advanced seo workshop, oms 2012 santa clara

Silicon Valley Convention Center | Room F

Advanced SEO WorkshopKeeping Up With The Engines

#OMS-AdvSEO

John ThyfaultVice President, Search & Social Media Marketing

Beasley Direct Marketing, Inc.

Twitter: @JohnThyfault

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Workshop Agenda

• State Of Modern SEO

• Panda and Penguin - Cuddly animals gone bad!

• Domain Management

• Advanced Information Architecture and Technology Optimization

• Advanced Onsite Content Optimization

• Advanced Offsite Factors Including Link Building & Maintenance

• SEO & Social Media2

About Beasley Direct Marketing

Beasley Direct Marketing, Inc. provides copywriting, design, programming, and consulting services for the following direct marketing channels:• Search (PPC and SEO)• Email Crea3ve, Design, Deliverability

Audits, and Broadcast• Direct mail (with and without PURLs)• Landing Page Design (with and without

PURLs)• Mobile• Video• Social • Website Design

• Catalog/eCommerce• Brochure, White Paper, and Guide copy

and design• List Building and CRM Database

Management• Telemarke3ng• Transla3on for all of the above• Execu3ve Dashboard Tracking, Repor3ng,

and Lead Assignment

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It’s Not Your Father’s SEO!

What are the Panda and Penguin updates and how did they change search engine

op4miza4on?

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What Was Panda To You?

A major change to the Google Algorithm in February, 2011 that wrecked havoc on the SEO world:Designed to lower the value of “thin/poor” content pages and sites -‐ site wide penalIes

Leading to lower traffic, devalued links, less site revenue, rains of fire, cats and dogs living together. Real Old Testament Stuff!

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What Was Penguin To You?

An algorithm update on April 24, 2012 that aimed to clean out “over opImized” sites. It targeted link text metrics and relevancy.

Not nearly as vicious as Panda, but sIll reaped havoc across the SEO world.

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Panda Changes

• Designed to eliminate the value of content farms, duplicated content and paid links in the SERPs

• Look at pages that have excessive ads, no links, lots of poor in-bound links and poorly written content

• Looks at pages on site as a group and not individual pages. i.e. if page A has links from Page B and page B is low quality, page A gets dinged!

• Looked at bounce rates/pogo sticking for sites• Released into the wild at roughly the same time

Demand Media had their IPO

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Penguin Changes

• Looked hard at relevancy of sites for in-bound links

• In bound links are measured on both relevancy of the

individual page content and the niche of the site

• Penalized over optimized anchor text, exact match in

anchor text across different sites killed results

• Google is trying to stop the gaming of anchor text

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Panda Results

• Large E-commerce retailer that had been successfully doing white hat SEO since 2001• 15,000 product pages optimized

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Panda Fallout

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Panda Fallout

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Panda Fallout

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Penguin Fallout

Google is moving from anchor text matching to niche/content relevancy for linking site as signal of primary link relevancy/quality

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Penguin Data - 60% of in bound links

Microsite Masters, Penguin Analysis: SEO Isn’t Dead, But You Need To Act Smarter, hRp://www.micrositemasters.com/blog/penguin-‐analysis-‐seo-‐isnt-‐dead-‐but-‐you-‐need-‐to-‐act-‐smarter-‐and-‐5-‐easy-‐ways-‐to-‐do-‐so/ 14

Penguin Data


How To Deal With Changes In The Algorithm

• Look at your basics with a critical eye–Domain, Information Architecture, Site

Technology, internal site link structure, external link profiles and development,

–Look at time on page (clicks of the back button)–Existing site content and offsite content

distribution programs –Social signals/validation

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Review Your Domain

• Age of the domain still matters• Do you have a keyword in your domain name?• .com is still the major TDL unless you can get

a .edu or .gov• Once you burn your domain’s rep, it takes a long

time to get back in the good graces of the engines

• For new sites, can you buy a domain that fits above

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What’s Your Hood?

• Can you host your own servers?• If not, are you on a shared server or on a virtual private

server?• Are there bad players that are with your hosting company?• Are you taking advantage of load balancing and remote

caching?–Google likes fast loading pages!

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Information Architecture

• Have a well organized site with pages and topics that relate to each being grouped together on the site

• Have this order support the menus and in text links

• Use logical keyword rich names for directories and files

• KEEP IT CONSISTENT!!

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Internal Linking

• Be consistent with how you create internal links–Both at user visible and source code level

• Focus internal link traffic to top pages on site–Make sure these top pages have great user

value• Keep the generic words out of internal links,

“Support,” “More”, “Click Here”, etc.

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Content Is King

• If your content is currently more focused on keywords and less focused on good writing

• Have topics that support one another within your site, link the most similar topics directly and the dis-similar topics through others

• Make the content on your pages actionable, ask the user to complete your site goals

• If your site is poorly written, it does not matter where the keywords are

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Content Is King

• Be specific and then be more specific• Make your headlines for the web and not for print

– Drunk gets nine years in violin case– Drunken man gets a nine years sentence in stolen violin

case• Create pages that are easy to read and skim

– Bulleted and numbered lists are a wonderful thing– A ordered list draws crawler attention to the content with

HTML• If your pages are low quality, kill them or move them to

another domain

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Query Freshness

Google looks at the query volume around phrases and will change your ranking based on how fresh the query is

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Page Level Metrics

• Time on page, less than 15 seconds is bad (if they go back to Google)

• Number of pages visited on your site, deep user exploration as measured by Google toolbar and Google sign-in

• How many of your visitors are first time users?

• Exit rate and bounce rate – Do people find the answer and exit or do they go back to Google for another site

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Links To Your Site• Make it easy for partners, customers and colleagues to

link to your site. Provide varied anchor text and targets• Add links with varied, quality anchor text to any outbound

communication–Apply good SEO techniques to the following outbound

communications• Blogs• Tweets• Facebook/LinkedIn• Press Releases

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New Links• Create compelling content that has value over and above

SEO• Social links can be broken into two sets, both important

–Primary – original–Secondary – re-tweets, shares, likes

• Google & Bing are giving increasing prominence to social signals

• Pay attention to the niche that the target site is in• Authority of social signals

• Domain authority• Author authority

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New Links

• Look for new links that do not come from the same IP C-block

• Look at Domain level authority when hunting for new links• Look at hosts for incoming links and try to weed out bad

actors

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Social Media How Does It Tie Into Search

• Google, Bing, Yahoo and all other search engines have worked social media signals into their ranking algorithms

• The signals are broken out into two categories–Volume and timeliness–Social reputation and influence

• There is overlap between these categories• All search engines are paying attention to this

communications channel–Sunday, January 8, 2012 - Tim Tebow sets new

Twitter record after winning touchdown pass during wildcard game. 9,420 tweets per second 31

• Tuesday, January 10, 2012–Google launches “Personal Results” - An initiative to tie

user’s personal social networks into real-time search results

–It is no surprise that Google+ dominates a most of the results initially.

–Twitter complains that their results are not being featured prominently in the new Personal Results• Twitter had ended an deep crawl agreement with Google last

summer–Twitter, Facebook and other social sites TOS prohibit

deep crawling and indexing of their content–Facebook is keeping quiet right now on the whole thing


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• Signals to watch–Share of voice–Sentiment–Awareness–Engagement–Influence–Volume


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• Facebook postings, shares and likes• Tweets and re-tweets• Yelp reviews• Google+’s• YouTube votes• Structured curation sites such as Pinterest & Snip.it


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• Social signals in search are measured at two levels–Author authority–Authority attributed to individual Tweeter, Facebook

Page, LinkedIn profile–How much influence and reach does the individual

have?• Domain authority

–Very similar to individual but applies to whole domain and is more relevant to blogs and target pages in social media stream


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Forrester/Groundswell Social Ladder

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Social Media Who Do We Target?

• Creators - roughly 1-2 % of universe• Critics - roughly 3-5 % of universe

–Creators & Critics are your primary targets• Collectors - roughly 20% of universe

–Collectors are a close secondary target• Joiners and Spectators - roughly 40% of universe

–Don’t ignore them, they can make or break your campaign. They are the ones who ultimately use your product.

• In-actives - roughly 20% of universe

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• Three things that you need to know to be successful–Who’s talking about your product, marketplace and the

problems your product offers a solution to• Identify the Creators and Critics and where they are having their conversations

–How are they talking about it? What is the language that they are using. • Not just keywords but the tone of voice in the conversation

Taking Advantage Of Social’s Influence On Search

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• Three things that you need to know to be successful (continued)–What is important to the Creators and Critics

• Straight facts• Center of attention / ego boosting• Solving problems for others

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• Understanding their language–Starts very similarly to a SEO/PPC research project

• Good strong tools such as WordTracker, Keyword Discovery, AdWords Keyword Tool, SEOmoz, SpyFu.com, etc., can give you the guidance on keyword list development and potential

• Start inputting your identified keywords into your social tools from the last slide. You will start to discover new sites, blogs, postings and people to target

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• Start a listening campaign–Look-back listening–Current listening–Always listen first before you start to participate

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• Start sharing resources, content and ideas from a number of different sources

• Target each conversation separately, different messages for different people

• Start your own conversations once you’ve established some credibility• Blogs, Tweets, Facebook pages, etc.

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• Start creating unique content to share• Increase your individual and domain authority

• Assign someone within your organization to be the social champion

• Lay out acceptable rules and guidelines for what can and can not be shared


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Taking Advantage Of Social’s Influence On Search• Make your contributions INTERESTING!

– Short, snappy headlines that promise info but don’t tell the whole story• “Top 5 ways to drive social traffic”• “The 8 most embarrassing moments in baseball”

– You’ve done the keyword research, now use them in any and all postings• Headlines• Body Text

– Always include a link to your site/blog/product/profile in any and all postings

– Find the critics and try to be the first to share/re-tweet/post their content. They will notice you and do the same for you

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Things To Remember With Search & Social

• Search engines are using social media signals in every ranking algorithm

• Social signals are surpassing other media as a primary and secondary source

• Social media is a good traffic in and of itself• If your content isn’t interesting, compelling or unique the

social world will ignore it

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• Use the language that the other participants in the social conversation use. You can very rarely impose your own language on top

• It takes time and effort to create a good social campaign

Things To Remember With Search & Social

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Conclusion

• A lot of the advanced work you will do to roll with the algorithms comes down to doing detailed work on the basics.–GO THE EXTRA MILE–It won’t be fast but hunting the details down and dealing

with issues that you let go earlier will pay off in the end

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Optimize Your Landing Pages With This Guide • Optimize your landing pages

with this 10-page, hands-on guide offering tips on:–Design–Personalization–Offers–Usability

h"p://www.BeasleyDirect.com/LandingPagesGuide.html

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Learn How to Optimize Your Emails

Learn how to optimize your emails for delivery through spam filters and for consistency across email browsers in this handy guide. Learn how to:

–Get your email around spam filters–Make your email look consistent

across browsers–Optimize your design for blocked

images and preview pane

h"p://www.BeasleyDirect.com/Email_marke?ng/EmailAuditGuide.html

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New Guide on Multichannel Marketing

Hot off the press, this new guide offers tips on how to save money and optimize effectiveness

h"p://www.beasleydirect.com/mul?channel_marke?ng/mul?channelmarke?ngguide.html

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Thank You!!

John Thyfaulthttp://www.beasleydirect.com/search_marketing.html

[email protected]@JohnThyfault

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