2011 was certainly an interesting year for SEO. We saw a number of things impacting our SEO world, from the introduction of the Panda updates, to the removal of keyword data on SSL based searches. 2012 promises to be just as interesting a year, and we have already had SEO drama despite it being early days with Google appearing to fall foul of their own human assessment (call me a cynic but that smells of pure Google propoganda – however thats another post)

I asked a number of fellow SEOs about how they saw SEO in 2012, where they saw the growth areas for this year, and whether they thought 2012 would be the year of Google + – with some surprising responses.

1) 2011 saw a number of significant changes to the Google interface, as well as the continued expansion of Google into vertical specific search products. What do you think 2012 holds and what will we see the the search engines doing during this year.

Bas Van Den Beld (State of Search):
Looking into the future is difficult. I don’t think many people expected that many changes in 2011. But my gut feeling is that in 2012 that will only be even more. Google is moving swiftly towards a more social experience which will mean even further changes to the interface, though maybe not as major as in 2011. But tweaks, more verticals and maybe even more surprising products are without a doubt coming in 2012.

Nick Garner (Unibet)
I have a preamble to this answer….When I look at what Google is going to do I reference people like Arron Wall. He has always looked at where the money is and worked his way back from there. Essentially as I see it, there is a relationship between how far you go to monetize something and how much users will put up with the disruption and unpleasantness of their experience before they go elsewhere.
When Google ‘turn the screw’ they don’t need to shift the needle much to have a massive effect on their revenues. Things like increasingly integrating their own properties into search results, query deserves freshness where commercial sites are pushed out in favour of news sites, on ads; using a yellow background on the top of page and then making that yellow so transparent many monitors don’t even pick it up any longer, leading to more mistaken clicks than ever before, using search suggest to corral users around certain phrases and thus intensify the ad auctions…it goes on.
So what do i see for 2012? more of the same from Google, but probably a bigger emphasis on adding ,more +1 results into the SERPS, possibly even removing the yellow background on the top of the page ads and pushing the informational and commercial search results even further apart.
The problem for users is that there’s such a massive ‘brand halo’ around Google now, they can get away with poor search results because most Google users wont even try Bing. This point is brought home by the recent results from ‘Blind search taste test’ ( http://blindsearch.fejus.com/ where Bing is now the preferred search engine. But you don’t hear users complain of the rising commercial tide. So expect to see a worsening search engine for 2012.
PS Bing is now my default search engine! – because it’s better!

Kevin Gibbons (SEOptimise)
Good question and I wish I knew – but reading into Google’s recent algorithm changes and social integration has to be highest on the agenda. For example, having trusted authors with linked Google+ profiles is likely to become a strong ranking factor for blogs and news sites, plus I’d expect to see more in the way of freshness/real-time updates as Google will be aware of the treat social search, Twitter in particularly, brings for breaking news queries or finding more trusted results from your social circle.

Justin Parks (SEO Dojo)
Aside from messing up the results and doing everyones head in with confounded and eratic personal search results the biggest looming change is still going to be the integration of g+ and the social profiling aspect, hence, more personal search results madness. Also, brand search will most likely become more refined and accurate as the year progresses.

I think Google will continue developing (and bloody changing) the various different results and interfaces that have been proven (like video and local) and terminate any of its less used or useful tools.

2) What do you think is the biggest challenge facing SEO’s during 2012 and why?

Bas Van Den Beld (State of Search):
The biggest challenge will continue to be: integration. Making sure as an SEO that everything integrates: social, search, paid, organic, but also offline. Integration will be very important. Many SEOs who do ‘on site’ work will also be working more on the rich snippet area.

Nick Garner (Unibet)
Google+1 results in the SERPS. Winning Plus1 votes is not an SEO thing, so our community will have some challenges because you can’t go to a vote seller and buy 10,000 real votes from real people who you actually might want to business with. 2nd is Google’s ever decreasing reliance on manipulable links. Lessening reliance these links = a tough time for SEO’ers who have relied on their link buyer friends and posting links on Directories/PR distribution sites. In other words the makeup of links is changing.

Kevin Gibbons (SEOptimise)
In my opinion, although panda was a massive update for SEOs in 2011, the most significant changes in 2011 are yet to have a full impact. Most importantly, these are social integration and roll out of SSL Search – with the ICO cookie compliance directive potentially being far more harmful to analytics and the way we measure search than anything we have seen so far during the last 12 months.

Justin Parks (SEO Dojo)
Personal search is already causing headaches for me as its not a matter of looking at a universal result anymore and assuming that this is the most likely or natural results set a visitor will. My challange is bringing together all of these marketing channels and focusing them into a benefical seo result.

Actually, I’m begining to isolate these aspects and even on occasion ignore the seo impact altogether as it has become to difficult to translate the data. Its simply to fuzzy to accuratly guage and much better to allow elements to do “their thing”. It simply means I take a much broader view of SEO than before.

3) Will Google+ make the breakthrough in 2012?2) What do you think is the biggest challenge facing SEO’s during 2012 and why?

Bas Van Den Beld (State of Search):
Depends on how you look at it: as a Facebook competitor: no. As the ‘center’ of Google products and as how we can see everything connected through Google+: yes. But it is very important to look at Google+ as not just that next Social Network. It is so much more.

Nick Garner (Unibet)
Google have always asserted that the whole of the internet is a social graph. If they can socially ‘link up’ even a small amount of it whilst remaining THE place to go when doing a commercial search, then its a win for Google. Remember, Google know that bribing website owners with traffic from Plus1 sources means they will comply and thus be a lever for Google. As webmasters know, a facebook ‘like’ doesn’t really bring in commercial traffic. Users don’t go to Facebook to buy stuff, they go there as a brand touch/connection point. So with this in mind, Google will prevail in the end, only because it’s where the money and fresh traffic comes from. In short, it won’t be a breakthrough. It will be a gradual rising of the tide over the next 3 years.

Kevin Gibbons (SEOptimise)
They’ve clearly got a huge task ahead of them in terms of really making a mark in social. Despite stagerring user growth figures, Google+ is still a huge way behind Twitter and Facebook. Plus it hasn’t quite got that stickability factor yet that makes you want to log in and post every day.

That being said, social has been big on Google’s agenda for a long time now – and with Google+ they finally seem to be getting somewhere. At least in comparison to their previous attempts. Also with the roll out of social integration into search results (via +1 votes, author profiles etc) they’re tapping into an audience of billions so stand every chance of making a huge push next year.

Justin Parks (SEO Dojo)
Ha! I know google want it to and the signups and “users” figures are being bounced about if it suits google to announce them but im still dubious about the actual effect of google plus on the average user who google really want. Facebook still wins that battle and continues to win the war in that respect. I think g+ will continue to carve put its own little niche but, unless something particularly dramatic occurs (like FB gets destroyed by some privacy issue for example) then it will temain niche rather than mainstream.

So then, no, I dont think google plus will make its breakthrough this year. Maybe 13 will be its lucky number.

My thanks must go out to Nick Garner, Bas van den Beld, Kevin Gibbons and Justin Parks for helping out.

Right on the heels of Google Panda comes Google Freshness – an algorithm change in the search engine which Google says will make search results much fresher than before. Google claims that unlike Panda, which only affected about 12% of all search queries, Google Freshness will have an effect on over 30% of all searches, close to 35%.

After moving over from the caffeine infrastructure a year ago, Google prepared itself for a much quicker search engine algorithm change. The Google Freshness change is the embodiment of this year-long plan.

What Google Freshness means to do is to give searchers the absolute latest information possible about a queried subject. Because of the caffeine infrastructure which allows Google to index, crawl and return results incredibly fast, this current search engine algorithm can give you the latest news almost instantly, providing you with high quality pages that may only be a couple of minutes old.

Another aspect of Google Freshness is the ability of the search engine algorithm to follow events that take place on a recurring basis, like presidential and congressional elections. Currently, looking up in advance that is recurrent may give you results from a long time ago. However, with Google Freshness, you are more likely to receive the results of the most recent recurrence of the activity instead of one from 40 years ago.

This update will also give you the absolute latest when it comes to products or services as well as news. For instance, if you were looking up a certain car or the latest smart phone, you would be more likely to get information on the newest iteration of that product rather than older versions.

Under the new Google Freshness update, content that is updated much more frequently will be rewarded under the algorithm. However, some opponents of the system have raised some doubts about what this will actually mean for search results. For instance, the Google Panda update stopped many black hat techniques in their tracks such as keyword stuffing and directory listing with spam directories. There was also some backlash with Panda, with many users saying that this particular update unfairly punished how to and wiki sites. However, the positive effect of Panda on search results and search engine optimisation both far outweighed the negatives – this was pretty much universally agreed upon by consumers and producers of online content alike.

Opponents of Google Freshness see a much higher probability for backlash with no positive effect. For instance, opponents say, simply making a small change to a page can give it a “freshness” update that will unfairly boost it to the top of search engine rankings without taking into account its relevance or true popularity. This would actually lead to huge decreases in relevancy and the ability of spammers and content with less gravitas to have greater presence in search results.

Google counters these critiques by saying that it has already incorporated search ranking factors that are tried and true in with the Freshness algorithm to reward content that is both fresh and good. They say that simply changing a small aspect of the page does not make it automatically become “fresh,” as opponents of the update say that it will.

However, there is a large constituency of “fresh” content that Google has never really been able to rein in. This is all of the content on Twitter, which far and away has most of the fresh information on the Internet. Though Google+ is attempting to catch up with the amount of content that Twitter provides, Twitter is the un-equivocated leader in fresh content on the web right now. The fact remains that Google simply cannot index all of this Twitter content fast enough to incorporate it into a freshness algorithm.

Google does not deny this, but simply diverse the issue by saying that they are more focused on the microblogs than on Twitter. Google says that Twitter might be fresh, but it is not good, because you really cannot get in depth with an issue in 140 characters.

Opponents of the continued changes of the Google algorithm had yet another argument for both Panda and Freshness – that is the fact that Google is still the sole arbiter of what is fresh and good. Until search engine rankings give more credence to social media networks, that is. Personally I find this update to work in favor of quality content, the same as Panda, but of course we will see the end results after we have time to measure the impacts of this new change.

This is the first guest post from Alex Petrovic a SEO strategist for Dejan SEO Company in Australia.

I recently did a great event in Leeds as part of the Leeds Digital Festival organised by Simon Wilson from Twentysix, with some of the best search minds from the region including Lee Allen from Stickyeyes, Andy Heaps from Epiphany Solutions and Ben Bisco from Home James to name a few (as well as others from BlueClaw, Bloom Media and Fusion Unlimited.

One of the questions posed to the panel was regarding Panda, something which it is quite obvious there is still a lot of under awareness of what it is and where it impacts. I was interested to see this morning that Google have pushed Panda 2.3 live. Changes to the algorithm are fairly common place – however what was interesting from some of the coverage of the latest update was Google defining actually how Panda works.

Going back to my earlier references to the Leeds Digital Festival, during the line of questioning one of the panelists mentioned that Panda wasn’t a one off and this was a regular ongoing ( rolling) update. From the latest update, Google have now confirmed that the Panda updates are in fact not rollng updates, but rather require a manual push from Google themselves to go live.

When one looks at the frequency of Panda updates this can possibly be put into better context

Panda Update 1.0: Feb. 24, 2011 – Primary hits US only sites
Panda Update 2.0: April 11, 2011 (about 7 weeks later) – Rolled out internationally
Panda Update 2.1: May 10, 2011 (about 4 weeks later) – Smaller Panda refinement rolled out
Panda Update 2.2: June 16, 2011 (about 5 weeks later) – Improved scraper detection
Panda Update 2.3: July 23, 2011 (about 5 weeks later)

The latest update (Panda 2.3) “incorporates some new signals that help differentiate between higher- and lower-quality sites.” “As a result, some sites are ranking higher after this most recent update,” according to a Google spokesman.

Whilst these are a manual update a rough pattern post Panda 2.0 is starting to develop. Between Panda 2.1 – 2.3 a gap of between 4 and 5 weeks is clearly evident between updates. The frequency of such updates whilst manual would suggest Google potentially do not see this as a long term requirement (ie regularly update algorithm updates) however whilst they are refining the algorithm they will push updates up on a regular basis. Further to that, Google have already said they push live around 500 updates during the course of an average year, so such updates one may suggest may just become part and parcel of general algorithmic updates.

What is increasingly evident is that those affected by Panda are still struggling to make back much of the loss of keyword coverage they had previously

Source: SearchMetrics

Source: SearchMetrics

Source: SearchMetricsti

This is certainly not the last of the updates, there is still a lot of low quality sites out there in the search engine rankings still utilising low quality search engine optimisation techniques to rank well. I would suggest this is something we are likely to see as part and parcel of the Google landscape for the foreseeable future – and I would suggest if they can get it right its something I wholeheartedly back. What the fallout of this update is still to be seen however as organisations become more aware of the new boundaries we may see a new SEO landscape to work within.

Earlier today I read a post by Slingshot SEO – Mission ImposSERPble: Establishing Click-through Rates

To start with, just thought I’d say I do really approve of posts like this, love the fact people are working hard to try and conduct experiments to confirm what they have read and any hypothesis they have put together.

That being said, I’m not sure I agree with a few points of the post, I’ll start from the top and talk about the methodology in general:

It’s clear that nowhere in the post Slingshot said they were trying to be scientific in the post, and so this is really more of a comment rather than a disagreement – I’m just not really sure pulling together any conclusion that has been based on 324 keywords can be seen as reliable – I’m not a scientist myself, and wouldn’t say I have masses of experience running tests, but even thinking logically it sounds insane to jump to a quality conclusion based on this amount of data.

There are two more issues I have with the methodology, these are:

• Using Google Adwords Keyword Tool for search volume data
  • However, saying this, I do think the data in GAKT has got a lot better recently and would almost class it as ‘semi-accurate’
  • Personally I would prefer, for a reliable data, to use PPC impression data based on a keyword with 100% impressions share and set as exact match. I do understand why this wasn’t done though, and it would be very costly if done on a large scale of keywords – just something to bear in mind when considering the results.
  • The positives of using the GAKT to establish CTR is, in my opinion, not to actual calculate CTR percentages to use – more so to get a percentage figure to calculate estimated traffic, but never actually presenting the percentage figure - Wow, that sentence was a mouthful, hope it makes sense!

Further that to that, other factors required further expansion take for example mentioning that universal search was a factor in CTR but not actually doing any monitoring of what items appeared where

• old style map listings shown?
• 3x video links?
• News links?
• Micro-formats on listing?
• etc. etc.

Without storing all this data, and getting sufficient occurrences of each, to come up with CTRs based on all possible combinations, this could massively affect CTR.

Again, this point will be really hard to actually complete and establish, just another thing to consider before taking the information at face value.

Another issue I have with the post, separate to the considerations that need to be made when looking at the data, is the fact I feel Slingshot are wrong to comment on how far their data is out from previous studies.

I may be completely wrong with this statement, but when I look at all the other studies I always make the assumption they are based on the volume of searches that are focused on natural listings only, not actual search volume… when you take that into consideration you get figures like this:

Keyword: Bingo
Search Volume (UK): 74,000
Using the CTRs from Slingshot: 74,000 * 18.2% = 13,468
Using the CTRs from Optify (and the 52% focus on Natural listings that Slingshot mentioned): (74,000 * 52%) * 36.4% = 14,007

Looking at that data alone show me that the whole point of the post, and why it has been seen as a “big thing” is because the figures are so drastically different, which they clearly aren’t.

I don’t want this post to be seen as having a lot off at Slingshot, as I said at the beginning of the post, I am very much an advocate of testing things out completely, I just felt that I needed to say something because I felt the conclusion of the post, and what people are going to take away from it, is completely incorrect.

And, just so that people don’t decide to go on and modify the test to include the points I’ve mentioned then come out with their own figures, just thought I’d add I didn’t mention a lot more things that need to be considered to establish a full conclusion… I’m impressed that Slingshot took the time to separately split apart longtail terms from head terms; however, there appears to be no breakdown of navigational vs. purchase intent vs. local intent, etc. etc. etc.

In summary, if you’re going to have a look at doing a test on CTR (or anything really) I would really suggest reading up about scientific testing methods and use the methodology that you can see in “proper testing” to make sure that all possible factors are considered and dealt with as much as possible.
If you can’t deal with any of the factors for whatever reason, or you feel that they fall out of the scope of the research piece you are conducting, always make sure you are clear that you considered these factors and what you did to try and neutralise them or why you discounted them.

That way you should avoid annoying refutes from people that see the smallest excuse to question your results. Then again, if you’re trying to get links to the research, just ignore everything I said, make up the research completely and, throw a couple of directed insults in there to get peoples backs up

We have seen a lot of evidence recently that suggests Google is becoming increasingly serious about the issue of ‘unnatural’ linking. Whilst Google addressing unnatural link patterns is nothing new, we have seen the likes of JC Penney et al penalised for the use of link networks for example – the use of Webmaster Tools as the delivery vehicle is a new and interesting move on Google’s behalf.

Various threads on prominent sites such as WebmasterWorld are reporting that Google have sent messages such as the following to verified owners of sites which appear to be contravening Google guidelines:

Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.domain.com/,
We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.
We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.
If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.
If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team

Whilst this would suggest a proactive stance by Google, this still leaves the issue that many SEO’s still have concerns with as regards Google – that of just how good their spam detection is with regards to paid links. Whilst this may deter many new ‘link builders’ from turning to the dark side, one can’t help thinking those that test the boundaries of acceptable link building are not likely to be detered by these events. Further to that it will be interesting just to see where the line is drawn as regards Google sending such correspondance.

Whilst it is certainly a good move as there is an obvious benefit to those who may be the recipients of negative SEO campaigns for example, it still doesn’t full address the issue in my opinion, and until Google can deal comprehensively with the link guideline issue – people will continue to push the boundaries of what is and isn’t acceptable – or more realistically – what does and doesn’t work.

Google last night confirmed that the Panda update -released in the US a couple of months ago, is now live globally to all english speaking Google users. This also includes further feedback signals, not surprising given some of the feedback about the update when it was released in the US, as highlighted below

In some high-confidence situations, we are beginning to incorporate data about the sites that users block into our algorithms. In addition, this change also goes deeper into the “long tail” of low-quality websites to return higher-quality results where the algorithm might not have been able to make an assessment before. The impact of these new signals is smaller in scope than the original change: about 2% of U.S. queries are affected by a reasonable amount, compared with almost 12% of U.S. queries for the original change.

Initial analysis of the SERPs would suggest the impact of this is fairly limited, something which speaking to a couple of colleagues in the industry seems to be a view shared. It is however worth keeping an eye on this over the coming days, however if this is the extent of the impact I think many UK SEO’s will be breathing a significant sigh of relief

For those that were down at Brighton SEO, the conversation with regards to Andy Budd’s earlier comments and posts regarding SEO’s was met with a mixed response. In particular the comment from his post below was one of the points that really got me thinking..

So Im going to make a request to any truly “white hat” practitioners out there. Please distance your self from the world of SEO, stop talking about search engine rankings and start helping your clients deliver real value to their users. Stop defining yourself by the discovery medium and focus on the content itself. I don’t mind what you call yourselves, be that digital marketers, content strategists or simply web designers. But whatever you do, remove the word “search” from your job title. It’s tainted and devalued and you’re much better than that.

To a certain extent this does highlight the great divide that exists within the Search Marketing industry, from the white hat peddlers to the black hat ‘charlatans’. For me much of the misunderstanding of what SEO is – causes much of the slightly ‘greyer’ area to get peddled in with the black hat brigade – something I personally think is grossly misleading and can result in further scaremongering in an already ‘jumpy’ industry.

Clients want results and clients want return on investment. I would argue that this is one of the key factors behind the bad press which SEO often receives client-side rather than those agencies which may have employed more ‘unethical’ optimisation technique such as paid linkage campaigns. Sure if the site disappears thats certainly not good – but that again comes back to return on investment from a client perspective. Further to that no one wants to see hacking and other extreme forms of unethical behaviour make its way into industry, however clients who don’t buy into SEO are often the same clients who have brought into SEO campaigns and have not seen a return on investment. THis is not to say pure white hat SEO cannot deliver results however this often takes time and to be honest can be very very difficult to make work in heavily competitive verticals as one of the biggest issues in many such circumstances in scalability. Great content and scalability are often difficult to marry, one of the main reasons the ‘linkbaiting’ strategy many white hat agencies utilise is flawed from the start in my opinion (similarly as ‘Viral Videos’ is flawed somewhat).

Further to that, who dictates what ‘great content’ actually is. Whats great for me, may not be great for you. I will use the example of the ’30 most influential SEO’ post done a while back on this exact blog. The post drew a mixed response from many in the industry, however it generated hundreds of links, resulted in tens of thousands of visits and is used in a prominent search marketeers signature to boot. Great content or not – you decide?

I would also ask whether customers really want to see the site that produces the best content. If I type online sofa into Google, do I really want to see sofasofasofa.com or thesofablog.com (neither site has been chosen for its editorial quality here – more for indicative purposes) – or do they want to see the likes of DFS, CSL, Furniture Village and SCS. I would argue the latter. The issue with many larger organisations exists with complience which due to the size and nature of these sites they may not want or be able to produce that volume of ‘great content’ – however one would argue these are certainly the most relevant results which ultimately is what Google needs to reproduce to browers.

I think Rishi put it perfectly:

Stop being ordinary SEOs and link junkies, become a real marketer. Learn psychology, learn behaviours and use that knowledge.

I can’t help but agree with that sentiment – and its something I personally have said within my internal circles for a while. SEO is not something that is formulaic – its a fluid, diverse beast and one that can only be truly understood by sustained testing, learning and refining ones optimisation techniques.

Great content is part of that strategy however as search engine marketeers we need to think above and beyond this point. Communication is key to advertising in what ever form – and the more we learn to integrate facets of other marketing into our mindset the better it can only be to the industry as a whole.

March the 1st has arrived, something which could have quite far reaching implications in terms of SEO for both website owners and SEOs themselves. ASA regulations are nothing new to the advertising industry, certainly they have been round in other media such as newspapers, catalogues and posters as well as display and paid keyword advertising on search engines.

However this new legislation broadens the scope of such legislation as well as bringing into scope a very major ally in Google, who are not only supporting the regulations but also part funding them. Google have long since waged a battle against that of paid links, and in the revised regulations would appear to have finally met an ally which could help them put a hammer blow into the paid links argument,

Matt Brittin from Google was quoted as saying:

If people have a complaint about a claim made on a website it’s important that it is properly investigated. We support the ASA’s aims of providing consumer protection and are happy to help get this up and running for the benefit of UK consumers and businesses.

Under the new ruling, any links wishing to be under the guidelines of the new CAP guidelines would need to be disclosed as being paid for in such a way that made it very obvious of any paid relationship between the advertiser and publisher or using the OFT terminology advertisers must:

disclose, in a manner unavoidable to the average consumer, that the promotion has been paid for or otherwise remunerated.

Further more:

• Claims which cannot be substantiated will need to be proved. (sidenote: I can think of a number of SEO companies here that may need to prove to be the number 1 SEO in the UK here )
• Any disclosures to special offers or discounts will need to be accurate and not in any way misleading
• All product descriptions and claims will need to be factually true and verifiable.

This opens a whole merry go round of legalities as far as policing this is concerned,for example:

• How will the ASA deal with links acquired from international sites with no direct link to the UK – such as .com, .net. This surely will be a far more difficult to deal with than simple UK to UK relationships.
• Where does the remit for this end. For example, the guise to develop content networks to build links on either under the guise of content or direct links may fall under this remit – and as such be of just as much concern as the upcoming Google ‘Farmer Update’ here in the UK
• How far does disclosure go. Does appropriate categorisation in a particular channel suffice or does one have to definitely state that the advertorial/link/blog post etc is of a paid variety in a case by case basis.
• Where does this leave offsite SEO companies offering services to overseas companies targeting UK audiences – I can think of a number particularly in the health/supplements sector where this may well apply.
• Will this play into the hands of churn and burn affiliates who may not be worried about long term visibility. I personally can’t help thinking this legislation is of greater to larger organisations rather than ‘opportunistic’ affiliates wishing to exploit potential loopholes.
• Finally, and very seriously in my opinion. Whats to stop an unscrupulous competitor buying links on a website, not disclosing them and then reporting a competitor to the ASA. This is not something that is likely to happen on either paid search, display or above the line activity but lets face it. Links are cheap and easy to acquire – and something as small as this could be a very easy way to potentially cause a lot of problems to advertisers. Have the ASA in my opinion necessarily thought of this through given the limited experience in this sector?

Google in particular will be watching things very closely for two reasons. Firstly there is obviously a very open footprint to expose potential paid links on websites, something one can’t help Google will happily utilise in search of websites which may or may not contravene the guidelines. As I said during my post earlier today, I can’t help thinking there may some reconsideration on Google’s part for this, as this may have the net result of high churn tactics which merely stimulate areas which promote low quality content output,something if we are all honest doesn’t necessarily always result in great quality content or useful content to a reader – but thats another argument.

All this begs the question as to how this will be regulated. Emma Atkins, Commercial Litigation & Intellectual Property lawyer at Denison Till Solicitors suggests the following (from the Epiphany Solutions blog)

In reality, as has always been the case, provided the communications you make are legal, decent, honest, and truthful and in the ‘spirit of the code’ you are unlikely to be at risk. Moreover, the ASA is a reactive enforcer rarely seeking out problems and preferring to wait until a complaint is made; most instances of minor non-compliance will likely go unnoticed.

Nevertheless, it has indicated that it will be making ‘spot checks’, monitoring problem sites and seeking the cooperation of search engines in punishing breaches of the CAP Code. Where a breach is found to have taken place the ASA will in most cases make a simple request for withdrawal of the communication. The ASA also has powers to:

> name and shame repeat offenders on the ASA website
> place warning advertisements alongside the search results listings of products and brands of non-compliant businesses
> force the removal of paid for links/advertisements that link directly to the page hosting the non compliant marketing communications
> refer matters to the Office of Fair Trading for action under the Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 or the Business Protection from Misleading Marketing Regulations 2008

This is said to be the most comprehensive and robust approach to the regulation of advertising online anywhere in the world but the reputation of the internet as being notoriously difficult to police will not be greatly affected in my view.

Nevertheless, anyone dealing with marketing communications, such as website owners and agents should amend their regulatory compliance procedures to account for the new rules. They should consider:

> introducing or amending procedures to ensure regular checking of their web presence
> training any employees contributing content on company’s website, facebook, blogs, twitter
> reviewing standard agreements to make sure references to relevant codes of practice cover the new CAP Code and other relevant ASA guidance
> ensuring agreements with advertisers/agents require compliance with all laws, codes and regulations in all territories at which the communication is targeted

The ASA has set up CAP Services, which provides free guidance and training on how to comply with the CAP Code and this can be accessed through their website.

For agencies that are currently employing a number of ethical routes to link building this wont come as much of a concern, however there is no doubting there will be a number of agencies and clients in particular that will be drawing some very deep breaths as the deadline day draws ever nearer. Will this eradicate paid links – I highly doubt – and much of this will come down to a risk reward scenario – particular given the perceived risks of contravening this guidelines which would appear to be fairly weak and limited particularly for early offenders – and in many instances may just result in a request for the link to be taken down rather than any serious legal implications.

That said I think this is an interesting day for UK search marketing as a whole, and one potentially which may have far reaching effects over the coming years. I can’t help thinking early days are going to be a bit touch and feel for both the ASA and the search marketing sector as a whole – as both sides test the boundaries. My main concern would appear to be the scale at which the ASA in particular is able to deal with this given the potential scope of policing required to man this effectively – lets face it they haven’t got the algorithmic capabilities of Google – and whether this merely ends up being a very good idea with limited remit. Time will ultimately tell….

You may have read from a number of sources of the recent New York Times article which ‘outed’ the link building practises undertaken by JC Penney or more accurately their SEO agency Searchdex. For those that haven’t read the story the following resources are worth reading:

• Search Engine Optimisation and its dirty little secrets – New York Times
• New York Times Exposes J.C. Penney Link Scheme That Causes Plummeting Rankings in Google

– Search Engine Land

• New York Times outs major US retailer for link spam

- Blogstorm

To provide a quick overview, it appears that JC Penney had utilised a load of low quality link sources as the basis for the SEO link building, primarily from the well known link network TNX. Its not the first time I have seen TNX work particularly well, it used to work fantastically for GHD counterfeit sites as well. However more worryingly it has highlighted a number of more worrying issues as regards Google and its ability to deal with any sort of simple ‘negative’ link building.

They have since taken action. On Wednesday evening, Google began what it calls a “manual action” against JC Penney, primary keyword level demotions specifically aimed at the company.

At 7 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, J. C. Penney was still the No. 1 result for “Samsonite carry on luggage.”
Two hours later, it was at No. 71.
At 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Penney was No. 1 in searches for “living room furniture.”
By 9 p.m., it had sunk to No. 68.

However the following key points would appear to stand out as regards the activity which entire issue:

• Relevancy or lack of it would appear to have little bearing on site success. The fact that a number of the links came from a number of ‘dubious’ link sources would be testament to this, and I have seen Russian sites within the TNX network work very well as well.
• Spikes in link building don’t necessarily mean Google will catch you. Lets face it, it wasn’t Google that caught this issue going on – it was the NYT and before that the site had seen some very aggresive link building taking place – which as mentioned earlier didn’t exactly have a blend that should have gone unnoticed.
  
• More importantly – why didnt Google pick this up. We are led to believe that Google’s network of human evaluators and cutting edge algorithm is more than capable of finding and punishing you if you overstep the Google guidelines – however it wasn’t until the news broke that Google took any action at all.
• Strangely it is a newspaper breaking the news. One better hope they never decide to offer any form of linkage which goes against Google Guidelines as one would suggest there are going to be a lot of people waiting to return the favour if they do.

At the end of the day, one has to say that Google does do a better job of sorting the wheat from the chaff than many of their competitors – however one can’t help that a certain level of competition wouldn’t go amiss – if not just to keep Google on their toes a bit more. Missing such an example sends completely the wrong message out, and goes against much of the traditional rhetoric that comes out from Google. After all its actions that often speak much loader than words.

Last year we saw an encouraging year from a search perspective, with the recession appearing to keep reasonably clear of the search marketing sector. Some reports during the year suggested spend in search would be up by around 60% however whilst the Google Q3 figures later in the year suggested these estimates may have beena abit high – there is no doubt it was a good year none the less.

That in mind, we asked our experts how they thought this year would shape up from a search perspective:

With many recent figures suggesting a ‘mini-revival’ – do you think 2011 will be a bumper year for search, and if so which channel (SEO/PPC) do you think will see greater traction and why

David Harry

Huh, I guess I’ve been out of the loop on the ‘recent figures’, please do send some over. Personally I see budgets becoming tighter this year which generally means the SEOs, those odd little mystical creatures, will get smacked down if anything. Between business folks not understanding what we do and the many snake oil, crap hat, shit for brains providers, I bet that PPC will emerge the winner. That is at least trackable. The SEO world really hasn’t made serious in-roads as far as building the perceptions of what we do. I know many an in-house SEO that has been relegated over the last few months. Probably the writing on the wall there. SEO still has some growing to do as an industry.

Ben Bisco

I’ve seen so much change over the last few years that I wouldn’t even like to hazard a guess!

Paul Reilly:

I think the mini-revival was largely economic rather than behavioural. However my mind tells me to expect SEO to gain more traction, but as Google get’s smarter and those engaged with crappy SEO practitioners find themselves struggling, they too will be forced to spend more money on paid search in order to maintain their budgeted growth targets.

Bas van den Beld

That is a big question there Pete . Search will continue to do good, as long as it doesn’t only focus on optimising websites. It needs to take the next step. Then SEO will have the bigger traction at first, but PPC will come close if it starts looking across the borders of search to for example Facebook.

Nichola Stott

I do think 2011 will be a bumper year for search. The last two years have hit some industries hard, and marketing spend is often throttled in a recession. Those businesses that have survived will be now looking to get aggressive about their marketing strategy and some sectors are starting to come back to health anyway. I wouldn’t expect there to be any significant difference in growth for either SEO or PPC.

Judith Lewis

I think, based on my experience in B2B as well as B2C that PPC will be stronger in this “mini revival” but that SEO will also see gains. I think as a % that SEO will see the larger rise but in absolute money terms that PPC will see more investment.

Andy Beard

Whatever converts – the added insecurity with frequent unexplained Adwords bans will mean SEO is a necessary investment. .

Andy Redfern

The E-learning Foundation recently reported that over two million children in the Britain do not have Internet access, whilst the GBBO (Getting British Business Online) estimates that there are a whopping one and a half million businesses that do not have a website. These figures clearly demonstrate a natural growth occurring in 2011 as more consumers and businesses come online. With this in mind I would therefore predict both PPC and SEO to grow at a greater pace than 2010. The interesting growth aspect for PPC marketers will be how far Google rolls out its PPC extensions (Local, Shopping) and how fast its adopted.

Shaun Anderson

Google wants companies to use PPC as their primary marketing channel so with that in mind, PPC may grow more. SEO will be important though as long as you can use the same methods to rank a site we have been using the last few years – and i don’t see that changing much at all.

Peter Young

Last year saw a fairly good year for search particularly given the current economic climate. Whilst we certainly saw some consolidation in the UK marketplace in terms of the agency space, spend in both PPC and SEO seemed to be growing well (our post on Google’s Q3 figures perhaps being most symbolic of this) .

I can’t help feeling 2011 may run very similarly to 2010. Continued spend in search I think should continue however we may see a shift from boutique search agencies to more integrated media/digital agencies as the expertise within these organisations increases – and thus perhaps a more considered integrated search approach – however lets wait and see….

Will Critchlow

I’m pretty sure we will see continued growth through 2011. SEO is such a less mature market than PPC that I can’t help but think that will grow quicker – though I’m sure it will be dwarfed (and to some degree cannibalised) by the growth rate of social media spends. I’m not sure this is the best thing for companies’ ROI.

Other parts in the Experts View series:
Q1 : Do you think a viable competitor to Google will emerge in 2011?
Q2 : Where do you think the growth area in search will emerge in 2011?
Q3 : Do you think Social media’s influence on SEO will continue to increase or fade away?

In the second of the Experts View series, we asked us our experts where they felt the growth area for 2011 was. 2010 certainly saw the potential threat of the social networks rise, consolidation within the search engine marketplace and the growth of Twitter. Two new experts join us today, namely Bas van den Beld from State of Searchand Will Critchlow from Distilled to give us his views on what 2011 may hold for Search.

So where do our experts think the growth area will lie in 2011?

Where do you think the growth area in search will emerge in 2011?

David Harry

Local. Sure, I know it’s already done some extensive growth over the last 18 months, but with (Google’s) Marissa (Mayer) recently moving over there and the subsequent announcement of ‘contextual search’, we will certainly see more movement in this area. Beyond that, I still say there will be further decay in the link obsessed algorithms. To that end I am watching for better semantic analysis, deeper personalization (via social) and more emphasis on meta-data and named entities (non-link citations).

Ben Bisco

Learning to use search intelligently in line with the attribution modelling & retargeting as mentioned above. Attribution modelling has obviously been around for yonks, but the developments in Display remarketing will mean that Search and Display potentially swap roles with Search providing awareness of brands via generic searches and display reaching consumers when they are ready to buy. This changes the game for how we manage our search campaigns. This probably applies most to PPC of course, but will affect SEO to an extent: particularly when it comes to deciding which keywords to focus our efforts on.

Mobile Search & Local – particularly in combination.

Paul Reilly:

Mobile, Location, Hyperlocal, Video, Discovery, Social Recommendation, Social Commerce.

Bas van den Beld

It is obvious that at first sight people will be looking to be putting their time and money into local and social stuff. The recent changes from Google show the local interest of the search engine and many companies will try and act on that. That means more local efforts. They will also still be looking for how to really embed social into search. With Universal at its peak and Google and Bing both actually taking social signals into account companies will look for ways to use that. But I do believe that 2011 will still be a year in which it will be a lot of trial and error on that area. Companies will put more time and money in ‘social search’ but will not find the holy grail just yet…

Nichola Stott

Mobile.

Judith Lewis

Facebook. Have you done a search in Facebook lately? Ya, it’s still kind of crap but more and more businesses are directing people to their web properties from within Facebook. The world is using Facebook as a portal to the web much as AOL used to be and I think it would be foolish to ignore Facebook. You *will* have to launch a unique Facebook strategy to deal with it and goodness me don’t set it up and leave it and ignore the wall posts but you will _have_ to be there in 2011 or your business will suffer.

However I’d also like to point towards something else here and I hope you’ll follow my thinking here. It has nothing to do with data and search and everything about social expectations. Wolfram Alpha would be a smart acquisition by someone to further the expansion of the semantic web and I saw some technology from an Israeli university that was as accurate as a human in understanding sentiment. This technology I feel will become a *must buy* for search engines. They are increasingly being expected to deliver not just the best data-driven result but to make a _value judgement_ for the searcher and deliver the *best* result bot just from an optimisation point of view but from an ethical, moral and value-driven point of view. The case with the glasses company late in the year is the best example. It is not about spam or buying links – it is about the perception of the public that the results that are delivered through search are good, reliable, honest and “the best”. Users have started expecting search engines to make not just data-driven judgements but _value-driven_ judgements. I think that for search engines, this will be their 2011 challenge and one the various governments of the world may collectively force them to make through various methods.

Much as searchers expect businesses to be in search, they are also starting to find them within Facebook.

Will Critchlow
(Answered via Twitter)

the buzzwords will be social (twitter = links etc) but the old stuff will keep working just fine

Andy Beard

Smart solutions to leverage links and conversions. Empowering the influencers to spread your message.

Andy Redfern

Local – We have seen in recent months the local fragmentation of Google. This will mean SEO will become more complex in the way it managed and delivery. Successful campaigns in 2011 will have to operate effectively at a local as well as a national level.

Shaun Anderson

To be honest, I don’t chase the growth areas that much. I stick to ranking in competitive niches for clients and being represented in local verticles, and owning the keywords a client really should be able to own. Not much has changed (for me) in that sense for the last few years, considering all the changes Google has introduced to it’s UI the last year. I’m keeping an eye on social of course – I am really interested (now) in conversion optimisation but I probably need to take a class on it or something. I am even more interested in marketing as a broader subject, than a narrower one in 2011.

Peter Young

Certainly local is going to be a big growth area this year,particularly if you look at the way Google in particular positioned itself towards the latter end of 2010. I would only expect that trend to continue for the early part of 2011. Retargeting is another area where we may see further growth this year, as experience and awareness of this opportunity within paid search increases. Further to that we always include mobile in nearly all of these growth area forecasts but given my first point on local – and new products being talked about such as the Google Newsstand I really think we could see this actually happen this year. However I would suggest we may see vertical search being the biggest growth area in 2011, particularly given the launch of sites like Boutique.com and the impending signoff of the ITA acquisition.

Other parts in the Experts View series:
Q1 : Do you think a viable competitor to Google will emerge in 2011?

As many regular readers may remember – and many of you who have Twitter accounts may remember we ran a recent poll on the most influential SEO in the UK. I originally was only going to post my own thoughts on this – however the thought of getting the community involved in this not only gave this a bit more personality but was interesting in terms of both the amount of noise this created and the lengths just some of our participants would go to to get near the top.

The vote itself attracted over 5000 votes – however as many people are aware of we had to remove some due to some overzealous scripting (no it wasn’t Paul Madden) for the poll – however we still had around 2000 odd legitimate votes during the lifetime of the poll which ran for just over a week.

30 – Lyndon Antcliff – Cornwall SEO
Twitter: lyndoman
The King of linkbait, Lyndon has been on the circuit for a number of years. Lyndon runs Cornwall SEO and is a regular speaker on the national and international speaking circuits

29 – Kelvin Newman – Site Visibility
Twitter: kelvinnewman
Had the privilege of having Kelvin up for the recent Sascon Manchester SEO mini-conferences, and Kelvin is certainly one of the new generation coming through. Creative Director @ Site Visibility, Kelvin is also one of the founders of the Internet Marketing Podcast which has around 17000 subscribers.

28 – Ben Mckay – MEC Manchester
Twitter: yetanotherben
Ben is one of the SEO directors at Manchester agency MEC Manchester, part of Group M – and runs the justmeandmy search marketing blog. Ben is a prolific blogger and can also be found blogging at Search Engine Journal and SEO Scoop and is also one of the founder members of the Sascon search conference.

27 – Lisa Myers – Verve Search
Twitter: lisadmyers
Lisa is certainly one of the most influential women in UK SEO, and in my opinion one of the best speakers on the circuit at this present moment in time (in my opinion should have been far higher up in this poll). Lisa is one of the founders of the State of Search blog (with Bas van den Beld) and of her search agency Verve Search. Also married to fellow nominee Jon Myers and new mother to Isla.

26 – Jaamit Durrani – OMD
Twitter: jaamit
Jaamit’s come a long way since his days at Fresh Egg, and is now the SEO Director at OMD testament not only to his knowledge but also his time on Twitter (joke – PY). Another one of the new breed of UK SEO’s on the circuit at the moment, and certainly one to watch for the future.

25 – Jon Myers – Yahoo
Twitter: jondmyers
The newly appointed Head of Account Management for Yahoo, Jon is a veteren of the UK search industry. Widely respected within the industry following senior spells at both Mediavest Manchester and Latitude Digital Marketing. Further to that one of the nicest blokes in the industry and the other half of the Myers search dynasty.

24 – Judith Lewis – Beyond
Twitter: judithlewis
Another SEO who has been around the industry since the early days, and reknowned for her love of chocolate. Now Head of Search at Beyond following a spell at I-Level – Judith is also one of the founder members of the SEO-Chicks with Lisa Myers.

23 – Tom Critchlow – Distilled
Twitter: tomcritchlow
One of the two brothers on the nominee list, I had the pleasure of meeting Tom at Sascon last year. Extremely knowledgable within search and analytics, and highly respected within the industry. Tom is Head of Search at Distilled and one of the SEOMoz Alumni.

22 – Andy Heaps – Epiphany Solutions
Twitter: andyheaps
Now Head of Search at Epiphany Solutions following a spell as Head of SEO at Latitude Digital Marketing. Andy is another that appears to have been round the industry for a number

21 – Kevin Gibbons – SEOptimise
Twitter: kevgibbo
Founder and Director of SEOptimise, and prolific blogger for Econsultancy amongst others. Kevin is also a regular speaker on many of the UK conferences.

20 – Peter Young – Holistic Search
Twitter: peteyoung
(You may wonder why my name was on there – but this was purely down to a nomination on the earlier Twitter post). New Head of SEO at Brilliant Media following previous stints at Mediavest Manchester and Amaze. Peter also runs the Manchester SEO Mini Conferences as well as being one of the founder members of Sascon. A prolific blogger, Peter also blogs at State of Search and David Harry’s new search news portal – Search News Central

19 – Nichola Stott – TheMediaFlow
Twitter: nicholastott
Owner of search marketing agency theMediaFlow – a SEO and social media agency based Hampshire. Nichola is a fellow blogger on European search marketing agency State of Search as well as SearchEngineWatch. Nichola is also a regular speaker on the Search marketing conference circuit and and absolute blast on a night out!!!!

18 – Barry Adams – Pierce Communications
Twitter: badams
Ex SEO for the Belfast Telegraph who as a sidenote went as far as writing a story on the website announcing his nomination. Barry blogs across a number of different online publications including Search News Central and State of Search – as well as being a massive advocate that SEO is not dead

17 – Rishi Lakhani
Twitter: rishil
Aparently your average guy interested in SEO – however there is nothing average about Rishil. Well versed marketeer who from a client side perspective brings a different approach to many of the nominees on the list. Highly intelligent, always entertaining – and well worth a place on the list (as a sidenote his blog explicitly.me is well worth a read)

16 – Neil Walker – SEOMad
Twitter: theukseo
Ex Chief Technical Officer for Just Search, and now running his own show. Speaker at the recent Manchester SEO mini-conference – however speakers at a number of events including Traffic and Ad-tech.

15 – James Lowery – Latitude
Twitter: yrewol
Currently Head of SEO at Latitude, following in the footsteps of fellow nominee Andy Heaps. Despite a heavy Latitude vote, a very competent SEO well versed in SEO amongst some of the biggest clients in the UK in some of the most competitive industries.

14 – Dom Hodgson – Think Visibility
Twitter: thehodge
Founder of the hugely successful Think Visibility search marketing conference in Leeds, and hardcore affiliate marketeer – which belies his age. Certainly one to watch in the industry for the future.

13 – Neil Jackson – Tamar
Twitter: neil66
Director of Search Strategy at search marketing agency Tamar, Neil has been on the scene for a number of years. A regular speaker on the search circuit including SMX and Sascon

12 – Julian Sambles – The Telegraph Media Group
Twitter: juliansambles
Julian is the Digital Operations Director at the Telegraph Media Group and as such not your typical SEO. A regular speaker on the circuit as with many of the other nominees

11 – Andrew Girdwood – Bigmouthmedia/LBi
Twitter: andrewgirdwood
Bigmouthmedia through and through, self-confessed geek Andrew Girdwood comes in at 11. In my opinion, one I had expected higher up in the list.

10 – Paul Madden – formally SEOIdiot
Twitter: pauldavidmadden
Everyone’s favourite dark master, Paul has made a fortune out of affiliate marketing and Adsense in particular. The one person I have heard people always look forward to hearing on the speaking circuit (no matter of their hat colour), and a fantastically intelligent bloke to boot. Despite some apparent ‘automation’ in his votes (Couldnt prove due to different ips – spammers learn a lesson there), well worth his place in the Top 10.

9 – Dixon Jones – Receptional/Majestic SEO
Twitter: dixon_jones
Marketing Director of Majestic SEO, Director of Receptional and Moderator at WebmasterWorld, Dixon eats, sleeps, dreams and breaths SEO. His association with leading link analysis tool Majestic SEO has made him one of the must speak to people when it comes to links and link analysis in particular.

8 – Teddy Cowell – Guava
Twitter: guavauk
I had the fortune to meet Teddy at an EConsultancy roundtable a couple of years ago, and was hugely impressed by his knowledge on SEO. The regular collaboration with EConsultancy as regards the SEO industry sector reports, makes Guava and Teddy in particular is one of the reasons I would suggest Teddy is hugely influential in the UK space

7 – Will Critchlow – Distilled
Twitter: willcritchlow
Another on the list who was higher up on my original list, however there is no doubting the influence the Distilled boys have on the UK SEO Industry through their affiliation with SEOMoz and the increasingly popular ProSEO search marketing series.

6 – Richard Baxter – SEOGadget
Twitter: richardbaxter
The increasing success of SEOGadget can only be attributed to the expertise of Richard Baxter. One of the more technical SEO’s on the circuit at present, Richard is a well respected expert within the SEO field – particularly with regards to Microformat markup and information architecture.

5 – Patrick Altoft – Branded3
Twitter: patrickaltoft
Respect both sides of the Atlantic highlights the influence both Patrick and his Blogstorm blog have within the SEO Community as a whole. Increasingly visibible on the search marketing conference circuit and definitely a cert for the Top 5.

4 – Guy Levine – Return on Digital
Twitter: guylevine
Many may be wondering why Guy is in the top 5, however one has to consider the breadth this poll actually went. A well orchestrated campaign saw Guy end in fourth place in the poll, having even run David close at the top for a couple of days. One of the Millionnare Mentors (on search) with James Caan and founder of Return on Digital, Guy is a regular speaker to both client and agency side audiences.

3 – Paul Reilly – StickyEyes
Twitter: paulreilly
Head of Search at StickyEyes, and regular speaker on the Gaming and search marketing conferences – and now heading London-way. Worked across a number of highly competitive verticals including gaming and mobile phones, Paul is well respected by both clients and agencies alike.

2 – David Naylor – Bronco
Twitter: davenaylor
Led the way for the majority of the way, and by the winners own admission the most influential SEO in the UK at this present moment. Dave commands respect – not just for his Yorkshire accent but his expertise within SEO. Known and respected by nearly all SEO’s within the industry, whether new or seasoned veterans, Dave runs the Bronco search agency in Yorkshire as well as speaking at a number of conferences both here in the UK, in Europe and further afield.

1 – Shaun Anderson – HoboWeb
Twitter: hobo_web
Shaun just sneaked home within the closing stages of the competition, thanks in no small part to a fairly significant promotional campaign which included a number of references via the RSS feed of his site. However there is no doubting the respect and influence Shaun has within the SEO community as a whole.

Its getting towards that time of the year again when many of us starting thinking about next years calendar – and what/which conferences we may attend during the course of the year. We in the UK are fairly spoilt for choice. We in the UK are reasonably spoilt for choice with global brands such as SMX/SES, Affiliates conference A4U, the International Search Summit and some out of London fayre in terms of Think Visibility and Sascon.

If you think of any we may have missed out – let me know and we will add them in (and I’m sure people will as is the nature of these polls)

In the fast paced world of search engine marketing you can often find yourself rushing around trying to understand the latest algorithm change, interpret the latest Adwords policies, keep up to date with the latest social media channels, pitch for new business, service client requests and somewhere in there fit in some search marketing for your clients. Whilst it is this fast pace which makes search engine marketing such an exciting market to work in, it can also be the reason that neither agency, nor client gets the most from their efforts.

Chasing algorithms, the latest social media craze, or breaking news piece maybe fun (and sometimes not so fun!) but it is the boring things like process and long term strategy which will ensure that your search marketing reaps solid business rewards in the end. It is this process and strategy which will ensure:

• Everyone in the relationship knows what is expected of them, and when.
• Operations teams can effectively manage their time rather than be chasing their tails at an every expanding URGENT task list
• SLAs can be developed to ensure which form the basis of the relationship
• Each individual party can agree what the best route forward for the websites search engine marketing and there will be less finger pointing if it doesn’t work out!
• You have a blueprint to refer back to in order to help guide future discussions

It is important that at the start of any relationship, whether it is between client and agency, internal departments, or between a boss and employee, that you sit down and agree the actions and milestones which are going to get you to where you want to be. Key deliverables and markers for each month, quarter and year that everybody agrees will produce the desired results. Once everyone has bought into the blueprint for success, the elements can then flow down into SLAs and commitment from both sides. Operations teams can plan their time effectively and know what their KPIs are for a given time period, and each stakeholder will know what they need to do to keep up their side of the bargain.

That’s not to say this original blue print won’t change over time, obviously it needs to adapt. As success, and failure, are seen with tactics strategies these need to be fed back into the long term plan. So blueprints need to be reviewed at monthly and quarterly intervals to ensure that they still make sense, and expectations (performance or otherwise) are being met from all sides.

It’s fun to talk about the exciting goings on in search engine marketing, and to implement tactics that are new and original, but sometimes it is being boring which pays off in the long term!

Rob Weatherhead is Operations Director at Latitude Express and one of the regular guest post contributors here at Holistic Search

After a number of queries on Twitter, we have compiled our poll for the most influential SEO in the UK. The criteria was as follows:

• UK based
• Works in SEO rather than Social Media or affiliated channels

We will be compiling this list just in November so get your votes in now (You can vote for 3 people at a time)

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

There used to be a time when as marketeers, us SEO’s sat as a very siloed bunch – but times have changed and continue to change at breakneck speed. SEO techniques are increasingly more sophisticated, and with it the way SEO practioners measure and evaluate campaign success, something we covered during a recent post on whether rankings as a metric for success were dead.

One area which is developing very quickly are analytics. Traditionally many SEOs have used traditional tools such as Google Analytics to evalaute their campaign impact much of the time in isolation to other activity which may be going on within an advertisers marketing ix, however as the influence of SEO has grown the traditional big boys within the paid search campaign management marketplace have started to take notice.

In particular, two tools have started to make interesting manouvres into the organic marketplace, namely Atlas and Doubleclick. Before I go further its possibly worth highlighting why I say interesting. Lets create a scenario:

• Client x is running three channels namely PPC, SEO and Display, of which that client is monitoring/managing their campaigns via Doubleclick – SEO is monitored for traffic purposes through Google Analytics – a scenario I would suggest many SEO’s are used to.  For simplicity sake we are only going to use PPC and SEO here though.
• At the end of the month PPCagency A reports on their traffic, leads/sales and lead/sales revenue to the client, using last click attribution from their monitoring systems. At the same time SEOAgency B does the same  – however using Google Analytics as their source for data.
• Client x gets the report and concludes that PPC leads + SEO leads = overall leads and does not take into account any potential cannabilisation from the above mentioned sources.

The problem with the above scenario in a traditional sense is that we are going to have a fairly significant volume of doublecounted leads in the scenario highlighted above for the following reasons

• The PPC tracking system in all likelihood has not been configured to monitor organic traffic and as such will set the cookie for last click to PPC.  Say the user then goes away from the site – and then returns via an organic result – the analytics would pick this up – however the paid search monitoring system will not
• The user then goes on to convert and gets counted as a lead via GA for organic search and as a lead for paid search via the tracking system there. Same lead but attributed to two differenct channels….

Traditionally this has been a very difficult situation to overcome – however increasingly these Paid Search management systems are starting to migrate into the organic search landscape. With Doubleclick for example, one is now able to track organic search like never before, allowing the opportunity to pivot, query and integorate data like never before.

Lets take the scenario outlined above, and incorporate these tools into the framework with a central tracking system in place such as Doubleclick:

• User enters the site via PPC.  User then goes away from the site and returns via organic search. Depending how my system is configured this would now correctly be attributed as an : organic visitor (if last click), paid search visitor (if first click) or blend of paid/organic (if blended option) has been chosen.
• The same principle as highlighted above would then be attributed to conversion as well.

Last Click and Multi-touch attribution models both have their own pros and cons. Many argue that the last click is the most beneficial as around 75% of conversions can be attributed to a single click, however there is an increasing appreciation of the role of other channels apart from search within the conversion matrix. Further to this, assigning attribution back to Local or even offline activity is increasingly important in a blended marketing world.

Such a framework provides a far more ‘realistic’ overview of a clients search landscape and a much truer representation of the true commercial impact of their marketing activity. Doubleclick is one of the tools on the market would appear to have the upper hand at the current moment in time, however other tools Atlas shouldn’t be discounted and what these systems now allow organic search practioners to monitor and report on is the true search engine landscape – often taking into account full channel attribution modelling or ‘search path analysis’.

I should add these aren’t the only two systems on the market – however what I would highlight is that I can’t help thinking having run these blended campaigns on a number of accounts that it provides a much more more intelligent framework to work in where paid search and organic search are configured to work completely in synergy with each other. At the end of the day talk a language that is consistent to both effectively allowing you to compare apples with apples – which I can’t help thinking means less work and more time to spend doing what really makes the difference to your clients  – increasing visibility.

Shock, horror!!!. At Holistic Search we have recently run a poll on the site which we put out to the general public. The question we posed was whether or not it was possible to rank in super competitive sectors (such as car insurance, gambling, loans etc) without using paid links. I have my own views on this which I will cover later, however it was interesting gauging the feedback from an initial Twitter Sample against that from the integrated poll on the Holistic Search website.

Before we go any further it may be worth highlighting what I would constitute as a super competitive market

• Mature organic market
• High number of high profile organisations. Credit cards for example was not included due to the number of potential competitors
• Generally very high CPC which restricts the number of entrants and coverage an organisation can get (without blowing the budget)
• Often are ‘jackpot’ terms within a particular vertical/sector. For example – Car Insurance searches far outweigh that of similar and further qualified search terms
• Previous histories of organisations erring on the ‘grey’ side of SEO

Response: Is it possible to rank on a super competitive phrase without paid links

Contrary however to the earlier Twitter poll I ran before the start of the poll on Holistic, the result of this one suggested many Holistic Search browsers thought it impossible to rank a site on a competitive keyword phrase without incorporating paid links into the overall link acquisition strategy with votes suggesting it was impossible outnumbering those against by nearly 2:1.

Interestingly, having run each other close for much of the duration of the poll, the trend of the poll changed significantly after the post was published regarding ‘Link Building in competitive verticals – are you scaling enough‘ with subsequent votes suggesting that paid links were a massive part of super competitive link strategies and one would have to use fire against fire.

Response: Poll response by day - Yes vs No

This would suggest two things

• Google is not as clever at identifiying paid link patterns as many people think
• There is more of a widespread acceptance of *cough* paid links than many would suggest

Paid links are a debate that are is not going to go away. Increasingly there is a sentiment Google are moving away from pure linkage signals and factoring more behavioural and social factors into the algorithm, however one can’t help but feel – for the moment at least that within super competitive verticals – that if content is king, paid links are pretender to the throne that just won’t go away.

During recent weeks I have been doing some link analyis of certain verticals (what some may call spectral link analysis ), something which has been extremely interesting (for a geek like me). In particular, car insurance has stuck out as a particularly interesting case in question, as this has been extremely volatile of late with a number of high profile organisations seeing significant flux, despite having been very solid in terms of visibility for a number of months.

During this time we have seen a number of interesting observations:

• Moneysupermarket having dominated a number of insurance related terms have dropped from 1st pre September to 8th at the present moment
• Asda Finance have bounced around quite a lot, including a very brief stint in first position at the beginning of September
• Go Compare having spent some considerable time in the past in the SERP wilderness have now firmly entrenched themselves in at number 1
• Very little consistency in any positions. Flux pre: September was generally one or two positional changes in the top twenty per day. Its about 12-14 at the moment.

Further analysis of their link acquisition highlights some interesting trends:

Not suprisingly, Moneysupermarket led the way by a considerable margin, however it must be caveated that many of these were not keyword anchored references, but also included a reasonable proportion of brand and secondary product linkage. What was interesting was the scale at which they appear to have increased significantly the throughput of links during the last three or four months – dwarfing many of the competitors who themselves are building high end links at a not-too-shabby rate.

This thus begs the question, to compete in such a space you need to be making enough noise with your link building both in terms of quality and quantity of links. You can bet your bottom dollar, if your not your competitor is – and thus you are already starting on the long slippery slope towards mid serp obscurity – magnified in such competitive sectors such as car insurance.

This is where your link tactics come into play.  Networks offer scale, but many with high risks to the ‘purchaser’,  paid links offer a more manageable framework – however again this is not without risk and are far more time consuming to generate. As such many organisations utilise more ethical approaches to link building such as Online PR, Content Spinning, Social Search tactics – such as blogger relations and social bookmarking and directory submissions. Many of these allow scalability however are far more long term in many cases in terms of producing tangible results.

Further to this and perhaps controversially I would suggest it is becoming increasingly difficult to operate effectively in these sectors without employing some form of paid link strategy as part of the overall link acquisition mix. This would seem to be a sentiment shared by many of those who took part in our recent poll with results currently 50/50 (27 votes apiece) at the time of writing:

One thing is for sure. In mature markets such as car insurance, gaming and travel you need to be maximising your link acquisition resource in order to compete. One thing the likes of Moneysupermarket do very very well is integrate SEO into their very fabric whether that be their integrated search approach (ie how they operate SEO and PPC in conjunction with each other), utilisation of as much PR as possible through the online channels or merely a ruthless approach to link building and acquisition. If you therefore want to play in these spaces, and play with the big boys, prepare to play hard

Analysis of the SERPs would suggest many verticals are dominated by organisations who obtain links beyond the rules outlined by Google’s guidelines particularly on jackpot terms such as ‘car insurance’, ‘online casino’ etc etc.

As such we thought it would be good to find out whether you – as SEO’s – think its possible for a site to rank number one

There has been a lot of drivel written over the last couple of weeks – magnified by the Google Instant launch at the beginning of September. Interestingly many of these have centered on the ‘SEO is dead’ angle, the first being Steve Rubel from Edelman and more recently one from Techmap profisicing the same thing. Many of these articles seem to have an underlying tone of SEO being replaced with social media or derivatives thereof or merely removed from a consumers behaviour due to technical changes.

Its disappointing to see articles such as that written by the Techmap rabble suggesting the death of SEO and apparently suggesting budget should be migrated towards social. Whilst there is no doubting the role social media and engagement can play in the online marcomms mix, this needs the support of other channels both on and offline – particularly when one looks to monetize such campaigns in terms of its effect on ROI.

Through many of the agencies I have worked with, integrated SEO has been key. That is not just in terms of the integration of SEO with paid search but how SEO works and integrates with other marketing channels including press, display and affiliates. Note here the mention of integration rather than replacement. These channels are not working in isolation but rather together to produce the best results for the client. Further to this there have been a number of ‘studies’ in terms of the effect of Display/Social media etc on SEO both in terms of ‘share of voice’ (visibility) and in terms of direct return on investment. A recent .Fox Networks/Comscore study found the following:

1. Video and display advertising both successfully increased brand engagement in each of the four campaigns analysed. The average uplift across the campaigns saw site visitation increase by more than a factor of seven over a four week period following exposure to an ad, with consumers three times more likely to conduct search queries using brand or relevant generic terms in the same time period.
2. When evaluating video and display side by side, consumers exposed to video advertising were 28 percent more likely to visit the brand site and nearly twice as likely to conduct a trademark search.
3. Confirming expectations and previous industry understanding, video was able to generate a more immediate impact in the first five exposures than display ads in terms of increases in site visitation and search queries; however, behavioural response for those exposed to display climbed steadily as the number of ad impressions increased..

This highlights quite effectively the natural effect of display advertising directly on the search landscape, and further to this there have been a number of research studies related directly to the impact of social on SEO (further to this the direct impact of social related links and subsequent linkage activity highlight the power that channels such as organic search. Such activity could similarly be done on the effect of TV etc on social media (take for example the Evian TV ads, or Meerkat ads here in the UK whose adverts have gone supersonic on Youtube.

Convergence in media
It is thus more important than ever to think of a converged media, rather than channels in isolation. Increasingly clients are looking for more bang for the buck – particularly given the current economic climate – and as such every pound spent will be scrutinised. Isolating other channels thus is likely to not result in the increased spend you are looking for (well perhaps short term), but rather a lack of understanding of the digital mix.

I have long since advocated that SEO supports multiple channels and really should be central to your marketing communications

• TV – Online distribution of video. Development of Youtube branding/presence etc.
• PR & Press – Online PR and Blogger Relations
• Radio  – Podcasting/Vodcasting + Social Seeding

All these offline channels can work a lot harder when working in collaboration with a digital specialist, simply using these offline is only telling half the story – particularly given that more and more people increasingly are online whilst watching TV or consuming other media.

A Holistic Search Approach
Increasingly agencies in particularly are looking at search as an integrated piece, rather than SEO and PPC operating in isolation. This increasingly can offer

• Greater efficiencies in spend where spend
• Greater share of voice
• Increased awareness of the search landscape as response can be measured side by side rather than in isolation
• Greater awareness of the search path – that is how people interact with your site.

One of the tools aiding such innovation in the sector is the number of tools now able to provide a more blended overview. Take for example Doubleclick, once the domain of Paid Search, which now is able to track natural seach. Such tools allow a more blended overview to be presented, and a more accurate one as one tool is able to offer the insight on both a last click and contributory model – something which is essential to any succesful campaign planning framework.

So what for the future

Rather than the doom mongers which suggest the end of search engine optimisation, one can’t help but feel positive for the future of SEO. Yes our landscape is evolving but surely that has to be a good thing to a certain extent. We as SEO’s now have far more scope of influence than we have ever had, and given the increasing budgets which appear to be migrated towards SEO one has to suggest clients are increasingly aware of how this can be used successful.

Google Instant won’t be the last big change we will have to deal with, there will be more coming – but lets face it without organic search provides the search engines wuith a level of balance, something which is often difficult to achieve purely via paid search inventory, where bigger clients can afford to drive bigger campaigns, with more widespread visibility.  Sure Google is looking to increasingly monetize its real estate – however we have to tailor this with its strive for relevance – and that is where SEO is key to Googles future plans

There was a fascinating read on TechCrunch this morning from Eli Feldblum,the CTO & Co-Founder of RankAbove. Since the release of Google Instant just under two weeks ago, there has been a lot of coverage as to the effects of Instant on search behaviour and the impact it may have on paid search and SEO as a whole. The study itself analysed a number of different potential impacts of Instant, and tested them in a ‘live environment’ with some surprising results

Source: Slashgear

Results on the first page is even more important
Surprisingly the research suggested that users were not as ‘fold’ conscious as many people expected. The study suggested that users in fact were more likely to scroll down the results page on completion of a query, however these users were less likely to go onto the second page. Results that sat just below the fold showed little difference in terms of traction.

We must bear in mind here that the difference between the top two or three positions and five is fairly big in terms of potential CTR, however the fact that Instant would appear not to have impacted too heavily on such real estate will come as a relief to many. What this may do however is increase competition on already saturated ‘jackpot’ serps.

Long tail is significantly affected by Google Instant
Many people have suggested that one of the major impacts of Google Instant would be on the way people searched for their information. In particular, given the way suggest works that people would be more inclined to follow these suggestions now that they could see the results propogating as well. The study suggested that there was good reason for these concerns with Eli stating as follows:

So far, this one is coming true in a major way. While organic traffic levels have risen about 5% for all Drive users since Instant was introduced, keyword variety has fallen more than 15%! Thousands of phrases are no longer driving any traffic, but most sites aren’t suffering for it.

It is worth highlighting that recent figures I have seen suggest only 2% of users are actually seeing Google Instant however all the same this could be a real game changer both in terms of organic and paid search alike. Whilst some of this may merely mean realignment of long tail focus – one can’t help thinking there are a number of organisations whose search strategies may have to change significantly as takeup of this increases.

Google is growing up
Google Instant has often been ridiculed over its apparent lack of maturity as regards showing adult related searches. Further to this many people have suggested that there would be little change in the volumes pertaining to adult phrases. The study debunked these theories significantly, suggesting that they had seen a significant uplift in phrases containing the word ‘sex’ , with slightly less identified on other mature phrases.

I would highly recommend reading the article in full, where further stats relating to the study and Eli’s recommendations on remediation can be found.

We’ve all been there; tasked with producing a great piece of content for a client, you’ve been through the keyword list, covered off every angle you can think of, you’ve rung up your contact in the marketing department and brainstormed your hardest. You even used your nuclear option, making a cup of tea for the whole office and hoping something comes to between the filling the kettle and it hitting the boil.

Well that’s exactly the situation I was in today, but while the kettle was getting going I didn’t come up with a great idea but I did think of a few places to look, where the inspiration did come. So I thought I’d share them with you to help you getting out of making that big tea round!

Sales Team - Chances are the budget from search marketing is going to be coming from marketing or I.T which means if your in-house or an agency you might never of had a huge amount of contact with the sales team. This is a huge shame because everyday they are going to be coming across questions asked by prospects and potential customers. If they’re a good sales person they’ll even have good answers to these objections.

Writing up this experience into a blog post or a new page for an information centre is a great opportunity for a search marketer. Not only will this be the useful type of content that will be a powerful tool in link building but also it should do a good job covering keywords for people will the same concerns, plus it could increase your conversion rates by reassuring visitors.

Academic Reports - do you read many academic papers or studies? since I left uni I’ve done my best to avoid them, but the truth is they are often a goldmine for content ideas, They should be new and fresh but not many people are going to have taken the time to read through and pull out the interesting angles. This is far more likely to get linking attention than just adding your two pence on a topic that’s appearing in Google News. Avoid adding to the echo chamber of news and try and start a discussion about something new.

Amazon Reviews – a trick that’s worked for me well in the past is to go adjective hunting in reviews related to an industry, Amazon and TripAdvisor normally work well for me. I read through a few related product reviews and see if any descriptive adjectives stand out. Any that do I use for a list post like ‘most adjective product’ or a ‘guide to getting more adjective products’ etc. People search on these terms as well so can get links and visitors.

Wikipedia Citations Needed - have a read through any related Wikipedia pages are there any statements which some ones marked as needing a citation? These are great topics to write about, your interest here isn’t the fact that you want the citation from Wikipedia (it’ll be no followed) what your using for is a cue of something that interesting enough to be mentioned on Wikipedia but nobody has really written about it in much detail online. Sounds like a great content opportunity to me.

Sticky Threads in Forums – anyone who’s been a regular member of any forum or community online will know that every new days someone will sign up start their first thread and ask a classic noob question that’s been covered a thousands times before. Sticky threads are one way to try and reduce this repetition, but it never really seems to work. Have a trawl through those stickys they are going to contain lots of frequently asked questions, you can compile the advice from the forum, mix it with your own and produce the definitive guide to the topic, the kind of content that attracts links with very little effort.

Kelvin Newman is SiteVisibility’s Creative Director and is the editor of the UK’s most listened to Marketing Podcast. He also spends his time at conferences, tweeting too much and working on top secret research and development projects.

The following is a guest post by Angie Nikoleychuk, somebody I had the absolute pleasure to meet at the recent Think Visibility conference in Leeds and a fellow member at the SEO Dojo

Audiences are fickle. That’s a given. The success of your content ultimately relies on which way the wind of approval is blowing at that moment, but you can improve your chances by doing the prep work.

When most people start writing, they start with a topic. Great content, however, starts with the reader in mind. You see, quality content is more than good spelling and grammar. (In many forms of online content, it’s important to avoid proper grammar!) In fact, when you think about it, writing great content is a lot like remodelling your kitchen.

(Credit)

Getting To Know Your Audience

When it’s time to redo your kitchen, you can’t just toss some paint up on the wall, arrange some fake plants, and call it a day. Well, you could, but it’d look like crap. Sort of like when you toss words on a page, arrange a few pictures, and call it a story.

If you want a quality renovation, you do some research to find out the latest styles, colours, and features. Then, you make a list of everything you need, go shopping, fill the holes in the wall, tape off the trim, cover the flooring, add a coat of primer, etc.

In other words, you have to do a lot of work before you actually start. Writing is just like that.

What is the reader doing? What things upset them? What are the highlights in their lives? What do they dream about? Now, you’re probably wondering what in the world this has to do with writing great copy!

Well, my friend let me tell you. (I’ve tried to set this up so you can continue to refer back to it and create great content over and over again!)

Defining the Purpose

First, define the object of your copy:

• Who are you speaking to?
• What do they feel is most important?
• What is their biggest pet peeve?
• What related questions are they asking most often?
• What language are they using? (i.e. client-based keyword research)
• What are the hot topics in their circle?

Why this step is important: If you wanted to learn about the history of a country, which would be more pleasant to read: a textbook or an article that’s actually interesting and friendly? If your target audience finds reading your content a chore, you’ve already lost. It also provokes trust, makes it easy to identify with you, and all that other good stuff.

Next, decide what your copy should accomplish:
• What is the one thing your reader should do when visiting the page?
• What is the one thought the reader should have about you, your product, or your services?
• Who are you trying to attract with the piece?

Why this step is important: Good content should always have some sort of purpose. Otherwise, you’re wasting your time. This doesn’t mean it always have to sell something, however. If you want to create something that does well in social media, for example, you’ll need to know which one so you can research the site you want to focus on and make a list of what makes content successful on it.

Even though it’s tough, consider your competition:
• Do they offer something similar to you or have similar content already available?
• If so, what do they do right? What’s working? If not, have they covered it some other way?
• What advantages do they have over you?
• Where could they improve?
• What is your target audience saying about your competition?

Why this step is important: No matter whether you’re blogging or creating sales copy, people need a reason to choose you over everyone else. You have to be special and offer something they can’t get anywhere else, even if you’re only emphasizing points your competition doesn’t.

(Credit)

If you look at this piece, you should be able to recognize each of these things. First, I wanted to create something you’ll consider a resource, hopefully one you’ll bookmark and return to. I know that many of you are male, and even if you’re not, many of you have redone a room or two.

I’ve addressed the questions many of you have. For example, you all know how to put sentences together, so the problem for many of you is nailing down the finer points of copy. Also, after checking with the competitors of Holistic Search, I know they have what some might call copywriting guides, but not like this.

Finding the Right Angle and Putting All the Pieces Together

At this point, you should have a list of valuable information, including what your content needs to achieve, the voice and style you’ll need to use, what examples and imagery to use, and which details you need to emphasize. Now, you need to put it all together.
• Write down all the important points you want to make
• Arrange them in some sort of logical order (don’t tell the reader to start slathering on the paint before you’ve told them to prep the surface)
• Flesh out each point into paragraphs
• Create sub headings
• Come up with an effective title
• Make sure the style and voice are consistent and will appeal to the reader
• If you have specific keywords, go back and blend them in until they’re impossible for the everyday reader to detect.
• Compare your work to this guide for creating sticky content. (It has a ton of great tips!)
• (And while I’m sure I don’t have to add this…) Check your spelling and grammar to make sure it’s appropriate.

Now you have everything you need to create amazing web copy, sales copy, blog posts, and more. Or, did I miss something? What other tricks and tips do you use to create quality content?

I was disappointed to see a well respected marketing expert sink to the levels of the ‘SEO is dead’ tirade, however Steve Rubel – Head of Insights for Edelman Digital did just that during a post on the impacts of Google Insights. In his awful post Steve wrote as follows:

Google today launched an ambitious effort to speed up searching. But what they really did is kill SEO.

And went on to say

Google Instant means no one will see the same web anymore, making optimizing it virtually impossible. Real-time feedback will change and personalize people’s search behaviors.

In such a position of responsibility its disappointing to see someone with that level of respect go down that particular avenue. Are we really that short of a hook that we need to resort to that level – with little more than a personal fancy and no substance.

I would suggest Mr Rubel take a long hard look. Good SEO’s are not single keyword morons. Nor are the search engines that domain of content only results. The modern search result takes into account a multitude of channels, Video, Feeds and PR. Further to that I would suggest Instant is not a channel changer – it is a behavioural changer – something that is going to impact paid search as much as it is organic search. So I would ask you Mr Rubel – Is Paid Search dead as well?

No I thought not. If I am looking for cheap car insurance, I am not going to go and buy a cheap holiday (suggest you play with Google Instants here – it’s the first result that comes back when I start to type cheap) as that is not my intent – and as such I would suggest there is a lot of doom and scare mongering taking place as to what will happen.

There is no doubting this will have an impact on impressions, on click through, on costs-per-click and yes on search behaviour. However lets be honest Steve Are you really that naïve to think that this is that much of a game changer – or were you merely just short of something decent to write???

If you work in the digital world you’ll no doubt be aware of V.Cs or Venture Capitalists, to give them their full name. They are the Dragon’s Den style investors who stump up the cash to make budding entrepreneurs digital business ideas come alive.

But behind every investment is an understanding of risk, they know that a large number of their investments will never pay off; but they manage the risk so that when they do make an investment that comes good, it covers all the downside of their failed attempts and still delivers a big money prize.

It’s a clever approach and one that I think most search marketers would be wise to use with their link building campaign.

Are you playing too safe?

A lot of link building campaigns aren’t particularly inspired; a simple mixture of directory submission, article syndication and the odd bit of back link analysis here and there when time permits. It’s not going to set the world alight but your fairly confident for every hour of work you’ll put in you’ll get reliable outcome of links which will push the needle in the right direction.

There’s no shame in taking a cautious approach like this but you need to realize to make the big wins, you need an ambitious campaign even if that makes it a little riskier.

Not Every Tactic Will Work

Sometimes when people get more adventurous in their attempts to get links they trial one approach and get scared when it doesn’t come off.

As soon as you increase the potential risk there is a likelihood that not every campaign will work. This needn’t be a problem and shouldn’t put you off. You just need a portfolio of approaches where the upside in the few successful campaigns covers those less fortunate.

So don’t just write one piece of linkbait and give up when it only gets 25 Diggs, write a dozen, and produce some infographics, do a Twitter give away, send some freebies to bloggers etc. The more adventurous your ideas the more important the diversity in your approach becomes.

Compare the Potential

Venture Capitalist spend a lot of time forecasting and understanding the potential of any project before investing. You should take a similar approach for your campaigns. What would you consider a success? What is the likelihood of success? Would the potential outweigh the risk? All difficult questions to quantify in link building campaigns; but exactly the types of
questions you should be asking.

As you gain experience in this approach your forecasting will improve, in the same way a seasoned VC has a much higher success rate than someone just starting out.

Know when to fold

Sometimes with a VC they will grow a business that is to some extent successful but pull out and shutter the project because the reward they require is no-longer possible.

It’s very likely a link building effort that’s delivered the goods in the past may still work. However does it currently justify it’s expense. It’s likely a few of your old school habits might fall in this category. Just because it works in some small ways doesn’t mean it works well enough to justify your attention.

So are you taking a portfolio approach to your link building mixing high risk high reward projects which have the potential to recover the lost time and effort of your failed attempts? Not every campaign will work but that shouldn’t stop you taking risks it should just make you more intelligent about the risks you are prepaid to take.

Kelvin Newman is SiteVisibility’s Creative Director and is the editor of the UK’s most listened to Marketing Podcast. He also spends his time at conferences, tweeting too much and working on top secret research and development projects.

There was an interesting conversation that came to light during one of the SEO Dojo conversations during the early part of Saturday morning over at the Think Vis conference in Leeds. Andy Beard was talking about how he was being shown 20 results rather than 10, something it would appear that Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land is seeing as well.

I would highly recommend reading Andy’s post in particularly as it very graphically highlights the scale of the current test, both on traditional search results and those results which have been the changed as a result of the recent ‘Pseudo Site Search updates’.

Source: Andy Beard

Its interesting that Google should be rolling out such a test, one of many which have been rolling out during recent weeks. Further to this, the continuing cannabalisation of traditional organic real estate by blended search and premium paid search inventory makes this even a more interesting development particularly if you take some points into consideration (from 2007 Comscore report – probably something more recent about)

• The average performs 84 searches per month
• The average number of search results pages per search is 1.33 (Down from 1.40 a year earlier
• Further to this – other studies have highlighted the considerable drop off as you move further down the page – in particular between page fold and beneath.
• The net result is that people would rather refine a query than look deeper into the results

Now take these latest changes into account. Google now offers a longer resultset to users. This is likely to have a number of impacts

• SEO’s have a greater number of premium (first page) results to go for, this may pacify SEO’s short term particularly given recent changes to the results
• People less likely to go onto second page
• The number of searches could go either way, as even in the current climate, people dont really like to scroll – however that said the greater number of results may encourage them to do so
• Paid search real estate is significantly increased beyond the current 8 or so adverts which are displayed.

My personal feel is that this has probably as much to do with the final point as it does the three above. Lets face it, Google is a commercial entity, no matter what they say about ‘Do no evil’ etc – and has one function and that is to make a profit. Much of the recent changes in particular the ‘Premium Sponsored Listings‘  are aimed at making more and more money – let alone the plans they have for expansion – ie real estate, social media and in all likelihood travel.

More space == More inventory == More opportunity for sales == More Revenue. Its not a difficult equation.

Link Building in Real Life – Think Visibility 04-09-10

Lisa starts by saying that the currency of the webs is no longer links but also takes into account social media. SEO has changed a lot in recent years including

• Incoing links are judged more strictly, big crackdown on paid links (personally don’t 100% agree with
• SEO’s have had to take into account social media channels into account
• Social media + SEO help spread the word – its not all about twitter / facebook they’re just TOOLS! its about grouped ideas

Before you start – understand – whos your target audience, what are their age, gender, location. Put yourself in their shoes – what problem are they trying to sound, how do they find what they want

Linkbaiting here comes into vogue. Create a piece of content that specifically increases chances of increasing organic links. Spread the word – no point doing it without doing this. The creative concept is fundamental for success here. Once you have this – find the linkerati – the people that are going to help you get the links. Be smart about finding them and remember they are not stupid. These people are usually

• Bloggers
• Tweet peeps -her words not mine
• Networkers

Host your content – don’t host it elsewhere , not via third party. Creating a link on an external domain obviously takes the link element out of it thus does not have an SEO benefit.

Integration is crucial – Make sure all components work together. Things have to be easy otherwise people won’t spread it. If its not easy people wont use it – something I think people often dont consider from a social perspective  -however they would do on aspects like conversion optimision.

Give something back – why should they link to you. Content? Discount? Breaking News? Free “something”.

I will try and get Lisa’s slide deck for later to talk through the examples – in particular I would draw your attention to the Yale Locks slides.

First serious panel at the day with Gary Taylor (a Think Visibility speaking virgin) – covering a number of aspects to keyword domains and mini-sites. Gary is a domainer – who buys, sells and developers domain names.

His first slides covering the basics of keyword domains, namely

• Exact Match is essential
• Localised domains can often help in localisation – particularly if you have a domain which is a key traffic driver within a particular vertical

Mini-sites as the name suggest are just that – small websites – consisting of between 1-10 pages. With these sites be very keyword specific don’t get carried with lots of SEO work – but focus specifically on those terms with only a very variations. Gary highlights the fact that time is money – the longer you are willing to hold on to a domain – the more valuable they are likely to become. Self sustaining here is crucial – both on and off-page.

A quote from Rich Schartz (Ricksblog.com – a well known domainer) is

“…know the difference between investment-quality domains and domains that mean nothing, say nothing have no idea behind it, no traffic within it, no idea how to make money with it and nobody wants to buy… what i refer to as pigeon shit…. pigeon shit with an extention

Key to your domain decision should be

• Exact Match
• CPC and Promotional opportunities (at the very least do some research on search based keyword tool to see what market is there

Its interesting here that Gary highlights how a scalable model can quickly become a good revenue earner. 3-5 per week per domain based on ten domains is going to give you around £2600 in revenue.  Start however by covering costs. Monetise your domain by using a variety of sources:

• Amazon E-Store Widgets
• Adsense
• Affiliates

Would suggest reading Gary’s post on his experiences with flyfishingbooks.com – http://bit.ly/d6d5cy

Considerations:

• Dominating a niche
• Lead Generation
• Diversify
• Hand Registration vs Auctions
• Long Tail vs Generic
• Network of related sites vs one-off sites.

Gary has a number of resources which should be read

• Rick Schartz
• Frank Schilling (highly recommended reading)
• Kevin Ham (reinvent.com – worth looking at owns the most domains out of anyone, makes $70m a year)
• Gary Kremen (originally owned match.com and still owns sex.com – currently available for auction

If you are looking for auction sites suggested ones are:

• Sedo.com
• Domainlore.co.uk (currently in beta)
• Greatdomains.com
• Afternic.com

Domaining tools resources:

• DomainTOols.com
• Valuate.com
• Estibot.com

Parking and Drop Catching – gary suggests doing this if you arent going to use it. At least allows some authority going to be gained.

• Whypark.com
• Pool.com

Forums/Resources:

• Acorndomains.co.uk
• Domaining.com

Q & A

Hyphenated domains – Gary not keen on hyphenated domains. Resale value of hyphenated domain is significantly lower than non-hyphenated domains

Domains – Gary suggests .org.uk still valuable – if you can’t get a .co.uk. .Org he favours over.net. From a personal perspective here have to agree as from the affiliate sites I work on

Selling domains – Thinks agencies have an opportunity here. Thinks domainers should contact agencies if they are looking to sell. Also highlights that .com is far more valuable than .orgs. End Users often pay less for domains than domainers do.

Leasing domains – From personal perspective think there is huge opportunity here for domainers – something Gary has just reitterated.  Beneficial for both parties at the end of the day

Trademarks – Suggests stay away from trademarks. Approaching a whole world of trouble. However clever long tail targeting is useful

Content – A site has got to have decent content in order for this to work. Crap content is not likely to be rewarded. Again completely agree here – some automation does work – but needs unique content alongside it.

Whois If you have a content network of domains this may be a consideration.

Bubble Bursting – Gary thinks this is already happening.

All of us have been there, sitting in front of a client who wants world domination – or indeed wanting to be the client who wants world domination. However dominating something, whether it be a singular keyword or an entire sector is not easily done – and takes a lot of time, work and meticulous planning.

Search itself is an interesting sector. Many organisations struggle to get a foothold within organic results, relying on secondary channels such as Affiliates, Paid Search and more recently Social Media. This is especially evident in sectors such as Gaming – where returns are often high, markets heavily competitive and the sector itself highly mature.

It is roughly possible to break organisations within search down into four rough groups, which I have provisionally named:

• Sector Specialists
• Keyword Kings
• Long Tail Leaders
• Non-Starters

The groups above could be differentiated based on

• Content developed – Assumed here is obviously a well thought out information architecture and clear differentiation of unique content
• Links acquired – Again assumed that clear strategy to link acquisition – with some focus on the acquisition of semantically relevant links to the site.

Further to this I broke this down into the four distinct groups outlined above, which could be described further as follows:

Sector Specialists

Examples: MoneySupermarket (UK)

There aren’t many examples of organisations out in the wild, however Moneysupermarket could be described as one such example. Dominant across a number of heavily competitive generic and long tail queries across the finance sector including home insurance (and until recently car insurance), secured loans and a number of utility centric terms.

When you go into Moneysupermarket you get a feeling for why. Its one of the most search centric of organisations I have come across, with a number of the functions heavily feeding into their organic search, something which I hate to say a lot of clients do not do effectively. That aside, that visibility has been built up by extensive link acquisition targeting a variation of their targeted terms – and extensive on-page content content development (at last count 90,100 and counting).

This isn’t something that can be recreated overnight – in fact I would argue that any site starting out   now may find that job nigh on impossible to recreate it.

Keyword Kings

Examples: Admiral (currently no.1 car insurance)

Keyword Kings are often sites that heavily focus in particular areas – one particular trait here can often be seen in their keyword profiles. Keyword kings are often much more heavily offpage dependant – relying less on the day to day content development.

More attainable than achieving sector specialism merely because the lack of dillution allows for much greater traction – however the effect of much of this is that the effect of this often varies significantly from vertical to vertical.

I would suggest this is where you will find many of the high end organisations targeting particularly in areas such as insurance, or gaming where you can often find ‘jackpot terms’ driving a vast majority of the traffic to the sites.

Long tail leader

Examples: Too many – Marmaris Holidays would be an example though

For many sites starting off, this is often the way to make some initial wins before taking on much loftier targets. For larger sites however, who can rely on much greater site authority, this can often be a good way to mop up smaller volumes of targets.

Given the lesser volumes of active competitors, there are still a number of long tail terms which can be actively achieved without any significant direct link acquisition and by just a degree of on-page optimisation.

Cheap flights is an example of a site which has attacked these long tails very effectively, from destination led search terms to source led search terms, they have gone after many of these via extensive content supported by a very cohesive internal architecture framework..

One shouldn’t at this point forget the important role that internal navigation can play. If you can’t at the end of the day provide the search engines with a clear indication of what you consider authority pages, then why should Google presume that?

Non-starters

Exactly as it sounds, and as the graph suggests comes down to organisations/sites who do not develop any content strategy or acquire any links. Doing so is unlikely to see you generate any significant traffic or visibility to the site – and as a result little direct ROI atributable back to organic activity.

Such sites will often require significant support via paid search in particular – however other channels may also come into vogue where required. Thats not to say such sites can’t be succesful – one however probably shouldn’t factor organic search into play as a major factor.

Conclusion

Search engine optimisation is an interesting channel – however there is no doubting things are very different from the days when I started out (strangely talking to the likes of Rand Fishkin in the Cre8asite forums) – with campaigns now bringing together a wide variety of on and off-page techniques as well as external channels such as PR and Video in many cases.

As such simply standing still and hoping for the best is not enough. A search engine optimised site is simply not enough and needs to be supported by either further extensive on-page content or via off-page activity – where aggression is often determined by competitiveness and the competition itself.