Single Grain » SEO

Google Panda in Plain English (Infographic)

Sujan Patel — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 18:41:40 +0000

In February of 2011, the Google Panda algorithm changed the SEO world forever. After a year of ripping through what Google deems as “spammy” sites, how has Panda affected you? There has been non-stop chatter between Internet marketers and SEOs about how to protect your site from Panda, but with all of the updates and revisions to this algorithm change, things can get confusing quickly. So here it is; Google Panda in Plain English.

<a href="http://www.singlegrain.com/blog/google-panda-in-plain-english-infographic" target=”_blank"></a> [Via: <a href="http://www.singlegrain.com/">Single Grain - A Digital Marketing Agency</a>]

Top 5 Over-Optimization Mistakes to Avoid

Sujan Patel — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 13:52:02 +0000

We all know that performing proper search engine optimization is vitally important for getting your website ranked in the search engine results pages for the best possible keywords. However, it’s also true that you can have too much of a good thing. In fact, over-optimizing your sites has been known to trigger penalties that could cause your sites to drop significantly in the SERPS – or worse, be eliminated from the index altogether.

So to take advantage of the power of SEO without triggering an over-optimization penalty, consider the following tips for maximizing your on-page and off-page SEO:

On-Page Over-Optimization

On-page optimization refers to the SEO activities that take place within your website, including traditional SEO activities like meta tag optimization and keyword inclusion (as measured by the instances of your keyword found in your body content). While the standard best practices of on-page SEO are widely accepted, there are still a few things you’ll want to keep in mind when optimizing your website.

Keyword inclusion

Yes, the search engines *will* notice if every single page on your site is optimized the exact same way. While there’s value in including your target keywords in prime locations, it’s also possible to make your pages so unnatural looking that they trigger over-optimization penalties. For example, if every page on your site includes the exact same tag structure and keyword inclusion percentage, there’s a chance the search engines will issue a penalty.

So how can you prevent this penalty from occurring while still maximizing your on-page SEO? Simple – think “natural” first. Imagine for a second that you were building a natural website without any ulterior SEO motives in mind. How often would you include your target keyword phrase and where would it make sense to do so? How would your site look if you weren’t trying to wedge in your keywords a certain number of times?

Once you have an idea of what a more natural site would look like, try to incorporate some of its attributes into your own site. Add your keywords in areas that have a demonstrated SEO impact, but do it in a way that feels natural to both your readers and the search engines.

Content creation

Similarly, when drafting the articles you’ll use on your website, be careful to maintain a natural voice instead of “writing to the keyword.” For example, just because the keyword, “national park pa forest” has good potential doesn’t mean that you should write an article around this unnatural keyword. Consider the following sample text to see why:

“National Park PA Forest: The Best National Forest Park in PA”

Visitors everywhere are flocking to national park PA forest for its stunning natural features. You should go to national park PA forest to see these features for yourself. To learn more about national park PA forest, click on the link below.

Sound goofy? Although this might seem like an exaggeration, this type of content – and worse – plagues the internet due to mostly well-meaning SEOs who believe that the only way to rank well in the SERPs is to build content around strict keywords.

And yes, sometimes this content wins and ranks highly for the keywords it targets. However, before you run out and start creating your own keyword-stuffed articles, consider that Google’s primary goal is to provide the best possible search results to its users and that good quality content is always going to win out in that consideration in the long run. Google Panda provided plenty of evidence that content quality will be a major focus going forward, so be sure to write your content to appeal to your visitors – not just the search engines.

Off-Page Over-Optimization

While on-page optimization refers to the way you build your website to appeal to the search engines, off-page optimization includes the activities you engage in on other sites to improve your rankings. For most webmasters, backlinking remains the primary off-page optimization activity, but just like with on-page SEO, there are a few things you’ll want to be careful about when creating inbound backlinks in order to avoid penalties.

Backlink velocity

Although backlinks are incredibly valuable in helping to improve your search engine rankings, building too many – too quickly – looks suspicious to the search engines. For this reason, it’s important to build quality links using a slow link velocity at first until your site overcomes Google’s trust barrier.

But how many links is too many links? That’s tough to say, and realistically, the answer will never truly be known as long as Google keeps its lips shut about specific algorithm ranking factors. However, most experts put the maximum number of links that should be built in a day at no more than 30-100, depending on your site’s industry, audience and traffic levels. When in doubt, slow down and re-focus on building quality links over quantity.

Anchor text creation

Besides the rate at which you build links, it’s also important to consider the structure of the links themselves. Using the same anchor text for each link you create looks suspicious as well, so be sure to vary your anchor text to create a natural looking link profile.

But not only can varying your anchor text phrases help you to avoid an over-optimization penalty, it can also help you to get your site ranked in the SERPs for different, but related keyword phrases, thus expanding your market penetration and increasing traffic. To find out which additional keywords Google feels are substantially related to your main target phrase, enter your target keyword into Google and then click on the “Related searches” option in the left-hand sidebar. This should display a number of related keywords to use as anchor text phrases in your link building efforts:

Link type

Anyone who’s ever built a website knows that there are dozens or hundreds of different link types that can be built. From spammy profile backlinks to links from high quality directories like DMOZ, there are tons of different ways to create links, each with its own set of advantages and benefits. Unfortunately, many website owners focus too heavily on one particular link type over another (typically determined by whatever latest method the “gurus” are preaching), which leads to an unnatural looking link profile.

Again, it’s important to consider what your site would look like if it grew entirely organically. Chances are – as long as you put out good quality content – you’d attract a wide range of link types from many different types of sites, including social networking links, in-content links from other sites in your industry and others. When building links, try to mimic this diversity, as building a single type of link or creating links in a single, tightly-defined neighborhood reflects poorly on your site.

So finally, when considering good SEO and how to avoid over-optimization penalties, the general rule of thumb is this – create high quality, natural-looking content and backlinks, and your site is sure to win in the long run.

Image: Mitchell Bartlett

The Best SEO Posts of 2011

AJ Kumar — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 14:06:56 +0000

No matter what else you might have to say about the year 2011, you can’t deny that it’s been a time of incredible changes in the SEO world. So to recap everything that’s happened this year, we’re bringing you the top SEO posts of 2011:

Google Panda

Probably the biggest change to hit the SEO world this year was the implementation of the Google Panda algorithm change. Plenty of great articles were written on what this update means and how to recover from any assessed penalties, so be sure to check out the following sites:

What is Google Panda?

Quick Sprout – Absolutely Everything You Need to Know About the Google Panda Update
Sistrix – Google Farmer Update: Quest for Quality
Search Engine Land – Number Crunchers: Who Lost in Google’s Panda Algorithm Update?
SEOMoz – Google Algorithm Change History – 2011

Google Panda Update History

Search Engine Roundtable – Google Panda 1.0 (February 24^th)
Search Engine Roundtable – Google Panda 2.0 (April 11^th)
Search Engine Land – Google Panda 2.1 (May 9^th)
Search Engine Land – Google Panda 2.2 (June 18^th)
Search Engine Roundtable – Google Panda 2.3 (July 22^nd)
Search Engine Land – Google Panda 2.4 (August 2011)
Search Engine Roundtable – Google Panda 2.5 (September 28^th)
Search Engine Roundtable – Google Panda 2.5.1 (October 9^th)
Search Engine Roundtable – Google Panda 2.5.2 (October 13^th)
Search Engine Roundtable – Google Panda 2.5.3 (October 19^th)

Succeeding in a Post-Google Panda World

SEOMoz – Beating Google’s Panda Update – 5 Deadly Content Sins
Six Revisions – Creating Websites Optimized for Google’s Panda Algorithm
SEOMoz – How Google’s Panda Update Changed SEO Best Practices Forever
Business Insider – How Google Panda Will Create Jobs in News and Publishing
Search Engine Land – 5 New Tactics for SEO Post-Panda

Google+

This year, Google made major strides in its efforts to compete with Facebook and provide the best possible search results by customizing the SERPs to its users’ preferences. Here’s how it happened:

The Launch of the Google +1 Button

The launch of the Google +1 button surprised many SEO experts, as the full strategy behind Google’s search and content integrations wasn’t yet completely clear.

Search Engine Land – It’s Here: Google +1 Button for Websites
Huffington Post – Google +1 Button Explained: What Happens When You Click It
Search Engine Journal – Does the Google +1 Button Signal the End of “Don’t Be Evil”?
Search Engine Watch – Google +1 Button Loses Search Visibility

The Google+ Social Networking Site

Although it has yet to steal a significant amount of market share from Facebook in the competitive social networking space, Google+ offers a number of unique tools and features that could make it a contender in the future.

Official Google Blog – Introducing the Google+ Project
TechCrunch – Google+ Project
Mashable – Google Launches Google+ to Battle Facebook
Forbes – 10 Things CMOs Need to Know About Google+

Personalized Search

With personalized search results replacing traditional SEO rankings in many Google SERPs, webmasters are well advised to focus on building their social networks and developing viral, sharable content.

SEOMoz – Social Annotations in Search: Now Your Social Network = Rankings
NY Times – How Useful is Google’s Personalized Search?
Leo Dimilo – Personalized Search and the Future
Kikolani – How Personalized Search Should Affect Blogging Strategies for Ranking
Common Sense Marketing – 5 Things You Need to Know About Personalized Search
SEOptimise – The Pros and Cons of Personalized Search

New Metrics in SEO

Across the search engines, major shifts have been taking place in terms of the factors that lead to high rankings. No longer is it enough for webmasters to optimize their title tags, fill out their meta descriptions and include target keywords at a specific density. These traditional SEO markers are on their way out – and the following new metrics are in!

Social Media

Probably the biggest change to SEO metrics in the past year has been the increased importance of social media signals as a ranking factor.

Quick Sprout – How to Create a Jaw Dropping Social Media Strategy in 5 Steps
SEOMoz – The Social Media Marketer’s SEO Checklist
Search Engine Watch – Top 13 Social Media Ranking Factors for SEO
Search Engine Journal – How SEO and Social Media Add Up to Online Marketing Success
Mashable – How Social Media Affects Content Relevance in Search
Social Media Examiner – Social Media and Search Engine Optimization: Why They Work Together
Search Engine Land – It’s Not “He Said, She Said” Over Google Rankings & Facebook Shares
SEOMoz – A Tweet’s Effect on Rankings – An Unexpected Case Study

Site Speed

Although site speed isn’t a new ranking factor, its importance is growing, which makes it a relevant area of opportunity for most webmasters.

Distilled – Site Speed for Dummies Part 1 – Why Bother…?
Distilled – Site Speed for Dummies Part 2 – How to Do It
SEOMoz – Take Advantage of Google’s Site Speed Algorithm
Google Analytics – Measure Page Load Time with Site Speed Analytics Report
WebProNews – Google Analytics Site Speed Metrics Expanded

Bounce Rate, CTR and Other Metrics

Smart webmasters are shifting their attention off of keyword density and other traditional SEO metrics and taking a look at bounce rate, CTR and other current indications of site quality.

Bruce Clay – Meaningful SEO Metrics: Going Behind the Numbers
Single Grain – The New SEO Metrics You Need to Know About
SEO Theory – SEO Metrics You Must Track and Report
Search Engine Watch – Maximizing Your CTR for SEO in Organic Results
Inc. – How to Reduce Your Website’s Bounce Rate
Traffic Generation Café – Bounce Rate: 16 Ways to Make Your Blog Sticky

Freshness

Recently, content “freshness” has grown hugely in importance, making it a vital consideration for brands, blogs, content sites and more.

Official Google Blog – Giving You Fresher, More Recent Search Results
Huffington Post – Google’s Freshness Update: New SEO Opportunities
SEOMoz – Freshness Factor: 10 Illustrations on How Fresh Content Can Influence Rankings
TechCrunch – The Winners and Losers of Google’s Freshness Update Revealed
SEOptimise – Google Freshness Update – What it Means for Your Brand
Search Engine Land – Brands & News Sites Among Winners from Google’s Freshness Algo Update

Content Quality

The Panda update was all about rewarding content quality and weeding junk sites out of the SERPs. Here’s how to improve the quality of the content on your site to take advantage of this new metric:

Search Engine Land – Why Quality Content is the Only Sustainable SEO Strategy
Google Webmaster Blog – More Guidance on Building High Quality Sites
Single Grain – How the Search Engines Could Quantify Quality
Search Engine People – The 5 Point Checklist to Quality Content
SEODesk – Why Quality Content is So Essential to SEO
Openview Partners – Why Quality SEO Equals Quality Content (and Visa Versa)

Branding

Surprisingly, SEO has shifted in focus to favor defined brands, meaning that high rankings can no longer be achieved by keyword optimization alone.

Kaiser the Sage – Branding in SEO – The Big Shift in Online Marketing
Brafton – Expert Tips on Brand Marketing to Boost SEO
SEODesk – Branding or SEO?
Adrants – SEO is for Tail Chasers; Brand Awareness is for Pack Leaders
Search News Central – Dealing with Brands in SEO

The Future of SEO

Although there’s no way to know for sure which factors will impact SEO most in the coming years, we can make a few extrapolations based on what we’ve seen so far. The following articles highlight the changes we’ve seen to SEO over the past year and make predictions about what will be big in 2012:

SEOMoz – 2011 Search Engine Ranking Factors Survey
Search Engine Journal – The Future of SEO: 5 Clear Facts You Should Know
Quick Sprout – SEO Trends You Can’t Ignore if You Want High Rankings
David Wood – Google Panda Updates and the Future of SEO
Small Box – The Future of SEO
SEOptimise – 30 Web Trends for 2012

Image: manishpandey

How to Implement PDF SEO Techniques

Sujan Patel — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 17:16:22 +0000

You’ve gone through every page of your website and added your target keywords to your title tags, heading tags, meta tags and body content – that means you’re done with your search engine optimization, right?!

Guess again! In fact, if you only optimize the HTML pages on your website, you’re missing out on a key opportunity – the ability to optimize the PDF files that reside on your site as well.

If you’ve never done PDF optimization before (and don’t worry, a lot of people haven’t!), check out the following tips on how to get the biggest search benefit from these hidden files:

Traditional SEO for PDF Files

In a lot of ways, PDF files are treated like any other page on your website. The search engines are able to crawl them and index their content, as long as you follow certain rules. These include:

Creating your PDF files using text-based programs. Although Adobe InDesign and other graphics-based programs can produce great-looking PDFs, they may prevent your files from being indexed correctly in the search engines. For this reason, it’s important to use text-based programs like Microsoft Word to create any PDF files that will be deployed on your site.

Optimizing your PDF file correctly. As with web page optimization, there are a few specific ways you’ll want to include your target keywords in your PDFs for maximum SEO benefit:

Specify your “document properties”. When creating PDFs you should have the opportunity to add relevant title, author, subject and keyword tags, depending on the program you use to create your files. Make sure that each of these fields is optimized with your target keywords, just like you would the meta tags on a traditional web page.
Make use of keyword-rich headline tags, image caption tags and body content. Just like on HTML web pages, the locations in which your target keywords appear and the frequency with which they’re used helps the search engine spiders to understand what your file is all about and where it should be ranked in the SERPs.
Use appropriate SEO file naming conventions. On a standard website, you’d name your HTML and image files according to your target keywords to improve your page’s SEO, and PDFs should be no different. Titling your PDF as “my-target-keyword.pdf” may give your file the slight advantage that allows it to rank highly in the blended SERPs, resulting in increased traffic and exposure for your site.

Placing your PDFs strategically on your site. If you bury your PDFs too deeply in your content pages or – worse yet – upload them in compressed .ZIP files, they won’t be crawled by the search engines. For maximum value, link to PDFs from your home page or make it very obvious that you’re linking to a PDF file if you must include them on sub-pages within 1-2 clicks of your homepage.

Obviously, as with traditional web pages, it’s important not to go overboard and over-optimize your PDFs. Use your target keywords strategically, but sparingly, in a way that provides value for your readers without appearing too spammy to the search engines.

The Role of PDFs in Mobile Discovery

Another important thing to consider when it comes to using PDF files on your site is how mobile discovery platforms might identify vital information about your business.

In a recent article on Entrepreneur.com, we took a look at how Siri, Apple’s new voice recognition software, could impact the importance of traditional local SEO. Basically, if people come to rely on programs like this to identify local businesses for their needs (in the article, we used the example of asking Siri to call a cab after a night on the town), they could ultimately wind up bypassing the traditional SERPs entirely.

Obviously, traditional websites, review sites and social profiles will all continue to have their place in the search hierarchy, but the important thing for business owners to consider now is how programs like Siri might access information on their sites. Right now, it’s not entirely clear how Siri analyzes information when determining which results to direct a user to, but it’s safe to say that the algorithm isn’t yet as sophisticated as it could be – which might mean that the information contained in PDF files isn’t being analyzed correctly.

So if you, as a local business owner, have important information like restaurant menus, open hours, directions and so on stored in PDF files on your site, it might be a good idea to place this information on the home page of your site as well in order to improve access by Siri and other similar programs that are sure to be coming in the future.

Using PDFs to Improve Off-Page SEO

Another extremely under-utilized way to improve your site’s SEO with PDFs is to use these files as link bait in order to spur the creation of high-quality inbound links to your site. Generally, PDFs are high-value documents – whether they’re lecture slides packed with detailed information, guides to completing specific processes or other valuable descriptions – which makes them ideal candidates for drawing links back to your site.

One way to do this is to post your PDFs on file sharing websites like Scribd or SlideShare. Not only will deploying your PDFs on these sites help to build traffic to your site through increased brand awareness, you’ll receive a backlink to your site every time these PDFs are shared on other sites (assuming, of course, that you followed the rules described earlier about optimizing your files for search engine discovery).

It’s also a good idea to encourage the social sharing of your PDFs. Since we now know that social signals are a ranking factor in Google’s and Bing’s search algorithms, we can use our PDFs to generate social shares that point back to our websites. Depending on the quality and value of your PDF, this could be as simple as seeding your PDFs on your favorite social networking sites and watching them go viral as people share your files with friends and family members.

If this all sounds like a lot of work, don’t worry – it isn’t necessary to complete every step listed above in order to improve the SEO of your PDFs. However, keep in mind that because these key SEO principles aren’t widely known or utilized by most site owners, they could represent a valuable opportunity for your business to distinguish itself in the search engines by implementing these techniques ahead of your competitors. So give these ideas a try – you might just be surprised by how much you can improve your site’s SEO with just a little effort at optimizing your PDFs.

Image: chworkspace

25 SEO Myths Debunked

AJ Kumar — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 14:00:53 +0000

Search engine optimization is an ever-changing field, and given how secretive the search engines are about their algorithms, it’s one that’s prone to myths and half-truths being blown out of proportion by well-meaning webmasters.

So today, let’s clear the air and separate the facts from the fiction when it comes to search engine optimization. The following are 25 of the biggest SEO myths out there, along with explanations of why they’ve been debunked:

Myths about on-page optimization

Meta tags matter – Honestly, meta tags might still play some teeny, tiny role in how your site ranks, but the effect is so small that it’s not even worth optimizing these tags. Even the description tag – long considered to be a holdout amongst meta tags – isn’t always used as the Google snippet, so skip the extra work here.
Targeting a specific keyword density helps your rankings – Any article that tells you to target 2.5% (or 5%, or 10%…) keyword density is lying to you. Including keywords in your content helps the search engine spiders understand what your site is about, but there’s no single target density that will help your site get ranked.
Keyword and link stuffing works – Guess what? 1999 called, and they want their SEO strategies back! If you’re still stuffing your meta tags or inline content with keywords and links designed to boost your rankings, stop. Just stop.
The search engines can’t read CSS files – Thought you could get away with stuffing your CSS files full of fake div tags? Think again, as the search engines can and do read these files. Spamming text here is treated the same way as it is anywhere else on your site.
Optimizing your “Home” links with target keywords will improve your rankings – Sorry to burst your bubble again, but SEOMoz found that the anchor text of your “Home” links is usually ignored.

Site-wide SEO myths

Great content always ranks well – Writing good content helps, but inbound links still win out as the most powerful SEO technique. Great content paired with authority backlinks, on the other hand, is a recipe for winning!
Exact match domain names are a must – A simple look at any SERP will tell you that there are plenty of other sites beating out their exact match domain competitors. In fact, most experts believe that the importance of exact match domains as a ranking factor will decrease significantly compared to the use of social signals.
Posting an XML sitemap will increase your rankings – Yes, an XML sitemap helps the search engine spiders to navigate your site easily and index all of your content, but its presence – in and of itself – isn’t a ranking factor.
All of your pages should end in “.html” – Really, this has never mattered to search engine optimization. Structure your permalinks however you want, as long as your target keywords make an appearance in the page’s file name.
Toolbar PageRank is the same as actual PageRank – Actual PageRank is updated constantly, while toolbar PageRank is only changed intermittently, making it notoriously out of date and unfit to base major SEO decisions off of.

Frequently heard SEO myths about backlinking

More links are always better – Nope (Chuck Testa). I’ll take one relevant, high quality PR4 backlink over 1,000 spam links any day.
Paying for links will get your site penalized – Yes, certain paid links can give your site a black mark, but think about sites like the DMoz directory or the Yahoo directory. Both of these sites require payment to participate, but their effects on SEO are positive.
Only high PageRank links are valuable – High PageRank links are awesome, but Google knows that sites attract more than just PR4-PR9 links. Balance your link building efforts to include lower PR links as well to form a more natural-looking link profile.
Backlinks must be relevant to count – Relevant links are great, but there’s some dispute as to how well the search engines are able to define relevancy. Although it’s a good idea to solicit links from sites in the same general category as your own, you don’t need to be competing on the same keywords for the link to be a good fit.
No-follow links don’t count – Although sites that send you no-follow backlinks might not pass on any link juice, they’re definitely still counted and factored into the search engine ranking algorithms.

General search engine optimization myths

SEO is a one-time project – There’s no “set it and forget it” Rotisserie Magic” here. SEO is an ongoing task that requires constant upkeep as techniques change. Anyone who tells you that he “finished the SEO” on his site is sadly misinformed.
Personalized search has killed traditional SEO – Although personalized search has the potential to bump sites out of their traditional ranking spots, not all search phrases are affected and those that are don’t seem to be showing significant changes – which means it’s business as usual for most SEOs.
What works for one site can be applied universally – Just because you got your kid’s baseball team’s site ranked in Google five years ago doesn’t mean you’re qualified to help multinational corporations spruce up their SEO. Every site brings different factors to the table, which requires a separate set of SEO tools.
It’s possible to “game” Google – Google hires some of the smartest engineers and web developers out there, so do you really think you’re going to be able to sneak something as obvious as a linkwheel or reciprocal link past them?
Google is the only search engine you should optimize for – Yes, Google has a monopoly on the search space, but all indications point to Youtube and Bing gaining traction as search properties. Be sure to show them a little love as well when it comes to your SEO campaigns.

Myths commonly held by SEO agencies

“Our agency is endorsed by Google…” – Although there are certifications for Google’s Adsense and Adwords program, Google itself doesn’t explicitly endorse any SEO agencies.
“We guarantee top placement in the SERPs…” – Sorry, but unless you’re talking about top placement in the sponsored search (where you can pay to have your site featured), there’s no way to guarantee a Top 3 placement in the results pages. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.
“The success of our project will be defined by a high PageRank for your site…” – Having a high PageRank is nice, but objectively, it doesn’t do anything for your site. Focusing on achieving high rankings in multiple SERPs to drive natural search traffic
“You’ll see results quickly…” – Technically, it’s possible. Depending on the competitiveness of your search terms, you might see fast results with SEO. However, for most projects, anticipate at least a month to start to see results from an SEO plan – maybe much, much longer if you’re going after a tough keyword.
“We’ll submit your site to the search engines…” – The myth here is that submitting sites to the search engines is necessary, which hasn’t been the case in years. These days, the search engines will find your site through backlinks. Anyone telling you that this is an important feature of an SEO plan is selling you a load of BS.

Have you fallen victim to any of these SEO myths before? Or do you have another SEO myth you’d like to address? Share your thoughts below in the comments!

How to Implement PDF SEO Techniques

Sujan Patel — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 16:24:22 +0000

Guess again! In fact, if you only optimize the HTML pages on your website, you’re missing out on a key opportunity – the ability to optimize the PDF files that reside on your site as well.

If you’ve never done PDF optimization before (and don’t worry, a lot of people haven’t!), check out the following tips on how to get the biggest search benefit from these hidden files:

Traditional SEO for PDF Files

In a lot of ways, PDF files are treated like any other page on your website. The search engines are able to crawl them and index their content, as long as you follow certain rules. These include:

Optimizing your PDF file correctly. As with web page optimization, there are a few specific ways you’ll want to include your target keywords in your PDFs for maximum SEO benefit:

Specify your “document properties”. When creating PDFs you should have the opportunity to add relevant title, author, subject and keyword tags, depending on the program you use to create your files. Make sure that each of these fields is optimized with your target keywords, just like you would the meta tags on a traditional web page.
Make use of keyword-rich headline tags, image caption tags and body content. Just like on HTML web pages, the locations in which your target keywords appear and the frequency with which they’re used helps the search engine spiders to understand what your file is all about and where it should be ranked in the SERPs.
Use appropriate SEO file naming conventions. On a standard website, you’d name your HTML and image files according to your target keywords to improve your page’s SEO, and PDFs should be no different. Titling your PDF as “my-target-keyword.pdf” may give your file the slight advantage that allows it to rank highly in the blended SERPs, resulting in increased traffic and exposure for your site.

The Role of PDFs in Mobile Discovery

Another important thing to consider when it comes to using PDF files on your site is how mobile discovery platforms might identify vital information about your business.

Using PDFs to Improve Off-Page SEO

Image: vpickering

How to Teach Developers to Think Like SEOs

Sujan Patel — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 14:00:43 +0000

Sure, as an SEO professional, you know certain truisms about how the search engines identify and evaluate information online. But try telling your developer that the brilliant flash-based navigation system he’s just coded is killing your internal linking structure, and you could find yourself in for a mighty unpleasant conversation…

Obviously, the solution is for both parties to work together towards a shared goal – so how do you get your developer on board when it comes to your website’s SEO needs? Start with the following issues, which represent some of the biggest intersections between SEO and web development work:

Item #1 – Site Speed

SEO professionals know that Google is placing an increasing priority on site speed – even going so far as using it as a ranking factor – given the role this key item plays in a user’s site experience. However, not all web developers are aware of this, meaning that the code they develop may not be initially optimized for speed.

To get your developer on board, send him over to Web Page Test and have him compare your site with your competitors. If your site loads noticeably slower than the others in the test, ask him to either remove the white space contained with your site’s Javascript and CSS files or to call resources that aren’t loaded within the head section of your website from a subdomain, reducing the server calls that can slow down site speed.

Item #2 – Site Redirection

When you involve a web developer in the process of redirecting on site URL to another for any reason, there are a few important SEO distinctions that your developer may not be aware of. Let’s look at a few of them…

301 versus 302 redirects – A 301 redirect is used when a page moves permanently, while a 302 redirect is used to indicated a temporary change of URL (for example, if a page was briefly down for maintenance or a split test). Because a 301 redirect passes on PageRank, link juice and other site authority factors, it offers a major SEO benefit if a page is being moved permanently. Some developers use these two redirects interchangeably, so it’s an important point of distinction to make when moving pages around on your site.

IP-based redirects – When designing a website, developers can insert code into the head sections of web pages that enables them to detect the IP address of the viewer and issue a redirect based on the geographic location of the address. For example, if a viewer accessed the “website.co.uk” version of a website from France, an IP-based redirect could automatically pass the reader on to the “website.fr” version of the page (if one existed).

The problem is that while this type of redirection is great from a user experience standpoint (since it automatically delivers the most relevant content based on the viewer’s location), it has some pretty big hang-ups in terms of SEO, as the search engine spiders – which are based primarily in the US – will be automatically redirected to the pages built for US-based IP addresses. This leaves a large amount of site content uncrawled.

“Rel=canonical” tags – Adding the rel=canonical tag to your site to manage duplicate penalties is often much easier to execute that creating the appropriate 301 redirects, but it’s important to understand the SEO implications of this move. According to Paddy Moogan of Distilled,

“This tag is not a strict rule. The search engines do not have to take notice of it and can change how they treat it at any time they want.”

Although the search engines do seem to follow the tag now, there’s no guarantee that they’ll continue to do so in the future, making it a more precarious choice from an SEO standpoint.

Issue #3 – Javascript and Flash

Don’t get me wrong, Javascript and Flash can be used to do some pretty amazing things on your website. They can add tremendous user functionality and improve the user experience through good graphics and design. However, they have limitations when it comes to SEO, and it’s important to be sure your developer is aware of them.

As a general rule, important content from a search engine spider’s point of view should never be placed in either Javascript code or Flash animations. This could include the content of your navigation system (as mentioned earlier), the text located under a “More Information” tag (which is often served up through Javascript) or important title and headline tags (which may be encompassed by Flash headers and graphics).

When you store relevant information in these areas, the search engine spiders simply can’t read it. Although they’re getting better at processing these types of content, the technology simply isn’t there – which means that you could be missing out on important SEO benefits if your developer uses either of these tools.

As an alternative, consider the use of the Jquery language, which provides the visual benefits of Javascript, but in a more SEO-friendly way. In terms of imagery, limit the use of Flash animations to areas without information that’s critical for SEO or utilize additional scripts or plugins to replicate the information contained in these graphics in a way the search engines can understand.

Issue #4 – Source Code

Although your goals for your source code and your web developer’s objectives might be different, there are a few things you should both be able to agree on. First, the code should be cleanly written and free from errors, as this plays a role in both SEO and the development-oriented performance of your site. In addition, the code should accurately create the look and feel you’re aiming for – a goal that should be evaluated with the help of your creative team as well.

But beyond simply ensuring that the code is complete, there are a few things your developer can do within the code of your page to ensure optimal SEO results. For example, as Scott McClay describes on the SEOMoz blog, a “meta http-equiv” tag can be added to the head section of each page on your site that displays the date when the content was last updated:

“Another change that is important is the last modified header; I believe this should be entered on every page as it tells search bots if your content is fresh or not, something that we all know Google loves. Adding the last modified header to your pages is easy as most CMS systems record the last edited time of the content within the database so it’s just a case of calling the data with a few lines of code.”

Use these issues as a jumping off point to open the dialog with your web developer in order to create an environment where the success of the website is the top priority. Although it may not always seem like it, developers and SEO professionals really are on the same team, as everybody wins when a website is executed correctly and ranked high in the SERPs because of both party’s contributions.

Image: Rusfet

SEO Tips for Your Web Videos

Sujan Patel — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 13:00:59 +0000

Creating web videos for use on your site or for sharing on video services like Youtube or Vimeo remains a great way to drive additional traffic to your website and sneak into the search engines for highly competitive search phrases. As Benjamin Wayne, a guest author for the popular Tech Crunch blog, points out:

“Not only do Google’s search and indexing algorithms continue to evolve in complexity, but Google has given over more and more of its search results real estate to “blended” search results, displaying videos and images towards the top of the first page, and pushing down—and sometimes off the page—traditional web results that would have otherwise competed for top rankings.”

Of course, in order to maximize these benefits, it’s important to apply the correct search engine optimization principles to every web video you create. Since you’ll need to follow a different set of guidelines when optimizing the video on your site versus video hosted on major video sharing sites, we’ll look at each option in more depth in order to understand how to get the biggest possible benefit from your web videos.

Video SEO for Your Site

Attempting to get web video hosted on your sites to rank in the blended search results is a great idea – if a visitor encounters your video in these SERPs, they’ll be sent directly to your site where they’re able to interact with even more of your content (versus simply moving on to the next Youtube video). It’s also a good way to secure additional traffic, as a ReelSEO study found that, “videos in universal search results have a 41% higher click through rate than their plain text counterparts.”

However, the biggest challenge you’ll face here is that most video content is invisible to the search engine spiders. On Youtube and other video sharing sites, your videos are surrounded by title tags, your description and keyword phrases, which help the search engines determine what your video is about and how it should be ranked. But when the video is hosted on your site – especially if it’s launched on pages that are devoid of any other text – it’s up to you to provide this information.

The first thing you’ll want to do is to create a video sitemap. According to Google’s Webmaster Support page:

“Video content includes web pages which embed video, URLs to players for video, or the URLs of raw video content hosted on your site. If Google cannot discover video content at the URLs you provide, those records will be ignored by Googlebot.”

By creating and submitting a video sitemap, you’ll be able to define the title, keywords and description that should be associated with your video in the Google index. For more instructions on how to do this – as well as for instructions on how to ensure that your site’s robots.txt file isn’t preventing the Googlebot from indexing your video sitemap – check out the video support page at the link above.

In addition to creating your video sitemap, Wayne recommends the following on-page video tweaks to help get your video page ranked in the natural SERPs:

Use consistent page and video titles. For example, if your video is titled “How to Change a Tire”, the page the video is hosted on should have the same text in its title tag.
Target long-tail keywords. As with any other type of page, you’re far more likely to see your videos ranked for long-tail keywords than you are when your video is on a more general subject. As you might expect, you’re much more likely to get ranked with a video titled, “2011 Chevy Trailblazer Review” than you will be with a video labeled, “Car Reviews.”

It’s also important to keep in mind that the size and age of your site don’t matter when it comes to getting your videos ranked in the SERPs. Because the search engine spiders are limited in terms of the types of information they can access related to the video files on your site, they’re just as likely to rank videos from newer sites as they are to reward dynamic content from older authority sites.

What this means – especially when you consider that the introduction of blended search gives you an even greater chance of competing with “old guard” sites in the first place – is that the creation of web video is a promotional technique that’s open to anyone. You don’t need to be a well-established power player in order to benefit from web video – you simply need to put out good content that’s correctly optimized in order to succeed with this method.

Video Optimization Off Your Site

But while it’s nice to try to rank content that’s hosted within your site for the branding benefit you’ll receive, submitting your videos to video sharing services has some advantages as well. If you submit your video to Youtube, for example, you’ll know for certain that your video will be indexed by Google and you’ll also receive the benefit of a high-quality Google backlink back to your site.

Of course, there’s plenty of competition here from related videos, so if you decide to host your content on these sites, there are a few things you’ll want to do in order to make your video as attractive as possible to the search engines. First, you’ll want to include your target keyword phrase(s) in as many places as possible. At a minimum, be sure it can be found in the following locations:

In the file name of your video
In the title of your video
In the description you upload for your video
In the list of keywords and keyword phrases you submit

Optimizing these elements will help ensure your video content receives consideration for inclusion in the blended search results on both Google and Bing, but don’t stop there. In addition to positioning your video to receive extra search traffic, it’s also a good idea to optimize your content to receive additional traffic from within the video sharing sites.

In order to capitalize on the millions of users who frequent sites like Youtube and Vimeo each day, study the titles and keywords that popular videos on these services are targeting. By publishing related content, you increase your chances of being promoted as a “Related Video” whenever these top videos are played. You can also increase your chances of getting noticed from within Youtube by creating video content as “responses” to popular videos.

With the number of free screen capture and video editing programs on the market today, there’s never been a better time to market your website using the power of video marketing. Whether you decide to host your video on your own site or take advantage of powerful video sharing sites, creating video content and optimizing it using the techniques described above can be a great way to build traffic to your site and expand the reach of your brand online.

Image: fallingpixel

How the Search Engines Could Quantify Quality

Sujan Patel — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 13:00:57 +0000

The Google Panda update – as well as the hundreds of other algorithm tweaks Google has been making lately – was ostensibly done in the name of improving the “quality” of their search results. But although Google has given us plenty of clues as to what constitutes a quality site (see Amit Singhal’s now iconic list of 23 quality-based questions for more details), the question remains whether or not Google’s engineers will ever be able to effectively codify the concept of site quality into measurable metrics.

Think about this challenge for a second… Imagine a high quality website in your mind. What makes the site high quality? Is it the number of words on the page? Maybe, but if this metric was the only one implemented into Google’s algorithm as the basis for a quality analysis, spammers and black hat site owners would have a field day launching pages full of jibberish.

Instead, you might use terms like “relevant”, “applicable”, “interesting” or “authoritative” to describe content that you define as good. But keep in mind that the search engine spiders don’t have a “gut feeling” and they don’t have the luxury of classifying sites based on these qualitative assessments. Instead, their decisions must be based on numbers or other filters that can be easily and arbitrarily applied.

This challenge is at the heart of search science, and the number of scraper sites that continue to dominate some search queries shows that while Google Panda may have made a few improvements to the quality of the SERPs, the overall problem hasn’t been resolved yet.

But in order to understand how Google is approaching this problem of codifying search quality, we first need to look at some of the processes the company uses when determining the order of the different results that appear in the SERPs. From that, we can extrapolate some variables that could eventually play a role in quantifying search quality. By attempting to understand what Google’s future moves will be, we can better prepare our sites to succeed in the search engines both in the present and in the future.

The key to understanding this process is to understand the role of machine learning in Google’s algorithm. According to Ninja Bonnie of the Internet Marketing Ninjas:

“Machine learning is using a computer to recognize patterns in data, to then make predictions about new data, based on the pattern recognized or learned from prior chosen training datasets.”

Essentially, machine learning involves training an algorithm based on defined datasets. In Google’s case, there are two types of information that can be used in this process – the vast history of usage and behavior data that Google has accumulated over the years, as well as new datasets created by the groups of test users and raters that Google uses to manually identify quality sites.

Interestingly enough, Google hasn’t always used the process of machine learning in its live search results. In a 2008 post on Datawocky, Anand Rajaraman describes a meeting he had with Google’s former Director of Search Quality, Peter Norvig, saying:

“The big surprise is that Google still uses the manually-crafted formula for its search results. They haven’t cut over to the machine learned model yet.”

In the article, Rajaraman posits that the reason machine learning hadn’t yet gone live was that testing had revealed weaknesses in the model, resulting in “catastrophic errors” when it was used to predict results for phenomena that fall outside of the standard bell curve model. Basically, because the algorithm could only be trained on a small set of potential and past searches, Google’s engineers weren’t confident the model would hold up under real-world circumstances.

Obviously, things have changed, as the launch of the Panda algorithm represents the biggest shift thus far in Google’s integration of machine learning models into its search results. According to Rand Fishkin, speaking in a video on the SEOMoz blog, much of this change can be attributed to Google engineer Navneet Panda who helped to make the machine learning model more scalable and applicable to a wider range of potential search queries.

“Basically before Panda, machine learning scalability at Google was at level X, and after it was at the much higher level Y.“

So what we know about Google’s machine learning integration is this: Google has begun to use machine learning models to generate live search results and it is basing these models, in part, off of data generated by user groups assigned to assess the quality of a site based off of Singhal’s 23 questions (although there are undoubtedly other factors at play as well).

But, because Singhal’s questions revolve around qualitative assessments (for example, “Would you trust the information presented in this article?” or “Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?”), it’s safe to assume that the machine learning models are translating the different elements found on the “good” pages versus the bad into numeric signals that can be applied across large volumes of search queries.

Of course, Google won’t release these exact signals, but we can make some extrapolations based off of the sites that suffered most in the past six months of Panda rollouts. Keep in mind, these are only assumptions and that what works on one site may not work on another. When making changes to your site, always test and track your results to ensure that these suppositions hold true for your site.

Spectrum of Topics on Your Site

The Google Panda update is supposed to be all about “authority” – that is, rewarding pages built by legitimate authorities in their industries. Since it’s nearly impossible to be an authority in every single industry, sites that focus on one narrow topic could be ranked above those addressing a wide spectrum of issues. This could be one of the reasons for the major hit to content aggregators like Hubpages, EzineArticles and Demand Media.

User Experience

The natural result of applying Singhal’s 23 questions to a set of websites will be that those sites that focus on providing a good experience for their visitors will be ranked highest. And according to most SEO experts this comes down to three things: site design, site navigation and site speed (all of which could be easily quantified by the search engine algorithms).

Put simply, if your site hasn’t been touched in the 10 years since you put it up, chances are you aren’t catering to your users’ experience as much as Google would like you to. And if your site is difficult to navigate and slow to load, you can bet that you won’t fare well when machine learning algorithms trained off of user-generated quality datasets decide where you should rank.

Social, Social, Social!

We’ve beaten it into death here, but there’s no doubt that social signals play a role in both the current post-Panda SERPs and in Google’s machine learning models. Imagine that you were one of Google’s website testers. Wouldn’t you be more likely to rate a site higher on the “authority” scale if the webmaster had an active social networking presence, than if he or she had no presence on these sites?

Social signals can be quantified in terms of the number of inbound links pointing to your site from social media sites, the number of fans or followers you have on a given network, or even how frequently you post to these sites. And again, although this is all speculation as to what factors Google could be quantifying in order to shape its new post-Panda algorithm, it’s worth testing changes to these elements in order to bring your site into better alignment with Google’s long term goals.

Image: wiki.com

Can Bing’s Tiger Make it Competitive with Google?

Sujan Patel — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 13:00:23 +0000

Although the search engine news world has largely revolved around Google and its most recent algorithm changes for the last few months, the world’s fourth largest search engine – Bing – has been making some changes behind the scenes designed to improve its efficiency and relevancy. Could these changes make it more competitive with Google? Let’s take a look…

First of all, it’s important to understand the extent to which Google is dominating the search marketplace. According to Netmarketshare, web searchers used Google for over 80% of their search queries in the past year, with Yahoo, Baidu (China’s national search engine) and Bing coming in a very distant second, third and fourth place.

So when we ask, “Can Bing’s latest achievements make it competitive with Google?” this isn’t a small consideration. The changes implemented by Bing would need to be truly impressive in order to break even a chunk of users away from the stranglehold that Google currently has on the search landscape.

Does Bing’s Tiger update have a chance at bringing about this kind of upheaval? Let’s first look at what Tiger is, how it could affect Bing’s search results and whether or not these factors might enable Bing to gain traction against Google.

According to Microsoft, Bing’s Tiger isn’t an algorithm update in the same vein as Google’s Panda, although its launch does have the potential to reorganize Bing’s search results in a similar way. Basically, the company describes Tiger as an update to their back-end search indexing platform, making it more similar to the past Google Caffeine update, which aimed to improve search speed by as much as 50%.

The result of this update will be twofold, according to Microsoft – increased efficiency (resulting in reduced operating costs for the financially-beleaguered search engine) and better relevancy in the Bing SERPs. Summarizing the dual goals of this update, Yongdong Wang, general manager of Microsoft’s Search Technology Center in Asia stated:

“In Tiger, we not only look at improved efficiency but also look at new ways of processing queries. These new ways will enable scenarios where we can significantly improve the relevance of the results seen by users.”

Bing is achieving the increased efficiency side of things by shifting its data management to Solid State Disk (SSD) technology, which will allow it to check search queries against its existing index much more quickly. The added capacity of this shift also means that Bing can implement new indexing algorithms designed to make its results more accurate – an area where the search engine is seen as lagging behind Google.

According to Mary-Jo Foley, writing about the Tiger rollout for tech blog ZDNet:

“The evolving Bing crawling/indexing system (where Tiger fits in) is part of Bing’s “new system for web search backend that will be orders of magnitude larger and faster than anything that currently exists.””

No guesses needed there about who Bing is targeting with this latest update!

With the move to SSD technology, it’s pretty easy to see how Bing plans to compete in terms of search efficiency. Better servers equals faster processing times, which enables the engine to both index new and existing pages faster, as well as compare them and serve up results more quickly when search queries are carried out.

What isn’t quite as clear is how exactly Tiger will improve the relevancy of Bing’s search results, which will likely be the key to mounting any significant challenge to Google search in the future. It’s not that Google’s search results are that much better than Bing’s (although that embarrassing little snafu about copied results might have something to do with upstart Bing’s results coming in at a similar quality level as old-guard Google’s…). In fact, some studies suggest that Bing’s results may already be better than Google’s.

Consider the (admittedly small and limited in scope) study that Conrad Saam conducted over on Search Engine Land in order to compare the quality of Google’s and Bing’s SERPs. Saam created a list of search long tail search queries that were both highly specific in their desired result and potentially confusing to the engines, split evenly between transactional and informational queries. He then searched each term in both Google and Bing and assigned points based on the quality and ranking of each result on the corresponding SERPs.

Here’s what he found:

As you can see, in this particular instance, Bing comes out on top. And while this singular study can in no way, shape or form be considered conclusive evidence that Bing’s SERPs are of a higher quality than Google’s, Saam isn’t the only one coming to this conclusion. Analyses by PC World and Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan show weaknesses in Google’s SERPs quality as well.

Of course, as of now, it doesn’t really matter which search engine has the best quality results – you can argue until you’re blue in the face that Bing’s search results are best, but that’s not going to do much to change Google’s dominant position in the search marketplace.

It’s up to Bing to convince users to make the switch to its service, but is the Tiger update strong enough make a difference? That’s hard to say, as so little information has been released about the specific ways in which Bing might try to improve the accuracy and relevancy of their SERPs. The key might lie in Microsoft’s parallel development of Cosmos and SCOPE, described in a Microsoft job post as follows:

“We support the Online Services Division analyzing petabytes of data every day, operating at high scale and with high availability for data mining and business intelligence applications. As part of Cosmos, we build a highly parallel querying capability (called SCOPE) that allows front-end customers to focus on solving problems as if they are using a single machine.”

Certainly, more speculation will occur in the future as SEOs try to puzzle out how these new releases might play a role in reorganizing the Bing SERPs (along with assessments about whether or not they’ve been successful). However, it’s worth noting that the rollout of these services has been occurring since August, and that a month or two into the process, there’s been nary a peep about any dramatic improvements to the quality of Bing’s results.

At therein lays the problem. Realistically, if Bing wants to take on the King of the Search Engines, it’s got to do something big and bold that provides enough incentive for users to abandon Google. As we’ve seen, even though Google’s results aren’t significantly better than Bing’s or Yahoo’s, they’ve still captured the majority of the market – which, as most commenters in the Search Engine Land article referenced above agree, is likely due to the fact that there’s been no compelling reason to change.

Even if it doesn’t pass muster in SEOs’ surveys and studies, the public perception of the major search engines is still that Google provides the best results. And until Bing can assert itself by providing a significant value advantage in a way that resonates with web searchers, this prevailing opinion is likely to remain.

Image: michperu