Arrow Internet Marketing SEO Blog

This is an excerpt from a recent interview given by Matt Cutts, who is verily the ‘horse’. For those who don’t know, Matt is a veteran blogger on all issues pertaining to Google. He also heads the Google SPAM team.

Key findings from the interview :

Avoid backlink obsession : According to Matt, selected quality links from authority websites e.g, government, media, education etc are more credible than a large number of links from ‘any’ website

EXAMPLE :

“Why are my 297 links:

1 x PR7 + 25 x PR6 + 151 x (PR5 and PR4) + 120 x (PR3)

are nothing in Google’s eyes compared with my competitor’s site which only has got 59 links

(4 x PR6 + 38 x PR5 + 17 x PR4)

That site is the first for the normal KW query . How can it be true?”

Obviously, the latter has better quality links pointing to it.

My Comments :

There is one caveat here. Don’t buy high PR links to get around this challenge. Actually go about obtaining authority links by natuaral methods e.g providing useful content on your website, creating newsworthy stories which get picked up by journos, providing tools and calculators on your website which people link to automatically. Also there is nothing wrong with soliciting links from complementary businesses and strategic partners.

More from the horses mouth in my new post. Follow the horse and get rewarded for your SEO efforts.

We like to follow the google guidelines. There are two benefits :

* Our SEO Services are robust and once our clients get the coveted rank 1, they retain it
* Our SEO Services are SMARTER giving our clients quicker results

So your SEO company has done a fabulous job & you get found on rank 1 of Google for all keyphrases possible. You have the traffic flowing and enquiries are coming. Great! Is it time to celebrate? Yes, However…

When people conduct a search on your/your company name, what do they find? Do they find just your website and your linked in profile? Or do they find conversations on blogs and forums about you/your company. If yes, do you know what these conversations are about? Are they some of your delighted customers talking about how you helped them. Or is it an angry customer/ slanderer intent on tarnishing your reputation?

If there are conversations happening about you/your company, the good news is : ‘any conversation’ is better than ‘no conversation’
Even if someone is trying to tarnish your reputation by slandering about you online, it is an opportunity for you (and some of your brand advocates) to enter the conversation. This will highlight your positive side and get more attention to your website & company

If you want to build your reputation, follow these steps :

* Put up an online poll on your website to get customer opinion on different aspects of your service
* Publish useful information for your customers e.g, if you are in first home loans, latest information about government grants, property trends and forecasts, recent auctions etc. If your website is resource rich and provides the LATEST info, you get recognised as a GIVER and GIVERS GAIN
* Don’t be afraid to publish your opinion about what is happening. Opinion Leaders get more respect and following than fence sitters
* Get endorsements from customers and industry bodies and publish them prominently on your website
* If you make any claims, back them with evidence. The internet is a cesspool of information and any claims not backed by evidence will be looked at with skepticism
* Show the informal side of your company. Make a video of your employees in an informal setting outside your office.

Everyday prospects, customers and other stakeholders connect with your company on an emotional level.

So when SEO is on max, it’s time for some reputation building!

A search on Google trends reveals that Mildura, a small town is performing more searches for ‘SEO’ than Melbourne.

What I think is that businesses in Metropolitan cities are now already using SEO but businesses in smaller towns are now becoming more aware of it.

What do you think?

I am glad that Google is changing the rules for SEO. If we look at the 7 major changes Google has made recently, the lessons are obvious :

• Tap into the power of Google Universal. If your business is based locally, list it on Google Maps. If your industry has fast changing trends and insights, start a news section on your website. If you can create videos and upload them on your website, do so. This will turbocharge your SEO efforts.
• You need user generated content on your website. Start a Blog and even better launch a forum to make your website more interactive
• Put comprehensive content on your website.  Think about different information/tools etc your users may be interested in and provide it. This will help your website get more stickiness, reduce the bounce rate and improve it’s positioning as an authority site
• Attract Links to your website, don’t buy them or get low quality links from hundreds of link exchanges. To attract links to your website, use smart methods to engage the linkerati (webmasters, siteowners etc) who decide to link to your website.
• Write Articles or Colums in Newspapers/Magazines or Blogs. Blog owners need content as much as you need the visibility, so they will be glad if you can provide them with valuable content
• Get visible on social media. Facebook, Twitter etc are very useful if you participate in the conversation in an active way. The secret for getting the right following on twitter is to tweet about topics of interest to interested people
• Don’t be obsessed with rankings for a few keyphrases. Focus on quality traffic and conversions. Have a mania for metrics e.g, number of unique visitors, time on site, traffic sources, what parts of your site are getting clicked more frequently and what parts are getting ignored, which pages are converting better and use this data to make constant improvements.

Do all this and you can be sure that your SEO efforts will be rewarded well.

I am really excited about the launch of Bing! I think that it will bring a refreshing perspective to search. What Google has done with search options is exciting but what Bing has done is to create a whole new search engine around search options. For example, if you are searching for an italian restaurant in Sydney Harbour, Bing will enable you to first find the most relevant restaurant and then sort out the results by different criterion e.g price, parking, how sexy the waitresses are   (just kidding, although would love it if they could do that) and so on!

What are the implications for SEO. I foresee that for high search engine rankings on Google, Yahoo and Bing , comprehensive content will become key to web rankings and traffic. So if you are in the restaurant business, include as much information as you can about cuisine, menus, prices, parking, waitresses and so son. Think about your end users…what do they look for or care for when choosing your product or service and make sure it is all outlined clearly on your website.

Yesterday I was presenting at the Webforward conference in Sydney. During the Q&A session, one of the question that was posed was “What according to me are the most significant changes in Google from an SEO standpoint over the last one year.” I talked about Google Universal search and local business results. While we were at the conference the Google team was at their Searcheology event where they announced the release of Google Search Options. It is basically enabling the user to further refine their search by presenting them with options.

Here is an example, I did a search for Jet Boating and on the blue bar with number of results is a new feature called show options. If I click on that I can further refine the search results to show me videos, reviews etc , get results sorted by time, see related searches. In this case it was trying to refine the search according to location. If I am a searcher who just wants to know more about the sport, safety tips etc it did not present with those options. What it did do in the last column was present few other entertainment options like bridge climb, go karting which is kind of cool.

In my opinion, this is more for the advanced searcher. For common users we just like the simplicity of Google search results and don’t want it to get cluttered or complicated. Personally, I don’t see myself digging deeper into search options unless the search results don’t match my query.

From an SEO perspective, nothing much has changed except keeping your site updated has become even more important.

Share your thoughts on what you think of this Google update.

This is a part of a series I am launching on SEO-What’s Hot, What’s Not with a weekly update.

SEO is everchanging. Keeping abreast of the latest developments is vital for outperforming competition.  So come on friends, let’s sharpen our axe and get the cutting edge

What’s Hot :

The Long Tail

What’s Not :

Few Selected Keywords

The reason for this trend is that searching habits of users are becoming more mature as time passes by. If someone is looking for a ‘five star hotel in sydney harbour’, they will not type ‘hotels’ to look for it. Being on page 1 results for the word ‘hotels’  (and putting in massive efforts for mantaining the ranking) will still not get you the person who was looking for a five star hotel like yours on the sydney harbour. Besides, you can get that ranking with relatively lesser effort.

To find out more talk to an SEO Consultant today!

In a recent survey by SEMPO of more than 800 large companies, 90% of the respondents mentioned that they use this method for marketing. The widespread adoption of SEO among large  companies is a result of measurable ROI of SEO efforts as compared to Print, Newspapers, TV and Direct Mail. Infact, over the last one year 26% of the large companies shifted their adspends from print to SEO & SEM. 

This is related to the widespread adoption of the online medium by different types of target audiences.

In another survey held by Monash university, the average Australian spends more time online, than watching TV. For many australians, watching the news no longer has to be on TV. One can easily customise the google desktop to keep updating on latest news on a real time basis. Also, it is possible to specify what type of news we want to get.

For Australian Small Businesses, the message is clear : embrace internet is a key element of marketing strategy. Get expert SEO Advice from a reputed company.

Google has redefined SEO by rolling out it’s semantic search capability.

This technology will allow Google to find associations related to a query, improving the list of related search terms Google displays along with its results.

For example, Google’s search engine, upon encountering a query like “principles of physics,” now understands that “angular momentum,” “special relativity,” “big bang” and “quantum mechanics” are related terms.

What this means for SEO is that the focus will shift from ‘keywords’ to ‘concepts’ and sites with related concepts will be identified by Google has relevant to a theme.

The good news for the SEO community is that optimising a site for ‘ten’ phrases will bring it up on many more, (if the semantics & concept density) are handled appropriately.

You have been getting SEO done on your website for many months. Even then, competitors are taking the clicks away and your site is not on top of Google Results. If this sounds like you, then read on…..

1. How frequently does the content on your website change. If the content on your website has become stale, then your returning visitors will be low and site rankings will go down

2. Have you got any resources, tools etc on your website to engage your customers. Caution, if you are going to make tools, don’t use heavy flash content

3. How much is the loading time of your website? If it takes more than 25 seconds to load, you are not going to make it to page 1. Check the bandwidth of your server and make sure the pages are not too heavy

4. Check your internal links. Very often, opportunities for internal linking have not been expoited completely.
When creating internal links, make sure that they use proper ‘anchor text’. This will give immediate seo benefits

5. Use bold & strong fonts to highlight the keywords that you want to be ranked on. Caution : Don’t overdo this

6. Check the external or backlinks of your competitors. You will get some clever insights from them.

7. Look for Government bodies, educational institutions, councils and media sites from which you can get backlinks. A good way of doing this is to provide them with useful information or resources.

When the going gets tough, the tough get going. When I meet business owners who are trying to reduce costs in the new economy, I see their point of view immediately. But where should we reduce costs first : On areas where wastage is taking pace.
We cannot become more profitable by reducing our marketing budgets. We will become more profitable if we spend our marketing budgets judiciously. Internet Marketing, SEO, Google Adwords and E-Mail Marketing are methods which provide a measurable return on investment. With these methods, it is possible to calculate the cost/lead or cost/sale and plan our marketing budgets to meet our sales targets.

1. Competitor Analysis : Find out what your competitors are doing both onpage and with regard to links. You will find that they may be using dynamic content, providing resources, building quality links, using keyword rich URL’s etc. Find the gaps between your site and five major competitors.

2. Use RSS Feeds to syndicate content both to your site and from your site. This will provide food for the search engine spiders and also improve your incoming links.

3. Social Media Optimisation.  Make your site prominent on social media by participating in blogs, forums and online communities. Engage your target audience using the power of conversation marketing. More on this in the next post

In a recent survey of Australian business owners, these are the results. If your year is trucking along OK, that’s great! Otherwise, take a day off, replan and make a fresh strategy.
If you don’t have a website, get one. If you have a website, optimise it. Using low cost marketing methods which work will get your business out of the blues faster than ever

21.1% Going bonkers

35.5% Trucking along ok

26.3% A little bit scary

17.1% Freaking me out

• Keyword density will change to concept density :  Just inserting keywords will not work. Related keywords woven into meaningul concepts will do the magic.
• Link Buyers will get a kick on the butt (good, Google). Can be seen from penalties on Google Japan
• The social web will become important (blogs, forums, social media),  will become extremely important as Google will give more weight to endorsements than artificially created links
• Website usage data will become important. If your site is not fresh, engaging and useful for your visitors, forget about ranking on top
• Google will crack down heavily on duplicate content.
• Cheap SEO’s will become obsolete.
• Credible SEO Consultants will be worth their weight in Gold
• User generated content and interactivity will become popular. A survey by Nielsons Net Ratings reveals that online consumer recommendations are the second most trusted on media next only to word of mouth.

Ten years back, people thought of websites as brochureware.

Then, websites became powerful tools for winning new business by using clever SEO techniques.

Today, successful companies are leveraging their websites for customer engagement and loyalty.

This can be done very simply by :

• Personalising the website according to customer interests.
• Rewarding customers for loyalty. They can earn reward points everytime they buy
• Rewarding customers for referrals. Use a tell a friend or refer a friend widget for this
• Creating a forum for customers to make suggestions and incorporating those suggestions. It’s important to acknowledge the suggetions
• Putting an internal search on the website and analysing what your visitors look for within the site. Once you collect data, you can make the navigation easier or provide new resources to make the website more appealing to the visitors (many of whom may be your repeat customers)
• Having a Blog where the customers can share their ideas/experiences
• Creating an online community where customers or fans of your brand can interact. e.g, http://www.facebook.com/pages/Billabong/9234817714

Billabong has 193,115 fans on it’s facebook community site. This makes the brand stronger and increases customer loyalty. If you notice, the current profile talks about Billabong’s spring collection. They have a feed running to the facebook profile which updates new content. They also have user generated content like billabong videos.