Digital Marketing Agency | Barracuda Digital

This week I was asked some entry level SEO questions by Web Designer Magazine Editor Mark Billen.

Read the full story at http://www.webdesignermag.co.uk/interviews/nick-leech/

User experience research firm User Centric recently carried out some research to find out where on the search engine results pages users actually looked.

User Centric studied the search behaviour of 24 “experienced users” of both Google and Bing, all between 18 and 54 years old. They were asked to do eight searches — four on Google (with Google Instant turned off) and the other four on Bing.

And the bad news for some advertisers is that if they’re only on the right hand side then they’re getting almost no eye time at all.

Here’s a table which breaks down the actual numbers:

When it comes to the organic results, these are still taking the lions share. And for bold advertisers the good news is that the top slot is still viewed by 91% of searchers. But those falling lower down – particular the right hand ad slots –get almost no attention at all.

There were some differences between user behaviour on Google as opposed to Bing, with users considering where to click for 4 more seconds on Google.

That’s it

Whether it comes to SEO or PPC it’s the top positions that are taking the lion’s share of users’ attention. But those that are really losing out are PPC advertisers running in lower positions.

You wanted to make more sales from your website. To do that you knew you had to increase not only the number of visitors to your website, but the type of visitors that buy stuff. And you also knew that one of the best sources of this traffic was Google.

You looked at your Google Analytics and found that you weren’t getting much traffic from Google. And you searched for your products on Google, you found that you rarely found your website in the results pages (SERPs). There was just one thing for it: you needed to SEO your website.

Whether you employed an SEO pro in house, or you used an SEO agency, its important to work out how it’s all going.

Here’s 11 ways you can evaluate your SEO program

1. Are you getting more general non-paid Search Traffic?

OK this one is pretty obvious, but take time to drill into your analytics to find out if the overall number of non-paid search visitors is going up or down. As some SEO takes time, be sure to look at week on week, month on month and year on year comparisons.

Remember there will be peaks and troughs around the other marketing activity you do, and seasonal events too. For example, an email blast may cause people to search for you online, artificially boosting your traffic figures.

2. Are you getting more traffic from key search terms?

The initial keyword research carried out by your SEO should have identified key search terms that your SEO was going to focus on. Analyse the individual keyword data to find how your traffic is trending against these keywords.

3. Are you keyword ranks improving?

Make sure your SEO gives you access to their keyword ranking tool in order to work out whether your keyword rankings are going up or down. Be sure to use a tool rather than searching for yourself online to make sure you getting ‘normalised’ results.

4. Are you making more sales?

Another simple one: Are you making more sales from your website? Is this down to your SEO program exposing your website to more people? Or are other seasonal or marketing factors at play?

5. Is your conversion rate improving?

Remember good SEO is not just about improving ranking and boosting traffic, but improving rankings in order to get visitors who will buy. If the quality of the traffic source goes up, then the conversion rate of your website will go up.

6. Are you getting visitors from a wider pool of keywords

Whilst SEO initially focuses on specific keywords, a well set up and search engine friendly site will rank well for a wide range of keywords. If your website is gaining traffic from a much larger quantity of keywords, it’s an indication that your SEO is going in the right direction.

7. Are you getting an increased number of links from other websites?

A key part of your SEO program will be building links from other websites. Use a tool like Linkscape from SEOmoz to find out if the number of sites linking to yours is going up.

8. Are you getting an increased number of referral visitors?

An easy way to evaluate the quality of the links to your website is to see whether or not they actually bring you any visitors. Genuinely useful and powerful links serve the purpose for which they were originally intended – as a way for people to click from one website to another.

9. Is your organic Click Through Rate increasing?

Well crafted page titles and descriptions not only help you rank well, they also entice searchers to choose to click on your website in the SERPs. Use Google Webmaster Tools to find out if the CTR from organic search as improved.

10. Are more of your pages being indexed?

As you build new pages and add new content to your website, Google should find and evaluate these pages and add them to its index. Use Google Webmaster tools to find out if the number of indexed pages is going up.

11. Is Google crawling your website more often?

The more you improve your website, and the more content and pages you add the greater attention Google should pay to you. It’s likely that if you are adding good quality and unique content in a well structured manner, Google will choose to revisit and crawl your website more frequently.

12. Are more people searching for your website online?

As you expose your website to more people, and those in turn recommend you on to others, the number of people searching for your website or brand should go up. Of course, brand searches are always influenced by other marketing activities, and are not purely as a result of improved rank.

That’s it

It’s important for every website owner to establish the success of their SEO program. Ask these simple questions to find out how yours is going.

Website redesigns are both exciting and scary. Exciting in the sense that you are presenting a new face to the world, and a new opportunity to show, grow and impress your website visitors… Scary in the fear that your website will not perform quite as well as the last one.

And a particularly scary part of that is SEO. Will your new website rank as well as the old one, or will the redesign have a negative impact?

The unfortunate truth is that website owners often consider SEO only once a redesign has taken place, which means that the SEO recommendations are often in conflict with the new design.

SEO needs to be considered before the designers put pen to paper. Take these 9 simple steps to make sure your new website hits the ground running with a good chance of improved rank.

1. Audit your current site

The audit should identify the positive factors of why your website ranks well for some keywords, and work out why it doesn’t rank for others. These problems can be addressed in the new design.

2. Carry out fresh keyword research

Think you know which are your highest traffic and best converting keywords? Are they just your website’s best, or are they the best in the market? Is it a high traffic term for you simply because you don’t rank well for the really high traffic terms?

A site redesign is an opportunity to refresh your target keyword list to identify new targets. Make use of:

SEM data – PPC is an invaluable data set to find out the highest traffic and highest converting words.

Google Analytics – make sure you have identified your current best keywords and phrases.

Webmaster Tools – this is a great way to find out not only which keywords sent you traffic but which keywords brought you impressions too. It might be that you are generating lots of impressions but few clicks on a keyword, simply because you rank too low. With a little boost these might be the easiest win for your website.

3. Make use of the data you find

I know that new things hold a bit of fear, and it’s often safe to stick to way things are, but the reason you’ve done a site audit and fresh keyword research is because you want to improve. So make use of the data you find.

*Does your keyword research throw up whole new categories of keywords that you hadn’t considered before? Is it worth creating new pages and content to cater for this category?
*Optimize your pages for your target keywords

Even before the designers have done their first draft, you need to have produced the optimized pages for them to slot their design into. I’m not saying that SEO takes precedent over design but unless you produce these first you’ll always be trying to slot your SEO into the designer’s framework.

4. Produce a linking structure

Your SEO optimized pages are not in isolation but need to be stitched together with a cohesive and structured links.

Optimised Internal links are often the best way to give power to your priority pages so make sure you’re consistent with your anchor text.

5. And a navigation structure

Don’t forget that your site is about visitors too. Although keyword rich anchor text might be the best signal for Google, unless it’s styled in the right graphic and positioned correctly on the page you’re going to bet letting your users down.

6. Identify your highest ranking and best performing landing page

Don’t reinvent the wheel for the sake of it. If you can identify great performing pages and the reasons for their performance, then make use of the content and structure in your new design.

7. Minimise the number of URL changes

URL structure changes can have significant and long lasting effects on your ranks. Try to keep these to a minimum, or use them to build on. Where you do need to change be meticulous in applying 301 redirects to every single one.

8. Take stock of your incoming links

Links from other websites are a key source of traffic and of course help you rank too. If you can identify some really important ones that lead to pages where you a implementing a 301, consider contacting those sites and asking them to modify the destination of their link.

9. Set up a customised 404 page before launch

This is vital. Anyone clicking on search based links to pages that have been redirected may well end up on a 404 – the last thing you want is to lose them.

That’s it

If you’re considering a site redesign then make sure SEO is taken into account before, during, and after the design team get to work. For more in depth advice get in touch.

Google’s Public Data Explorer tool has been interesting and effective at making public data easier to explore and understand.

In all there are 27 datasets and more than 30 data metrics. Popular data sets have included: Internet speed

…gender balance in parliaments…

…government debt levels…

…and population density by municipality.

Google have now opened up the Public Data Explorer to allow anyone to add their own data. They’ve created a new data format called the Dataset Publishing Language (DSPL) . This means that there is an interface allowing you to upload your own datasets.

This is a huge SEO opportunity. Great interactive charts make tasty link bait – adding a relevant one to your website will almost certainly attract inbound links.

Creating a chart is easy out of existing data is easy. Just add an XML metadata file to your existing CSV data files. Then upload by clicking on the “My Datasets” on the left-hand side of the Public Data Explorer.

An imported dataset can be published, embedded on your website, and shared with others.

That’s it

Barracuda Digital can use the Google Public data explorer to create linkbait for your website. For more information get in touch.

On Monday, the Barracuda Digital SEO team attended a search event organised by Jo Turnbull. It was a very interesting and informative meet-up where Nichola Scott spoke about how an SEO approach to social media can impact search presence and traffic.  The presentation slides can be viewed here.

This is a quick round up of what was discussed:

Brand Search Domination

We all know how valuable it is for a brand with customer awareness and brand image to dominate SERPs for brand searches. Big brands are more likely to get clicks from brand searches and often find that PPC campaigns are cheaper on those keywords, and the conversion rate is much higher: therefore there is little question about the value of this.
I often find that my client’s resellers  also rank for the same brand name and, in some cases, offering better deals. This is an issue particularly  in the case of a big high street brand that competes with its own retailers. It’s necessary to reduce the retailers’ impact on the brand’s organic traffic as these could hurt the brand reputation (and reduce sales for the brand itself).

Brand search domination of your business market should always be the ultimate goal.

Twitter

Since Google confirmed that social signals count as quality signals for web ranking it is time to take advantage of these social media outlets and spice up the results page with our real-time presence.

Google is already indexing tweets so Twitter pages and even individual tweets have already started appearing within Google search results. Considering that the effect of tweets is temporary, we should make sure that we tweet regularly.

Here is an example of tweets showing up in SERPs:

The authority and engagement levels of your Twitter account (such as number of followers, mentions and retweets) is an important factor. For example if someone who has 50 followers and tweets your press release carries a smaller weight than if someone with 1000s of followers and  mentions tweets the same.

I also think that as the time goes by and as Google becomes more insightful, the authority of your followers will be a factor too. I have found businesses offering services where they help you get 1000s of followers in a very short period of time. This sounds to be a black hat technique and as we know Google is fighting against black hat practitioners. The only way Google will be able to weed this out is by looking at your followers’ authority and engagement too.

In order to achieve a great online presence and dominate SERPs, it is strongly advisable that every brand/company create a profile on each and every social media websites. Although this can be done by yourself, it is very time consuming. Another way to do that is by using KnowEm which offers a complete sign up of all profile info in hundreds of social media sites.

XFN

What is rel attribute in HTML? The rel attribute defines the relationship between the target page and the linking page. XFN stands for XHTML Friend Network and is a simple way to represent human relationships on the web using hyperlinks. It puts a human face on links. Everyone has his/her own social network and by using this XFN, you can tell search engines who your friends are or what your relation is with others in your own social network.
There is a very good representation of XFN here. XFN can be used for example on your LinkedIn profile to tell Google what your relation is with your connections.

Social Search

Google’s push into social this year consists in pulling more content from social sites into search results and site links showing your social connections. Google social search helps you discover relevant content from your social connections – a set of your online friends and contacts that Google knows by looking at your XFN. Content from your friends and acquaintances is sometimes more relevant and meaningful to you than content from any random person.

To use this feature make sure you are logged in.

This is only the beginning, Google is getting better at understanding you and your social circle. The questions we are asking now such as “Where is the nearest hair dresser that is good?” “What movies are worth to see?” will eventually be answered in according to what your friends are recommending so that social context will be leveraged here.

One of the trending topics for SEO this year is the impact of Social Media campaigns on SEO. It’s clear that Search engines, especially Google, are using Social media signals as a parameter in their algorithm for organic results. It makes sense that if an article is frequently retweeted or referenced in social networks that could be interpreted as a signal of authority and therefore would rank better in search engines.
The time is right to take advantage of this.

What factors are Search Engines considering when they rank websites?
A few weeks ago, Google announced they were making several changes to their Social Search functionality and that they would continue to give more and more importance to social media factors in their ranking algorithm.
The main areas that Google & Bing could be considering to rank pages are:

Tweets
There is a concept called “Author Authority” and it is the equivalent to page rank applied to a twitter user. There are several things that could impact on your author authority:

• Follower Count: Google and Bing look at how many people follow you, and how many people you follow. I don’t want to say that followers=influence (so spammers, don’t waste your time), but this is probably part of the calculation.
• Retweets: A good signal of authority depends on how many retweets you can achieve. If you have authority you are supposed to post interesting content and people retweet it. This is a kind of link quality signal.
• Use of @accountname: Could this be a trust indicator? Probably – if the account is managed by a spammer, it doesn’t have direct messages, @mentions, and so on. If I were Google, probably I would look at this kind of messages trying to detect and filter spammy twitter accounts.
• Account Age: In Social Media, the account age can’t be as important as domain age is in SEO. New trends and early adopters mean that the digital environment is constantly changing. However, account age could be an indicator related with authority.

Is this the same for Facebook?
When it comes to Facebook, there are probably similar signals that search engines are using to calculate the social authority of a user or fan page. Very likely they look at how many friends you have, or either how many “likes” your fan page has.
The key is to be social, to be relevant for your audience, and create quality content designed to spread.

Blogs
Using a blog is an obvious way to spread your content on internet. It lets you talk about topics that maybe in your core web you can’t discuss, and adopt another perspective. This is especially useful when you are trying to rank on long tail keywords.
Of course, linking to your core website is an incoming link source that could help you reinforce your root domain.
Finally you can use bookmarking sites like digg and stumbleupon to make your content go viral.

Is that all?
Of course it’s not. The power of Videos to reinforce your SEO efforts is an important factor without a doubt. Since Google shows video results in organic SERPs, the importance of video content creation has increased and video content implementation should be part of the overall SEO strategy.
On the other hand, there are plenty of social media sites that search engines are monitoring and considering when calculating the quality of certain content or website. Think about flickr, tumblr, del.icio.us, etc.
Nowadays Social Media is not a luxury, it must be a core part of your SEO strategy.

So finally
Think on social. There are SEO topics that have not changed with time, but search engines are evolving and your strategy has to adapt. Don’t be spammy and don’t rely on massive social media bookmarking. Try to be an authorative user in your topic, write quality content, and take your time to do networking while establishing relationship via the internet. It’s a lot of work, I know, but it’s the only way to achieve success.
What do you think? Do you agree with us? Have you noticed the impact of Social Media in your SEO efforts?

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Without doubt, these days the most fashionable topic in SEO circles is the already famous “Panda update”. Although we must pay attention to these kinds of drastic changes when Google announces them, we must not overlook the fact that there are less in-vogue topics and trends in SEO that are acquiring importance on the mid and long term.
One of these trends that Google is giving importance to is the semantic web, or Web 3.0

WHAT DOES “SEMANTIC WEB” MEANS?

If you search for the term “semantic web” on Wikipedia, you will find that it is a “web of data” that enables machines to understand the semantics, or meaning, of information on the World Wide Web.
Humans are capable of using the Web to carry out tasks such as finding the Irish word for “folder,” reserving a library book, and searching for a low priced DVD. However, machines cannot accomplish all of these tasks without human direction, because web pages are designed to be read by people not machines.
The semantic web is a vision of information that can be interpreted by machines, so machines can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, combining, and acting upon information on the web.
A good example of how this information can be used by search engines is shown below:

As you can see, in this case Google is able to give you the information filtering it by calories, ingredients, cooking time… Here Google is able to give you more accurate and better information.

HOW DOES THIS AFFECT SEO STRATEGIES?

SEO consultants must take advantage of the new opportunities offered by the semantic web, so we can make our web more accessible in different formats and with different tools. There will be time when people will use information published on the web, in ways that we didn’t imagine before; tools that will give the user more accurate and relevant results. Since making our information reach the right audience is one of the aims of what we do, the most important aspect of this is the fact that search engines already started to use this structured data a few years ago.
Sites which implement this structured data are standing out in SERPs. For example we can see that sites with the semantic data ‘review’, stand out in SERPs (at least at a visual level)

Recently there has been a growing chorus of complaints by users and SEOs about the quality of websites that Google ranks highly in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

Searches on almost any topic, service or product yield results that include websites with little or no unique content, offering users very shallow and often valueless information about the topic of their search.

To tackle this issue Google last week  announced an update to it’s search algorithm which is designed to weed out these low value results from the SERPs. This update has been called ‘Farmer’ because it tackles so called ‘content farms’.

In their words ‘in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries’.

‘This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.’

The flip side of this is that sites that offer genuine insight, thought or in-depth information receive a boost to their rank.

So what does this mean for your website?

Well the truth is that most sites aren’t affected. But if you operate in a market that has been drowning in these low value sites – I’m talking about some affiliate sites, article and PR distribution sites, and auto-created sites – then (if you are offering good content to the user) your rank should improve.

What does this mean for the SEO Process?

The simple fact is that it will take a lot of testing to find out how best to capitalise on this change. In the short term the clear action is that article and PR content distribution should either be wound down or halted. That type of link building just will not work any more

In time Barracuda Digital will publish a full analysis of what we have found and how this affects your website.

Who have been the big winners and losers?

According to a blog post on SEOmoz which featured data by SearchMetrics, these are the websites that have been affected the most:

Content Farms? Thin sites? There’s certainly quite a few of those in there.

That’s it

For more information about Farmer update, and for advice on how we can help boost the rank of your website, get in touch.

The world of SEO is full of useful tools, website, apps and programs – read our post on the best link building tools for example. But to uncover what’s wrong with a website – and how to fix it – you often need not look beyond Google’s very own Webmaster Tools (GWT).

Here’s 8 ways to use GWT to unpick your SEO

1. Run a Crawl Error report

This highlights all the broken links found in the most recent crawl.

Google hates broken links: they’re dead ends, and block the flow of link juice around your website. Mend these links by making sure they lead to the right page, or set up 301 redirects if not.

2. Run an HTML Suggestions Report

This is the way to find duplicate content. The report highlights pages which have matching title and description tags.

Make sure every page has unique and compelling meta data and visible content.

3. Run a Crawl stats report

This is a perfect way to find out if Google can reach all your web pages.

The report shows pages crawled, the time spent crawling and the amount of data downloaded per day.

If there is rising trend in time spent downloading a page then you might have a performance issue, caused by images, hosting or large volumes of code.

Spend time fixing these issues to decrease the amount of time it takes for Google to crawl your site.

4. Report: Your site on the web

The keywords report tells you what Google thinks are the commonest keywords are on your website. Are they keywords you’ve been focusing your SEO on? If not, then it’s time to re do your Meta data and tweak your content.

If you click on a keyword you can see all the keyword variations found on your website, and the pages that Google thinks are most associated with them.

This is the report you need to work out which pages you want to rank for which theme of keywords.

5. Search Queries report

Pure and simple: this tells you which queries your site ranks for, and which queries are getting you clicks.

Use our glossary to help you understand what Impressions, clicks CTR and average position means.

If you click on a specific search query you get a more detailed Google Analytics style detailed report on the performance over time of that keyword.

Remember: SEO is not just about ranking, it’s about users too: If you have a low CTR for a particular keyword it might mean that the title and description does not entice users to click through. Time to rewrite it!

6. Find out who links to you

The ‘Links to your site’ report helps to discover the links that really power your rankings.

‘How your data is linked’ lets you see the anchor text. And your most linked content’ let’s you see which pages have generated the most links. This is a good way to find out which articles on your blog have been most referenced. Once you know the type of content that generates links, you can create more of it.

7. Review your internal links

The Internal links report helps you understand which pages have the most links from within your site. Are you passing link juice to the most important pages? Do your utility links (Ts & Cs, Privacy etc) have too much prominence? Make sure your links highlight the best stuff you have.

8. Messages

If there is a sudden change in what Google has found on your site; or if your site has had some downtime, ‘messages’ is where Google will notify you – so make sure you check them.

That’s it

GWT does a lot more than what we’ve mentioned here, including helping you set up and manage sitelinks or submitting sitemaps (XML or video). But when it comes to finding out what’s right – and what’s wrong – with your SEO, the reports above make a great first stop.