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Whilst the noise about the Google Panda update (previously called the Farmer update) is beginning to die down, there will still be many websites who should consider the value and quality of all their content and how this may reduce their chances of good listing in the SERPs.
The obvious contenders may not be those you first assume. Aged and static content that has not been updated for some time may actually be bringing in long tail traffic, so don’t just bin old pages without checking your traffic stats and backlinks for those pages first. However, it may be that your business has changed direction since that content was added and it is no longer relevant, so take a look at some of your historic content to ensure it still fits the bill.
More likely culprits for content deemed to be of low quality by the search engines are those which may seem far too similar to other pages on other sites. For instance, if you sell products with a generic product description that other companies also sell, and you have one page per product (required for inclusion in Google Shopping/Base), these product pages may not appear unique to the spiders.
A quick fix would be to add the capability for reviews and testimonials. Until those reviews begin to appear on your site, add a “no index” tag, and then manually remove this from any pages where reviews have been added. You can request reviews from your customers for products that they have purchased, which will also give you a chance to get in touch with your customers and ask for feedback.
Other low quality pages may be a links page that includes broken links, links to irrelevant content, or links which are not providing any link juice to your site. Keep a weather eye on any links on your site to ensure that these are working, relevant and worthwhile.
Check your traffic stats (analytics) to see which pages are rarely visited or have high bounce rates. Check to see why this might be the case – is navigation difficult to reach that page? Is the content out of date or off-topic for your target audience? A quick revamp of your navigation or content may be all that is required to raise the quality score for that page.
And whilst we are talking about Quality Score – take a good look at your PPC, or ensure that your internet marketing agency understands how Quality Score works. One or two keywords in your Pay Per Click campaign that are not performing as they should can have a decidedly negative effect on your QS rating, which will affect your PPC positions.
People often get confused about the importance of both outbound and backlinks, so Matt Cutts from Google has created a short video that makes it clear how the Google algorithm (and the now not-so-important PageRank) work with links on your own website.
Here’s the video:
Way back when, Google did not want more than 100 links on a page. This was not just because of link farms and spammy sites, but because of a technical issue within Google that limited the amount of content indexed on a page to 101Kb, meaning that frequently a long list of links simply was not indexed.
However, now many people will have pages on their websites that do include a considerable number of links.Imagine, for instance, a page on your site that lists search engine optimisation and internet marketing tools, grouped by category. With the proliferation of tools for those wishing to conduct internet marketing campaigns, this could easily contain more than a hundred recommended websites in twenty categories for keywords, SEO, social media, traffic analysis, conversion tools, and so on. Thus, creating a really useful resource to the huge variety of software and applications that an avid internet marketer might wish for.
Luckily, if you stick to a single theme on a page, and only include the best of links, Google will no longer penalise you for passing the 100 link limit. Think carefully though whether you have created a useful, SEO and user-friendly resource, or a high bounce page for your visitors and the search engine bots.
You can easily add a QR code to any bit.ly link now simply by adding .qr to a bit.ly link e.g. http://bit.ly/dNcRxx.qr
Now, for some people this may seem gibberish, but it actually represents a great opportunity for forward thinking businesses looking to promote their companies, products and websites, particularly using mobile marketing or social media, such as Twitter.
A QR code (Quick Response code) is a two dimensional barcode, made to be read by camera phones equipped with the software required to read the codes. QR codes are all the rage in other countries, for instance, Japan, and will undoubtedly catch on soon in the UK because of the multiple purposes for which they can be used.
The barcode can link to an image (for instance of a product), open a website in the mobile browser, display text, or you can use them as a kind of digital business card with all your contact information. The list of places where such a barcode can be displayed is endless – think “flat surface”, and you get the idea.
Bit.ly, the URL shortening service, decided last autumn to incorporate QR codes into its service; so to direct people to your QR code for a specific website, you just add .qr to the end of the bit.ly link. The advantages of this could be manyfold, particularly for those who have realised the potential of QR codes for marketing purposes.
Imagine that you can now include an advert or an article with a QR in your target market’s favourite magazine that takes them straight to an online video, podcast, Buy it Now page etc, without them needing to search for you online, type in a long URL etc? Or you decde to conduct a local advertising campaign by putting QR codes on buses, in shop windows, on billboards and so on? Or you can hand out business cards at an industry event or networking meeting that hold a wealth of information on a dedicated website specifically aimed at that audience, and accessed simply by pointing a mobile phone at the QR?
QR codes are free to create and share, and their novelty to many people means that if you are the first to use them, in your sector, region or marketing, and provide compelling content to capture the imagination of your audience, you are likely to be on to a great traffic generator for your online content.
How could you use QR codes in your business today?
Dr Dave Chaffey discusses why so many businesses still fail to fully exploit the power of internal linking, why it matters, and offers some quick-win suggestions that might help even those with inflexible sites leverage the power of internal links for SEO and navigational gain.
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We all know that quality backlinks from authoritative sites are essential to SEO success in competitive markets. We also know that this is hard work and takes a lot of investment in outstanding quality content to attract the links and PR outreach to obtain these links.
With so much emphasis and effort on external links, perhaps opportunities to improve rankings through internal links on sites we own are missed. Many mid to large companies have multiple sites which give lots opportunities to link between sites highlighting relevant product or service keywords in the anchor text. But if links do exist they often simply reference the brand name rather than the service and they will just provide a link to the home page. Much better to create a targeted deep link to a specific product category, particularly since these types of links are more difficult to obtain from third-parties.
Within a site there are also opportunities to link with relevant anchor text. Typically this is achieved through the navigation, which is fine, but there are other opportunities. Secondary or tertiary navigation links within pages of a section of a site referencing a particular product category, but expanding on the short keywords used in the main navigation can really help improve rankings for that term.
Of course to improve links within navigation or page templates will likely require a redesign and this will restrict many companies who due to inflexibility of their page templates, content management system or budget restrictions will only complete a design refresh every 2 to 4 years! It’s frustrating that in 2010 it’s still so difficult and costly to redesign and change the information architecture.
One form of internal linking is relatively easy and quick, but opportunities are often missed because copywriters don’t know the importance of it, or the importance of search engine optimisation. I’m talking about editorial links which are within the body copy of a page, separate from the main navigation. These links are also beneficial from a usability point of view since they engage visitors and can be used as “scent trails” to introduce visitors to particular products or offers.
Over the years, the weight of editorial links has increased as this video shows since Google has reduced the impact of approaches such as site-wide footer links. However, footer links or mini-sitemaps are another internal linking approach that is still worth pursuing.
Try entering http://hmrc.gov.uk. As this is the website for Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, one would assume that just entering HMRC without the www would work. After all, it’s a very minor setting for any hosting provider to set up a TLD (Top Level Domain) so that there is no requirement for the wuh-wuh-wuh part of it.
If you are accessing websites through a mobile device, which an increasing number of people do, typing www is a bore. And completely unnecessary as you shouldn’t need the 3 w’s to get to a site.
Just as you don’t need to know which letters are capitalised in either a TLD or an email address. eg. eXpErTs@ClIcKtHrOuGh-MaRkEtInG.cOm will arrive as easily as experts@clickthrough-marketing.com
Any website designer who uses a mish mash of capitals and lower case letters in file names below the TLD (e.g. http://www.fsb.org.uk/accessAbility-intro) should be shot as it invariably leads to a 404 error and often a lost punter or conversion, particularly when the website address has been communicated verbally, but in the TLD, neither capitals nor WWW should matter.
Check your site today. You could be losing visitors unnecessarily if you don’t regularly review this much-forgotten aspect of web usability best practice.
This month Dave explains why not all links are created equally and shows some of the measures and tools ClickThrough use to benchmark link quality when performing link audits for our clients.
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We all know that in competitive markets (aren’t they all?) success in SEO is all about the links.
Sure, you can improve results through re-engineering what we call the TDKs at ClickThrough. That’s the Page meta data like the Title, Description and Keywords targeted. That’s always worthwhile and gives quick wins at the start of a project.
If you’re reading this you’ll know that it’s not the quantity of backlinks from other sites that matters, it’s the quality that counts for better results.
So when you’re working with a new agency, it’s essential to determine early on precisely what a quality link is. That way you can set targets for quality links and make sure that the right types of links are delivered each month.
Setting criteria for good links also helps you avoid bad links which won’t contribute value or can even be damaging since they’re from an unrelated or spammy site.
So what is a quality link? In my Econsultancy best practice guide we look at many factors that form a successful link, but here’s what I recommend you look for and some tools that can help you decide their value.
Ask your agency or internal team which tools they use and how they score links.
Here are five of the most important criteria to consider:
1. Authority of site. Sites which are themselves authority sites are the most effective link sources – that’s why a link from the BBC or a .gov or .uk are most coveted.
A simple measures of authority is the Google Page Rank of a site. A more sophisticated measure is available from the SEO Moz Linkscape (mozRank) and Majestic SEO (AcRank).
All of these measures vary by page also, so I suggest you create reports which overlay the measures above onto them onto tools which list backlinks such as Google Webmaster Tools or the Yahoo! Site Explorer.
The Google Chrome extension SEO Site Tools helps with this – I have listed it with my selection of the best Google Chrome Extensions.
2. Anchor text. Links containing keyphrases are more valuable, so audit the the number of links not containing anchor text.
The Open Site Explorer from SEOMoz shows you the overall authority of a domain and proportion of no followed links which could be reconfigured. It’s a powerful tool, but limited to a 1,000 links.
3. No followed links. Many blogs and social networks have external links using the rel=”nofollow” attribute in an effort to combat link spammers (it doesn’t work). These don’t pass the same value as vanilla links, so should be devalued.
4. New domain links. Gaining a link from a new domain is more powerful than gaining another link from a site that already links to you. Since ongoing link growth is important you should benchmark link growth of a site against its competitors. But not only simply total links, but links from domains. We use Majestic SEO – their Backlink history tool allows you to compare link growth from unique referring domains.
5. Relevant links. Finally search engines love relevance when assessing links and if they don’t see it, it can even give rise to a penalty. So links should be from relevant pages with a similar theme in terms of Title, headings and content.
Of course you can also review visits from different link partners, but oftentimes, clickthroughs from an individual publisher will be low unless you have a very prominent editorial link, that’s why I’ve concentrated on effective links from Google’s point of view.
I hope this prompts you to think how you review your link quality, or give you questions to ask your search engine optimisation agency. Next time I’ll look at benchmarking content effectiveness for SEO.
Whilst Google Webmaster tools can tell you whether a link is still working or not without you needing to visit every website you have ever linked to, a manual check every once in a while is strongly advisable.
Websites and domain names change hands all the time, and you may find yourself linking to inappropriate content. Unless a site visitor informs you of this, it can easily go unnoticed for months at a time, and may cause you damage to your credentials without you being aware of it.
You may also find that the link is no longer relevant to the information you are giving to your visitor, and it may be necessary to seek a better resource to link to.
Computers are all well and good for telling you simple things like “Linkrot has set in” but they can’t easily tell you if the content has changed from that which you and your site visitors were expecting to find. Better link housekeeping can improve your search engine rankings.
Find out more about link marketing in our SEO Book.
When looking to link between pages on your site, think beyond just a simple text link or navigation.
Link marketing has benefits beyond search engine optimisation. If you think your page looks more interesting/inviting after you have made the changes, your visitors will too!
To find out more about link marketing, check out tip #49 in our SEO book.
The ads proposing to get your site listed on 1000, 10,000 or even more sites have been around for approx 12 years now. Interestingly, the companies who offer these services don’t seem to stay around for anywhere near as long! This is because the service being offered is often of low or poor quality,and frequently bordering on useless as far as the client is concerned. (There are many reputable link marketing service providers, but they will offer to raise your sales by x percent as part of a comprehensive internet marketing package, rather than just get you listed in a zillion places!)
When looking to get your site visitor numbers up, links are often given high prominence in the list of things to do for internet marketing and search engine optimisation. However, there are far too many people still shouting that you need links EVERYWHERE, rather than encouraging website owners to focus on getting quality links that bring quality traffic.
Whilst it is wise to ensure that your website can be found in as many places as possible, exactly as you would like your brochure, business card, or advert to be seen by as many people as possible, it is important to ensure that it is seen by the right people.
If you do not ship products to Mongolia, then you do not want to waste advertising budget targeting Mongolians. By analysing where your likely customers congregate on the internet, which websites they visit, who they talk to, and what they read, you can decide where a link to your site would be most fitting.
Your audience may well respect a certain trade journal, a news source, a blogger, etc. In which case, you want to be looking to get a link from those places. However, none of this comes easily and you will need to deliver high quality unique content to that trade journal, a great press release to the news and media, or capture the blogger’s attention with an interesting offer. You cannot just ask for a link on a site that will bring you precisely the type of visitor you will benefit from without giving something valuable in return.
Remember that one good link can often be worth 100s or even 1000s of those being offered by the snake oil salesmen we mentioned at the outset of this post.
You can find out more about how the importance of quality to link building in our Search Engine Optimisation Book.
Whilst a simple text link can bring untold traffic from a busy site, a banner, button or creative can often add colour and variation to a webpage, and bring in more visitors from a link. Bloggers love to liven up their pages with images and photos so help make them give your link that little bit more chance to stand out by offering easy to cut and paste images with instructions.
These can also be used by press and media who often come looking for a press pack and images to use for stories. Be warned though – no-one is keen on reading through 25 pages of instructions for use of your images which goes into intricate detail about the size of margin allowed round an image etc etc. If you want a successful link building strategy, that helps people to promote your company, KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid)!
To learn more about link marketing, see tip #45 in our Search Engine Optimisation book.
