Content is King

Anyone who has interest in SEO, will know that Google has the habit of regularly throwing the cat among the pigeons by updating its algorithm to change the way it indexes pages.

Well they have been at it again. Earlier this month with an update nicknamed “Freshness“, and earlier in the year with a second update: “Panda” – which was itself tweaked only last week.

Both of these updates are aimed at ensuring that Google delivers search results that are considered relvant by their users.

Without going into too much technical detail, the main thrust of these updates is as follows:

The Panda Update

Panda changes the way that Google rate the popularity of a web page, and what the user experience is like. Traditionally, they have done this by assessing the number and quality of links coming into the page, and how well the page is designed. They have now enhanced this by bringing in user experience factors like:

• How frequently do people click on a site when it appears  in the search results
• How long do users spend on a site after they find it in a search
• How many people are referencing the page via social networking through Tweets, Facebook ‘likes‘ etc and of course the Google +1′s
• How often do people go straight back to the search results after clicking on the page

So there is a real focus on the quality of inbound links rather than the quantity. Another nail in the coffin of “500 links for $50″ link farms – no bad thing in our view!

I don’t plan to say much more about the SEO technicalities, but if you want to know more about Panda, (including where the name came from – though it isn’t as interesting as it might be!), you might find this video interesting.

I will talk a little more about the implications of Panda from a marketing perspective later, but first a little about “Freshness“, the second and more recent Googlke  update

The Freshness Update

Where the Panda update was all about ensuring that search results are offering the best user experience, Freshness is all about ensuring that search results are up to date. This is particularly relevant if your communications are time sensitive. If your content is about current news & events or celeb culture, then Freshness is going to have a big impact.

But whatever your market, Freshness puts the focus on new content, so keeping your site fresh and up to date is now more important than ever.

Again, if you want to know more from a direct SEO perspective, here is a video on the subject.

Marketing Implications

Enough of the technical stuff, the real question is what does this mean for your marketing, and how do our recommendations change in light of these updates?

The simple answer is they don’t really!

We have always advocated that the best approach to practical SEO is to ensure that your site is relevant, up to date and interesting for your target market.

These latest Google updates reinforce this position.

If your content is relevant and current, people will read it, share it and talk about it. This  will have a positive impact on your performance in search results.

One thing I would add to this is that making your content easy to share by including Like/Tweet/Google +1 buttons on your site is now even more important.

One final thing to bare in mind is that the Panda update seems to take into account behavior of non-search led traffic to your site. If users are activly seeking our your site, visiting it directly (not via a search) and spending time on it, this behaviour can have a positive effect on search performance.

We have always advocated targeted e-mail tied into good fresh website content as a great marketing approach. These updates strengthen this position through direct visits having a positive impact on your website search performance.

Panda & Freshness: Top Tips for your Marketing

Here are a few tips to consider when thinking about your marketing:

• Make sure your site can be easily updated with high quality, fresh content
• Ideally make sure that this content is available via an RSS feed (Following the freshness update Google now seem to be using RSS feeds more extensively in their serach results)
• Use  relevant buttons and links to make sure your content is easy to share on Twitter/Facebook/Google+ etc
• Monitor user behavior on your site. Are people browsing or just taking a quick look and going away never to return. This can be a indication of irrelevant or uninteresting content.
• Look for ways to attract relevant non-search driven users to your site. make sure you promote your site in all your marketing activities (both on and off line)

We have always said that if you have an interesting site, relvant to your target market, that people will be happy to find on Google, then Google will want it to rank high in relevant search results.

Our approach to online marketing has always followed this belief.

If you would like to talk about what we can do for you, please get in touch. We are always happy to talk about marketing, because we love it!

This is according to a recent post on the e-consultancy blog anyway, and if you read the article it does make a lot of sense.

The objective of a title, whether on an email, blog post or web page, is to get your content noticed.

• By search engines
• By people scanning their email inbox
• By social media followers

In all these cases 65 characters seems to be optimal.

For Search engines – 65-70 characters is seen to be the optimal length for a page title from an SEO perspective
For email 65 characters means that there is a good chance that your subject line will be seen in full in the inbox
For social media – Especially twitter, it leaves room for links, and most importantly for people to add their comments when the retweet.

You will find the full article here on e-consultancy, and it is well worth a read.

A good website is crucial for any business these days, but to take full advantage of the internet as a marketing tool, you need to be in control of your web presence and to be able to update it easily.

It may be that you have a website, and you like the look of it, and the image it presents, but are frustrated by the fact that every time you want to change something, you have to go to your web designer to make the change.

Well If this is you, there is good news… Enter WordPress, the industry leading, open source Content Management/Blogging system. Using WordPress, we can take the design of your existing website & convert it into a fully content managed site, and because WordPress is such a flexible system, it needn’t cost the earth.

From an SEO perspective too, WordPress ticks all the boxes, with Google’s Matt Cutts have been quoted as saying

“WordPress takes care of 80-90% of Google’s crawling issues simply through its design. Because WordPress itself has high ranking, it makes an excellent platform for not only blogging but for any web site.”

You will find full details of this interview here

Once in WordPress, you will be able to make amendments to most elements of your site using a simple web based interface.

What’s more, if you want to further develop your site, the nature of WordPress makes this a relatively straight forward and economical process.

BSA Marketing have a great deal of experience in developing and converting sites to WordPress, you will find some examples of our work here.

If you would like to take control of your site, and explore the possibilities of converting it to WordPress, get in touch. We would be happy to look at your site & discuss the options.

Over the past few months, Google have been rolling out their +1 button on search results and websites. The button allows users to “vote” for which sites and results in Google search they find useful.

For a while now, Google have been talking about how they want to factor social interaction into their search results. It is pretty obvious that the plus one button is a key tool in this objective.

Further supporting this is a quote from the Webmaster Central blog:

“We expect that these personalized annotations will help sites stand out by showing users which search results are personally relevant to them. As a result, +1’s could increase both the quality and quantity of traffic to the sites people care about.”

One SEO company (SEOmoz) has experimented with this, and discovered that it did have a significant impact on a pages search performance.

they shared shared page specifically set up for the purpose through his Google+ profile and then encouraged folks to share it through Google+, but not through Twitter, Facebook, direct linking, etc.

Within minutes the post was shared dozens of times, and Two hours later, this test URL ranked #1 for its keyword phrase in Google search results.

You will find full details of the experiment here.

All of this adds impact to what we have been saying;

“The key to internet marketing is being valued by your market, and you are seen as valuable if you deliver good, interesting content that is relevant to your target audience”.

What the Google + 1 button does is allows people to show their approval for your content, and this approval will have a positive impact on your search results, helping you to Be Heard.

So rather than spend resources on  “Traditional SEO”, we would recommend that once you have done the basic on page optimisation, you should devote your time to generating good interesting content, and communicating it to those people you know. Then encourage them to “+1″ your content if they like it.

This should in turn make the content easier to find for those people who you don’t know, creating a positive spiral.

We are increasingly using WordPress as a web publishing tool, as it allows the creation of highly featured, flexible websites, which are fully content managed.

One question we are regularly asked is “How well do WordPress sites perform on Search Engines?”. The simple answer is “very well”. WordPress has been recognised as an SEO friendly platform right from its inception.

However rather than taking my word for it, here is a presentation by Matt Cutts (SEO Guru at Google), where he talks about SEO and Why Google Loves Wordpress.

If you would like to investigate converting your site to WordPress, get in touch, we would be happy to discuss the possibilities.

Yet again, Google have made a change to their algorithms that will make it harder for companies to manipulate their search results for marketing purposes.

Two recent announcements:

1. Introduction of the ability for users to block entire domains
2. Inclusion of quality factors into their algorithms

Will potentially have some significant effects on SEO, in that it will move further towards the idea of personalised search results thus limiting the use of the “Ranking Report” much favoured by SEO companies to justify their existence, and mean that tactics such as buying links from “Content farms” will become counterproductive. In my opinion, Google should be praised for these moves.

Reading this you might get the impression that I discount search engine rankings when considering your marketing mix. In fact this is far from the truth. I believe good, targeted visibility on search engines is vital, especially for your company name and long tail search terms.

What I don’t believe in is putting resources into SEO in isolation. Good rankings are delivered by having a well structured site that clearly sets out your proposition, from your customer’s perspective rather than yours. If you do that, your site should include relevant key phrases, and thus will be indexed for these & should appear on search engines.

In terms of monitoring search engine performance, I would advocate monitoring Google analytics (Other analytics systems are available), to assess which media, including search engines, are delivering visits to your site and how these visits are contributing to sales.

You may find this post “Does Email Marketing Work?” interesting as it is a real case study that  looks at the impact of various marketing media (Including search engines) on sales.

One question that cropped up on numerous occasions during our recent Marketing Seminars was “How do I get my business listed on Google Maps”. So I thought it might be worth adding a quick tutorial to the blog:

The process is quite simple, especially if you already have a Google account. Assuming that you do, there are 2 ways to handle this:

1. If you can already see a basic listing for your business when you do a search on Google maps:
   • Click on the “More” link in the details bubble, and select “Edit Details”
   • After a few more clicks, you should arrive at a page where you can edit the company information, and accurately place the marker (you will need to be signed into your Google account to do this)
   • Once you have completed your edits, click submit
   • You will now be presented with a verification page, where you will be given a number of options as to how to verify your ownership of the listing. (note that if you have just claimed the listing, this verification process will probably be by post)
   • Assuming that you are given the option, click “verify by phone”, and you will receive an automated call from Google with a 5 digit pin number.
   • Enter this number into the box provided and you are done.
   • Your listing will appear a short time later.
2. If you cannot find a listing on Google, then log into your Google account, and select “Google Places” from the main accounts page. (alternatively, point your browser at  www.google.com/local/add/)
   • You can then click the add business link, and enter your company details into the relevant fields.
   • Select your country, and enter the phone number of the business you would like to add.
   • If Google has your details in its database, then it will present these for you to edit. Alternatively it will present you with a blank entry page.
   • Once you click Submit, you will then be taken through the verification process outlined above (from point 4)

The process is pretty straight forward, and shouldn’t take mare that 10 minutes to complete.

Today Google have launched a new feature on their website. “Google Instant” is a predictive search feature that starts to deliver search results as soon as you start typing, refining the search as you type more.

It seems like a neat feature which Google claim will speed up and improve the accuracy of searches, the question from our end is how will this affect SEO? The simple answer to which is “Only time will tell!!”.

Some experts claim that this “Will kill SEO”- (eg, Steve Rubel of Edelman Digital) – however most people seem to have the opinion that it will simply move the goal  posts. But what do we think?

As anyone who has read this blog before will know we have always felt that SEO should be a part of a broader web marketing strategy, and that it is not the magic wand that will solve all your web marketing issues with a single wave. We do not subscribe to the idea that “All I need is to be number one on Google for my chosen keyword(s) then the sales will roll in“.

In saying this, I am not rubbishing SEO. Being easy to find on Google is critical, but it should be seen in the context of a wider marketing program – both online and offline.

Focusing on the Web Marketing Mix

Before the internet, marketing focus was on “The Marketing Mix”. This meant considering the total array of marketing tools to in deciding which combination is best to deliver your message. Since the launch of Google, SEO and “Getting to the top of Google” has somewhat eclipsed this approach (wrongly in my opinion).

As a Marketer I believe that  “Focusing on the Marketing Mix” is still as important as ever, the difference is that with the advent of web marketing, the range of tools and options available to businesses – particularly SME businesses – has increased dramatically.

Key tools now include

• Email
• SEO
• Pay Per Click
• Web Advertising (eg Directories)
• Web PR
• Social media
• Off line marketing (yes this is still important)

Getting the mix of these tools right will always be more effective than simply focusing on “Getting to the top of Google”.

How will Google Instant Affect this

Coming back to the question I asked earlier, I believe Google Instant will have significant impact on web marketing, some positive, some negative:

• Google Instant only works if you are logged in to Google, so if people like the service they are more likely to log in. As well as activating Google instant, being logged in to your Google account also has (and has had for a while) a significant impact on the search results you see because  it uses the individual account history of previous web activity as part of the search algorithm.  So, the better your relationship with a searcher (i.e. they have searched for you/visited your site often in the past) the better your SEO performance. Consequently SEO ranking reports produced by SEO companies will become increasingly meaningless as the results they show will no longer reflect the results in the real world.

• Experts are predicting that Google Instant will reduce the length of search terms from the current average of 3 words to 2 words. This will significantly skew the searches and make searched for keywords more competitive (hence more expensive either from PPC or SEO point of view) thus making search marketing more difficult for smaller companies. Consequently it will become increasingly difficult to find niche keywords that are searched for, but that have little competition on the search engines, thus making SEO more difficult for smaller companies. However if you that the Web Marketing Mix approach and look to build Fans not Customers (read our earlier blog post on this subject), your SEO performance can still improve.

In conclusion, we would suggest that Google Instant will have an impact on SEO. It may well make it more difficult for samller companies to “get to the top of Google”. This said, it does not change our opinion that Web Marketing should be seen as a process mixing appropriate use of all available tools (see above), and in this context, I believe that SEO will continue to be an accessible and valuable element of that Web Marketing Mix.

RSS feeds are a great way of adding dynamic content to your site, but what if the content you are wanting to add does not offer an RSS feed.

The answer lies in free tools that create an RSS feed from any dynamic listing on any website. All you do is sign up for an account, and follow a couple of simple steps to create the feed.

Obviously google offer this service through their feedburner site feedburner.google.com. Alternatively, if you would prefer not to give Google even more information about your activities, there are other tools out there including www.ponyfish.com.

You can see the end result on www.net-recruit.co.uk who use a feed generator to deliver the “Latest Jobs” section of their homepage.

You can also use these sites to create RSS feeds for content on your site. A great way to encourage those all important backlinks!!

It now seems to be official that Google are considering adding website speed to their ranking algorithms. This means that they may now use the speed your pages load as one of the factors in determining your page ranking in their index.

You can hear it from the horse’s mouth in this interview with Matt Cutts of Google (The discussion on site speed is about 2:40m into the video).

Before we all start panicking and loosing sleep over this one, we need to consider a few things:

1. You should already be concerned about the speed of your site! – Speed is a significant factor in making your site appealing to visitors. If each page takes 30 seconds to load, visitors will not stay long, and you have a problem irrespective of whether Google list your site.

2. Given point 1 above, Google are not going to put a site with less relevant content that loads in 1 second ahead of a site with great content that loads in 3 seconds. Their mission is to deliver the content people are searching for, so the best way of ensuring a good ranking is still going to be having a site with great content that gives searchers what they are looking for.

3. Google have been using speed as a factor in their adwords quality score for a while now, and I have seen very people commenting that they are being penalised for the speed of their site in this area, so it would seem not to be a key factor. Google use over 200 ranking factors is indexing sites, each with different weightings. I do not believe that speed will be a heavily weighted factor.

Assuming that you do not see the speed of your site as an issue for a visitor experience point of view, I would suggest that you would be better spending resources on improving, enhancing your site content and ensuring it clearly communicates your message in an interesting & informative way, and on building good quality back links to your site. Once this job is done, then by all means spend time “minifying your javascript” to speed up your site.

In other words speed of your site should always be a consideration, but it should not become more important just because it has been added to Google’s agenda!!