Sunday, May 24, 2009

Disclosure of an SEO Experiment

Matt Ridout had a bundle of surprise for the people related to the world of SEOs. When the generation is battling at the cutthroat competition to conceal the test results, this man had the guts to display the entire testing process and all its relevant observations publically. Though experimentation is a key to success in search engine marketing, this event published on SEOUnique Blog was a bolt from the blue for many. He targeted one of his three months old website, which he used for this SEO experiment. He modified the following things:
  • Optimized the current Meta data.
  • Included keywords, substitute keywords, and phrases on the page.
  • Optimized the images from the page content.
These were the measures taken on the issues, which were amongst the basic SEO issues. Now all Matt Ridout had to do was to observe how this practical would help him acknowledge the ups and downs in rankings. He collected the records of the SERP positions of the keywords before this experiment and after that; he recorded them once a week for consecutive six weeks. Out of those results, he mapped neat and smart graphs and on the spot shared with many interested in the realm of search engine marketers.

The experts in the area of search marketing might have an overview of what he would have discovered. So let us see what his six-week long experiment’s summarized results say:
  • The first and the second week of the experiment showed a gradual hike in the rankings for most keywords. There were very rare occasions of dropped rankings.
  • As the third week arrived, there was a drastic dip in the rankings as they fell for 85% of the total keywords.
  • The fourth week brought again the new results. This duration of the experiment had 70% of the keywords, which crossed their original rankings and there were very few drops.
  • The fifth and the sixth week of the experiment hardly witnessed any major movement in the rankings.
The graphs plotted were very sharp and visually comprehensive. The experts and commentators scrutinized these graphs, which helps to understand them better. When the graph lines were ascending, there was a dip in rankings whereas the rise in ranking showed descends in the graph. The readings during third week of this SEO experiment got troublesome. The plotting of the graph clearly seemed like the life cycle over the period of six weeks. This falls under the superior quality content of case study for the people interested in learning more about SEO experiment. Leaking information in this way provides knowledge and people can gather them from the industrial information outlets.

Experiments like this prove to be a great source for the search marketers industry to grow. If the people do not disclose their findings, the next generation of discoveries would never occur. The display of such case studies lead to conferences and discussions, which in turn is responsible for greater developments.

Sunday, May 17, 2009

The Trilogy of SEO Strategies for Making You Think

Succeeding in any online business requires your website to be search engine friendly and full of informative content. SEO will help your website in earning a high page ranking and for this to be an event that stands long term, it is extremely important that you strategize well.

Mixing Different Forces for Attacking With Unique Tactics
SERP domination can be achieved through usage of multiple sites belonging to the same niche. These sites should be made to feature different kinds of content, design, development and link sources. Various other ideas can be materialized such as using audio, video, blogs, media profiles, image galleries, content generated by user, wikis, tools and articles. The networks and link sources should also be made to vary. If it happens that all the links on the site are coming from a single blogger whose blog is gradually decaying, then these might not be good signs for you. This might also cause the penalization of wikis for providing easy spamming facilities and so on.

Build Network
The website should focus on developing content that governs authority over a broad range of topics so that it is well respected and showcased by leading content networks such as Squidoo. It can also focus on capturing a particular market niche such as Gooruze (marketing). Providing abundant visibility to your website in SERPs helps in earning you readers who shall faithfully use kw+your authority’s name for performing all of their searches. Istanbul Wikipedia has projected this as a method of building long term traffic to your website. This strategy is often used for trading on your website’s domain equity. Along with the strategy mentioned earlier, this strategy can prove to be useful for building horizontal sites for the purpose of increasing industry presence, link equity, relationships, topic diversification possibilities, etc.

Cover the Opponent without Making Them Succumb
This involves researching on the people competing with you and finding their vulnerabilities and weaknesses.
  • Reliance on Few Links’ Sources: This involves researching the sources of your competing website’s links. Find out if it is possible to eliminate their back links. This can be made possible through in-post linking and blogroll.
  • Paid Links: This involves buying a review, buying blogs that are bringing maximum value to your competitors and paying bloggers for not following the links that were sold to them by your competitors.
  • Improper Anchor Text: Focus on differentiating your website through the usage of greater variety by going for n grams, especially in cases of competitive work, and anchor text algorithms and matrices.
  • Content: Find out about their marketing and operational policy deficiencies and after this is done, work really hard for building world-class content for your website.
Stay away from becoming desperate just for the sake of outscoring your competitor as this might backfire at you in strange ways, such as your site getting hacked or Google-bowled, meaning banning of a website because of a lot of spams pointing to it. Hence, stay cool, stay intelligent and outwit your competitor.

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Planning to Assign Link Building Activity to an Intern? Think Again

The thought might cross minds of many at the top level of organizations that what is the need to pay for link building services when the interns could be the counted as the source to tackle this job. This could have been feasible some years back but in today’s scenario, it might not be an appropriate option. Different SEO professionals would narrate different stories for link building efforts. Let us see the reasons why the amateurs should not handle this task.
  • An intern jumping out of college would not be much equipped with the apt details of link building. They would require proper supervision and training for weeks to months depending upon their grasping potential. A link builder should carry sufficient knowledge of SEO and what their work matters of search engine optimization. Link building handling requires a smart aptitude to achieve higher rankings. They have to design proper link building strategies to avoid higher costs.
  • Link building is not a small task. An internship would last for around 3-4 months and the job would pass over to the next candidate after this period. Now this would prove to be a cumbersome process. The new interns would follow-up the previous ones and there might be chances of communication failure in these cases. In a turn, this would harm the linking opportunity for the concerned site. Experts suggest that continuity is the key for better performance. The one who initiates the process should follow-up as many cooks might spoil the broth. One can take the assistance from Webmaster, but it is not a wise idea to bother them as they might refrain to sort out the issue.
  • Interns joined a firm with the intention to learn the maximum they can in the span of couple of months. They want to supplement their industrial experience and aim to please their future employer. They do not think beyond this level and hardly have any inclination to climb the next rung. In the domain of Web technology, things are not static; they need foresighted strategies and willingness to raise link-building programs to higher avenues. To be proficient in a client’s link building programs, the first step is to surpass basics, setup the initial link portfolio, and then with scientific and artistic edge find innovative alternatives to secure their links. For this, the team should have a long-term goal setting which might not be suitable for an intern.
  • SEO programs when catered by some interactive agency show more insight of the current trends and adaptability to capture them. Whereas interns might not furnish in this content and hence no such traces would arm over your link-building program. Moreover, the logs of efforts and their reports submitted regularly help SEO Analysts to track the performance of SEO program. In case of many interns coming in and going out in short durations, there are chances of losing the information. This tracking is an important constituent to measure growth of SEO program.

Sunday, May 03, 2009

The Importance of “Trust” while Outsourcing SEO

A Marketing channels need for SEO has increased leaps and bounds in the recent times of crisis, as far as Conversion Rate Optimization is concerned. In addition, with the passage of time, SEO industry is starting to mature as the number of people with the tag of ‘SEO Consultant’ is ever increasing. SEO consultants swarm the industry these days. This makes a firm’s decision of whether to outsource the search engine optimization or the carry out the optimization process with the firm itself, an extremely critical decision.

If you decide to outsource your SEO efforts, then one should surely keep in mind the following tip: “Outsourcing Tip: Hire talent you trust and let them do their job. Your micromanagement can hinder the process & results.” If you have been in this world of SEO’s, you would quickly realize that this is a simple yet extremely useful piece of information.

While consulting an expert regarding his experiences of Outsourcing SEO efforts, it was a clearly and strongly concluded that Trust is one of the primary factors based on which a decision to outsource can be made. The need for outsourcing is at its peak when occasionally, the workload increases exponentially. In such times of crisis, a firm usually has a few people to whom it can outsource their optimization issues. Among these, some have a good history of doing their work to such perfection, that to review their work is almost needless. Though reviewing and rechecking, is always a better practice to follow.

On the other hand, there are some, whose history of work is not so appreciable. Their work almost inevitably leads to lot of rework and review, which consumes a lot of time and effort, even after you decided to outsource. Effectively it is wastage of resources, time, and money.

Also in this world of SEO, it is very important to have a circle of trustworthy people around you. In this world, where competition is on the edge of a sword, each and every person would boast of himself as having best of the skills and maximum knowledge. All behave as if they are your best of friends. There might be a clear case, where in you did not have a network of people, which forces you to take a chance and ultimately you end up in a fix. These issues definitely throw some light on the importance of having relationships, on which you can depend upon. This will surely keep you at an advantage, if you have good rapport on a personal front, with the person to whom you decide to outsource.

So the lessons to learn from these instances is that do not go overboard as far as setting limits to the amount of work you can absorb. Most of the experts would agree that though money is important, it is certainly not worth a lot of stress and tensions. Outsource to people who have your trust, try to nourish the relationship and most importantly create your network of trustworthy people.