

Stand up for yourself- Many follow the crowd either because it is easier or because they are afraid to say what they really believe. If you don’t agree with a specific point then say so, you are never going to stand out if you are travelling in the same direction as everyone else, plus you never know, once you voice your opinion other’s may gain the courage to follow.

Research your industry- No this does not mean re report from other authority blogs, but do research the points these blogs make, add your own personal twist to concepts and practices.

It’s not easy standing out in a world full of experts but whether you’re a blogger, marketer or other online business owner you need to put yourself out there and you are not going to do it by being the same as everyone else.

I don’t know if any of my long standing readers have noticed lately but I have been posting a lot less and my interaction on sites such as stumble, twitter and other social networks has been almost none existent.

Now besides being extremely busy there are other reasons for this, the truth is social networking and spending time on these sites building profiles has never been my strong point, the time it takes to become involved and interact, in my opinion, cannot be justified. I have found so much more reward in developing other areas of my blog and general online portfolio.

Before I go deep into this post I want to assure anyone who I meet or who have met via social media, or those who found my site via social links, that I am not disregarding them as ‘not worth the effort’, if you found me via social media that is great, I love interacting with others who are interested in SEO and other internet marketing strategies, however the ROI of time spent on social sites is simply overrated in my opinion. WOW that was a long (probably badly written) sentence!

You see originally I am from an internet marketing background, ranking sites and making money via affiliate products and ad clicks, I soon found myself in the Google Adwords game but quickly abandoned ship when it became too expensive to use for affiliate marketing. I only really decided to test social networks when I started marketing SEO wizz back in March this year, it was a test, it was time consuming and unfortunately the stats show I have wasted my time somewhat.

Any without any further waiting, here are my 5 reasons I have found social media to be an unprofitable strategy.

The Time

If you really want to build a network via sites like digg, stumble and twitter then you are going to need to put the hours in, I found at one point I was spending more time on these sites than I was spending on my own site! That can’t be right can it? Tweeting, stumbling, answering questions etc….

I met people yes, I got to help a lot of nice people and I also got help from a lot of nice people, but that rarely turned into leads, sales or links and on that note I’ll continue.

Low Conversion Rates

When I talk about conversion rates I am referring to SEO enquiries, ad clicks, affiliate clicks and subscribers. Social media simply does not convert compared to search traffic, that’s why I spend my time building my own site and its link portfolio.

Adsense: I have messed around with adsense on the site and trust me it converts nowhere near in the same league as it does on my other niche blogs but I haven’t really optimised the site for adsense. Still I found that search traffic has around a 2.45% click through rate and social traffic has about 0.13%. That is a huge, huge, huge difference. If I wanted to advertise on a site why would I ever pay to have my banner or link on a site that receives 90% social traffic?? That’s a bad investment.

Just to clarify at this point, for the exercise of establishing click through rates I have classed all referral and Direct traffic as “social traffic”

Affiliate Links: I did a 3 month test of having affiliate links in the right column of SEO wizz and yes I got quite a few commissions from it; however the same was true as was with the adsense. I made around 56 sales and only 1 came from social traffic, yes that’s right 1!! The rest came from Google with a few coming from Bing!!! So if you are in this game to make money social traffic is probably not the best route.

Subscribers: This is a figure I was quite surprised about, as I expected social traffic to do a lot better than it did. Search traffic has around a 0.6% subscriber rate whilst social traffic is a little better at 0.8%, now yes social traffic is ever so slightly better when it comes to developing a readership but only just and those readers aren’t going to buy from you, they’re simply going to read, which is fine but don’t be under the illusion that readers = profits.

SEO Enquiries: I won’t even go into this, just believe when I say the percentages are that low for social media that it’s not worth bothering with.

Social Visitors Are Not Looking For Solutions

I think this is the main factor to consider for any new online business and that is “social visitors generally aren’t looking to a solution to a problem”, they want interesting content and funny articles (the majority do anyway). Visitors that come to your site via search are inputting keyword after keyword into Google to try and find help to a problem or a need they are looking to satisfy. I get loads of long tail search traffic on terms like “how to rank higher in search engines”, “Where have all my links gone”, “Why is my site not ranking” and “how do I get more traffic”. These people are looking for answers, for products and for services.

Social traffic fulfils a purpose but does not provide profit.

Link Acquisition

When I was spending hours on twitter and stumble I kept telling myself, hey it’s a great way to build links. The truth is 90% of my links have come from my own link building efforts like, article marketing, directory submissions, blog carnivals and press releases. Yes I have links from some viral posts not from social media sites but from other websites that have found my content. Saying all this one of my biggest link building strategies has been through keyword targeting. I published a post on Bing SEO back in the summer, I did and still do get search traffic to that post, over 500 a month and it is still continuing to pull in links for me, around 350 as it stands. The long tail targeted posts on my site get search traffic and convert into sales, clicks, readers and links better than any other form of traffic.

High Bounce Rates

Now this is only a minor factor but still social media traffic involves huge bounce rates, I think stumble averages around 85% with Twitter not far behind. Now I know there is no concrete evidence to show this effects search engine rankings, however no matter how you look at it high bounce rates on a content rich site never looks particularly good. In comparison bounce rates on search traffic is around 50%, again which would you prefer???

Right I have battered social media enough, let me offer a little consolation and make a few points about what social media can actually do;

- Help you brand your site
- Help you rank for your company/site name (first page domination)
- Build friendships
- Help you find advice on topics
- It can be fun

Despite these facts, in my opinion, social media should be kept in its rightful place and that is to assist in connecting with people and not as a business building tool, because the truth is that it is a highly unprofitable way to spend your time online.

Just so I don’t get scorned, Yes I do use twitter a little and every now and then I login to my stumble account, however I am sick to death of the spam!!! Stumble my “diamond shop” home page and review it??? Come on guys, even if I stumble it it’s not going to make your site profitable!!! Spend your time doing something more worthwhile, like ranking for “buy diamond rings” (hmm I wonder how much search traffic it gets?).

Also just to clear something up, I mentioned at the beginning of the post I have not been posting as often as I once did and there are a number of reasons for this;

a) I decided to post once a week, this allows me to put together a better quality post.

b) I have been so busy with client work

c) Link building does more for my traffic than posting 3 times a week for the sake of it ever could

Has my traffic levels dropped? Nope they have increased.

Have I lost subscribers? Nope they have increased.

Have I lost anything? Yes!! The pain in my hands from typing 3 or 4 times a week

Seriously everyone the advice you read on most social blogs, in my opinion is false;

- You don’t need to post every day

- You don’t need to create endless pointless lists

- You don’t have to spend all your time on digg, stumble and twitter

Don’t let huge subscriber lists fool you, it does not equal success or profit (unless your goal is to get as many subscribers as possible, then it equals success).

Remember it’s easy for the high profile bloggers to say “just create great content and submit it to social sites” the fact is they have a load of loyal readers who hang on everything they say and go out and push their content all over the web, meanwhile 98% of start up bloggers do the same thing and realise it doesn’t quite work the same.

Don’t bother submitting your posts to these sites, if someone really likes your content they will submit it and pass it around their network. This is where social media comes into play, not by spamming social sites but by allowing networks of friends to share content easily.

I hope I haven’t offended anyone with this post; I value all the friendships I have built up via multiple means. I enjoy writing and interacting with those who read and interact with my content, all I am saying is that none of this = money, profits or anything like that.

If you want to read another excellent post with a great take on social media head over to Jason’s business blog (sorry Jason I pinched your image).

Also if you want to read some more posts on the value of social traffic head over to Allyn’s Blogger Illustrated post on Social Traffic (very funny guy) and Griz’s take on social media traffic. Both are a no holds barred assault on social traffic, so if you think you might get offended; best not click the links

Until next time!

This is the first post I have had chance to write this week as I have been working on another project which has meant a great deal of research and content creation.

For those of you who didn’t know, as well as an SEO consultant I am also pretty heavily involved in ‘niche blogging’. This basically means I rank blogs on Google to generate income through ads and affiliate links, hey once you have learnt SEO why not make some money out of it and leverage your sites?

Anyway I may talk about niche blogging in later posts and my current project is not finished therefore posting at SEOwizz is going to be down to once a week I’m afraid.

What I wanted to do today is highlight a couple of things that may be obvious to a lot of my readers but thought I would highlight it for the minority.

We all have widgets we use in the sidebars of our blogs, whether its recent comments, recent posts, popular articles, friends lists, blogrolls, rss feeds or simply ads, we all have them. All these features help our readers interact with our content and our community, however recent comments and popular posts widgets also benefit us from an SEO point of view, let me explain.

Recent Posts

Yes most of us have the recent posts widget in our sidebars acting as a site wide link to our most recent pearls of wisdom, however having them there does so much more than simply helping readers find your newest material.

A common problem many bloggers face is getting their most recent content indexed quickly, now this can be down to a lack of back links or it could be that Google does not think the new page is important enough yet.

A recent posts widget puts a link to that page on every page of your blog, what could be more important than a page with a link from every page of your blog? The page will be crawled more and therefore indexed quicker.

There is another benefit to having your recent posts displayed on every page and that is, exposure. If you don’t have a recent posts widget then your post is only displayed on your blog homepage, but what about visitors that hit deep pages? They may only read the deep page and bounce, however if your most recent posts are displayed in the sidebar there is a chance one of the titles may attract their attention and WHAM!! They click through and a bounce is saved.

I still don’t think bounce rate is a ranking factor yet but it may be one day and having a low bounce rate is good for any informational site.

Popular Posts

Again having a popular posts widget is a great way to increase interaction with your readers but it is also a great way of increasing the value of your most popular posts.

Again if your most popular posts are linked to from every page on your site, Google will index them quicker and the pages will rank higher.

So you will be getting more traffic to your cracking content via search engines and obviously more traffic to the pages by having links to them on every page of your site.

What does this mean?? Well,, your content is popular for a reason, that’s because its great!! So naturally the more people that read it the more links you will acquire, the higher rankings you will get and more visitors will keep streaming through.

So in broad terms Recent Posts + Popular Posts = More Visits, More Links, Higher Rankings, More Traffic, Lower Bounce Rates.

Dofollow Blogs

Over the past month I have been experimenting by leaving comments on dofollow blogs and getting the site wide ‘top commentators’ links that give you a link from every page. All I wanted to know was, how much value does it have as a link building method?

OK…. The first bit of news is yes the links were recognised by Google and Yes my link popularity went up around 5% from 4500 to about 4800 ish.

Did this effect rankings

NO – but let me discuss this at the end.

Did it do anything in terms of SEO

YES! I noticed a significant increase in search engine traffic, in fact one day I had 500 visits from search, 2 weeks after ‘top commentator’ links were recognised on 2 sites. Unfortunately the increase could have been caused by other factors, like link age or long tail ranking increases, however the fact it came directly after the commentator links makes me believe this had something to do with it.

Now I want to talk rankings and I want to talk about it very carefully, this due to the fact I don’t want people to rush out and spam do follow blogs.

OK…. My rankings did not increase, not even one place and I believe there are better ways to build links for rank.

Anyway, I believe do follow blogs links can be beneficial for ranks if….. You use a target anchor text.

Now I am actually going to discourage blog commenting for SEO purposes for the following reasons;

A – Only the site wide ‘top commentators’ links are really worth it

B – Commenting simply for a link decreases the value of the discussion

C – The longevity of these type of links are questionable, to say the least (The blogger could remove the link or ‘top commentators’ widget.)

D – If your link drops out of the top comments widget you have to start all over again.

Let me explain point D a little better;

If you place a load of comments on a do follow blog and get a link in the ‘top commentators’ widget then congrats you have a site wide link, however…..

Google has this little aspect of their algorithm that gives weight to the age of links, what happens if you forget to comment for a while, get knocked out of the top spots and Google crawl’s the page and your link is not there?? (Most blogs are crawled daily – well the ones worth getting these links from are)

This will mean you have to go plant a load more comments and you are right back to the beginning with Google seeing it as a fresh link, I hope you follow that.

I am not saying don’t comment at all, but only do so to add value and when you really have an interest in the conversation or topic. I wouldn’t want anyone commenting here that was doing it for a link only.

Also if you are trying to build a solid link profile, these types of links are far too risky, you could see half your link profile vanish in days given the right circumstances.

Anyway these are my observations; please feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.

Is there any real need for on page optimisation anymore? All of my research on the SERPS seems to be pointing in 1 direction and that is, when it comes to high rankings for competitive terms only your link profile really matters.

After all Google is still ranking number 2 for the keyword “caffeine” even though all it does is slap it in the title tag and has a shed load of links, the result is only relevant to somebody searching for it from an internet marketing background, those wanting information on a mild drug are going to be disappointed.

Anyway, as well as examples like the above and ongoing comments in the SEO industry about ‘how headings are no longer of value’ I decided to carry out a little research myself.

The research was based on the heading tags h1 – h4 and on general keyword density. Like with so many of the other tests I perform this one was based on 25 search terms and the top 8 results were examined.

Headings Optimisation

I guess the first place to start is with the headings, it is an area I also believe has lost most of its value but let’s peak at the results before coming to a conclusion.

For those of you who aren’t sure how headings are supposed to work with SEO, basically it is taught that you should use your keyword in them to build relevance h1 holding the most weight and decreasing accordingly to h6.

The first test was simple, ranking pages 1-8 were tested to see if they had optimised their heading tags for the target keyword.

A score was given to each heading optimised on each site h1 = 8 h2 = 6 etc… The ranking position with the highest score had obviously better optimised headings.

As you can see from the graph the blue line represents the true ranking order and the red line is how it would rank if rankings were based on optimised headings.

There are massive differences here and even though this is correlation and not causation I still feel it is a strong indication that headings are not quite as valuable as one may think.

If you look at the below chart;

62.5% of pages on the first page have the h1 optimised for the target keyword, however 0% have the h4 optimised.

I can also confirm that 15% of the pages tested had not optimised any headings.

The only thing we can take from this is that if you are going to optimise your headings, stick to h1 and h2 the rest seem to be irrelevant but don’t expect it to work miracles for your rankings because it won’t.

Keyword Density

In this test the same 25 pages were checked for keyword density rates against the target phrase. The percentages were taken and the below chart shows the results.

Even I was surprised at these results, when re ranked the sites there was almost a complete reverse with the lowest ranking sites having the highest keyword density.

So what does this mean??

Keep things to a natural level use the keyword naturally but don’t feel under pressure to use it in every paragraph because it clearly does not matter.

Where does this leave on page optimisation?

Well what can I say?

First of all there is a lot more to on page search engine optimisation other than keyword issues;

- Crawlability
- Internal Linking
- Sitemaps
- Click Paths
- Code to Content Ratio

etc…..

However in my opinion the days of stressing over keyword density, keyword proximity or prominence are over along with heading optimisation, it just is not as powerful as it once was.

The only place to worry about your keywords, in my opinion, is in your title tag, outbound links and obviously try and get it in the content a couple of times. Apart from that the jobs a good one.

There are obviously a few areas I didn’t touch on;

- How does this apply to longtail keywords?
- Does keyword position matter? Top, bottom, sidebar, footer
- I also did not take into account image alt attributes

These are all posts for another time. So quit worrying about how many times you’ve stuffed your keyword into your content and start building some links

I don’t think I really need to say anymore than the above title really, but feel I need to raise something as some people are obviously not getting it. Let me just give you a snippet of quite a rude email I received only last night.

SEO Wizz, I have been reading through your tutorials now for the last 6 months and quite frankly I think they are inaccurate and misleading. One of the link building methods you seem to make a big deal out of is article marketing, after implementing what you taught I have to say this technique is laughable and only newbie’s and amateurs must try it. How can you call yourself an SEO consultant whilst giving such lame advice??

As you can imagine this took me back a little, I know the SEO advice I give works because, well, I use it

Anyway I thought to myself should I entertain this email or delete it with the daily spam I receive; I decided to email Mr X back.

After a few bits of correspondence I realised this guy had suffered at the hands of money making scams and online opportunities for the last 3 years and was still getting nowhere. This made me feel kind of sorry for him so last night (still only 3 hours after receiving the initial email) I had a look at his issue. He sent me the articles he had wrote and where he had submitted them.

Things were pretty much in order, good length article, good English, structured nicely and anchor text at the bottom, OK there seems to be an issue.

I couldn’t figure out why these links weren’t counting until I started looking at all the articles he had published in the last month in the author sections.

All the articles were similar with literally one or two words changed in each paragraph, after another email I discovered he had been spinning multiple copies of the same article.

Ahhhhh!!! Everything makes sense.

So here’s the problem and if you have been spinning articles you might want to read this;

Fresh Content

This is the fundamental principle anybody performing SEO should know. Google needs fresh, unique content, I am not just talking about on your sites but on any page you decide to get a link from, if the content is copied or even if it is slightly changed, the chances are the page is not going to be indexed.

Indexed Content

If a page is not indexed any link you have on that page will not count, it is a waste of your time and energy. Why would Google want to give you credit for a link from a page it can’t even be bothered to add to the index??

Making Article Marketing Clear

If you are going to article market, fine, however don’t expect great results by writing 1 unique article and spinning it into 20 (for anyone who does not know what spinning is, it is when you make some of the words in the article variable and software changes the phrases between articles). If you are going to article market correctly you need to write a new piece of content each time, this maximises the number of links you will receive back.

Will only one copy of your article be indexed?

If you write an article and publish it on 30 different directories you may notice that only ten of the directory articles get indexed therefore you have 10 links. These articles will no doubt belong to the article directories with established domains and domain authority. So why publish to as many directories as possible??

Even the low value directories will hopefully increase in authority and trust, therefore one day your article could be indexed, however if your article has been spun 20 times and is published on the same domains the chances are it will never be indexed despite how powerful the domain is.

Are You Against Spinning Articles?

I am not against anything that works and doesn’t get your site banned, unfortunately article spinning is a technique with limited effect. If you are going to spin an article I would suggest creating 4 to 5 variations on each paragraph and having 3 variable titles, on top of this spin it 5 – 7 times max but don’t be surprised if it is rejected from the major directories. This will still not mean all are indexed but it will up the chances. You may consider this a little grey hat but if it works and doesn’t cause a penalty why shouldn’t I tell you?

So to finish up, content needs to be fresh and unique not just on your own site but on any content network you use to get links.

Article marketing works, every internet marketer out there knows this and is implementing some form of article marketing strategy to rank highly. The guy in the email was simply lost in a world of lies and scammers, it’s a shame but it’s a learning curve many of us have to come through.

Like I say to anyone struggling at this game, if you want to know how to rank, study and listen to those that are doing it.

Recently the vince or brand update has reared its ugly head. Matthew Trewhella of Google recently stated the brand up date was aimed at maximising the user experience, “every time a Google user has to enter a second search, Google considers this a failure”.

You can read a little bit more about the brand update at SEO Book.

So how do we use this information for our SEO efforts? I have always been of the opinion that bounce rates are not really a factor in the Google mix yet; this is mainly due to the fact that not everyone uses analytics so how would a ranking algorithm based on bounce rates be fair?

OK, so if it’s not bounce rates how else can Google measure the quality of the results they are showing on the first page of queries?

I guess it’s really pretty straight forward, click through rates. If your site sits on the first page of Google but has a low click through rate for its position, the chances are the page will slowly lose ranking, I personally believe that an algorithm to this effect is already in place.

Up until recently SEOwizz was ranking first page for “Google Search Engine”, clearly it wasn’t what searchers were looking for and I had 1 click in 3 weeks, safe to say it dropped back 3 pages and probably more now.

Right, knowing this should make us automatically consider click optimisation, increasing the number of clicks we receive to our sites and there are a few ways we can optimise this;

Title Tags

When it comes to title tags it is easy to simply consider using keywords separated with hyphens but looking unnatural. I made the decision a while ago to include my brand in the title tag in hope that users may attach a little more trust to the listing. It can be a tough compromise when it comes to the title tag, many advise to ask a question in it, or even use capitals to grab attention. I personally say leave that to adwords marketing, stick with using the right keywords in prominent positions but making it sound a little more natural and human.

Meta Description

It is debatable as to whether or not Google takes the meta description into consideration, we know meta keywords are a total no go and Google recently confirmed this, for a change

Right, but even if they do not use the description in the ranking algorithm, we know for a fact relevant keywords with in it are bolded, just like an adwords ad.

So the same applies, use the keywords in a prominent position, in my opinion use them twice. This will make your listing stand out which will increase click through rates and hopefully rankings.

Ranking with a twist

I am not going to insult your intelligence by stating “ranking higher increases click through rates”, however I am sure you have been in a position where you are stuck on the first page in 4th or 5th position and the sites in front of you have millions of links? Is there anything you can do to increase your visibility without increasing rank?

In my opinion, yes and it was spoken about recently at SEOmoz, it is the idea of indented listings. This is where a site is listed and then has a sub listing directly below, slightly indented, hence the name.

Rand at SEOmoz runs through how to do this but it is really simple.

• Find the listing you are ranking on the first page for
• Find the page on your site which is most relevant to the keyword the initial page is ranking for (if you want to find which pages of your site are relevant to a particular keyword simply tap “keyword site:your site” into Google search , this will bring up a list of your pages in order of relevance to the target keyword.)
• Link from the initial page to the new page using the target keyword
• If the new page has few external links, use articles and link partnerships to build some authority.

The video at SEOmoz goes into a little more detail if you want to skip over and watch it.

What will this do? Simple, it will cause your site to stand out more and will significantly increase your traffic on that keyword.

I tried to do it on my Bing SEO articles but rank number 1 for the keyword now anyway. This is a great way to increase organic traffic as a whole to your site, so I would suggest skipping through your analytics to see if there are any keywords you get traffic on that can be enhanced.

OK, so in my opinion these are the best ways of increasing your click through rate and rank. Of course having you major keyword in your URL helps but that’s a little obvious to state.

Just a quick post today but something I think you will appreciate and find interesting.

I feel recently that all I have been posting about is backlinks, in-depth analysis, opinion and of course proof. Surely there is more to SEO than simply links, right?

Yes I believe there is but the thing is, links play a huge role, in fact a lot of the time they are the overwhelming factor.

I read quite a few SEO / Internet marketing blogs and I sometimes get a little cheesed off at the level of depth they go into. Sure I have done many in-depth tests into the SERPS but at the end of any test I usually highlight what really matters, links, links, links.

Just for the sake of it let me give you a quick example.

When I first started the SEOwizz blog I got a lot of links from friends and online buddies anchored with the term “seo consultant”, which is a fair description. In fact I did think about targeting it heavily in the early days but decided the traffic was not heavy enough and it wasn’t particularly the audience I wanted to attract. In fact after running a few adwords campaigns I was convinced the only people searching on the term were the SEO’s trying to rank for it.

Anyway as you can see from by homepage, I in no way what so ever target the keyword “seo consultant”, in fact I don’t think I have the keyword on the page and as you can see my title tag does not include it.

Despite this major disregard towards that term I rank on the second page in 17th! Plus, don’t forget this is a pretty competitive term;

The only reason I rank for this term is down to links or more specifically keyword targeted links. Take a look at all the other pages on the first 5 pages of the SERPS, 98% of them use the “seo consultant” term in their title tag, the most powerful on page factor, yet I out rank most of them.

I don’t know how many of you remember school if not I can, and can tell you that popularity mattered. It didn’t matter if you were the ugliest person in your year if you had a list of friends all pointing at you saying you were cool, you were in your peer groups eyes, popular.

SEO is pretty much the same, sometimes like school it is unfortunately so, if you have enough links pointing at you saying what you want, whether it be “seo consultant”, “karate expert” or “worlds best geek”, it doesn’t matter get enough friends vouching for you and Google will reward.

So I’ve made my point but what am I getting at?

We all read deep and meaningful articles on SEO, yes I even publish the complex nonsense here too but at the end of the day I take such an interest in the SERPS out of sheer interest and not because I need to do it to rank highly. Of course I also do my research to ensure I am prioritising my client work correctly, I have a responsibility to them to do so.

What’s the difference between an SEO expert and the average webmaster?

At the end of the day anyone could learn how to implement SEO techniques, I always say only around 20% of it is particularly complex, the rest is time consuming and frustrating, trust me on that

The other difference of course is wisdom, if you’re an experienced SEO you will know not only what it takes to rank but where to go to make it happen. SEO’s are those that can answer the what, where, why, when and how questions and not just give you a detailed description of SEO theory.

I get so frustrated at SEO blogs that blurt out “hey you need links with your text as anchor”, that does nobody any good. Where do you get those links? How effective are links from A,B and C? How do you manage to get anchor links? Which directories carry weight? How fast should these links be built? Which sites can I get some quick links from??

These are the questions people need to know in order to rank highly online; this is the difference between SEO in theory and those who can actually rank a site.

So no matter what you read here or at any SEO blog, remember it’s all about links.

Hello one and all

Sorry I know this week has been thin on the posts but my schedule has been hectic and I have had a few technical issues, but hey I’m scraping one in before the end of the week.

I’ll be honest with you my brain is fried this week so thinking of an innovative post has proved challenging, therefore I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to follow up on one of the many SEO tests I conduct.

You may or may not recall that I wrote a post around a month ago about using longtail keywords to gradually build search traffic using your blog.

You can read the post “increase organic search traffic” but the bones of it was the idea of optimising each post for low traffic longtail keywords. I demonstrated how you could effectively use the google adwords keyword tool to find this low hanging fruit and how to implement the keywords for maximum effect.

Making this process a permanent part of your blogging schedule will slowly but surely build your search engine traffic, month after month. This is the answer to the question I am asked most often;

“How did you manage to build your search traffic to nearly 10,000 visitors a month in just 7 months???” Well this is how, optimising for the niche keywords.

Many bloggers say to start 100′s of different blogs all targeting niche longtail keywords in order to make money online with search traffic, I say built an authority site in a broad niche and treat every post like a new page, research your keywords and optimise, simple right??

If you’re still a little sceptical about all this let me show you a little evidence, go back to the post “increasing organic traffic”, you will see it’s a fairly straight forward post optimised in all the right places. I targeted around 15 niche keywords in it, knowing that it could increase my search traffic every month by around 15 – 40 visits. Yes, this doesn’t sound like much but just imagine doing this for every post, think of the difference over a year. If I told you in 12 months you could have between 10 and 15 thousand search visits a month by implementing a simple tactic, would you implement it?? It’s so easy you’d be a fool not to.

Anyway time for the evidence, I published the post on 10th September, here are the ‘search’ stats to date:-

As you can see 29 views from 16 keywords, in 1 month.

Here are the top ten keywords

Now overall I had around 700 visits to this post most from social traffic and directly from the feed, but you cannot ignore the search traffic.

The search traffic will be pretty consistent month after month, and even though it’s only 30 a month, thats only 1 post. I may publish 100 more posts this year, if they all drive 30 visits to my site a month thats 9000 visits by the end of the year.

So if you implement the longtail, link build as normal to your main pages and blog posts there is no reason within 1 year you should not be getting 10,000 visits from the engines every month, minimum.

I hope I have sold you on this technique, even if your site is more commercially focused, yes the longtail will not convert as well as the broader high converting keywords, however can you really afford not to implement this simple tactic??

One word of warning with this, it will not work if you have not built a solid link profile for your domain. Your site needs some authority, the more authority the better this technique will work.

Have a great weekend and I’ll be back next week with my usual blogging schedule.