Google has uploaded a new video to its YouTube channel describing five of the most common search engine optimisation mistakes – and six ‘good ideas’ to help internet marketers get results.
The video is presented by Maile Ohye, a developer programs tech lead at Google. A summary of the slip-ups she mentions is presented below:
The first mistake is to begin to optimise your business’ website without first establishing your USPs (unique selling points). Apart from the simple reason that conversion matters – appearing in search engine results pages (SERPs) does not mean that people will buy into your product – this could also be tied to Google’s recent innovations in social search, as effectively-communicated USPs may encourage users to share your page with others.
The second mistake is to carry out your SEO separately from your other marketing activities. By tying offline marketing into online marketing, key phrases and slogans that users have searched for after seeing them on ‘real world’ adverts should begin to rank well in SERPs.
The third mistake is related to pagination – companies must use the latest standards to help search engines index their pages rather than using canonical tags, or fail to use code at all.
Ohye’s fourth tip is to avoid getting caught in ‘trends’. She uses the example of the way in which search engines and websites were once focused on attracting users, whereas now the focus has shifted towards achieving good rankings. As she points out, a good ranking does not necessarily mean good traffic.
The fifth and final SEO pitfall is, conversely, to fail to respond quickly to changes in search engines and within your industry. This includes simple matters like regular website updates, but also being able to quickly implement changes recommended by marketing and SEO teams when, for example, Google updates its algorithm.
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The UK’s Internet marketing and search engine optimisation industry is now worth more than £500m, according to a report by Econsultancy.
The online marketers’ site released the SEO Agencies Buyer’s Guide on March 19, with figures showing an 18% leap in the SEO market in 2011.
Econsultancy says the year-end value of SEO in the UK was around £514m – up from £436m in 2010.
The 2012 SEO Agencies Buyer’s Guide breaks down the valuation: explaining it was calculated using payments to agencies, investment and specialist costs for PR or social media marketing campaigns.
“It’s great to see that natural search has developed into a half-billion pound industry in the UK,” said Jake Hird, senior research analyst for Econsultancy.
“This also demonstrates the shifting landscape of the SEO marketplace. Now, search practitioners have to deal with elements such as social, mobile and local search, as well as continuing to optimise for other types of content, such as videos and images.”
The Econsultancy report also drew a correlation between SEO activity and other kinds of online marketing: with SEO becoming intrinsically important for PR, social media, content marketing and on-page information.
The report also looks at trends, changes and predictions for SEO, such as the focus on Google+, mobile search and increasing integration of SEO with other marketing campaigns.
The guide is aimed at companies looking to hire an SEO agency, with a breakdown of the UK’s most successful online marketing firms, together with their costs, services and achievements.
The guide is available to buy through Econsultancy.
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Search engine giant Google is set to change the game for search engine optimisation once again: by penalising sites that are too obviously optimised.
Recent changes to Google’s algorithm have attempted to weed out sites which feature poor content, poor information and poor quality, but rank well because of their SEO measures.
Now, the engine is going a step further: it will downrank pages which are too obviously tweaked for SEO.
The changes should be a bonus for any site which features quality, pertinent content, and a death knell for spam sites set up to farm clicks.
Similarly, the move will also see amateur SEO efforts – which are often based on outdated information, black hat strategies or falsehoods – become less effective, whilst agency-experienced SEO will become more effective and more valuable.
Head of search at Google, Matt Cutts, told delegates at the South by Southwest conference: “The idea is to try to level the playing ground,” he is reported to have said by Search Engine Land.
“We try to make the GoogleBot smarter, try to make our relevance more adaptive, so that if people don’t do SEO, we handle that,” he said. “And we are also looking at the people who abuse it, who put too many keywords on a page, exchange way too many links, or whatever else they are doing to go beyond what you normally expect.”
The changes have been in the pipeline for some time, but are likely to go public sooner, rather than later, Cutts said.
The announcement comes after Google said it was refocusing its efforts on Semantic Search, to return better search results for mobile and voice queries.
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Search engine giant Google is set to tweak its algorithm to improve its semantic search results.
Google is hoping to make its results more informative and useful for mobile users, and those using voice recognition technology.
Amit Singhal, from Google, revealed that upcoming algorithm changes will focus on semantic search tweaks.
Industry experts have postulated that Google’s focus on semantic search ties to the launch of the Google Assistant – which will allow Android users to make voice-activated search queries, much like Apple’s Siri feature.
Google has already introduced some semantic results: if a user asks “How tall is the London Eye?” the top result answers the question with “Best guess for London Eye height is 135 metres” – using aggregated information from trusted sources like Wikipedia.
Type “weather”, and the first result will show the latest forecasts.
The move is particularly useful for mobile web users, as it provides instantaneous answers without the need to trawl through websites. For queries on-the-go, semantic makes the search process smoother and more refined. For voice queries, it ensures a useful result is returned.
Google has led the way for search algorithm – constantly tweaking its site to return more relevant, higher quality and specific results. Its search technology already knows to look for synonyms (motor and auto, for instance) – but semantic will take this a step further: by essentially guessing why the user has made a specific search query.
By analysing billions of daily searches, Google is building a “Knowledge Graph”: a database with some 200 million entries that will help to track how searchers use results data, so the results can be made more relevant.
Of course, it will be some time before the technology becomes smart enough to react to queries like a human might – but these changes will certainly make mobile internet navigation more simple.
By displaying direct answers internally, instead of returning external pages, Google is, however, essentially positioning itself as a one-stop Internet shop. Whereas users now will initially go to Google to find web pages to comb for further information, semantic results will, to some extent, negate the need to do this.
Internalising information to Google could have repercussions for search engine optimisation strategies. For precedent, Rupert Murdoch already signalled disdain with Google News search results returning “copyrighted” content from the Sun and the Times.
News Corp’s way of dealing with Google republishing stories in its News results was swift, and expensive: paywalls.
Some trusted information sites are unlikely to oppose to Google cutting out the middle man for organic queries. But this won’t be the case across the board. How those sites react to semantic search remains to be seen: as well as how Google manages this process.
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In response to comments made by entrepreneur Jason Calacanis six years ago, Ray Comstock has penned a passionate defence of SEO.
In an article published at Search Engine Watch, Comstock provides reasons why ‘SEO will never die’, in a direct rebuttal of Calacanis’ comments, made at the Search Engine Strategies Chicago conference in 2006.
Comstock claims to know exactly why people are driven to spread rumours of this sort: “This has been happening for years because someone always wants to drive traffic to a blog post or an article by claiming something similar.”
He continues: “It’s funny because, six years later, SEOs are still optimising website content for search engines and there seems to be no shortage of people who want our help.”
Here are two of Comstock’s reasons for SEO’s persistent good health:
SEO continues to make money – As Google still continues to deliver traffic via organic search, the opportunities to improve rankings are still there.
“Where there’s money, there is competition and a willingness to spend money to win,” Comstock writes.
SEO benefits users – SEOs carry out a number of activities that improve the overall user experience. Comstock provides a huge list, but here are just a few of those user experience benefits that SEO provides -
- “Correct spelling.”
- “Meaningful, keyword-focused page titles.”
- “Eliminating 404 pages that shouldn’t exist.”
- “Eliminating duplicate content.”
- “Reducing page load speed as much as possible.”
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Many people working in SEO aren’t happy at the fact that Wikipedia ranks so highly in Google’s SERPs (search engine results pages). One of the reasons is that some of the poorly written content published on Wikipedia often outranks more authoritative websites on exactly the same subject.
A recent study, conducted by Intelligent Positioning, and featured in an article published by Search Engine Watch, has found that Wikipedia results appear on page one for around 99 per cent of all searches.
Wikipedia is also found to rank in first position for around 56 per cent of searches; Intelligent Positioning found that just eight keywords didn’t have a Wikipedia result featuring on page one of Google – Mail, news, trainers, national, sweets, wardrobe, phone and flight.
Sam Silverwood-Cope, the author of the study, found that Wikipedia did “extremely well” on geographic and scientific searches, as well as food and clothing.
Silverwood-Cope also wrote: “If there was one place taken up in every search by Wikipedia, then that would mean there is one place in the Top Ten for possible PPC paying corporations.”
He added that this was ‘just a thought, not a fact.’
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In an age in which versatility is seen as a major asset, Bob Tripathi, writing for Search Engine Watch, has suggested that “the modern day SEO should be an integrated SEO digital marketer – one who knows about on-page SEO and other integrated tactics.”
Tripathi has also highlighted five skills which he believes are must-haves for an SEO professional.
Here are just a couple of those aforementioned skills:
Technical SEO – Tripathi states that SEO is about more than keyword research and page optimisation; he write: “SEO is about making websites better at both the page and server level in a structured way to enhance their chances of being found on search engines, with the eventual goal of generating traffic.”
Therefore it is important to have a sound knowledge of how SEO works at a technical level, i.e, coding, server settings, site maps etc. Having this knowledge will make solving problems much easier.
Content Marketing – Content is the thing that engages users most – it’s also the thing that is likely to attract users to your website. Therefore it is important to know how to market this content. Tripathi states that the content marketing process can be split in to two tasks – content creation and content distribution.
Having this skill will serve an SEO well in their role as a gatekeeper – providing support for ideas that are going to improve the site. “Basic skills like keyword research, finding content gaps, and distributing your content will come in handy,” he states.
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It is well-known that huge amounts of effort put into SEO can bring significant rewards. However, it should also be noted that there are a number of quick tasks that you can carry out to keep your overall SEO effort ticking over.
Writing for Search Engine Watch, Josh McCoy, has highlighted a number of these tasks – which can be done in under 15 minutes.
Here are just a few of those tasks in a summarised form:
- Review your Robots.txt file; assess your Meta Robots tagging – This can be done by checking /robots.txt. In the process of doing this you may find that images, folders and pages on your site are being withheld from search engines – preventing traffic from being driven to your site.
McCoy also recommends running “a site scan with a tool such as Screaming Frog to assess if there are any pages on your site you are excluding via a meta robots tag.”
- Review your site for duplicate title elements – Checks for duplicate title elements can be carried in Google Webmaster Tools.
McCoy adds: “Checking this Google property feature can quickly show you these issues and give insight into whether you need to spend the next 15 minutes writing unique title elements, creating redirects, or thinking about which of the multiple pages should include a certain keyword term.”
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Traditionally social media rivals, Facebook, Myspace and Twitter have grouped together to create a new tool, aimed at drawing users’ attention to the “biased” results provided as part of Google’s Search Plus Your World, according to an article published by the Telegraph.
Entitled “Don’t be evil” (a nod to one of the search engine giant’s early mottos), the browser add-on is currently only compatible with Firefox.
The tool has been created to prevent Google searches returning content that’s been ‘ranked up’ by Google from its own social network, Google+.
A recent change has seen Google searches return Google+ content at the top of search results – a change previously announced as part of Search Plus Your World – at the expense of results from Twitter and Facebook.
Google has explained how the new update – which could affect SEO – worked.
A post published by Google read: “Starting today, if you search for a topic like (music) or (baseball), you might see prominent people who frequently discuss this topic on Google+ appearing on the right-hand side of the results page.”
The search engine giant has yet to respond to the launch of ‘Don’t be evil’ – which is currently only available in America. However, Google did previously say it had tried to strike a deal with both Twitter and Facebook to include their results in a prominent position – but wrangles over cost and privacy scuppered such a move.
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In recent times, search engines have made a number of advancements that allow them to look at and evaluate the content featured on websites in a much more comprehensive manner.
Gareth Owen, writing for Search Engine Watch, has attempted to pinpoint the ten elements of a “perfectly optimised page.”
Here are just a few of the elements highlighted by Owen:
Title Tags – Owens states that while title tags are important, it is vital not to “over optimize them.”
URL – The URL should ideally mention the keywords determined in your overall SEO strategy.
Content – Rather than featuring multiple keyword mentions, Owens states: “Content is now about semantically relevant supporting keywords.”
Using a recipe as an example, he adds: “In order to make béarnaise sauce there are specific ingredients that are 100 per cent relevant to the eventual outcome. One way of checking what keywords Google might consider as relevant is to do a ‘~keyword’ (or tilde) search.”
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