Make It Look Nice

I highly recommend this handy tutorial with downloadable template to help you create a “photostrip” using Photoshop.

If you don’t have Photoshop or can’t afford the hefty price tag, then just download the free trial or subscribe to their monthly licence option for $50 a month.

Optimize Your About Page

Make sure you provide a description as well as links to your site and all other social media profiles.
This is really important for not only establishing your social media footprint, but pages that aren’t filled out properly look more like spammy profiles and you don’t want to be one of those!

Connect With Influencers

Google Plus have really excelled here in providing tools to seek out the big hitters and the best content on their platform.

First of all, you can pick out a few obvious choices for people you may want to follow. So for SEO you might look for Danny Sullivan, Matt Cutts and Rand Fishkin and add them to your “SEO” circle.

Then you can look at who they have in their circles and add them to your circles too.

Once you’ve done this it’s time to see what content is popular and who is making it popular… and this is the really cool tool that I have kept for last….

Google Ripples

You can see a fantastic explanation and “How to” guide here: Using Google+ Ripples to Connect with Influencers by Casey Henry

If you want to go play now then this is a quick guide to what you need to do:

When you find a post that has tons of shares and comments it’s a clear sign that this is popular. So how do you identify who exactly made it spread like wildfire?

In the top right of the post you will see a little arrow which when clicks reveals a menu and at the bottom you will see ‘View Ripples” which will take you to a map showing who shared it, when on the timeline and how much of an effect their share had on spreading this piece of content.

Go and play with it and read the SEOMoz post above… IT IS AWESOOOOOOOME!

BONUS TIP

Another brilliant tool for finding influencers on Google Plus is Find People on Plus which is effectively a Followerwonk for Google Plus.

In a nutshell, they are penalizing pages that place advertising more prominently than the actual content of the page so that the user has to scroll or look for the content instead if seeing it immediately upon arriving at the page.

As with most things in SEO there is no magic number or clear line between good and bad so the same rule applies which is that you need to use your common sense and judge for yourself… WITHOUT your business performance head on.

According to the announcement on the Google Blog, “As we’ve mentioned previously, we’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.”

How do your pages stand against this update?

Google are suggesting you use its Google Browser Size tool or something similar so that you can see what a user sees based on their screen size and resolution.
As with all their algorithm updates, this is again in favour of the user so it’s not a witch hunt as many often claim when these updates come along. In fact, it seems somewhat ironic that many sites carry Google ads anyway so you have to tip your hat to Google on this one. Will Reynolds actually writes a good post about this in Never Worry About an Algorithm Update Again, a History where he talks about the merits of focusing on ”doing hard work & connecting with customers” instead of racing to beat the search engines.

This approach to SEO is one we hold very close to heart at Red Mud Media because we feel the effort it takes to chase algorithms could just as well be spent on great content and social media… the tricky bit is managing client expectations because as we all know, doing it in this way can take a bit longer and requires patience to see the ROI figures that the marketing and business teams crave.

A more in depth discussion around the update has been published by Danny Sullivan on SearchEngineLand that includes diagrams and videos.

Last week Google officially rolled out Search, plus Your World and Rand Fishkin has been kind enough to provide an extensive break down with some key actionable takeaways for marketers to jump on this bandwagon.

In this post, I have summarized Rand’s presentation by highlighting the points as I understand them so would still suggest reading his post and/or watching the video to form your own opinions.

In an ideal world, I would’ve liked to have our own page in order before posting this, but as that will take some trial and error to get things running smoothly, I see no reason to hold back.

Google Search+ Your World

1. Personal profile outranks everything – Optimize your profile
2. People in your network will show up under a brand’s listing that they have +1d
- Sometimes things like Flickr, Quora etc can show too, but bias in favour of G+.
- This is likely to push a piece of content higher so the bigger your network, the more high rankings you will get for stuff YOU have +1d.
- Stuff that is not necessarily keyword relvant is also ranking.
3. New box on the side of the search results, even for logged out users, that shows People and Pages of people relevent to your search… suggestions for brands with big circles. Do a search for “SEO” and imagine the benefit/opportunity.
- Link to “Learn How You Can Appear Hear Too”
4. Google is personalising search to show you stuff that is relevant to stuff you like or to stuff your friends like.
5. Quora very important to Google+ because they use it to access data on Facebook???
6. Adoption is set for 100mil by year end, currently 60mil.
7. Richness of snippets where more and more users will see stuff that has been endorsed by their circles i.e. links/votes with persnalities who you know and trust.
8. No social signals suggests no trust from users. So Google+ is an important tool to distance your brand from being perceived as spam.
9. Google foregoing relevance in favour of G+ and other social signals suggests they are throwing the kitchen sink at this.
Quality and relevance is still vitally important because this is still what matters to the user and therefore what will ultimately feed the social signals anyway.

Is Google monopolizing? Perhaps, but that’s not a concern for marketers at this stage because it is clear you either beat them or join them and I know which side of the fight I stand on that one.

Image courtesy of Searchnewscentral.com

While we at Red Mud Media have no immediate concerns about this, it once again opens the debate about what is natural vs. unnatural and “is there a magic ratio that sets off the flagging systems?”.
We have no concerns about this because any “link building” we do is focused entirely on user experience, quality content and most importantly, relevance.
Where this does raise concern comes down to money. Every company serious about SEO is doing link building. In some way or another, this link building is being paid for, whether through direct payments for links or through indirect means such as handing out Nexus phones to journalists and bloggers… ahem…Google I’m looking at you.
A recent post by Kevin Gibbons provides convincing evidence of what we all know to be true which showed that 74% of SEOs Buy (or Would Consider Buying) Links!

It would be interesting to see where Google draws the line between ranking a site based on brand authority and penalizing a site based on unnatural links… For the small companies who can’t afford to have broad sets of keywords in their link building strategies and who can’t afford to spend money on making sure their footprint is natural, this presents a big concern.
I am 100% in support of focusing on a great user experience, quality content and building links naturally, but most small companies can’t compete with the bigger guys who have the resources and so the pendulum once again gets nudged further in favour of the big brand, big budget sites.

We will continue to urge clients to develop their content and social media strategies, but the reality is many or most of the small companies simply don’t have the manpower or budgets to do so effectively and as such, risk being left behind if they don’t channel what resources they do have into what works today.

Source: Detected Unnatural Links Notice From Google.

• You’ve been to Google Analytics help and other forums only to find repeated answers along the lines of “your adwords account isn’t linked properly”.
• Your natural response is, “I’m not sending any damn PPC traffic to this page!!” or perhaps if you’re a little less angry than I have become, “..but my Adwords accounts ARE all linked up correctly”.

So what the hell is going on?

Step forward Jill Whalen of High Rankings, a regular contributor and purveyor of incredibly useful nuggets of information!

Jill Whalen CEO and Founder High Rankings

“If you’re looking at a part in Google Analytics where there can be traffic from other sources than search engines, for instance, referrals or direct traffic, and you cross reference with “keywords” you’ll see (not set) because there were actually no keywords involved.

You have to go directly to the search engine reports and then you won’t see the “not set.”

It doesn’t mean you’re getting found by the phrase ‘not set.’”

via (not Set) Keyword In Google Analytics – High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum.

Hooray! Thank you Jill. We can all go home now.

It is, after all, a key component of any broader SEO strategy, but it is still very much misunderstood.Two of the most common problems businesses are faced with are:

1. Limited human resource or budget to put the right people in place.

2. A lack of knowledge and understanding.

Social media needs a lot of love and attention if you are to get it right, but many businesses don’t have the bandwidth to dedicate enough to social media so it is very often consigned to the “when we have a moment” pile.
There is hope, but it’s perhaps easier said than done. All you need is the right tools and to dedicate a little bit of time each day to see results. Finding the right tools and knowing what to dedicate your time to is very often what holds us back, so we thought it would be useful to share this infographic showing How Small Businesses Are Using Social Media in the hope that it may inspire you to seek out those tools and processes.

We will be featuring a post on our favourite social media tools in the coming weeks and Red Mud Media are in the process of developing a platform that will bridge the gap of limited time and resource thereby making it easy for businesses of any size to make the most of social media, even with limited resources. More on that when we have something to show you…

Crowdsourced Logo and Graphic Design by crowdSPRING

Google's "Inside Search" Blog

Key Take Aways

• With the development of things like Google translate being incorporated into your browser, it is clear from these latest updates that they are taking translation very seriously and that it is easy to see a future where we will become less reliant on paying expensive translation fees.
• It’s widely known that the meta keyword tag died a sorry death some time ago, but it seems they aren’t stopping there as they are now more likely to pick text from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a header or menu.
• Sites using boiler plate copy on their pages have been a target for some time, even before Panda and the May Day updates. We also know that “over optimisation” is being spotted and not necessarily being penalised, but certainly nullified. Well now boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are being seen as “not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these”. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content.
  We have seen this with clients who have had unexplained variations showing up in the SERPs for exactly the same type of page.
• There has been a lot of noise around rich snippets in recent weeks so this is no surprise. What is surprising is that this is still very untapped. It’s worth reading Schema.org – Why You’re Behind if You’re Not Using It… by – Craig Bradford of Distilled.

The Google engineers carry out over 500 changes each year so it is virtually impossible to stay ahead, but by applying a little common sense you can remain relatively unscathed from any nasty penalties or hard hitting updates.

How Does This Apply To Mobile SEO?

If you read Do You Know Google’s Official Stance On Mobile Search & SEO? by Bryson Meunier on Searchengineland.com you will see by his collection of quotes from various Google employees that the same theme persists  i.e. user experience is very important so if a mobile site looks better and loads quicker on a mobile device, then go that route…. So you don’t HAVE to have mobile for mobile devices, but remember this….

“Google is hyper-focused on getting the mobile user experience right in mobile search.”

“Do it in a way that takes advantage of what that specific device can do.”

Other than that, you may be having a discussion about your international SEO strategy or perhaps you publish lots of different sites and you want to link them to each other to help your SEO?

Why would your IP address matter to SEO? Well, to put this in real world terms, having loads of links to your site from the same C Block is a bit like increasing your sales through a pyramid scheme i.e. each link is not counted independently because the sites are related and therefore are likely to have influenced each other in the decision to link to you.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just that links from different C Blocks will carry more weight.

It becomes a problem when the patterns in your link profile suggest the use of link farms which are often hosted on the same C Block or IP address.

I hope the analogy using pyramid schemes has not been interpreted as “all links from the same c class are bad”. Analogies never were my strong point, it has to be said; although I do like explaining that a beautifully designed website with no fresh content or links is like a car with no fuel or tyres.

The best explanation I have found to explain Class C Blocks of IP Addresses is from a thread on Search Engine Watch where the notorious Dane (not Hamlet, but the SEO guy), Mikkel deMib Svendsen provides a clear explanation….

An IP consist of 4 parts AAA.BBB.CCC.xxx – the first part is called A-class, the second part B-class and the third part C-class. So any IP under the last part will be in the same C-class.

So for example:

123.123.123.1 and 123.123.123.2 are in the same C-class but
123.123.123.1 and 123.123.124.1 is in two different C-classes

Many smaller hosts only mange one single or very few C-classes and therefore makes it difficult to get multiple IPs in different C-classes if you host all your sites the same place. Larger hosts have many C-classes (I believe some even have almost full B-classes but unless you specifically request your various sites to be on different C-class IPs you still could end up on the same. It’s usually not something hosts care about (in relation to SEO and linking) -
(Source: Mikkel deMib Svendsen via Search Engine Watch forum)

Understanding Google Caffeine

This is big news in more ways than one because…

1. It is bigger than Panda in that it will affect around 35% of searches. (Panda affects approximately 12% of searches)
2. It will force the hand of reluctant marketing managers to invest in fresh content, although this opens another spam door which Google says has been considered and will be tempered by other ranking factors such as trust and authority of the domain.
3. It spells the beginning of the end of “lazy” SEO content strategies (hooray!) that rely on boiler plate copy and other workarounds that churn out tons of worthless, keyword targeted content.

The key areas that will be targeted and will ultimately benefit are:

• Current/Recent Events – “For recent events or hot topics that begin trending on the web, you want to find the latest information immediately. Now when you search for current events and you’ll see more high-quality pages that might only be minutes old.”

• Regular Events – When searching for related terms e.g. “presidential election” then Google will assume you mean the most recent or current campaign.
• Frequently Updated – Do a search for “news” on Google and you will see all the likely sites appearing i.e. CNN for the US is number 1 and the BBC for the UK. How this will be applied to other industries that are perhaps less inclined to publish so frequently remains to be seen. One would assume sites like Travelzoo might do quite well as they publish travel deals with well written and unique content every day.

Is this update a good thing? Of course it is! It means the end user gets up to date information and it means that online businesses who are serious about their SEO will need to focus on developing high quality content strategies.

This post is not about preaching white hat SEO techniques and how you should invest in the long term instead of chasing your tail and trying to win at SEO today! It’s more an effort to highlight where we try to steer the SEO priorities of our clients and how to strike a balance with the inevitable challenges of every client and boss we have ever worked with wanting and needing results “quickly”.

Please read How Long-term SEO Works and Why Long-term SEO Succeeds by Michael Martinez

Understanding how the search engines maintain and update their algorithms holds the key to successful SEO, but you needn’t study this to make progress because the main objective of these search engine algorithms is to deliver a great user experience.

What defines a good search engine user experience?

Getting the most relevant and up to date piece of information for your query within as few searches as possible.

What contributes to this user experience?

The speed at which the page loads, the structure of the information which dictates the ease at which it can be digested.

If the user gets to the information they are looking for quickly and it is beautifully presented they are more likely to share it and link to it which comes full circle back to the search engine; “telling” them that that piece of content is worthy of being presented to users in the SERPs.

How do Google change their algorithms?

Considering they make around 500 changes a year, it goes without saying that that is rather an open question, but…

You may have seen a “leaked” document doing the rounds last week which was Google’s training manual for human URL quality raters. With Google adding ‘search engine optimization” to the Google Analytics interface and linking up Webmaster Tools accounts, the sceptic in me can’t help wondering whether this was indeed deliberate on Google’s part now that they have accepted us SEO’s can be of use to them in their battle against spam. Don’t get me started on their decision to start encrypting search terms for signed in Google users… a topic for another day, perhaps when we get a better understanding for where they are going with that one.

Credit to Pot Pie Girl for unearthing this little gem, a must read for anyone trying to grasp SEO and of particular use when trying to convince SEO skeptics (designers and user experience folks, I’m looking at you!) that we do in fact place the user first and are not just going to stuff your site full of horrible content with set “keyword densities”. For the record, we care NOT about “keyword density”!

Further reading on this topic:

How Google Search Works