June was a month full of interesting seo developments, nevertheless most news was rather overshadowed by the launch of Google+ on 28th June. This is examined in our recent post; Is Google + poised to push Facebook off the social throne?
So Google+ aside, this month SEOmoz focus on site quality and its improvement. There are articles on refining your landing pages for PPC, using actionable metrics in Google Analytics and getting to know your audience. On the social media side, Twitter’s effect on SERPs is explored and Roy Peleg illustrates how to make Facebook comments indexable by Google and other search engine bots. If those articles have left you eager for more, lastly Rand Fishkin answers some readers SEO questions and SEOmoz continue their look at Link Building methodology.
8 Methods + Lots of Tools for Getting to Know Your Audience
Do you really feel that you know your audience and what they want from your site? What tools and methods are there out there to help you refine your knowledge? Laura Lippay looks at some of the ways to gather truly insightful information on your potential customers. Armed with this knowledge, businesses can really get into the mind-set of their audience and focus on their specific desires.
The Tweet Effect: How Twitter Effects Rankings
These days there is no doubt that a social presence is a key component in a business’s online marketing strategy. Indeed there are few businesses that have attacked online seriously without having a twitter account linked to their website.
Recently, Google and Bing have both admitted to using social media signals as an influencer in ranking websites. So how will some practical tests using Twitter prove or disprove our theories on the subject? John Doherty discovers that tweeting articles alerts bots to their presence more quickly so they are indexed earlier than normal. His experiments also show that a high number of tweets or retweets from influential users seems to affect page rank.
11 Analytics Metrics That Are Actionable
It would be easy to spend all day examining data on Google analytics, however what use is measurement unless you can actually improve or remedy weaker areas in your site? Paddy Moogan explores the metrics that matter, that help you to ‘get stuff done’ and allow your site to work harder for you. Topics include page load speed, form field tracking, average order value and exit points.
Make Facebook Comments Box Indexable by Search Engines
Roy Peleg examines the pros and cons of implementing Facebook comments on your site including the potential for buzz and organic traffic, the ability to fight spam and the problems with posts being non-indexable by search-engine bots. Or so he thought..!
As Facebook comments posts are loaded in an iframe, they were generally accepted as being non-crawlable. However, Roy was able to establish contact with a Facebook engineer who suggested a way of exporting comments for any given URL.
So using a simple script, Facebook comments box can now be used on your site and crawled an indexed by GoogleBot or any other crawler/browser agent. This is pretty big news in the seo world!
6 Essential PPC Landing Page Optimizations
Are your landing pages successful in driving conversions from your ppc campaign or do they need some work? Salar Salahshoor explores some techniques for creating effective landing-pages including call-to-action, focusing the eye, instilling confidence and even some methods normally associated with seo.
Answers to 4 excellent SEO Questions
Rand Fishkin produces some insightful answers to reader questions
A New Perspective On Link Building
Continuing on from where Rand Fishkin left off last month in his post ‘Don’t Ask Sites for Links. Find People and Connect’, Dan Deceuster delves further into approaches to linkbuilding. Whilst traditional methods may have served us to date, Deceuster believes the future will be all about relationship building as ultimately ‘People are going to influence rankings more than links do’.
The New Google Social Network – Google+
Last but by no means least, SEOmoz talk us through their first thoughts on Google+.