SearchViews
Twitter has quickly emerged as one of the go-to tools for brand monitoring and reputation management, and as Miguel Cancino notes, it’s becoming an SEO tool as well. While doing some “vanity Googling,” Cancino found that his tweets (or the 140 character Twitter messages) comprised about 20% of the results on the first page. So imagine the potential branding benefits of a company’s own tweets (or the tweets of its devoted customers) taking up that much SERP space.
“It appears to me that the single biggest factor contributing to Twitter’s impressive SEO is the fact that Twitter profiles/status pages are sub-directories of Twitter.com (i.e. http://twitter.com/searchviews), as opposed to sub-domains (http://searchviews.twitter.com),” Cancino says. “Whatever SEO benefits Twitter receives is passed to its sub-directories (this is not the case with sub-domains.) In other words, it’s Trickle Down Twitternomics.”
And that link value is golden from an SEO standpoint, so Cancino suggests doing some keyword research for your Twitter posts (much as you would for a blog).
SEO Book
“As you may have noticed, the search engine results pages on Google’s geo-targeted search services frequently display different rankings than those you experience on Google.com,” Aaron Wall says. “In order to make search results more relevant to local audiences, Google uses different sorting methodologies than those used on Google.com.” And Wall offers tips for optimizing your copy, domain and overall strategy for regional searchers.
First, decide whether you need a local domain extension for your top-level domain (TLD). “There are exceptions, but the local TLD tends to trump .com when it comes to local result sets,” Wall says. Don’t forget to specific your country association in Webmaster tools, as this can be done on a domain, sub-domain and directory level, include local contact info on the page, and maybe even consider a local hosting service.
As for the on-page factors, be mindful of regional spelling and grammar differences (i.e. optimize vs. optimise), as well as the tone of voice you use in the copy. “For example, the sales language used in the US is usually more direct than that typically used in the UK, Australia or New Zealand,” Wall says. “Familiarize yourself with local approaches to marketing, or engage local copywriters.”
Then, get started with link building–targeting local directories and Webs ites (particularly those that have the country’s TLD)–as well as broader tactics like press release distribution and offline efforts.
Search Engine Guide
“The domain name is part of the identity of your business,” says Stoney deGeyter. “The URL chosen can have a significant impact on brand identity and in a lesser extent, keyword ranking performance. However, how your site domain name and page URLs function can have significant impact on the crawlability of the site as well as overall visitor and traffic performance.”
And with that, deGeyter serves up a list of domain and URL features that search pros should stay on top of. First, try to keep the domain name short and simple–avoiding unneccesary dashes, extra words and underscores–and use targeted keywords whenever possible. Make sure that company emails end in the same domain (as opposed to a free provider like @gmail.com).
Longevity is also a factor, so try to keep your domain registered for five to 10 years instead of renewing annually. And don’t forget to 301-redirect alternate or misspelled domains that you may have purchased back to the primary domain, or to redirect “site.com” to www.site.com.”
MoreVisibility
When you’ve attained prime organic placement for a client across the major search engines, the question of why/whether they need to continue to (or start to) invest in PPC for their branded terms may arise. And the MoreVisibility team has got some insights to help you formulate a good answer.
“In reality, having strong positions in the natural listings in addition to strong presence in the paid listings gives your website (and business) the best chance for success in online marketing,” the team says. That’s because you can’t bank on searcher behavior. Some users may just click on the first result they see, while others scan the entire page before making a choice. Meanwhile, some searchers make it a point to avoid paid results, while others make a beeline for them.
There’s also the question of competitive advantage. “Just because you rank high for your business name organically doesn’t mean the web surfer won’t click on the paid ad your competitor is running on your business name,” the team says. “Why give your competitor a chance to grab that lead because you rely on only one section of the page?”
Bill Hartzer
Bill Hartzer delivers the rundown on six ways to get “nearly instant” links to your Web site. And why might you need inbound links ASAP? “Perhaps it’s a blog post,” Hartzer says. “Perhaps it’s just a new web site and a brand new domain name and you ‘want to do something’ to jumpstart it somehow.”
First, submit your site to OneMission.com or Easy Link Directory, two sites that quickly establish links. You could also add link-back to the site through one of your (many) social media accounts, including StumbleUpon, dropjack.com and spicypages.com. Or go one better and craft link-worthy content on the site, and use said profiles to promote the articles.
Lastly, make comments on some “do follow blogs,” typically for one of the most recent posts. “Keep in mind that you really DO need to make a useful comment (especially on my blog) because most of these (if not all of them) are moderated,” Hartzer says.
Search Engine People
Blog posts tied to breaking news often suffer from a limited shelf-life–but they can help garner lots of juice-passing links that can help propel your blog (or the encompassing site) to the top of the organic listings. And there’s a new plugin for WordPress bloggers that lets you automatically create 301 redirects so that you can pass the juice on from those highly-trafficked posts.
Search Engine People developed the free plugin, which is available at http://www.searchenginepeople.com/tools/wp-301redirect.zip. It allows you to redirect any blot post or page to any other post or page–whether its internal or external–simply by entering the new URL. And you can even choose a specific time and date to have the redirect occur.
WebmasterWorld
What happens when you tweak title tags across a swath of pages on your Web site at the same time? Apparently, tumbling rankings, a decrease in the number of pages indexed and an ensuing slowdown in traffic, according to one Webmaster’s account. Internetheaven, a WebmasterWorld forums user,explains that organic traffic to his site dropped by 65% in the wake of him changing the title tags for about 60 of the site’s 250 pages.
“Last week I went through about 60 of them and adjusted the title tags to something I thought would be more appropriate,” he said, “E.g. from: ‘CompanyName - Get your keyword1, keyword2, keyword3 & keyword4 Quote Now from Company Name’ to CompanyName.com ¦ Company Name Keyword1 & Keyword2 Quotes’.” And while it wasn’t a drastic change, as the site wasn’t generating much traffic from the deleted terms, the ensuing results were awful. So the discussion focuses on whether Internetheaven fiddled with too many title tags at once and sparked Google’s “excessive optimization” radar. As one reader says: “Unless you are a super trusted authority site (ie you can throw up a page on a long tail and rank Top 3 in an hour), then Google is very cranky about title changes lately.” The reader suggests that Internetheaven should change the bulk of the title tags back to their original setup, leave one “optimized” and see how/when the rankings fluctuate.
Another reader suggests that including “Companyname.com” as the first word of every title tag was likely the culprit. Google weights the first words of the title more than later words,” says Steveb. “Putting Companyname.com as the first words of every page is suicide, and odd anyway. Change is not a problem, literally completely useless duplicate content is.”
SEO Scientist
If you have a Web page with multiple links to another page on it, chances are, Google is only going to pay attention to the very first link it crawls. You can change the anchor tags, nofollow the first link, or otherwise try to get the “juice” to flow differently, but according to a field test by Branko Rihtman, the first link to a new domain is the only one that really counts.
Rihtman’s test actually piggybacks on a theory Rand Fishkin posed in an SEOmoz post back in March, but offers some concrete evidence that the first link on each page carries all the weight. He tested one start page with two links to the same destination page, and found that Google only indexed the first link. Even with a nofollow tag, the giant’s spider still picked up the initial link and ignored the second.
E-Commerce Times
Peter Hamilton lists some guidelines for creating and promoting online video–and makes the case for why clips may be the best link bait ever.
But we’re not talking about your standard UGC, or even semi-professional company interview. Hamilton says that the quality of the video counts — from niche-specific how-to videos, to footage of the annual charity softball game. “The quality of content will directly impact the rest of the campaign, just as the quality of written content attracts links,” he says.
Factors like image resolution and audio clarity are non-negotiables for video link bait–because if viewers can’t understand the dialogue or have trouble making out the images, they won’t watch (or share). “Though amateurs have produced some of the highest-viewed online videos on YouTube and other posting sites, the audio and image quality is always such that the message is clear,” Hamilton says.
E-Marketing Performance
A majority of e-commerce Web sites have secure domains or sections to help protect consumers while they’re making purchases (designated by the https: prefix as opposed to http:). While security is a must, these secure and non-secure site versions can cause duplicate content issues, so Stoney deGeyter offers tips for how to avoid them.
DeGeyter suggests that the problem typically arises when consumers enter secure mode by adding items to their shopping cart–and then continue browsing, viewing all ensuing content under the https: domain. The fix for this is simple.
“There is no reason to go secure just by adding products to a cart,” he says. “The place to go secure is when they hit the checkout button.” And if they leave the checkout process to continue shopping, they need to automatically be placed back onto non-secure pages.
“When shoppers can access secure and non secure versions of the same unsecure page, then likely the search engines can as well,” deGeyter says. “This creates almost a complete duplicate of your site, one secure and one non-secure version.” He recommends using absolute URLs for all navigation and product pages to avoid having multiple versions.