Social Optimization: Your Content Or Yourself?

There is an interesting conversation going on at Cre8asite Forums about your clients participating in social networks and the importance of that.

The given is that social is growing in importance, as it related to search rankings either indirectly and in the future, directly.

The bigger question in the thread is, do you yourself need to be active in social or does your content need to be socially appealing? The easy answer is both.

But like EGOL said in the thread, not everyone who writes the outstanding content is able to participate within social networks. People are disinterested, too busy, confused or unable to be part of the social networks, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and others.

Does that leave them at a disadvantage or can the content make up for it.

EGOL wrote:

Although I don't embrace social with my time my website gets a lot of traffic from Facebook, Stumble, Pintrest and especially the TIL part of Reddit. My visitors take my content to social for me because they want to share it with others. It works nicely. Other people do the jobs that I don't want to do and I don't have to pay them. That's how things are supposed to work IMO. It is more genuine to let it happen that way rather than hiring a shill to do it for you.

Indeed but if there is a conversation going on at the social network and if you are not there, that can be an issue. Of course, also, building your own authority outside of your own web site, then as you share content, it just helps spread that content through the network - that also is natural.

40% of Facebook Users Visit the Site Multiple Times Per Day [Study]

As social media users are diversifying their online networking platforms, Facebook remains the dominant player, according to Pew's Social Media Update 2013.

Pew's new study reveals that more that 7 in 10 online U.S. adults had Facebook accounts in 2013, up 4 percent from 2012. By contrast, around 20 percent visited LinkedIn and Pinterest, respectively.

Meanwhile, 42 percent of online U.S. adults used two or more social networks in the past year. Among the 36 percent who used only one major social networking site, more than 80 percent said that they frequented Facebook. In comparison, 8 percent used LinkedIn,4 percent constantly visited Pinterest, and a mere 2 percent went to Instagram or Twitter.

In addition to its large user base, Facebook is the most effective platform in terms of user engagement. More than two-thirds of Facebook users visited the site at least once a day, with 40 percent doing so multiple times throughout the day, according to the study.

Instagram, a photo-sharing application purchased by Facebook in 2012, exhibits a high level of user engagement as well. Close to 60 percent of its users visited the site at least once a day, with 35 percent visiting multiple times per day. Twitter attracted 46 percent daily users in 2013, with 29 percent visiting multiple times a day.

Pew also points out that while Facebook dominates the online social networking scene, other social media platforms have developed their own unique demographic user profiles. Pinterest appeals to females; LinkedIn is frequented by college graduates and users with higher income; and Twitter and Instagram are popular with younger adults, urban dwellers, and non-whites.

Data in this report came from telephone interviews with 1,801 adults.

Rap Genius Back In Google After 10 Day Penalty, Ranks For Its Name But What About Lyrics?

Lyrics site Rap Genius says that is is no longer penalized within Google after taking action to correct “unnatural links” that it helped create. The site was hit with a penalty for 10 days, which meant people seeking it by name couldn’t find it. That’s been fixed, though it’s unclear how much traffic the site will regain for generic lyrics searches.

Rap Genius Back By Name In Google

After the penalty, people couldn’t find Rap Genius when searching for it on Google by name. Now, searches for “rap genius” show the site back at the top of Google’s web search listings (though news headlines items do come first in Google’s news box):

Removing Links To Remove A Penalty

The company explained in a blog post today that it received a manual action notice from Google on Christmas Day accusing it of unnatural linking, which resulted in a penalty. The Rap Genius post detailed some of the linking practices the company has done and how it tried to correct what it thought Google objected to, which included asking people to remove links as well as disavowing links. The post concluded with an apology:

To Google and our fans: we’re sorry for being such morons. We regret our foray into irrelevant unnatural linking. We’re focused on building the best site in the world for understanding lyrics, poetry, and prose and watching it naturally rise to the top of the search results.

Fast Return To Google

Rap Genius was never banned from Google. Instead, it was slapped with a penalty that appears to have made its content that would normally show in the first page of Google listings slip to the sixth page (sometimes called a -60 penalty).

The drop lasted for 10 days is about the same for another big brand that was hit with a penalty over linking early last year, Interflora, which found itself penalized for 11 days. But it’s less than the 90 days that both JC Penney and Google’s own Chrome browserweb site were hit with in 2011 and 2012, respectively, over link issues.

Back For Some Lyric Searches But Still Missing For Some

While Rap Genius is ranking again for its own name, it’s not clear that it is regaining traffic for what’s most important to it, generic terms related to lyrics.

Searchmetrics analyzed some of the terms sending Rap Genius traffic that it took hits for, as well as the overall drop in is search visibility. It’s too early for the Searchmetrics tool to show if there’s been rise in visibility (give it a day or two), but some spot checks on terms show it may not all be back to normal.

For “rap lyrics,” Rap Genius has a solid number one listing, back after dropping, according to Searchmetrics, 100 spots:

For just “lyrics,” it’s not in the first page of results — though it probably wasn’t there before the penalty, either:

This seems likely because the site started with a focus on rap lyrics (hence its name) while many older sites have been far more encompassing. It could also be that the other sites are just spamming Google, as Rap Genius alleged when it first blogged about being penalized and saying “other lyrics sites are almost definitely doing worse stuff.”

For a fairly high-volume search query such as “someone like you lyrics,” where Rap Genius took a 95 spot plunge according to Searchmetrics, it now ranks on page 7, not much of an improvement:

Moreover, the page that it apparently was ranking for, lyrics for Mac Miller’s “Someone like you” song, isn’t the one showing in page seven of the results. As far as I can tell, it’s not showing up in the top 100 results all.

The Rap Genius page for Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah,” which fell 92 spots, is nowhere to be found in the top 100 results, from what I can see.

I think it’s fairly likely Rap Genius will see some of its direct Google traffic recover, now that the penalty has been lifted. But I suspect that the removal of so many links may also cost it some of the rankings it previously had, so that traffic may remain lower than it was.

The B2B Marketer’s Guide to Baidu SEO

Baidu is the most popular search engine in China, which makes it a very powerful channel for B2B marketers in the global market. As of November 2013, Baidu held63.55% of the search engine market share in China. The other two big players in the market are 360 with 21.84% of the market and Sogou at 10.53%. For any B2B company with a Chinese website, optimizing for Baidu is a necessity. While it’s important to keep 360 and Sogou in mind as well, both are very new search engines that only recently emerged in the China market, so there’s not much documentation out yet on SEO guidelines.

Chinese search engine market share diagram

What makes Baidu optimization so unique is that it’s like Google 2009, but with different rules due to heavy censorship by the Chinese government. Optimizing for Baidu entails creating high quality and quantity content, fulfilling Baidu-specific technical SEO requirements, building a massive volume of links, and conforming to Chinese censorship laws. All the tactics within this article are geared towards B2B marketers, but the concepts can also be applied to the B2C sector.

Content Requirements

• No duplicate content: Baidu penalizes websites more than most other search engines for duplicate content. Every piece of content on the site should be unique. It would also be good practice to check for other websites who have scraped your content on a regular basis and request for them to remove the scraped content. When developing the site, pay close attention to duplicate content issues with the site like canonical issues, taxonomies, etc.
• Language Usage: All content and meta tags should be written in simplified Chinese characters. Baidu prefers simplified over traditional Chinese characters, and does not like romanized characters.
• Content Definitions: In the Chinese language, there are multiple dialects and multiple meanings to a single word. One word could have 7 different meanings. All words in the content should be checked for relevance and other meanings to ensure the correct words are being used. From a marketer’s standpoint, this means you need to hire a native Chinese translator with very strong language skills and knowledge of the different dialects in China.
• Content Quantity: Baidu relies heavily upon content quality and quantity for achieving rankings. Every page on the site that you want to rank should have a minimum of 300 words of unique content.
• Title Tags: Title tags should be written the same way you would for Google, but with a different character limit. With romanized characters, the title tag buffer limit is 70 characters. A simplified Chinese character is equal to two characters, so the buffer limit is 35 characters. When constructing the tag, use a keyword-rich phrase that’s descriptive of the page’s content, followed by a branded term.
• Meta Descriptions: Unlike Google and Bing, Baidu still uses meta descriptions as a ranking factor. Make sure each meta description has one or two keyword phrases along with a branded term. Also keep in mind that the meta description buffer limit for romanized characters is 156, so the limit for simplified Chinese characters would be 78.
• Meta Keyword Tags: Meta keywords may have been phased out by most other search engines, but Baidu still uses them as a ranking factor. They should be implemented on every page on the site and should include 3-5 keyword phrases. Avoid keyword stuffing.
• Image ALT Attributes: Baidu’s algorithm for crawling images is still very basic. The ALT attribute is the most important ranking factor for images, so make sure they are used on every image.
• Heading Tags: Heading usage for Baidu is no different than any other major search engine. Make sure each page has an h1 tag that appears before any other heading tag. Also make sure your heading tags follow a hierarchy. Be sure to incorporate keywords into the heading tags, but avoid keyword stuffing.
• Blogs: Company blogs are an important element to have on a website. Blogs not only allow for more internal linking, they also show Baidu that the website is content-rich and updated frequently. Baidu also has a news feed for blogs, which can help drive in more organic traffic. Be sure to submit the blog to Baidu’s news feed.

Technical SEO Requirements

• Robots.txt: Baidu does not like websites with a robots.txt file. If one currently exists, it should be removed. Any important rules that would normally be set up in the robots.txt file should be set in the .htaccess file or IIS server settings.
• Sub-domains and Multiple Domains: Baidu dislikes websites that use sub-domains and multiple domains. Only one domain per site should be used. Other language versions of a site should be hosted off of a completely separate domain and should not be linked from the Chinese version. Sub-domains should not be used at all.
• Site Speed: Site speed is a major ranking factor for Baidu. A site that loads slowly will have a much lower chance of ranking well. This further builds the case for hosting the site on a server in China, which will be explained later in this article.
• iFrames: Do not use iFrames for any important content. Baidu is unable to spider any element of a page within an iFrame.
• JavaScript and Flash: Baidu is unable to effectively crawl JS and Flash, so make sure no important content is fed through either. If you need to put navigation or any other important element in JavaScript, make sure there is an HTML alternative located somewhere on the page.

Link Building Requirements

• Navigation: As mentioned previously, Baidu has a difficult time crawling content in JavaScript. For usability purposes, having a drop-down menu for the main navigation may be a necessity. A good work-around for this would be to create a fat footer with text links to every important page on the site. Make sure every page has some form of text link navigation somewhere to make it easy for Baidu to crawl and pass on authority.
• Anchor Text: Baidu still places a lot of weight on keyword usage in anchor text. All links within the internal linking structure should contain keyword-optimized anchor text. When building links from external sites, try to optimize the anchor text as often as possible.
• Link Building:  One of the biggest areas where Baidu has not developed their algorithm is inbound link building. They place a bigger emphasis on quantity of links than quality. Building lower quality links is still an acceptable practice. With that in mind, you’ll still need to consider that what works today may not work a year from now (and also may not work for 360 or Sogou). Build high quality links whenever possible, and avoid any risky link building schemes. Directory submissions and content curation are safer tactics for building a high quantity of links. All link building activities should target websites on a .cn domain that uses simplified Chinese characters.

Chinese Law Requirements

• Physical Address: A legitimate physical address in China should be included somewhere on the website to establish that the website is China-based.
• Domain Types: Baidu prefers websites with the following domain types: .cn, .com and .net. Websites using a .cn domain are generally given preference over all other domain types.
• Web Hosting: Aside from preferring Chinese domains, Baidu also prefers websites to be hosted in China. This will also help improve page load speed.
• Internet Content Publishing License: In China, a special license is required by the Chinese government to have any chance of achieving high rankings in Baidu. Obtaining an ICP License through the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology will greatly improve organic search rankings.
• Censorship: The Chinese government censors a lot of Internet content from its citizens, including most Google services and major social networks. If a piece of content contains any words blacklisted by the Chinese government, Baidu will de-index the page, or the site as a whole. Anything on this list of words blacklisted by the Chinese government should not be used anywhere on the website (variations of these words should not be used, either). If your site allows for user-generated content, be sure to put in measures to reject any content submitted with these words.

Tools for Baidu

• Submit Website: Since Baidu doesn’t have any webmaster tools or sitemap submission feature, the website should be re-submitted every time major changes are made to the website. The website submission tool for Baidu can be found here.
• Keyword Research: When optimizing for Baidu, keyword research should be done for Baidu. People in China will have different search habits than people in other countries. This keyword traffic estimator tool can be used for Baidu keyword research.

Top 10 SEO New Year's Resolutions for a Successful 2014

It's been quite a year for SEO folk everywhere.

As 2013 shutters its doors and 2014 beckons, it's an opportune time to reevaluate, reassess, and revisit SEO tactics.

In the spirit of a New Year's Eve edition, I'm presenting some of the most popular (according to the US Government) New Years Resolutions through an SEO lens, in the hope of spreading some good cheer and great strategy along with a very happy new year to you and yours!

Without further ado... below are the top 10 SEO resolutions for your 2014 success!

1. Drink Less SEO Kool-Aid 

In the SEO world, there's a fire hose of information. It's easy to drink the Kool-Aid of popular industry experts.

Although there are some folks who are worthy of quoting and following, I'd lay off the hard-liquor-high until you've actually tested "expert" recommendations and seen the results for yourself.

It's easy to get intoxicated with the SEO practice du jour, but it's sobering when you're trying to justify a bad outcome to a client by saying, "but [enter SEO expert name here] said it worked for [enter big brand website name here]."

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2. Eat Healthy SEO Fare

The Internet is fueled by great content, and the healthiest of content is unique, valuable, authoritative, and share-worthy.

Google's Matt Cutts said recently that 25-30 percent of the content on the web is duplicate. Although that might make you feel a little peckish for some long form articles, you need to focus on the best in healthy snacks; link-inspiring user-generated content, educating prose, expert opinion, multimedia munches and share-demanding content desserts.

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3. Get a Better SEO Education

With great resources like Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Land,Moz, and Google themselves, there's no reason not to better educate yourself as to the trends and updates in the SEO industry.

Set up an RSS feed of your favorite resources and spend the first 15 minutes of the day reviewing, interacting, asking questions, and learning a little more about the constantly evolving landscape of search, social, display and paid search.

The future is cross-channel attribution, and learning more about more is a sure way to stay on the cutting edge and in demand.

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4. Get Your Site Fit, Lose Excess Code Weight

2014 is sure to (finally) be the year of mobile, right after the year of mobile that was 2013. And if your business relies on localized, mobilized, and focalized customers, then a mobile optimized site is a necessity!

To get your site fit, focused, slimmed down, and ready for a mobile push, get implementing responsive web design, a specialized mobile site, or app based experience. Whichever you chose (and Google recommends in most cases a well-engineered responsive site), make certain to trim excess code, optimize images, squeeze scripts, and lighten server loads to deliver the best (and fastest) mobile experience you can.

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5. Manage SEO Stress

As SEO professionals, I'm not sure we're ever not stressed with Google updates, client requests, deadlines, and migrations where redirects were "overlooked" by tech teams, but that leads to the best stress management recommendations: stress testing every recommendation and implementation! Twice. At least.

SEO isn't an exact science, but it is something that requires technical savvy, sophistication, and strategy to ensure alignment with search visibility goals.

The best way to manage technology stress is to test, test, and keep testing, everything from user site engagement, to site usability, to server stress tests, to guarantee an optimal onsite experience.

Managing stress is easy... you just have to plan to do everything perfect.

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6. Give Up Bad Habits 

Everyone has vices, easy "go-tos" when the going gets tough; the link schemes, overseas outsourced content, or short cuts for short-term gains. Now's the time to resolve to "never puff again" by implementing long-term strategies via sustainable tactics to ensure online success.

Go cold turkey and you'll find the world of fresh thinking (and fresh air) opens up, and you can return to the fundamentals of:

• Understanding the customer's journey.
• Creating content that connects with individual intent.
• Leveraging engagement to drive loyalty, visibility and discoverability.

Give up the bad habits, and adopt a fresher, longer-term outlook!

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7. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

The popular resolution to "reduce, reuse, and recycle" might very well be made for eco-friendly reasons, but applies equally well to your website content strategy.

Panda bought us thin content awareness, and recent messages in Google Webmaster Tools underscore the need to reduce or remove content that isn't user-focused, user-useful or share-worthy.

As for reusing and recycling, for content that connects with core intent (and context), your focus should be on intelligent repurposing of content copy, content elements, content themes and content ideas, to create unique and aligned articles, rejiggered for different platforms, mediums, formats and audiences.

No piece of written content is an island. If you aren't promoting worthy content in the most appropriate formats across your social channels, then 2014 may not be your year!

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8. Save SEO Money 

Many folks look to the New Year as a time to be frugal, put some cash away for a rainy day, and generally be more careful where they spend.

The goal for SEO professionals isn't to save money. Rather, it's to leverage data, metrics that matter, and broad analytics to spendsmarter and/or justify budgets and efforts.

Although the initial outcome may be more less money in the bank, investing in data-informed areas of opportunity will almost definitely pay off in the long term, through additional revenue, valuable insights and happier customers.

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9. Take a Trip to an Industry Conference

I can't put a value on the information, networking or camaraderie I've experienced through some of the great industry events I've attended (including SES conferences!) It's one of the easiest ROIs in SEO to return from 2 or 3 days of intensive learning and impart the knowledge gained to work colleagues and your boss.

Taking a little trip doesn't have to be expensive either. With conferences that offer East and West Coast venues (and everything in between), inexpensive airfares when you book in advance, and advanced conference ticket deals, you'll find the value of taking a learning trip gives you the tips, knowledge, and tools to help both your site or your clients sites succeed.

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10. Help Other SEO Folks

It's simple. Give back!

For those starting out in search, you have a unique perspective and valuable insights in the questions you ask. For those seasoned folks, it's important to realize that your experience has value to the industry as a whole.

Some of the best information I've learned has been from both these groups, beginners asking hard questions, and SEO pros sharing a trick I hadn't thought of. In a season of giving, write a blog post, conduct a webinar, share some survey results, or take an SEO newbie under your wing to share the wealth of knowledge!

Google Shopping Expanding 360 Degree Product Images, Making New Hire

                                                                                                         

Last year, Google began adding 360 degree product views to Google Shopping ahead of the holiday season. This year, the search giant continued to tout the 360 views and have expanded from toys to other consumer products that consumers typically like to examine closely such as cameras. Users can move the images around to see all sides, top and bottom of a product and theoretically “feel as if they’re picking up products off the shelf”.

The company appears to have hired or be close to hiring a new partner technology manager for the program. A LinkedIn posting now states the job is no longer accepting applications. The person in this position will join the gTech Partner Solutions team which actually creates the images in-house, partnering with manufacturers who supply product samples for image capture. It’s quite an undertaking, scalability is part of the team’s focus according to the job description: “We also design and develop tools to scale partner onboarding process.”

Finding products with the 3D view is still tough, but presumably a good number of manufacturers are signed-on to the program. The sign-up for Google posted last year is now closed. We can expect Google to ramp this program as it continues to build up Google Shopping and take on the likes of Amazon for product search dominance.

PPC Excel Tips For Every Level: Part 3, Advanced Level Keyword Research And Data Visualization

We close out our three-part series of Excel tips from Bing Ads Evangelist John Gagnon today with some advanced level tools that, in fact, even beginners can start using successfully today. While many of the tips we’ve covered can also help SEOs as well as PPC practitioners, today’s focus on keyword research is particularly relevant to both camps.

Advanced Tip: Bing Ads Intelligence for deep-dive keyword research and Power BI for big data analysis and visualization.

Bing Ads Intelligence is an Excel add-in for keyword research that enables Excel to integrate directly with your Bing Ads accounts. However, you can use this tool for keyword research outside of Bing Ads campaigns as well.

Once you download the add-in, you’ll see the Bing Ads Intelligence tab in the top navigation. If you want to download your campaign data, sign in to your Bing Ads account by clicking “Sign In” icon to the far right. You can then see your keywords along with performance metrics.

These are John’s top 3 features in Bing Ads Intelligence:

1. Keyword Suggestions: Keyword recommendations fine-tuned from Yahoo Bing Network data.

What’s also interesting about the Keyword Suggestion tool is that it will give include suggestions for match types not currently in our account along with the performance data and estimated bids for mainline and sidebar positions. Not only that, but you can run the Keyword Suggestion tool for any list of keywords, not just those already in your account, and it will show the broad, phrase and exact match statistics for each variation. Don’t want to look at phrase match types? Just use the filter to hide them from the list. 

2. Traffic: See the number of searches users conducted on the Yahoo Bing Network for a specific query.

The Traffic tool can be used to look at multiple keywords or one. The cool thing about this feature is you can see historical trending and you can break out performance by device. In the example below, I’ve chosen to see the traffic performance of the keyword “classic cars sale” on Desktops and Laptops and then on Smart phones by week. In this example, Desktop and laptop traffic trended down closer to Thanksgiving, while Smart phone traffic actually ticked up slightly in that final week of November. You could break this down by day if you wanted as well.

3. Keyword Performance: For any keyword, it will show you a snapshot of keyword performance by position. This can be powerful when trying to estimate traffic and set bidding strategies, says John. Again, these don’t need to be words you are currently bidding on in your account, and you can separate results based on device type and match type. To see the performance stats for a keyword by every position, select “All” at the bottom of the Ad Position drop down menu as shown below.

Quick note: You’ll notice the shading in several columns in the tables above. This is done using Conditional Formatting, found under the Home tab. Conditional Formatting allows you to shade and color cells based on their values to be able to better visualize opportunities and problems.

In the Keyword List Generator template shown below, conditional formatting rules are set using the Conditional Formatting Rules Manager to show a different color in each metric column. In this table you can quickly see that, while the search volume for “buy new laptop” is relatively low, the CPC and Average Bid are high. With this template, you can add any sequence of keywords you want. Hitting the “Refresh All” button under the Bing Ads Intelligence tab will update the data keyword variations.

You can find this template and others for download by clicking the “Keyword Research Templates” button under the Bing Ads Intelligence Tab. There is much more to explore with this tool, so if you haven’t done so, download it and start experimenting.

Power BI

For those with the right software, Microsoft’s new Power BI tools for Excel offers advanced-level tools for data analysis. Here is the feature set for Excel in Power BI

• Power Query – Connect to data from public and corporate data sources including databases, web pages, even Facebook graph data.
• Power Pivot – Data Modelling tool that can handle nearly 2 billion rows of data
• Power View – Create reports and analytical views with interactive data visualizations
• Power Map –Visualize your campaign (or other) data geographically in 3-D within Excel

John is especially excited about Power Map for search advertisers. With it you can take the “geographic location” data from the dimensions report in Bing Ads and put it into Power Map to see where clicks are coming from by geographic location, for example.

There is a barrier to entry here, however. You will need Office Professional Plus 2013 or Office 365 ProPlus to run Power Map.If you’re working with huge amounts of campaign data, Power BI tools could give you the bandwidth you need. Power Map also has broader applications beyond your own campaign data. You can import third-party or your CRM data to map out and see where your current customer and prospect bases are located for clearer insights into content development and campaign targeting. Think about the types of data sources available to you and how they might be able to inform your marketing efforts in new ways using Power BI tools.