Top 12 SEO Tips for 2011 - Post Panda
I've been working on this for months now and just when it was ready to release Google released the Panda/Farmer update and I have spent the last two months or so collaborating with my US colleagues to adjust everything according to what is known.
What I have posted (and will be posting) are as a result of a lot of testing that we (from the UK) are just getting stuck into.
This isn't the end-all, and as with every update Google releases, may change But for now this is a pretty good starter guide.
I'm going to start with my views on the update and the reasoning behind it because I think this is very important to understand what they were thinking when they tweaking the algo.
Then I will post a new tip every day or so in the hopes that each can be addressed and questions asked whilst keeping the thread easier to follow.
I invite comments and opinions and even criticism, but know in advance that I test EVERYTHING thoroughly before I stick my neck out there and even now have dozens of ongoing tests going on to monitor the impact of this update. We are doing these because in many cases Google will roll back certain elements of an update, add tweaks and make ongoing adjustments according to feedback that many of the same people I collaborate with make via Google Webmaster Blog.
That being said, we are always looking for new participants for the testing of search metrics and if you have a few hours a week, a few international servers/hosting accounts please drop me a PM.
There are many basic-to-advanced SEO tactics that you can read in earlier versions of Top 12 SEO Tips for 2007-20010 that are still spot-on in terms of the current state of SEO.
After a major update I would normally I get together with a bunch of other SEO freaks and do some testing to get real data to back my conclusions. This time however the research was already done. The same things work now that worked 4 or 5 years ago, just in a different proportion.
Most of the tips below directly relate to the Panda Update in some way because the basis behind this update in my mind is saturating the amount of information utilised to establish the most relevant pages in Google. They are doing this with LSI, social media and information from third party bookmarking companies like Furl, Facebook and Reddit. This makes it much harder for SEO’s to manipulate the results, and There are many basic-to-advanced SEO tactics that you can read in earlier versions of Top 12 SEO Tips for 2006-2007 that are still spot-on in terms of the current state of SEO. This year though I timed it right and the Panda Update was just released a week or two back.
After a major update I would normally I get together with a bunch of other SEO freaks and do some testing to get real data to back my conclusions. This time however the research was already done. The same things work now that worked 4 or 5 years ago, just in a different proportion.
I’ve spoken many times in the past on Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI as its known. It’s use by all 3 search engines started years ago for various reasons and now it is being injected into Google’s algorithm more than ever before in the newest release of the “Panda” or “Farmer” update. Unlike the Jagger or the Caffeine updates, this directly targets sites by using LSI along with other triggers.
For those of you that don’t live and breath all things SEO, LSI is best defined,"Latent semantic indexing allows a search engine to determine what a page is about outside of specifically matching search query text. By placing additional weight on related words in content LSI has a net effect of lowering the value of pages which only match the specific term and do not back it up with related terms." That was SEO Guru Aaron Wall’s description and probably the best one when put into ‘layman’s' terms.
Over the last 4 years LSI has been in nearly half of the conferences I have had the opportunity to speak at, but unfortunately only by me it seemed. I started talking about it back when the ‘Minus 950’ penalty hit in one month and Universal Search was released the next.
At that time I told of Google buying a US based company named Applied Semantics in April of 2003 to further their research on algorithms. Google even talked about the residual integration of LSI publicly. So did MSN and Yahoo. Yahoo even applied for a patent on their own version. The odd thing was...although these conferences were considered advanced (Gaming, Affiliate and SEO) no one else was talking about it.
Google has been testing LSI in speech recognition software, cross-language document retrieval and search engine integration, as well as many others, for a long time. Its a bit scary when you think about it. The military used this stuff to identify terrorist chat amidst billions of spoken words in a short time frame.
When you apply this powerful tool to search you reduce the potential of engineered results from guys like me - SEO’s. Because it looks at relative terms, it makes it 1000x harder to “game” the algorithm because of the number of terms that could be considered relative. Apply this to enviorments like social networks, add in sloppy linguistics, slang, native language and a little local salt and you can get a lot of variables. That’s the data Google has at their disposal to analyse. Even scarier when you consider that Google gets their information from everything you do. Ever think about the fact that Google GMail serves up Adsense ads in your email that have some relevance to the actual content in your email?
Techniques like buying links with relative anchor text takes on a whole mew meaning when you add LSI into the mix.
I personally think that with all the data Google has now collected, they can finally utilise the findings of Applied Semantics and build their own sort of “Semantic Synonym” dictionary and use it as an algorithmic plug in at will. for Google to identify sites attempting to engineer the results in their favour. companies like Furl, Facebook and Reddit. This makes it much harder for SEO’s to manipulate the results, and easier for Google to identify sites attempting to engineer the results in their favor.
The following is a graph that Smart Insights Digital Marketing has come up with. The purity of their testing is unknown to me but after looking at the graph and reading feedback from the US after the update I tend to agree with what it says.
It makes sense that they would use this ability and possibly even have a knob to turn it up or down. The easiest way to reduce the ability of SEO’s to manipulate the results is to spread the area (or add the information) into the playing field and water down their ability. At the same time they may truly have started their way toward delivering a top-notch set of results.
Universal Search was meant to do this back in 2007 and although it helped to jumble the type of results, there were too many blogs, articles and quite a bit of spammy sites too. They have been tweaking it ever since, and average one update per day.
So the significance of LSI or Longtail keyword targeting is hugely now a part of life and although it seems daunting, successful SEO can still be broken down into manageable terms. It may require that you outsource much of the grinding work like content writing but much of the tasks I paid ten of thousands to get accomplished over the past 10+ years have been automated.
There are a few new elements like Social Media, Web 2.0 and Social Bookmarking but even these can be managed.
Before April 12th the playing field was dominated and even though it still is to a point, the longtail variable in Google has opened the gates for people that have struggled in the past.
On other thing that I would like to say before jumping into the Top 12 SEO Tips for 2011 that’s is something that really needs to be said; Here’s the facts: 25% of all searches are 1st time searches. That is a stunning statistic.
When you combine that fact, and, if you are measured on conversions and conversion rates in whatever you do, then this next statistic will really open your eyes. 60% of all conversions come from this 25%. That’s a conversion rate of 15%. When you consider the average conversion rate across all sectors is between 3-5% and in gaming its 1 ½ to 2%, 15% sounds pretty good doesn’t it? You would think.
When I get ambitious SME’s or Top FTSE/Fortune 500 companies questioning whether or not an investment in a SEO, PPC and Social Media mix for 12 months is worth the risk it “twists me melon” (I live in Yorkshire England and have been trying to fit that in somewhere but coming from an American it just doesn’t sound right). What other investment can you be out of the red in 6-12 months? What business school did these people go to?
Whether its gaming, forex, binary options, memory foam mattresses or pet supplies, you can make money very quickly when SEO, PPC, Social Media and Conversion Optimisation are implemented correctly. It has always been a “sure bet” scenario. But now the Panda Update has increased these odds.
If you are an Affiliate this is huge because we have always targeted long tail, or had to target long tail because of big investment and/or brand protection in PPC.
So where some feel this will hurt them, look at it this way; Affiliates have always delivered 40% of the traffic of any given company regardless of sector since time (Internet time that is) began, and this will not change. Plenty of the top Super Affiliate website have had good content and are neck-deep in social media and everything I have suggested to this point for some time now. Have a look at Bingoport. They are both Top Notch SEO’s and Social Media Strategists.
So just to finish on this thought and move on; if you haven’t financially prepared yourself for a 12 month building process then you shouldn’t be investing in what you see as such a high risk endeavor. Some will get top 10 very quickly depending on your niche, and most will start to offset the expenses almost immediately using PPC (pay per click), but its now going to take a bit longer and take more effort.
Here is a mix of on and off page tips that I feel are currently the most significant. I do Top 12 SEO Tips every year and the previous versions can be found
One last thing. Because Panda has a lot of influencing factors primarily based around social media and Semantics, which I explained earlier I have been preaching for the last 5 years, a few may seem familiar. I have made a few additional suggestions though.
These are also in order of what I recommend using as a step-by-step guide, which is another reason I am going to post them one at a time and every other day.
Top 12 SEO Tips for 2011
1. Navigation (on-page SEO elements)
Use your canonical tag - The canonical tags prevents losing juice from back links that may have been used wrong. WWW versus a non-www url in the links pointing bck to your site. The canonical tag tells the search engines which page is your primary and redirects the link juice to that page. You can also manually tell Google in Webmaster Central which url is your selected primary. This will also prevent duplicate content.
Keep your url’s clean
Session ID’s and messy URL’s should be rewritten to include keywords. If you have a CMS (content management system) this can be as simple as a plugin. Using capital letters instead of lower case can also be an issue
Don’t use ‘rel’ tag when you can use absolutes
Using a relative tag has the potential to confuse the search engines. Absolute tags are very powerful when used right and when compared side to side with a relative tag. This is part of the silo method of building or rebuilding your site.
Check for infinite loops
Most programs like Joomla have auto-detection for these but its always a good idea to run Screaming Monkey to look for loops. Some sites use a plugin that will create links automatically from a selected keyword to the internal page targeting that term.
Identify duplicate content issue with cross-domain rel="canonical" link element
Ecommerce sites that are fed by xml product feeds are know for causing this issue because they syndicate their descriptions along with their products, but sometimes it can be caused by the shopping cart software creating multiple paths to the same content.
If someone was searching for holidays in Greece and this content can be reached by several paths within your site you may have an issue.
http://www.example.com/products/greece/holidays
http://example.com/shop/index.php?product_id=32&highlight=greek+holiday+sp ecials&cat_id=1&sessionid=123&affid=431>
http://example.com/greece/specials?gclid=ABCD
http://www.example.com/dresses/greekholidays.html
Also, many website owners have more than a single website but use the same content feeds for both. This link element can also resolve this issue.
Canonical Link Element at page level
Alternatively, If you don’t have access to server-side redirects and you can’t use a 301 redirect (free hosting or no access to changing the code) you can use the Canonical link element
First Link Rule
First Link Prioritisation happens when Google crawls a webpage and analyses its outbound links. First Link Priority rule states that when a page links more than once to the same target page, Google will completely ignore all links after the first, and this can cause negative SEO consequences.
According to Rand over at SEO Moz and quite a bit of research by several people Google only counts the first internal link in your page. Use CSS to prevent this from happening on your header logo if it (and a link to the homepage) comes first in your code.
I knew about the 'first link rule' for content but wasn't aware of this application of it. It seems like when Google initially crawls and parses a site the header would be considered part of the template and ignored as it looked for new content.
If you look at log files and when googlebot crawls a website you see they have frequent 'small crawls' and at other times, 'deep crawls'. Both are progressively more frequent if there is a regular stream of fresh content near the root.
When Google started constant crawling and updating a year or two ago, they said they were deep crawling even more often but were optimising their crawl. So did they buy a million more servers? No they optimised the way the bots crawl by eliminating the time spent on looking at duplicate code throughout the website.
The following is an easy fix if you have CSS to work around. This will hide the link from google;
.logo{
display:block;
text-indent:-1000em;
background: url(images/imagefile.jpg) no-repeat 0 0;
width:640px;
height:70px;
}
I'll be doing live sessions on all the 12 tips at the IGB Super Show in Dublin as well as the Bingo Summit in London and https://www.gpwa.org/forum/images/InvalidImage.gif in the coming months so if you would like to book a 30 minute 1-on-1 to look at your site or ask any questions feel free to ring me at Blueclaw.
And finally - a daily fix of baby laugh
Top 12 SEO Tips for 2011 (Tips 4 - 6)
4. On-Page Advertising - Ditch it
Remove advertisement from your index page, unless its making you rich take them all off. I have proven this to be a negative factor and even one that can draw a marginal penalty of 10 or so spots. Your own banners are okay, its the 3 adsense blocks, 4 adbrites and the rest of the lot that makes it look just like an Affiliate portal.
5. Use Subomains Effectively
Let me say this loud and clear; Google treats subdomains as individual websites. So blog.yoursite.com is a completely different website than yoursite.com. The key to this strategy is to link the main site to the subdomain. This passes the trust and authority from the main site and passes it to the subdomain website.
https://www.gpwa.org/forum/images/InvalidImage.gif
In the above example you can see (kinda :)) that bingoplayeronline.com is ranking second and third for a longtail search phrase. This is one terrific reason to us subdomains rather than subdirectories.
6. Geotargeting for Language or Regional Targeting
The various ways that people search and the results the search engines are delivering are evolving rapidly. Smarter queries and more complex algorithms mean that you need to use various techniques to be sure you are showing up in the results. Local search, advanced search, regional search and language-based searches are some of the filters an end-user or a search engine can use in determining who shows up, when they show up and where they show up.
Geotargeting is one tool Google has refined and one that you can manipulate to a point in order to increase saturation in any market. Beyond the obvious on-page considerations, different searches will deliver (in most cases) a different set of results.
The results can differ greatly depending on several considerations;
1. The IP of the end-user
2. The server location of the website
3. Any geographically targeted settings in Webmaster Central
4 . The relationship between the search filters and the resulting web pages (I.e. Did they search for Pages from [region] or Pages in [language]
5. If the end-user is searching a different extension than the defaulted engine (they manually enter Google.com searching for US or English results in a non-US region.
The other elements that will affect rankings will be back links;
1. Are the links from a TLD that matches the destination URL (I.e. .nl linking to an .nl website)?
2. Is the IP linking website located in the same region and the linked URL?
3. Page rank, linking anchor text, additional outbound links on the page linking to you
4. On-page relevancy
5. Language based meta-tags
6. Everything in the above 5 items relating to the linking website/page
Any one of these elements can give you an edge over your competition. Searching any of Google's (non-US) datasets will generally return a variety of websites when no language or location filter is selected. These can include internal pages in a website, subdirectories (www.yoursite.com/french), Subdomains (www.french.yoursite.com), and various TLD's (top level domains like .com and .nl). All 11 of the above factors are present (but not exclusive) in the automatic algorithm.
The problem is that no one really knows which approach is best, or which algorithmic attribute is the most effective, so what can we do with this? What we want to do is to look at the existing results using the available search filters, and the existing websites that are ranking high and determine what the best strategy for your website is. This takes deep page analysis of your competitors.
The important thing to note is that there is a hierarchy between one and the other in terms of which is the best solution. Every website has its own individual solution based on their demographics, site mechanics and available resources.
What you need to consider are;
1 .Your target market?
2. If you need or don't need geographical targeting?
3. If you need language based subdomains or subdirectories?
4. Should you move hosting?
Can I afford to do it all?
How & When to Use Geographical Targeting
Here's what to do if you wish to;
Geographically target a region
1 .Create a subdomain or a subdirectory in the native language and use Webmaster Central to geographically target it
2 .Host the subdomain on a server in the native region and use geographical targeting
3 .Build back links from similar TLD's
Target a specific language
1 .Create a subdirectory in the native language (I.e. www.yoursite.com/nl/)
2 .Build back links from same language websites
3 .Do not use geographical targeting
The reason that you do not want to use geographical targeting along with a language-based strategy is that if the end-user searches in the native language on Google.com, a site using content in that language will be stronger than the same site with geographical targeting in place. (This isn't dependent on whether you use subdirectories or subdomains unless you hosted the subdomain in the target region).
The answer for me is that I want it all...and NOW!!
I've recently had subdomains rank with geographical targeting turned on and in the native language rank top 10 in 6 weeks. I've had brand new websites with the appropriate TLD's (I.e. .nl, .de & .es) show up in 8 weeks. I've even had a .com hosted in the US without geographical targeting show up in the top 10 results for “Hollywood” terms when they had never been in results in the UK.
You can start with subdomains. Look at your log files to determine where the current traffic is coming from to tell you what to do first. Bounce rates can also tell you a lot.
For example, if your secondary traffic source is Germany and you have a high bounce rate, start with a language-based subdirectory, then maybe move onto creating a subdomains, hosting it in Germany, then set the geographical targeting to Germany in Webmaster Central. Then go back and start all over again using the region that has the next highest contribution.
Important Things to Remember!
• To target a language using only subdirectories do not use geographic targeting
• You can target a language with both subdomains and subdirectories but if you have a top-level TLD (.com) use subdirectories versus subdomains.
• You can use Google geographical targeting on subdomains and subdirectories
• Your title should be in the native language and/or use regional slang terms where they apply.
• Use language-based meta tags whenever targeting language-based searches
• Host subdomains that are for geographical targeting in the target region
• When you implement the subdomain strategy, link to it from the original website
• Create new sitemaps for each subdomain
• When creating meta tags and content be sure to use native slang. (If you sold pants in the US and the UK. Pants are referred to as trousers. Sweaters are referred to as jumpers.
• Get back links from same TLD's (get a .nl link to your .nl site in the native language)
• If you have a ccTLD (like .nl or .de) do not use geographical targeting. These domains are already associated with its designated region
TIP – In the past when you moved domains to a new host (or in this case Subdomains) it could take up to a week. Google WMC now has a tool that makes this almost instantaneous. Just get your ‘A’ address, move your content and any redirects from the parent site (Remember linking to the new subdomain from your parent site will pass nearly 100% of the PR, trust and authority, even though its seen and treated as a stand-alone website)
In a nutshell, I recommend that if you already have an existing website with a TLD like a .com or .cu.uk, and they are your target market, do not use the geographical targeting option. Start building subdirectories using the top native language determined by looking at Google Analytics or your log files. Identify your top referrer language. If the languages are close, as it the case between the US, UK, New Zealand and Australia, use native slang in the title, metatags and content. Build a new xml site map and manually submit it through all the main search engines.
The next step is to create a subdomain and get it hosted in the region that you are targeting. Build content in the native language and get r submit it, as well as setting up the geographical target in Webmaster Central.
By implementing this strategy, you will have a significant advantage over most of your competition (or a little less after this article is released).
Whether the search is initiated in the region or outside the region, whether your site is located in the region or just hosted there, or even if they search in the native language or manually enter a specific Google engine like Google.com.mx or Google.es, you will have improved saturation.
UPDATE - If you own a country specific ccTLD like .nl, .be or .ca, build this site as soon as possible. These are finally starting to outrank TLD’s like .com. In past issues of Top 12 Tips I recommended using TLD’s and subdomains. I still recommend subdomains but now ccTLD’s are finally coming to fruition in terms of Google’s past ccTLD prejudice and I said to be on the lookout for this. Well now its happening so get your ccTLD’s in order with some fresh content.
The easiest short-term solution until you can do it right is do buy a drupal or Joomla (or even Wordpress for that matter) from Template Monster (under $100) and put an RSS feed, a phpBB forum and a blog in place to get it crawled regularly. Work on your permanent site and when you launch you can either use redirects or bolt it on to the site and benefit from any rankings/traffic plus get a head start as well. Also remember to link to it from your existing domain. This will give it a little push as well.
