Posts Tagged ‘Search Engine Optimization’

Is Your SEO Still on Track with Google?

in Search Engine Optimization on February 20th, 2013 | No Comments »

SEO is a rapidly changing business for international and local Seattle industries. Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines are constantly updating their policies, but Google, which controls more than 70% of traffic, updates most of all. If you haven’t been keeping up with Google’s SEO trends your website might not be on track, which means that you could begin to see your ranking and your traffic drop whenever your website is scanned! Check your Seattle SEO against these recent SEO changes to make sure you are headed in the right direction.

Images No Longer Help With SEO

In the first month of 2013, many website owners saw their traffic soar as Google’s new image search policies directed more and more visitors to properly tagged images. As a result, many SEOs began using targeted photos as a form of SEO. Now, Google has changed their image policy so that the searcher does not actually have to visit your website to get the full size image. This change took place during first week in February and it’s definitely a game changer. While you can still benefit from having keywords as your image title and alt tags, it probably will not increase your SEO.

What about Headers?

Headers are great to include in your blog because they help organize it (and Google loves organization), but they don’t help with your SEO very much. The old rule of putting one keyword in the title and one in a subtitle no longer works because Google isn’t really paying attention. Using the right keywords in your content lets Google know what it is you are talking about without using it in a header. Importantly, your title should include your keyword or a variation of your keyword. However, this is for the readers benefit, not Google’s.

How is Your Social Doing?

If you really want to dominate Google in today’s market, you have to pay attention to your social. New updates are placing even more focus on social responders including how much, and how quickly, you get social shares and likes. While a good post doesn’t necessarily need a lot of attention from social to come up in search, it does help if you have a competitive keyword. Look around, check anyone competing for your Seattle SEO keywords and see how they are doing. If their SEO is as good as yours and you are doing worse than they are, the answer is likely in social. Similarly, if you aren’t participating in Google’s Authorship program, you might want to start because it makes your post larger in search and can help you to get more prominent positions once you start to build your author rank.

Backlinks

You might already know this but now, more than ever, a surge of artificial backlinks can kill your ranking. Google has caught on to spam techniques like automatic link building, link submission, and even mass guest posting on low PR blogs. Now if you want your backlinks to be beneficial to your site, they must publish quality content, not have a history of spam, and usually be at least PR2 or hire. While there are a lot of variables, the moral is that you should choose your backlinks slowly and build to your site from quality links and articles.

Want to know more? Keep following Rory Martin to stay on top of the latest Seattle SEO that will affect your ranking. Google is changing quickly which means that it is important to stay on top of the factors that affect your SEO.

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Seattle Social Media: 5 Reasons Google Authorship is a Must-Have for Any Blogging Website

in Social Media Marketing on January 12th, 2013 | 2 Comments »

Google Authorship is one of Google’s newer tools for authors, and one of the newest ‘SEO kittens’ available for site owners. With recent and forthcoming updates to Google’s search engine algorithm, Google Authorship is expected to be very important to blogging websites, and an integral part of Seattle social media optimization sometime in the very near future. So what are the benefits of Google Authorship, and how can you utilize it for your site?

Attract More Attention to Your Post in Search

The first and most obvious result of using Google Authorship is that you will eventually see a photo, a small bio, and a link to your Google + directly in search. While this might not seem like much more than a vanity point, consider two things. The first is that the post is bigger than any posts that do not have authorship, this immediately attracts more attention. Second, and most importantly, anyone looking for a quality article can see who wrote that article and that you are confident enough of its quality to put your name and your face on it. Google Authorship has sometimes seen as much as a 30% increase in click through rate based on impressions, meaning that you could be getting a lot more traffic just by adding your name and your face to your results in search.

Increase Author and Site Credibility

Not only are you putting your name on your post, you’re allowing Google to see what you are claiming. Based on your user reaction, the helpfulness and SEO quality of the blog, and of course, the amount of social media sharing you get, Google will ‘remember’ that you post good content, and start placing you higher in search. Readers can also see how many followers you have on Google +, a great indicator as to whether or not you deserve to be read.

Easily Access Statistics and Click-Through Rates

If you’re attempting to track your content to see click through rate, traffic, or even average position in Google search, there is literally no better tool than the Google Authorship statistics. Currently the tool is only accessible via labs (meaning that it may break, vanish, or disappear at any time), but it is well worth your time and effort to check out. Want to see for yourself? Log into your Google Webmaster Tools, click ‘Labs’ and then choose ‘Author Stats’.

Does Google Have a ‘Favorite’ Child?

It has been rumored in the past that Google has a tendency to ‘play favorites’ with its own content, so you might want to consider using Google + and utilizing Google Authorship with it for that reason. Google currently owns about 65-75% of internet search, meaning that of the estimated nearly 300 million internet users in 2012 at least 195 million used a Google search engine.

Benefit Your Local Seattle Social Media Optimization

Last year, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam, talked about how a well ranked Google Authorship website might continue to place well in search, even if the site changes hands to someone who doesn’t worry quite as much about quality. But this doesn’t mean you should start being lax with grammar and content, instead, it means that once you have a reputation, you will keep it for some time.  Google authorship allows you to build your SEO over time by simply posting great content and engaging with your readers, customers, or clients. Social activity involving your posts, sharing, number of clicks, and of course, your number of followers will all contribute to your ‘credibility’. With the many new changes to Google search engine algorithms, including the introduction of Penguin, Panda, and Google Authorship; you can’t afford to exclude this great tool from your Seattle Social Media optimization. If you have not set your Google Authorship up yet, you can find out how here.

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How to Plan a Link-Building Strategy

in Search Engine Optimization on November 2nd, 2012 | No Comments »

You might have heard the phrase ‘link building’ tossed around when new media marketing professionals talk about search engine optimization,  and to many, it sounds incomprehensible. How can you build a link? Can you pay someone to link to your site, like an advertisement? Or do you create connections with other companies and bloggers, who might then link to you? The answer is: both of these strategies, and more.

Link Building Tools

But let’s start from the beginning. When coming up with a link-building strategy, we need to know what we’re aiming for. Which website linking to yours would be the best for your company’s overall business strategy? Shoot for the stars at this stage, because you really never know who might pick up on your content. Once you have a comprehensive list of all the sites you’d like a link from, highlight the biggest. This doesn’t have to be the site with the most readers, but the one with the most authority in your area of expertise.

Now ask yourself: Why would they want to link to us? The answer is already on their site. What kind of content do they currently publish? What do they usually link to? Are they all about fresh new statistics? Unusual ways to make business connections? Graphics about obscure points of code? Try to find a gap in their current content spread – maybe they haven’t covered JavaScript in a while, or perhaps you recently had an employee attend a stand-up comedy workshop for better confidence when giving presentations. Whatever you choose to write about, make sure that you have as much information as possible on this subject. Remember this piece is going to be seen by hundreds of thousands of people, right?

After bringing all the research together, and creating the content, see if there’s a timely opportunity to publish it. Maybe it’s World Comedy Day or World Code Day. These sorts of events mean that people will be looking for content on these topics, and they will be prepared to share them. On a smaller scale, there will be blogs running carnivals, and blogs curating all the posts on these topics for that day, so seek these out and make sure you get a link on their websites. This will make it easier for the bigger names to find you.

Finally, don’t assume that researches on the big name sites, or in the big name companies, will stumble on your content, and don’t be afraid to directly contact the people who you want to link to you. It’s more acceptable than ever to shoot off a succinct and respectful email asking for a link, or even to Tweet at people who might be interested in your piece.

What do you think of this off page SEO strategy? Have you successfully earned a link from a big name site or company? How did you do it?

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Cultivate Inbound Links by Diversifying your Audience

in Search Engine Optimization on October 4th, 2012 | No Comments »

An important factor in search engine optimization is cultivating in-bound links. Links that come to your site from a well-known, authoritative website increase the likelihood of search engines deciding that your site must also be authoritative.  This is especially true if the linking site uses a keyword for their anchor text that’s something you offer or something that you want to be known for – i.e. ‘great marketing techniques’ or ‘best sauna’.

There are various strategies for encouraging other sites to link to your website, and they all primarily involve offering them something to link to by way of content, but also giving them a reason to do so.

Many company blogs are well-written, frequently updated, factual and interesting, yet still don’t receive as many incoming links as, say, a less-well written or informative piece about social media. This may be related to the fact that there are just fewer sauna-builders or owners with well-kept blogs or a renowned social media presence than there are social media consultants, who live on the internet.

All is not lost however. The answer here is to appeal to a demographic which builds links. A corporate website that sells and builds saunas could write about working from home, for instance, and ask how people move from work-mode into evening-mode without the benefit of a commute. Finally, they can suggest that readers purchase a sauna with the money they save commuting! Many people who work from home make use of social media, or blogging, as a pseudo-office environment and might get involved in a discussion about after-work decompression techniques.

Something else to think about is language use and structure, especially if you want the media to pick up on your site. Would a reporter be able to link to your site to provide further evidence for their piece? This isn’t to say that you should know what a newspaper is about to publish on, but having a clear title and an obvious slant from the first paragraph, as well as accurate and researched facts should increase the likelihood of a piece being linked to – by anyone, not just the media.

The main factor to consider when trying to cultivate more inbound links is to ask what is in it for the people linking to you. One tactic is to run giveaways which require linking to the site, but consider that many people use their blogs in order to appear authoritative on a subject. Being well-read is one way of appearing authoritative, so make your content as helpful, or factual, as possible, and this will encourage people to link to your site in order to look better-educated themselves.

Have you had any success with building inbound links to improve search engine optimization? What is your preferred method of encouraging these relationships?

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Search Engine Optimization for Better Organic Rankings

in Search Engine Optimization on September 26th, 2012 | No Comments »

GreenAre you tired of paying companies for search engine optimization and continuing to find yourself on the third page of results? SEO is about more than throwing money at keywords (although buying your spot can be a part of a well-integrated optimization strategy).  There are plenty of ways to ensure a well-placed organic ranking with search engines and, just like a well-integrated strategy should, they involve good quality content, cultivating inbound links, and having an easily navigable site. At RoryMartin.com, we know how important SEO is to conversions and click-through-rates.  Here are a few things to remember when performing optimization on your site:

When it comes to content, make sure that your keywords are placed in the title of the piece or product page, and also in the headers. H1 tags are great indicators of what a page is about.  Search spiders often crawl these first, and curate pages accordingly.

Some companies go a little overboard in this, and fill their pages with any and all keywords – related or not. This may earn you a penalty from Google; however, if it does lead search engine spiders to your site, it won’t necessarily attract living, breathing human beings.  If you have ‘Toshiba Laptop’ in your title, and a potential customer finds that you only resell MacBooks, your conversions will drop.  Your clients will be very disappointed – and possibly vocally so.

Try to make your content sound as if it was written by humans for humans, and work the keywords in naturally. You can also add a keyword or two into the URL of the page, without it appearing in the title. This will increase the likelihood that you come up in search results for that keyword, without having to force it into the title of a piece.

If you have a large website, or a site with lots of content, such as a frequently updated blog, then your users will want to navigate around it with ease. Search engine spiders are the same. Have you checked your website recently to make sure that all of your links are working, that they all reach the appropriate page, and that they are all tagged or categorized correctly? This is something that should be done frequently, especially if you are constantly adding new content and/or products. Both users and spiders will become frustrated and give up if they can’t easily find what they’re looking for.  404′s, 403′s – they are not your friends.  Keep your links up-to-date.

We know that search engines rank sites according to their authority, which is why incoming links are so important. The more sites that link to your site using keyword-specific anchor text, the higher your site will rank as an authority on this text. Of course, generating links to your website takes a lot of work and relationship-building with other website owners or bloggers (along with producing the sort of content that others will want to link to in the first place).  This off-page SEO is one of the hardest parts of Search Engine Optimization.

If you follow white-hat SEO, your website should naturally rise through the rankings.  The added bonus: fellow website owners and bloggers are now aware of your site, and are more likely to promote it to their followers!

What’s your top tip when it comes to search engine optimization geared towards organic rankings?

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Solve Your Customers’ Problems Through Search Engine Optimization

in Search Engine Optimization on September 25th, 2012 | No Comments »

Search engine optimization is certainly one of the trickier beasts to handle on the internet, which is why we at RoryMartin.com work hard to help you improve your SEO, and implement search enginge optimization strategies which will result in increased customer conversions at your website.

How many times have you, frustratedly, typed a question into a search engine, rather than a search specific keyword? We’re not talking ‘Where are my keys?’ but more, ‘Why is my internet so slow?’ or ‘Why doesn’t this bike pump work with my tires?’ Many companies use their websites as a place to put the information which they want people to read, but only a few companies give a thought to what their customers might actually want to know.

People purchase products or hire services because want solutions to their problems. All good marketing creates an awareness of this problem in the potential customer’s life, and then offers the perfect solution – as far as they’re concerned. Most companies use this tactic in their advertising, but how can this be used for better search engine optimization?

Implementing this is a several stage process. You should already know the most popular search terms through which people arrive at your website, so it’s important to notice if any are of the ‘frustrated question’ type. Firstly, see if is this a question which your business was made to answer. If it is, then check which page this search leads to. Does this page have an explicit answer to this question? If it does, then congratulations! You can expect this person to have a positive view of your website, and your products or services. Hopefully, this will even lead to a conversion.

However, if the page doesn’t have an explicit answer to this question, when it could, then your site will achieve the opposite of the desired effect. The final stage in this implementation process is to either create new pages which directly answer the most common question searches, or to clearly add in the information which most people come to your site searching for.

What do you think of this as an SEO strategy? Have you already implemented something similar?

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What Search Engine Marketing Can Do For Your Brand

in Search Engine Marketing on September 19th, 2012 | No Comments »

When was the last time that you invested in some search engine marketing for your business? If you think that all that was dealt with when you set up your website, then it might be time to gather up your colleagues and have a little chat.

Search engine marketing doesn’t stop once your website is set up, it’s an on-going process which everyone in your company can be a part of. In a world where link-building and social signals are a key part of boosting your company websites rankings, it seems strange that over half of most U.S companies actually block their employees access to social sites, such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

Why? Earlier this year we thought up seven solid tips for good SEO, one being to cultivate links with other sites. Well, what if the links were coming from inside the building?

As a part of a wider search engine marketing strategy, which includes link building outside of the company, it can be very beneficial to encourage employees in the building to talk about their work on social media sites, and even to blog about their work and research – with links back to the company site.

Of course you would want to keep a handle on the specifics, but developing a strategy like this – where potential customers feel as though they are getting to know (and coming to trust) more sides of the company than just the marketing arm – can do wonders for the visibility of your brand in search engine rankings. And with all the sites linking to each other, they’re only going to continue to become stronger.

Would you consider implementing a search engine marketing strategy like this at your workplace? How do you think it would benefit your brand?

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Content Marketing For Search Engine Optimization

in Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing on June 20th, 2012 | No Comments »

Will content marketing ever replace traditional methods of garnering attention for your brand? This is a question which raises a lot of ire on the internet, as traditionalists point out that blogs and social media will never have the reach of an advertisement placed during the Super Bowl (as if every company can afford to do that!) and content marketers and search engine optimization specialists, like the team at RoryMartin.com, retaliate with the fact that people use search engines before doing anything: buying a product, booking a holiday, hiring a service, going out for dinner.

When people are using search engines to help them make all of their decisions, then your company needs to be ranking high for the keywords they’re plugging in. Content marketing is a part of search engine optimization, and it works like this:

Search engines love fresh content

We all assume that the latest news must be the most accurate, and so does Google. Having a blog which is updated weekly is the perfect way to start your journey to the top of the rankings.

Search engines search for authoritative sites

The way that a website’s authority is measured can vary between search engines, but a big part of authority is how many people are sharing your content. It’s unlikely with a static site that you’ll frequently get enough people linking to your page on Super-Cool Jacuzzi X9500 to boost it up the search rankings – unless you have an offer on! – but if you wrote a blog post about how to clean it, or the latest celebrity to purchase it, then you might find a lot of interested readers deciding their networks would be interested too. Social signals are very important in the early stages of ranking. If your article gets shared by many influential people, you get a higher exposure for a limited amount of time.

Search engines value consistency

Social media shares will boost your page rankings for a certain period of time. This is usually about a week, depending on how large your network already is, and where the post is being promoted. If your article is good, though, this is about the time that people will start linking to you.

There is no long-term ranking without links from one site to another, but if you are publishing new content weekly and it is being shared regularly, then your website should remain consistently ranking highly for your chosen keywords. In fact, you can choose different keywords to rank for each week!

Content marketing also builds familiarity, likeability and trust among current customers, potential customers and most importantly, people who interact online with potential customers.  If you need to determine a content marketing strategy, RoryMartin.com’s social media and SEO experts can help.

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Optimize Your Mobile Site for SEO and Reach a Wider Audience

in Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing on May 18th, 2012 | No Comments »

With 1.2 billion mobile web users using their smartphones to search the internet every day, you need to make sure that your mobile site is grasping and keeping the attention of your audience. Here at RoryMartin.com, we strive to bring you the latest news and information on SEO and Social Media strategy, and we have advice for you on how to correctly optimize your mobile web site for the best user experience.

First off, think about why a user would come to your mobile site. What information are they looking for while on the move? Brands like Walgreens understand that most mobile users are looking for their nearest store, so location search is firmly at the top of their mobile site. Develop a searcher persona of a mobile user based on keyword, demographic and psychographic research. Motivations of this user ought to be the basis of your mobile site.

Once you have a site filled with content appropriate for mobile users, it’s time to think about SEO. Late last year, Google introduced a smartphone bot which access mobile sites in a similar way to iPhones, but they have been rather reticent on how the bot likes mobile sites to be optimized. Luckily, SEO experts out there have been working on figuring this out. Much of what is true for desktop SEO is true for mobile SEO: avoid duplicate content, avoid black hat techniques, and make sure your pages have tags relevant to the content.

However, there is one issue with mobile sites which might find your site ranking a little too low for your liking and that is 404 errors and misdirects. There is a risk that Google’s new smartphone crawler may be overly literal at first, and rely exclusively on the redirects that are in place, but not evaluate other signals or algorithmic elements. 404 errors on the mobile web can occur from something as typical as trailing slashes, or a misplaced capital in the url. Having lots of these errors on your site hinders crawling and indexing, and can cast your mobile site in a bad light. Check your content frequently for indexed 404 errors in Webmaster Tools to catch these issues as they arise, especially when adding more pages and redirects.

Finally: splash screens. There are a lot of people who think it’s a great idea to have a splash screen when someone first accesses their mobile site. We definitely want people to see something amazing when they come to our mobile site but from an SEO point of view, splash pages are a terrible idea, and their main effect is to cause visitors to leave your site!

If all of this seems a little too complicated, rest assured that we at RoryMartin.com are just waiting to work with you to improve the search engine optimization of your mobile site, and give you and your audience the benefit of our experience in social media marketing.

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Have You Gone Overboard on Your Search Engine Optimization?

in Search Engine Optimization on May 3rd, 2012 | No Comments »

The rules of search engine optimization are always changing, and at RoryMartin.com we keep on top of those changes, for your benefit. Recently, Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, made a comment about how the search engine will soon be penalizing sites which go overboard on their SEO. Some typical ways of improving rankings will now be responsible for pushing your site off the front page; maybe it won’t even appear at all.

Previously, search engines have assumed that a website or blog post which mentions certain words, over and over, will be relevant to that word, which seems logical. However, some SEO practices repeat certain words more than necessary, to the point where the website content becomes useless, but ranks highly. We are assured that keywords are still important, but optimization tricks such as duplicating content and writing repetitive post and page titles will be no-go. Primarily, the search engine will be looking for signs of life.

We’ve compiled a few tricks of our own to help your website and social media strategies stay afloat as the changes roll out.

To begin with, try to consolidate any duplicated content. For instance, if you have one page on ‘Decorative Lights’ and one page on ‘Fairy Lights’ with similar general product descriptions, this could work against you.

Too many links in your website could become a problem as well. It can be difficult to know where to draw the line, especially if you sell a main product and accessories – you will need a thoroughly linked website – but a footer full of arbitrary links is a distraction for the user and a point against you from Google.

Even too many links into your website can now affect you negatively, although this is mainly a problem if they come in from penalised websites. Instead of arranging linkshares with websites, try to cultivate a social media presence; Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn links are all being integrated into Google search algorithms and are seen as more trustworthy – social media is all about people sharing useful links rather than bots spamming keywords, after all!

We want to help you improve your search engine optimization strategy, so if you’ve noticed a drop in your traffic, or if you’re just starting out with your website, get in touch and let us give you the advantage of our expertise.

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