Not everyone in our office had access to Knowledge Graph, luckily my Google profile did have access.
For example, here is a search for “The Sun”:
First you get the regular results for “The Sun,” but notice in the right column, there is a link to find out if you meant to search for the celestial object that lights our world and gives life to all known beings.
If you click the link, you get the following results that provides you a short list of information about the sun, including data points like “surface temperature,” “rotation speed,” “distance to earth,” “mass,” etc.
If you click the bold information titles, you go into a deeper search discovery mode that provides results on information related to the original query, however it hopefully reveals deeper relationships, such as, did you know one Jupiter year is very close to the sunspot cycle. Very interesting if they are related, and enough to get someone to want to know more.
Next, you’ll see that Google’s semantic search results for the Sun’s surface temperature has references if you click “show details.”
Now that you can see the sources of the information, you can see which sites that Google is pulling data from. Since 5,778 degrees Kelvin was referenced twice out of the four sources 5,778 was the chosen number. However, if you think this is inaccurate, you can let Google know using their feedback links below the source citations.
I think this is a great step for Google, however a few questions pop up in my mind:
Will your site get more traffic if you’re cited by Google’s semantic search results?
Will users tend to never leave Google’s property if they get the “good enough” answer directly on the SERP?
How will the knowledge graph affect ad placement, or ad delivery?
Will certain types of SEO emerge with the purpose to become the cited source in the Knowledge Graph results?
I’ve been reading up on the hype of semantic search lately. You can find some of that here, here, and here.
Lance Haun thinks the hype is a response to the negative reaction to Google’s “Search Plus Your World”. It could be. There are tons of people blogging and commenting, lamenting the new search as a form of censorship, clouding knowledge of the world based on your connections. For a few techy purists, it’s a valid point, however I think most people don’t even notice it. This tech/online marketing echo chamber sometimes seems like the real world.
As many people have already said, semantic search is not that new. Google already offers semantic search for certain questions. Geoff Duncan gives a great breakdown of the difference between semantic and literal search, however my view of semantic search is creating the ultimate know-it-all. I’m sure Doug Pokorny wouldn’t like to lose his spot to Google in Facebook.
If Google created a bot that could log into Facebook, and beat Doug Pokorny in trivia, then Google will have created “The Ultimate Know-It-All”.
Jon Mitchell at ReadWriteWeb expresses in his headline about Google’s semantics search that semantic search is “bad for SEO”, however many people take it (as I think it was intended) as a “THE SKY IS FALLING” moment for their livelihood. This could be the case for the armies of link builders in far-off lands that create nonsense blog posts with exact anchor text. For those internet marketers focused on SEO for our clients, semantic search isn’t a scary thing or bad thing, it is a challenge.
SEO is about constantly learning and adapting. Optimizing for semantic search shouldn’t be on your radar unless your income is based off of advertising that floats around information that Google will scrape and display as “semantic results”.
The difference of semantic search will have on the current SEO paradigm is that people researching information will not go to sites outside of Google until they’re ready to take specific action, such as purchase a product or service. Much of this has been done with Google+. Brands are posting information to their Google+ pages, and those pages are being found via search. If you go to the Google+ page, you are not leaving Google to go to the brand’s site. Google wants more and more of the interaction to happen in their playground, and reduce users leaving Google once they’ve completed a query.
With Google’s push into finance and banking with Google Wallet, the combination of semantic search, and Google+ identity layer, Google will capture more transactions and user activity without having users leave their site for a brand’s site, or for Paypal.
The question becomes, if the juggernaut of Google succeeds by improving the user experience with semantic search, Google Wallet and Google+, will commerce exist outside of Google? And will Google’s next move be to create their own currency?
Also, forgot to mention, Google is compiling their database for semantic search with Freebase.
Google+ has over 90 million users as of January 2012 according to Google+ News. Now that Google has started “Search plus Your World”, Google+ is a significant contributor to your organic search rankings. Also, the new Google search interface has separated personal from non-personal results.
Several bloggers have commented on the importance of Google+ in your online marketing mix. You will need to consider Google+ as part of your social strategy and your search strategy. (more…)
There are several ways to slice this question, however we are going to focus on mid-sized businesses that are looking to get more from organic search.
The silver bullet to SEO success is … alignment.
When I say that the silver bullet to SEO success is alignment, I mean alignment of key people in your organization. There are so many times that great SEO plans do not get implemented, or take too long to implement and fizzle out because of that lack of alignment. In organizations that are larger and compartmentalized, alignment is not an easy task.
We’ll outline the typical scenario of contributing groups to a successful SEO plan implementation:
Marketing: Marketing has the responsibility for planning, organizing and reporting on the SEO contribution to company revenue. Marketing should vet the SEO plan with their search agency. Marketing should also be the coordinator of SEO training within the organization. Bring in the resources you need to get the knowledge spread around. The SEO basics should be understood by all the contributing groups.
Public Relations: If you have a good SEO plan, it should include public relations as part of the equation. It’s all about how the public should think of your business. Public relations is more than a link building ploy, it’s also a way to help build awareness of the terms you rank for, and to give searchers the words they need to find your website.
IT: The IT department is responsible for ensuring the website and supporting infrastructure is online and functional. IT should also help with the site structure coding, content management system changes, cms template changes, and server side changes such as the .htaccess (for LAMP users) file updates. IT needs to be aware of the SEO basics and best practices for semantic markup in the site code.
SME (subject matter experts): Subject matter experts can come from anywhere in the organization as long as they have useful knowledge for your clients. A good SEO plan includes great content. You can get great content ideas from your internal experts throughout your organization. All your customer facing people should help you with content ideas for the website. They will know what your customers are looking for, and they should know what the website isn’t doing well because they have to make up for the lack of the website’s content. Do you have engineers designing widgets? They should also be interviewed for content ideas.
Executive (CEO/President): The leadership’s role is supporting the organization and planning of the marketing executives to ensure timely implementation of SEO plans. If the CEO is on board with the SEO program it will help to align all the players.
Alignment requires that you have a solid SEO plan. Your search agency should provide a comprehensive SEO plan that integrates and supports all your online marketing initiatives including your social outreach, paid media, and email marketing.
The silver bullet is not as simple as it is to write about it. It takes a lot of communication time and training within your organization, however once everyone is aligned, the implementation of the SEO plan will happen much faster.
Lead with your keywords. Your headline should resonate with your topic. Your topic is described by your focus keywords. Make sure to lead with your keywords as it will help for searchers and search engines find your press release.
Keep it short. Your headline should be about as long as a meta title with a sweet spot of 50 to 130 characters in length. If you go over 150 your headline used as title tag will get cut off in the search engine result pages.
2. Focused body copy
Laser focused content. Don’t try to make the press release about several different topics. If other topics must be included, make sure they are directly related and help to support the main topic. Also, write short paragraphs, and get to the point quickly. It’s good for your audience to stay on topic, and it’s good for search engines to know your press release is relevant.
3. Limited links
Focus your call-to-action by limiting the number of links. Think of links in the press release as calls to action. Ideally there should only be one call to action, however you may need to include additional links for your readers as resources.
Have one link using descriptive anchor text (never use ‘click here’) in the body of the copy. This should be your main call to action link.
Include resource links at the end of the press release. Repeat the main call to action link in the resources section. Resource links should be links to more information about the company, about the people quoted, and contacts in social media profiles.
4. Images & Video
Visual aids help your press release engagement and pick-up rate. Augment your readers’ experience with visual stimulants to help them understand your message, and in some cases emotionally engage with them. This is all about quality of content. Also, remember to give good descriptive names to the image files or video titles.
5. Promotion
Post your press releases to your site first. After you posted your press release to your newsroom on your site (make one if you don’t have one), post it in other places as well (just be sure to post to your site first). If you have a blog, promote your press release on your blog, too.
Have a list of influencers. Over time you should continually build a list of online topic influencers that may be interested in your updates. Keep them in the loop of what’s new. Some of them may be interested in what you’re offering and repeat it on their site or social profiles. Engage with this list periodically to make sure they are still active, and to show you care about their input. Sometimes you may get ideas for press releases from this network of influencers.
Distribute through the main portals. Some include prnewswire.com, prweb.com, marketwire.com, businesswire.com. Make sure to follow their guidelines. Many press release distribution sites have limitations on links and the format of your press release. Read their tips and how-to’s to make sure your press releases get distributed.
Also, don’t forget to distribute your press release through all of your social media networks. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ are all great distribution channels.
The short answer is “it depends”. I’m sure you love that answer because it’s so reassuring and final, but seriously, there are many factors in the search environment that affect results, many of which are out of your direct control.
We’ll break this down into three sections:
what you control
what you influence
and what is out of your control
Factors you control:
If you don’t have this baseline covered, you should spend most of your time here first. Change what you have control over for faster results.
SEO results can be quickly improved from on-site optimization if your brand is strong, and if you have a continual flow of fresh content.
Offering: Your business controls your offering. Do you focus your offering on the top converting personas? Do you even have personas outlined? Get to know personas in order to optimize your offering language. Your offerings are on landing pages, ad copy, blog posts. Why should anyone care about your business? You control the message about your offering, so make sure it resonates with the right people.
Profiles: Your social profiles, directory listings and business citations should be under your control. Make sure to claim your brand in the majors like Google Places, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and Google+, and don’t forget all the social content sharing sites like Flickr, Youtube, and Slideshare (to name a few).
Content: You control your content, or you should. You need to have a blog and consistently update it. Vet the content to make sure it’s valuable to your personas just like your business offering. Why would someone care about your content? Your content should be insightful, helpful, and/or entertaining.
Content promotion: Now that you have content, how does anyone know about it? Most of the time nobody will know until you tell someone. In order for people to find your content in search, it needs to be in the index through crawling, and given importance by links. Make sure your site is pushed to the search engines first through a submitted RSS feed to Feedburner, or through your XML sitemap submission with Google Webmaster Tools. Also, get feedback on your content through your social media profiles, and thank those that participate. Contact industry influencers with your content. The content better be helpful, entertaining or insightful, or your contacts will delete your messages!
Usability: Can your personas complete the tasks they intended when landing on your site? What circumstances lead to barriers for completion of tasks? Is the site easy on the eyes? Does the site load fast? Usability is not necessarily going to directly impact keyword rankings. Indirectly a better user experience will entice linking which will directly improve your keyword rankings. Nobody wants to link to a site that is difficult to use, or takes forever to load, and you control this!
Site code / structure: This ties into usability, however it mostly ties directly to providing Google a way to find your content. Make sure you have unique title tags for each page. Make sure you have semantic heading structures for your content. Make sure your internal linking structure provides keyword rich descriptions of the destination pages. Make sure you use link CSS files instead of HTML styling. These are a few of the items to be aware of when improving your site code.
This is not an exhaustive list by any means, however it should help you get started in thinking about what you can change about your online presence for the benefit of improved search visibility.
Factors you influence:
The factors you influence are worth spending time in, however don’t expect instant results. These take time to build up, and require persistence and patience.
User participation: Getting users to create content about your business takes time to build up awareness and trust. It starts with you showing an interest in them. You’ll need to built up a base of advocates that are not afraid of public brand affection. Start small and focused in order to build momentum. Engage in two-way conversations in order to help customers. Make sure your customer experience rocks so that your customers will show you love online.
News / media: Stay current on your industry and keep a pulse on the top news. Subscribe to industry news RSS feeds, setup Twitter lists to filter down to your news feed. Modify your Google News page to include your top keywords. By keeping your ear to the ground you’ll be able to jump at opportunities quickly. You’ll want to be able to speak out on issues, or events using press releases, blog posts, social commentary in social networks in order to help your message spread and get picked up from news outlets, and/or leading blogs. Also, make sure your SEO strategy is integrated with your PR strategy.
Brand awareness: Typically business sites receive a plurality if not a majority of their traffic from branded terms. Many times SEO strategies revolve around getting more traffic from non-branded terms, however brand awareness campaigns can deliver huge returns if done right. Use your website analytics to gauge your brand awareness levels. If a campaign is working, you should see an increase in branded traffic to your website. Make sure to display your main website address in any of your brand awareness campaigns whether its printed, televised, or event-based. If your site address isn’t your brand, make sure you are ranking for your brand. Also, check the search engine results pages for your branded terms to make sure you dominate the space with paid media, and multiple types of content and social profiles that should be listed under your website and site links.
Factors you don’t control:
These factors are outside your sphere of influence, however they are useful when studied. You need to stay informed of the environment so you’ll know how to adapt.
Competitors: Keep an eye on what your competitors are doing. See how they present themselves online and explore how they are executing on their online marketing campaigns. Understand their value propositions to understand how they differentiate themselves. This will help you to refine, evolve and fight. Sometimes you may lose an SEO fight, but you may also find a weakness in the competitors’ rankings that can be broken. Know your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses in order to understand your own threats and opportunities in search.
Search algorithm changes: Stay aware of the recent changes to Google, Yahoo and Bing. If you are doing business in China, check out Baidu, and if in Russia, Yandex. Changes to search algorithms can’t be anticipated unless you’re a search engineer for a top search engine. Make sure to be aware of when search engines change their interface, how they display results, how results are ranked, and review industry commentary on the changes to get a well-rounded perspective on what the changes mean to your business.
New technology habits by users: Do you remember how people used the Internet only 6 years ago? In March of 2005 Google had 36% market share, and Yahoo! had double the market share of Microsoft. Fastforward to 2011, and Google has eaten Yahoo!’s share, and Microsoft’s Bing is just slightly less than Yahoo!. Also, Yahoo! is using Bing’s search engine for all US searches. So, users may change which search engines they use, however Google has been the main beneficiary of the change. Also, I’d be surprised if you havn’t heard of social media. Back in 2005 social media was new, and all the rage with hype around “Web 2.0.” Look out for the next hot trends, but be a fast follower instead of an early adopter. Observe how the system is being built, and play with the tools before fully integrating into your marketing mix. Find out for yourself how the technologies work. Some things to look out for all revolve around local, social and mobile, and interfaces. Think Siri, it addresses all of these issues.
So, when you ask, “how long does SEO take to get results?” the answer “it depends” really means it depends on you. How long does it take to plan and execute? Are you targeting the right personas? Are your goals focused on revenue instead of rankings? Are you integrating SEO into your inbound marketing practices? Are you integrating your PPC campaigns with your SEO strategy? How are you measuring the success of your SEO campaigns?
To really understand how soon SEO will bring results, you need to have a site SWOT analysis, a competitive analysis, and top notch keyword research that outlines your best opportunities. Armed with the right data, you will have a much better idea of how much time will need to be invested to get results in SEO for your website.
Google Adwords Phishing emails are still getting through. The phishers use Google email addresses that Adwords clients recognize, but don’t be fooled!
This morning I received an email that was from Google’s Adwords email address. The formatting looked slightly off from other Adwords emails usually I receive, so I was immediately suspicious. I hovered my mouse over the link titled “click here to review your ads and let us know if we made a mistake,” and found that the destination URL led to “google-tih.com”. I searched Google for the exact domain name and found no reference in Google to the URL.
Watch out for the following email subject: “Account has stopped running”
If you receive this email do not click the link. They are asking for your Adwords credentials and you could endanger your clients’ or your company’s campaign integrity.
Here’s a screenshot of the email received:
According to OnlyMyEmail the spammer will cause all your ads to direct to their sites.
Google, what are you doing about this? It has been going on for quite a long time. Search for “Google Adwords Phishing” and you will see scams as old as 2009.
Search engine optimization should be integrated with all your online marketing efforts. It starts with having a great offering and communicating. Do people love your business? Is your customer experience awesome? If your business provides an awesome customer experience your business will grow by “Word of Mouth” (or WOM), and SEO will make it easy for more customers to find your business.
If someone posts your link to their Facebook page, it is a form of WOM, and doesn’t require users to search, they just click the link. However, if they want to find the same link two weeks later, they may have difficulty finding that same link in their social media profile, and will quickly turn to their favorite search engine to find the site they were interested in.
This is where SEO is incredibly important, because the user may not remember your brand name if they had only seen the brand once, but they will remember the offering, and will use search terms based on the offering.
The question then becomes “Does your site rank on page 1 for the offering terms?”
If your site doesn’t naturally rank for your business offering terms, you should consider paid search advertising with Google Adwords and Bing Adcenter. This way you can catch those users that are looking for your offering.
Your catch will only be a small percentage of the total impressions from your target search terms, however when you gain natural rankings in addition to having paid search advertising you will have increased your shelf space on the search engine results page (SERP) and gain a higher percentage of clicks from the total number of SERP impressions.
Remember, searchers are expressing intent with their keyword choices. Also, searchers use terms they know. Part of your online marketing campaign is to help prospects to remember the words they should use to find your business online.
The vocabulary of your marketing communications should reinforce terms that your site naturally ranks for, and that you are bidding on in your paid search advertising. By planting the keyword seeds in the minds of prospects through interruption marketing you prepare them to use the keyword phrases that you dominate in search.
If your branding initiatives are working, you will notice upward trending in brand-related search traffic to your site (assuming you are checking your website’s analytics reports).
SEO complements your push marketing messages by allowing those that develop interest to find your offering online and do their research. Ranking naturally in search is a sign of credibility to people that are researching your offering.
SEO is the golden thread that connects all your online marketing efforts. From public relations, social media, email marketing, display and banner ads, paid search advertising, and your website experience, all should be in concert with the purpose of gaining customers by being easy to find through search. All the marketing communications vocabulary should be customer-focused. Use the language of your customers to make it easy for more of them to find your business.
There are many technical aspects to SEO, such as semantic site code structure, information architecture, crawlability, anchor text of inbound links, unique title tags and meta descriptions; however none of these aspects make up for a poor customer experience. SEO amplifies a great customer experience. If your businesses provides a poor customer experience, SEO becomes difficult because a large part of SEO depends on WOM sharing of your links from your customers and prospects.
Considering all the above, SEO is not a stand alone marketing campaign. It is best used as a thought pattern applied to all of your online marketing activities that should keep your business focused on your customers throughout all your marketing communications.
See part one of the SEO question series: What is SEO?
the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.
So how is online visibility improved? It requires an understanding of how search engines work without having access to the search engines’ secret algorithms that determine the results, and an understanding of the users that are searching.
Starting with understanding how search engines work; out of the over 200 factors that determine your site’s ranking on Google, they can mostly be categorized into four main buckets:
Relevance
Importance
Personalization
Localization
Depending on the nature of your site these factors may take on differing levels of importance however the order of the factors are generally in order of importance.
Relevance is the foundation of ranking. Your site needs content that is focused on the keywords that you want to rank for. If your site isn’t using the keywords in the title tags, body copy, anchor text and alt attributes, your site will not be associated with the desired keyword.
Importance is the vote of confidence from your ‘peers’. Search engines have millions of ‘relevant’ content associated with keywords, yet they still need to order the results by importance. Importance is influenced by the age of the site, the quality and diversity of your backlinks, and how much the content is shared socially. The best kind of links you can get are links in the body copy of another site with surrounding content that is relevant to your site content.
Personalization is based on users’ search history. Google’s algorithm is aware of your search history and will adjust it’s results based on past searches. This is a very tricky factor, as it’s pretty much impossible to know how you rank in personalized results, because the results may be unique to each user based on their search history.
Localization is incredibly important to small business. For those businesses that rely on local customers, localization can make or break your business. Your site needs to be associated with a physical address from a search perspective. Also, many other sites should include your physical address as Google will see other listings of that address associated with your company name as votes of confidence that your address is correct.
With the basic understanding of how search engines rank sites, it is imperative to know how users are finding your site. If your website is ranking for a keyword that nobody searches for such as “appendix transplant” it doesn’t matter. The purpose of the SEO process is to drive high quality traffic to your site that will result in the desired engagement.
Understanding the vocabulary of your users and the intent implied by the words used should drive your keyword strategy. Establishing your keyword strategy is the backbone of any legitimate SEO campaign, which is the subject of the next post in this series.
If you type Facebook.com directly into your browser, you might mis-type the URL and input Facebok.com instead. If you do you will find this spammy survey site saying that you are a winner:
TIPS if you typo’ed Facebook:
Don’t click any links on the survey site.
Hit the Esc key to get out of the pop-up dialog box, and close the browser.
Go to Facebook.com and bookmark in your browser or favorite bookmarking service so that you never have to type Facebook.com again.
855.360.4601
