Category: Video Blog

People at Google have recently stated that the importance of backlinks within the overall ranking scheme could diminish over the next few years. According to observers, the search engine may be looking at alternative ways to determine the relevance of a website to a particular keyword. These include signals from experts, the qualitative and quantitative interaction of humans with the content, and other on-site indicators.

Signals from experts could be links from a top journalist to your site, for example. If the industry is the same as yours, or similar to yours, and the linking party is considered an expert, you could benefit immensely from such a link.

Alternatively, Authority websites can also be gauged by their on-site content. On-site content is one of the easiest ways a search engine can determine a site’s worth. Detecting content matter, nuances of language, use of industry terminology, quality of language used, and even grammar can help a search engine get to grips with site quality and any potential authority status.

Currently, inbound links are the most important ways a search engine can determine the relevance of a web page to a particular keyword. However, unscrupulous link builders have been using links to increase relevance for web pages that are not really relevant. Motives can include monetary profit for one’s business, or working on a client’s behalf to raise rankings.

Quality link building involves creating mutual relationships with other businesses and stakeholders, so that any links between websites act as reflections of real world relationships. These are likely to be trusted by search engines, and your website is more likely to receive the benefit and rank higher.

Transcript:

The importance of outbound links

Usually, when we talk about link building we refer to inbound links to a website. However, another important aspect of a website is its outbound links. These are links that point out from your website, toward other websites.

Outbound link are especially easy to manage, since we do have control over our websites. What are some of the things we can do to ensure that outbound links are good and beneficial, and not at all detrimental to our cause?

First, we need to ensure that any outbound links are relevant to the page on which they are found. So if a web page is about gardening, you cannot have an outbound link about insurance.

Next, we need to make sure that the page on which the outbound link is found, is relevant to the rest of the website. For example, you cannot have a special page dedicated to an irrelevant topic, for the sole purpose of housing that link. Many people would probably approach you to house such a new page on your site, with their link in it. Do not easily give in to their demands, because if the page is not relevant to your own website, your entire website runs the risk of being penalised.

Yes, your whole website can be penalised and can thus loose its rankings, if you are hosting irrelevant content with outbound links in them. They key here is the relevance or otherwise of the new page in question.

You are free to decide what level of freedom you are willing to offer people who write on your website. Just be careful when accepting guest blog post offers from others.

 

We all know about on-site and off-site SEO. Today we’re going to talk about a lesser known variable in SEO: Reputation. What is reputation? In real life, reputation refers to the beliefs or opinions that are generally held about an entity or person.

When it comes to search marketing, on-site and off-site optimisation are really all about building your reputation. Think of the online world as a mirror of the real world. Links toward a website actually result from reputation. In this way, links are a by product of better reputation, not the goal.

You are defined by the company you keep. This is especially true online, and search engines go to great lengths to understand your company and associates to get a better idea of what you’re about.
Reputation can be traced from both website mentions of your brand, links to you, or social media signals talking about you.

There is a difference between acting good and actually being good. In the real world, we can usually sense who’s genuine and who’s faking it. Search engines are now getting better and better at differentiating between genuinely good sites and those that are trying to look good.

So what can we do to stay ahead in the game? Well, for one thing, we can be really good at what we claim to be doing, or selling. Genuine competence will win out in the end. Professional help will always provide you with significant advantage, however, and good SEO consultancy will help you stay ahead of the game. Keep watching Net66.

Transcript:

Welcome to Net66! 

Today, we’re going to take a look at how a search engine works from the inside. Lets take a look at the innards of a search engine. 

First, we’ve got the world wide web. Next the spider traverses the world wide web. The Spider is a specialised computer program built by search engines to crawl or traverse the world wide web. 

The spider passes its findings onto the search engine where the data is extracted, tokenised by which it means that the data is broken up into little bits, discrete bits such as title tags and h1 tags. It is then selected and unwanted bits are discarded, and finally stored. 

It is then passed into the data warehouse that houses all of the search engine’s cache. Now lets take a look at what happens on the other side when a user makes a query in the search engine. We’ve got the user here, the query is passed, first to the proxy server, the proxy server is responsible for all the local communication to and from the user. 

Next it is passed to the personalisation server. This is responsible for the geographical and other localised preferences for the user.

From there the data is passed to the web server. The web server is like any other web server on the internet that deals primarily with TCP/IP communication on the internet that passes through TCP/IP port 80. 

From there, the data is passed into the search engine. The query is then extracted from the data stores and passed to the data server. 

The Data server serves the data from the data warehouse to the semantic algorithms. The semantic algorithms are responsible for translating the data from the data warehouse into a 1-10 search engine results page. 

This is further propagated into the search results we see, on Google for example. 

The search results are then passed into the web server and from there they’re served back to the personalisation and geo-targeting server, from there to the proxy server and then finally, to the user as a 1-10 list of search results. 

And that is briefly how a search engine works from the inside. 

Thanks for watching!

 

Transcript:

Welcome to Net66. Today, we’re going to be talking about on-site optimisation. On-site optimisation is one of the twin pillars of SEO, the other being off-site link building. On-site optimisation involves proactively managing the evolution of a website and its various components to ensure that it gains favour with the search engines.

A website is a system with many components, such as title tags, header tags, paragraphs, sidebars, textual content, images, and internal and external links. All these components interact with each other to create the perfect website.

All of a website parts can be modified through on-site best practices to ensure that they portray the best picture of your business. Let’s take a look at some of these opportunities.

Title tags are by far the most important part of any web page. These appear in the blue bar at the top of your browser, and also show up as the blue clickable link in the search engine results pages. Title tags signal to the search engine what the page is all about, and usually host the most important keywords describing that page. It is extremely important to make sure you get your title tags right.

Header tags such as H1s, H2 and H3s are other important parts of a page. These specify captions on a page, with the H1 forming the most important caption, followed by H2, and H3 in that order. Header tags should reflect the keywords that you have in your title tag.

The page’s textual content should also incorporate the kewyords mentioned in the title and headers. These are just some of the on-page components that we can optimise.
For more about on-site SEO, keep watching Net 66. Thank You.

Here is another informative video blog by Net66.

Welcome to Net66.

Today we are going to be talking about Google Glass. What is Google Glass? It is actually a wearable computer that you can put on your head as spectacles. It has a tiny heads up display, a camera and sound capabilities.

Google Glass is especially important for SEO as it will allow people to search for products and services on the move, you could look at a product in a store and search for similar or cheaper products. You might even be able to complete a purchase by simply winking at a product.

Search results will be displayed as in-sole cards which you can then swipe away to move onto the next one. Insole cards are boxes of information that display text in large concise lettering. This means that customers might not really want to browse beyond the top one or two search results.

This also implies that if your business is not ranking in the top one or two positions a Google Glass user might not really want to see it. How will this change SEO?

Well for one, businesses can aim to rank in the top positions for less competitive keywords. In other words it may be better to rank number one for many lesser used keywords than ranking on the first page for more popular keywords.

With Google Glass, audio search may also become more popular as people simply choose to search for things by more impulsive uttering keywords. All this may change SEO as we know it but it all depends on how many people take up Google Glass.

Google Glass is set to arrive in late 2014 and we at Net66 are ready for it. Are you?

Thank You.

Take a look at this weeks video blog from Net66. This time we’re discussing SEO & Social Media.

Welcome to Net66.

Today we are going to be talking about social signals and SEO. Social media is a young medium of communication which has quickly established itself as a genuine source of online expression. It is intensely personal, so entities such as tweets and likes can act as strong signals of endorsement from individual personalities.

Twitter and Facebook are the two most prominent social media sites that reference content across the web. Pinterest and Reddit come in a close second. Twitter, meanwhile offers a special pronounced real time discussion about a business’ offerings.

Pinterest also gives brands the chance to showcase their offerings as images, whilst Reddit can offer an impartial, non-promotional review of your product or business. Google + offers its operator Google the most direct access to personal signals imaginable.

Since we know search engines aim to emulate human behaviour to put themselves in your shoes as if you were. It would be very logical to assume that they would also take notice of social signals and incorporate their outputs in search engine rankings.

Indeed, over the years professional SEO practitioners have mentioned a direct correlation between the intensity of social signals and search engine rankings. We at Net66 tend to agree with this hypothesis.

For more information about SEO, keep watching the Net66 channel.

Thank you.

Check out our latest video blog on the differences between unethical and ethical SEO.

What is the difference between ethical and unethical SEO?

Ethical search engine optimisation is performed while following the guidelines of the major search engines such as Google. This means that content is created that is original, meaningful, and congruent with the website or business purpose.

Additionally, ethical SEO entails that any link building performed must add value to the wider World Wide Web. Links should be a reflection of natural social and business relationships, so they act as votes and endorsements ff website content.

Unethical SEO, meanwhile, could encompass black hat techniques such as link farming, hidden  content, or paid links.

Paid links are especially frowned upon by the search engines, as they can hide or obfuscate a website’s true worth on the Web. They can create a false picture of external endorsement, which can confuse search engines and cause artificially inflated rankings.

These practices detract from a meaningful experience on the Web, and websites indulging in them can be penalised by the search engines.

Google algorithmic updates such as Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird can contribute to the filtering of unethically optimised websites, contributing to a higher search experience.

For more information about SEO, keep watching the Net 66 channel. Thank You.