Wondering how the rampant innovations in search and social media are impacting SEO best practices?

HubSpot recently got input from Aaron Khalow of Online Marketing Summit on the evolution of SEO and what it means for SMBs.  To continue the conversation, we asked two more internet marketing luminaries to weigh in on the topic.

Sage Lewis of SageRock, a digital marketing agency, and Nathan Thompson of Marketing Experiments both agreed that as search gets more relevant through social media and real time results, and Page Rank is declining in importance as the metric of note.

Sage used multi-media to his advantage and answered our questions on the evolution of SEO via video.   Ultimately, he says that “If you optimize for the visitor, your site will naturally be optimized for search engines,” emphasizing that a modern, ethical approach to content creation and optimization is key and is driving legitimacy in SEO.

Though Sage’s agency perspective is similar, the Marketing Experiments approach is a little different.  In fact, Nathan is a marketer after my own heart and ties his responses back to ROI.

How have you seen SEO as a practice change over the last few years?

For better or worse, SEO efforts are becoming more sophisticated over time. Most SEO “best practices” have been so widely circulated that just having keywords in your copy and title tags isn’t going to put you at the top of Google. At the same time, there is still a lot of bad information floating around, so getting the basics right is necessary just to play the game.

As more people have started to see the value of SEO, and invest more time and money into SEO, it has become increasingly important to take a testing approach to your SEO efforts. Understanding how, why and when your efforts affect your rankings is just as important as your rank itself. Some of this comes from research, but even more of it comes from watching those who rank above you and from your own experimentation.

Is search engine rank (page rank) important?  Why or Why not?

It’s a question of ROI.

If you’re happy with your current level of traffic, leads, traffic quality, etc. then rank probably doesn’t matter much to you, unless it changes. If all of your high-converting traffic comes from affiliates or PPC advertising, then rank probably doesn’t mean much to you. But if improving your rank is going to provide you an ROI based on increased leads, more qualified traffic, etc. then rank probably matters to you a lot. Saying you don’t want to rank at the top spot for one of your primary keywords is like saying you don’t care if you win the lottery. While you’re probably ok without it, you’d probably be really ok with it, too.  The bigger question is, “when is it feasible, considering your time and resources, to focus on achieving one more spot, versus focusing on your optimization efforts to increase sales with the traffic you already have?” Like any other business decision, it comes down to priorities and ROI.

How do you think localization and personalization have changed the relevance of search ranks?

As someone using search engines to find information, localization and personalization provides me with results that are more relevant to me, making me a more motivated, more qualified lead when I click on results and arrive at a site. As a site owner this makes the traffic arriving from these results even more valuable to me. I think this has increased the relevance of search ranks and places even more importance on SEO efforts.

What will be the impact of social media inclusion in search?

Read article…

Optimize your site’s search engine ranking with video
By Mikal Belicove   |   Entrepreneur Magazine - February 2010

Because video has become the new darling of search engines, many startups are rushing to create and post video on their websites. Just run a Google or Bing search on any topic, and links to video clips pop up right on page one. The reason for this is that search engines are tripping over themselves to provide blended search results­–links to news, blog posts, photos, video and other specialized content all mixed together. To ensure video is included in the results, search engines give them preferential treatment.

This trend presents startups that are able to produce quality video content with tremendous search engine optimization (SEO) opportunities. In fact, Forrester Research reports that compared with standard SEO techniques, a properly submitted video is 50 times more likely to achieve a first-page Google ranking. And because video is in such short supply, relative to other web-based content, the competition for search engine attention is less fierce.

Many startups and entrepreneurs are not yet taking full advantage of this opportunity. They are not using web-based video, are disregarding video SEO, or are trying but doing it all wrong.

Read article…

It’s essential to understand SEO before you spend thousands hiring consultants you may not even need.
By Erin Weinger   |   Entrepreneur Magazine - February 2010

Search engine optimization–the canny use of keywords and other techniques designed to shoot a website to the top of a search–is the make-or-break factor for many new businesses.

It is also the web’s unfolding, and unregulated, frontier. There are countless SEO strategists, consultants and self-professed experts who will claim they can beam your site up into Google’s top 10 search results–for a price, of course. Consultants commonly charge upward of $200 an hour, and most will pressure you to sign a contract that keeps them on retainer for months–at prices as steep as $12,000 a month. Unscrupulous SEO firms not only make promises they can’t keep, the worst of them also use shady practices that might produce no traffic, deliver the wrong traffic or even get you banned from planet Google.

“The SEO business is 80 percent scam,” says Peter Kent, an internet marketing strategist and author of earch Engine Optimization for Dummies. “It’s very, very difficult to find a good firm.”

Read article…

“What are the first steps to optimizing my blog for searches?” - question submitted by @monedays using the #pbquestions hashtag on Twitter.

Much has been written on the topic of search engine optimization for bloggers - but let me give you a few basic first steps:

1. Content is King

The quality of the posts you write is the single most important factor when it comes to Search Optimization on a Blog. I suspect others will argue differently but as I look at my own blogs success in the search engines I’d say that this has been the number one factor.

Quality content that helps people will quite often draw a reader to want to share what they’ve written - of course they do this by passing on the link to your post and often they’ll do it in a way that helps your search rankings (on their own blog for example).

2. Anticipate What People Will be Searching For

Every time you write a post you should be automatically be considering what words people might be putting into search engines to find that type of information. Once you know what kinds of words they’re using you’re in a great position to position yourself for that search.

3. Titles Titles Titles

There are a number of things to keep in mind when it comes to titles. Google pays particular attention to titles - so make sure you get them right:

• first make sure that the way you set your blog up puts the title of your post in the ‘title tags’ on the back end of your blog. This is really important.
• if you’re just looking from an SEO perspective don’t include your blog name in the title tags of single posts. This dilutes your keywords. Of course if you’re looking more at branding including your blog’s name in the title tags might be worth doing.
• next - include the keywords that you identified in point #2 in your post title
• also, keep in mind that the words you use at the start of a title tend to carry more weight than words you use later in your title

4. Keywords in other parts of your post

Use the keywords you identified in point #2 within your post also. If you want Google to rank you for a term or phrase you need to use that term or phrase. Use it in sub headings in your post (use h tags where you can), use it in the content itself, use the words in the alt tags of images etc. Don’t go over the topic but do use the words where you can naturally in the post.

5. Link to Your Own Posts

Don’t over do this one but while links from other sites are a great way to increase your blog’s rankings so are links from your blog. Interlink your posts to share where readers can find more information on your topic (where relevant) but also consider linking to key posts on your blog from other places on the blog (sidebar, front page etc).

6. Links from Outside Your Blog

Links from other sites to yours are key in SEO but they can be hard to get. Start to linking to your blog from other sites that you have or are active on. Some (like on Twitter) won’t count for anything much as they have no-follow tags but they are all potential ways for people to access your site and some will help with SEO.

Don’t become obsessed with getting links - rather become obsessed about writing great content and the links will generally come in time. However if you’ve written a great post that you think will be relevant to another blog don’t be afraid to let that blogger or website owner know about it - they could just link up.

Also - take note of the type of posts that you write that do well at getting other sites to link to you. You can learn a lot about generating linkable content by doing so and might just develop a technique that will work again and again.

7. Plugins

I don’t tend to do much to the back end of my blog to alter things like meta tags - but there are some good plugins around if you’re using WordPress that can help with some of this and that may give you a small edge. Check out 9 SEO plugins that every WordPress Blog Should have for some suggestions on this.

8. Readers Begat Readers

This isn’t an SEO technique as such but it plays a part. The more readers you have the more likely your blog is to be found by other readers. There’s a certain ’snowballing’ thing that happens on a site over time - as you get readers quite often momentum grows as those readers pass on your site to others in their network. They link to you, they bookmark you, they tweet about you, they email friends about you, they blog about you, they suggest your site in recommendation engines….

Not all of this counts with SEO but some does and the accumulation of it over time all certainly helps to grow both organic and search traffic. I guess what I’m saying is to get readers any way you can - don’t just focus upon ‘SEO’ as such. It all counts.

My Hunch with SEO

Before I share my hunch…. let me say that I’m not an SEO and this could be completely wrong…. but it’s a hunch that I’ve had for a while now.

I’ve been doing this blogging thing for almost 7 years now and from what I can see the tweaks that many bloggers do on their blogs to optimize it seem to be having less and less impact on the rankings of blogs. Don’t get me wrong - I stand by the above tips completely and would do them as a common sense bare minimum - but from where I sit Google seem to be in the business of finding the best information that they can for their users. They don’t always get it right but I think they do a pretty good job.

As a blogger your job should be to provide the best information that you can.

It strikes me that Google have an ever increasing way of working out if your information is good. It’s not just about what keywords you have or how many links that you get - but these days they own Feedburner (know how many people subscribe to your blog and what links people are clicking on), they own Google Reader (again giving them all kinds of great data), they own Gmail, Google Analytics, YouTube etc…..

Now they may or may not use all the data in their ranking of sites but they certainly could know a lot about your blog and the posts you write. There’s also been increasing talk over the last 6 months or so about how easy it’d be for search engines to start generating data on what content is being shared in social networks and bookmarking sites.

My hunch is that many traditional SEO methods are less important (NOT irrelevant though) and that other factors are increasingly going to come into play. I’m sure that some will work out ways to manipulate this (SEO 2.0?) but increasingly the way to get ranked high in Google will be that you just need to keep producing great content and making sure that it’s sneezed out to your network.

Help this process along by giving your readers way to share your content (and seed it to social networks) as well as to become subscribers.

Mike Dobbs is the group director of SEO at 360i, a digital marketing agency that drives results for premier brands. The agency recently released the Social Marketing Playbook, a guide for brands. You can follow 360i on Twitter.

With all the rumors suggesting that Google will soon offer real-time search capabilities, indexing Tweets and other real-time web data, now is a good time to take a closer look at your Twitter presence. Even now, what you tweet can be held against you on the engines, although it can also work to your advantage.

As an example, Google is already indexing tweets (albeit not in real-time) so Twitter pages and even individual tweets have already started appearing within Google search results.

[Mashable’s Twitter page appears in a search query on Google.]

[Tweets are even appearing on the first page of Google for non-brand searches, like in this example for the query “pac man tweet.”]

But, never fear, you still have time to start optimizing your Twitter presence before your random tweets about what you ate for lunch start appearing in searches for your name. By following these ten Twitter tips, you, your company or your brand can build up more prominent links in high places on the engines.

---

1. Choose a good handle

---

Be sure to pick an optimal handle that’s relevant to your brand or campaign and easy to remember. Your handle (also known as your Username) then becomes part of your customized Twitter URL such as twitter.com/yoursite or twitter.com/yourtopic. Doing this creates a static address for future search indexing, which also helps usability for other cross-channel promotions. So choose wisely! The fun challenge: doing all this while keeping your name short and succinct so it’s easily tweetable.

---

2. Select an account name wisely

---

Optimize the Twitter account name to best reflect your brand. Your name is what appears next to your profile, which can be different than your handle/URL. You obviously want an account name that promotes yourself, your company or your brand. You should also consider which variation of you brand name has the most search frequency every month.

---

3. Make your bio count

---

Optimize your Twitter page’s “Bio” line so it includes the most important, mission-critical phrases for your brand. Take advantage of all 160 characters! (Yep, that’s right: They give you 20 more characters than a normal tweet.) Your bio is consistently indexed so its contents are what provide your Twitter page with its core relevance.

---

4. Spread the word

---

Now think about ways to build the link reputation of this newfound social web address. For example, you can integrate your Twitter URL into your website by placing a call to action on the site for your customers to follow you on Twitter. You could also integrate your Twitter URL within your site’s Global Footer, which appears at the bottom of every page of your site. Both of these options offer usability to your site visitors and help drive your Twitter URL up in the search engines.

---

5. Remember your URL

---

In the account settings, be sure to add your website’s URL or perhaps use it to promote your presence on another social platform, for example, yoursite.com. This is a great way to drive traffic back to your destination of choice; although, truth be told, the link does not provide any offsite reputation – a.k.a. SEO link juice – due to a “Nofollow” attribute that Twitter has in place. (Sorry Twitter spammers!)

---

6. Select the initial characters of each tweet carefully

---

The “lead-in” of each tweet appears to be important for SEO as it will determine what appears in the tweet’s title tag when it shows up as a search result on Google. Approximately 42 characters are factored into each tweet’s title tag, including the account name, as well as the initial characters of each tweet. Keep in mind that your full tweet and all its characters are still being indexed by major engines, though.

[The first characters of your tweet may have the most impact on its future SEO value.]

---

7. Write keyword-rich tweets if possible

---

Wherever possible, start your tweet with a primary keyword phrase to theme each message. Take advantage of any “active lingo” or buzz words as this will enable you to capitalize on timely searches on those terms. Of course, this doesn’t mean you should fill your tweets with buzz words at the expense of providing value to your followers! Rather, think carefully about which word choices will best convey your message and also allow you to leverage the real-time and long-term index relevance across the engines that continuously spider and index tweets.

---

8. Mind your retweetability

---

Make sure your tweet’s character limits allow for optimal “retweetability.” If you want a message to proliferate on Twitter, it’s ideal to keep it under 120 characters so your followers can easily add RT @YourHandle in front of the tweet. However, the exact number is different from everyone as it depends on the number of characters needed for someone to include the phrase “RT @yourname” in their re-tweet.

---

9. Provide some link love

---

Insert back links to redirect users back to your content. Twitter has proven to be a significant traffic driver for bloggers and others using the space to share links. If you do share links, use one of the many URL shorteners available (TinyURL and Bit.ly are two common shorteners). We recommend using the URL shortener Bit.ly, as it tracks click-throughs for the specific links you share on the platform. Bit.ly even has the power to track links in aggregate. For example, if multiple Bit.ly URLs were created and shared by separate users, all leading back to the same URL, the service can track and report click-throughs for all of them in aggregate. Bit.ly also tracks clicks over time, so you can see when people are clicking your links most.

---

10. As always, give ‘em what they want

---

When providing Bit.ly links or any other URLs, make sure the redirection leads to pages which provide a richer content experience. Twitter users are hungry for information and accustomed to getting it “right now.” Send users directly to the details instead of having them fish around for it.

Mike Dobbs is the group director of SEO at 360i, a digital marketing agency that drives results for premier brands through insights, ideas, and technologies. The agency recently released the Social Marketing Playbook, a guide for brands utilizing social media to connect with their customers. You can follow 360i on Twitter.

You spend a little money and buy some drugs, and they make you feel good.  Then the effect wears off.  You spend more money for more drugs, and feel good again.  Then the effect wears off again.  You find more money and buy yet more drugs.  Pretty soon, you are out of money, and feel horrible, and have no drugs to make you feel better.  Big problem.

The same thing can happen to even the best marketers.  You start buying some Google AdWords PPC.  It generates some leads.  Then the sales team uses up all the leads.  Then you buy some more.  Then sales asks for more leads again.  So, you ask your boss for more budget.  You buy more leads.  Sales uses all the leads and wants more…  What’s wrong with this picture?

The problem with this situation is that you are not building any sustainable marketing assets for your business.  All you are doing is buying leads from Google that go bad very quickly.  There is no leverage in your marketing model.  To double in size, you need to double your marketing spend (if not even more).  Nothing you are doing helps you generate more leads next month, or the month after, with less effort.  You will always be working just as hard and spending just as much money, just to stay afloat.

But, what about another strategy?  What about search engine optimization, blogging and social media? Well, if you spend time/money to publish a few blog articles, they will start to rank in organic (free!) search results in Google.  And you don’t need to pay for that.  So, next month you have the 10 articles you wrote last month, plus 10 more you will write this month.  The month after that you will have 20 articles from the prior two months, plus 10 more you write that month.  Get the picture?  Blogging and SEO are asset-centric marketing programs.  You are building an asset that has a payout each and every month over time.

Social media is an asset-centric marketing strategy as well.  As you build a following in Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, you build on top of what you have already done.  As you attract more friends and followers to you and your company, the size of the audience you can reach increases each month.  The benefit you get increases over time.

Certainly not all drugs are completely bad.  Caffeine.  Alcohol?  Prescription drugs?  When taken in moderation and managed properly, they can be part of your overall life.  But only when balanced with other things.  The same is true of Google AdWords PPC.  I’ve used them.  But I also leverage asset-centric marketing programs as much as possible.

Google’s creation of sites’ titles and descriptions (or “snippets”) is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page as well as references to it that appear on the web.

We use a number of different sources for this information, including descriptive information in the META tag for each page. Where this information isn’t available, we may use publicly available information from DMOZ. While accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won’t impact your ranking within search results. We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL’s content. This directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics.

While we’re unable to manually change titles or snippets for individual sites, we’re always working to make them as relevant as possible. You can help improve the quality of the snippets displayed for your pages by providing informative meta descriptions for each page.

Read more about changing your site’s title and description here.

Earlier this week a woman at an event I participated in asked a great question: How do you optimize your site for all the queries that are relevant to your business?

Typical search engine optimization focuses on high-traffic, high-relevance keywords. This is important, but as the woman’s question hints, it can’t be the only thing your business is focused on.

In addition to high-traffic, high-relevance keywords, most businesses have a long tail of relevant searches that get less traffic.

For example, if you’re a Boston-based web design agency, you might focus on a high-traffic keyword phrase like “Boston Web Design.” But there are hundreds of other lower-traffic queries that you also want to rank for: “Boston area web design”, “Boston area web site design”, “Massachusetts web site design” and on and on.

Few of a business’ hundreds of variant queries get much traffic on their own, yet in aggregate, they account for an enormous amount of potential search traffic.

How much? At HubSpot, over 95% of our search traffic in the last month came from keywords that are not one of our top-10 referring keywords. In other words, without the long-tail search results, we would be receiving a fraction of the search traffic we’re currently getting.

So, back to the woman’s question: How do you optimize for low-frequency queries? Even the smallest businesses have thousands of relevant low-traffic search queries, so how can you possibly optimize for them all?

The answer is simple: Create lots of keyword-rich content.

Why? Think of search as a lottery with lots of drawings. If you buy one ticket, you have one chance to win. If you buy lots of tickets, you have lots of chances to win.

In the SEO lottery, content is you ticket.

If you have a site with five pages and no blog, you have five chances to rank in search engines. If you have a site with 100 and pages and a blog with hundreds of posts, you have hundreds of chances to rank. Many of the keywords you’ll rank for will get you one or two visits a month, but in the aggregate — as we’ve seen at HubSpot — those long tail search querries will account for far more traffic than the high-traffic queries.

What do you think? How much of your search traffic comes from long-tail keywords? Could you increase this number with more content?

Kevin Gibbons is the Director of Search at SEOptimise, a UK search engine marketing agency. Follow him at @kevgibbo or visit the SEOptimise blog.

A popular topic at the moment is the increasing importance of Twitter as a marketing and traffic generation tool. In the UK Twitter has been growing rapidly during the last 12 months and many people are now realising that micro-blogging is quickly becoming a very useful social media marketing tactic.

The Power of a Retweet

The following diagram helps to show the potential increase in reach when a message is retweeted:

So when I post a tweet it’s sent out to my 722 followers, if this contains a link it may send a handful of clicks, but this really is just the start of promoting a message. The real value is in the power of a retweet, this can potentially reach a far wider audience if retweeted, then maybe retweeted again and hopefully again.

If a tweet was picked up and retweeted by @problogger, for example, this would reach out to an additional 43,000+ followers, many of which are likely to retweet this themselves and hopefully create a snowball effect of RT messages across Twitter. It may also reach additional highly-followed users, such as Stephen Fry (as shown in the image above), helping to spread your message further. There will almost certainly be an overlap in users receiving tweets/retweets, but this also increases the chances of these users seeing your message as it could have been easily missed first time around.

How to find retweeting followers?

So how do you find new followers to RT your tweet? Firstly you should be tweeting the type of messages which your followers will take notice of. But you can take action to seek out new followers who potentially can help to retweet your messages too.

Bio Search - Find users in your industry by performing a query on Twitter bios on website’s such as Twellow. Also make sure you complete your bio using industry specific keywords to help ensure you get found by people searching for similar users to follow. Plus if you are trying to promote your own content try using the bio search to find bloggers and journalists who may be interested in writing about your latest posts.

Find users who like to RT - For example, if you’re looking to find users who will retweet your messages about SEO why not try searching for “RT SEO”? This will instantly show you users who have recently retweeted messages related to the topics you like to tweet about. These users may become very valuable in order to help spread your tweets to a wider audience.

Location Search - Find local users via an advanced search to help build relationships with Twitter users within your region. Try using top locational ranking tools to find the most powerful users with a specific location.

Analyse your traffic stats - View the full referral URL’s for traffic from Twitter, this way you can find the traffic sent from a user profile page and find the users who send you the most traffic. Make sure you are following these users and interact with them frequently.

Don’t use all 140 characters - Keep your messages as concise as possible, leaving more room for reweets and multiple RT’s without forcing people to edit your original message.

Retweet for others - Once you’ve identified the top users you want to connect with; you need to give them a reason to follow and retweet you. Quality content is key, but it may not be enough to get you noticed in the first place. Make sure you communicate with your targeted users and start retweeting some of their interesting tweets, this will help to improve the chances of getting them to follow you back and start to take notice of your tweets.

So those are my tips, what ideas do you have for increasing the visibility of your Twitter account and tweets?

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

In this series we’re looking at 9 things that bloggers need to work on once their blog moves out of ‘launch phase’ and into maturity.

Today I want to focus upon the topic of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

While SEO is something that is well worth while focusing upon right from the start of your blog - I’ve found that it becomes particularly important once your blog is at least a few months old. In my experience it is not until a blog is 6 to 12 months old that it really begins to grow in its authority in Google.

I will not rehash everything I know about SEO here (I’ll link to some resources at the bottom of this post) but here are just two tasks that I think established bloggers will particularly want to focus upon (I’m assuming that you’ve got some of the basics like getting titles set up right):

1. Optimizing Successful Pages on Your Blog

I mentioned this earlier in this series of posts but one of the first things to do is to identify and analyze the pages that people are arriving to your blog on from Search Engines. If you’re like most blogs you’ll find that a handful of your old posts generate a significant percentage of your search engine traffic. Identify these pages and you can then go about increasing the ranking of those pages even further in Google by doing some of the following:

• increasing keyword density of these pages - don’t add the keywords that people are searching for too many more times, but it can help to add them 1-2 times more, bold the keywords, add them to heading tags, add them to image tags etc.
• increase the internal links to these pages - if you find a page that is getting a lot of search traffic, any extra links to the page that you can generate (from both within your blog and outside it) can help its authority. You might want to even highlight some of these pages in your sidebar or navigation - or to link to them within other posts on your blog on a similar topic.

2. Create More Content on Related Search Terms

Once you start getting a handle on what type of information that people are searching for you should begin to make a list of other related topics that you might want to write about. You can get ideas from this by looking at keywords that people use to arrive on your blog and thinking about synonyms for those words but also by looking at online services like Google Trends which maps what people are searching the web for.

Another good tool for analyzing search traffic and coming up with new topics to write about it 103bees which gives some metrics on the questions people are asking to find your blog. These questions are topics your readers are actually asking which shows you what they’re typing into Google. Another great tool to try is Lijit which is a search tool you can use on your blog (see it in my sidebar). This tracks what terms people are searching your blog for. The useful thing about it is that they also show you what terms people searched for that there was no search results on your blog for - very handy information.

There is A LOT more that you can do to increase the search engine authority of your blog. Part of it just comes down to writing great quality content over the long haul (which over time increases the number of doorways into your blog and grows the number of links from other sites to it) but below I’ve listed some other resources from both within ProBlogger and from SEO experts that will hopefully give you plenty of things to work on.

Further Reading:

• Search Engine Optimization for Blogs (SEO)
• SEO Book - one of the best resources to invest your time and money into in this area of SEO. I’ve learnt a lot from Aaron the author of this resource.
• 9 SEO Plugins Every WordPress Blog Should Have
• How to Get Search Engine Traffic to Your Blog

Also - here are three helpful videos (particularly for WordPress Users) with some great tips from Matt Cutts (Google Engineer), Joost de Valk and Stephan Spencer.

WordPress SEO & Optimisation Strategies a4uexpo London 2008 from existem on Vimeo.