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

I have been working in SEO for over 7 years now and in that time I have had the opportunity to work with and discuss SEO services with many small business owners with limited budgets for investing in search engine optimisation. Many of them have invested £300 – £600 to find that the basics have not been covered and in effect they have been paying for a ranking report and some title tag optimisation.

This has always been a frustration of mine and with every client I have worked with I have always stressed the importance of link building and educated the client with regards to real ranking factors. Working with small businesses is a lot different to working with brand clients, both in terms of budget and in strategy.

As of today I am pleased to announce that myself and Branded3 have teamed together to create Baby SEO, it’s a company dedicated to delivering results based on smaller budgets and being absolutely transparent in terms of the work we do. As a consultant I have worked with many small businesses and have worked out efficient ways of delivering results based on smaller budgets.

Today is the official launch, however over the last month or two we have gained new clients and have a small business SEO Team in place. Packages range from £300 – £1500 per month, giving any business an opportunity to progress their SEO work. If you have friends or clients that you think would benefit from this we are currently offering a 20% referral fees and also offer a white label option, perfect if you’re a web designer or developer wanting to offer your client base genuine SEO services.

Please get in touch if you would like to know more about the service.

Thanks

Well I hope everyone has enjoyed the festivities and are looking forward to those still to come tonight!

I thought it would be a good idea to revisit posts from 2010 add a little commentary and then try to understand how it may be relevant to our SEO efforts in 2011.

As way of an overview it has been a pretty good year for the blog and here are a few stats to prove it;

259,402 – Visits

404,854 – Pageviews

144,755 – Google Organic Visitors

72 – posts

1200 – comments

Don’t get me wrong, these aren’t social blogging figures, but the promotion of SEOwizz has pretty much been SEO and think these figures are healthy considering my social disabilities.

Anyway let’s have a quick round up of these posts and then I’ll go over some possibilities for the blog in 2011…..

Anchor Text Has Lost Its Edge – Time To Build A Healthy Strong Domain, Old Techniques Are Not Going to Cut it

This was by far the most popular post of 2010 and in September it set off a bit of a stir being picked up and linked to by the biggest search authorities on the web.

The article came after some link analysis into some of the most competitive keyword targets and the sites ranking for them, it showed that sites were ranking with their homepages with little or no anchor text links or even relevant variations. The article was not meant to be scientific and was simply observations so you can imagine the ‘trolls’ jumped all over it.

Anyway, it turned out I had to retract the conclusion thanks to Google’s algo switch to show deep pages and the real reason the brand driven homepages were ranking.

Still don’t think that Brand links have no use, Google have been off the boil of late and if your a geek like me and have had your finger on the pulse over the holidays you may have noticed some significant changes in the SERP’s .

There was another popular article on brand anchor text here.

Analytics + Optimised Content + Anchor Text Links = More Traffic

Very often in SEO we get caught up on glory terms, however in my experience they’re not that important except in a few high profile industries. It’s long tail traffic that is the real bread and butter of most websites and this article displayed a quick way of identifying opportunities and how to capitalise on them.

5 Link Building Myths You Should Ignore

Every year brings new link building techniques and the opinions that go with them, who you decide to listen to will go a long way to decide where you rank on Google.

The problem is techniques that work aren’t always what we would call ‘white hat’ and SEO’s with profiles struggle to talk about them due to unwanted Google attention, and trust me when I say even little blogs like this get unwanted attention

So whenever techniques, that could be on the dark side are discussed, it always has to be backed up with a ‘but Google will punish you’, the article above looks at some of the myths that come from this issue, my advice is simple if anyone says Google will crush you take it with a pinch of salt and always have test blogs and sites to trial new techniques.

Facebook Search – Open Graph

This was a post from my good friend David Jones discussing the possibilities of Facebook Open Graph and how it could eventually evolve to challenge Google.

Me and Dave don’t see eye to eye entirely but he raises some excellent points and as you will have seen in one of my recent posts I am too beginning to see the potential.

The End Of Google Rankings As We Know It! Rotational Rankings?

I published this soon after the WMT interface changed to show rankings, it almost seemed to show that no one site permantly ranks in the same position for a keyword, this was interesting and almost suggested some sort of rotational ranking system.

It still needs a lot more research but with suggestions of split testing and rankings based on click through rates it is hardly inconcievable.

Keyword Stuffing & Link Spam Will Make Google Love You! What Are Google Doing?

You will have probably noticed a lot of moaning from me in December about the state of the SERP’s, at least in the UK.

I am not going to proceed with 400 words on why they are still a mess because you have definitely heard enough, however I just thought I better clear something up. My gripe with the SERP’s has nothing to do with the webmasters ranking but instead is with Google because of their inconsistency.

As I said above there have been some changes in the last 5 days and I think these will roll out across more keywords into the new year, watch this space.

So there you have it, a handful of posts that got a little attention in 2010…..

As for SEOwizz…….

I have a number of plans in 2011 to spruce up the blog:-

1 – It is due a redesign, just need to finalise the brief (I use quixoticmedia.org, excellent with Thesis)

2 – With over 1000 hits a day on average I have upgraded the server (apologies for the site speed over the past 6 weeks).

3 – I am playing with the idea of opening up the blog to guest posting, so if your interested drop me a line.

4 – A forum……

We have over 2000 RSS subscribers now, which isn’t massive but I do find I get a lot of emails, for that reason alone I think a forum would be a good idea?? I just need to know who would benefit from it??

So if you’re a silent reader, drop a comment below or ping me when you get chance if you would like to see a forum on SEOwizz.

If I do go ahead with it, it will be free and not open to search engines This isn’t a way of building longtail traffic but a way of getting issues and questions out in the open, so let me know.

Ok well I think thats me done for 2010, wishing you all a prosperous 2011!!

Happy New Year!

Just a real quick announcement type post, but I am sure some will find it interesting…..

I have received a significant number of emails over the past few weeks asking me why I no longer rank for some of my core terms, many were presuming some kind of penalty or filter….

Well first of all I’d like to thank you all for your concern, however the ranking drop is completely of my own doing…

Why would you kill your rankings?

Well I didn’t exactly set about to kill my rankings, I simply decided to have a clean up of my link profile, booting out some links I had on other sites I own and cleaning up a few of the site wide links I had pointing at SEOwizz.

Within 3 days of removing what I presumed to be poor quality links, SEOwizz dropped out of the top 100 for some core terms such as search engine optimisation, SEO etc….

I have to admit at first I panicked, however presumed it must of been some kind of Google Dance and my rankings would pop back up, 3 weeks later and they’re still struggling.

Now you might think the first thing I am going to do is put all the links I removed back up, but you’d be wrong. You see, even though Google’s algo was fooled I wasn’t and I have got to the point where I have to be a little more careful about my link profile due to a little too much attention from the wrong sort of folk

In all honesty my core rankings only brought in around 2% of my organic traffic so they were literally ‘glory rankings’, the majority of my traffic comes from long tail queries and this has gone up in the last 3 weeks rather than down.

So to sum up, no I haven’t got a penalty, yes my rankings have taken a hit, however don’t think for one second I won’t be back up mixing it at the top very soon .

Thanks for the emails.

The last couple of months have been a link analysis month for me and the team at Branded3, the unique changes we are seeing in SERP activity sparked an ongoing interest in the office into how Google is now ranking sites.

As you will have seen my last couple of posts have been focused on these changes, first with the assumption of brand anchor text value and secondly the possibility of a tighten anchor text filter. There are other interesting trends we have come across but unfortunately I cannot publish them all just yet, however one thing we are noticing is how well Google are now devaluing ‘assumed’ paid links.

Whenever paid links have been discussed in the SEO world and how Google maybe detecting them, it has always been focused on the site selling for e.g. If a site has lots of anchor text sidebar anchor rich links then Google can presume these are paid and that’s probably a correct assumption, however….

From the research we have conducted it seems to suggest Google could be deciding whether to count links based on the link profile of the domain it is pointing to, so if you have an over optimised link profile and Google finds hundreds more exact anchor links, the theory is they will not count.

However, if you have a very natural anchor text profile and a proportionate amount of optimised links, these will have more chance of counting.

This has all been covered to an extent in my previous articles, which if you missed, you can read here;

Anchor Text Over Optimisation

Brand Anchor Text

Natural Link Profile

As well as anchor text there are other ways that Google could be establishing how optimised a link profile is, for example if a website only has links from high PageRank websites is this natural? Could it be that the site is buying lots of links from what they perceive to be high quality websites?

Any good SEO will tell you a natural link profile will probably have as many low quality links as it does high quality.

Now PageRank is not a good metric for lots of different reason, however the crew at SEOmoz have provided us with the excellent open site explorer which we can use to download our link profiles into excel.

Once we have all the links downloaded and have removed duplicate URL’s we can use a pivot chart to see the spread of domain authority across the domains linking to our site.

This is what the SEOwizz profile looks like;

I like to think this is quite a natural looking profile, a little spike around the 30 mark but generally it’s quite flat with links from all kinds of domains ranging from the good to the ugly.

Now if you’re buying links left right and centre you might have a link profile that looks a little like this;

I don’t like outing sites, hence the reason I haven’t named the above but this is a genuine link profile of a recently penalised brand attempting to rank for a major financial term. Typically if you’re buying links from domains with a certain amount of Domain Authority your link profile is going to look like this and in my opinion, this isn’t going to work anymore. It is all too easy for search engines to analyze this sort of profile and quickly discover there are very few links from websites other than those with domain authority of between 30 – 50. Is this what a natural well linked to website should look like? In my opinion this looks manipulated and when you investigate further it clearly is.

Just to confirm this is all theory based on recent consulting and research, however if you have been struggling to rank for a keyword;

Step one; check your anchor text and make sure you have enough natural link text

Step two; download your links to make sure you have an even spread of links

Many SEO’s are precious about where they source links from not realising that a genuine website is linked to from every different kind of domain authority imaginable, in fact if you have a content rich site there is no doubt you’ll have a lot of links from good old scrapers!

The best link profile is not always one filled with high quality websites, Google wants the links they count to be natural and high PageRank, Mozrank etc… does not always if ever equal natural. High quality link sources are always needed but what makes us think a natural link profile would only include these?

In Mar/April last year I made comment on Bing and did a little comparison between Google’s and Bing’s results in terms of what factors I thought differed between them. At that point everyone expected Bing to make a real dent in Google’s search share with Microsoft pumping millions in investment into the project.

Now we are approaching the end of 2010 and Bing have had a little over a year to establish some authority, I thought it would be interesting to see what impact they have had, after all for some reason I seem to rank No.1 for “bing seo”

In order to look at search share I compiled the stats from 100 sites that I have analytics data for, this includes client websites, associate websites and obviously my own websites. The websites range from high end brands to new start up websites and across multiple verticals, there is no point taking into account traffic levels due to seasonal search and ongoing SEO efforts, however it was interesting to look at the month on month search share since the beginning of the year.

No websites will be divulged due to privacy reasons

This research is based on 100 UK based websites and provides limited information into current search share.

2010 So far

As you can see from the above chart Google is still dominating proceedings in the UK with its search share actually growing to above 90% from May onwards.

Both Yahoo and Bing have diminished in terms of their share by nearly 1% each, no doubt this is being lost to social websites like twitter and facebook but Google still seems to be pinching the traffic.

In July both Yahoo and Bing had less than 5% search share with Yahoo slightly piping Bing.

So What Now?

I am sure we have all seen Bing on TV, “the decision engine” right? Well it looks like, at least from this research that Bing is having very little impact, maybe stealing the odd bit of traffic from Yahoo but really not bringing a challenge to the door of the big G!

There have been a few shouts around the internet marketing community saying Bing is getting more and more popular and that efforts should be made now to optimise for Bing, at the minute I really don’t see the point.

I have a number of contacts in Germany and France and they too have confirmed Google’s growth and the insignificance of Bing. What I would really love to see is some US based research that shows some kind of increase in Bing’s share otherwise I am afraid it is just going to get swept under the carpet like all the other search alternatives.

SO….. In brief…… Google is still Daddy and there is nothing to suggest a change in the near future.

Hello!!!

First of all let me apologise it has been almost a month since I last posted. I have been unbelievably busy on various projects and unfortunately the blog has had to take a back seat. However, you should now start seeing regular posts again

As I said, over the last 5 – 6 weeks I have been making preparations for various projects, some my own and others with Branded3. As I have been trying to devise a link strategy for these new websites it occurred to me there aren’t many SEO’s that are actually going to tell you how a site ranks in Google.

We all know a website needs links, but how do you get them? Where do you get them? What makes them good? What makes them useless? Unfortunately you’re going to get a lot of mixed messages in this area for a few different reasons;

1 – High profile SEO blogs (SEOmoz) have to say what they think Google want them to say, even when they talk about what I call ‘cheap SEO’ methods they always back it up with, “we don’t think this will work in the long term” meaning “we can’t endorse this, regardless of how well it works”.

2 – You then get those bloggers who simply repeat everything they read on the high profile blogs adding very little in term of their own experience.

3 – There are also those people who don’t want to get on the wrong side of Google so they keep things to themselves and attempt to discreetly push others in the right direction.

I unfortunately now fall into the bottom category… I posted a month ago on how links don’t have to be indexed to count and hinted at a site that might be using linking techniques with this in mind. Within a week of posting the website I ‘hinted’ at was removed and my site lost PR and all my site links (still lost now). I didn’t lose any of my rankings or traffic but I have seen this kind of activity before and it’s normally Google’s way of saying ‘be careful’.

I may be completely wrong but it all seems a little coincidental to me….. hmmm

Anyway, in a complete show of defiance I decided to post some of the biggest link building myths your likely to read online and many times from the most popular resources, let’s dive right in…….

You should aim for high PageRank Links

Why???

Because they pass more juice? True

Because they have more authority? Debatable!!!

The truth is what we know as toolbar pagerank is absolutely irrelevant when it comes to link building these days. I could launch a site tomorrow and have a PR5 by the next update by buying a handful of high PageRank links; this wouldn’t make my new spam site a good place to get a link from.

In terms of rankings for a keyword term toolbar PageRank is irrelevant – I have lost count of the amount of times I have out ranked a high PR website with a PR2 blog. Seriously toolbar PageRank is not going to help you on your way to top rankings, if that’s your link building plan be prepared to fail.

I am not saying you shouldn’t get high PR links, just don’t rely on them, you need a lot more to rank at the top of Google

Links that aren’t relevant don’t count

Absolutely laughable……

Yes you should aim to get links from relevant websites with good authority but the fact that people say irrelevant links don’t count is a joke. My advice is, if you can get a link from a site, GET IT!! Yes look for relevant links but don’t refuse one because it isn’t relevant.

Links that aren’t indexed don’t count

Well I addressed this in my previous post, however for all those who hang onto Matts Cutts every word; “Just because we see them doesn’t mean their passing weight” & “just because there in webmaster tools doesn’t mean they count”.

Believe me or not when I say I have seen websites rank with as few as 6 indexed links for majorly competitive terms, all the anchor text ones aren’t even indexed.

This is what I believe – Google comes along crawls a new page, decides the page isn’t worth indexing but still follows the links on it and credits anchor text accordingly. I a firm believer that anchor text only counts the first time it is crawled,, What!!! I hear you say?

That’s right; I think all those people who look for social mentions and then run around asking people to change the anchor text are wasting their time. Let me give you an example.

- I have ranked for the keyword ‘SEO’ for the last 6 months in around 14th ish.

- Patrick at Blogstorm gave me a link in April with the Anchor Text “SEO consultant”

- My ranking for this keyword jumped to 3rd within a week

- 3 weeks after placing the link he changed it to just “SEO” for me to see the effect….. There wasn’t any

- I still rank 3rd for “SEO consultant” and my “SEO” rank hasn’t budged

So what does this mean?? Does Google only count the link the first time it is crawled? Does Google count links placed on a page after it has crawled it a few times already? Does buying links within old blog posts/news articles work?? My opinion is NO, don’t waste your money or time.

(By the way there are high profile SEO firms out there that will try and sell you this tactic, trust me when I say don’t waste your money, keep it for links within fresh content)

Link Buyers Get Punished

You know what maybe they do, however I have never seen it. In fact I could put a giant list together in the next few days of thousands of sites actively buying links, report it to Google and nothing would ever be done.

I know there are those out there saying they have seen a site punished, unfortunately I would want to know the website and see definitive proof that it was the links that caused the punishment and not some other error.

I’ll say no more on link buying in fear of being slapped by G (Don’t you just hate competitors that report you to Google just because they can’t get ahead of you in the SERPS?)

Google actively checks IP’s

I agree that Google could do this, but are they???

Again I have seen no evidence of it and regularly see websites ranking thanks to a nice IP linked network. They may check it upon a manual review but not on a bulk basis.

It pains me to say this but when it comes to SEO you shouldn’t believe everything you read, there are too many copy bloggers and others who are scared of being slapped. As you have read above I have my own suspicions about the readers of SEOwizz and Google connections but the way I see it is I am only telling the truth. If Google did punish link buyers then I would be singing a different song, if Google were more open about the anchor text signal there would be no need to speculate and dig deep into link data.

What Google have to recognise is that webmasters aren’t really bothered about what Google consider to be good or bad SEO, they only want to know what works. Google should put all SEO bloggers out of the picture and just start getting honest.

Sorry for the mass content on this page but it has been a while

First of all apologies for the lack of posting over the last couple of weeks, work has been busy and the World Cup has pretty much dominated my evenings

So now England have been dumped out shamefully I thought it might be a good idea to discuss something pretty positive that has happened to me over this World Cup period, I NOW RANK IN THE TOP 5 FOR ‘search engine optimisation’!!!

Now that I have gained a glory ranking I thought it might be a good idea to discuss how I got there. I work with clients daily that throw massive budgets at SEO and not surprisingly get results very quick, however my blog has had very little in terms of budget thrown at it and it goes to show you can make it to the top working cheap, the results will come a lot slower though.

Altogether it has taken me 18 months to position my website there; I did a lot of the work in the early stages and as my site has grown in trust the anchor text from article directories and blog carnivals have really started to count.

The truth is, in the last 3 months I have done very little link building with most of my links coming socially and none of them anchored with the target keyword (except maybe one site wide a fellow SEO kindly gave me).I genuinely believe working to a tight budget does not exclude you from achieving results as long as you’re consistent and gradually increase your investment.

Anyway enough bragging, what I want to do now is show you my exact approach to ranking SEO wizz where it currently is (4th ‘search engine optimisation’ 13th ‘seo’),

Quarter One

The first 3 months of any blog are painful, you spend 90% of your time writing and 10% reading, however there were a few fundamentals I wanted to achieve in the first Quarter, ones that I knew would see me well in the future;

- I wanted to create a hook, so I developed some tutorials, this would ensure a nice flow of natural links

- I wanted to have at least 20 posts optimised for long tail target keywords

- I made it a must to at least get one link back to each deep page/post

I knew things would be slow at first as I have created many affiliate blogs and they have all started the same way.

Quarter Two

My blog now had enough content and I could really let Google know it existed without risking the sandbox. The idea was to get as many links to the blog as possible with preferential anchor text.

- I decided to write 100 articles

- Submitted them through Article Marketer (Now content crooner)

- Mixed the anchor text between my main target keywords search engine optimisation, seo techniques, google seo, seo consultant, seo (All of which are now on the first page of Google bar ‘SEO’ however watch this space.)

This wasn’t about getting the blog to rank, it was more about building a bulk amount of links so that I could get new content indexed faster and give myself a little bit of an anchor text push.

Quarter Three

Traffic was now picking up; Google was beginning to give me a little authority so it was now time to turn up the heat. To do this I decided to write some posts that would ensure me a way of getting links in the long term, I am talking serious viral content.

There is an important definition to be made here, some people consider viral content as a way of driving masses of traffic, the problem is going viral on stumble (which I have done quite a few times) does not necessarily mean masses of links, in fact very often it doesn’t mean any. I wanted to create content that when people did find it they would link to it.

- I posted on Bing SEO vs Google and did a small case study (I rank no.1 for Bing SEO and gain new links every week with no effort)

- I posted about Link/Ranking correlation (Linked to by SEOmoz and has delivered 1000′s of visitors and recognition)

- I also completed a monster post on SEO content writing which ranks very highly and is still my third most visited page!!

This is the back bone of my website, the posts that give a return over the long period and not just an instant traffic boost. Every website should create this type of content/product/resource, something that is going to continually get new recognition.

Quarter Four

I was really beginning to rank well now but still needed more diverse links; I had some high quality links but needed a more diverse profile. To accomplish this I;

- Submitted to blog carnivals taking advantage of preferential anchor text

- Joined new forums adding my links in bio’s and signatures (not spamming, genuine forums)

- Attempted some cross linking with other bloggers (Didn’t particularly work)

The above gave me a better profile and pushed my PageRank to 4; however I was still sitting on the second page for some of my major terms.

Quarter Five

Now I had a diverse profile and some really good quality or high PageRank links, however it was time to bulk up the quantity, to do this I:

- Created some reciprocal link partners with good online buddies

- Commented on do follow blogs with ‘top commenter’ widgets (I stopped this as it didn’t really work)

The increase in the sheer quantity of links lifted me onto the first page of Google for a lot of terms; however I still needed to add something to the mix…

Quarter Six

I knew in order to reach the top five I need those ‘trusted’ links from websites long established on Google and the only way to do this was to grovel!

- I leveraged all my blogging connections and friends

- I offered links from my other sites in return for a link to SEO wizz

I only managed a few however these highly trusted links were very effective, pushing my website to the top of the tree!

You see??? No Magic, no ridiculous techniques just hard work and a smart well thought-out plan and anyone can do the same, given the right skills and commitment.

What’s my plan moving forward???

Well I can’t give everything away; however I will let you know when I’ve done it

Thanks to all who read, link to, promote and support SEO wizz, reaching the top wouldn’t have been possible without you guys.

Cheers

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.

Well it has been a while; things are really busy at Branded3 with business coming in thick and fast, hence the lack of posts recently.

Something I wanted to discuss today is a trap I always get caught in despite knowing better, I just can’t help myself, let me explain….

SEO wizz has found itself on the first page of Google for some decent keywords including ‘search engine optimisation’ ‘google seo’ ‘search engine marketing’ ‘seo consultant’ and even ‘seo’ on the odd occasion. (These are UK rankings)

Despite these ranking successes 90% of my search engine traffic still comes from long tail keywords.

For example, I consistently rank between 1 and 5 for ‘SEO consultant’ a keyword that the Google keyword tool estimates around 8100 searches on a month in the UK. You would have thought my top 5 ranking would pull in a decent amount of search then???

Nope about 35 a month!!!!!

Why is this? Well Google’s tool is definitely inaccurate but I also think the only people searching on this term are SEO consultants attempting to rank for this keyword!!

This keyword is far from the exception, I have worked with a client ranking 2nd for the keyword ‘mobile phones’ out of 5 million estimated searches per month, guess how many clicks they got???

A whopping 4500 per month!!!! That’s 0.09%!!

Yes the Google Tool is definitely not accurate and I know for a fact that figure would have been 10 times higher if they had been in first but it should make everyone in the search engine marketing industry think twice about ‘Glory Rankings’, this is not how high traffic sites gain all those lovely visits.

I have long advocated targeting long tail terms and if you want to create a huge amount of traffic this is where your focus should also be. Yes target those competitive keywords on your homepage (TLD) but make sure you put the same amount of effort into making sure your site has lots of genuine content that is easily found.

Indexing Issues

Many websites that struggle to pull in large amounts of search engine traffic usually suffer with these common issues;

1- They don’t create enough unique content

2- Not enough pages on their website

3- Poor internal link structure

4- Poor on page optimisation

5- Have a Google penalty of some sort

One of the main issues I see with big clients suffering to get the amount of search traffic they think they warrant is indexing issues and this usually comes down to poor internal linking or a homepage heavy link profile.

If you think you might have a problem with pages being indexed there is a fairly straight forward way to find out…

Simply login to your Google Analytics account and perform a month by month search on the keywords your site has been found on, compare this to the amount of landing pages your website has been found on recording both figures for every month, to make it more visual place the figures into an excel file like so;

This is a graph for SEO wizz over the last 13 months as you can see I recently took a dip in landing pages, there is a reason for this that I’ll get to later.

Once you have highlighted a dip in keywords and landing pages, and that dip has not re peaked, there is a strong possibility your pages are not being indexed in the same quantity.

The first step you should take is to make sure your site is not suffering with any sort of penalty..

- Is it coming up in Google when you search your domain?

- Does it come up for an exact title tag search?

- Have any of your rankings suddenly dropped off the charts?

If you have any of the above issues you may be experiencing a penalty which is a whole other post, if not it’s time to move on.

The next thing to check is your internal linking;

- Are there any forgotten no followed internal links (this was one of my issues)

- How often are you publishing new content? (Again one of my issues, if you aren’t updating 3 – 4 times a week I have noticed drops across multiple websites)

- Are pages deeper than 3 links in a standard crawl from the home page?

If you wanted to get more technical you could create multiple sitemaps for each category which can help you highlight which areas may be struggling, read more about this on blogstorm.

This will usually present a fix, if you have checked all of the above you will almost always come across issues that you can fix, however there is one more thing to be aware of…..

If your site is new or has very few links to the homepage, there is a strong possibility that Google deems your site to be lacking in terms of importance and therefore why would it rank your deep pages??

The easiest way to fix this is to build lots of easy links (article marketing, social bookmarking, and directory links) to deep pages of your website, sometimes simply book marking every page you create can solve this issue and you will see significant traffic improvements.

So to summarise…. If you want more search traffic put more focus on having a well indexed site rather than ranking for ‘glory terms’.