Advanced SEO at Interactive Marketing Day SD

Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz bestowed upon us some advanced SEO strategies. He’s already talking about statistics, but promises not to get too statistical. The presentation covers four areas where one could improve.

He notes that paid search gets about 14% of SERP clicks while organic areas get 86%, per Avinash Kausnik. He notes the tremendous imbalance in industry wide paid search spends and SEO spends considering these stats.

Four methods accelerate SEO:

• Increase rankings in individual results.
• Getting rankings in universal search (video, news, GPS)
• Improve long tail traffic
• Better convert existing search traffic

Think about search volume, the value of a visitor, and the competition when doing keyword research. This can be done with tools or manually, depending on the scope. Analyzing the competition and their on-site strengths, as well as their linking. Look at domain diversity in backlink profiles, this is a sign of strength. You have to also be weary of altering anchor text. And of course links from authority sites is fantastic.

Now Rand goes into correlation data that he has gathered that points out the heavy influence that exact match keyword domains have in rankings. Links from exact match keyword rich domains as well as just owning them is a powerful strategy.

Badge strategies are a good link building technique. He uses Picnik as an example of offering badges, that have keyword rich alt tags, for fans to post on their sites.  They rank VERY well because of this.

Infographics are great for link building. Don’t just focus on people linking to your infographic. Offer your infographic in an embeddable format for people to use.

Content licensing is another great link building tactic. Allrecipes.com offers licensing of their recipes, images, and other content as long as you link back to them! this solution is highly scalable.

The Search Engine Ranking Factors at SEOmoz are discussed next. I am highly familiar with this and feel that it is spot on. It is reproduced every two years and put on to the same URL, with the old info moving to a different page. This allows that URL to gain strength over and over again with time. So if at first you don’t succeed in ranking, try try again!

Next he gives some resources on how to get visibility in Universal Search. Video results are a great place to get visibility. Video results get high CTR in the SERPs and not many people are optimizing for it. You can use many different platforms to host the video for you, making it very cost effective and scalable.

Local/maps results are another fairly easy way to get more visibility through Universal Search. If you do not optimize for local searches you need to submit to the Google Local Business center. Here is a great local optimization resource.

Image results can be another great place to get traffic and exposure. Believe it or not this drives significant traffic and are hyper effective for certain verticals like crafts, furniture, design. Some best practices for ranking well in image search are keyword rich alt image tags. The image file name is no long a high ranking factor but having the image posted on other sites seems to have an effect. Size matters in image search rankings. Check sizing of images ranking for what you want to rank for and mimic that.

News results require an RSS feed with title, date, author, etc. Google does look into your business to see if you provide enough good content when you submit for inclusion. Blogs will get accepted to Google News. If you do not submit, you’ll never get in so go for it.

Real time results depends on speed of publishing of course. Big media firms have staff ready 24/7 to post breaking stories. But anyone can break news with the advent of Twitter! This is bigger than ever with the recent Google Caffeine update rolled out completely just a few weeks ago. Google Caffeine allows for faster indexing and ranking of results and is based on predictive modeling and topics.

Blog results are similar to Google News. But all you really need is an RSS feed. Getting referenced (linked to) from other authority bloggers really helps you get into blog results faster.

Shopping results are based on product data feeds that you submit. Reviews are aggregated and posted within these results. High volumes of reviews seem to really help, not necessarily good ones just get volume.

25% of all queries are brand spanking new, the long tail is still very strong and I do not see that changing. Lot’s of unique content really helps here. It is really easy to rank for long tail search. Rand does not think that blogging is really a big long tail strategy, he feels that it is just too difficult to scale. UGC is the way to go for scaling content. Gawker Media pays his writers based on how much traffic their articles command. Finally, Twitter is a great way to build content.

Now he moves into conversion optimization as the final strategy. Look at the conversion funnel and isolate opportunities at each point in the funnel. Even the smallest incremental increase in conversion rate has such a huge impact. It is highly effective because of this! There is a ton of psychology is powerful in CRO. Making your higher price points or add on the default selection has a huge impact. Social proof, put a name and face to your offer! Scarcity is a huge factor as well, show that only a few products are left and people will be compelled to buy now, before it’s gone!

That wraps it up for now. Overall it was a good presentation and was a good fit for the crowd here. I feel like most of the audience found value. There were not many advanced SEOs in the room, at least that is the vibe that I got. But there were many people that employ SEOs in the room and they seemed to glean a ton of value. I will embed Rand’s presentation once I can get my hands on it.