Q&A Spot: What's New in SEO since your Webinar

QUESTION: Ive used your webinar very successfully over the past six months but is there anything new I should be aware of since it was produced?

Mike Hardcastle, GeoMapping Ltd, Somerset

ANSWER: The first thing to say is that the webinar (and the blog lessons also) are still valid and will bring you great success in your seo activities.

I would like however to outline some new points - mainly changes of emphasis you should be aware of :-

1. The first module focuses on Keyphrase analysis and the tools /techniques approaches are all very relevant but we place less emphasis on KEIs nowadays (keyword effectiveness indices).

There's a more accurate method for deciding and prioritising keyphrases outlined in a recent post.

2. The third module focuses on optimising your content. Again all perfectly valid but the search engine spiders are getting cleverer so LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) is an important factor as well as density issues - see this post for more information.

3. The fourth module covers the subject of backlinking. Again still very important but 'google bombing' George Bush no longer works. Does this mean big G has changed it algorithm to prevent 'google bombing'? - some say so, I think not as getting good anchor text in inbound links still makes a big difference (other say it was a 'hand job' where specific bombs were defused for political correctness).

Much more on the value of the Page Rank indicator in assessing backlink quality at a recent post.

I'll make you aware of any other changes you should be aware of as they arise.

A Fresh Look at Keyphrase Selection

What's below folks is a little technique for you for deciding on keyphrases you want to go with.

We've discussed this before at length - lots tools and techniques at previous posts( see postings on keyphrase analysis )

However, this area of optimisation continues to be crucially important so here's more useful stuff, below is a step by step process for you but before that lets review some of the basics.

What are the most important factors in deciding on your keyphrases?

There are three you must consider:-

Search volume - how may times a day is your phrase searched for? (get a feel at www.digitalpoint.com)

Relevance - to your business objectives and what sort of searchers you want to capture

Competition

Its this last factor which is the real indicator of how easy/difficult it might be to get good rankings.

The classical way of doing this is to see how many pages are returned when doing a google search, for example on doing a google search for "international relocation" in the top right hand corner of the results google will say 'results 1-10 of about 34300 for international relocation 0.09 seconds'

Its this figure of 34300 we normally take as the competition figure. (dont forget to include the search term in quote marks if you do this so you return just the pages with the exact phrase).

But are these really competitors just because they include the phrase in a page? They could be, but there again many of these pages may not be optimised so its a crude measure. This is the figure use when measuring the KEI (keyword effectiveness index) so confirming why KEI is only a crude measure and should be used as such.

Here's a more accurate way.

Lets stay with the term "international relocation" as our example.

Lets say our first objective is to get into the top 5 positions. This is a good target because we know now that this 'above the scroll' area delivers most visits (around 85%).

Doing a google search for this term will show us our top competitors. We will take the guy in 5th position and examine him to see how difficult/easy it might be to get above him. Below is the snippet in 5th position.

We then look at two main variables which have given him this position.

One is his degree of on page optimisation; the other is his backlink profile.

Much can be gleaned from viewing the snippet above in terms of his on page optimisation. We can see that the title above (the first line of the snippet and very important as I'm sure you will remember) is not particularly well optimised since the term 'international relocation' is not in there.

We can also see that the 'description' (the two lines below the title which are the contents of the description metatag) is not well optimised (again the selected keyphrase is not in there). Finally if we click on the 'cached' (on the last line of the snippet in red) we get:-

This is google showing us the repetitions it has recorded for this page and you can see there are no significant repetitions of the phrase. In fact all we need to do is to repeat the phrase 'international relocation' a few times in our page, include the phrase as the first item in our title tag and bingo we've out optimised him.

So how come this guy does so well in google if his on-page optimisation is so poor? It must be that his off-page optimisation (ie his backlinks) is good.

We can confirm this by looking at his Page Rank.
If you remember you need to download this from http://toolbar.google.com

As we can see (by scrolling over the PageRank indicator above) his PageRank is 4.
If we now check how many backlinks he's got (many ways to do this but going to yahoo and typing in the following is as good as any):-


If you did this you will see he has around 1000 backlinks. Now we know why he ranks so high!

So, if we check our own backlinks we can work out how many and how long it will take to be in a position to compete. As an example lets say we have 600, so we need another 400 (lets say adding 100 per month for 4 months and that would do it.)

This is a rough guide only - it may be that by getting better quality links (more 'contextually relevant' better anchor text and so on.... all stuff we've discussed before) we dont need so many links. Also this is pretty exceptional for a small business, most of you wont need anywhere near so many links. (please note the limitations of Page Rank also - see the last post)

So I hope you can see this is a good way of working out how easy and how long it will take to get good rankings on specific keyphrases. Sometimes its very simple, perhaps just changing some on-page factors, some times more difficult (like the example above).

If you need any more input on this dont hesitate to call. (01928 788100) - always happy to speak with you...

Best Wishes

Jan Klin

What's new in SEO in 2007?

The SES (Search Engine Strategies) Conference in February was massive. Almost 1000 companies from all over the world were in London to hear assorted luminaries from the top companies speak - from Matt Cutts the Google celebrity 'engineer' (how many engineers do you know worth over £100m?) to executives from major search companies.

Here are a few impressions/facts I can away with you may find interesting:-

Google has become dominant - you probably knew that, may be what you didnt know is that they now have over 70% market share in the UK, BUT Yahoo have grow faster in the last year (by about 15% but still only around a 10% market share). MSN continues to slide and ASK is now up to a 5% market share. Surely when thinking of optimising our sites we dont need to think much outside of these stars?

Major companies are increasing their spend in SEO - sometimes spending 100's of thousands per annum on getting top rankings. The good news for small businesses is that there are not too many big ones to dominate the page one spots (did you know over 90% of UK companies have less than 10 employees?). The other good news for small businesses is that 95% of your competitors dont do SEO (worse still they assume their website designer has done it for them!)

More free tools for SEO are available - even some I didnt know - Have a look at this http://tools.seobook.com/

Every free tool you can think of from from keyword analysis, to backink checkers to sitemap generators and ranking checkers. Including spider simulators (to see what bits of your site spiders can see) to metatag generators - and more - and all for free!

Talking about tools - here's a special one - Google Webmaster Central -one which has recently become available and provides all you need to improve your google position http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Search Engine Spiders are getting cleverer - for example it used to be that 'keyword density' was a major factor - nowadays the spiders are into 'Latent Semantic Indexing' (LSI) meaning that, for example, a page containing 'romance', 'love', 'heart' and 'valentines day' is more likely to be about valentines day that a page stuffed with many repetitions of 'valentines day'.

The experts dont like the Google 'Page Rank' indicator anymore - You know the little green indicator telling you how much google likes your page. In fact one MD said that downloading from http://toolbar.google.com/ was a sackable offence in his search marketing company and referred to it as 'little green fairy dust'.
My own feeling is that its still a reasonable indicator of ranking - we just have to remember it is a function of the number of inbound links mainly and doesn’t take account the 'contextual relevance' of the link (you know, if an incoming link to a page on 'wedding rings' is from a wedding related website and is surrounded by text about best places to buy wedding rings - that is contextual relevance - and its increasingly important for google's ranking)
Neither does it take into account 'anchor text' - in the above example the anchor text (or link text) would be 'wedding rings'.

Social networking sites are important for SEO - The likes of MySpace, Bebo etc where you can communicate with like minded dickheads - as one speaker delicately put it, and 100 million knobheads a day cant all be wrong (I think this was from the same speaker - a guy from IBM I think).
The point here is you can legitimately leave links from these sites but in terms of relevant traffic its only going to attract a very specific (and probably non business) demographic.

Backlink quality is more important than ever - in fact a new area of specialism has developed called link baiting. Essentially its a simple as saying if you have good quality content and can get the message out there people will link to you automatically. Blogs seem to be the favoured way of facilitating this. Also RSS is increasingly used as away of distributing your links automatically. There are some good postings on this subject at SEOMOZ (see, thats how it works!)


Pay per Click – is getting more expensive by the month , and even prohibitive in some sectors like finance, telecoms and gambling. So you really have no alternative but to embrace SEO for long term sustainable search success!

Finally though (and reassuringly!) some things never change - providing you do the following you are well on your way to out competing the masses:-

-Ensure you have well written, keyword rich (but not stuffed - see LSI above) content on very page - say 250 nicely formatted, and well laid out, words.

-Ensure your title tag includes 1-3 of the phrases you want to capture (which also of course appears on the page)

- Ensure these title tags are different on each page as are the other metatags - particularly the keyword and description tags.

-Make sure the keyword tag ONLY includes words that are on the page.

-Make sure the description tag includes the keyphrases in question a couple of times and is a bit salesy (this tag will get listed in the rankings list so will have an input on whether people click through or not )

- Make sure you have good navigation between pages - eg a list of links at the bottom of each page pointing to every other optimised page; a google sitemap is also a good idea especially if you have a database driven site. If there are links from within each page to other pages (with the relevenat link/anchor text) so much the better

- Build quality backlinks - easy to say, difficult to do, but definitely worth it in the long run - cos this is your route to free advertsing on google, so what if it does take twelve months, you're in business for ever arent you?

All this explained in a structured way in the rest of this blog and in my webinar. Also don’t hesitate to call if you need any help – I’m always happy to hear from you. (Jan Klin – 01928 788100)