The main problem for Google in the past was deciding which comments were legitimate and which could be considered “comment spam”. This 3^rd party system would allow Google to assign less value to comments that would be seen as manipulative and more value to “useful” comments. Google would track the overall Google activity of the author of each comment by tracking their Gmail, Google+ and Youtube usage. Commenters would have to build up their credibility with Google to have their comments seen as having SEO weight.

It goes without saying then that we have seen the end of “NoFollow” tags on comments and as long as Google sees the authors of comments as credible, link juice will be passed on to the sites which they link to in the comments. Google will however limit the value of excessive links from legitimate commenters over a short period of time, so commenters would be advised to use this tactic sparingly. The highest value would be given to links that are on-topic, haven’t been posted an inordinate amount of times and have good click-through rates.

So it would appear that Google has created a very enticing commentary system that webmasters should definitely consider implementing on their websites, although it’s way too early to say if Google will give adopters of its commentary system preferential treatment in their algorithm. We feel that the SEO implications of this system are significant enough to warrant adoption. Promoting Google+ does seem to be the priority of Google at the moment, and this system proves that point.

People have been using black hat SEO techniques to artificially manipulate organic rankings for a long time. And it worked. These individuals did everything from using invisible text stuffed with keywords to building massive link farms. The SEO professionals that strive to perform white hat Search Engine Optimisation and sticking to Google’s guidelines have often felt that their success is somewhat unfair. Sites with obvious black hat SEO often outranked their white hat competitors. To be fair, Google has improved this over the years. In the late 90s you could get away with basically anything. However, although the ethical route does pay off with hard work, even today certain black hat strategies still work.

Could it be that the game might finally change for good?

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team recently made the following statement:

“What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO. We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working on in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.“

A popular example of Google’s recent crackdown is the link network, buildmyrank.com. The site has openly admitted defeat and offered a refund to their customers after Google deindexed the majority of their network.

I am not sure if Google will phase everything in gradually. We have, however, seen some surprising results during the last month. One of our clients’ sites was competing with a website that was using obvious black hat SEO techniques. This site dropped out of the SERPs completely a few weeks ago. We have also seen quite a few dramatic positive shifts for our clients, possibly this is due to Google penalising all the black hat competitors and therefore shifting white hat sites up the rankings.

All this cracking down proves that you need to be very careful about anything you do. You might get penalised even if your intention was not to be black hat. Be sure to read up on Googles guidelines and remember that if you always strive to optimise for the user, you can feel safe. Google has sent a message to the webmaster tools interface of sites that violate their guidelines. If you find that a site you manage might possibly be one of these, take the steps to remove all suspicious SEO activity. Remove bad backlinks where possible, remove spammy content and meta data.

Many sites out there are in existence to make money and one of the most common ways to do this is through advertising. Google understands this, especially as it is thanks to advertising that Google has become the internet giant that it is. However there are sites that go overboard in this respect with big blocks of ads above the fold. Google says that less than 1% of searches will be noticeably be affected by this algorithm change, but webmasters and designers alike should take note of this. Using this method of adverts first and content later could negatively affect a website’s Search Engine Optimization efforts.

Google stated that webmasters who believed that their websites were negatively affected by this should consider how the website uses the above-the-fold area and whether the content on the page is hidden or otherwise hard for users to read quickly. The type of device used to view the website is also a factor. Webmasters are encouraged to use Google’s Browser Size tool to see how their website is viewed on screens of different sizes and resolutions. A webpage’s content might be easily accessible on a PC, but hidden on a mobile device.

The best advice is to keep the advertising near the bottom and the sides of the webpage and the content near the top. This will also help the Googlebot read / index your website quicker.

In true Google philosophy and all in the name of making the web a friendlier, easier place to be, this is just one of the 500+ changes that Google has undertaken to make to their algorithm in 2012 .

As mentioned in my previous post(s), it seems that Search Plus Your World has caused quite an uproar. When Twitter accuses Google of manipulating search results and not having the best interest of users at heart, you should take notice. In this article I will attempt to wrap up my thoughts on this issue.

Will Google Plus survive?

I have not touched this issue before in depth, but it has been lingering in my mind for quite a while now. Last month Larry Page announced that Google Plus reached 90 million users. Facebook has about 800 million users. To the casual observer this might seem that Google Plus is gaining significant ground on the social giant (it has managed to get more than 10% of the amount of users in less than a year!).

For the following reasons, I do not think that this is the case…

There are a few problems and gripes I have with Google Plus. As much as I love Google and what they do, I’ll quote a post I read from one of my ‘friends’ on Google Plus (just before he abandoned using the Social Network) : “I do not want all my eggs in one Google basket”. This however, might be a personal thought process and not the consensus of the majority. What bugs me personally though, is that although I have a significant number of people in my circles – my news feed is basically empty. When I scroll down for a couple of seconds, I already start seeing posts from weeks ago. I am sure many people will echo my conclusion : there is nothing going on on Google Plus. You might be asking yourself – ‘Why do they then have 90 million users?”. The answer is simple. Because every person with a gmail account got signed up to Google+ automatically when it officially launched. I have a Google Plus account, I am part of the 90 million, do I ever use it? The answer is no. Technically, there is nothing wrong with Google Plus – but when no one uses it because there are no others using it, it creates a vicious cycle. I predict that Google Plus will die slowly (although I hope not). Facebook is just too big and established.

The only saving grace will be if Google Plus fills a different segment of the market – perhaps a social network focused on businesses…

SEO in 2012 and beyond

One cannot predict what changes Google will make to their algorithm in the future, perhaps links will play a smaller role, perhaps social search will dominate or (as discussed above) Google Plus will fade away.

I cannot foresee search evolving into something inherently social unless Facebook, Twitter etc decides to play along and open up all public content for Google to index. This will in turn depend on Google to position results in an unbiased manner. If and when this happens on large scale, SEO will be a totally different ballgame. As I have mentioned in the past, SEO ultimately boils down to ensuring that a website is optimised for the user. This aspect will never go away. Websites will always need relevant quality content, the site will always have to be user friendly and designed in such a way to deliver a great user experience.

At this point in time however, an SEO specialist cannot ignore the social aspect of search, it should benefit your SEO client noticeably if you include social in your SEO efforts.

Google’s social rival, the massively popular micro blogging site Twitter, are on the forefront of the accusing camp. After the new search algorithm was launched by Google, Twitter accused Google of trying to drive traffic to their social network by manipulating search results. A Twitter representative made the following statement: “For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results any time they wanted to find something on the internet. As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter, as a result, Twitter accounts and tweets are often the most relevant results. We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organisations and Twitter users”.

Personally, I think Twitter has a point. Twitter has had a massive social impact over the last few years (the “Twitter Revolutions” for example) and breaking news can often be found first on Twitter. If results from Twitter (or any other site for that matter) is the most relevant, the information should be available first in Google search results. This also ties in with the aforementioned Search Engine Optimisation. If you have to compete with only slightly relevant data from Google itself, you’re in for a losing battle. One option is to embrace the change from a social marketing perspective. But is this really best for the user?

In conclusion, it seems that many are worried that relevant results get pushed down in favour of Google + content. Fundamentally, relevancy is what it all boils down to. Google might not be in the wrong here, they are certainly entitled to promote their social network, but they should not compromise the quality of their search results in the process.

Twitter/Facebook - image credit - www.cbsnews.com

Having all the Personalised content from Google Plus mentioned above weaved into search result pages might not be welcomed by everyone. And at first glance it might seem to completely change the way we approach SEO. A lot of us in the field of Search Engine Optimization have been preparing for the day that search gets social. The option to switch between Global and Personalized results however, came as a surprise. Users can choose whether or not they want to use personalised search. This essentially means that current SEO practices still play the same role as always.

One cannot, however, predict the changes Google will make in the future, and tapping into the SEO potential of Personalised Search will play an increasingly important role in a Search Marketing campaign. Google might require us to be logged in at all times to use any of its features, including search. Even if this happens, I believe traditional SEO will remain alive and well. In its core, SEO is about optimization for the user, to optimize websites in order to facilitate and improve the search experience. This will always remain relevant.

With Search engine optimisation (SEO) you not only build brand awareness, but more importantly, you gain trust within your industry. The higher the ranking of your site in the search results, and the more frequently your page appears on the results pages, the more visitors and sales you’ll have, because you are targeting people who are looking for your product. Being listed on top of search engine results also almost automatically cements your company as a market leader.

Trust + brand awareness + more visitors = more sales.

So what is SEO? SEO (or Search Engine Optimisation) is the process of structuring a web page so that it is found, read, and indexed by search engines as effectively as possible. It improves the visibility of your website in search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.

These search engines use crawlers to follow links from one page to another and retrieve the contents. This is indexed and added to their databases. Search engines’ web crawlers rank sites according to their relevance to search terms, which is calculated using criteria such as the extent of keyword matches and the number of sites linked to a website. Done properly, SEO ensures that, when users search for terms relevant to your business, they will find your website every time.

Unique content counts. Having professionally written, relevant copy on your site (different from the content on other sites in wording, structure and topics) can provide a big boost for your site’s rankings. Frequency of content change is also a must – not small changes to existing content, but new content which shows that your website is active and dynamic.

One advantage of PPC is that it is a lot more flexible than SEO, you can cover a lot more keywords than with a SEO campaign, so while you optimize your SEO campaign to rank high for your beter performing keywords you can also target a whole range of other keywords to drive people to your site.

I want to show a comparative report on how these can work together and especially how you can  even double your visits if you do SEO together with your PPC campaign.

For one of our clients we started doing SEO more than 2 years ago, you can really see a difference in the traffic they get. The graph below shows visits from the first of January 2009 to the 30^th of September 2010. The orange line  represents Paid traffic and one thing you can clearly see from it is that they haven’t increased their Adwords budget, it stayed the  same. If you look at the green line which represents organic traffic you will see that it gradually got more, up to a point 7 months ago where it started outperforming the PPC traffic.

The quality of the visits don’t differ a lot however, the bounce rate, average time spent and page views are a bit beter on SEO traffic than the PPC. The blue line indicates the total visits to the website, so you can imagine what the difference would have been if the client only focused on PPC or SEO. By doing both PPC and SEO you can maximize your reach to clients looking for your services.

By looking at these statistics you can clearly see how SEO traffic grows over time and how it can work together with PPC to give you a great Search Marketing campaign. So if you are just doing just PPC or SEO at the moment, you have now seen what your traffic can look like when you combine it.

Search engine optimization in essence is the practice of altering and tweaking a website and factors outside of your website to gain higher rankings in organic listings for targeted search terms. Organic listings are also referred to as natural listings these are the results that are not “paid for” (Payments to search engines that is).

Now a big misconception which people quite often make is that SEO is firstly an once off thing and secondly is something cheap. Now back when search engine’s started to become popular it might have been cheaper to rank well but since the benefit of ranking well in search engine result pages has been noticed it has become quite competitive. Thus it takes experts to analyze competitors to make sure you do more than your competitors to out rank them.

It also definitely isn’t a once off thing. Once you reach your rankings you will need to ensure you keep one step ahead of your competitors. Thus there are definitely costs associated with SEO which is determined by the vertical your company is classed in, the state of your website and what your current rankings are. SEO is also definitely a bespoke service and as such this adds to the cost and time needed to work out an effective strategy.

We have achieved some amazing results for our clients by using SEO. I’m going to look at 3 of our clients who have reached great results since signing up for SEO.

In our first example above (Company One) you can see we have done an comparison of their organic traffic compared from July 2007 to July 2010. We started this campaign off 3 years ago and have been constantly working with this company advising them on every step they take. They compete in quite a competitive vertical so it is important to be involved every step of the way. They did initially have some organic traffic before we started as indicated by the green line on the graph above but from the graph above you can see that this was nothing compared to what we have helped them achieve by utilizing SEO. We trebled their organic traffic in the last three years, which was a phenomenal feat. This has lead to our client becoming leaders in their relative industry.

Our second example is Company Two, who competes on a less competitive vertical. They started out with very limited organic traffic and no SEO strategy as well as website that was not search engine friendly at all. We helped them transform their website and define a SEO strategy both of which has helped them achieve the amazing results you see on the graph above. Their organic results have grown by a 613%.

Our last example is of side project we started in our company with the goal of turning it into a business. We thus had the opportunity to work with it from start to end. We created a website which would target our audience and use a very clearly defined SEO strategy. This meant me could develop the website with this strategy in mind. This resulted in us completely overshooting all our targets and building an extremely profitable on-line business driven by only organic traffic. The traffic in this comparison shows a growth of 890%.

So now that you have a few examples of what SEO can do for a company, do you really think you can compete without it? Feel free to drop us a line to find out how SEO could be helping your company. Have a great week and check in again for our case studies on social media and it’s benefits.

Now how has branding changed? Traditional media such as TV, banner and radio ads has always been important for branding as it reaches such a wide audience. It has also traditionally created trust in the brand with the audience because they believe that a company is successful when it can afford to advertise on these expensive mediums. Thus the company must be “good” if they have enough funds to advertise on these mediums.

Today the situation has changed – people have become lazy. Now that’s quite a bold statement but I say this in relation to branding and traditional media because a new step has been added to buying process. Traditional media creates a need with customers but the online world has become the medium that fulfills that need. So now people turn to search to find what they are looking for instead of memorizing what they hear or saw on advertising. Thus branding has lost some of its power when not closing the cycle by making sure your brand is also found when people look for your company.

So SEO has become part of the branding process and there are two ways SEO has a branding effect.

1. Branding by ranking on generic keywords

The first is branding you receive when users find your company in the results on some of the more generic keywords for your products or services. This is for instance if your company specializes in laptop sales and you rank high for the keywords [buying a laptop] or something similar.

2. Branding by reach of exposure

This is when your reach is wider, which you achieve by ranking for lots of long tail keyword searches such as [sony viao 13 laptop battery]. Your company can then establish itself as an expert on the subject, which also creates trust and branding for your company.

These two methods are quite different and require you to build in an approach to target each in your SEO strategy. They can both have phenomenal effects on your branding but also on your sales as you might shorten the buying process. Once you have a customer on your site and you have created trust for your company it improves your company’s chances dramatically of making the sale.

I hope this brief overview has been informative feel free to leave a comment or subscribe to our RSS.