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.

Keeping Google Interested In Your Content

An important question was posed to Matt Cutts at Google Webmaster Help today…

“Say your index page has been cached by Google and you then you change the meta description. How long does it take for a Google bot to recrawl that page? Or must your request it via Webmaster Tools?”

So this is addressing caching of pages by Google, which is a very important determinant of how authoritative Google views your domain or specific pages. A higher frequency of caching means that your site is important enough for Google come back and crawl it more often than not. If it takes six weeks between cache dates on a page then you can safely say that Google finds the page stale and possibly not relevant anymore (time/freshness factor) or that the page is not as valuable to visitors. Eventually cache dates will get further and further apart, and then the page will fall into a supplemental index which is like being a second class citizen in Google’s world.

How does one avoid falling into supplemental oblivion? Well, let’s first examine Mr. Cutts response…

“There are a few cases where if we haven’t seen the content change the last eighteen times that we visited then maybe the nineteenth time we’ll wait even longer (between caches/indexing). But in general when there’s regular content, and in our opinion that’s important content…”

Now what constitutes “important” content in the eyes of Google?

“…we’ll generally try to revisit that page often to see whether it’s changed or whether there is any new information on it.”

A good blog post with a high level of engagement (comments) is a great example of new information being added to a page. This should attract Google to cache the post more often. This is why getting your constituents to engage with your content is critical in establishing authority within Google.

“But if the page hasn’t changed in a while (no fresh content/ discussions), or the page doesn’t have a high Page Rank, then it can take longer to cache.”

And there it is, Page Rank! Page Rank is not the end all be all measure of authority by any means (at least not the Page Rank we see). This is proven in many instances where a page with a lower Page Rank will rank above a page with a higher Page Rank. A truer metric of rankings is Google’s internal, secret Page Rank that no one can or ever will see. Google uses it to calculate authority of a given page, and this calculation is almost entirely based on linking, or the various sites that are linking to YOUR page(s).

SUMMARRY

There are two things that can increase the caching/indexing of your pages; fresh content and links.

Now when Google says fresh content this doesn’t necessarily mean that the content has to update every day or even every week. But if Google crawls a page a bunch of times, over a few months probably, and sees no changes to content, it will stop crawling the page as often to focus on other relevant pages with newer content. So adding new content or tweaking the existing content on your pages every so often is a good idea, especially to keep the content updated with the times. Google is placing a great deal of emphasis on time and dates of pages lately too. There is just no need to obsess over it on a weekly basis. I suggest refreshing your most important pages every few months to keep them current. Ultimately this should please your visitors and the search engines. And after all, that is what search engine optimization is all about!

The other thing that can keep your pages popular with Google are links, the equity of Page Rank and ultimately rankings. Links, like fresh content, send a signal to Google that other people find your page(s) useful, fresh, and relevant. Google figures that if other pages are still linking to your content then it must be of some use or importance. A steady growth of new links to your most important pages will help ensure that they stay at the forefront. It does not have to a large amount of links, and it can even come in the form of blog comments from relevant sites or social media sites.

THE FUTURE

A few things have not been specifically addressed here. Is social media a factor? So for instance if a page is referenced in Twitter, will that increase Google perception of authority, relevance, and freshness?

And are engagement stats like CTR (click-thru rate), time on site, and/or bounce rate being factored into Google’s perceived authority of a page?

I would love to hear everyone chime in with comments on these two things and let me know what you think of social media and engagements stats and their role in page authority, if any, at the moment!