Google's EMD Update: the numbers - HP Group Blog Only got 5 minutes? skip to the bottom for the TL;DR version. Just over a week ago now (September 28 to be exact), Google released what is being called the “EMD Update“. You can follow that link for a bit more background, but in essence this update was the long-awaited solution to the apparent problem of low quality Exact Match Domains ranking in the SERPs. Shortly after the update, Mozcast showed a big dip in their chart for EMD Influence: The EMD ‘problem’ has been around a long time. I won’t get into my views on the EMD issue right now, but here’s a great post by Martin MacDonald that is close to my opinion: Why EMDs should stay. From looking at the Mozcast EMD Influence chart above you would be forgiven for thinking that this had a massive impact on SERPs, but in truth most search terms witnessed very little overall movement, as can be seen on SERPmetrics Flux on the day: The Real Impact of the EMD Update Average Ranking of Exact-Match Domains across 5000 keywords So, who got hit?
WordPress Google SEO Tips 2012 WordPress Google SEO Tips 2012 Branding Social Media: One of the big changes to hit 2012 will be the focus on branding. Make sure your business stands out from the crowd and has its own identity. The more unique you sound, the better this will be towards your own identity and hence you will stand out from your competitors. Regular posting schedules: The more content you publish, the better chance Google will pick up on it and it also enables more crawling of your site. Unique Content: Nothing new here, right? Add multimedia to your blogs: Now more than ever does Google want to see video and high quality images added to your content releases. Add more video: Take interviews, add real life footage of products or services Every post needs images: Google sees multimedia as an essential part of the user experience, how do you look compared to your competition? Update Poor Content: Specifically, check for duplicate content. Visual Aids: One of the posts I wrote was on infographics.
Predatory Thinking and Robots – Brighton SEO September 2012 Friday 14th September kicked off another great BrightonSEO event which was just as full of antics and inspiring presentations as last April’s. Remote control cars, scooters and shooting NERF nail guns at cut outs of Justin Bieber! A big shout out to Kelvin, the sponsors, the speakers, attendees and everyone else involved in the event! Here is my recap of the best from the Brighton Dome. Dave Trott @davetrott – Predatory Thinking In hindsight Dave kicked off with my personal favourite presentation of the day. £18.3 Billion was spent last year in the UK on ads, with 89% not remembered, 4% remembered positively and 7% negatively. He breaks advertising down into 3 simple steps; impact, communication and persuasion and stresses the importance of impact. He gives a few examples of upstream thinking. Dave has his own book out entitled “Creative Mischief”, so check it out! Antony Mayfield of @brilliantnoise – Do You Speak Brand? Stephanie Troeth @sniffles – Speaking your User’s Language
Advancing from SEO to CRO: Using AB Testing to Maximize Conversions This entry is a guest post by Nick Eubanks, the VP of Digital Strategy at W.L. Snook and Associates, Inc. You can follow him on Twitter: @nick_eubanks. SEO moves fast. I realize this contradicts the fact that SEO is a marathon and not a sprint, however I’m not talking about the process or the results, but the industry… In a recent post by Matt Beswick he compares SEO to “trying to build a house in a fault zone,” and specifically that “by the time you have laid down the foundation, the gound underneath may have shifted.” I know often times SEO’s focus on the on-page factors before jumping into link building, but there is usually a lot of money conversion left on the table. Even when you have maxed out your on-page optimization efforts, there is always room to improve the experience and the focus of your content to drive more conversions. Optimizing For Conversion I have always been a firm believer that the job of the SEO is to acquire targeted traffic to the right pages via search engines.
26 Tips for Using Pinterest for Business Are you wondering how your business could use Pinterest? To say there’s been a lot of buzz about Pinterest in recent months would be putting it mildly! Pinterest’s ease of use for visually bookmarking, organizing and sharing things you love has made it a hit among individuals and businesses alike. What follows are 26 tips, an A-Z guide for creating a business presence on Pinterest. #1: Add a Pinterest “Follow” and/or “Pin It” Button One important way to let your clients and prospects know about your presence on Pinterest is to add a Pinterest button. Follow buttons are a great way to let users know you’re on Pinterest. #2: Brands and Pinterest While Pinterest hasn’t yet created a distinction between a personal profile and brand page (like Facebook), early adopting brands are making good use of their Pinterest presences and the pins and boards they’re sharing. *Note: Pinterest is one of the 60 new open graph websites and apps that allow a tighter integration with Facebook’s Timeline. #26: Zine
The Ultimate Guide to Startup Marketing Starting a business is exhilarating. Unfortunately, the “build it and they will come” theory doesn’t hold much weight and those overnight success stories you hear about are often the result of behind the scenes years of hard work. Simply put, startup marketing is a unique challenge often times because of the limited resources, whether it’s time, money or talent. You have to be sure every effort, no matter how small, is well-planned and flawlessly executed. Startup marketing is a whole different science. So, starting from the beginning, here’s the complete Startup Marketing Manual. Foundation Before you start laying bricks, you need a solid foundation. 1. It’s easy for startup founders to believe the whole world will love their products. If you try to market your startup to everyone, you waste both time and money. How do you choose a market? Market Size – Are you targeting a regional demographic? 2. With a clearly defined market, you can begin building a keyword list. 3. 4. 5. 6. 1. 2. 3.
Link Juice Explained Link juice is the currency of Google. In other words, it's the secret sauce that allows you to beat your competitors for rankings in Google. Sure, there are some other factors that Google uses to calculate rankings (see Search Engine Optimization), but link juice is by far the most important aspect of dominating Google and in order to understand Google, you have to understand link juice. Google looks at how sites link to each other to figure out which ones are the best. To show this in a way that's understandable, let's show a few examples. Let's say that Site A and Site B are both about 'some keyword' and would both like to rank for 'some keyword'. Google is going to take a look at links to determine which of these two sites is likely the best. Site A now looks better to Google and will outrank Site B. Now they both look the same to Google, who will now have to look at another ranking factor to determine which one is the best. Tienda Online Rentable “575″ height=”168″ /> zp8497586rq
How to Grow a Targeted Twitter Following If you’re like me, you might be a little wary of automated solutions that allow you to grow your Twitter list exponentially, but also have the potential of getting your account shut down. So instead, I thought I would share with you my simple strategy for slowly and steadily growing your Twitter followers. This isn’t about getting a huge number of just any Twitter followers, but a smaller concentration of Twitter followers that will be interested in your content. Tweet Links with Author’s Twitter Handle If you read and tweet blog posts a lot, chances are you are using the Tweet button on the post or an app like Buffer to schedule your tweets. The people who might notice your tweets, however, are the authors of those posts. There, you will find a link to their Twitter profile. When you tweet the post, be sure to include the author’s Twitter handle in the tweet and also follow the author. Does this work all of the time? Follow People Who Tweet Your Posts Follow People You Converse With
Online Ads Hit New Record: $2.83 Billion a Month Internet advertising is having a banner year — its best ever, in fact. We already saw a record first quarter for the industry. Now, according to a biannual report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, online ad revenues climbed to an astonishing $17 billion in the first half of 2012, or around $2.83 billion every month. That represents 14% growth compared to the first half of 2011. Search advertising such as AdWords — traditionally the strongest sector — is still in the lead, accounting for 48% of all online ad sales. Banner ads (21%) and Craigslist-style classifieds (8%) are slipping slightly, while video ads are holding steady at 7% of the total spend. And the much-touted mobile advertising market? The study, conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers, is compiled directly from information supplied by online ad sellers, and is widely considered the most accurate gauge of the industry's health. How big can the online ad business get?
Google Now Shows You Your Most Recent Links Google has added a new option for downloading your links in Google Webmaster Tools. You can now click on a “download latest links” button. The latest links download option will download your links that Google Webmaster Tools discovered but do so sorted by date. Google will have the link in one column and in the other column list out the date Google discovered the link. Matt Cutts tweeted the feature upgrade last night, saying: You can now download links from Google *sorted by date*. Googler, John Mueller, shared a screen shot of the new button: And here is a preview of how the links look when you download them: This may be one of the more useful feature upgrades to the link reporting tool within webmaster tools. Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Google: Webmaster Central | Top News
The 6 Month Link Building Plan for an Established Website You've probably seen the extremely comprehensive noob guide to online marketing by Oli Gardner, or the companion noob guide to link building from Mike King, you've also likely seen one of the many posts or presentations on SEO for startups (here, here and here) - suffice to say there is plenty of reading material for building new web properties but what about link building for an established website? There are an abundance of link opportunities (and challenges) that are pretty unique to an established website. I decided to compile a public Trello board which is based on some of our internal boards for clients to help you to visualise the process I am about to run through. Please bear in mind that this is not a six-month SEO plan so we won't be covering site audits or keyword research for example (although you should read this post if you are planning to conduct an SEO audit), I will be focusing on the acquisition and optimisation of links and content for links. Quick links: By month Month 1
The Guide to Developing a Content Strategy for "Boring" Industries The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz. There have been multiple articles that have discussed the value and opportunities that content marketing brings to SEO - from organically building external links and ranking for more long tail keywords, to establishing a community and building brand awareness. As the SEO industry slowly moves away from manual linkbuilding and adapts a more long-term and forward-thinking approach (whether it be forced as a result of recent aggressive Google algorithm updates or because as an industry, we're starting to seek a sustainable methodology to establish authority), the challenge is in figuring out how to set up a proper framework that would help our community develop a content strategy for all websites. Image courtesy of SEOmoz Image courtesy of Distilled Step 1: Asking the Right Questions (Learning About the Industry) How do tire shoppers use the Internet?
Identifying and Fixing Your Worst Landing Pages The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz. Lately, I’ve been working on a lot more conversion-based projects, and one of the easiest and quickest improvements is to pick out the landing pages that aren’t performing and give them an overhaul. This post explores a core process that I usually work from. Finding your worst pages I’m going to use Google Analytics in my examples because most of us have it, but I believe all of these reports can be replicated in the likes of Omniture, etc. When I’m looking for landing pages that are underperforming, some of the metrics that I take into account include: Bounce rate Navigation summary Conversion rates Filtering Before I talk more specifically about each of these metrics, I want to touch on the power of using filters in your web analytics. You could use /product/ as a filter in order to check your product pages. Bounce Rate Navigation Summary Conversion Rate 1.