Internet Marketing Revealed

The second day of SMX started with a panelist discussion on social shares, and top tips on how marketers are truly going to be influential.

Here are the top takeaways from the first morning session with more to follow later on today!

Social Shares | New Link Building from @LisaDMyers

• Rel=Author one of the key factors of Link signals in years to come, mixing in the need of SEO & Social Media
• If your not there already understand and begin to use Google +, as research has shown a direct correlation for companies having better SERPs because of using G+
• The end game has not changed in terms of link building, in essence creativity is essential to build great links
• Examples of short term Social SEO link building: post and publish blogs, articles, breaking news, infographics, competitions and interviews
• Example of long term Social SEO link building: create a social community, developing a blog, writing white papers and making yourself seem a social authority
• Understand your target market in making sure they will share your items, relevancy is key
• Makes the most of what is happening now in the market

Making Waves Not Ripples: Effective Syndicatoin to Drive Social Sharing from @mrjamescarson

 

• Social Shares are like links its good to have a mix not just G+, don’t just focus on what social media platform
• Understand where you should invest your time for social media, as for different industries work better  for example:
• Facebook better geared for big brands and the media
• Google + and Twitter better geared for Technology
• Reddit & Youtube caters for a wide market
• Tumblr better geared for fashion and music
• Pinterest better geared for gifts
• Focus on quality of your audience who will retweet you and like you in the long term rather than just vanity figures
• How to find your social media influencers: G+ Search, Follower Wonk & Klout
• Create a list in understanding and segmenting your list | Step by step
• Aiming for the big shot influencers may not be the best for you and aim for who they are influenced by!
• Celebrity endorsement probably the best way to get celebrities to retweet and social share your brand
• Good Tip | Within product pages create a competitions for long term social value
• Understanding different local trends for Twitter check out trendsmap.com
• Even though research has shown in general people are better receptive for different social media times – your actual target social market might be better receptive at night times rather than day times
• Ultimately game and engage with your customers for better results from your social media marketing campaign

Google+ify or die from @basvandenbeld

Discussing the similarities of key human interactions in real life social terms and how Google+ has taken this and developed the idea further:

• The question?  How can G+ translate what people do to our social network?
• Understand that there are essentially two uses of G+: For Users (Which Bas Discusses) & Businesses (Discussed by Kevin)
• Google + aims to offer people: Authority, Trust, Envy, Peer Pressure, People enjoy interacting with one another
• Authority – How Trust worthy is that person
• Trust – Word of Mouth Marketing is key
• Envy – People naturally are curious and are influenced by what others have and if they see it they will want it, even subliminally!
• Interact – We enjoy interaction and socialising with one another
• G+ is essentially growing to help better understand their users and can be seen as an “Identification Management Tool”
• Rather than seeing G+ as a competitor to Facebook, it is not!  G+ essentially maps out and shows where everyone is connected and then brings the data together
• Use G+ to get into the mindset of your target market and understand what they like to talk about and see who they perceive as influential

How much SEO juice do you get from Google + from @kevgibbo

Kevin Gibbons discusses the value of Google+ for businesses:

• Used two case studies of brands using G+ signals actually lowers CTR’s – which makes sense as +1 results are often less relevant than standard listings
• Using a Tool called Analytics Canvas found that brands with G+ brand page found a drop in 19.5% in organic traffic for those that did not use G+ & then 42.6% in organic traffic for clients who actively use Google+
• ASOS is leading the way in terms of utilising a G+ brand page – using stats from Search Metrics found a significant uplift attributed Year on Year from the implementation of G+
• Ultimately having a G+ page does this mean you will get better rankings and better search results? NO! G+ is just an attribution that can have an effect.
• Read the signs quote from Greg Boser “SEO is like being a weather man” – Understand where things are going at the moment and you will be market leading
• When opening up plus.google.com it seems that this is now crawlable and being indexed by Google!
• Google Panda has made link building harder, its more about long term results now
• 5  tips for G+ businesses – 1) Focus on great content and stop chasing the algorithm, 2) Build a great content team or you can outsource it using Pro Blogger Job Board  3) Use the Rel=Author Mark up Now! 4) Create a G+ brand page and link to your site for example Mashable 5) Share content daily, force yourself to do it!
• Tools to check out for G+ – View your social connections, find your influencers via findpeopleonplus, Google ripples in showing the outreach of key influencers and Google Analytics information
• Read the full slides below:

King Content versus Panda: How to Survive & Thrive with New Content Rules

 

Expanding on Panda and Penguin, rebounding and capitalizing on these algo changes. The speakers were:

Andy Atkins-Krueger is Group CEO at WebCertain Speakers (moderator)

Vince Blackham is director of social media at 97th floor

Stephen Croome is heads of seo delivery at seogadget

Ken Dobell is president of digital at DAC Group

Simon Penson is founder at Zazzle Media LTD

 

• Semantic search means its now about more than counting links, we need to fulfill deeper personal engagement
• Must get people to like you and not just notice you shouting in the SERPs
• Tool rec: PAGEtorrent
• The more specific queries are leading to higher conversions
• SEO is not an end within itself, we must push into content solutions
• Understanding site penalties is key, often times site owners are confused
• “Continuum of link understanding in a penguin context” – translation: link evaluation with penguin update
• The old evaluation of links includes count, anchor text, location of link on page, age of page, last time page was edited
• How to best understand your links?
• 1 -The relevance of content on page is now playing a much larger role in link evaluation
• 2 -Density of links and keywords on page
•  Then compare your links with competitors: where on the page are links placed?
• Lastly is knowledge, check out your back link acquisition graph.
• Use at least 20% branded links as minimum for
• How to perform panda recovery
• 1 implement a good monitoring system
• This may include awr, gwmt, twitter, email, analytics, search metrics, Somoza
• 2 use data to prove that shit content needs to be deleted or improved
• 3 cleaned up the sites index that had Los of ugly URLs
• Use no index follow and canonical
• 4 deleted or rehomed the orphaned pages
• 5 reorganized the navigation and internal linking
• 6 threw away product feed descriptions so affiliates don’t create duplicates. For a few money rich products the site content were rewritten
• 7 too many target niches, throw away. Like gifts for moms vs mums
• 8 adding UGC to product pages, like fb comments
• 9 use l
• What do you need to consider with your content: Diversity freshness quality and authority
• Content vs link buys – content is the long term win
• Infographics rock with embedded links
• Tool suggestion TINEYE

Comments

Links are a big part of the success of your Search Engine Optimization efforts and the overall traffic from organic search to your site. However, there are several issues related to links to your site, including anchor text that you need to pay attention to. One of them that you may not know about is the text that surrounds your links. This is just as important as your internal links with anchor text.

You may have a link in the footer or the sidebar of someone else’s web site. Yet you need to find out what the surrounding text is around those locations. You don’t want to appear to be nothing more than on a list of paid links located on another site. Instead, you want those links to be promoting you as a trustworthy site that has something of value to offer them. You want the links to your web site surrounded by text, as if the other site is “talking about” and thus pointing to your web site.

Let’s take a look at an example list of links:

- Search Engine Watch
- Search Engine Land
- Search Engine Roundtable

That above is a list of links. Although it is a list of some of my favorite search engine related web sites, those links are not really the “ideal” type of links. Sure, they all include keywords related to “search engines”. Let’s take a look at the next paragraph of text:

The search engine news web site that has been around the longest is Search Engine Watch. SEW was run by Danny Sullivan, who now operates Search Engine Land. Barry is in charge of Search Engine Roundtable, which updates their site several times each day–and tends to have information that you won’t find on those other search engine sites.

The text that is around the links in the paragraph above provide context and are relevant to the paragraph. So, the search engines (mainly Google) tend to “like” those links better than if the links might appear as a list (as shown above). While there are other factors involved, such as whether or not those links appear on a sidebar, in a footer, or somewhere lower on the site (perhaps you have to scroll down a bit to see them), it is always preferred to have your link surrounded by text.

If you already have links to your web site, or are analyzing your current links, you may want to see the the text that surrounds your links. If you aren’t happy with it, or if the text that surrounds your link is not on-topic, take the time to talk to the web site owner that’s linking to you–you may be able to get it changed.

Read more of my search engine optimization tips for more info about link building and overall SEO.

Comments

It’s clear that titles matter to search. You’re less likely to rank well in search engines for key phrases if those phrases are not in the title of your content. It’s also clear that search engines are putting a great deal of emphasis on social signals when ranking content. Interestingly enough, titles also have a direct impact on just how much your content will be shared socially.

Earlier this year, there was a story from Forbes, which got some attention in the press. It was covering something that was already covered by the New York Times, but the Forbes version with the more provocative title reportedly got shared a lot more, and as a result received a lot more traffic. Nick O’Neill wrote an interesting piece talking about this, which I followed up with my own take on the discussion.

The main point is that the title can make a world of difference. Having the right words in the title of an article can be the difference between 30 pageviews or 300 pageviews. It can be the difference between 1,000 pageviews or 50,000 pageviews.

It’s possible to get a lot of shares based on great content with a not-so-great title, but it’s a lot harder. I also believe a lot of people share content based on the title without even reading the article. Titles matter. A lot.

There’s something about this, however, that doesn’t quite sit entirely well, with regards to the increased emphasis search engines are placing on social signals for relevancy. Here, you’ll find Bing’s Duane Forrester talking up the importance of social. Google, as you may know, launched Search Plus Your World, the highly personalized (based on social signals) version of Google search that favors content you have a social connection to.

Google’s +1 system is all about a social connection to an article, to send Google a signal. If I +1 a piece of content and share it to Google+, I’m not only sharing it with my followers, I’m endorsing that piece of content as being something Google should be ranking well. The problem with that is that I may like that piece of content, and so may many others, but that does not necessarily make it better than some other great piece of content out there on the web that is similar, and just hasn’t found its way in front of my (and others’) eyeballs. Perhaps that other, better (more relevant to a potential search) piece of content just didn’t have as catchy a title, and didn’t inspire as much sharing because of it.

We don’t know how much weight Google gives to any singular signal (it has over 200). However, we can see various changes Google makes that do put social in the spotlight. The +1 button and Search Plus Your World are obviously two major components, but there are plenty of more subtle things. There were a few, for instance, in Google’s list of algorithm changes in March:

Better indexing of profile pages. [launch codename "Prof-2"] This change improves the comprehensiveness of public profile pages in our index from more than two-hundred social sites.

Updates to personalization signals. [project codename "PSearch"] This change updates signals used to personalize search results.

+1 button in search for more countries and domains. This month we’ve internationalized the +1 button on the search results page to additional languages and domains. The +1 button in search makes it easy to share recommendations with the world right from your search results. As we said in our initial blog post, the beauty of +1’s is their relevance—you get the right recommendations (because they come from people who matter to you), at the right time (when you are actually looking for information about that topic) and in the right format (your search results).

We discussed that first one in a separate article. It seems that Google+ profiles aren’t getting quite the special treatment that they were when SPYW first launched, but it clearly places great emphasis on social, with “improved comprehensiveness” related to 200 social sites.

The second one up there is very vague. Updates to signals used to personalize search results. I could be wrong, but something tells me the update wasn’t about making things less personalized (social, being a big factor in Google’s personalization).

Third, the expansion of the +1 is a no brainer. The title isn’t as likely to influence a +1 from the search result page, as a share on Google+ itself might be, for example, but it inspires more use of that social signal.

“The beauty of +1’s is their relevance,” Google says, but how many are driven because of a catchy title of an article the user didn’t even bother to read. Even if they did read it, who’s to say it wasn’t shared with them in the first place because it had a catchier title than some other publication that may have been competing for that user’s attention.

While it has the added value of sending a signal to Google search, we can probably agree that for all intents and purposes, the +1 button is Google’s (Google+’s) version of the Facebook like button. How many times have you “liked” a link shared on Facebook based on the title without reading the article? What if by simply doing that, you were getting that content (which may or may not have been a total piece of crap article) favored more in search engines just because of some title-based likes. What if that was ranking higher than a really thoughtful and original piece on the same topic, and was really much more suitable to searchers’ needs?

And that doesn’t even take into consideration the potential for real abuse. SEO strategist Trond Lyngbø wrote an interesting article talking about all of that. Most people blindly liking an article without reading it aren’t trying to promote a particular site or game search. But there are plenty who are.

For better or worse, it doesn’t look like social signals will play any less of a role in search engines for the foreseeable future. While titles should be relevant to the topic at hand (usually with relevant key words), you’d be wise not to undervalue the shareability of a headline.

As an added benefit, even if this doesn’t translate into the search visibility you’re hoping for, if it’s being shared a lot on various social networks, there’s a good chance you will hardly miss the search traffic anyway. It’s better to diversify your traffic sources anyway. You don’t want to be too dependent on Google or any other one source of traffic. Any Panda victim can tell you that. Good titles that inspire sharing can help a great deal in getting shared through multiple social channels.

Do you think search engines are putting too much emphasis on social signals?

Comments