Search London – The Value of SEO and Social

Searchmetrics will be sponsoring our last Search London event for 2011 which will take place on Wednesday, December 7th.

The meetup “The Value of SEO and Social” will have two speakers:

Steve Overton from Searchmetrics and Richard Kirk from Performics. I am sure some of your clients may be asking what the return on investment is from seo and social and sometimes it is a bit hard to quantify. Steve will be talking about the value of SEO and Richard will be speaking about the value of social, he has recently been studying the impactof social inputs on organic search.

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Searchmetrics is the global expert in search analytics software, empowering marketers to increase visibility and market share on the world’s leading search engines.

I would like to thank everyone who has come to Search London during the year. We have had 7 meetups and the group has gone from 200 members to over 460. Please RSVP to the last Search London of 2011

Search London – Search In House or Agency

Thank you all for coming to the last meetup “Search London – SEO & PPC In House or Agency” that took place on Wednesday, October 26th.

Thanks to IG Index who sponsored the event, giving us a few drinks at the bar. Martin MacDonlad’s presentation of search agency side has been uploaded to slideshare.

http://www.slideshare.net/seojoblogs/search-london-seo-ppc-in-house

Check out the photos from the latest event.

http://www.meetup.com/search-london/photos/4208332/

I have also uploaded them to this site.

Search London – SEO & PPC In House Or Agency

Search London – SEO & PPC In House Or Agency – Sharon Harris

Sharon Harris, Head of Search at IG Group will be discussing the benefits of taking SEO & PPC In House. IG Group is a FTSE 250 leader servicing over 130,000 clients across 130 countries. The sheer size and scale of IG Group proved a challenging yet rewarding online platform for search integration.

IG Group encompasses IG Markets, IG Index and Nadex. IG Markets CFDs offer traders the ability to take a directional position on market movement. IG Index acts as a gateway into spread betting across a range of markets including the fast paced world of forex spreads. Nadex is a fully regulated US Exchange.

These markets offer complex derivative products yet understanding remains at the heart of IG Group. Integrating search enabled IG Group to tap into the users desire to learn at the point of inception, targeting both the newbie and professional trader. Increased online exposure across multiple keywords significantly enhanced visibility and conversion rates on a global scale.

Financial markets are fast and dynamic – Sharon Harris has fine tuned global SEO & PPC to react accordingly.

The event “SEO & PPC In House Or Agency” will take place:

When: Wednesday, October 26th, 7:00pm

Where: Theodore Bullfrog, 26 John Adam Street, London WC2N 6HL

RSVP to Search London to guarantee your place

Integration is Key – SEO, PPC and Social

I held a meetup last Thursday on the HMS President. We had two speakers:

Martin McDonald from seoforums.org
Matt Owen from Econsultancy

Martin McDonald kicked off the event with:

A brief history of search
Larry Page and Sergey Brin set up Backrub.com – yes that was the name before they changed it to Google. They were both students at Stanford University at the time. There were two search boxes. There was the option users to search Stanford University and also the web. In order to be seen within the search engine, you had to have keywords in the code of your site telling the engine what your site was about. This is now referred to as “Keyword Stuffing” and it did help many sites rank for 7 or 8 years.

What is PageRank?
PageRank is what Google uses to determine the importance of a web page. It’s one of many factors used to determine which pages appear in search results. It was designed by Page and Sergey. The more links a site had to it, the higher the PageRank it could achieve. Therefore people started buying and selling links, trying to boost their own PageRank. This is not what Google intended and this is where social signals comes in.
Read more »

SEO Predictions 2011

What does 2011 bring for search?

1) Integration between ppc, seo and social media
This has been discussed last year but 2011 is the year where people are going to sit up and take note of the positive effects you can get from combining all three as a digital strategy. Once a client has tracking on their website, it is possible to see the visits from paid and natural and social sites. Cost savings can be made on paid search if the site is ranking well for some of those key terms. Regarding social media, blogger outreach content can be optimised by the seo team, if the blogger is going to write about a particular product, they might as well include a couple of links back to that site

SEO predictions for 2011

2) Local search
With the introduction of Google Places in September 2009 and then the merger of the local business centre in April last year, local search is going to play an even more important role in 2011. If you do not already use places for your business, then you should start now.

3) Mobile
People have been jumping on the mobile apps and mobile site bandwagon. Mobile will be increasingly important in 2011. However, webmasters and marketeers will have a better understanding of a mobile app vs a mobile site and how to make these “seo” friendly. To me, it is making your site readable on a mobile device and when someone is looking for your store, they should find it on their handset, which ties back into the second point above, local search

Here are a few seo predictions from the industry experts like Rand Fishkin

#1: Someone Proves (or a Search Engine Confirms) that Clicks/Visits Influence Rankings

I’m taking a chance on this one, but I’ve been hearing from more and more SEOs that there’s some correlation between earning clicks and moving up in the rankings. In 2011, we’ll get confirmation, either through testing or an admission from an engine that click-through-rate from the SERPs, visit count outside of search (or diversity of sources), or other usage-based data is in the ranking algorithm (or a method they use to help ID spam).

#2: Google Local/Maps Adds Filters and Sorting

The big reason Yelp is so much better than Google Maps/Local for finding a good local “place” isn’t just the reviews (which Google aggregates from Yelp anyway). It’s the filters that let me sort by features/pricing/proximity/open status/etc. Google’s been playing the silly game of forcing users to choose search queries to enable rough, imperfect filtering, but 2011 is going to see the search engine shift to a model that allows at least some important filters/feature-selection.

#3: Social Search Will Rise

There’s power in social media search, and Google/Bing’s efforts to date have been lackluster at best. I suspect in 2011, we’ll see the nascent beginning of search that leverages Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn connections to find results from your friends. It’s possible this will start niche-based only (search articles your friends have shared, ala Trunk.ly), but it could also be broader – possibly something from Facebook or Twitter themselves.

I am looking forward to SES London next month, when some of these predictions will be reinforced by other key speakers and industry experts. No one knows for sure what will happen in 2011, but based on the results from last year, we know there will be more developments in search and the fight between Google and Bing will continue.

Twitter & Facebook impact on SEO

Clients have often asked if the number of twitter followers you have and facebook fans affects rankings and it does. As seo professionals, we always knew it was important but there was never any confirmation from the search engines till this week.

On December 1st, Danny Sullivan, from search engine land published an interview he took with Bing and Google which confirmed that links shared through Twitter and Facebook have a direct impact on rankings. You can find out more here:

http://searchengineland.com/what-social-signals-do-google-bing-really-count-55389

Below is the interview by Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan: If an article is retweeted or referenced much in Twitter, do you count that as a signal outside of finding any non-nofollowed links that may naturally result from it?

Bing:

We do look at the social authority of a user. We look at how many people you follow, how many follow you, and this can add a little weight to a listing in regular search results. It carries much more weight in Bing Social Search, where tweets from more authoritative people will flow to the top when best match relevancy is used.

Google:

Yes, we do use it as a signal. It is used as a signal in our organic and news rankings. We also use it to enhance our news universal by marking how many people shared an article [NOTE: see the end of this article for more about that].

Danny Sullivan: Do you try to calculate the authority of someone who tweets that might be assigned to their Twitter page. Do you try to “know,” if you will, who they are?

Bing:

Yes. We do calculate the authority of someone who tweets. For known public figures or publishers, we do associate them with who they are. (For example, query for Danny Sullivan)

Google:

Yes we do compute and use author quality. We don’t know who anyone is in real life

Danny Sullivan: Do you calculate whether a link should carry more weight depending on the person who tweets it?

Bing:

Yes.

Google:

Yes we do use this as a signal, especially in the “Top links” section [of Google Realtime Search]. Author authority is independent of PageRank, but it is currently only used in limited situations in ordinary web search.

Danny Sullivan: Do you track links shared within Facebook, either through personal walls or fan pages?

Bing:

Yes. We look at links shared that are marked as “Everyone,” and links shared from Facebook fan pages.

Google:

We treat links shared on Facebook fan pages the same as we treat tweeted links. We have no personal wall data from Facebook.

Danny Sullivan: Do you try to calculate the authority of someone on Facebook, either say via their personal wall or their fan page.

Bing:

We don’t do this on Facebook. On Facebook, we only get what’s public, only updates and things you’ve posted to everyone as viewable. We don’t get things only shared with friends, so we don’t know how authoritative you are on Facebook. There isn’t the whole convenient retweet mechanism we see on Twitter.

We do see valuable content shared by Facebook users, even though we only get what’s public. For example when Gary Coleman died we saw a video from Different Strokes, saying his favorite line “what ya talk’in ’bout Willis” gain popularity. It happened to be what a lot of people are sharing on the day he passed away.

Google:

Again, the treatment is the same as for Twitter. And we have no personal wall data from Facebook.

Danny Sullivan: Do you calculate whether a link should carry more weight depending on the person who shared it on Facebook?

Bing:

We can tell if something is of quality on Facebook by leveraging Twitter. If the same link is shared in both places, it’s more likely to be legitimate.

Google:

Same as question 5.

So what does this mean for seo? Well it confirms what we already knew and the same best practices of seo can be applied here.
Facebook and Twitter can be seen as an external link building channel. The more varied the links from the different Twitter and Facebook fans, the better. So you can’t go on retweeting a post x number of times from the same account, hoping to build more authoritative links, it just won’t work.

I am pleased Google and Bing confirmed the impact of social media on seo as it proves my point that integration is the key in this digital space.

New London Meetup – SEO, SMO and PPC

I have just taken over as organizer for SEO, SMO and PPC meetup and will look to organise an event in the New Year.

New organizer for the meetup

It is important to integrate, seo, social media and paid search and therefore I was pleased when the organizer position became available to demonstrate how these three areas can be integrated. I think it is hard to think of each separately in this digital age. There is so much cross over between the three.

Blogger outreach – social media seem to have taken control of this. However, when bloggers are contacted and write content about a product/service, the seo team should become involved. They should work with the social media team to put together optimised content the bloggers can post on their blog. Optimised content, simply means links on keywords back to the site that is building up rank and traffic.

Keywords – paid search data showing the impressions and number of clicks can feed into seo work. When a new page is built, the seo team carries out keyword research to see which words have the highest search volume. Google keyword is sometimes used to view the search volume for the terms but it is often inaccurate. This is when the paid search data can be used to see the words that have the highest click throughs. If paid search are using certain terms that are performing well, then these terms can also be used on the landing page for that campaign. This also helps to improve the quality score of the paid search advert.

Buzz - the social media team monitor the amount of buzz generated for a certain client. However, it is the seo team that monitors the traffic and sales to the site that this buzz has generated. The seo team also record the rankings for its key terms and should see rankings improve. It is important to be able to assign a ROI to the buzz, otherwise it is very easy to keep spending money on social media with out seeing a return on the investment.

Integration is not just a new word, it is here and now and going to stay. The more people pay attention to it instead of treating PPC, SMO and SEO separately, then the more we will be able to reap the awards.

Sign up to SEO, SMO and PPC meetup on meetup.com to network and meet like minded digital people.

Integrated search – a new buzz word

So you are looking for a new agency to help you with your digital strategy and all the people you have met are talking about delivering an “integrated search” strategy.

This is the new buzz word in search and it is here to stay. Affiliates, paid search, seo and social media working independently will not get you to the top of the search results. Paid search and seo go hand in hand. They are a match made in digital heaven and should not be treated as separately.

How do they compliment one another?
Studies have shown that if users see both a paid search ad and the natural search results, they will click on the natural search listings which is free. You are not paying for that click and if that therefore generates sales, you are lowering your cost per acquisition.

How can you integrate the two?
Communication is the key. Have regular meetings with the paid and natural search team. In this way both teams are aware of the campaigns and seo work on optimising the key landing pages the site wants to rank for making it appear higher in the search results.

Report back as one
When you are analysing the results, make sure you record how seo and ppc have complimented one another on a campaign by campaign level and then how this has led to a decrease in paid search costs overall. This way you can show to senior management and those in control of the purse strings the positive effect of integration while drilling down to the detail of the campaigns and can tweak these even further for next time.

Do you have any case studies where you have delivered an integrated search strategy that has worked well? Or perhaps you are still in the middle of working on it. Let me know, all comments welcome.

Photo is from Flickr

Don’t optimise your website

if you want minimal traffic to your site.

But what would be the point in that? If you have a site, of course you want traffic. Surprisingly there are some clients that do not even think about seo. I am always battling to encourage those important stakeholders in a web project to use implement seo before the site has been built, ever before the wireframes are signed off.

Here are a few tips to help those fighting for seo overcome the hurdles:

1. Keyword research
You need to have evidence to back up why you want to use certain keywords for the website. If it is a new product launch and there is no search volume, use Google Insights to show how popular the term is.

2. Google Caffeine
What I like about this is that so many non seo people picked up on caffeine and the fact they thought it would affect their site dramtically. Little did they know that caffeine was working in the background and it was the press release by Google in June that announced they were happy with caffeine. In companies I have worked in, people are more responsive to seo when there are press releases from Google about algorithmns and updates.

3. Title and meta description
If there is not much you can do on the page as that would spoil the “design”, then at least optimise the page title and meta description. The page title is one of the most important elements of seo, you must make sure the keywords you want the page to rank for are the first terms in the title tag. Despite what the brand team may want, I would put the brand name at the end of the title tag.

4. Optimise their press release
If the company has press releases that they regularly post on their website, but has very little optimised copy, make sure you insert links in the body copy. Choose a couple of keyterms where you want to link from on the press release and link internally to that desired page.

5. Monitor all results
Make sure you report back on the results that you see in regards to the changes made. This will then give you more evidence to push forward for more seo changes. Once the client is amazed by the little work done so far and the amazing results, then you can suggest implementing seo as BAU on any new webproject.

Once clients have seen results, they can then begin to understand how important seo is for their website. Don’t give up if they are proving difficult and are reluctant to spend a lot of money on seo.

Include seo and social media as part of your search strategy

It is important to have an integrated search strategy to deliver to your clients. There is so much overlap between paid search, seo and social media, that implementing one without the other means that you are failing to capture all potential traffic to your website.

I work closely with social media who produce monitor the amount of online mentions or “buzz” for a particular brand. The seo guys use these buzz reports to see which bloggers and twitters are talking about the brands. The social media team contacts the bloggers but the seo team people give them the optimised content. This means that when the bloggers write about a particular product we have asked them to review they are linking back to our destinated web page on our key terms.

Facebook ties in with social media, but it also has an impact on seo. If your client wants to have a facebook page then they need to make sure it is optimised for seo. They must make sure that their key terms and links are on the facebook page and that they have an optimised URL.

Paid search and seo go hand in hand. By monitoring paid search adverts, we can see the number of impressions and click throughs for certain campaigns. If there is a high number of clicks on key terms and then we see through tracking that there is a high bounce rate, it may be that the landing page does not have enough content or that people cannot find what they are looking for. A new landing page will need to be created and the keywords that generated the highest CTR will be used in the page title, meta description and on page copy.

Another example of working together is when there is a brief for a new landing page to be built. Paid search will carry out keyword research to check the volumes around particular terms. This research can also feed into the seo recommendations.

The next time a client asks you just to do their paid search for them, look at their site and see if they have optimised it for seo. If they have not, show them the great opportunities there are with the integrated search strategy.

Integration is the key to unlocking traffic and high rankings.