Digital Marketing Agency | Barracuda Digital

The impact of Google’s recent over optimisation penalty, swifty followed by the role out of the Penguin update 2 weeks ago, have created confusion about the long term impact on SEO rankings, how Google will evaluate  website authority in the future and how link building for major brands should be managed in a safe ethical way. SEO opinion is split between these changes being a typical Google update, devalueing spammy links such as buildmyrank, to those who believe the cause is routed in more serious anchor text adjustments. The truth is probably a mix of several factors but one of the best courses of action is to keep a close eye on the leading bloggers to keep up to date on this this update might unravel.

We have compiled a list below of the best blog posts on what these updates will mean for online marketeers in the future:

1) Dave Naylor’s blog post announced on the 18th April that Google Webmaster tools had been emailing over 800,000 notices to website owners that Google had detected spam on their websites: detected unnatural links

2) The authority SEO blog Search Engine land, run by SEO rock star Danny Sullivan, publicly announced a potential major Google update on April 24th titled Google launches update targetting webspam  

3) Blogstorm, the popular UK SEO blog site, written by Patrick Altoft, published a post explaining the new link algorithm here:

4) Matt Cutts, Head of Google’s web spam team remained relatively silent but did announce on his Google plus page that part of the recent update and resultant penalisation was caused by a “classifier for parked domains reading from a couple files which mistakenly were empty”

5) SEO Moz posted a very useful blog post here on how to survive Google’s unnatural links warning 

So how should you be managing SEO rankings and your link building in the future? The severity of this update has yet to be fully realised but it will be critical to regularly keep up to date on Google’s own blog  as well keeping up to date as specialist SEO blogs to measure the likely impact so that this news can be professionally communicated back to the clients and any negative impact can be minimised.

With almost 500 million people actively using the internet in China to search for products and services and with plenty of room for growth (less than 40% of China’s total population is online) (Source E-consultancy http://econsultancy.com/uk/reports/asia-internet-statistics-compendium), it’s a wonder that more ambitious brands and businesses who want to expand overseas haven’t considered search marketing to China.

In this article we examine the steps one has to take to set up a search campaign-be it SEO or PPC in China.

Which Search engine engines to use?

Unlike in the UK and US, Google is not quite the giant that dominates the search engine market.

Google only takes around 17% of the market and Sougou and other search engines take the remaining 3% of the market.

The most used search engine in China is Baidu.com. Around 77% of internet searches are done through this native search engine. For marketers and brands looking to tap into the Chinese market, Baidu is the gateway that search efforts should be focussed on.

Language

Your landing page should be in Chinese, and if you are targeting mainland China this should be Simplified Chinese. A study shows that over 70% of consumers are more likely to buy online if the information is available in their first language (Source: Common sense advisory http://www.commonsenseadvisory.com/Resources/FactsandFigures.aspx).

Censorship

After a high profile feud with China’s leadership over censorship, Google withdrew their operations (to some extent) in China.

This should serve as a warning to those looking to either rank for or display information that doesn’t stay within the Chinese Government’s censorship guidelines.

Baidu is heavily censored by the Chinese Government and this means brands looking to market products to do with politically sensitive events (such as The Tiananmen Square Massacre) and any material slating the Chinese government is a no-go if you want to search market in China.

Search Engine Optimisation in China

For brands looking to appear in the search results organically, there is a wealth of information about how to SEO for Google.com so this information applies when optimising for Google.hk. Since the same algorithm is used across Google, a brand only has to apply the tactics from their existing UK based SEO campaign in Google China to get results.

If you’re looking to rank organically in Baidu, Baidu’s algorithm is somewhat less developed than that of Google so a lot of techniques that are ignored by Google’s crawlers would help page rankings in Baidu.com.

Things that help:

Meta tags

Domain names

Hosted Locally

Things that aren’t weighted so much:

Inbound links

An SEO should also be aware of how connectivity issues in China will affect the Baidu crawlers, for example they will often only crawl the first 100 to 120k of content on a page.

PPC

Paid search works the same way for Google.co.uk and Google.hk and you can learn more about paid search from our blog.

The bidding system and even the editor used for managing Baidu ad campaigns are remarkably similar to Google. Phoenix Nest, also known as “Baidu Professional Edition”, is used to manage paid search campaigns in Baidu.

In terms of display, if your advert qualifies to be triggered for a search term exactly, it appears on the top position above the natural results. Adverts that you have made a bid on that are a broad match are displayed on the right hand side as shown in this example:

These are the basic things for a marketer to consider if they are looking expand into China. The key takeaways from this post are that it is relatively easy to appear in the organic results of the most used search engine in China, it is easy to set up a paid search campaign in Baidu and finally, China is an untapped market as we speak.

If you would like an informal chat about how to set up a paid search campaign in China, or if you would like Barracuda to launch and manage your search campaign in China, please call us on 0207 593 1841.

We wanted to recommend to you what we believe to be the most important priorities for online marketers regarding the efficent management of your SEO strategy in 2012. Below is a list of what we think are the most important priorities:

1) Google + One

The impact of Google + one and most recently “your world” will be hugely significant for internal online marketing teams not just because of the massive resource Google are investing in this roll out but also the likely impact on personalised SEO results, your internal content distribution and how it will impact your Paid Search performance.

2) The growing internationalisation of Search.

As the Uk Search marketing hits saturation point and the economy slows, ambitious online businesses will be looking to their agencies to provide Search expertise in the new emerging marketing frontiers, not just multilingual expertise but also expertise in how Baidu works in China and or Yandex for targetting  Russia. The 2012 Olympics in London will surely prompt more brands to consider the potential of international Search.

3) Mobile Search
Traffic growth through mobile search has been prenomenal in the last 12 months which was further strengthened by the healthly tablet sales at Xmas 2011, approximately 1.2 million sales in Xmas according to a recent Econsultancy 2011 Xmas sales report. Enabling your website to be compatible with all mobile devises and understanding what customers’s mobile search behaviour are key priorities for 2012.

4) The impact of SSL Search restictions
Google’s analytics update in October 2011, restricting access to Google analytics via SSL referred traffic , has had a very disruptive impact on how non-branded SEO traffic can be accurately measured. While so far the impact on your SEO trafffic is likely to be only in single figures, ‘not provided’ traffic is growing and when this update rolls out in the UK the impact is likely to be more severe.

5) The Cookie Law Directive
Perhaps overlooked but hugely significant for SEO management is the Cookie Law Directive.  If the cookie law goes head this will have a severe implication on tracking and measurement

6) Content
The panda update in 2011 reinforced the absolute need for website owners to build authoritive, indepth content including references, review and comments. Content will need to be not only good enough to be linked to but also needs to good enough to encourage sharing

7) Social and SEO working side by side
The growing importance as an algorithmic SEO ranking factor of Social signals will require a fundamental structural need for Social Strategy to be closely aligned with your SEO teams internally

Integration of Search with Offline behaviour
As searching behaviour becoming more mobile, there is a growing need to understand how other forms of marketing, particularly TV viewing habits, are impacting the search performance of your customers. Google’s roll out of Google TV and the $100 Million investment earmarked for new TV channels proves that they believe the integration of TV will be a natural entension of Search

So what do you think? We welcome any comments

Ever since Google revealed last year that page load speed would be a ranking factor, there has been a scramble amongst site owners to speed up their sites.

For Google to take page load into account was always inevitable, since a slow site represents a poor experience for users, and Google is all about improving user experience.

Now it seems like everyone is trying to ‘sell’ a solution to slow pages, from web hosts to CDNs. Google themselves have just started offering to host your pages on their index. But what action can you yourself take to speed up your site?

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As a further development of Google Instant, Google has launched ‘Instant Pages’.

Instant Pages prerenders the top search result in the background of the Search Engine Results Pages whilst you’re still choosing which link to click.

They reckon this saves users another two to five seconds.

Google will only prerender a webpage if they are ‘very confident’ that you are about to click that link.

Google are making this change because they are ‘obsessed with speed’. They know that an increase in speed leads to an increase in user happiness and engagement. By cutting out the load time of the site, they’re saving everyone time.

This is currently available just to those using the developer version of Google Chrome. Google Webmaster Tools will only count visits when an actual user arrives on your website.

Facebook and the SEO platform BrightEdge have published a whitepaper about how to help your Facebook page rank better on Search Engines. According to the BrightEdge data, 70% of the Facebook Pages of the top 200 companies in the Fortune 500 aren’t ranked when you search for their brand name on Google.

Boosting the rank of your Facebook page in the SERPs is a good way to outrank those negative results than can damage your brand’s reputation, or retailers that are well ranked for your brand’s name. This can also help you to manage your brand’s online reputation, improve your visibility and increase the engagement of your Facebook users.

The main recommendations in the whitepaper are:

1. Set your vanity URL to exactly match your brand’s name. Try to avoid secondary keywords because you are not going to be well ranked either for your brand’s name or the general keywords. Try to keep it simple, short, and stay focused on your brand’s name.
2. Link to your Facebook page from your website. Link to the vanity URL and use as anchor text the brand’s name: “BarracudaDigital on Facebook”. Put the link on your home page, which is the page on your website with highest PageRank, as well as on inner pages.
3. Use your brand’s name in the post title when you publish something on Facebook. This text is read by crawlers and can help you to rank better.
4. Achieve more “likes”. Those links that are present on users’ open walls and fanpages linked to yours are crawled by search engines and makes your page more relevant for that search term. Also use the social plugins from Facebook on your website as well as the Sponsored Stories format of Facebook Ads.
5. Create sub-pages for specific keywords. If you have sections or categories within your website that you want to promote, try to create different facebook pages and link to them from the different categories on your website. On your main Facebook pages set up the secondary ones as favourite pages in order to link to them and make a ring of your brand’s pages.

Facebook has realised that it’s quite hard for business to keep up to date with the constant innovations and changes that Facebook is publishing all the time. This advice can help anyone to improve the performance of their marketing efforts in the SEO and Social Media fields.

That’s all, try to keep it simple, relevant to your brand’s name, and earn links and likes as much as you can. Take a look at the full report and don’t hesitate to contact us if you need help ranking your Facebook page.

Link building is becoming more and more challenging day by day since the traditional way of contacting bloggers/website owners to request a link turns out to have a very low `conversion` rate. Editorial and Advertorial links are one of the most natural and effective links a business/brand can gain however, not everyone has an SEO budget to pay thousands of pounds to get featured in the Times or Daily Mail.

The Haro Concept

Haro is a simple and great idea; moreover it is a free service that is being used by a number of media giants. The basic concept behind it is to provide a free platform where journalists, writing a story on a specific subject, are able to connect with experts in the field. The topic of an article is chosen by the journalists, and instead of spending hours researching, they just ask experts directly to respond to their questions.

How it Works?

To use this platform you simply have to set up an account. Then if you are a journalist you submit your query and if you are a source, you immediately start to get lists of opportunities. They arrive three times a day at exactly the same time every day.
Below is just part of one of the emails I receive:

Lifestyle and Fitness
5 Common Summer Skin Problems (GalTime.com)
Beauty story (Tatler Magazine, Hong Kong)
Brazilian Fashion Industry (Time Out)

Travel
Activities for Family Fun in Reno/Tahoe (GETAWAY Magazine Reno/Tahoe)
Best Summer Vacation Resorts / Destinations (Business 2 Community)
Seeking locals favorites or “must see” attractions (Short-trip Itineray)
Celebrity Fathers Day getaways (World Footprints)

Business and Finance
Life Coach Business (BusinessNewsDaily)
Working in a family business (NJ Star Ledger)
Seeking Recruiting VPs & HR Directors to share Hiring Needs, Best Practices for Job Applicants (Blog, News.StartWire.com)
Cash vs. Credit (Investopedia)
Social Media Marketing Success Stories (GigCoin blog)
Addressing the stigma of being “overqualified” (SHRM’s HR Job Seekers newsletter)
Jobs landscape for recruiters (SHRM’s HR Job Seekers newsletter)
Small Businesses That Got Burned by Participating in Deal Site Promotions (Empower Me! Magazine)

Here is a summary of one story about this summer`s bikini trends:

This is good for the journalists because…..

They are desperate for stories and often write articles about a number of different topics they have not much knowledge or experience about. Journalists are excellent writers but very rarely subject experts. They need good sources and instead of digging deep to find source material that is where we (SEOs/business owners) come in to the picture.

…but where is my benefit as a business owner?

Firstly, this is a good way to build relationships with journalist. If they find a good source, they will keep coming back. Secondly, if you are a business owner or an SEO with clients from a number of different industries you get free publicity in return as journalists include your full name and qualifications or your business` name in the article, and a link to your website.

If you’re a small business owner this is a fantastic way to get free press coverage.

Although Haro claims that over 1,200 queries are sent out from WORLDWIDE media each week, the only difficulty at the moment is that the media giants registered on the site are mainly US based.

…but I have a good news! They are rolling out their services to the UK within the next 3 months so get ready!!!

That`s all. From then on it is up to your pitch to grab the opportunity of free publicity.

Until early last year, links to your website from Social Media were interesting and useful for users, but of no benefit to your website rank. If people were chatting about your website on Facebook or Twitter then it might be that their recommendations were followed, but there would be no secondary search benefit.

And then search started to get social: Twitter integrated with Google and Bing; recommendations from users’ social circle started to appear in the Search Engine Results Pages; and the whole game began to change.

So when it comes to using social media to boost your website rank, what do you need to work on? There’s no definitive rule, but if you want to boost social media indicators then these are the types of issues that you should be considering:

1. Number of Likes

Have you integrated your website in the Facebook Open Graph protocol? Adding a ‘like’ button to you websites allows people to express interest in your site, and let their friends know what websites they’re into.

2. Number of Fans

Facebook Fans are important, not just for their social influence, but because their liking your brand on Facebook is taken into account as a ranking factor.

3. Number of Comments on your Facebook and YouTube Pages

Anyone can game ‘likes’, but comments on a Facebook page represents genuine engagement that search engines take note of.

4. Number of Views of your video content

Highly watched YouTube video content – which of course should link to your site in the description – can pass great value to your website.

5. Number of links from other YouTube profiles

A powerful YouTube channel that engages with its audience should generate inbound links from other YouTube channels – and these all have a value that can help your channel and by association your website.

6. The title of your YouTube Videos

Video titles that are themed tightly to your website will help to pass authority to your website, when linked. Don’t forget the tags too.

7. Number of likes on YouTube, and the percentage of Likes vs. Dislikes

Likes represent engagement. Dislikes do too – although Google won’t want to highly rank disliked content.

8. Number of followers on Twitter

The more followers you have, the more influence Google perceives you to yield, and the more highly it will rank your listed website.

9. Percentage of followers vs follows

You yield influence if many people follow you, but you don’t follow many. You are perceived as a hub of authority rather than a reflection of it. A higher percentage of followers to follows is the equivalent of a website with lots of inbound links and not many outbound.

10. Influence of your followers

If powerful and influential Twitters follow you, then you by default are powerful – the same as if a website with high page rank links to you.

11. Number of Retweets

If you are powerful and popular, others will retweet you. Retweets are votes of authority to your twitter profile and by default your website.

12. Number of tweets & retweet links followed

Tweeted or retweeted links that are followed obviously carry influence – people are taking note. Google takes these into account when calculating rank

That’s it for now

It’s clear that Google and Bing look at Social Media to help rank websites. This is list is probably is just the tip of the iceberg, and it’s by no means all tested and proved. Set up your social media strategy to achieve the goals above, and aside from engaging users you will help boost your website too.

Search Engine Land have practised what they preach and published a great bit of link bait in the form of The Periodic Table of SEO ranking factors.

This make an easy introduction to SEO, and highlights the main On-Page and Off-Page areas to focus on. There’s an indication of pitfalls to – Violations and Blocking. Here it is in all it’s glory.

Much of the work that goes into constructing effective PPC campaigns is focused around ways to boost Click Through Rate. Keywords are grouped with ads that match search query and ad text. Incitements to click include low prices, free offers and exclusive deals.

But when it comes to SEO campaigns, it seems that all anyone cares about is position. Am I or am I not ranking higher in the SERPs?

But what really counts for organic traffic is not just rank but actual traffic. And an easy way to boost organic traffic without increasing your rank is to work on Click Through Rate. If a greater percentage of searchers actually clicked on your listing, you’d get more organic traffic without needing and improved rank.

The other factor at play here is that whilst they don’t admit it, search engines may well look at CTR to help rank results. Google claim to want to show the most relevant results to searchers – surely a listing with a good CTR is identifying itself as relevant?

SERPs done badly

First of all let’s first of all look at a bad set of results.

Here you can see that there is little correlation between what I’ve searched for and the title of each listing. I can’t see much information about the results. And I’m not really given any reason to click.

How to boost CTR for your organic listing

The key here is to approach your page titles, descriptions and other elements as though it were a PPC advert. You need to look at:

1. Your Brand

Do you have a well known brand or are you a minnow in your market? Well know brands should make use of their brand in the page titles as this will invite more clicks. Unknown brands should use the full character allocation to craft an inviting page title.

2. Using Keyword in titles

You will be doing this already, but having the keyword that you want to rank for is important. Place the keyword at the start of the title.

3. Using keywords in descriptions

Instances of your keyword will be bold in the SERPs, and attact clicks. try to place your keywords near the start of your description line.

4. Include a call to action in your description

Invite clicks by giving people a reason to click on your link. This might be a good price (just £9.99), an offer (20% discount), or an endorsement (voted best widget maker)

5. Make use of all your weapons

Since search terms are highlighted in the snipped text, it makes sense to use them whenever you can, as long as your search terms don’t appear spammy. So be sure to make use of Wemaster tools to maximize exposure for the best Sitelinks, Breadcrumbs, and Rich Snippets.

Here’s a good example

I’m interested in clicking on this listing because the keyword I’ve searched with has been highlighted in the title, description and URL. I’m given an in incentive to click – ‘get your name on the web’. And I’ve got the option of diving deeper into the site through effective sitelinks too.

You can’t control everything

Recently we’ve seen that Google sometimes modifies the presentation of the SERPs, playing with titles, snippets and sitelinks. So whatever you do you may still be at the mercy of Google.

That’s it

An easy way to boost organic traffic without increasing rank is to increase the Click Through Rate on your listing. Follow these steps to make yours stand out from the crowd.