Monday, June 24, 2013

SEO Tactics Die, But SEO Never Will

This article isn’t about review for broadening our brand; it’s all about why we think every statement of SEO's termination misses some foundation about our future.

The Essence of Search

The internet is so large that even Google get weary of counting and it’s increasing in size exponentially. It’s been five years Google has notified the trillion mark, and the article suggests that URL changes now make the potential indexed page count theoretically infinite.

We can't simply print out the internet and read it at our spare time. We need a filter - a way to sieve and classify our collected content and that's basically all that search is. However search develops gradually or whatever happens to Google, the extension of human knowledge is accelerating. Unless we endure a technical deluge, we will need search in particular form for the rest of human history.

Searchers and Searches

Until search exists, there will be two groups of people: 1) People want to search some things and 2) People who want to be found in the search or both and the people who want to be found could be businesses, governments, etc., but for each search there will be some essence who wants themselves to be in good position in search engines.

They want to be established in search which isn't new or unique to online search. What’s unlike to online search is that the process has become so complex that automated techniques governs who gets found, and as the range of knowledge grows, that's not about to alteration. The end result, whenever a system controls who will be found in search and the people who understand that system well sufficiently to help being end up on the results.

This goes across manipulative, black hat practices - data needs to be give a pattern, regulations complied with, and many flinders put into place to make sure that the information should be systems friendly that make a systematic list and filter it. As time passes these systems will get more refined, but they will never be absolute. As long as the search exists, we need experts who can optimize data so that it can be found without difficulty.

SEO Is Not One Tactic

When we say "SEO Is Dead!”, we’re normally reacting to the latest tactical fad or notice from Google. Finally, we can say that SEO is not one strategy and however Google at present dominates the market but SEO never live and die with Google. There's no question that search is changing, and our diligence is hardly out of its state. In the broad feeling, though, the necessity for people who create good information and attract people to that data will outlast any single tactic, any single SEO expert, and even any search engine.

New Feature in Adwords: Sitelink Descriptions

   Google Adwords is introducing new feature called sitelink extensions. You can add descriptions to the sitelinks which displays along with your ads. You can be able to easily click on the page which is mostly relevant to you and helps advertiser by reducing irrelevant clicks. In February 2012, sitelinks with further details are shown in the ads but they were pulled from other ads in the campaign.

   At present Google allows advertisers to mention the specific text advertisers to appear in the sitelink descriptions. Advertisers can also control the copy of sitelinks and what appears on enhanced ads. They will also be specific in choosing what text should appear.

   If your campaign is not converted into enhanced campaign then this option will not be active. If your campaign has been upgraded to enhanced campaign you can see the description field while you create or edit sitelink.

   Below is the screenshot for adding new descriptions to edit existing sitelinks or creating new sitelinks:

Tech Specs:

   The character limit of link name in sitelink is 25 characters. Both the descriptions 1 and 2 can have 35 characters. You can use 95 characters for sitelink extension. Sitelinks should not be similar as others which are in the same adgroup or campaign or ad and also should not use keyword insertions.

   For example, you can see how sitelink descriptions appear in search results for the keyword ses san francisco:

   The click-through rates are high for the ads which appear with sitelinks with additional details. These sitelinks provide additional information which will be useful and relevant for searchers. You can add up to 4 sitelinks in a text ad.

   Using these sitelink extensions you can expect high click through rate and quality of traffic from your campaign and increase in conversions. So start upgrading your accounts and use the new sitelinks with descriptions.

Five Ways To Get Response When SEO Clients Are Unresponsive

In this business world, clients are busy with their multiple responsibilities. So this might be one of the reasons for not responding to your SEO efforts. In such situation in order to drag the minimum response from the busy clients there are few tactics to be followed.

The following are the five tactics that you can follow up to get response from unresponsive clients:

1. Check and buildup existing content assets:

If you want to get a new content on to site, check for the existing assets available for promoting it to clients’ site. Look up for most visited posts, widgets, highlighted content etc. With this analysis you will get an idea about linkable content assets on blogs. Also you can find with tools like majestic seo, ahref's and open site explorer. With these you can come to know the links to the particular site. You can also check specific traffic in referral traffic of webmaster analytics.

2. Check and buildup existing press announcements and leaderships:

You can check up for existing press announcements and leadership profiles
to find opportunities. Check out the new events that didn’t drag the press but it is useful to target the resource oriented outreach. Have a glance over company leaderships.

3. Competitive link research:

Identify the circumstances with competitor's sites to get an outreach. There are few tools to identify where your competitor's having links like SEO book's hub-finder tool, the link research tool, competitive link finder tool. Apart from these, you can also check up with these resources like:
i. http://www.buzzstream.com/blog/how-to-use-buzzstream-with-the-competitive-link-finderfrom-seomoz.html
ii. http://www.johnfdoherty.com/competitor-link-prospecting-microsoft-excel/
iii. http://searchengineland.com/the-link-builders-guide-to-analyzing-serp-dominators-for-linkopportunities-21076

4. Find out citation that aren’t links:

With the analysis of citation you can identify the brand citations which may not include links. There are few ways to find citations and can be converted to useful actual links, so that you should use Google alerts, buzz stream social monitoring tools and SEO Moz's fresh web explorer.

5. Guest posts placed on clients behalf:

Whenever your client signed off on your guest posts, this could be a better way to get quality links with client’s involvement. If you are not having idea on this, you can opt for another resources like:
i. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/five-common-guest-posting-mistakes-how-to-avoidthem/38959/
ii. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/5-important-post-penguin-guest-post-prospectingquestions/49672/
iii. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/quick-ways-to-choose-better-guest-post-opportunitieswith-audience-social-metrics/59499/
iv. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/37-mind-blowing-secrets-about-guest-blog-posts/61220/

Few Reasons Why Small Businesses Often Fail With AdWords

   For few advertisers managing adwords campaigns offer a challenging task. Small business marketers don’t have an idea about how Google Adwords works. Lack of knowledge and experience in adwords field is one of the biggest reasons for most of the advertisers to fail in online marketing.

By avoiding below six biggest mistakes you can have a better chance of achieving success in your business.

1. One Campaign with One Ad Group For All Keywords

For new advertisers, to setup and manage adwords account properly is a time taking task. But with a planned and decent budget you can easily be successful in adwords campaigns.

An Adwords campaign is about relevancy. Creating a campaign with one ad group and lumping together all the keywords in one ad group is a waste of money. Keywords play an important role for your ads. If you group all keywords into one ad group, few keywords become high priority to the ad group while others are not.

This is the biggest mistake most of the advertisers make to boost impressions. You can use tools like webmaster Wordtracker Free Suggestion Tool to find which keywords to begin with.

If you create more ad groups while setting up a new campaign, the more response you will get from the visitors.

2. Limited By Budget

At the beginning stage, conversions and ROI are the important factors for visibility.  When your campaign budget limit reaches to the end before midnight, your ads will stop being enabled until midnight.

It displays your ads when you reset your budget.  Small business owners have to really care about visibility factor. By reducing your budget, you will get low position.

3. Too Many Changes All The Time

If you keep on changing your adwords campaign settings, adwords account performs bad and reaches worse.  Optimizing adwords account is necessary but making changes on regular basis will be a bad practice. You need to optimize accounts based on few statistics.

 4. Wrongful Implementation of Conversion Tracking

With the improper implementation of adwords conversion tracking instructions with analytics instructions may lead you to not get exact information of your adwords campaigns. You need to implement conversion tracking code into the landing page for tracking return on spend.

5. Only Using Broad Match

Many of the marketers don't have an idea about keywords in adwords have different types. In adwords, the standard type is Broad Match.  It has expansion option that makes your ads enable for keywords that has relevant meaning.

For example, for lawn care services keyword, broad match type enable your ads for following queries:
lawn moving job
how to move a lawn
lawn mower maintenance

Advertisers feel working with adwords is simple and easy when they understand how adwords play prominent in online ecosystem.  Having a basic knowledge on Adwords will give you a better chance of achieving success in online marketing.
 

Attribution Modeling Works Effectively & Smarter in 3 Ways

          Digital marketers main target is “impulsive buyers” that is who just do not bother about information or details related to store and purchase what they see at first with in impulse (no time).  The majority of marketers evaluate hard work of achievement through first and last click conversion of these impulsive buyers.
   If there would be high number of impulsive buyers then marketing would be very easy for digital marketers. But enormous number of buyers will first get information about the store then browse the products, compare prices and then purchase products by becoming customer of that particular store.

Use of Attribution Modeling:

When the above scenario is applied to online world it can be illustrated as below. First time when a buyer views a display ad then he just does not blindly purchase the product. Because it is the first time he heard about this online store, but second time when he comes across your text ad or banner he will just consider your store in to list. But before his purchase starts he does searching as [your brand] + “reviews” and [your brand] + “return policy”. Then after analyzing site thoroughly he starts purchasing from the site and bookmarks it for future purchases.
Above steps can be viewed in analytics in the following way:


From the above table we can make a point that marketers rely highly on last-click conversion attribution when making decisions about budget and resources. This is because digital marketing and attribution marketing are too complex and also digital markets are under extreme stress to produce high ROI with less span of time. But in this present day everything is carried out in online world, sales are done with online ads. Online ads are carried out on optimization of campaigns and allocating budget quickly as the data arrives.
It is the best method to carry out attribution modeling rather than keeping our hopes on last click. Better to work on it as soon as possible. Here are three ways of attribution modeling that helps to work smarter and effectively.

1. Real picture is shown to you:

As we know that a customer will never make decision in vacuum, so does the marketers never rely on one digital channel. Results will be limited if evaluation is solely based on last click conversion in all channels.


                 From above table we can make out that for display ads, assisted conversions are higher than last click conversions while in search, last click conversions are high than assisted conversions.  The channels that provide assisted conversions are that which appear at someplace in the path of consumers’ purchases but are not always the last exposure the consumer has to your brand prior to purchasing. Channels such as display are stronger in leading consumers down the purchase funnel while others are good in closing sales like search.

             We can conclude that interaction of display ads and search ads will be more powerful for a site than individual.

2. Making Higher Impact Campaign Optimizations


To yield good results we need to focus our attention on optimization with help of attribution modeling and also helps in avoiding fixing things that are not broken. If we find any changes in performance then before we take any change it is important to consider interaction in broader digital marketing portfolio. Let us consider an example where ROI of search campaign has declined over past 4 weeks and also display budgets are very low at present.

 So if we just rely on search data then we fail to revive campaigns performance because as there display budget has not been considered and had demand on lowering keywords. Below is the table that gives results of both search and display conversion combination.


               By evaluating and analyzing combinations of various working channels in conversion path reports will help us to think various ways of optimization that leads to a privileged impact on overall performance. It is much important to spend time on search campaign before expending amount on display campaign and vice versa. This is the process where we can save time and boost performance.

3. Achieving A more Unified Digital Strategy:

Above are the two examples that illustrate, digital channels work in combination even though how much importance we put on last click conversions. Once we gain the knowledge of incorporating this in to our daily routine then we can create campaigns that yield better results when unified.  A precise estimation of first- and last-click conversions, as well as consumer paths to purchases, will give us more insight into the consumer experience.

        If we provide consumers with the information they need at each step of their purchase decision, even though we take a narrow approach we will be able to see an increase in overall conversions.

So we can conclude that campaigns should not be optimized for impulsive shoppers but for vast majority of consumers who think before they purchase. To get new customers to our site, attribution models with path analysis and channel interaction are highly important for brands. 

Structured Data: Content, Rich Snippets & Authorship vs. Author Rank

Over the past few months, webmasters have noticed a rapid change in search as well as in social media marketing techniques. This evolution has brought a change in the way webmasters produce and consume content and data.

1. Relevant content and structured data

Data exists in different formats such as unstructured, semi-structured & structured data. Before stepping into the structured data and markup in search, as the first step you need to build up relevant, targeted, and engaging content.
When you’re thinking about marking up the content on your website, you have to consider both structured data and content conversations factors primarily. So, that search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing indexes your content in a unique way. Google clearly instructed webmasters to focus mainly on quality content along with structured data in GWT during panda updates.
As a marketer, your job is to ensure whether site is visible and have relevant results in SERPS. In addition, both structured data and semantic markup allows search engines to crawl more effectively by providing websites data and content structure.
Before crawling website, Semantic markup enables search engines to understand about the content format.
As well as, structured data enables search engine to understand about what the website content is about. In addition, it makes users to look at the value of website before they begin to click and visit the website via rich snippets in the SERPS.


2. Rich Snippets and Schema.org

To help searchers to access relevant search results, search engines employed additional rich information in the snippets. Through this marketers can get high CTRs and revenue from search engines.
Rich snippets such as reviews and pricing information allow users to quickly search for precise information. To get rich content information in snippet, search engines rely on markup on the source page while crawling.
For search engine spiders there are various formats to approach markup pages. Google supports formats such as microdata, microformats and rdf-a. Mostly all search engines including Google uses schema.org markups to provide relevant results for users.




3. Authorship

Within the search results, verified online websites will rank high when compared to sites without such online verification, which in turn users click on top (verified) results.
Search and social media factors have distributed locally and globally across multiple devices such as smart phones, videos, images etc. The content which you create must be unique and relevant based upon your channel distribution.
Authorship is more useful social signal because social signal affects website rank. Over the last few years, the social graph has been increased extensively when compared to the link graph.

Building Authorship

While building, ensure whether you’re online content is properly linked to g+ profile.
Post your content on number of important sites that are relevant to your website.
Once again check whether your authored content is properly verified or not.

4.  Author Rank

Both Authorship and Author rank techniques are different. Through authorship you can connect your website anywhere on the web. With author rank, you can potentially gain a score for your website content. Ranking scores are determined through trust and how your content is shared among web. The word Author rank mainly comes from SEO space.