5 Advanced SEO Strategies for Inbound Experts

SEO is easy to pick up, but very difficult to master. Anyone who spends a few hours learning the fundamental pillars of SEO can get a relatively firm grasp on the basics — including keeping your site updated, harnessing the power of great content, building external links, and getting involved on social media. Each of those strategies is critically important to an SEO campaign, and you can spend months or even years perfecting your approach to each of those strategies.

For the experienced inbound marketer, the basic advice on how to best handle those tactics is redundant. Browsing through the archives of articles on SEO shows you just how in-depth those basic strategies can be, but it doesn’t provide you with any new information or any advanced techniques that you can put to use in your own SEO campaign.

Fortunately, there are plenty of more advanced tips and tricks you can use to gain traction in your SEO strategy:

1. Site Speed Optimization

You may already be aware that the speed of your site plays a role in how you rank. Specifically, the faster your site loads and the quicker your users can engage with your material, the better you’re going to fare in search visibility. But you may not be aware of all the micro-tactics you can employ to effectively maximize your site’s speed.

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First, improve your browser caching — make sure your caching plugin (or function) is enabled, but keep it free from complicated settings. Compress as much information on your site as possible, clear out any old pages or drafts stored in your back end, and reduce the size of all your images by loading smaller versions and stripping them of meta data before uploading. You should also find a reliable hosting provider, minimize your redirects, and simplify your code as much as possible, giving users as much functionality as possible without bogging down the processes necessary to make it happen. As with anything else in SEO, you’ll probably have to make tweaks over time.

2. Advanced Link-Building Techniques

Simple link-building tactics include posting in industry forums or submitting guest posts to similar sites. It’s time to take those strategies to the next level. First, start wooing government and educational sites in your area - .gov and .edu links are hard to get, but they’re some of the juiciest links you can find. Sponsor a community college or provide data to a local branch of government — build real relationships with your local .gov and .edu site holders, and build links from there.

Next, start producing high-quality images. Infographics are, of course, effective for this, but any high-quality photography will do. Make them publicly available, so long as people link back to your domain, and as other bloggers and authors use them, they’ll link to your website to give image credit. You can also take more efforts to circulate your great content by posting them on social bookmarking sites and getting involved in more social channels.

3. Establishing a Multi-Platform Presence

By now, you undoubtedly have a Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, but the social world is far more complex today than it was even two years ago. Get involved on as many channels and platforms as possible. Start by making a mobile app — Google is indexing apps now, and they’ll likely play a larger role in ranking in the future. Then claim your company’s profile on any social platforms you’ve as of yet neglected, such as Snapchat, Yik Yak, or Meerkat. Wider visibility is always better.

Finally, get yourself noticed on all the third-party apps you can. List your business on local directories like Yelp, but go a step further to get mentioned in other applications. Strike a deal with Uber or Lyft. Find niche apps related to your industry, and offer something of value to them in exchange for a mention.

4. Ensuring the Accessibility of Your Site

Take the time to occasionally gauge the accessibility of your site using Google Webmaster Tools. First, check to ensure your site is up and functioning properly, then head to the "Crawl Errors" section and scout for any page-level discrepancies that might have sprouted since the last time you checked. If there are any 404 errors listed here, set up a 301 redirect to a new, appropriate page to instantly fix the problem.

You’ll also want to pull a manually updated sitemap from your website and compare it against all the pages that Google lists as currently indexed. If there are any discrepancies here, you might have a major indexing problem.

5. Subverting the Knowledge Graph

The Knowledge Graph is one of the most formidable obstacles search marketers will face in the next few years. Because it offers searchers immediate information, it prevents at least some portion of potential visitors from traveling to your site. Right now, the Knowledge Graph’s domain is relatively limited, but it’s going to expand dramatically in the next few years.

To prepare for this, shift your content strategy. Stay away from any topics that provide immediate, direct information about a general topic. Instead, focus on in-depth how-to articles or very niche questions that Google wouldn’t be able to easily store in a database. Keep your topics as specific as possible, and start answering more complicated questions.

These are only a handful of the advanced practices that inbound experts use to hone their approach to SEO. With an in-depth knowledge of the functions in Webmaster Tools and a ground-level understanding of website code, you can delve even deeper into the bits and pieces that ultimately make your website successful in ranking higher.

I’ll leave you with one more piece of advice, useful for new SEO strategists but indispensable for more experienced experts: read the news. It’s advice you’ve undoubtedly heard before, but it’s all too easy to let the habit slip. In as little as a few days, you could fall behind the times and your strategy could lag behind the competition. Staying up-to-date on the latest technologies, latest Google updates, and latest rounds of speculation could very well give you the competitive edge you need to stay ahead.

Courtesy of: searchenginewatch.com

Stop Believing These Three Common SEO Lies

Given that good Search Engine Optimisation techniques are considered the Holy Grail of online branding, it should probably come as no surprise to find a multitude of myths, tall-tales and outright lies being spread about the process.

The trouble is, when these misleading ideas become popular, real businesses start following them. By the time they realise they took a wrong turn, it’s too late. The damage has been done, and they’ve wasted time and, quite possibly, a good bit of money in the process.

To help you avoid these all-too-common SEO lies, here are three of the most depressingly widespread falsehoods.

1. If you build an optimised website, you’re sorted

Some companies think all the SEO their website needs can be handled during its design. As long as all the initial text we upload is well-written and packed with relevant keywords, they think, we’ve done all the ‘SEO-ing’ we need.

This may be true if you are in a niche that gets searched a couple of times per week. If that is the case, you don’t really need SEO as nobody is looking for what you provide anyway.

2. Google hates link building

This downright lie has become so common recently, that even some fairly trusted sources have started believing it. The idea is that, during recent algorithm changes, Google expressly took action against all attempts to link build and, so, trying to implement these tactics in your SEO is now essentially a grey hat activity. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Natural links are still a 100% legitimate way to add authority to your website. Earn your links instead of buying them or using spammy link building tactics.

3. It’s all about targeting one big keyword

This is an area where may amateur marketers go very, very wrong. They decide that, because their company deals in, say, photocopiers, their sole SEO aim should be to lead the Google search rankings for ‘photocopiers’. From that point on, they pour all their content efforts into targeting this and only this keyword. This quest is doomed from the start.

The problem is, unless they are the only site in the world discussing photocopiers (and they won’t be), they are unlikely to ever make good on the goal. Similarly, as they are ignoring all the other highly lucrative long form keywords related to photocopiers, they are missing out on much more obtainable and much more lucrative SEO opportunities.

SEO is crucial for any company who wants to get noticed online. Yet that does not mean you should believe everything that you read about the topic. Good SEO is all about crafting a well-balanced, regular, long term strategy, involving relevant, intelligent content and smart keywords. If anybody offers ‘advice’ that tells you different, you would be wise not to follow.

Courtesy of: business2community.com

Bing joins Google in favoring mobile-friendly sites

Microsoft is adjusting how it ranks Bing search results for mobile users, prioritizing sites that display better on smaller screens to accommodate the increased use of mobile search.

The changes, announced Thursday, come less than a month after Google started prioritizing mobile-optimized sites in its search results. Both companies are looking to attract more users by providing a better search experience on smartphones and tablets.

Microsoft said it expects to roll out the changes in the coming months. Sites that display well on smaller screens will also be flagged with a new “mobile friendly” tag.

In the U.S. last year, Bing had roughly 6 percent of the mobile search market, compared with Google’s 83 percent, according to figures from StatCounter.

The changes don’t mean mobile-optimized sites will necessarily appear at the top of results. “You can always expect to see the most relevant results for a search query ranked higher, even if some of them are not mobile friendly,” Microsoft said.

It considers a variety of elements to decide which sites display best on smartphones and tablets. For example, sites with large navigational elements that are spaced well apart will be prioritized, as well as sites that don’t require a lot of zooming and lateral scrolling. Bing will also favor sites with mobile-compatible content. That means pages with Flash content, which doesn’t work well on iOS devices, might get demoted.

Microsoft highlighted Fandango’s mobile site as one that will be prioritized under the changes, more so than Movies.com.

The company has also developed a tool to help webmasters assess the mobile friendliness of their sites. It will be made available in a few weeks.

Courtesy of: pcworld.com

Google Panda Update SEO Survival Tips

Google Panda 2.2 is looming to drop sometime soon, and with it, increasing levels of apprehension in the small business community on fears of further collateral damage to organic search traffic. As a speaker at SES Toronto this year, I had the distinct honor of accompanying Dave Davies,Thom Craver and Terry Van Horne on a panel to discuss the impact of Google Panda, and long-term strategies for SEO success.

Diversify Your Traffic

Much to my own amazement and to that of my peers on stage, many in attendance at SES Toronto felt that they received significantly more traffic from Google organic search than any other source, and that SEO traffic converted much better than other sources.

As a general rule of thumb, no more than 40 percent of your referred traffic should come from Google because any significant change is bound to have a negative impact on your bottom line. When you consider how long it can take to notice and recover from an SEO penalty for even small mistakes (such as server downtime, bad navigational links, forgotten redirects, etc.), putting all your eggs into one basket substantially increases your risk.

Normally I wouldn't disagree with a large group at SES, but to say organic traffic converts better than other sources indicates that very few attendees are properly optimizing their paid search campaigns. Why? Paid search marketing has several distinct advantages over organic search traffic that should yield higher conversion:

• Product: Guaranteed exposure to only those products and services you want to promote in search results. Match keywords to exact product offerings and watch conversion skyrocket.
• Price: In this case, it’s not the price of the product or services offered, but the price your business pays for the traffic itself. Don’t forget to factor in all the time and effort invested into ranking for keywords in organic results, and how often changes may be required.
• Promotion: While you can change the content surrounding your products, you may not have the same amount of creative license to change that content as quickly for mainstay (SEO targeted) pages versus paid search landing pages, nor will you necessarily have control over which pages Google chooses to display in results pages for any given query.
• Place: Distribution of your product won’t change, but distribution of your product in organic SERPs may be highly elastic versus highly-controllable paid search campaigns.
• People: Perhaps the most important component is your inability to control and target behavioral cues in search queries using SEO. It doesn’t get much better than the complete control that multiple keyword match types, negative match keyword lists, and advanced query performance reporting affords a search marketer.

My final argument about why organic search traffic may not convert as well as other sources? Visitor intent.

Visitors coming from organic search results for the first time are extremely hard to convert, and it can take several repeat visits, if your content is good enough, to finally convert them sometime down the line.

Measure Success Using Actionable KPIs

I love data, but much of it is useless and not actionable. In terms of useless SEO metrics, here are a few:

• “Average position” and “Impressions” as provided by Google Webmaster Tools are useless metrics because Google varies position by geographic locale, personalized results (when logged in), and likely past-user behavior (not logged-in cookies).
• “Visits” and “Page Views” and even “Average Time Spent” as measured using analytics software aren't as useless, unless used alone because webmasters have little control over how much traffic search engines send them.

The emphasis should be put on measuring actionable KPI’s segmented by traffic source such as bounce rate, micro and macro conversion rates, revenue, and visitor loyalty.

Want to get really sophisticated? Try testing out multi-source attribution and start assigning real dollar values to each one of your traffic sources touch points.

Build a Community

The group was decidedly split on the influence of social media on Google Panda, due in part to a tangent discussion on how Google might one day leverage social signals from Google +1. As it stands, Google currently uses Twitter’s “fire hose” feed and some signals from public pages on Facebook to influence rankings, the former weighing much more heavily in substantial, but short-lived SEO boost.

Google’s modus operandi seems to have always been to show up late to a party, build their own dance floor, and either win people over, or buy out their best competitor (YouTube, DoubleClick, Postini, Urchin, etc). In much the same respect, it will take time to see whether Google +1 gains enough momentum and critical mass to make a sizeable dent on the hundreds of other “favoriting” sites like Digg, Reddit, Delicious, and StumbleUpon, to name a few.

Don’t look to social media to build links for SEO because the best links come from establishing earned media from a community of loyal brand ambassadors. Talk to your visitors and customers, engage communities, and start practicing the art of building personas. Through careful research, webmasters can hone into communities online that serve the best bang for their buck, and those might not be in any of the top social websites.

If you invest time into building a community, your business isn’t as likely to be as hard hit by changes to search algorithms such as Google Panda.