Category: seo

This topic has been getting a lot of coverage consistently this year. Namely down to the fact that there have been some massive updates in the world of SEO this year. Penguin 2.0, the integration of Panda into the algorithm and, of course, the latest and biggest update Hummingbird.

This has effectively signalled the end for bad link building practices. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people still out there who practice these techniques. Lets take a look at which techniques to avoid.

Buying Links

You’d think this would go without saying these days but unfortunately this is still rife amongst SEOs. It’s seen as a quick win thing, and you might get some luck out of it. But Google will realise what you’ve done, and then you’ll be in an even worse position than when you started off.

Article Directories

These did actually help SEO at one point. Content was written and published to relevant sectors of article directories. Then came the spammers. Spun content and automatic submissions grew exponentially and Google had no choice but to ban or take manual action on some article directories. These days it would be surprising if Google took article directories seriously.

Low Quality Link Directories

As with article directories, you can still do this well. What you need is an industry specific, high quality, structured directory. You should upload accurate information about your company and avoid exact match anchor text. What you don’t want, is to hit hundreds of general link directories with exact match anchors. That will get you nowhere.

Are there any other techniques you would avoid using when link building?

Blog Post by Greg McVey

Whenever SEOs gather for a chat, whether it be at a conference or, if we’re particularly lucky, a pub, you cannot escape the conversation without the pros, cons, reasons and rhymes for and against the use of meta tags.

The meta keywords attribute discussion has died down a fair bit with the universal opinion being: You do not need meta keywords tags and they’re a complete waste of time.

The other opinion, widely panned by observers of the first opinion, is that you do need them. Reason being: You don’t need skirting boards in a house, they do however mark the bottom of the wall, which is obvious. Yet it’s rare you come across a house without skirting boards in . In effect, it’s better to have it an not need it than need it and not have it.

Even though Google have said they don’t use the meta keywords tag for ranking, it’s still nice to have it there for structure etc.

The Meta Description tag however, is much more open to debate. Everyone agrees that you need them. Everyone agrees they should be unique. But not everyone agrees you should have them on every page.

Naturally you should add them to any important pages. But for all other pages on your website, should you have a unique meta description? A default one? Well, the question was put to Matt Cutts in the following:

“Is it necessary for every page to have a meta description?”

Matt’s answer below:

As you can see, there are some definitive answers there. First of all, no duplicates. Matt made that much clear, each meta description should be unique if present. Secondly, it’s better to have no meta description at all than a duplicate.

Finally, although you may have an auto generated snippet acting as your meta descriptions, which ensures unique content, if it doesn’t read well then you should re-write it manually. You have to put the user first here and make sure you’re helping them as much as possible by adding correct, legible content on your site.

Blog Post by Greg McVey

Google have today announced measures that will block people searching for abusive images and in particular, child abuse images.

The don’t stop at just blocking searches though, they’ve taken action blocking thousands of videos and images that are known to contain abusive images.

The extent to which Google has committed themselves to this campaign is such that over 100,000 phrases related to abuse have been blocked. This has been coupled with the ability to “tag” known videos and images as duplicates of previously blocked material.

These changes directly affect Google’s search engines across the glove and in over 150 languages.

After growing unease and calls for the internet giant to do more, Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt says “we’ve listened” and that’s the reason why these measures have been taken. He went on to say:

“We’ve fine-tuned Google Search to prevent links to child sexual abuse material from appearing in our results.”

This all comes before Google’s meeting with the Prime Minister where representatives of Microsoft and BT will also be present.

Blog Post by Greg McVey

Guest posting is a bit contentious at the minute. There are those who say it’s a great links back to your own site from relevant websites that’s really great for SEO. Especially if you can get keyword links from the site you’re posting on. It’s all natural and loved by Google.

Then there are those who are cynics and say that guest posting isn’t natural and you shouldn’t have keyword anchors on there as it’s spammy. There are even those who say it is spammy as a lot of people pay for guest posts making them paid follow links. Bad for SEO.

Whatever you think on the matter, here are some tips you can use so that you will have a better chance to add a guest post to someone else’s website.

Read Their Posts: You might be a great writer, but if you’re writing with a view that’s opposed to the website you will be publishing on, then you wont be able to publish a guest post on that site. For example, you talk to the owner of a forum who wants you to write a post. The forum owner encourages keywords in their reply signatures as it’s good for SEO and this is how they get traffic to their site. If you then write an article condemning spammy, over optimised anchor links in forum signatures, it might not get published (the might is sarcastic, you have close to no chance).  Maybe a bit of an extreme example, but you do need to make sure you’re reading the blogs you want to post on so that you’ll be able to further that website’s point.

Be Friendly: If you have a blog, you’ll probably get at least 2 emails a day from people asking to publish on your website. They’ll have a standard “Dear Website Owner, we’ve read your blog and would very much like to help contribute to the excellent writing on there”. Chances are, hundreds of other website owners got the same email and rather than smiling and enjoying such a glowing compliment, would be a bit more cynical and delete the email attributing it as spam. So send a personalised email, add some excerpts of blogs that you’ve read. Remember you’re emailing someone with a personality, so show off yours.

Follow these tips and you’ll be sure to see an increase in your guest post submission success rate.

Blog Post by Greg McVey

If you’re having trouble with your Google Authorship, you can see Net66’s how-to on adding Google authorship to you page. You can also use this handy infographic from Search Engine Land:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

As with most things concerning Google, no matter how good it’s service is, there are always some bugs and people who notice them. One thing however that doesn’t seem to be a bug, but Google still gets criticised for, is it’s auto complete feature.

It’s been getting a lot of criticism at high levels with even the UN running a campaign for women’s rights using the feature. The reason Google has been used is not only down to the fact that it’s the biggest search engine out there. But more to do with the fact that Google aggregates data to come up with its instant suggestions.

Here’s the advert that is causing so much of a stir:

So how have these results come about? Google stores every single search made on their search engine. They measure the words used and the position in the sentence used. They then count the words, they count the sentences, then they will count the first two words used, then the first second and third words used and so on and so forth.

Then they’ll begin to examine how many times each word positioned second, is used after the first word in the sentence. Then after word one, in our example “women”, the word “shouldn’t” will then be suggested.

Now the complaints being levied are two fold on this account. People are blaming Google for suggesting such things as “Women shouldn’t vote”, but at the same time, it’s us users who are making those searches. An argument also exists that Google is in effect finishing our sentences, and people who wouldn’t usually search for something like that, will indeed search for it as they have their curiosity aroused.

Do you think Google should be doing more about this? Or so you think that it’s down to users to change this?

Not long ago the internet was alive with Google’s Authorship Program believing that it could revolutionise the already revolutionary exponential growth of Content Marketing.

The argument was that there was going to be an “Authorship rank”. And that this would be directly related to how often each author wrote, how many websites they wrote on and of course, relevant to how much quality was in the content.

These three factors would then be combined to give a rough estimate of the Rank of an Author. So if you have an author write a blog post on your website who is associated with only one other website and whilst they do write consistently, the quality isn’t great and it doesn’t get that much traffic, this might not be a big bonus to your website.

However if you get quite a few different authors who all publish great content on a couple of popular sites in your industry, and you get them to write for you, their Author Rank will pass onto your site, boosting your SEO.

Sadly, no one knows if this is the case or not. And now it looks like all that speculation was for naught. Google Authorship is set to be changing as we know it. The main reason for this seems to be participation, or rather, the lack of it. Not enough top quality authors are in the Authorship programme so to use authorship and author rank as ranking indicators could cause some pretty large and well known blogs to lose rankings because of it.

The good news however, is that Authorship markup still increases click through rates from the SERPs and the markup is here to stay. So if you STILL haven’t added Google Authorship to your blog, you need to.

Blog Post by Greg McVey

You may have heard the news doing the circuit on the SEO blogs that Google Analytics will no longer be providing keyword data. That is, of course, unless you’re willing to forego all your previous SEO work and switch to Paid Adverts a la Google Adwords. Failing that if you have a spare £90,000 per year lying around, you could easily afford Google Analytics Premium. Where “user privacy” – the reason Google are switching to (not provided) keywords – appears to be easily bought.

But we’re not here to gripe about who appears to be taking advantage of a monopoly position, we’re here to discuss what can be done to regain some useful data back from Google. See our top tips below:

Take Advantage of your Landing Pages

As we all know, one of the main keys in SEO is relevance. You want to optimise a specific page for each individual keyword. So now that you’ve done that, you’ll be able to look at which pages are the most relevant for each keyword. Through Google Analytics (It is still quite useful after all) if you navigate to Behaviour > Site Content > Landing Pages. This shows you a a list of your most popular landing pages and also just exactly how many hits you’re getting directly to them. Adding an advanced search to this will also help you narrow it down. If you add the secondary dimension as source and then search this for “Google”, it will show only the Google traffic to your landing pages.

Analysing the statistics from this section you’ll be able to discern which pages are performing better than others. For example our SEO services has more hits to it this month than our website design page. So from that it’s indicative we’re getting found more for SEO related keywords than web design keyword. Apply the same principle to your own clients’ analytics and you’ll be able to privide them with more accurate data.

Using Google Webmasters Tools

Google also offer a range of Webmasters Tools which help you produce a website worth of Google’s listings. In this set of tools you’ll find such things as the links Google have discovered to your site, which can prove an excellent link analysis tool. Especially when you consider that if you are ever to receive a link warning from them, they almost always refer to the links contained within webmaster.

But what we’re after here is the “keywords” section of Google Webmasters Tools. You can access it by clicking Search Engine > Search Queries. This will provide you with a list of your most popular queries and how many impressions you’ve made. You’ll also be able to see just how many clicks you’re getting from your impressions as well. This will give you some great data such as which pages appear for that search term the most as well as their average ranking positions in the search engines.

So although we might not be getting the best and most accurate data from Google Analytics anymore, there’s no need to panic massively as there’s still a lot you can do. Such as the above tips.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Oscar Wilde once said “Everything in Moderation is the key, including moderation”. Matt Cutts is no Oscar Wilde but he has come out with his own views on what should be carried out in moderation this week, which is Guest Blogging.

The reason for this is that he was asked how Google can distinguish between genuine guest blogs and paid links. And he went on to explain pretty much how the distinctions are made. Firstly, if there is a spam review, then a member of the webspam team will take a look at it. And as they’re a human they’ll be able to judge it correctly.

Anchor Text. A good indicator of a paid link is keyword rich anchor text. It might seem obvious now but people are still paying for keyword rich anchor text, especially if it’s a dofollow. If you’re writing a genuine guest post then you aren’t doing it for the anchor text, you’re writing it as you’re an expert on the subject and have a genuine passion for it. Due to this you’re much more likely to make links contextual.

Relevance. Identifying a genuine guest blog post is also helped by how relevant the post is to the rest of the website. If you’re a website looking for a guest post, you’re likely looking for an expert relevant in your industry. If you’re simply paying to get a blog post on that site, then in theory you’re only looking for the links you’ll be adding to your post and won’t care much about relevance. Indicating paid links.

Authorship. As a content writer you take pride in your work and want to receive the kudos, well deserved of course, that your writing inspires. As such, you’ll be wanting to write a bit about yourself at the end of any guest posts you do. You’ll probably also include a Google+ link and a link to your personal blog. If you were doing this for the links, a jot would not be given as long as the submitted article contained keyword rich anchor text. Again, indicative of paid links over genuine guest post.

So if you’re approached to write a guest post, keep this tips in mind when you’re writing. Otherwise you might get on the wrong end of Googles paid link detector. You an see Matt Cutts answer in full on the webmaster video below:

Blog Post by Greg McVey