Relevance reads the SEO MOZ blog so you don’t have to. This SEO blog summarises what has been going on in the SEO MOZ blog during late November and Early December 2012. Read our summary of the best blogs of the month and click on the title to view each blog in full.
SEO Moz Blog Summary – Learn about the Google Algorithm and lots more
In this blog Dr. Peter J. Meyers warns us of impending Google algorithm updates, and gives ideas on how to protect what we build up in terms of SEO during 2013.
Meyers stresses’ the importance of diversity in terms of SEO tactics commenting “Any single-tactic approach is short-term at best. Real companies, real link profiles, and real marketing are rich with variety.”
His 5 points of diversity are summarised below:
• 1A. Diversify Anchor Text
It is now more important than ever to alternate anchor text on your back-links so that search engine robots can see variety and identify that you are not spamming.
• 1B. Diversify Your Links
“Any link-building tactic can be low quality, if you abuse it.” Comments Dr. Pete, meaning that we need to diversify where our links are coming from and ensure we are always on the lookout for new, different link building tactics.
• 1C. Diversify Traffic Sources
Depending only on Google for website traffic could be dangerous. It is important to have your digital marketing eggs in many baskets, this way if there is a change to an algorithm which hits you hard in one area, you should have your back covered in other areas.
• 1D. Diversify Your Marketing
Build the brand, build a community and give value to your customers. “If you understand your value proposition, content and marketing naturally flow out of that.” Said Meyers.
• 1E. Diversify Your Point Of View
Passion for your own products and services is key to delivering the confidence and faith to your customers. If you believe, they will believe.
Technical Skills are Vital for Online Marketing
“Stated simply, a great technical marketer can devise, develop, launch, and analyze their marketing campaigns with little or no assistance.” States Jamie Steven who was originally a developer and now full time marketer. He believes it is vital to be technically minded in order to get the best out of your marketing campaigns.
Below is Jamie’s list of skills and experience needed from a technical marketer:
Discovering Local Citation Opportunities
In this video log Rand Fishkin explains the importance of listing your business details on various internet platforms – using structured and unstructured citation techniques in order to dominate local search queries.
Local citations can ensure that your products and services are more likely to be found by search engine users. This will also ensure that your website is visible using Google Maps. This is a technique which Relevance applies for all its clients’ websites.
Fishkin noted “Many queries that are done from the desktop now are assumed to have local intent, and certainly anytime you add a modifier – a city name, an address, a ZIP code, those kinds of things – Google is going to think local intent. This means those local results can dominate a lot of search queries, and a ton of searches today are already resulting in a lot of these local types of listings.”
7 Key Ways to Optimise Facebook Fan Page
Here Nathan Latka goes into detail about how we can ensure our company Facebook pages are well optimised and are visible to search engine users.
• Choose the best name for your Facebook fan page
It is important to choose a title which is not to spammy but also not too generic, get the balance right and the reward will be good. Quick Tip: The first word in your fan page title is given the most weight (importance) by Google.
• Create a custom fan page vanity URL
Once you have 25 ‘likes’ for your page, you can choose your own personalised URL. Make sure your URL reflects your business and services well.
• Use keywords in strategic locations on your fan page
Nathan says “The most important pieces to pay attention to are the About section, Mission, and Company Description, since these areas are actually pulled from your fan page as SEO elements.”
• Include your phone number and address
As mentioned in the Citations blog above, providing a phone number and address will help with local search rankings and increase your brands overall SEO.
• Backlink to your fan page on existing channels
Linking to your Facebook page from other digital channels such as your website, blog and other social media channels will allow Google to see that your page is more authoritative.
• Optimise Facebook fan page status updates
Latka explains “When posting updates to your Facebook wall, remember that the first 18 characters of a Facebook post serve as the meta description.”
• SEO for Facebook Notes
It is possible to optimise Facebook notes for SEO, this also gives you the possibility to have multiple ‘notes’ pages under the main page.
Latka added “While using the methods above can help boost your SERP ranking, the most crucial part is that it coincides with an awesome product and incredible engagement to grow your following.”
The Google Panda Update – Some good has come from it
In this interesting blog, Ruth Burr embraces the Google Panda update and explains that good things have come from it. Back in 2010, Google did not always produce the most relevant results and as a consequence, search engine users had to do more digging to find what they were looking for.
Recently Burr commented “It (the Google Panda update) ultimately did make a lot of SERPs (search engine results pages) better, returning more trustworthy information that is more relevant to the query.
However Ruth does touch on the fact that innocent businesses were affected by Panda and empathises with that. Unfortunately certain businesses which were carrying out white hat SEO practises were affected and had their efforts wiped out or seriously diminished. However SERPs have improved since the Google Panda update and Ruth celebrates that fact in her blog.
Commenting on the extra knowledge we now have on Google algorithms, Burr ended by saying “I’m also hoping that future updates like Panda – designed to keep quality in the SERPs – will be less dangerous to small and local businesses, because they’ll know more about what to do and what not to do.”
Creating your Link Building Strategy
Scott McLay talks us thorough the best practises for quality link building. In this blog, Scott talks about how his link building strategy has changed since 2010.
McLay states “Creating a solid strategy should be the starting point for any link building campaign, not having one in the current climate would be like running into a minefield wearing a blindfold.”
Relevance agrees with this and also ensures to obtain quality links for clients. Our main aim is to create quality contextual links featuring on professionally written blogs and press releases. Scott explains that this form of link building is the safest, and even more powerful if you can get the links within the first paragraph.
Maclay also touches on the need to check out where your competitor’s links are coming from. He ends by saying “Looking at the direction Google has been taken over the last year, it has become very clear that they have started cracking down on a large number of unnatural linking activities, but as I mentioned that does not mean we need to step away from traditional link building.”
The Importance of Marketing Analytics
Joanna Lord delves deeper into Marketing Analytics and talks about the importance of measuring and optimising your marketing activities and not just your web activities.
Lord illustrates some great ideas of looking deeper into the way we market our websites, she comments “What about the time of day you did things, or the vehicles you used? What about the conversations off-site, and the engagement in real life that resulted from those efforts? Marketing analytics is the act of looking past mere website results, and asking yourself, « How did that marketing campaign really go? »
Joanna goes into detail on the following points:
1. How are your marketing activities performing?
2. Where are your competitors investing time and resources?
3. How do your marketing activities perform in the long-term?
4. How does your marketing analytics data inform your next decision?
Anchor Text is Weakening…And May Be Replaced by Co-Occurrence
In this video log, Rand Fishkin talks about his opinion on web page optimisation. Anchor text may still be powerful but its power could be fading, whilst co-occurrence could be on the rise.
Fishkin believes that Google is getting much smarter and can understand the correlation between keywords and relevant web pages, even if those particular web pages do not feature the keyword used for the search in the meta data.
The way he believes this is possible is down to co-occurrence. Take a look at the five minute video for more information.
For more information on any of the topics above, please contact Relevance Web Marketing.
English