I first discovered the power of incorporating keywords into websites to boost rankings in 1996. By adding a desirable keyword into the META keyword tag and repeating it frequently in the text, I ranked clients’ websites on popular search engines like WebCrawler and Lycos. It wasn’t simple however, as I was optimizing client websites for 14 search engines, which all had differing algorithms. While much has changed since Google introduced PageRank, many of the fundamentals I refined in the 90s still apply.

I originally shared my philosophy on search engine optimization (SEO) a decade ago with The 3 C’s of SEO. In my article, I identified three primary areas of focus for successful SEO: content, code and credibility. While social media has influenced Google’s algorithm, the 3 C’s still apply today. In this article, I will outline the most common (and timeless) mistakes and misconceptions about SEO.

Content
One of the most formidable challenges with SEO is the creation of fresh, unique, relevant and compelling content. Creating copy, photography, infographics, video or other forms of content is both time-consuming and costly. Over the past few years, Google has dedicated substantial time improving the algorithm’s understanding of natural language. With the BERT update in 2019, context came into play, and marketers were presented with another challenge: supporting search intent. As Google’s search algorithm develops and matures, marketers make a few common mistakes when attempting SEO without adult supervision, most of which centers around quality, relevance, and search intent.

For starters, marketers often mistake the value of quantity vs. quality of content. Nowadays, Google has thousands of page graders who manually review individual web pages, and their major criteria includes E-A-T which stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. In short, Google wants to ensure that websites within their search engine provide up-to-date, factual information that users can trust. Google places strict responsibility on pages that offer medical information, financial information, or other highly impactful topics. These pages are aptly referred to as “Your Money or Your Life” pages because the information could significantly affect one’s livelihood, happiness, financial situation, or safety. Ecommerce sites are included within this category as a result of customers imputing credit card information. Thus, marketers should avoid generic, unprofessional or generally low-quality content, which includes outdated information, short blog posts, fact-less articles or poor-quality images and video.

When creating new content for a website, too many marketers fail to keep voice search in mind. While voice search can be performed through voice assistants such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home, the majority of voice searches are now completed through smartphones using Siri and Google Assistant. Not only are queries more informal and conversational, but they also tend to be phrased in the form of an actual question instead of 3-5 topical keywords. A related oversight by some marketers is the failure to localize content for different countries, languages or business locations. The internet is both global and local and Google rewards brands that understand this fact.

Even if marketers can create truly compelling content, some are still working off outdated strategies. The biggest mistake website content can make is not supporting search intent. If the information on your page does not provide a valuable resource to what a searcher needs, Google will never offer your site to their users. How can we begin to understand search intent? Break down queries and target keywords to construct your content. Does the searcher need an answer to a question? Is the searcher looking to do research or make a purchase? Developing your content to address the answers will help prove that your website will provide the best possible support to searchers which gets rewarded with better rankings.

Technical/Code
Google cares a great deal about the technical makeup and performance of websites which involves site speed, schema markup, and user experience. Content Management Systems (CMS) such as WordPress and Shopify are incredible tools that allow novice website owners to create complex and personalized websites without coding knowledge or experience. Even so, there are a handful of technical strategies to consider, and to forego any could significantly impact a website’s visibility. First and foremost, the code must be clean, fast, and responsive. Second, a website should always utilize some form of schema markup which not only provides a search engine with coded information about elements on a page, but it qualifies your website to show in Google’s Rich Results which means more attention and engagement.

The most common problem with CMS platforms is that users rely on plugins to install advanced functionality onto a website which comes with large amounts of code that slows down site speed. Site speed is not only important from a user-experience perspective, but poor site speed can impact how many pages a search engine can crawl. Google recognizes and rewards exceptional user experiences, which includes designing with mobile users in mind. Also known as responsive design, mobile-friendly websites render a page differently depending on screen size. Luckily, Google provides several testing tools that provide clear opportunities for improving site speed.

With or without a CMS platform, websites should be designed with CSS, minimal JavaScript and optimized image and video files for maximum speed and usability. Far too many websites rely on outdated versions of HTML or other coding platforms, or have been built or rebuilt over the years, making them slower, less reliable and more difficult to index. I still come across prospective clients that do not have a current XML sitemap or robots.txt files to help guide search engines. Marketers may also not realize the impact of a sites’ architecture and structure can impact rankings. Historically, Google has preferred a flatter site hierarchy, which sometimes directly conflicted with a deeper structure that was more challenging to navigate and spider.

Google is constantly changing how information gets displayed and how users can interact with results. This means that marketers have endless opportunities to enhance the appearance of their website which ultimately helps to stand out against competitors. To qualify, websites must utilize structured data on appropriate pages. The most accepted form of structured data is JSON-LD which stands for JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data, and there are hundreds of acceptable schema types that websites can use. Currently, FAQ schema is the popular type; however, the other commonly used types include local business schema, product schema, and video schema.

While I haven’t experienced code trickery like cloaking for years, some marketers are still committed to black and grey hat SEO, meaning they are willing to bend or break rules for short-term gains. Unfortunately, Google always catches up and once penalized, websites may not recover for months, if ever. Along the same lines, many sites are not properly secured with an active SSL certificate which means trustworthiness suffers. While we’re on the topic of trickery, it should be noted that Google does not like duplicate content, whether intended or not.

The final area of oversight relating to code best practices, revolves around a website’s metadata. Believe it or not, despite a proactive focus on SEO, many marketers fail to incorporate keywords where it matters most: Title and header tags. While meta descriptions no longer directly impact rankings, they do serve as the elevator pitch to a webpage which means they do impact click-through-rate (CTR). To Google, a website with a lower CTR means it was a bad match or a poor resource to searchers. Additional keyword-optimization opportunities include ALT tags, anchor text and file names.

User Experience
Search engines want to provide their users with the best possible resources available which does not include a website that is slow, unaccommodating, or malfunctioning. Throughout the content development and technical support, marketers often overlook whether or not their website provides a positive experience.

Recently, Google has announced that the Core Web Vitals scores will be considered as ranking signals come May of 2021. The Core Web Vitals scores measure page experience and focus on three major components: loading (CLS), interactivity (FID), and visual stability (CLS). Google rarely provides warnings on algorithm or ranking signal updates, and it would be a mistake to not take advantage of it. It is also important to note that the Core Web Vitals and technical makeup of web pages go hand in hand, so websites with poor technical components will most likely have poor Core Web Vitals scores.

Another major mistake marketers make with regards to user experience – ignoring or unfamiliarity with ADA Compliance. Websites are now responsible for ensuring that websites are fully accessible to all users, and that can be harder than it sounds. For example, visually impaired users rely on screen readers to navigate throughout a website. A button simply labeled “Click Here” makes it impossible for that user to know where that button will lead to. Other common web features that are not ADA compliant include: flashing graphics, videos that auto play without the control to stop it, and images without any set alt-text.

Credibility
While the need for quality content and clean code has not changed in the last 20 years of search engine marketing, credibility factors have changed dramatically. Since Google came on the scene in 1998, with an innovative algorithm that focused on the hub-and-spoke model of authority, SEO professionals have put a good deal of effort into securing inbound links. Unfortunately, too many marketers have forsaken quality links (from popular and reputable websites) for quantity (typically lower quality websites with questionable domain authority).

We’ve known for years that quality trumps quantity when it comes to inbound links. Some marketers are holding out on that insight and continue to purchase links from high domain authority websites or even create or buy into link farms, which has been out-of-vogue for nearly a decade, but still retains the allure for desperate marketers.

While links continue to be a major focus for SEO professionals, there has been discussion around the weighting of inbound links in Google’s algorithm. Recent research unveiled by Stone Temple Consulting at SEMpdx Engage Conference, indicates that links are still a significant factor in the ranking algorithm. The vote of confidence an inbound link (or citation) provides a website is still a key factor and should be considered heavily in marketing efforts.

One area that marketers continue to debate is the impact of SEO initiatives on graphic design, copywriting and coding. In the early days of Internet marketing, I would get into arguments with my interactive agency counterparts about copy, code and design, in which SEO best practices would appear to conflict with design best practices. That issue has largely resolved itself, as Google has become more sophisticated and focuses more on the user experience and high value content. As a result, sites that are beautifully designed with unique content and artful coding tend to out-rank sites designed solely for SEO and not the user.

Credibility covers a host of elements, many of which are unknown or misunderstood by unwashed marketers. One example is domain history, which includes the age of the domain and when it expires. Google likes old domains that expire many years from now, so stop auto-renewing annually and renew every 5-10 years. Domain authority, which is available via Moz, indicates how likely the site is to rank for unbranded terms. A strong domain authority is over 50 out of 100. Off-site factors including quality and quantity of inbound links weigh heavily in the Open Site Explorer domain authority ranking.

A clear majority of businesses have a formal address. Regardless, every business should claim and optimize its Google My Business local listing. The biggest mistake in this aspect is most marketers believe small, local businesses should have an optimized Google My Business profile. However, all businesses and corporations should have an up-to-date GMB profile which is now the top consideration for local SEO rankings. Far too often, marketers overlook the claiming and optimizing of local listings, including Facebook, Yelp and other third-party feed providers for maps and business directories. Another factor related to local listings is reviews. Business reviews can make or break a business, and to take this a step further, reviews must be addressed, particularly reviews on your GMB. Marketers are particularly bad about ignoring bad reviews and not securing a meaningful number of positive reviews, which directly impact revenue, per recent research. Adding one additional star in the 5-star economy, adds 9 percent to topline revenue.

Learn from the mistakes of others and follow best practices when optimizing your website. I’ve included a few helpful SEO resources below, to ensure you are up-to-speed on the latest SEO strategies, tactics and tools.

The post 22 Common SEO Mistakes To Avoid in 2021 appeared first on SEMpdx.

Advertising: Amazon Will Eat Google and Facebook’s Lunch
You may be aware that many product searches start on Amazon. Amazon, smart agencies and brands are already well-aware (that includes Anvil of course). What we see changing most in 2020 is Amazon’s ability to improve its advertising options for brands and sellers alike, especially in the voice search realm (we’ve been wrong about this in the past, but we really feel it this year!). Amazon Advertising is one of the few high growth areas of its business lines and will make greater strides in 2020, taking more market share from Google and even Facebook. Make sure you have an Amazon marketing strategy for your product business in 2020 or get left in the dust.

Display Ads: Animated GIFs, Video and Interactivity will Replace Image Ads
Static image ads on social platforms will start to fall away and videos, animated GIFs and interactive ads will supplant the 25-year-old ad format on popular platforms like Google and Facebook. This trend is already starting to occur, with video becoming increasingly prevalent. The reason is obvious: interactive and motion-oriented ad formats are more engaging, memorable and tend to convert better. While static imagery is still a majority of ad format inventory, that will change by the end of 2020. Brands and agencies designing ads in animated, interactive and video formats will take a leadership role and stand out in a crowded marketplace.

SEO: Structured Data Strategy will be More Important than Ever Before
In 2019, “0” or ‘no-click’ searches surpassed regular clicks on organic and paid links in search results. As a result, brands will need to become intimate with structured data, most commonly powered by schema markup. As more searches move to mobile devices, users are not scrolling down the page, as they expect the first result they see to answer their query. Similarly, with voice search, users expect the first search result to be the best answer to their query. Marking up content with multiple types of structured data to secure the featured snippet real estate will be more important than ever. Sites who do not take advantage of structured data will see their site slip down the results page and will ultimately lose traffic to competitors with strong structured markup strategies. Google wants to be able to provide an answer to a user query as fast as possible, and with structured data on a page Google can more easily understand and compartmentalize the information on you site. With that better understanding, Google will be able and more likely to serve your content as a result when it is applicable to a query. Routinely making sure the structured data implemented on your site is error-free and up-to-date should be a required part of every ongoing SEO strategy.

SEO: Google Will Mandate That All Websites Be Voice Search Compliant
Anticipating the continued proliferation of smart speakers and digital voice assistants through 2020, Google will proactively mandate that all websites be voice search compliant by the end of 2020. Currently, over 40 percent of searches are voice-activated and that will continue to increase, likely becoming most searches by 2021. Website copy and content will have to be voice search friendly to rank well in Google searches. Brands will need to utilize structured data (aka schema markup or rich snippets) to power the ‘best answer’ on smart speakers or position 0 on screens. Site structure and content will also need to be altered to better answer questions commonly asked via voice assistants and smart speakers. Websites that lack structured data will be penalized by Google. This prediction expands on the previous structured data trend.

SEO: Augmented Reality Will Play a Bigger Role
Imagine virtually trying out clothes from your favorite brands without leaving your home. Augmented Reality (AR) can make this a reality. AR provides brands an opportunity to overlay information in video, text, or image format onto everyday surroundings, objects and real-world locations. Nearly 80 percent of the information the brain takes in is visual. By providing information in a visual medium, that also has the spatial nature of augmented reality, brands are giving the brain a very intuitive way of accessing and understanding information. ECommerce will benefit the most from AR implementation, as will destinations, automotive and other complex sales. Brands like adidas and Converse have already implemented AR, earning higher conversion rates with fewer product returns.

Email Marketing: The Flywheel Will Displace the Traditional Sales Funnel
More companies will be moving away from the traditional sales/marketing ‘funnel’ to the Flywheel model in 2020 in order to focus on creating experiences that engage and empower customers. Originally created in 1898, the AIDA (Awareness/Interest/Desire/Action) funnel model is a linear approach that focuses on attracting new customers and engaging them in a business or service to turn them into a quantifiable lead. The flywheel approach takes an innovative view of the buyer journey and uses all client-facing roles such as customer service, marketing, and sales to interact with customers at every stage. Attracting, engaging, and delighting customers even past the point of purchase – so companies continue to interact with customers instead of treating them as one-time-only prospects. The customer is the lynchpin, with the flywheel itself divided into three equal segments, each representing stages along the customer journey: attract, engage, and delight. Each area creates energy and passes it along to the next, with the delight phase feeding back into attract. Note: Anvil was not paid by HubSpot to endorse its model, we just agree with the methodology and hope for greater awareness and adoption.

Email Marketing: Push Notifications Will Replace Email
Email is going the way of the dinosaur, maybe not next year, but in the coming years. Starting in 2020, however, there will be a notable shift to push notifications and chatbots as viable replacements, especially for brands targeting Gen Y/Z, consumers and retail environments. Push notifications are alert style messages that can be sent to a user via desktop or mobile web, depending on context. At least twice as many people today sign up for web push notifications, compared to newsletter registrations. Only the top 10 percent of the email marketers can achieve a newsletter sign-up rate that matches the performance of push notifications. The average time that passes before the recipient opens a newsletter is 6.4 hours. With push notifications, the recipient will see the message immediately. The updates to the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations) and stricter filters have dented the potency of email marketing, which will be further compromised by the CCPA legislation. As alluded to earlier, younger, digital-native audiences favor fewer touchpoints and other methods of communication than email, when engaging brands.

Social Media: Performance Metrics Will Replace ‘Likes’
Those following social media closely are likely familiar with Instagram’s recent decision to hide “Likes” from followers. With the proposed change, only account owners and select third-party platforms will have access to that data. While influencers and marketers alike have voiced concerns about the change, it does provide an opportunity for everyone to be smarter about social media strategies, especially evaluating influencer marketing programs. For example, influencers will need to up their game to become more professional about how they represent their potential impact, focusing on reach and engagement rates over Likes. This trend will also push brands to adopt performance models based on transactional goals. The social platforms, especially Instagram and Pinterest, are making buying product easier than ever, so the timing is ripe for change.

Social Media: Consumers will Drive Alignment and Transparency in Influencer Marketing
Moving forward, look for brands and influencers to create better alignment and transparency. According to research, 84 percent of consumers believe authenticity is important when choosing influencers to follow. More compelling: only 11 percent of influencers are CMA and FTC-compliant when disclosing relationships with sponsoring brands. Millennials are increasingly skeptical of businesses’ motives and impact on society, according to Deloitte. As a result, brands looking to target Gens X, Y and Z will need to be more intentional about how they select and engage influencers based on core values and fit vs reach. Another trend that will go together with transparency and alignment is a shift to “always-on” instead of project-based influencer campaigns. The writing is on the wall for brands and agencies, especially for brands targeting younger consumers, to plan accordingly.

Social Media: TikTok Will Lose Momentum – Relegating It to a Snapchat Knockoff
While we’ve seen a good deal of hype and momentum built around TikTok this year, marketers are still trying to figure out how they can use it to their advantage. It is true that TikTok saw incredible growth this year (over 500 million active users in Fall 2019), which earned it the title “social platform of 2019.” But’s also true that signups are coming to a near grinding halt. As a result, parallels can be made with Snapchat’s adoption history – incredible growth, everyone joins, signups slow, users leave/become less engaged. We believe TikTok will figure out how to utilize ads more effectively in 2020, but we don’t think user engagement will sustain and the platform will end up in the same purgatory as Snapchat. It will become an afterthought as brands evaluate platforms on which to target and invest. The one exception to this prediction, is if you’re looking to reach a very, very broad audience within a certain *cough* young demographic (and China as a growth marketplace).

We hope to get good grades when we review our 2020 digital marketing predictions at the end of the year. Let us know what you think of our 2020 digital marketing trends in the comments section or add your own predictions. May your 2020 be full of fulfilled predictions!

The post 2020 Digital Marketing Predictions from Anvil Media appeared first on SEMpdx.

The post October 2016 – AMPed SEO with Mike Arnesen appeared first on SEMpdx.

Most startups are looking to make the biggest possible impact within the confines of a restricted marketing budget. Digital marketing is highly measurable and more affordable than traditional media channels. Within digital, search is the most common channel to pursue for a successful launch. Organic search engine optimization (SEO) provides a low cost for targeted reach. Paid search (pay-per-click or PPC) advertising can quickly and effectively connect prospective customers with a new business. In this post, we will examine key factors to consider when deciding how to approach organic and paid search as key components of a go-to-market strategy for startups.

SEO Consideration Factors
Organic search is the single most cost-effective channel for building awareness and generating leads, since you don’t pay for each website visitor. SEO is ideal for cost-conscious startups that have more resources than cash, as organic search success is based primarily on the ability to create compelling content over time. While SEO can be considered highly technical (especially when it comes to optimizing site code), it is still fundamentally focused on creating and optimizing compelling content that generates inbound links and mentions of your brand and website to further increase your visibility in relevant search results. While SEO is a front-loaded marketing strategy, the benefits last as long as the life of the website, which his typically 3–5 years. The downside to SEO is that it takes time. In order to build trust with the search engines, websites need a history and a consistent velocity of fresh content and links. New company websites in emerging industries can take weeks or months to rank initially (vs. hours or days for new content on a trusted site).

PPC Consideration Factors
Paid search, on the other hand, is ideal for relatively well-funded startups that are flush with cash and have a more aggressive sales trajectory. PPC campaigns can be turned on within 24 hours and can generate significant returns, depending on media budget, audience, message and offer. While large-scale PPC programs can be exceedingly complex and require dedicated teams to manage for optimal returns, a basic campaign can be set up quickly by a relative novice and generate instant feedback/results. In fact, a modest media budget (starting at $500) is highly recommended for testing keywords before optimizing for organic search, let alone honing overall corporate messaging. Despite a cost-per-click model of buying website visitors, PPC is still one of the most cost-effective forms of generating high volumes of qualified leads over time, as you have the ability to modify campaigns in real-time for optimal performance. The downside to PPC is that there’s no long-term equity in the ads, as once the budget is depleted or campaigns are turned off, there is no trace of the brand’s presence in search results, unlike SEO.

Mixing it Up
While the ideal traffic mix/investment for a mature business is 80 percent organic and 20 percent paid search, many startups are typically inverse: front-loading paid search budgets until trust is built with search engines and organic rankings begin to drive significant traffic. Regardless of your funding and resources, consider a combination of organic and paid search for your company launch (and beyond). Feel free to check out the blog, articles, cheat sheets and white papers in Anvil’s Resources section for more information.

The post 10 Factors to a Successful Company Launch via Paid and Organic Search Marketing appeared first on SEMpdx.

In their quest for the most useful search result, Google’s algorithm has placed increasing weight on social media signals including citations, likes, comments, and shares. Brands that have hesitated to enter the social media fracas have paid a price in terms of organic search rankings. Conversely, brands who embraced social early have benefitted from the additional boost in visibility. The integration of social media tactics into search engine optimization (SEO) efforts can maximize the impact of those efforts on brand visibility, credibility, and sales. The following seven steps will ensure an optimal organic search engine presence.

Step 1: Claim & Optimize Social Profiles
The first and most important step in improving your organic search visibility via social media is to ensure you’ve created profiles on the top platforms. It only takes a few minutes to claim a profile on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+, Instagram, and Pinterest. Be sure to secure your brand name as your handle, as it typically becomes the URL and is your best performing keyword in search results. Make sure to incorporate relevant industry keywords into your biography and status updates to boost non-branded search visibility. If you only have time to claim one profile, make sure it is Google+, as there is no such thing as SEO on Google without a Google+ company profile.

Step 2: Listen, Learn & Apply
In case you haven’t yet figured it out, social media is the world’s largest focus group. Every day, millions of people publish their thoughts, opinions, and insights about your company, competitors, and industry. Analyzing keywords and phrases posted on social media provides insights into future content opportunities for SEO. When you have insights into current trends, you can create unique, timely, and compelling content for your website, blog, and social profiles. Utilize Google, social platform search, and related tools (like FollowerWonk) to identify industry influencers and leverage your content to engage target constituents. The goal: seek the Share, which is the most powerful vote of confidence regarding the quality of your content and credibility of your website.

Step 3: Integrate with Website
In order to maximize the value of your investment in social media, it is important to close the loop between your social profiles and website. The first step is to embed links to your primary social media profiles into your website (ideally at the header or footer of your template, so that they appear on every page for optimal visibility). This will tell Google and site visitors that you have a social media presence worth visiting. The second step is to embed social sharing buttons (again, ideally on every page) so that visitors can easily share your content via their social media profiles without having to navigate away and lose their browsing momentum. I mentioned leveraging the power of the share, and this is the easiest way to facilitate that sharing. The third step is to integrate feeds from your social profiles into your website (ideally the home page). This is a great way to keep your website content fresh and interesting to users and search engines. Utilizing tools like Postano will aid in content syndication, curation, and measurement of engagement. Last but not least, consider syndicating customer reviews from third-party websites on your own website. Review sites are often highly visible and respected, and offer critical third-party validation. Martin Hospitality on the Oregon Coast incorporates reviews from TripAdvisor and other platforms into their websites to boost credibility.

Step 4: Develop Winning Content
Content has always been King. There is no such thing as a social media or SEO strategy without content. Leverage the research performed in Step 2 to create shareable content. Google loves multimedia, so think about a multi-dimensional media content strategy. The most efficient approach to content creation is to start with HD video, as one 60-second recording can be repurposed to YouTube, Vimeo, and Facebook, and edited down for Instagram (15 seconds) and Vine (6 seconds). That same HD video also provides more than 1 million still images (for Pinterest and Instagram), and 60 seconds of audio (for iTunes), and can also be transcribed into text for a blog post or an article. Post and syndicate the content on your website and across your social media profiles for maximum reach and engagement.

Step 5: Go Local, Mobile & Social with Search
According to Search Engine Watch, 50 percent of mobile searches have local intent and 61 percent of those mobile searches result in a purchase. As such, mobile search and social cannot be ignored, especially by retail brands. The first step in creating a meaningful local presence is to claim and optimize your local listings on search engines, directories, and review sites. Google and Yelp are two of the most important platforms in this arena. Once claimed and populated with content, it is essential to monitor and update the listings regularly, as freshness is important. Be sure to optimize your website for local search as well, utilizing Schema.org Local Business markup and Google Maps for driving directions.

Step 6: Monitor Social Mentions & Citations
Among the primary signals influencing search rankings are mentions of your brand in social media. Even if all mentions of your brand are positive (which is unlikely), it is essential to monitor social conversations. Quickly address negative reviews and be sure to celebrate and syndicate positive reviews. Engage constituents in conversation to build rapport and trust. Ask and answer questions about your brand or industry and encourage offline-to-online engagement where possible, including encouraging happy customers to post reviews based on their recent experience. This content will all be factored into your rankings. For bonus points, incorporate positive reviews into your paid advertising and offline marketing.

Step 7: Measure & Optimize
What gets measured gets managed, as my old boss used to say. In order to get the most out of your search and social marketing efforts, it is essential to continuously measure and optimize. While there are limitless ways to measure the impact of social media on your search visibility, there are a few primary metrics on which to focus. The first set of metrics relates to the impact of your presence in social media, and includes shares, comments, and brand or website mentions (aka citations). The higher the numbers, the more credible your social presence and the greater the likelihood that they will positively impact search rankings. The second set of metrics, which are further down the funnel, relate to the impact of social media on your website. These metrics include level of visibility in targeted search rankings, the associated traffic to your website, and any resulting leads or sales (which require conversion tracking in your analytics to properly measure). Last but not least, it is worthwhile to measure overall sentiment and related qualitative metrics, which are likely to impact site traffic, rankings and sales. Regularly tweak your content based on insights from analytics to maximize your rankings.

Due to recent changes in consumer behavior, social media will continue to impact search engine rankings and SEO strategy. By integrating social media with your search marketing efforts, you will see a measurable and positive impact on your rankings, traffic and ultimately, sales. Follow the seven steps outlined above and see a return on your marketing investment in the coming year, before your competitors figure it out.

The post 7 Steps to Leverage Social Media to Increase Search Engine Visibility appeared first on SEMpdx.

Even though I took copious notes, rather than recap all the sessions, which has already been done so well by many others, I thought I would blog about only the newest information I learned.

Not all of the information below came from the sessions, and in a few cases, they came from conversations in the hallways, or even after hours. Not everything here might be useful for you to know, but I found it all to be pretty interesting.

Here then, (in no particular order) are my own top 10 SMX Advanced nuggets of knowledge:

1. Google news
When Google news displays results on the same line, more often than not, it pulls images from one source, and the story snippet from another. I was surprised to hear that, but I’ve verified this to be true.

This makes a great case for making sure that you optimize your images for search, including using an alt tag, surrounding the image by relevant text, naming the image with the word photo, pic, or JPEG etc. in the filename, and ensuring that your images directory is crawlable, and not blocked with your robots.txt file.

2. Where you search from, matters
To hear that he originating location of the search plays a part in the results even for non-geographic search terms was a surprise to me, but besides hearing it from Rand Fishkin during his presentation, a couple of other people confirmed it as well.

I had always assumed that the difference in search results that people might see came only from the fact that Google has multiple data centers, and this is still partially the case.

The apparent truth of the matter though, is that if three people search for “plumber” from different parts of the country, they are all going to be served different results, even if they are on the same Google datacenter.

When I first heard this I was skeptical, but I’ve since been able to verify it (occasionally) by picking just one Google datacenter, and then using different proxy servers to search for the same non-geographic key phrases.

I did this for a few phrases, and sometimes the top 10 were a little different, and sometimes they were identical, so it appears that the variance kicks in only when certain search terms are used.

How does knowing this help you? Well, I guess it doesn’t. Throw in Personal Search, (where Google users can get completely different results when they are logged in), and you quickly realize that SERP reports are becoming even more useless as time goes on (but clients still want ’em, don’t they?).

3. “Who you link to” matters more than ever
Okay I admit that this isn’t really something I learned here, but it seems to have gained more importance than I was aware of over the past few months. More than one speaker referred to “co-citation”, and checking out your link partners websites to ensure that they’re linkworthy.

We all know that linking to a bad neighborhood will closely associate you with that site, so logically, linking to the most authoritative sites in the world can’t hurt, can it? As Google cracks down even further on link sellers and other garbage websites, you want to be sure that you are not recommending them from your own site.

Conversely, linking to authoritative informational websites that are valued highly by the search engines actually does help establish you as a trusted authority of of information. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t give you a huge boost in trust, but these days, every bit helps.

So, might displaying the RSS feeds of the highest authority industry relevant sites help you? I’ll bet it might…

4. Yahoo offers dynamic URL rewriting
Most search marketing professionals know that long ugly URLs strings used to be problematic for the search engines. While they have all gotten much better at crawling strings with multiple variables,
it’s still better to make sure that you have search engine friendly URLs throughout your website.

Sometimes though, technical issues make that unacheivable, so Yahoo site explorer has apparently been offering on-the-fly dynamic URL rewriting since last August, which I think would be a pretty big deal, if they had more market share.

I asked a Google engineer if Webmaster Tools was going to be offering this, and pretty much got told that they didn’t have a problem crawling dynamic URLs, so no, because they don’t have to. For complete details on the why and how Yahoo is doing this, see this

5. Changing registration info can harm a site
Wow, really? During the session titled, “Buying Sites for SEO” more than one speaker talked about not changing the who is information after purchasing an old domain name.

I think it was both Gab Goldberg and Todd Malicoat that suggested using a legal agreement and an escrow service to ensure protection for you, the new owner, but if you could avoid changing the actual registration information, it would be preferable.

The reality is, due to expense and inconvenience, (not to mention the risk of the old owner coming back at you), most of us will not take this step. Whenever I get a chance to grab an old domain, the last thing I would ever have thought of would have been to keep the old registrants information.

I suspect that it’s more due to the combination of factors, like changing hosts, changing registrars, changing Whois information, and changing the content all at once that can trigger a filter causing the search engines to take a closer look at the website.

Still, if you buy an old site, and can manage to retain the content, it appears as if the experts agree that you’ll do yourself a favor if you take the extra steps necessary to work out a way to keep the registrant information intact.

6. Downloadable file from Google Webmaster tools is not totally worthless
When you are logged into Google Webmaster tools, and you go to statistics – top search queries, you get to see two rows of phrases, but only the top 20 on each side. Below the left column there are two links, one to “download data”, and one to “download all query stats” for your website.

It’s probably been six months since I last bothered downloading the “all query stats” file because I found it to be pretty much useless. Although it comes in a CSV format, and importing it into a spreadsheet leave you with your columns of key phrases mashed together and separated by brackets like this –
etc.

I can remember wasting over an hour trying to make something out of this data, and I just scratched my head (okay, maybe I beat my fist on the desk) wondering what I might have done wrong, and finally just moved on. To this day, I still don’t understand why Google doesn’t fix it.

However, a top affiliate marketer named Carsten Cumbrowski has apparently created a tool he calls the
Google stats converter, and it’s really quite useful. Simply visit his site, upload your file, and get it converted for instant download.

Unfortunately, Googles has seen fit to remove the one critical piece of information that you may really want, and that makes no sense to me. I want to see the same information they show me on that top 20 screen before I download the file in the first place, which is to see my ranking for each phrase.

Sure they show you a thousand phrases, along with the location of the search, the search type, whether images, mobile etc., and they even show you the number of clicks, but they won’t show you
where you rank! That seems to defeat the whole purpose in providing the file anyway, doesn’t it?

Why should you care where you rank? Well, if you knew what good phrases you are already already on page 2 and 3 for, then you could optimize some pages and shoot a few links their way to bounce to page 1.

I can’t understand why Google would remove this information other than to make our lives more difficult, so that’s why I’ll continue to use SEODigger. Although the information they provide is up to 90 days old, at least it’s quite helpful for helping a site realize it’s untapped potential.

7. Links from Meetup.com are not nofollowed
Not exactly earth shattering news, but hey, just like Flicker, having access to any well established
and frequently crawled site where you can send some link juice where you like is always nice. Besides, I’m trying to make a top 10 list here

8. Google penalties officially cleared up
Most of us have heard about the supposed Google -5 penalty, or the -30, -60, -90, or even the -950,
were people claim to have verifiable proof that Google has dropped them these exact numbers of spots. I’ve seen these posts, participated in a few myself, and had no doubt they existed.

During the “You & A with Matt Cutts session, Matt verified that yes, there ARE varying degrees of Google penalty, ranging from lowered PageRank, to lowered ranking of varying degrees. Of course we all know it’s even possible to be completely removed from the index, but he said that the penalties are not “specific numbered penalties” that get assigned to different situations.

So now it’s completely cleared up, right? Google does penalize sites as they see fit ranging anywhere from one to a thousand dropped spots, and the exact reasons why are clearly defined right here in the
Google Webmaster guidelines.

9. Age of your inbound link matters
This is another one that I guess I knew, but unfortunately there’s really not a lot we can do about it. What I didn’t know was that it appears to have become increasingly important, and most people I talked with about it seemed to agree.

A brand-new link is not going to do you as much good as a well-established link that’s been around for a long time. This is good news for well-established sites with lots of links, but bad news for competitors trying to break in to new markets with new domains.

This opens up a couple of other questions that I was unable to get answered – namely…

1. Does the age of the anchor text matter? – It’s long been established practice to review your own inbound link profile, and go back to some of your old partners, and try to get the anchor text changed, but might that be “resetting the clock” somehow? Bad idea?
2. Does changing the URL of an inbound link matter? – If you can somehow actually get a link partner to change the inbound link text, then it’s probably no more difficult to get them to change the target. Anyone that’s tried it has seen that help in the past. However, does changing the target URL to a deeper link but would that “reset the clock” somehow?
3. What about changing the domain entirely for that old link? Does that reset the clock too?

Maybe Matt from Google can answer these questions but maybe it’s too specific and would give away some details they’d rather not share?

So, just remember that building trusted links is more important than ever, but in the grand scheme of things, the Internet is still very young. Someday, that link you obtained way back in June of 2008 is going to be old, crusty, and quite valuable, so get to work.

10. I still have a lot to learn
I heard a lot of people saying that for a supposedly “Advanced” conference, there sure was a lot of basic information, and I suppose that to some degree that was true, but only if you stayed in sessions where you are already an expert.

The Give it up session notwithstanding, (where for the first time, I heard “dark side” suggestions and comments at a mainstream conference), I find it very hard to believe that anyone could have a problem finding things to learn here, and saying it wasn’t “advanced” enough. What did they expect? I talked to a lot of newbies there, and trust me, plenty of them were pretty overwhelmed!

As we all get smarter in our chosen niches, we’re always going to find less in our usual session choices, but by branching out of my own comfort zone and attending sessions in a wider variety of subjects, I’m going to be able to continue my quest for knowledge in the Internet marketing world.

I met lots of people and heard several amazing speakers that were far more knowledgeable than I am in their areas of expertise. At a small conference like this, you get to rub elbows with some of the brightest minds on the planet, and pick their brains.

Just a few that come to mind immediately were Jonah Stein of ItstheROI, Jay Young of Str0ud, and Christoph Cemper of Cemper.com. I’d never met any of them before, and it was a nice “advanced” treat.

I also want to extend a special thanks to Jonathan Hochman of Hochman Consultants for picking up a large dinner tab at the Edgewater, and Stephan Spencer of Net Concepts for patiently answering every stupid question i could think of to ask him.

The post SMX Advanced 2008 – Top 10 Nuggets of Knowledge appeared first on SEMpdx.