searchengineoptimization

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web...

As we reported back in December, a Sponsored Stories lawsuit was allowed to proceed against the social media giant as Facebook failed to have it thrown out.  Today, the lawsuit was settled “in principle”at a federal court in San Jose, CA. Originally five Facebook members sued Facebook... Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web...

Here’s our daily recap of what happened in online marketing today, as reported on Marketing Land and other places across the web. From Marketing Land: Larry Page: It’s “Unfortunate” That Facebook Keeps Data Closed & Holds Users Hostage Google’s CEO Larry Page made... Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

A couple of days ago, I said that the best way to keep traffic flowing to your website was to create solid usable and / or enjoyable content. Whether you’re selling a product, service or yourself, a static page of information won’t bring customers back over and over again. Content does that. Articles, short posts, videos, how-tos, tip sheets, photos, user submissions, games, stories, interviews — these are things customers come back for and search engine spiders, literally, eat them up.

The Huffington Post knows this, so they’re expanding their content reach by reaching out to brands who want to become publishers.

According to AdAge, Huffington Post is currently working with a major consumer goods advertisers to create an online lifestyle publication. The site will include articles curated from HuffPo’s extensive archive as well as new works created specifically to support the brand. And since HuffPo is an extension of AOL, it’s likely that these new sites will carry ads from their platform so it’s a big win for everyone involved.

It’s also a win for consumers because good information is good information, it doesn’t matter if it’s back by a specific brand, newspaper, or a lone opinionated person.

How do you get in on this? Easy. Create your own content site. It probably won’t be as big, fancy and well connected as a HuffPo / AOL / Brand collaboration, but it doesn’t have to be. Look at Craigslist.org if you don’t think simple sells.

3 Steps to Creating Your Own Content Site

1. Hire help and pay them. Writers, video makers, graphic artist, find them on Craigslist and pay them something. Seriously. People who are good at what they do get paid to do it. None of this, labor of love or work for credit nonsense.

2. Brainstorm ideas that relate to your brand but aren’t brand specific. For example, a bike store could put together a directory of bike trails, a shoe company can write about celebrity style. Your content must be generic enough to have mass appeal.

3. Post new content regularly. That means at least once a week. Posting new content once every other month or so is a waste of time. To build up readers and to connect with search engines you need to post on a schedule. Once or twice a week is plenty for a branded website. Believe me, unless you have a dedicated content person, even that will be hard to keep up.

Creating content is easy at the start. You have lots of ideas and enthusiasm. But creating a content-rich site is a long term project. What you post a year from now has to be as fresh and intriguing as what you post next week. So don’t burn yourself out with a big push at the start. Try a few things and let the audience response be your guide.

What are your thoughts on content creation? Fun? Easy? Or last on your list of things to do?

This guest post is by Keith Bishop of Online Digital Junkie.

Google’s Panda Update, as well as the recent post from Darren about hosting a guest post series, has prompted me to take a deeper look into the implementation and search benefits associated with putting series on my own sites.

What I found tells me that publishing a series can be a good move if it’s done correctly. So let’s look at when a series is a good idea, as well as some of the issues that need to be avoided for the optimal search performance of the series you publish.

When to use a series

A series is best used when you have a lot of material and media that would slow your page load time if you published it all in one article. Long load times can have a negative effect on your search ranking, as well as causing users to hit the Back button before your post ever finishes loading.

You can check page download speeds on sites like Pingdom. My personal goals are to have all of my main landing pages load with 1.5 seconds, and the rest no longer than two seconds.

Another great time to use series is if you find a group of posts on your site that have similar content with overlapping keywords. This scenario causes your own pages to compete with each other and suffer in search rank. Under these circumstances it would be beneficial to rework your content into a series and allow it to build upon itself. The result of this, as I will explain later, will harness all of the combined SEO benefits and push your series up in the SERP.

The last, and probably most applicable, reason to publish series is when you have a lengthy subject that you are covering over an extended period of time. I certainly don’t want to read a 10,000 word article on the same subject—or have it delivered to my email. Everyone needs a little variety.

The negative aspects of series

Series have their downsides, as far as usability and search rank go. The worst part is the increased load time that the user experiences while navigating to each article, instead of having it load all at once on a single page. Most of the time, this is a good trade-off—the only exception being a long text article which will likely load quickly as a single post, and won’t benefit from being split into parts.

Another issue arises when the middle or last part of the series ranks better in the search results than the first part, and that becomes the landing page for search users. This is sort of like showing a guest your home by walking them through the garage first, and it’s something you want to avoid. The solution? Optimizing your series navigation.

How to link your series for greatest SEO and usability

Proper linking is accomplished by using the [link] element in the [head] section of the post page. This hints to Google that the page is part of a series, and also indicates the position of the document within the series.

To accomplish page ordering, we use the [rel=”prev” and rel=”next”] attributes that in the [link] pagination. This will ensure that the first part of your series will almost always be the one to show up in the search results. Note, though, that Google says “almost always” when it discusses this, so there must be occasions where the search engine likes an article deeper in the series for some reason.

Pagination is easy in WordPress, and there are probably some short codes for the other content management systems that will make it easy to implement in those as well.

Let’s imagine that you want to publish all the material in a series at once. All you need to do in WP is to put the entire series of articles into one post, then add [<!--nextpage-->] wherever you want to break the content up into separate pages or parts. You can then modify the look of your pagination links with CSS.

If you want to drip-feed your series to users over an extended period of time—perhaps in weekly installments—use a head injection plugin that will allow you to add the [] information to the series manually as you publish each article.

A good WordPress plugin that takes care of this is HiFi (Head injection / Foot injection).

Hand-coded blogs will need to have this information added manually into the head section. Here is an example of what the code looks like.

<head>

<title>Your Page Title</title>

<link rel=”prev” href=”http://yoursite.com/previouspage/”>

<link rel=”next” href=”http://yoursite.com/nextpage/”>

</head>

Naturally, the first page in the series will not have a [prev]  attribute and the last page will not have a [next] attribute. This is how the search bots know where the series starts and ends. Clickable navigation links will also need to be coded at the end of each article in the series.

The most beneficial reason to use the [prev/next] attributes is that the search engines will count the series as one article and funnel all the SEO benefits from the series through to the page that’s shown in the search results.

This means that all of the likes, G+, tweets, and links back from the entire series will count together, instead of competing with one another. I don’t know about you, but that gets me excited.

What not to do

You may still find information about this online, but what you do not want to do is link your series using the [rel=”canonical”] attribute on your links.

This method will prevent the wrong post (e.g. a later part in a series) from ranking higher than the one you wanted (the first part in the series), but it also tells the search engine that this is duplicate content and it shouldn’t be indexed. The canonical attribute was used in the past under a slightly different set of circumstances, and is no longer applicable to series.

Too bad there isn’t some way to certify our content so that we could get the SEO benefits from our content when it gets scraped or syndicated. That would be awesome, but it is likely a dream for another day…

Keith currently writes for Beauty & Bandaids and is currently obsessed with his new outdoor adventure watch. Watch obsession to new blog is OCD at its finest.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How to SEO Your Blog Post Series

SMBs have an uphill battle in the online marketing arena; smaller budgets and less manpower may leave them feeling like David to big business Goliaths. Industry vet and “Optimize” author Lee Odden offers solutions to five common SMB challenges.

IBM sat down to talk one-on-one with 1,700 CEO’s in 64 countries to discuss changes in how they do business.

First, let’s marvel at the logistics behind that. All those busy people. All those languages. All that data. Seriously, I don’t think we appreciate the effort that goes into these things. Now, let’s move on to the results.

To the right you see a chart with a surprising message. The CEO’s were asked how they engage with their customers. The top line represents where they are today, the bottom line where they expect to be in 3 to 5 years.

Right now, social media came in dead last but it’s expected to climb to the second spot in the coming years. At a glance, I would say that these results relate to B2B companies, but the report doesn’t say one way or the other. I understand B2B being heavily face-to-face. I don’t see it in business to consumer. But again, the study doesn’t specify one or the other so I have to assume it’s a mix.

Technology in general came up as the aspect most likely to impact business in the coming year. Their second choice was “People Skills.” It’s not well defined in the report, but I’m sure old school CEO’s are worried that technology is erasing our ability to connect one-on-one.

Looking internally, the top CEO’s agreed that the old corporate structure doesn’t work anymore. They said they were working toward an open and honest environment where collaboration and new ideas are encouraged at every level. They also stressed the importance of values and making sure that everyone in the company is on board and working toward the same goal.

But even with social media chipping away at face-to-face, the CEO’s said that personalization was still important. They believe that technology is giving us new ways to collect that data we need to listen and respond to our customers. IBM calls data a “critical new natural resource” that can be harnessed to propel a company to new heights.

What do you think? Has technology made it easier to listen and respond to our customers? Or are we moving farther and farther away from personalized, customer service?

Join the Marketing Pilgrim Facebook Community

Google’s CEO made an apperance on Charlie Rose yesterday, and he didn’t have many nice things to say about Facebook.  Rose asked Larry Page about Facebook’s competition in search which led to an exchange about Facebook’s semi-closed policy on contact information. Page was... Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

European antitrust chiefs are offering Google a chance to end the 18-month investigation into alleged monopoly abuses by the company. U.S. senators say the deal is a positive step forward in addressing the concerns they also have with the firm.

A solid understanding of localization is now critically important for any company looking to drive into international markets.  No matter what product or service is being sold, it sure that it will face stiff competition both locally and from abroad, which is why localization – translating and adapting content for specific markets – is absolutely [...]

AdWords marketers’ days of regularly refreshing on all their keywords may be over — or at least that activity may not be quite so necessary. Google is releasing a new report — Auction Insights — that helps marketers understand how their ads stand, compared to others in the... Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Meet nearly 40 leading solution providers. Attend 2 sessions on emerging search engine marketing topics. Attend Matt Cutts’ keynote via simulcast. Connect with your next client, employer, vendor or mentor at three networking events. Search Marketing Expo – SMX Advanced hits the Bell Harbor... Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Bing Senior Product Manager Duane Forrester posted five tips for webmasters to help diversify their traffic sources and avoid major losses during algorithm changes, using a poem about Google’s Penguin and Panda updates to illustrate his point.

Testing the new auto-broadcasting feature. To any of our readers who may happen to see this: we apologize! This post will be removed shortly.

I had an interesting email hit my inbox, someone showing me how a Google employee was “100%” sure there had been no Penguin Update. There was, of course, and it’s a reminder that just because someone is a Googler, that doesn’t mean they know how Google Search works. Google... Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

With the trends that we are seeing in the search engines as they become more and more social, I think it is fair to assume that social sharing will be a major part (or at the very least, be a piece) of consideration in any future updates. This is exactly why it’s more important than ever [...] Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Google announced a new AdWords report today – Auction Insights.  The goal of the tool is to give advertisers a deeper view of the auction environment at the keyword level without divulging too much competitor information.

With this new report, which can be found on the Keyword tab in the AdWords UI, advertisers can see how they stack up against the competition for a given keyword on 5 metrics: impression share, average position, overlap rate, position above rate, and top of page percent.

Important notes to keep in mind – Google is not telling you that the other domains are actively bidding on the given keyword – just that their ads are triggered by it (think broad match).  Google is also not telling you (explicitly) what the total impression volume is for a given query.  They are showing you information for one particular keyword given all of the settings you have enabled for it (device targeting, geo-targeting, time of day rules, etc).

The data is only available for high traffic terms, similar to Google’s bid simulator tool, and we will only be able to be generate reports going back to the beginning on May 2012.  The data is populated daily, so as you change the time range you are looking at in the AdWords UI, the Auction Insights report changes to match.

This also gets tricky when you think about match types.  How many keywords in your account would be eligible to show for a given query?  If the answer is more than one, advertisers may be concerned about how impressions share is calculated.

Google has informed us that “an auction/impression opportunity is only counted against one keyword in an account. So, if the advertiser has keywords: [party dresses] in exact and ‘blue party dress’ in broad, and the user searches for party dresses, only one of these keywords can be used to serve the ad, and the system would attribute both the opportunity and the actual impression (if it occurs) to that keyword. There is therefore no double counting of an impression opportunity.”

For now, this report is only available for one keyword at a time in the UI, but Google is hoping to add multiple keyword functionality and, maybe someday, API integration as well.

Curious to hear what others think of this new report?

---

Related:

• New Insights Into the Google Auction Click-by-click position data available now in AdWords!...
• The AdWords Auction and Why Google’s Automatic Bid Pushes are Risky Google recently introduced the ability to automatically push keyword bids to the top of page CPC. Does it make sense...
• Google Insights for Search: The Power of Trends Trend data is fascinating, and occasionally even useful!...

The Search Alliance between Yahoo and Microsoft had some unintended beneficiaries (now casualties). Yahoo’s former senior director of business management, Robert Kwok, has pled guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud, after being accused that he told a mutual fund manager in July 2009... Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Global domination. This is what appears to have been Facebook’s goal in 2012, according to the World Map of Social Networks, which is based on both Google Trends for Websites and Alexa. It would be difficult to describe differently the success of a company which holds the lead in 127 out of 136 countries. In [...]