Writing solely for SEO

Some bloggers use their blogs purely as a way of trying to convince search engines that their site is a so-called ‘authority’ in its field. Those who use their blogs in this fashion at the expense of everything else are likely to suffer for their efforts. Although search engines take notice of keywords and relevant terms in content, they are sophisticated enough to recognise a site that is simply spamming its blog with keywords.

Writing without regard for SEO

Sometimes, you can write articles for your website that don’t contain keywords and aren’t particularly relevant to the purpose of your site. You may include these articles because you find them rewarding to write or because you simply want to keep your site updated. Whilst regular updating is something that has a positive effect in terms of SEO, the lack of relevance in many of these articles could act against you. You must remember that your target audience is generally searching for a particular service that you are offering via a search engine, not directly, and most of the content you put out there should reflect this by showing some concern for SEO.

Striking a balance in your blog posts

As with so many things, the way to get the very best out of your blog is to go for moderation. You have to strike a balance between writing content that satisfies you and content that satisfies search engines. What this essentially means is that you construct posts according to a couple of different principles. One principle will be that which motivates you to write in the first place – your motivational principle. The other will be your editing principle – the one that redrafts what you have produced for SEO purposes.

In order to get going, you may start by writing the articles that take your fancy. Remember to try and stay on topic, because your blog is, after all, meant to contain relevant information for your target audience. If thinking about SEO at the same time as writing stifles your creative process, then just save such considerations for the editing stage.

When your article is complete, allow your editing principle to take over. At this point, you need to identify parts of the post where your keywords would fit without interrupting the flow of the text. A few neat substitutions of words and phrases here and there is all it really takes to turn a weak article in SEO terms into a powerful one.

John Rosser
Content Writer

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

Every time an advert appears for a search query, Enhanced CPC predicts the likelihood of conversion and automatically lowers or raises the ad’s maximum cost per click bid. The thing to note here is that Enhanced CPC can bid 30% above the set max CPC bid if a conversion is likely to happen.

We feel that this new feature will certainly help in boosting conversions, unlike Conversion Optimizer which needs 15 conversions within 30 days to be enabled. This feature comes in very handy and you can apply it to your campaign at any time. In order to set Enhanced CPC for your campaigns, log in to your AdWords account, and select the campaign you wish to test. Then, click settings and look for ‘Bidding and Budget ‘. Click edit next to the ‘Bidding’ option and select ‘Enhanced CPC’. Once enabled, wait for couple of weeks to see how it has impacted upon your conversions.

We hope that Google will keep on adding new features to AdWords, helping advertisers achieve their desired ROI.

Adil Jain
PPC Account Executive

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

At its heart Digg is a democratic approach to a news website where all the users are editors. Once an article or post from a site has been submitted to Digg, it waits in a queue where review users can view it and decide whether they like the submission or not. If they like it then they select the ‘Digg it’ button. If it is liked by enough reviewers it makes its way to the Digg home page.

Digg was originally founded in 2004, and has become popular over the years. The new version of Digg, released this week, provides us with new facilities in keeping up to date with the latest technologies, by entering into social media and attempting to take advantage of all that this market has to offer.

What are the new changes that it has made?

The new Digg has seen the largest update by the site since its launch and is now up to Version 4. So, what are the new updates?

• Allows users to submit articles, Digg content and load pages at a much faster rate.
• Users can now create new custom pages called ‘My News’ which allows users to view and access content from their friends and those they follow.
• Did I just say follow? Yes, I did. The new Digg takes this element from Twitter and allows users to follow others and view what they have Dugg (Like twitter updates) on their ‘My News’ page.
• Of course there is a new slick design to go with the above!

According to Digg’s founder, Kevin Rose, this is just the beginning of a multitude of changes to come.

Why do we think Digg has made these changes?

The web is moving fast and has evolved considerably within the last year. To keep up with this, Digg saw the need to change their vision and direction to keep up with the needs of its users.

Rose mentioned in an interview:

“We’re making some drastic changes, but they’re much-needed drastic changes,” he told The Telegraph. “People are going to be shocked at some of the directions we’re taking.”

Ultimately this was to embrace real-time web, as most Digg users will be familiar with the style of Twitter and Facebook (already well received).

Conclusion

With this new look and the move towards a more social feel, similar to Twitter, it seems that Digg is doing what a lot of other sites are doing and trying to get a piece of the social media market. Many sites seem to be copying the facilities of other already successful sites in the social media arena. This is not a new philosophy in the world of the Internet. There are other examples that I will delve into below:

Google

Google has, over the last month, spent something in the region of $200 million on companies that have brought us the best social network games out there. These purchases however are not in a bid to bring you something that is new-fangled, but instead to provide something that brings friends and social networks together. For me this is exactly what Facebook do now, but Google are keeping their cards very close to their chest about the new Google ME Social network.

Facebook

Facebook has only recently released a new feature for its already vast empire. This feature lets you tell friends where you are by signing in to a location on your phone. Basically, if you went to say Starbucks in Manchester then you can use your phone to announce that you are there and then all your friends will know where you are and they can meet you if they are nearby. This new feature is going to be called ‘Places’.

Funny thing is that this has already been done before and if I am not mistaken is very successful. The company who already do this is called FourSquare. They already perform this social media feature very well and over 4 million people use FourSquare worldwide.

Overall

Using social tools like this can be a brilliant way to enhance and promote your website to others. If you look at all the big brands, they will always have a social media aspect to their internet marketing, as it helps to generate more traffic to a site.

Authors: Gemma Neesham, Ahmed Bhula and David Stopher.

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

Now into its twelfth year, the event attracts thousands of search marketers and professionals alike, with a great selection of daily keynotes, training, labs and sessions to attend. In total, there were over 200 sessions over five days, given by over 80 speakers, so it really was a packed event. The sessions covered a variety of the sessions covered a variety of internet marketing service topics including SEO, PPC, social media, link building, mobile engagement, usability and multiple site issues to name just a few. As well as the above, there were over 100 companies in the expo hall, with a variety of networking events and parties to attend.

SES is an event for anyone who is interested in search marketing, at any level of ability; there are basic or primer sessions for the absolute beginners and advanced sessions for seasoned veterans of search.

Moscone Centre

This is the first time the SES event has been staged at the Moscone Centre and I have to say they did a brilliant job. Registration on the first day took less than five minutes and all the staff were very helpful and welcoming. There were a number of friendly staff stood around on each floor ready to help out and advise. I found the charging station to be a life saver, as many others would agree when their laptops and mobile phones were running flat!

Several Starbucks coffee stations were placed conveniently outside the main halls, which they call ‘tracks’. Lunch was a selection of salads, sandwiches and cakes, all different every day. The expo hall was split in half; one half contained the expo stands and the other half contained tables where our lunch was eaten.

The Sessions

Monday and Friday were full day training workshops, while the conference itself was held for three days between Tuesday and Thursday, from 9.30am until around 6pm. Each morning kicked off with a guest keynote speaker, each a prominent figure in online marketing, who would speak for about an hour. Following that were the actual sessions, with five sessions running concurrently. There were so many topics to choose from, we were really spoilt for choice. Between the sessions were 15 minute breaks with a one hour lunch each day.

SEW Labs

The SEW Labs is a new addition and format for SES. As their site clinic approach, featuring live site audits were so popular they had decided to expand on the format and make it a mainstay. Attendees who wish to have their site audited by leading industry experts join the session in a peer-group learning experience. This particular SES even featured some of SEO’s best, including Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOMoz and Maile Ohye, Senior Developer at Google.

Final Thoughts

This was my first experience attending an SEO conference, and I can say that it was definitely worth it, even if I had to travel almost 10,000 kilometres to get there! To top it all off, I managed to win a signed copy of keynote speaker Tim Ash’s book ‘Landing Page Optimisation’. I think anyone interested in SEO or online marketing would definitely benefit from going to SES as you’ll leave with a wealth of knowledge and ideas.

Julie Cheung
Natural SEO Programmer

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

Adding users to WordPress

The process of adding a new user to your WordPress site is actually very simple; this can be done in one of two ways:

• Allow visitors to register themselves – All they have to do is fill out their email and password, and ‘voila!’ just like that they have created a user on your website.
• Add users using the WordPress Dashboard – As long as you have ‘Administrator’ privileges (more on this shortly), you will be able to manually add users yourself.

The former way of adding users is obviously preferred if you simply want to build a community of users, who will comment and posts and the like. However, when it comes to adding new users who can actually contribute to the content of the website by adding posts and pages,  you will need to add these manually (or at least upgraded existing user accounts).

Assigning roles to users

WordPress controls the access privileges of users by using ‘roles’. When editing or adding a user on the Dashboard, one of the options is to choose a ‘Role’ for the user. These will determine whether that user can simply comment on a post or has the ability to edit and delete content from the website. Below is a list of the roles available by default on WordPress, along with a brief explanation of what each role entails.

• Subscriber
  The most basic user level is a subscriber. These don’t have any access to the websites management functionality, except the ability to leave comments and edit their own profile.
• Contributor
  A contributor is able to write and submit their own posts and pages, but they must be approved by an Editor or Administrator before they go live.
• Author
  As the name suggests, ‘Authors’ can write and publish their own material and attach their own media to posts.
• Editor
  Users with the role ‘Editor’ are able to perform all the available functions related to managing posts, pages and uploaded media – even if they aren’t their own. This includes approving content submitted by contributors. They can also maintain the comments; approving, deleting or editing them if necessary.
• Administrator
  This is the highest user level you can have on WordPress. As administrator you have full control over everything from the WordPress configuration settings to managing users.
• Super Administrator
  Alright, so an Administrator isn’t technically the highest user role available. However, Super Administrators are only used in multi-site WordPress installations, so this option isn’t even visible to the majority of WordPress website owners. Super Admins have full administrator control over all the websites in the network.

Depending on the needs of the website, it is important to delegate the proper roles to users depending on what they are required to do. For example, if you have writers and you want them to only be able to edit their own posts, it is a good idea to give them Author roles. If you have writers, but don’t mind them managing each other’s posts then give them Editor roles.

Stefan Crowe
Content Developer

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

• Always run SQR reports on a weekly or fortnightly basis. This report will give you an insight into the queries being searched for on your campaigns. Analyse the keyword match type and select the best match type for your keywords. The report will also help you find out irrelevant keywords for your adverts. Analyse these irrelevant keywords and add them as negative.
• If you have more than 15 conversions in a campaign within the space of 30 days, then try using a conversion optimiser. With this, you can select a CPA for your campaign.
• Target iPhone and other mobile users by adding ‘phone extensions’ for your campaigns.
• Add sitelinks relevant to your business or campaigns. You can add up to 10 sitelinks and if your adverts are good, Google will reward you by adding sitelinks to it. You will usually get four sitelinks added to your advertisements. So, for best practice, always advertise your first four top pages / products / services on the first four sitelinks spaces.
• Add local extensions for your business. This will give you more visibility.
• Make sure that your adverts are pointing out on correct landing pages as that will improve your ad rank.

In short, always test and refine your campaigns. Doing this will not only improve your CTR but you should also get a better ROI for all your campaigns.

Adil Jain
PPC Account Executive

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

If we want to buy something online, we have to trust.

Problems with this include the following;

• It has to be done instantly - You need to build trust with your users within 1/20th of a second, so you must impress them instantly.
• Users are anonymous – you don’t know them; their browser or location tells you nothing, so how do you build trust?
• They don’t know you – Unless you are a well-known brand, you’re out of luck with instant trust.

The Four Pillars of Trust

Appearance: The fact is we do judge a book by its cover, so it’s imperative that we relay quality and professionalism through appearance as standards are rising all the time. Instead of trying to grab the attention of your visitors, the design of your site should be like Zen, sparse and neat.

Transactional assurances: 70% of people abandon online shopping carts due to a lack of trust. It’s crucial to give assurance of trust at the point of sale.

Don’t bury your trust symbols where no one can see them – they are extremely powerful. If placed at the bottom of the page, your visitors will never see the trust symbols. People read images 400-500 times faster than text, so symbols and seals of trust are important.

Authorities: Authority is powerful. You can ‘borrow’ authority by using better known brands, such as reviews and awards, marquee clients, media mentions and trade associations. However, don’t overdo it but ensure they are visible.

Consensus of peers: If everyone is doing it, then users likely to do it too – peer pressure matters. The number of peers is the number of clients, downloads or transactions you’ve had on your site. Let your visitor know and say it in numbers. Say “54,344 satisfied customers have bought this”. Be specific.

PPC versus SEO

Here are some interesting facts from the session: PPC or SEO? The ultimate search marketing battle.

• PPC has a higher conversion rate than organic SEO; 1.2 times more, in fact
• Who gets more traffic though? SEO gets 7.3 times more traffic than PPC does
• Marketers spend more on PPC than on SEO
• PPC is great for testing keywords
• PPC is good due to full flexibility over spend (CPO, CPL, CPC)
• PPC is good because you can make adjustments within short notice
• PPC is good as results are quicker to achieve and there’s little to no changes to be made to the website
• PPC is good because various targeting options ensure happy visitors, such as customised landing pages.

But in the end, SEO and PPC like each other and work well together. The data generated from both can be exchanged for optimisation. It’s possible to remove space for bad reputation by saturating both organic SEO and PPC spots on the results pages which in turn equates to less space for competition to muscle in.

Duplicate content

Duplicate content is difficult to define as it’s not always an exact replica of a page, but search engines are looking for a resemblance.

Why should we care?

Duplicate content lowers the index count – fewer pages are available to rank due to duplicates being crawled and indexed.

The best converting pages (money pages) may not rank due to duplicates in the index, resulting in a loss of conversion.

Duplicate content is a tremendous waste of resources; crawlers won’t crawl as frequently or at all if they stumble upon duplicate content on your site. Bad for usability as users find duplicate content frustrating if they find duplicates of the same page in the results pages. Plus, it has a negative brand impact.

Ways to deal with duplicate content:

• It should be prevented in the first place – information architecture, site navigation and page interlinking should be well thought out beforehand.

• Robots.txt – are you preventing the web page from being crawled?

• Robots meta tag – if articles are shared across your network of sites, are you implementing noindex, nofollow appropriately?

• Canonical tag – this should be used as a last resort.

Summary

After three days at SES, I feel like I’ll be leaving with a barrage of cutting edge tips, information and thought-provoking ideas from the industries finest. I have gathered many tips, which I’ll be able to apply immediately, and the thoughts and ideas generated will no doubt spur me to approach SEO from a different perspective from now on. While I was only able to briefly cover limited topics in my daily blog post with you, my intention is to further expand on my notes – taken from all the sessions – when I return, and share them with you in much more detail. If I could sum up in one sentence what I have learnt from this experience, it would be that anything that can be searched for can also be optimised.

Julie Cheung
SEO Programmer

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

Using hot triggers in search

He tells us that his design mantra is: “Put ‘hot triggers’ in the path of motivated people.” Hot triggers are things that cause a user to take action, for example a sign, a request or some other call to action. He used Facebook as an example, stating that triggers on Facebook include photo tagging, friend requests, events and status updates, etc. These hot triggers can be placed on various other platforms, such as email and Twitter, the hot triggers on Twitter are actually the messages themselves. Hot triggers work well on social sites such as Facebook and Twitter are there to be distracted therefore, whereas search users are looking to accomplish a task so some hot triggers may not be ideal for search.

BJ Fogg concludes that while technology is ever changing, human psychology stays the same and this is something that must not be forgotten when designing and developing any system

Local Search

The next session included a section on local search delivered by speakers such as Steve Espinosa the VP of Innovation at eLocal Listing, David Rodecker the founder and CTO of Relevant Ads Inc. They stated that search engines call upon three different databases when producing search results pages. The PPC database, the bot crawled organic web index and local listings which consists of maps and business listings.

Local search consists of two types of searches; recovery and discovery. Recovery local search is when the user knows what they are looking for but just require the address or phone number. With discovery local search, the user knows what they want but doesn’t know where from.

They then give their top seven key factors on getting page one rankings in Google Places;

• Have a verified listing submitted directly to Google

• Have the same information on your verified listing on multiple other popular directories (like a popularity contest)

• Have appropriate categories selected that represent your business

• Have the website link in Google Places page that validates your category selection

• Having various online web reference that verify your business does what your categories say you do

• Physical address and local number should be consistent to the geography in which you are ranking for (So no 0800 numbers or a P.O. Box address)

• Only have one Google places page associated with your business – and make sure that the information on the page is complete and unique.

It was great to recieve some useful tips from top professionals about optimising Google local (Google places in the UK). This information has help reinforce our strategy on our Google Places here at Just Search. They even provided the address of a free tool to see how your business is listed in major search engines, this tool is uk.getlisted.org which we will be checking out soon.

News Search Optimisation

The speakers at this session include Brent Payne, SEO Director of Tribune; Allison Fabella, SEO and Social Media Manager of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution; Topher Kohan, SEO Manager at CNN and Eleanor Hong, Lead Editor of SEO at ABCNews.com.

Eleanor of ABC News explains that they look at what is trending in Google Trends, Yahoo! Trends, Twitter and Facebook. With the information they gather, they will then send a daily email to the editors of what’s currently trending and of interest. If there is breaking news, they will also look at related terms as they will be a great source of potential coverage in the following days.

This indicates that the premise of search engine optimisation is now widely used in traditional journalism, with ABC news regularly using information on searches to ensure their coverage is as full as possible.

The main differences between web results pages and news results pages are:

• The crawling is the same, no differences
• With indexing: news sites must request inclusion whereas the web is open for all
• Ranking: Sorority ranking, article ranking (localness of source, quality and trustworthiness, citation, note: links are NOT a factor)
• Sitemaps are needed for both (but different formats have to carry different attributes. Within Google Webmaster tools there are the tag options for all formats).

It is interesting to read that the belief is that links are NOT an SEO factor in news result listings, with Google relying on fresh high quality content and location.

Topher Kohan of CNN shares with us what he thinks is next for SEO:

• Videos – They create a better user experience, are a major push to the index and you can have them work across all platforms. Videos should play on-page, to help optimise for video you should put content around those pages.
• Video XML sitemaps and mRSS: It is essential to include a video sitemap on your website
• Semantic mark-up and micro formats: Google and Yahoo! are working on an open source set for a new standard
• HTML 5: This is going to completely change how search engines view the web so this is extremely important. Code will be easier to crawl and will be more understandable
• Yahoo & Bing: These shouldn’t be forgotten. They can potentially add an extra 10% of traffic so make sure you rank in Bing as well. Currently Bing is trying to seal a deal with Facebook to become their on-platform search engine.

It was really interesting hearing the views of some leaders of the SEO field with their take on several key topics of the day. Local search is becoming ever more prevalent and something we cannot ignore, and whilst we optimise for keyword terms in the organic traffic we mustn’t forget that local search needs optimising too.

News optimisation was fascinating, with SEOs from the main news providers summarising how they look for trends and how news results differ from normal, organic results. All in all, I felt the day was extremely insightful and looked into many different areas of search that we may not otherwise think of optimising.

Julie Cheung
SEO Programmer

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

Day 1

I was really excited to win tickets to the SES San Francisco conference and I have come here to represent Just Search as a company. There were many seminars on the first day, and far too much information for me to place in one blog post. Therefore I have decided to update you on the best bits from my day.

Spending on Internet Marketing

Interestingly they stated that money changes everything. In the US, currently 34% is spent online but only 12% represents media spend. These figures are set to massively increase and the prediction is that this will double by the year 2014, because technology is changing fast. This again further proves that even after the recession spending online is still increasing at a fast pace.

Search marketers becoming performance marketers

One interesting topic discussed was how search marketers are now becoming more performance marketers. Search is only one channel of obtaining traffic, there are many other forms of obtaining traffic meaning that search marketers also need to be mathematicians, who understand data and have ability to find trends within the data.

The future of Search

There were many ideas about how search will evolve in the future, some key comments include:

• Search results in the future will be real time and connected – The use of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter has resulted in twitter and blog results appearing in the search results. In the future, results are going to be influenced by those in your social networks. People we know or trust may influence the search results.

• Convergence of new technologies – Search in the future may be influenced by user behaviour. Search in the near future will be far more portable than simply on a PC. This will result in mobile searches outpacing PC searches, with most of the focus being on local based targeting, as mobile users will more often than not be looking for local not national services

• Today, search is keyword dominated – The future will be leveraging information through devices such as camera search, voice searches and social led searches.

These changes mean that marketers will need to think more outside the box when creating an online marketing strategy. Marketers will need to think about the following:

• Setting aside budget for testing and innovation
• Invest in data systems and skills – Employers will need to invest in more skilled workers who are able to analyse large volumes of data
• Think outside the PC – Think more about mobile devices that will be used now and more importantly in the future

Perhaps one of the best parts of the seminar is the questions and answers section. One great but simple question we all wanted to ask was ‘where SEO is going’? Below is an answer from Brian Kaminski, the CTO at iProspect.

Brian defined SEO as: “the aiding of generating useful information, if you see it like that. Stating that SEO is going nowhere as long as it continues to benefit users”

Conclusion

I really enjoyed my first day and met a lot of interesting people. I also took plenty of pictures which I will be hoping to share with you all over the next few days. It’s interesting to hear key speakers discuss the future of search, and how mobile search will affect search marketers in the near future, something that is food for thought for Just Search and our competitors here in the UK.

Tomorrow’s line-up seems equally as good, and I look forward to seeing what the day brings. I will be updating you all as soon as I can through Twitter and posts through Just Search UK.

Below are some images from my first day at SES

Me with Bruce Clay

Wendy Sturgis, Yahoo

Julie Cheung
SEO Programmer

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

Yes – Google is right to relax the policy

There is a very cynical view out on the internet that Google have done this purely to increase revenue. Although this is quite easy to believe, I do not believe this to be the reason, or even a main fact in the reasoning. If you are a reseller of a product that is trademarked, you would want to advertise that you sell a particular product. But due to the current trademark rules, Google will block you unless you get authority from the trademark owner to use it. So, the only way around this is to create similar words to the trademark, such as i-pod or i p o d instead of iPod.

Relaxing the rule will allow resellers to advertise more freely; they are not wanting to trick visitors into thinking that they are the trademark owners, just that they sell a particular product. This is also in the best interests of the trademark owner as a sale is a sale.

No – Google should not change the policy

The current policy helps protect brands that may have spent millions of pounds and many years in building up a reputation and recognisable brand. Under the current policy, if a client wants to use the trademark to resell they can always apply, giving full control to the legal owners.

Google is the provider of advertising space, so just like TV, newspapers and traditional forms of advertising they have a duty to help protect trademarks.

It will now be up to the trademark owner to stop any misuse of the trademark, whilst Google still profits.

Philip Pollock
PPC Account Manager

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC