How to Blog for Maximum SEO Benefit

Valuable and unique content is a critical element for SEO success.  Putting together a targeted blog plan now can help you be at the top of the natural search results in the upcoming holiday season.

1) Keyword Research

It’s common to think about keywords for Pay-Per-Click Advertising and SEO, but keywords are often an afterthought when it comes to blogging.  In order for blogging to achieve SEO success, it is vital to start with a keyword strategy.

Start by thinking about the products that you want in the lead for traffic and sales in the upcoming holiday.  We’ll use an example of a retailer who sells grill accessories: Grill Mitts, Grill Lights.

The next step is to generate a list of keywords for how people are going to be gift shopping for these items.  Whom will they be looking for gift ideas for?   What type of person is it for?  What problem does it solve?   If you get stuck you can always check out question sites, or read reviews on product pages to get ideas for the most favorite uses and solved needs.  Continuing on our example: Gifts for dad, Gifts for grill man, Grilling accessory gifts, Gifts for men who love to entertain, Lighting up grill space, Handling hot grill pans.

For other great ideas on generating keywords, check out the keyword tools list here: .

2) Blog Plan

The next step is to create a plan around blogging for sufficient coverage and awareness.  Your blog plan should include:

How will you provide sufficient coverage for each keyword? We recommend 2-5 blog posts for each of the keywords that you identified in the first step.  You can use different format and content approaches for each such as lists, guides, how-to’s, humorous slants, or consolidated summaries of all the reviews available.

How frequently you should blog? You can back into this answer by the volume of keywords and the number of posts necessary to cover the keywords.  We find that blogging a minimum once per day is a good start.

Who will be writing the blogs? Get everyone at the company involved, or try outsourcing if you can’t meet the demands internally.  There are some interesting outsourcing options out there such as TextBroker.

How will you promote the blog posts? After you’ve spent the time putting together your amazing blog content, it’s important to get the word out. Some options include:

• Push blog entries via social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter.
• Push your blog articles to social bookmarking sites such as Digg.
• Syndicate your articles to other related industry sites.
• Post your blog entry to relevant questions on answer sites such as Yahoo Answers and Google Groups.
• Comment on other related blog posts with a link back to your blog.
• List your content on Craigslist with the relevant product.
• Run a long-tail pay per click campaign.
• Include links to blog posts in the Site Links of your other PPC campaigns.
• Make your blog posts easily sharable and encourage people to share.
• Include coupon codes or discount offers in your blog posts to encourage sharing.

How will you keep your blog content fresh? Allow others to comment on your posts and you can also add updates to the blog article based on feedback received or new information.

3) Blog Content Optimization for SEO

The content on the blog article itself will need to be constructed in such a way that it yields you the best possible SEO results:

Blog Title. Include your target keywords into the title of the blog post.

Blog Tags. Use keywords as tags for your blog post entry.

Blog Post URL. Include your keywords in the URL itself.  Make sure to separate the words using dashes.

Blog Images. Optimize the names of any images used within your blog post with variations of your keywords.  Separate your keywords by dashes within the image name.

Blog Content.  Use secondary keywords and variations of target keywords throughout your content in a natural way.

Internal Linking. Inside your blog posts, link to previous related blog posts and product pages.  From within your website, links to your blog posts from relevant product pages, or product category pages.  Be sure that all anchor text includes keywords.

Link Building. Beyond internal links, you’ll want to get external links to your blog post.  One of the easiest things you can do here is to link out to other partner-type sites and complementary bloggers – and make sure they know about it.

Holiday shopping research will soon be in full swing, so now is the time to be getting your blog plan into place and actively producing and promoting your exceptional content for the best possible natural search traffic.

More Than One Way to Get to Page One of Search Engine Results Pages

One of the frequently over-looked pieces of content on a webpage when it comes to SEO is image optimization.  Optimizing images can significantly contribute to your SEO and also help you get additional exposure on SERP pages now that universal search results frequently include images.

While it might be difficult to get your pages to rank highly for many head terms, you might be able to get an image on page one for the head term, which, if compelling enough can bring you a decent volume of traffic.

Here are the five most impactful things you can do to optimize your images:

Use your keywords in your image file name. Rather than the typical image01.jpg filename, use a filename that it descriptive and keyword rich.  For example, seo-optimization-diagram.jpg. Make sure to separate these words by dashes only so the search engine can read them.

Include variations of your keywords in the image’s ALT attributes.  Many sites do make use of these attributes since they help searches who can’t see get information about what your image is about.  Just be sure to leverage keywords in the descriptors you use.

Include variations of your keywords in the image’s title tag. This one isn’t quite as impactful as the previous two, but should not be neglected.  The title tag is another great place for a variation of your keywords describing the image.

Make sure the content immediately surrounding the image on the webpage is relevant and includes variations of keywords.  The placement of the image on your page does matter when it comes to SEO, and search engines interpreting it’s meaning, so read the text above and below the image and make sure it has variations of the keywords emphasizing the theme of the image.

Get some relevant links.  Not all images will be link worthy, but many are.  Leverage your internal link structure to support your images.  For external links, social media can be a great way to share interesting pictures or insightful diagrams to get link juice pointing to your images.  As with any other piece of great content – just make sure they are easy to share.

One word of caution: keep the number of images on your page in check, unless you are a photo gallery or it’s a catalog of some sort.  Just a couple images on a page is all that is necessary for a powerful punch.

Start to optimize your images today and start to enjoy the road less traveled of SEO optimization.

How to Avoid “Black Hat” Techniques

If you check out popular crowdsourcing websites, you will find the “jobs” sections dominated by requests for social media marketing activities.  It can be difficult to get your social media up and off the ground–especially a regular, high-quality blog publishing effort–so it seems many small businesses have turned to what I would consider to be “black hat” techniques.

Consider the following most common social marketing “job” listings…

Blog and Article Writing. The pay for these ranges from $0.50 to $5.00 per article.  Most article requests range from 350 to 500 words and specify the keywords to be used and the keyword density.  These jobs seem to fall into a gray area.  If you can find good writers out there who can provide you with legitimate content, why not?  However, the quality of article you will get for the most popular price of $1.00 is very questionable to me.  It’s clear these businesses do not agree that truly valuable content is the best approach.

Now we will exit the lone “high-end” job category and get into the low-paying jobs.  Most jobs in this category pay anywhere from $0.01 to $0.50 for the tasks below.  (Personally, I think these folks could do better at the penny slots, or even begging on the street corner.)

YouTube. The jobs pertaining to YouTube involve getting paid for watching a video, voting on a video (some request likes only), leaving comments about a video, sharing a video or subscribing to a YouTube channel.

Twitter. Jobs pertaining to Twitter pay people to make tweets that link to a particular website (tweet included), retweeting messages, or becoming a follower for a business.

Facebook. These jobs typically pay for liking a Facebook fan page, leaving positive comments on a fan page, liking posts on a fan page or liking products or content on a company’s website.

Social Bookmarking. The tasks for social bookmarking are based on bookmarking a page on multiple social bookmarking sites.

Website Evangelism. This one involves posting a comment to popular forums, groups, or other related websites.  The post text and link are provided, along with posting frequency guidelines to avoid raising any spamming flags.  Obviously most of these are no-follow so it is not going to help with SEO.  However, these do certainly help drive traffic through online word-of-mouth which people attribute a high level of trust to.

Joining New Communities. This job involves getting paid to sign up for a new online social group or community.

Forums. These businesses are typically trying to quickly build out large forums in order to give their site more credibility.  Some tasks involve creating questions, most involve writing short answers to questions.

Contest Voting. You can get paid to vote for a particular participant in an online social contest, for example a best photo contest.

Posting Comments. This job requests that you post comments on forums, or on articles to help them appear more popular.

Blogger. This one involves getting paid to become a follower for a blogger account.

I will stop there, but it does get worse on freelancer sites — much worse.

Is it clever to employ the masses? Or, is this all shady?  The more I read the more in need of a shower I felt.  The things I value most about social media are the great content and the implied trust that comes with a comment or “Like” or other social endorsement action, and this type of behavior breaks both.

I am in no way saying that all crowdsourcing jobs are bad.  There are a ton of legitimate jobs out there and thousands of great ways to leverage crowdsourcing.

But, I was heartbroken to see all of the unethical social activity going on.  It’s probably even sadder to see what people will do for mere pennies – I mean, you can’t even get a gumball for a penny anymore.  (Although, in some countries this pay probably ends up working out to be a pretty decent job.)  The best way a business can get a social following — and the endorsements that come with it — is by diligently publishing high-quality content on a regular basis and winning fans for your efforts.  The pay-offs are often in the longer-term, but having earned it the honest way will mean you see real business benefits rather than just a list of hollow gestures.

13 Truly Useful Tips!

Everyone has gone social: you, your competitors, your partners, your customers, your leads, your friends–everyone.  So now what?

It’s time to set up a system to mine all of the qualitative data that is floating around out there and put it to good, practical use.  Try using this list of 13 truly useful things you can actively learn from monitoring social media:

1. Who’s in bed with the competition?

Who’s blogging favorably about them?  Who’s providing them with good reviews?  Who’s following them on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and active in their community?  Who’s presenting with them on webinars and co-sponsoring collateral with them?

Get some good monitoring going on around your competitors names, and keep an eye on their online reviews and their social media account followers and activities.

Find their biggest fans and start to court them away.  Everyone knows how big a competitive win is – but a competitive win who is loud in the social media world is the biggest competitive win of all.

2. Who loves you?

Similar to above, who’s blogging about you? Tweeting about you? Commenting about you on Facebook? Giving you positive reviews?

It’s standard practice to reward someone who refers you new business, so make it standard practice to reward those who are essentially referring you to the masses.  Provide these “fans” with some appropriate reciprocal love.  Perhaps it’s a link back, or a coupon or some other offer.  But make sure you let anyone who speaks positively about you know that you are listening, you really appreciate it and you’d love it if they do more!

3. What do people love the most about you?

Monitor trends in positive mentions about you in reviews, blog posts and other social media channels such as Twitter.

Sometimes what we may think are our biggest selling points are not what people love us  for most.  Pay attention to what people like  best about you, and start to actively promote those.  One technique we like is to actively call them out in your search ads using quotations.  Quotations lend more trust than just touting yourself, plus it will be in your audience’s own words.

4. What do people dislike the most about you?

While you’re poring through all of your praise, also start to document trends about any negative comments, or “if they only had….” comments.

Use “if only they had” information to inform your product development, road map and / or inventory adjustments.

5. What are your competitors hiring for?

Keep an active query in your reader (i.e., TweetDeck or HootSuite or Seesmic) that monitors job postings for your competitors.

One of the biggest hints about what they are up to next can be inside of those job postings.  Many companies are surprisingly candid about direction and weaknesses inside of their postings.

6. What are your competitor’s future plans?

Along those same lines, keeping an active query in your reader that includes your competitors name along with the word plans or powerpoint or pdf docs.

Many companies are surprisingly lax about what gets out into the web, you’ll be surprised about how much free competitive intelligence will flow your way.

7. Negative keywords for PPC campaigns.

Keep a query of your head keyword terms inside of your reader and monitor the headlines and themes of blog postings and news articles that are coming in.

Add anything and everything that isn’t relevant to you as a negative keyword in your ppc advertising campaigns.

8. New target keywords for PPC campaigns.

Same query as above, but this time monitoring for new ways people are talking about your space, or new needs and reasons that are rising up.

Take advantage of these by adding them in as new target keywords to always have your PPC campaigns on top of current trends.

9. Who are the influencers and thought leaders in your space / area?

Same head terms query – both of blogs and also of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Use this to identify who the big influencers are online in your space.  Then, make them your best friends and court them to talk about you.

10.  Hot topics for blogging

With that same head terms query, you can easily get a pulse for what is trendy.

Use trends to write blog posts about with your own opinion, expertise, and helpful information.  When you promote trendy blog posts, they will garner you the most value.

11.  Audience profiling

Where is your audience and how do they participate?  Do they blog? Do they write reviews on local sites? Do they attend webinars?  Do they download podcasts? Are they active on FourSquare, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo Questions or other communities?

Monitoring your audience’s activities and where they are most prevalent will help you figure out where to spend your precious marketing dollars and dedicate your marketing content and time.

12.  What should your Sales Tools & Collateral address?

What don’t they like about you? What is your competition promoting as their biggest advantages?  What are the current hot topics and needs?

Develop sale collateral around these so your sales force is always armed with the latest and greatest sales objections they are likely to run into and the most prevalent ways of discussing the current market climate and needs.

13.  Link building opportunities

Did someone mention you, but forgot to include a back link?

Reach out to them and kindly request that they add a link!

It’s all free data, so start to make social media one of your best sources of information today!

Fancy Nancy vs. Redundant Rhonda

When looking to hire or partner with someone to help with your search marketing, the traditional ideas of a fancy advertising agency tend to pop into people’s heads –fancy glass office, dressed fancy, talks fancy, creates fancy messaging and images, etc.  However, when it comes to search marketing, Fancy Nancy isn’t likely to get you very far.

Her sophistication and wit will likely mean that her content won’t reach, attract or convert the average searcher you are seeking out.   For online marketing, you should be thinking about working with Redundant Rhonda.  Qualities you really want are redundant, simple, monotonous and patient.

Why am I advocating for Redundant Rhonda?  Who in their right mind wants a boring person to handle activities related to marketing and advertising?

Here’s why…

Quality #1: Redundant

Being successful online is all about keywords.  From search to social, SEO to paid, from your home page to your landing page, keywords (in your audience’s voice) are the heart and soul.

Keywords are not fancy.  These are basic phrases that your leads use to research your offering and find you.  Long tail keyword generation is helpful – there is nothing fancy about this – which is just different combinations of the exact same words or plurals, singulars, prepositions, etc.

Once you know your keyword targets, these keywords and their variations must be redundantly used everywhere you are online:

Pay-per-click keywords

SEO keywords

Website copy

Blog titles

Blog copy

Landing pages

Pay-per-click ads

Website URLs

Google Local profile

Twitter profile

Twitter handler

Facebook profile

Tweets on Twitter

Internal anchor text

Inbound link anchor text

Press releases

Videos

Photos and images

Getting the picture?

Just to clarify: I said redundant usage – which should not to be confused with spammy usage!  Redundantly use your keywords in natural ways that any average person reading the English language would expect to see.

Quality #2: Simple

While Fancy Nancy is likely to come up with some very catchy tag lines, online searches are less about award-winning copy and more about helping people weed through information overload to find you, quickly comprehend what you do and contact you. Fluff need not apply.

Your PPC ad copy (in addition to being redundant) needs to simply state what you do, why it’s better than anything else, and inspiring a click-through.

Your website copy (again, in addition to being redundant) needs to very simply state in easy-to-read copy what it is you do – and why it’s better – with a clear call to action indicating what the visitor should do next.

You only have a few seconds to get a searchers’ attention and turn them into something valuable, so simple words lead to the fastest possible comprehension and action.

Quality #3: Loves Monotony

For managing and optimizing your search marketing, you will need a data geek who is happy with monotony.  My guess is Fancy Nancy would like to jump off the building at this point.  You’ll need someone who is happy pouring over tons of data, slicing and dicing it in oodles of formats, making some optimization adjustments based on the data, and then reviewing all of the metrics again.

The process goes like this: analyze, slice, dice, adjust, analyze, slice, dice, adjust, analyze, slice, adjust… there is no end game. (In the world of consumer products, it’s called “lather, rinse, repeat” — check your shampoo bottle!)  The world of search marketing is constantly changing, so the monotonous process will repeat itself again and again and again.

Quality #4: Patient

While some aspects of search marketing, like pay-per-click, carry with them some instant gratification, the process of getting to great results whether on PPC, SEO, landing pages or social takes time and patience.  Fancy Nancy is likely to want some immediate accolades for a campaign that is launched, but in the world of search, great downstream benefits can take quite a bit of time and stick-to-it-ness.  It can take quite a while to find pockets of great success – which may not last long before the world changes and you need to find new pockets of success.

So, as you think about your search marketing support system, remember this: forget the glamour, the glitter and the fluff and seek out someone who understands how to get you found, keep attention and create real results online.

Above-the-Board Tips and Tricks

One of the best ways to ensure your website ranks well for your most important keywords in natural search results is through in-bound links to your site.  But how do you attract them (short of begging other website owners to link to you)?  We’ve got some tips and tricks below that will help you build links to your website.

Before we get started, though, just a quick reminder about links, link juice and the social etiquette of linking:

First, not all links are created equal.  Google, Yahoo! and Bing all evaluate links to your website relative to the quality of the source of the link.  So, for instance, if you get a link from The New York Times it’s vastly more important to the search engines than if Yield Software links to you (we hope one day soon we’ll be in the same league!)  In practical terms, what this means is that the NYT link has more juice than the Yield link, and when the algorithm is determining what your page rank should be, it’s weighing the link juice of each individual link.  Other types of sites that provide powerful link juice are links from .gov sites and links from .edu sites, in addition to links from mainstream media source sites or very popular blogs such as BoingBoing or ReadWriteWeb.

Second, link unto others as you would have the link to you.  If you hope to generate lots of great links to your site, you must also be someone who sensibly links regularly.  The social etiquette of the Web dictates that website and blog owners conscientiously link to the sources of news, information, reference material or other sources of content; this, in turn, will inspire web publishers to link to you.  By declaring you’re a good netizen, people will want to engage you more.

Now, on to those recommendations!

“Top” Lists

One of the all-time best ways to get people to link to your content is through lists.  For instance, the top 10 best ways to evaluate a purchase.  Or three things to consider when making a purchasing.  Remember that your “Top” lists should have some relevance to what your site is all about, but SHOULD NOT be an overt promotion of or commercial about your products and services.  These should be objectively helpful lists that people would intuitive want to share with friends or colleagues or family members (for instance, in their own blogs or via a tweet on Twitter or in a post on Facebook.)

Video

After social networks, like Facebook, video is the hottest segment of the Web.  People can’t get enough of video!  So a good way to get people to link to your site or your blog is use video.  It’s super easy to embed a video in your site (especially if you’re publishing your website or blog on a content management system like WordPress).  As with “Top” lists, be sure to choose videos that relevant to what you do, sell or serve.  If you produce and publish your own videos (which you should!), again, make sure you’re doing something that is going to be useful to people.  How-to videos are hugely popular on the Web, particularly if it’s about something emerging that people want to do but don’t yet understand.

Photos

Believe it or not, photos are still very popular and capture people’s eye.  Photos that capture an amazing moment, or are somehow instructional in nature can always drive interest, links and traffic to your site.

Downloadable Content

Publish content on your site that is new, unique or unlike something folks can get elsewhere.  Perhaps it’s a how-to guide relating to your industry or the services you provide.  If you have the budget, commission a white paper or a study on some important aspect of the work you do.  Or maybe you’ve been doing a great job with your blog over the last few years and have a collection of blog posts that, when taken together, make a terrific e-book on a subject relating to your business or work.  There are a whole number of online e-book publishing sites that enable fast and easy production, and which you can then offer for free download on your site.  It’s easy to say, “oh, no one cares as much as I do about the thing I do” — but guess what: you’re NOT that unique!  If you love what you do, chances are there are a whole bunch of people (potentially tens of thousands, even) who share your interests and passion.

Graphs and Graphics

Another great, link-worthy strategy for your website and blog is the use of graphs and graphics.  From simple charts and graphs created by Excel to timeline graphics, tag cloud graphics and workflow illustrations, folks love great visuals that bring into specific relief that which may be difficult to imagine.  There are many free or low-cost graphic creation tools across the Web (do a search!) that enable you to simply plug in a number of data points and return a beautiful illustration that you can copy and publish.  If you have a little budget, you can also always hire graphic artists to create stunning visualizations of either data or workflow or technology stacks (among many other options.)

At the end of the day, content, even in the 21st century, is still king.  If you consistently publish good stuff on your website and blog, it will be link-worthy.  And when you do publish, don’t be shy about publicizing that fact.  You should copy the URL of your new content and paste it into tweets on Twitter, your Facebook updates, your LinkedIn updates and any other sites where you can provide updates of what you’re working on.

Once you’ve gotten into a rhythm, be sure to see how your site is ranking for your keywords across Google, Yahoo! and Bing. If you’re a Yield Software customer, you can do this quickly and conveniently by clicking on the Natural Search tab in the Yield Web Marketing Suite and checking your link counts.  You’ll also be able to see the sources of those links so you can evaluate how well you’re doing in terms of link juice / link source quality.

A Little Knowledge Goes a Long Way

A big blocker to an integrated search engine marketing approach is simply lack of knowledge about the different areas.  Commonly, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising guys don’t really “get” search engine optimization (SEO), while SEO guys are kind of put off by PPC campaign work.  But rich rewards await those who stretch beyond their comfort zones and embrace something new or unknown within the realm of search marketing.

What follows are some tips to help you take the information and knowledge you may currently have and start to expand your search engine marketing efforts in an integrated fashion.

PPC for the SEO Guy

If you are used to SEO and are starting PPC, be prepared for a fast pace game, and get ready to spend money on those clicks.

• Use what you already know – start off with your SEO data

1. Actual search queries.  Look at your keywords list in your analytics system.  Use the keywords that are relevant as your target keywords and use any terms that are irrelevant as negative keywords.
2. Look at the geographical source of your visitors and compare the bounce rate, average time on site and conversion rate.  Target the most effective regions for your PPC campaign geo-targets.

• Here’s your PPC blueprint:

1. Organize your keyword list into very tiny ad groups.  The keywords within the ad group should be almost identical with only plural or other very minor variations.  For example, the following keyword list:

Blue shiny widget

Blue shiny widgets

Pink widget

Blue widget supplier

Would be organized into ad groups as follows:

Blue shiny widget ad group with keywords: blue shiny widget, blue shiny widgets

Pink widget ad group with keywords: pink widget, pink widgets

Blue Widget Supplier ad group with keywords: blue widget supplier, blue widget suppliers, blue widgets supplier and blue widgets suppliers

2.  Write ad copy for each of the ad groups that includes the keywords (multiple times), your unique value and a call to action.

Always try more than 1 ad in each ad group:

Blue Shiny Widget Ad Group:

Blue Shiny Widgets

50% Off Blue Shiny Widgets.

Buy Today for Free Shipping!

www.DomainName.com/BlueShinyWidgets

Blue Shiny Widgets

Blue Shiny Widgets – 50% Off!

Order Now for Free Shipping.

BlueShinyWidgest.DomainName.com

3.  The destination page on your website for ads in this ad group, should take the visitor directly to the blue shiny widgets page.

SEO for the PPC Guy

If you are expanding from PPC into SEO, you’ll need to develop some patience.  Changes can take a very long time to happen, but once day do you’ll love the free clicks!

Here are some baby steps to get you on your way:

Use what you already know.  Keywords are also the name of the game here.

Put your keywords to work.  Keywords with high impressions and strong conversions.  This will be your target keyword list for SEO.  Make sure to target the most relevant keywords for each individual page of your website.  If you have a high volume of candidate keywords, start off with those with the least amount of natural search competition first.

Use geographic information.  Review your geographical performance of your visitors to see if you should be targeting any geographic names along with your keywords.

Page optimization.  Make on-page optimizations to ensure your page is relevant to your target keywords.  For example your Page Title should include your most important keywords.  Use your best-performing ads and landing page copy for hints about what effective SEO copy will be.

Page configuration.  Make sure your web page is properly configured and in good overall shape – for example, fix broken links, trim down excessive outbound links, and make sure your page loads fast – ideally in around 2 seconds.

Page content.  Now for the big one – create truly valuable and unique content on your page that emphasizes your keywords.  This one can take some time so leverage any resources you can,

Links.  Set up the internal linking structure throughout your site to point to your content using variations of your target keywords.

Promotion.  Now go market your page’s content to build links.

Your content placement report from PPC can include some clues for good link sites.  Look for other high authority sites in your space – industry organizations, partner sites, etc. that also rank well for your top terms.

Mayday Mayday – How Was Your Website Impacted?

Google is constantly making changes to its algorithms, which determine what websites appear in their natural search results and in what order they appear. Most changes do not have significant impacts, but Google’s recent change made between April 28th and May 3rd — called the “May Day Update” because it happened mostly on May 1st, but also “Mayday Update” because of its potential adverse impacts on websites — has resulted in the following for many websites:

• Rank of deeper individual pages within websites
• Rank for long tail keyword searches (three-plus words in the search query)

In a nutshell, Google has cracked down on quality for longer-tail keywords – making its evaluation of deeper individual website pages more similar to how it conducts natural search rankings for keyword searches with one-to-two words.

This is probably due to the fact that more and more searches these days contain more than three words, so it’s necessary for Google to ensure that its search results for these searches bring back the most relevant and highest quality results possible.

You can think of the change this way: your homepage is like the parent and it used to be able to boost up its children (the individual page on its website) just by having great authority itself — similar to how a parent’s reputation can often help children get a leg up in the world. But now, your individual pages have all grown up and are standing on their own two feet. Google is evaluating each of your website pages individually – for their own unique relevancy and individual page quality.

This individual evaluation will help Google ensure that even for the long-tail searches it is always providing a great set of search results.

What this means for websites:

• No more free rides for any of your individual pages based on your overall domain authority.
• All individual website pages must include unique and truly useful content.
• All individual website pages must have a strong back-link profile.

Who is typically “negatively” impacted by Google’s Mayday… er… May Day update?

• Deeper internal pages with duplicate content and no links
• Automatically-generated pages and content farms

Were you impacted?

Review your stats from around April 28th to May 3rd with an eye out on the following:

• Natural search traffic volumes coming to your deeper internal website pages
• Volume of natural search traffic you are received from long tail searches (three-plus keywords)

Google says the May Day change is here to stay, so what do you need to focus on?

There is nothing new here – just the same basic SEO principles, but now it’s imperative that your focus extends across all pages of your website, not just your home page and a few other top-level pages.

Here’s what you need to focus on for all individual pages of your website:

• Make sure you have unique, valuable and truly useful content on all of your individual pages within your site. How do you do this? Put yourself in the searcher’s shoes and think about what would truly help them in their quest for information that no one else is currently doing a great job of providing. Some examples include:

1. Reviews, videos, images, comments, etc. are all great ways to help make your content both unique and valuable to searchers. Leverage user generated content as much as possible so the workload is not so daunting.
2. If you have any copied or duplicate content (like from a manufacturer), replace it with your own unique content.

• Get lots of links for every single page. Ensure your link building campaigns focus on all of the individual pages for your site and not just your homepage and first tier pages. How do you do this?

1. Make it easy to link to your individual pages and encourage others to do this.
2. Link out to others in your blogs, forums, comments, etc to encourage others to link back to you.
3. Promote all of your content pieces individually.
4. Produce very unique and valuable content that others will want to link to.
5. Create a strong internal linking structure within the pages of your own website with long tail variations on anchor text.
6. Leverage social media to help get links tweets, or promoting specific pages with promotional offers and other incentives.

If you’ve been neglecting the deeper individual pages of your site, you can thank Google’s May Day for lighting a fire under your butt to give those pages some love.

…EIGHT Separate Ways

Google “Everything” (also referred to as “blended search results”, or “universal search”) provides companies with several opportunities to appear on the first page of natural search results. The days of search results pages (SRPs) being limited to text links are ancient history. SRPs now includes a variety of results, from tweets to images and videos. We encourage you not to limit yourself to just one link presence on the first page, but to go for as many listings as possible. The larger your presence on that first page, the better your click-through rate (CTR) and brand recall will be.

We’ve compiled a list of eight opportunities for landing on page one of SRPs for your keywords that are relevant to most business types, together with a “Cliff’s Notes” version of key points on how to optimize each of them.

1. Organic Search Text Link. This is the traditional listing we think of that used to be the sole content of SRPs on Google. Key optimization points here include:

• Have a properly configured page (good page title, etc.) with relevant and original content related to your target keywords.
• Attain high quality, relevant links from authoritative sources for your keywords with a variety of relevant inbound link text.
• Have a URL that is short and relevant to your business name and keywords.
• To bolster your CTR, make sure your page title is less than 64 characters and includes your keywords at the beginning and your meta description tag is succinct and also includes your keywords at the beginning. Both your page title and meta description tag should be unique. For more on Google’s page title and meta description recommendations read here.

2. Paid Search Ad. These are the traditional AdWords text ads that appear at the very top and down the far right-hand side of the results. To optimize your quality score and CTR you can:

• Choose your keywords wisely – it’s actually good to double up. If you rank well for a keyword in natural search or get natural search traffic for a keyword, you can actually increase traffic and brand recall for that term by also having a paid search ad appear for it.
• To have a strong CTR, write ad copy that is highly relevant. This requires very tight ad group organization so you can get highlights in 2 or more lines of your ad copy by incorporating the keywords from your ad group directly into your ad copy in more than one location.
• Offer something unique from the competition in your ad copy.
• Have your ad take up as much space as possible on the page. Take advantage of location display, site links and product feed links to get more “free” lines of space to have your ad stand out.

3. Local 10-Pack Listing. The 10-pack is the box within the set of natural search results that includes a map and a listing of 10 local businesses. When the local 10-pack appears, it takes up a monster amount of space. In order to make your way into the 10-pack, you can:

• Claim your business listing on Google local. Also make sure your listing is accurately submitted to Localeze and InfoUSA.
• Complete all of your business information on Google local – every single field. When categorizing your business be sure to focus on search queries searchers are likely to use.
• Include images of your business with your local listing.
• Get reviews. Reach out to customers and offer incentives for them to post reviews.
• On your website itself be sure to include your local phone number and business address across your pages.
• Get inbound links to your site from local authorities and location oriented sites, such as local news organizations or local business associations.
• Submit a Geo Sitemap to Google – instructions can be found here. There’s also a great free tool that helps you create a Geo Sitemap.
• For more information on the Google 10-Pack, check out our blog post.

4. An Image. Images can also appear in the blended search results. In order to have your images appear here you can:

• Optimize your image alt attributes to include your target keywords.
• Optimize your image file name with your keywords. Be sure to separate the keywords in the file name using dashes.
• Optimize your image title tag, but this one doesn’t carry as much weight.
• Ensure the text surrounding the image on your page is relevant.
• If possible – try some inbound links, or even internal links with descriptive anchor text to further re-enforce your relevancy.
• Avoid going overboard on the number of images on any page, ensure the number of images is appropriate for the page content size.
• Include the word “picture” or “image” along with your keywords – these are very popular search terms.
• Make sure the image links to your website.

5. A Video. I’ve seen some search queries generate up to eight video listings on the first page of the results – what an opportunity! If you can your video to appear here, you can:

• Create and submit a video sitemap to Google.
• Include your keywords within the video sitemap, in the Title, Description, Tags and Category.
• Optimize your thumbnail image – include the code for the image in your sitemap, specify which one Google should use, make it 80X60 pixels and make sure it’s very relevant to the target keywords so searcher are likely to click on it.
• Get inbound links (even internal) with keyword rich anchor text.
• Make sure the content on your page that surrounds the video is highly relevant.
• Include the word “video” in with your target keyword phrase . Video is a very popular search term.
• Host your video on your website, so that you reap all the benefits.

6. News Listing. Especially for hot topics, news listings frequently make it to the first page of Google’s search results. To have your news item appear here, you can:

• Submit a News Sitemap to Google.
• Only submit original-content news, not republished or from a syndication feed.
• Make your news timely. Check out Google Trends to find keywords phrases that are currently hot and trendy for Google. Use these exact terms as target keywords for your news article.
• Make it a dynamic article – include recent updates and allow comments.
• Include your location. Google loves to show results closest to searchers, so let Google know the location the news article is relevant to and where it’s coming from.
• Have a strong publisher reputation. This can be influenced by how much and how often you produce original content for your news category.
• Do some basic article optimization – URL with keywords, relevant title, keywords in the content, etc.
• Include a .jpg image with relevant alt text and caption with no link.
• CTRs matter — so focus on relevant images and your best lines first to bolster your click-through rate.

7.  Twitter Feeds. Another aspect of universal search means that Twitter feeds can be included on the first page of the Google results. Here are some tips to get your tweets onto the first page (for a primer on Twitter and associated lingo, check out this blog post first):

• Make your twitter handle relevant – your company name is a great choice since it will add to your first page presence. Or, make your handle something simple based on target keywords.
• Be sure to include your target keywords into your Twitter bio and page description.
• Get as many “high quality” followers as possible. These should be highly credible sources for your target areas with high volumes of followers themselves.
• Make sure the first words of your tweet include your most highly prized keywords.
• Use a hash tag before your target keyword, but limit yourself to one hash tag per tweet.
• Your hash tag keyword should also be included in your tweet content if you can do this naturally.
• Timely topics and re-tweets are great – another great use for Google Trends.
• Not only can you tweets appear, but your twitter profile can appear on the first page of the results, too, so be sure to include a link from the Twitter profile to your website.

8.  Product Listing. Feed your products to Google Shopping.  Try thinking outside the box here: you can feed your available hotel rooms, pictures of your software product, pictures of homes for sale — it doesn’t just have to be traditional e-commerce products, but anything that’s for sale on the Web.

• Set up your product feed into Google.
• Provide very frequent updates to your feed — daily, if possible.
• Do some link building on your specific products.
• Include keywords in your product names, product descriptions (in the first words), and product images (separated by dashes in the image file name).
• Optimize your product categories for specific keyword terms.
• Fill in every single detail for the product that you possibly can.
• Don’t use any marketing or sales terms in your product feed.  Stick to words that people would use to find you, not necessarily how you refer to things.
• Including holiday or special event terms can be really beneficial for more long-tail terms.
• Connect to your Google AdWords account so that you get your products to also display along with your AdWords ad.
• Always set your location.
• Get ratings. Offer incentives to get a volume of high rates.
• Have a competitive price (including tax and shipping, if applicable).

As with everything else online – the following four main principles apply and will always get you results:

1. Make great, original content…
2. …from your searchers eyes (that is, use terms your searchers use to look for your offerings)…
3. …that is popular (thanks to links, ratings, followers)…
4. …and locally relevant (whether at the country level or a small town level, always indicate where you are from).

Happy first page domination to you!

Google is Still Interested in Search, Right?

As I look back over the last few months and consider the developers’ conferences for Twitter, Facebook and Google, when taken together with Apple’s iPad / iAd introductions, the first half of this year has been nothing short of breathtaking.

At the I|O Conference last week, Google made it abundantly clear it’s going after Apple (and many others), and that they’re all in for HTML5. It’s also clear Google is all in for TV by officially introducing Google TV. One last thing Google is all-in for is mobile, and announced a new Android OS.

One thing they don’t seem to care much about any more is search. That is, it would be easy to conclude that, since search per se didn’t come up once during the conference.

But it’s easy to see why all the things Google is all-in for plays into their core search strength. Before I elaborate on this point, however, consider some numbers:

• More than 100,000 Android-enabled devices are being sold every day, overtaking sales of the iPhone worldwide.

• While there are one billion computer users globally, there are two billion mobile users. And as more and more searches emanate from smart phones these days, its getting easier to imagine these outpacing computer-based searches.

• Moreover, there are four billion TV users around the world; in the U.S., folks spend, on average, five hours per day watching the old boob tube (that’s an old-timey term for TV, not porn.)

• According to Google, $70 billion is spent on television advertising in the United States alone.

So, yeah, it’s easy to see why Google is all about these other things: it all comes back to its core search advertising strengths. The embrace of HTML5 similarly plays to their core strength while also improving the prospects of another key Google priority: YouTube (the boob tube of the 21st century).

A key reason why HTML5 is a darling not only at Google, but also at Apple and Microsoft, is because the as yet un-ratified Web development language supports, among other things, video, graphics and audio. Which means search engine crawlers are now able to index all those bits of web sites that were formerly unindexable (like Flash animations or Flash-enabled video.) Moreover, because these bits can be tagged via HTML5, they can be indexed more accurately.

As search engine optimization pros struggle to understand how to optimize sites for Facebook’s Open Graph, which was announced only a few weeks ago, they must now also contend with migrating to HTML5 – fast. Those that lag might potentially see a diminution in search rank as more nimble sites make the transition faster.

And what about Google TV? First, watch the video. Then, consider all the ways in which Google might use its expertise in marrying just-in-time ads generated from its bidding platform with all the intentions we might express when doing searches (powered by the Android OS and the Chrome browser) via Google TV. Though I imagine they’re going to be more focused on Content Network-type advertising (potentially expanded to enable the just-in-time placement of interstitials in YouTube videos), there will likely also be appropriate ways to include text ads from AdWords.

Users will also be able to visit a favored Web site via Google TV and instantly turn that into a widget displayed on your TV screen, essentially creating a new TV channel that you can tune-in to any time. Add to that all the apps from Google’s app store that will accompany Google TV, and your TV will now go well beyond what your cable provider makes available.

Many of these apps have the potential of bringing social networking components to televised entertainment, such as HitPost, a social app focused on sporting events and which also provides the potential of highly targeted advertising. Advertisers of all stripes will have better targeting capabilities via multiple channels (both literally and figuratively) with much improved measurability.

For brands willing to serve as the early adopters of Google TV advertising opportunities, potentially big rewards – and pitfalls – await. In terms of HTML5, however, that’s a bandwagon all search marketers need to jump on sooner rather than later.  Web developers can get some information from the W3C site, the Standardista Blog and industry leaders are rushing to publish guidelines and materials (follow @HTML5Now on Twitter for regular updates.)