Search Engine Marketing Blog | Tug » Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Link building in 2012: predictions and changes

Carlo Pandian — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 12:40:02 +0000

As Google gets new updates and the algorithm becomes smarter, the job of SEOs has to modify its practices in order to keep up. As my main activity is link building I am always testing new ways to deliver great results and to anticipate trends. I strongly believe that social mentions and back links have an equal weight for rankings, saying that, I have compiled these suggestions to get the most out of your link building campaigns:

When you are looking to publish a guest post for your clients or get a link, avoid evaluating your host with the old criteria: Page Rank, DA, MozRank. Nowadays it is more important if your contact has a good amount of followers and fans because you need to get tweets and likes out from your guest blogging activities.

Make a good use of Social Bookmarking tools and open themed accounts for every industry you are working for. After that remember to bookmark all your links and articles out there. If you want to be more efficient organise a community of people that bookmark your content, that will make your content attractive for the search engine and it will be indexed quickly with good social signals.

When you are doing guest blogging, maximise your effort. Tweet about a new post from the client social media account; ask the blogger to do the same and social bookmark everything.

Establish online relationships and start multiple collaborations. I have a great new idea, which is to get in touch students with businesses they are interested to work for. This way you can really set up new ways of producing great content for free.

As Google+ is definitely supporting the creation of personas (now you can connect articles to authors via G+) every business should choose a public speaker that can produce useful content for the web. It is something that was already in the sight as some companies started to use this strategy on Twitter for customer service.

If you want to talk about link building in 2012, drop me a tweet @tugagency

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Google launches Search plus Your World

Ben Romberg — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 13:42:56 +0000

The final piece in the social media puzzle for Google – integrating its social network Google+ into its search results – slotted into place yesterday in the form of “Search plus Your World“. Launched to a background of mixed reviews and a critical statement from Twitter, it seems that the decision has so far proved unpopular.

Starting today for people who enter an English search term into Google.com logged into their Google account, they will see results featuring posts and content from their wider Google+ network alongside worldwide search results. Below is an example of what happened when Neil searched for “Tug” while logged into his Google account.

You can see the top result indicates that there are 400 personal results in his Google+ network. Then the second and third results are personalised with a figurative logo in blue next them to indicate this is the case.

Image searches also fall under this category and the name of the friend who has posted this image appears in the thumbnail link, showing the name of the person who posted the picture to your network.

You can switch between your personal search results integrated with worldwide results and pure worldwide results using two new buttons that appear on the right hand side of the search bar.

This means you can filter out the social feed and opt to use natural Google search at the touch of a button.

Search plus Your World will impact the way Google users search for content online and highlights a sea-change in the importance of social media when considering your SEO strategy.

To talk to Tug about social media drop me a line at ben.romberg@tugsearch.co.uk

Or follow us on Twitter @tugagency

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Top 5 SEO tips for Mum Bloggers

Carlo Pandian — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 16:32:35 +0000

Thanks to Claire from BrightonMums, i am happy to share some SEO expertise with UK mum bloggers community. Feel free to connect with Tug, the marketing agency I am working for and learn more about how to promote your site.
Drop me a tweet @Tugagency if you have any questions!

Firstly, I would recommend you to use these suggestions carefully as you shouldn’t change your editorial style in order to be SEO friendly. Let’s get straight to the practice and see how a mom blog can meet Google standards:

1) Look at what people search with Google Keywords tool. In order to reach these users you should include some of these terms in the title tags, alt tag of images and/or in the first 100 characters of the post.

2) If you work with WordPress, our suggested platform, install any SEO pack in order to personalise meta descriptions and title tags with the keywords that people search for and that describe your article. Google XML sitemap is another great plug-in that creates a map of your site and send it to the search engine. If you don’t use WordPress, check online on how to optimize the title tag and the description of your posts and how to submit a sitemap to Google.

3) Create social media (Twitter, Facebook, Google+) and bookmarking (Reddit, Stumbleupon, Delicious and Digg) profiles for your blogs and share your content online. For Twitter remember to include related hash tags while for Facebook and G+ work include images. Sometimes ask to share your article if you feel that it can be of interest for the community. In 2012 social mentions are going to be an important ranking factor.

4) Add your blog to online free directories and write guest blogs with a link back to your one. The more links which are pointing back to you, the higher your ranking will be. Another good technique is to answer questions (Yahoo Answer and Quora) and comment other posts with useful information.

5) This is a great infograph on blog copywriting that explains how you can improve the readability of your text. I would add that you should link to other similar articles in your site if there are any.

Share this post to help build the great British mum blogger community!

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5 quick wins link building steps for your personal website

Carlo Pandian — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 15:55:31 +0000

With the introduction of social networks our identities are spread throughout the web, sometimes without our knowledge. You can enter most of your friend’s names into Google and be able to find some information about them, which they are completely oblivious to. However, it can be that this information is incorrect where it may be an old website subscription or homonyms.

These are 5 quick wins link building techniques to uplift your personal website that you want to show online.
First of all, decide which one you want to build links for (an example: about.me/johnmccain) and create these 5 accounts:

1) Twitter
you must include in the profiles settings a small description and your personal website url. Remember to tweet when you upload new information with a link to it. If you want to be shown near a particular term, for example your profession, include related hash tags and keywords.

2) LinkedIn
There’s a section in the profile where you are allowed to publish three sites. Select the option “Other”, write your full name as the anchor text pointing to your target.

3) Facebook
Select “edit my profile”, then “contact information”. There’s a section where you can insert your link.

4) WhoHub.com
It is a platform to release interviews about your interests or profession and allows you to add do-follow links (include just one). This is a great new resource because you can stuff a page with keywords that are connected to your profession.

5) Google+
In the section “other profiles” type your personal website first and then your other profiles below.

If you think you need more to reach a reasonable ranking, you can participate in bloggers’ conversations. In fact you can leave comments on posts using your full name as anchor text and your personal site. If you want to reach a better visibility you can write an article and sign them. You can find opportunities in your niche through looking at My Blog Guest forum.

These are all simple and easy techniques, however they can only get you so far, for example if you are called James Dean or Michael Smith, you will need to spend much more time and money to reach top positions.

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The Most Famous Algorithm: Google’s Updates Throughout Its History

Carlos Rabanillo — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 15:34:16 +0000

After the latest algorithm update was announced at the beginning of the month I decided do a recap of the most important search updates throughout Google’s history.

Few imagined when Google launched its search engine back in 2000 that was it was going to be such a massive success! Eleven years later, the whole SEO world trembles every time they announce another change to its algorithm.

Google changes its algorithm very frequently (more than once a day, according to statistics), but usually these are small changes and minor improvements that hardly affect the results. The ones that really matter are the changes that come with a “name”.

The first major change to its algorithm in September 2002 didn’t achieve the results they expected. It is no very clear what Google was trying to do, but for a couple weeks Google’s search results were full of errors and many users were being served 404 error pages results for very competitive keywords. Since then, all changes have been towards real improvement.

One of the key updates to its algorithm was called “Cassandra” back in 2003, which was the one what brought the golden rules of ranking in Google: the importance of linking to other pages and other pages linking to yours, META information and the importance of the navigation structure. Later that same year “Florida” became the first blow for blackhat SEOs, punishing all the blackhat techniques that were used back then to achieve top results (saturation of meta tags, invisible text, etc).

The next big algorithm change was in 2005 (Jagger), in order to penalize poor quality links. From then to 2010 Google have introduced more updates that have changed the search results page completely: the introduction and integration of pictures, videos and news to its results, Caffeine to give you the “fresher” content and real-time search.

Nevertheless, although these changes also affected SEO techniques, which needed to be updated, the last big change did not arrive until early 2011 with Panda: a change that affects 12% of the results and penalises poor quality content, dropping sites with lots of publicity and rewarding news sites and social networks. It received many critics because in some cases it ranked content aggregators over the pages with original content.

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Some tactics to build links in ac.uk websites

Carlo Pandian — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 09:39:08 +0000

When planning your off-page strategy you must consider building different types of links in terms of URLs, root domains, page ranks and social signals in order to show Google how popular your website is. The most valuable ones are placed in university and government sites and, in fact, they require a large amount of time

These are some tactics to get your links featured on university websites:

1) Collaborate with the career department

This department manages a career advice section in the university website and a list of job ads. In order to penetrate here, you can advertise a vacancy or write an article about skills development, suggestions for job seekers or opinions on the labour market.

2) Write a guest posts for an university blog

Some courses set up blogs where students write articles and are often interested in collaboration with businesses. You can approach them and ask to write a guest post, or offer your expertise to produce an interview or review of your products and services. For example, if you are a bank you could guest post on student finance blogs .

3) Participate in lectures and special conferences

These are usually entered in the news section with a description of the speakers with links to their personal page or company

4) Start a graduate scheme in your company
Make sure you showcase your program in the career department sections. Remember to ask to link to your website as you want people to decide when a good time is to start their career with you. This way your SEO will really benefit.

Have you ever built great links on government or school blogs? Leave your comment and improve this list.

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The Variation of Google Encrypted (not provided) Keywords Between Industries

Neil — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 16:04:02 +0000

As of the start of November Google is now encrypting its user search data for searchers that are logged into a Google account and as a result they have stopped sharing keyword data for any organic search terms from users searching while logged in, currently this is only active from google.com but is expected to be rolled out to other locations. If you look in your Google analytics account you are going to see the keyword (not provided) sending traffic that meets this criteria.

So far industry figures and Google engineers have suggested that the percentage of traffic affected could be anywhere between 5-30%, with Google’s Matt Cutts suggesting that the figure would sit well below 10% while some websites have reported figures closer to 33%.

I believe this is going to vary massively per industry, dependent on the user base, for example if the audience are more tech savvy they might be more likely to have Google+ accounts from which they are likely to be logged in more often than not. I would expect (not provided) keyword coverage to be alot higher for readers of tech blogs than perhaps food blogs.

I have analysed Google analytics keyword data across 5 different verticals that I have access to, looking at traffic just from the US to see how this is varying after just two weeks and as expected this differs hugely from site to site and industry to industry.

The following shows the percentage of US organic search traffic coming from (not provided) keywords, in 5 different industries

From my knowledge of the websites used for the 5 industries above the two industries with the largest number of visitors coming by way of (not provided) keywords have the youngest target audience, which again suggests that websites that attract younger more tech-savvy visitors are likely to get less keyword data, than say finance which out of the industries analysed presents the lowest number of searches from users that were logged into google.com.

I will be expanding this analysis across different industries to see how it further varies and I definitely need to look into more websites within the 5 industries above to see if this pattern continues. What is certain is that the initial predictions of (not provided) keyword data being in just single digit figures is already majorly incorrect for a number of websites/ industries and depending on the uptake of Google+ this could increase at a rapid rate very quickly.

Any questions give me a tweet at @neil_seo

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How to use Twitter search and Followerwonk to reach bloggers?

Carlo Pandian — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 17:23:07 +0000

Many link builders struggle to find contacts and establish long term relationships with bloggers. In fact when you are doing the blogger outreach it is important to contact the right audience to build links in coherent content websites. If Google (you may have used the search operator to investigate your community) has been your main tool to find contacts, the introduction of Followerwonk will far expand your list of bloggers and this will result in getting more leads.

These are some suggestions you may want to use when you are planning a guest blog, organizing a competition or developing social content for you clients:

1) Identify your audience

That’s the first step and it will provide you with the characteristics of your stakeholders for example mums, sport lovers, food bloggers, geeks or more particular niches like hyper local news sites, events directories etc.. Every group has specific interests and requests so you would be better to tailor your email to their needs.

2) Followerwonk search Bios section

This social media management tool is integrated with your Twitter account and lets you search through bios, analyze and track followers, and find influencers within a specific niche. With this i have been able to easily reach different audiences. Choose 1-2 keywords that represent your target that these may have included in their bios section. Choose a particular location if you are offering something related to a specific area (for example: a book about Scotland) or a certain amount of followers if you want to generate buzz through Twitter. In particular i have noticed that including the keywords “blogger” or “blog” in the description would provide you with a list of good ones usually managed by highly participative writers that contribute constantly and are usually prepared to collaborate with you.

3) Investigate hash tags that your audience use

Some bloggers participate in online debates including hash tags in their tweets. As online marketers use #seo to highlight related posts and comments, mum bloggers that have been to the #cybermummy conference have also exchanged opinions with their peers. If you can find out some hash tags connected to your niche, this will help you to contact Twitter users that can contribute at building links.

In conclusion, it is arguable that having a look at the buzz on certain topics in Twitter and in social media is a good move to compile your link building outreach gaining precious and useful contacts. It is now up to you to find a good and creative strategy to get links from them.

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How a company blog can improve the SEO of your main website

Carlo Pandian — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 11:00:08 +0000

Internet marketers have proven that a company blog is a great tactic to establish a relationship with customers outside the typical point of sales, namely product and service pages, and the shopping cart.So why are you employing the effort of curating and writing this content for your blog when it could be a good asset for the SEO of your most important pages, the ones that convert visitors into customers!

These are 4 suggestions why it would be good to use this content in your corporate blog to boost your rankings:

1) Keywords
As you have already done the keyword research for your website, this is useful for the blog copywriting as well. You should target a specific keyword for every blog post, this means you must include this in the title and in the body (repeated 3-4 times) of the article.

2) Links
Inside the blog post you should deep link in your website with a keyword rich anchor text. An example would make this step clearer: you sell sweets online and you have just written an entry about the biggest pistachio chocolate ever made. In this case you should link to the page that shows fancy flavour bites on sales or the biggest bar you offer.

3) Social media
As soon you have produced and uploaded a great piece of content, you need readers and you want them to share the article. Use your company Twitter and Facebook profile to syndicate the content.
For the first account, you may be better crafting an appealing tweet with a shorten link to your blog post and preferably a related hash tag. For Facebook, use your fan page and invite your customers to participate into a conversation, for example ask what is the sweetest thing they have ever done.

4) Social Bookmarking
The social bookmarking services store website address and can be considered as article directories. They have the power to bring tons of visitors to your blog and consequently send positive social signals to Google. When you post is live you should bookmark it in Reddit, Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon. You may need to say to your colleges/friends to do that as well!

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SearchLove London SEO Conference

Carlos Rabanillo — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 09:48:42 +0000

The first day we saw Rand Fishkin, who focused his speech on the natural creation of links and its best friend: a community of users sharing their opinions and associating with your brand. He spoke of the keys to building a great community by given them great content, and they in return will get you links to increase the popularity of our website or brand.

Stephen Pavlovich of Conversion Factory, said that conversion is only possible with a combination of marketing, design and psychology. Having identified the problem – why visitors leave your site? You should not skimp on A/B tests, observe and compare yourself with the competition and always have a good copy to give your site a personal and unique touch. Pavlovich is a regular user of Evernote, which he uses to collect those little moments of inspiration and ideas that we have throughout the day.

Patric Altoft from Branded3, gave us the methodology that everyone was waiting for, starting his speech with quick and specific recommendations for link building. Vary the anchor text making use of tools like Google Suggest to find variations of your keywords. When doing link building for a new website always start by creating links to URLs with content, such as blog entries, and only when Google has given your site some authority and trust, start linking to your product/sales pages. Altoft bets on twitter as a great way to gain natural links and diversify your link profile.

Also discussed topics such as the recent (and ongoing) Google changes affecting positions and Analytics metrics, trying to discern what’s going to happen with Analytics and what is Google going to do about it.

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