SEO

Local Search Ranking Factors David Mihm

An annual survey of local SEO experts that provides insights into what factors are affecting local search.

Local SEO Checklist for New Sites – Whiteboard Friday (video) SEOMoz

Key takeaways: It is essential that you use the exact same name and information for each site you register your business at.

Local SEO: 10 Tips for Ranking in Your Area Search Engine Watch

Key takeaways: Make sure your Whois information matches your business address. Participate on local sites and forums. Explore opportunities for local press coverage of your business.

35 Local Link Opportunities You Missed Seer Interactive

Key takeaways: Sponsor a local meetup, charity, or dog shelter. Write testimonials for your vendors for a link.

Where To Get Citations For Local SEO Search Engine Land

Key takeaways: More than 20% of Google searches are for local business. There are a hundred local directories – get a page on each one like Yelp, Superpages, Citysearch, Urbanspoon, Angie’s List, Trip Advisor, and Merchant Circle. Use the Whitespark Local Citation Finder.

5 Sources of Links for Local Businesses Search Engine Journal

Key Takeaways: Find and submit to local directories. Reach out to local reporters when you do something newsworthy.

Google Places Citations: 5 More Tactics to Earn Links for Your Local Business SEOMoz

Key Takeaways: Use Google discussion search to find places where you can provide local citations or links.

10 Local Search Tools I Simply Can’t Live Without Search Engine Journal

A great list of must have local SEO tools.

10 Unorthodox Ideas For Local Citations & Links Search Engine Land

Key takeaway: look for creative opportunities to get citations and links like writing a book, sponsoring a festival, providing free Wifi service, offering a special discount to local clubs, etc.

Nifty Hard Core Local SEO Tactics From SMX Advanced Search Engine Land

Key Takeaways: If you have multiple locations, claim Google Place listings in a corporate Google account. Each location must have a unique phone number.

Charles Sipe is the Director of Search at Sparkplug Digital. He enjoys working on link building, creating great content, bringing back the Seattle Sonics, and always learning new things about online marketing. Twitter: @charlessipe

Feel free to contact us with any questions at info(at)sparkplugdigital.com

On April 24th, Google launched the Penguin update to their algorithm that reduced traffic to a significant number of sites. Here are some great resources for learning more about Google Penguin.

Penguins, Pandas, and Panic at the Zoo SEOMoz

Key takeaway: Avoid being too aggressive with exact match anchor text links.

17 Ways SMBs Can Survive the Google Penguin Update Effect Search Engine Watch

Key takeaways: Diversify your inbound traffic to sources outside Google like social media. Business owners should spend 5 times as much time on other websites than on their own site.

Google Penguin Update Recovery Tips & Advice Search Engine Land

Key takeaways: Google confirms that the Penguin update is fully live. Penguin is an algorithmic change (not a manual penalty). Panda 3.5 was released on April 19th.

What to Do if Your Search Rankings Were Hurt by Google’s Penguin Update Hubspot

Key takeaways: Focus on creating remarkable content for potential customers. Make sure to verify your site Google Webmaster Tools to check for any warning messages. Avoid hidden text or links and keyword stuffing.

Penguin Analysis: SEO Isn’t Dead, But You Need to Act Smarter (And 5 Easy Ways to Do So!) Microsite Masters

Key takeaway: Anchor text is much less of a linking factor than in the past. Make sure at least 50% of your links use keywords that are not the keyword you are trying to rank for.

Google Penguin Update: 5 Types of Link Issues Harming Some Affected Websites Search Engine Watch

Key takeaway: Some linking factors that may have triggered Penguin are comment spam with exact match anchor text links, article marketing/article directories, and guest posts on questionable sites. The common denominator appears to be unnatural links.

Recover From Google Penguin Update: Get Better At Links WebProNews

Key takeaway: Avoid linking to bad neighborhoods as it can negatively affect your site. Avoid excessive link exchanges/reciprocal links.

Penguin Pain and Forward Planning Distilled

Key Takeaways: Don’t make a lot of changes to your site in a panic-driven state. Make sure you have a mix of anchor text links from other sites including brand anchor text, exact match, and phrase match.

Have you had an experience with the Penguin update? Please leave your comments below.

Charles Sipe is the Director of Search at Sparkplug Digital. He enjoys working on link building, creating great content, bringing back the Seattle Sonics, and always learning new things about online marketing. Twitter: @charlessipe

Feel free to contact us with any questions at info(at)sparkplugdigital.com

One of the great benefits of online marketing is that you can measure your efforts and calculate the effects of your efforts. Understanding analytics for SEO can be tremendously helpful in measuring key performance indicators and the following resources can help you become more knowledgeable in this area.

SEO Analytics, Middle Earth-Style Portent

Ian Lurie provides a great overview and approach to SEO analytics. The key takeaway: work on developing simple and actionable insights from the data. Ian uses tools like Authority Labs, SEOMoz, Screaming Frog, and Xeno to gather data. He advises that you track metrics like: non-branded visits, time on site, social media metrics, unique ranking domains, and rankings. He also suggests learning some programming using Python which can save a lot of time.

A Beginner’s Guide to Conversion Goals in Google Analytics Search Engine Journal

Key takeaways: Conversions can be non-sales events like email subscriptions, contact form completions, watching a video, etc.

Microsoft Excel for SEOs Distilled

An excellent guide for becoming an Excel ninja by the smart folks at Distilled. If you can use Excel, it can be one of the most useful tools in your arsenal for analyzing website data.

How to Use Advanced Segments in Google Analytics to Isolate SEO Problems [Tutorial] Search Engine Journal

An in-depth tutorial for learning how to leverage advanced segments to analyze your site’s data. Why are advanced segments in Google Analytics helpful? It allows you to view data only from a specific type of visitor (for example visitors who viewed a video and then viewed a product page). It also explains the steps for setting up an advanced segment in Google Analytics. Key takeaway: in meetings data usually trumps opinion.

Measuring Natural Keyword in the Age of (Not-Provided) Secure Search High Rankings

Key takeaway: the issue with not-provided keyword data will continue to get worse for search marketers and many sites may see 75% of their search traffic as not-provided.

The SEO’s Guide to Google Analytics 5 Search Engine Journal

A comprehensive 3-part guide on the new version of Google Analytics focused on SEO. It describes some of the key changes in GA5 and new features. Key takeaway: you can now see visitors from different geographic locations.

11 Google Analytics Tricks to Use for Your Website SEOMoz

Great tips on using Google Analytics to learn some useful insights and some really cool tricks to try out.

SEO Metrics for Publishers: How are You Tracking and Measuring Success? Adam Sherk
A good overview of SEO analytics for publishers. Key takeaways: rankings should not be a primary success metric due to personalization. Monitor number of pages with at least one visit during a period of time to measure indexation.

Do you have any additional resources to share? Please add them below in the comments.

Charles Sipe is the Director of Search at Sparkplug Digital. He enjoys working on link building, creating great content, and always learning new things about online marketing. Twitter: @charlessipe

Feel free to contact us with any questions at info(at)sparkplugdigital.com

For years the go to advice on SEO, at least in terms of Google’s public response to SEOs is concerned, has been to create content that people love. You know, stuff that site visitors actually want to read and look at.

Authorship, established using the rel=author tag linked back to a Google+ profile, is another big leap forward in rewarding those who are willing to invest in the regular production of quality content.

Authorship in action

When doing a search for “Google Penguin update”, approximately 80% of the first page results are shown to have author attribution.

Although these findings could be classified as atypical considering that most of the content is written by people in the search industry, who are obviously a couple steps ahead of the curve, it’s still nonetheless difficult to deny the growing popularity of the author tag. Just this week it was reported that 1 out of every 5 searches reveals author attribution in the top 100 search results.

Why does authorship matter?

Regardless of all the talk about why authorship may or may not change SEO, speaking from strictly a user’s perspective, authorship allows me (the person doing the search) to:

A) see the authors G+ photo
B) get the author’s name
C) see how popular / credible / influential they are on G+
D) read more by them if I so choose

I now have more information when it comes to deciding which links to click on and which to pass up. I’m no longer loyal to just sources, but also authors that I know and trust.

Power to the content producers

As someone who has written for multiple outlets and likes to make occasional guest contributions, authorship is potentially a big deal in the making.

So long as I have a G+ account and I’m willing to link back to it, I now have a sort of virtual passport that follows me everywhere I go. The implications for personal branding, let alone blogger outreach and link building, are large and conceivably game changing.

While some might say it’s little more than a subtle change in how results are displayed, or a ploy to increase G+ adoption (although that likely is part of it), at its core it appears as if authorship – at minimum – represents a shift in power towards content producers. How big the shift is and what it means for the future of search is still unknown, but given that G+ is being worked into everything Google does, even to the point where SERPs are being influenced, there’s little reason to not jump on the authorship bandwagon.

Image credit

 

In a move that arguably defines the axiom that “contempt breeds familiarity,” Google has announced that it will offer a commenting system to third-party websites that is similar to that of Facebook.

Facebook’s commenting system, which is already available to websites, allows users to make comments on the site’s content via their Facebook accounts and/or that are publishable to accounts, and is usually found at the bottom of the page below the content. The Google+ system, which is presumed to be a virtual carbon copy that will connect comments back to Google+ profiles in the same way, will compete for this space.

The motivation is simple: if a website decides to use Facebook plugins it will naturally be more integrated with Facebook and the social-media giant’s nearly 800 million users. This obviously interferes with Google’s Internet land grab and so competition for this comment space on third-party websites was a foregone conclusion.

Even so, analysts predict many website operators will be reluctant to switch from Facebook’s pltaform to the Google+ alternative, and not just because Google+ fails to compete in terms of numbers of users. Those who switch over may find that their comment histories are lost and confuse users who are used to (and likely want) the Facebook tie-in.

Of course, attracting more users is also a driver of Google’s gambit in the website commenting realm. If more people are talking about content through Google+, the assumption is that more people will be drawn into using the new social-media platform. Both experts and lay critics, however, believe this is an unlikely scenario and that Google’s efforts amount to little more than another Johnny-come-lately moment in its attempt to square off with the king of social media.

Google hopes new additions to commenting capability will help it edge out its Web nemesis, like the indexing of comments in Google Search to even further amplify and personalize its search platform for users, but there are no guarantees this will help convince website operators of its superiority. In fact, some may argue Google’s growing publicity problems over privacy concerns may make this a nonstarter.

While Google remains the master of search, the court of public opinion still favors Facebook when it comes to social media, and that blessing would appear to extend to third-party commenting initiatives. Only time will tell if Google’s new strategy will help draw more people to the Google+ well.

Photo by John Marino

Optify, a top inbound marketing software provider, released a new report yesterday that takes a comprehensive look at how Google and Bing factor breaking news into search engine results pages. Among the key takeaways was the discovery that an average of 70% of the SERP territory at the top of a page was reserved exclusively towards breaking news. When a huge piece of news, such as a scandalous incident involving an A list celebrity or a large natural disaster, starts making the rounds across the web, search engines will temporarily give priority to pages with fresh news content over those that regularly hold the top organic results. This information shouldn’t come as a jaw dropping revelation, however the report does provide a valuable perspective on how SEOs can best leverage breaking news to secure additional traffic.

What constitutes breaking news?

For the purpose of the study Optify examined 3 high profile news events that occurred over the past year, including a worldwide news event (the tsunami that hit Japan on March 11, 2011), a business news event (Steve Jobs stepping down from Apple on Aug 24), and a local news event (Amanda Knox returning to Seattle on Oct 4). In each of these cases Google and Bing were able to react quickly and funnel news to the top of the first results page. Unsurprisingly, the search results for the tsunami, one of the biggest stories of the year, resulted in a more aggressive display of news from both search engines as opposed to a smaller local news story such as Knox returning to her hometown.

Best practices for ranking with breaking news

The report includes a number of tips for using big news events as a traffic source. A few of the highlights include:

1. Using multiple types of content (text, images, and video) to increase your chances of being discovered.

2. Understanding that time is of the essence. Trying to jump on a news story days or even hours after it’s already been covered may not be worth the effort.

3. Making sure your site is being indexed as a news site.

4. Reporting on breaking news only when it’s relevant to the theme of your site.

5. Having the keywords you’d like to rank for already established before news breaks.

6. Keeping an eye on Twitter and trending #hashtags as a discovery resource for breaking news.

For complete analysis download the full breaking news study. 

Image credit: Johan Larss

“Transparency” is the new watchword in the search engine blogosphere as companies strive to demonstrate their willingness to share their rankings secrets … without giving away the golden goose in the process.

Microsoft’s Bing search platform, which struggles with Yahoo for a distant second place to Google, has started a new blog called “Quality Search Insights” in an effort to keep the public, policymakers and critics informed about its updates and what it is doing to improve its search engine results pages (SERPs).

The blog debut is written by Dr. Jan Pedersen, Bing’s Chief Scientist for Core Research, and discusses concepts like “Whole Page Relevance” and “Answer Ranking.” These are two key concepts driving Bing’s SERP design and layout as well as the content contained in them. Dr. Pedersen refers to Bing’s results as “answers” rather than results as a way to emphasize his department’s goal to deliver a precise block of relevant content rather than a series of best guesses.

Some pundits believe Bing’s move will take some of the pressure off of Google, which began lifting the curtain to show the wizard’s shoes a year ago in its “Search Quality Highlights” blog. Bing’s admission that Whole Page Relevance uses the exact same strategy as Google’s Universal Search, which blends results across many vertical functions (images, maps, news, video, etc.), puts the two on the same controversial playing field.

Google’s interest in displaying acts of transparency are apparent to most, especially in recent months as the search giant attracts more attention from the Securities and Exchange Commission and legislators for changes to its privacy policy, corporate acquisitions and other questionable decisions. But while Google’s motives are at least in part driven by anti-trust issues, Bing’s rationale for publishing its search “secrets” may be more influenced by the need for recognition.

It’s no secret that Bing is losing the search engine war. Everyone is losing to Google, and it’s a blowout. An argument could be made that Bing’s only real advantage in revealing its methodology is to show people that Google doesn’t have a monopoly on cutting-edge search strategies, and to perhaps curry favor with search engine optimization (SEO) specialists and other Web professionals who are helped by knowing such details.

Competition is good for any market, especially for one so lopsided as search, and it would be unfortunate to find that Bing’s attempt to gain a bigger share only succeeds in validating what some are calling the increasingly suspicious methods of the reigning champion.

James Madeiros is a staff writer for Sparkplug Digital, a Seattle SEO company providing SEO campaign management and link building for technology companies. Email info@sparkplugdigital.com

February was a busy month for Google.

Legal maneuvering and privacy policy issues aside, the company announced nearly 40 search updates to its platform in addition to the rollout of Panda 3.3 update, and one of the biggest changes for search engine optimization (SEO) specialists and other Web professionals is Google’s retooling of how it determines link values.

New link analysis and evaluation could impact the way an entire Web page is ranked, but as is often the case with these types of updates, Google is not revealing too many details about what it has changed or how much the change could influence search engine results pages (SERPs).

Google’s brief statement regarding the change indicates the company is “turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years.” Needless to say, this leaves a lot of room for speculation into what the change could have been.

There’s really no definitive way of knowing, but experts have made several guesses. SEO expert Bill Slawski offered a dozen possibilities, from eliminating a step the process of calculating PageRank to a modification of link evaluation based on its location on the page. The vagueness of Google’s statement means it hard to know what was “turned off” – whether it was as simple as the statement suggests, or if it was a combination of things to create a single effect.

Top guesses for what the change may be according to various polls include changes to title tags, PageRank, the age of the link, the position of the link, surrounding/anchor text and HTML signals. An apparent favorite based on user comments may be HTML signals, which many have found easy to manipulate as a way to influence SERPs in the past, and so worthwhile to modify by Google.

SEO experts in the field have not reported any notice of significant changes based on revised link analysis and evaluation, but it’s possible those reporting are not impacted or simply that the change is hard to notice.

That Google has remained so tight-lipped about what has been removed may in itself be an indicator of the significance of the change. It is no surprise that it would not be specific, because the assumed goal is to prevent page designers and Web writers from gaming the system, but if people are left unaware of how a system is “improved” it makes it difficult for Web professionals to know what they can do to make things better to meet legitimate goals.

James Madeiros writes for Sparkplug Digital, a Seattle SEO company that provides SEO audits and linkbuilding for tech companies and startups.

The beginning of the year is a great time “tune-up” your company’s SEO strategy so that you can get off to a great start in reaching your 2012 marketing goals. We created this infographic to provide a good checklist of things to consider to develop a high performing SEO strategy that will provide winning results.

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