What Can Social Bookmarking Websites Offer As Part Of An SEO Campaign?

At the South by Southwest Interactive Conference last week, a new version of a popular social bookmarking website was revealed to be in the pipeline. Digg is the first choice for SEO consultants and casual internet users alike, as it is the perfect platform for both saving and publicising websites and their content.

With the online social world moving at such a fast pace, it seems only right that Digg should reinvent itself. After all, with SEO consultants seeing increased benefits in social bookmarking, there has been a significant rise in the number of social bookmarking websites claiming to be the next best thing. If you search for ‘social bookmarking sites’ in Google, there are lists of hundreds of social bookmarking websites.

Social bookmarking websites such as Digg, Delicious and Mixx offer a number of benefits as part of an SEO campaign. Below are the main reasons why I think consultants should make use of these sites;

Inbound Links – Link building is one of the primary techniques used by optimisers. Links that point to a particular URL will gain attention from search engine robots. The more quality inbound links that a website has, the more authority that it achieves in the eyes of search engine such as, Google, Bing and Yahoo.  This can benefit a website in a number of ways; its page rank may increase, which could in turn push the website up the search engine listings to the prime, page one position one spot.

Of course, no inbound link is quite the same. More authority is likely to be achieved if a link is from a relevant site with a high page rank. For example, if building links for a home furnishings company, it would be beneficial to add the link to a ‘home’ section of a social bookmarking website.

Wide Audience – Search Engine Optimisation has developed rapidly over the past few years and whilst link building is still an important technique, consultants are increasingly concerned with reaching out to not just the search robots, but real internet users.

Social bookmarking is a means of publicising a website and its content. It allows audiences to learn more about the latest trends, news and opinions. With an audience of many thousands using Digg on a daily basis, it offers an opportunity for websites to be seen amongst the crowd.

Content Sharing – One of the main benefits of social bookmarking is that it enables users to share interesting information with their friends, family and colleagues.

If a link is interesting to a user they are likely to add it to their own list of bookmarks or even re-post it on their social networking news feed. Used alongside social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, websites and their content could reach an extremely large audience in just days – or even hours in some cases.

Social bookmarking offers a number of benefits to an SEO campaign, as a key tool there is no doubt that the new Digg will offer a whole host of new features to search engine optimisers. I hope that it provides a wider range of categories to post under, what do you hope that the new design and features will offer to users?

Entering a new market for any business is never easy, and starting a new SEO campaign on a brand new website is no exception.  Any good SEO campaign will be geared towards Google to ensure the site receives the best possible exposure in the search engines. However, it can be a tricky procedure, as Google (though they’ve never publicly said this, only hinted at it) has what is known as a ‘sandbox’.

The name ‘sandbox’ stems from people using juvenile SEO techniques such as buying links from link farms, creating duplicate content and other ‘childish’ black hat techniques. Basically these sites are literally ‘put back in the sandbox’ with the other children!

What do I do if I think my site has been Sandboxed?

Don’t panic! – If you think your site has been sandboxed, the natural reaction may well be to fret over it and send yourself mad with worry. This needn’t be the worst thing in the world, I always say, if you can turn adversity into fortune then you’re in for a stress free, successful life!

Sit back, and look at things objectively, there are things that can be done to help you get some business, even if it’s not going to be as effective as the possibility of catching those high value keywords you originally wanted to target.

Look at your keywords, and try and think ‘outside the box’ – see if you can find some keywords that, although are less popular, will still bring you traffic and sales. Start link building slowly for those phrases, it will, over time strengthen your campaign so isn’t a waste of time at all.

Look at the Longtail. Longtail keywords can be extremely powerful for conversion, and should be incorporated into all SEO campaigns anyway. Build up your content with relevant articles and pages written expressly for this purpose. Your site will be healthier and stronger when finally released from the sandbox, so this is most definitely the way forward.

Search out ‘authority’ links, such as DMOZ, industry standard sites, Fortune 500 sites etc. Also .gov .edu domains can provide relief from the sandbox filter as these are highly trusted sites and are usually exempt from the sandbox.

Think away from Google – often I find my sites perform extremely well on Yahoo and Bing, but start out slow in Google. Although traffic from less widely used search engines will always be much reduced than what you would expect from Google, these search engines shouldn’t ever be overlooked.

Look at generating traffic through social media marketing. Facebook and Twitter are quickly becoming more widely used, and could overtake Google in popularity. You can generate traffic and sales opportunities by using this different approach. There may even be a social media platform related to your industry.

Think about email marketing. If you have a list of existing customers, send them a newsletter telling them about your new site. Always give them the option to unsubscribe – otherwise you could run the risk of losing your existing customers, which would be entirely counterproductive.

If your site has been sandboxed, it can take up to 8 months to be released. However, if you do all the things mentioned above it should perform almost straight away when it is finally released.

You will have a lot of content published on your site targeting the longtail. These pages will still be there, working away for you as long as they remain on your site. Your time will not have been wasted! You may even find that the conversion rate from these pages is higher over time than that from the highly competitive keywords originally picked.

Have you ever heard of D-Moz?

I’m sorry I don’t listen to hip-hop…

Dmoz isn’t some bling covered rapper from across the Atlantic, I’m sure most people actually assume this when they hear the word…No? Just me then.

If you’re just starting out in the world of SEO (as I was a couple of weeks ago) then you may be unsure as to what Dmoz is.

Dmoz is actually an abbreviation of the original domain for the Open Directory Project (ODP), the largest human-edited directory on the internet.

In brief, Dmoz is a global directory with a vast number of categories, including websites regarding:

• Technology museums.
• Welding and soldering.
• Sporting eyewear protection.
• Bowling for gays, lesbians and bisexuals.
• And, much, much more.

I don’t think I’m dabbling in hyperbole when I say Dmoz contains directories of every imaginable thing, and every unimaginable thing!*

If you speak a couple of languages why not help Dmoz out by translating a directory or two into one of the many languages used.

To keep the behemoth from collapsing under it’s own volume a dedicated team of editors (somewhere in the region of 8,000) trim the fat and keep the system operating as smoothly as possible.

Although the site is free it’s owned by Netscape who are committed to a social contract which aspires to keep the site free and give back to the (internet) community.

With regards to SEO, a listing on Dmoz is essential, it’s a given, a standard for websites.  If your site isn’t on Dmoz then you’ve never heard of it until now or…I can’t think of another reason without insulting people, so let’s just leave it at one reason.

Google acknowledged Dmoz’s importance allowing it to command a high PageRank, therefore giving weight via backlinks to listed websites and making it vital for websites to be listed.

This is from the about page on Dmoz, and sums up the project more concisely than I could: “ODP editors are Web searchers creating a directory for other Web searches”.

Dmoz is for the people, and by the people.

*Yeah, fine, I dabbled

Will This Feature Reinvent Search Engine Optimisation?

Recently Google Social Search was put into the public domain after extensive beta testing at the tail-end of last year. After performing a Google search, this new feature finds relevant public content from your web social circle and highlights it at the bottom of the traditional results page. Many observers are asking the question – what does this mean for SEO?

While there may be a few changes in how search engine optimisation is performed, the reality is that the jury is still out. The first flaw with the feature is that users must be logged into a Google mail account for the social results to be presented. This is because it only picks up social network connections that are linked to users’ public Google profiles, such as Twitter, FriendFeed, Linked In, blogs and even images from Picasa and Flickr.

The second area of concern is the lack of Facebook presence in Google Social Searches. This particular social network is considered to be the biggest in the UK, if not the world. But it is essentially closed off to search engine spiders, meaning potentially optimised material will stay private. This is clearly going to have a detrimental effect on the effectiveness of Google Social Search, and needs to be rectified before it can be considered as a major force for the SEO industry.

What are the advantages?

It has to be pointed out however that Google Social Search could open so many doors for the SEO industry. To have so much social content in one place is obviously a powerful tool. The ability to build a large-scale network of friends, friends of friends and business associates will enable greater linking opportunities, and also provides new rankings to ‘exploit’. Viral content, such as Michael Angrave’s SEO Song, will spread like wildfire, and grow at a greater rate than ever before.

The bottom line remains the same – quality content is still king. As outlined in a recent blog post ‘Social Media Marketing for SEO’, by contributing material that is relevant and interesting you will identify yourself as someone to link with.

Once Google Social Search has had its flaw ironed out and moves into the wider public sphere, it is likely to become a tool for SEO firms to take advantage of. So get networking!

Embracing this bold new world can pay dividends to your SEO campaign

While search engine spiders won’t pick up on optimisation within a video itself, they can identify a range of text-based content that is associated with it. With the continued rise of YouTube – 999,987,865 videos and counting – it is easy to see why the industry is starting to wake up to the SEO possibilities of web video.

While it may be most famous for being home to videos of dancing dogs and skateboarding cats, YouTube also hosts an array of videos that offer expert opinion and analysis on related topics. As seen with my colleagues James and Nick’s SEO video blogs, they can generate significant traffic and stimulate debate among the audience. And with a transcript of the video in text form present as well as backward links to the mother site will also enable excellent search engine optimisation possibilities.

It is important to note however there are alternatives to YouTube in the videosphere. Social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace are still growing at an alarming rate, and also allow users to embed videos, alongside sites such as Twiddeo (Twitter’s sister site) and Vimeo. If the video is considered useful or has a certain X Factor it may even be shared between a web community for even wider exposure, which can spread like wild fire around the globe.

But remember to always add the video to your own site before uploading it elsewhere, to ensure your site gets the authority.

Linking provides another opportunity to maximise your SEO strategy from video content. Uploading to video sharing networks enables backward linking to your own website, which is particularly useful if the video you shoot is informative and entertaining - which will engage the audience and improve the likelihood of traffic being redirected.

Any HTML content surrounding a video, such as a transcript of the content for example, can represent one way of optimising. Even a word-for-word script can utilise extensive key phrasing. Ensure filenames, titles and video descriptions are key word rich, as well as always tagging videos with phrases incorporating these terms as well.

An XML or video sitemap on your own website will also generate activity within the search engines. Submitting the sitemap via Webmaster Tools will help the engines discover material they otherwise wouldn’t.

Don’t delay in harnessing the power of video in your SEO campaign. This bold new world offers a wealth of opportunities.

During the Summer Google made an announcement about a new project they are rolling out, they call it ‘Caffeine’. Caffeine is described as a re-write of the current search architecture, Matt Cutts suggested that many searches would stay the same but be faster.

At the time of this announcement, Matt Cutts discussed this new update with WebProNews. He suggested that it is very similar to the “Big daddy Update” from 2005, and consists of changes to the way Google crawls and then indexes sites.

Before Christmas, Google were kind enough to reassure everyone that Caffeine wouldn’t be rolled out until after the festivities. This was a very considerate thing of Google to do, especially as the Christmas period is often the busiest time of year for many businesses.

In November Google told us all about their intentions at PubCon. A few days ago Matt Cutts posted a video of his presentation at this event on his blog. It is well worth watching – if you want to skip ahead to the Caffeine bit though, it starts at around 22.10.

How will Caffeine affect your SEO

If you use white hat SEO techniques, and make sure your site is excellent for the end user (ie people) then you can’t really go wrong. Don’t forget to make sure your content is regularly updated, your coding is clean and tidy, and you link build using ethical and thoughtful techniques you can’t go wrong. The basic rules of SEO still apply!

Yesterday, Matt Cutts blogged about an official Google post on synonyms by Google engineer, Steven Baker, and how they affect search results. I find this a very interesting subject, and one that is clearly very relevant for SEO.

The fact that Google can understand many synonyms, I find amazing, because as Steven Baker states:

“An irony of computer science is that tasks humans struggle with can be performed easily by computer programs, but tasks humans can perform effortlessly remain difficult for computers.”

The tasks that computers find difficult are the understanding of the nuances of language. The English language, like all languages, has many subtleties that as humans we can understand effortlessly. Many of our words have more than one meaning, where the context in which they are placed makes all the difference to our understanding of them.

Steven Baker used the example of ‘pictures’ and ‘photos’ meaning the same thing within certain contexts. Google has the ability to understand that these two very different words can mean the same thing, and I think Google are right to be proud of such an achievement.

How does this affect SEO?

Well, the advice from Google has always been to use synonyms where possible. You should think about other terms, such as slang, for the same word and use those within your text as much as you can to ensure your copy is relevant for as many searches as possible. Where one person may call a USB drive a ‘flash drive’ and another may call it a ‘thumb drive’ you will need to make sure that both these terms are present on your page in order to be successful.

You shouldn’t just cram these words into your content, but make it read as naturally as possible, because there is nothing worse than clumsy, keyword stuffed text. You should always have your end users at the forefront of your mind when composing text for online consumption. So, make your text readable but include synonyms where possible, to ensure you get the best from your content.

Script:

Hi and welcome to this weeks SEO video blog, we are going to take a quick look at link building and in particular what to look out for when asked to pay for links on other webmasters sites.

Firstly tho, a bit of news. You might have seen the count down on Google when you clicked ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button, well after all the talk about it counting down to a new Google release or something exciting within the industry, it turned out to be a bit of a gimmick.

- video -

Very festive!

When thinking about buying links, it is important that you are very careful. Google can easily identify paid links, potentially leading to negative effects towards your SEO campaign.

So a few things to look out for when buying links are as follows:

Firstly, domain authority. Page Rank (PR) is a good way of seeing what sort of authority the domain has in the eyes of Google, it may also be worth looking at domain age and site performance.

Secondly, related content. When link building it is important that the sites content reflects your businesses keywords and SEO campaign, this will look more natural to Google.

Third, outbound links. If the site you are considering is littered with links already and covered in advertisements, it is probable that Google is already aware of this and it will have potentially lost some authority.

Fourth, quality content. Content is king, Good quality content is vital, so take some time to read through the text and make sure it isn’t full of spammy text and internal links.

Fifth, index depth. Small sites can only hold so much information, so a site with a larger search index can hold more related content, which can help to build the authority of a domain and increase the value of a link from this site.

I hope this mini list has been of some help, remember that when building backward links you should always consider quality over quantity.

Thanks for watching, please leave any questions or comments on the youtube channel or supporting blog post.

Yesterday’s WebProNews Video is all about duplicate content, and it got me thinking. We all know duplicate content isn’t a good thing, and this video drew my attention with the title: “How to Avoid Duplicate Content”. Shari Thurow of Omni Marketing Interactive gives some interesting and straightforward advice about how to avoid duplicate content.

The first thing that struck me was her assertion that you must ‘be proactive’ and ‘be consistent’ – this is such common sense advice that I can immediately see the merit in it. The advice to be consistent with your information architecture makes perfect sense to me too, by ensuring that you follow a logical and consistent structure to your sites you can ensure that they will not only be easier to crawl, but you can also lead the search engine to crawl the pages you want them to. This leads nicely to the third point from Thurow – “Link consistently to the same URLs” – if you link to the shortest, most keyword rich URL then you are giving the search engines the best URL and don’t forget this is also the one your visitors will want too.

You should always send consistent messages to the search engines regarding which pages they should index, because they will undoubtedly choose the wrong file to show in the SERPs.

Thurow makes the point that one could upload several files with almost identical content, but with the use of CSS these pages can look totally different to one another, (CSS Zen Garden is a prime example of this), a human visitor can look at the pages and see that they look different, but the search engine only has the html code to go on. So the search engine uses the only information they have available and class the pages as duplicate content. You should make sure that each page on your website has content that is dramatically different, as this is the only way to avoid falling into the duplicate content trap.

Thurow goes on to say that the canonical tag is both a blessing and a curse. It is a curse because SEO spammers regularly abuse it. It is a blessing when used correctly, and for the purpose it was designed for, it allows users to filter CMS sites easily, which you’ll appreciate is a blessing in itself.

Takeaway

So, to avoid duplicate content, the very best thing you can do is apply your common sense, look at your site logically and be consistent and proactive. Give the search engines as much information and help as you can and they will index the pages you want them to index. At all costs, avoid giving the search engines conflicting information though, as this will only result in disaster.

Script:

Welcome to this weeks SEO Video blog, We are going to take a look into Google’s new search based keyword tool.

It is designed to automatically choose keywords that fits your websites content and suggest phrases to improve your Adword campaign.

The idea behind the tool is to increase the conversion rate and try and reduce your monthly spend. The searched based keyword tool analysis the content of your site and returns results based on what it finds within your site.

Based on search traffic, it suggests phrases that currently may not be in your campaign, but still generate large search volumes. So rather than you having to know your market online, Google suggested phrases that it thinks are related to your company.

Lets have a look at the tool in action and see what it suggests for a couple of Creare’s clients.

The first client we can test it for is a large website with nearly 6000 pages indexed, Hunts Office Furniture. You can see that it looks through the content and it shows which page it extracted the information from, along with the search volume, competition and suggest bid price.

The first result shown is:

furniture sale - 8,200 searches - $1.13 per click - extracted from: Special Offers : Showroom Clearance Sale : ICE Glass M

Secondly we are going to have a look at a slightly smaller website, PCS Maintenance - Plumber London with 69 indexed pages, It works relatively well picking keywords which we are targeting in the organic campaign.

The first result shown is:

Worcester Bosch - 12,000 searches - $0.50 per click - extracted from: Combi Boiler, Gas Boiler, Worcester Bosch & Shower installations.

It seems to have recalled some quite good results, they seemed to have a good search volume and relatively cheap cost per click.

In conclusion it is another addition to a ever growing set of keyword selection tools, with all the options out there for choosing keywords, it has become relatively simple to choose the correct phrases for both organic or PPC campaigns.

Thanks for watching and please leave any comments or questions on the Youtube channel or supporting blog post.

Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year!