2010 SEO Trends

There are many things  several SEO professionals are talking about on how SEO will be in 2010 where from one person to another, the priorities vary. I am not saying one person is more correct from the other, but SEO has always been a do and observe type of science and art and everyone will always have their own opinion about it. As long as you have an open mind to new ideas, backed up with your own testing by doing your own experiments, and continuously sharing with other SEO professionals, you will get a good pulse of what’s coming in 2010. As for me, this is what I believe will be coming in 2010, read more on the 2010 search trends below. (more…)

As most of us know, Google has formally launched “personalized search” in an effort to continually improve each individual’s search experience in their engine.  The goal is to track user’s search behavior in order to continaully improve and “personalze” the relevance of results.  When these discussions first began, many SEO’s and Internet marketing companies feared that this would mean the end of Search Engine Optimization as we know it.  We are still waiting to see what affect this will have over the coming months but from the information disseminated thus far, it seems that most of the fundamental best practices will still apply. 

So How Does this Impact SEO for Our Clients?

The truth is, some of the important areas of focus that these changes bring to light, have really always been important.  The end goal of SEO is to grow a business through relevant natural search traffic that leads to conversions (whatever those conversion goals might be).  You can chase rankings all day long but if the result is not good quality traffic and conversions that lead to growth, there is something missing.  The key things that still matter are:

• Focus on traffic and conversions more than rankings:  Of course, we are still always going to look at rankings but now more than ever, we really need to combine the focus on rankings and the resulting traffic.  If a site sees an increase in rankings but stagnant levels (or decreasing levels) of traffic, personalized search may be posing a negative effect and the strategy shoulf be adjusted.  On the other hand, if rankings see a slight dip but traffic is improving, the site might be experiencing better results from the shift to personalized search. 
• This has of course been important for a long time but there is a renewed focus on “brand” quality:  The quality, interactivity, value, and user experience of a website will always impact traffic, bounce rates, repeat visitors, and link popularity.  Google is now placing more emphasis on this with personalized search.  This can create challenges for new businesses that may not yet be a “trusted brand” yet.  However, it certainly does encourage any business to develop great content and have a good user experience. 
• Other sources of traffic might have a positive impact on natural search results:  It seems that all traffic sources will now be taken into account with Google’s personalized metrics.  This could mean that paid search traffic and other key drivers to a website might positively (but indirectly) impact natural results within the personalized search spectrum.  It will be interesting to see the results of this in the coming months.

How Should We Be Adjusting Our Strategy and Campaigns?

Best practices still apply.  As mentioned above, we must conitue to improve user experience, brand loyalty, content, and traffic (from all sources).  Continue to follow best pratices for basic SEO coding and making all pages accessible to the search engines, use a keyword strategy relavent to your business goals and that is aligned with your user’s search behavior, continually develop good content, and earn great inbound links by being proactive in your industry.

Here are some recent comments from our PPC & Affiliate Marketing Director, Keith Posehn:

As you may have heard, Google has been on a website banning spree recently. In the last 48 hours, they have apparently banned several thousand accounts – agencies, merchants and affiliates alike. Further, they have given some guidance as to what to expect moving forward.  Here are some key factors to consider for all pay per click advertising and affiliate marketing programs:

1. Isolated landing pages and micro-sites are a thing of the past. When creating an AdWords campaign it is now essential to have a site that is ranked (and ranked well).  Addionally, is is crucial have a lot of quality unique content on these web pages.  Google seems to be placing more weight on content for PPC campaigns.
2. It is important to note that you can have a landing page, but it must be on a ranked and on a trusted domain; also, you should have a link directly to it from a page on the site that ranks well for the keywords being bid on.
3. Paid Search affiliates are largely gone – many affiliates are leaving paid search as affiliates. This is both a plus and a minus, because it means less competition but also fewer affiliates in the various networks.
4. SEO is much more important, even more so than last week!  If a site has no inbound links or trust, it will not be awarded a good Quality Score.
5. Google is not showing its cards in terms of what sites it does not like. There is a great deal of uncertainty right now.  Google is also now entering the market as a competitor directly (i.e. Google Affiliate Network)

What does this mean from an Internet marketing perspective (specifically PPC, Affiliate, and SEO)?

1. SEO and content-heavy sites are now an even more important part of PPC and therefore it is imperative to be pursuing both avenues in an online marketing strategy.
2. Every AdWords campaign needs much more content, trust and quality to survive.  This of course can be provided by Internet marketing companies as well as the brands/clients themselves.
3. A much greater level of research and care must be taken when planning any pay per click campaign.  Many factors must be considered.
4. It would be highly recommended that all e-commerce companies now have an affiliate program on the Google Affiliate Network.

We expect to see more developments over the next few weeks and will keep our readers informed!

1.  Establish yourself as an authority in your field of business: Having a blog that you contribute valuable information to on a regular basis (recommend daily or at least a few times a week) can be your primary tool for establishing credibility and trust amongst your customer base. Your blog should contain well-written, engaging, and informative articles that pertain to your industry. Topics can include ideas about current events, thought provoking themes, and news about your company. Make sure the messaging is not self serving and that every post provides some kind of FREE value.

2.  Add Valuable Content to Your Website: I always recommend that business owners incorporate their blog into their website as opposed to having a separate platform. There are plenty of open source blog platforms that can be integrated into as website such as http://wordpress.com. Therefore your blog becomes part of your site and adds new pages every time you post. For example, your URL would be www.MyCompanyName.com/blog.

3.  Provide Great SEO Value for Your Website: As mentioned above, each time you post a blog article you are essentially creating a new page for your website. New pages mean a constantly growing website that has content pertaining to your business. These pages can be easily indexed by the search engines and be ranked in the search engine results. If you write with your keyword strategy in mind and hyperlink specific keywords to relevant pages within your website, you will also create a good internal linking strategy.

4.  Support Your Internet Marketing Strategy: The best way to add value to your Internet marketing efforts is to produce engaging content that people will share and link to. This established authority in the search engines and gives people a reason to stay on your website longer. You are also giving them a reason to come back. Set up a simple RSS feed so people can be notified when new articles are posted. This brings them back to the site. The more they come back and the longer they stay on it, the more likely they are to convert into some kind of business.

5.  Support Your Social Media Marketing Strategies: The best way to establish brand loyalty and trust is to continually provide free value to your customers. Some of the best content on the web (in my opinion) comes in the form of blogs and videos. The more great content you provide, the greater marketing value it will eventually create. Social media is not about self promotion, it’s about customer communication. A great way to establish regular “communication” with your customer base is to give them consistent value. One way to do this is by blogging.

6.  Personal Development: There can be a productive and “selfish” reason for blogging to. The best blogs are not written completely off the cuff with no real educational content. The best blogs provide tips, how to guides, thought provoking questions, and well planned topics with supporting details. This is usually done by the writer researching a topic prior to writing or using his or her own experiences and sharing them so that others may learn. The process over even preparing to write a blog can be personally rewarding and provide learning opportunities for the writer. I always encourage the business owners and top level executives to be key blog contributors for their companies.

7.  Platform for Events and Promotions: Although your blog should be primarily used for communicating valuable information about your business and industry, you can also use it as a simple tool to announce special events like trade shows, promotions, upcoming charity events, etc. For example, if your company is going to attend a trade show, you might write an article about the show and your purpose for attending. After the show you could post an article about your experience and even include a video. Or maybe your company is involved in supporting a charitable cause. A blog is a perfect forum for telling your readers about it!

Things change rapidly in the SEO world and good marketers are always trying to stay on top of the latest and greatest information around “best practices”.  There is a science to SEO but not an exact science.  Many SEO’s have slightly different strategies and I think we can all agree that no one campaign is created equal.  However, when listening to different types of SEO advice circulate, there are always seem to be some misconceptions behind some of the core theories.  This is normal in such a dynamic industry so I wanted to review a few of these points as a discussion piece. 

LINK TRADING

This is a big one because everyone is very careful not to “anger the beast” (Google).  We all want to abide by best practices so as to build great relevant link popularity and increase rankings for oursleves or clients.  However, the fear factor has pushed this a little over the edge.  The idea behind link building is to create a interaction between a site and other relevant resources, partners, content, etc.  The foundation should be similar to how we build our own relationships personnaly or in the business world (at least if we want to gain the most value). 

So for example, people seem to still think that you should only build high power inbound links and never reciprocate.  This is true in some cases and may not be true in others (these are just my opinions).  If you get a link request that comes into your site from some randon website then you should probably stay away from it.  However, if a partner company, client, or relevant blog has linked to you and is interested in having you reciprocate, then it should be fine.  Again, this goes back to key relationships and have a link architecture that makes sense.  Don’t accept a link and give a link if both parties are just doing to have another link.  It probably won’t do you much good.

CONTENT:  SEO VS MARKETING VALUE

This topic is a difficult one because there is value on both sides and the truth or best practice most likely falls somewhere in the middle.  Bascially, I am talking about the difference between search engine optimization copywriting that may be good from an SEO algorithm (a machine reading your content) perspective vs a more emotion driven marketing perspective (a person reading your content and being compelled to link to you, share the content, or convert to a sale). 

The best case scenario is to have a blend of both it seems but this is easier said than done.  To achieve this the SEO content writers must be very good writers and have a sound understanding of an industry and the audience.  This is why I always encourage cleints to blog.  They know their business the best, and with a little coaching, can weave in some keyword strategy as well.

TITLE, H1, AND URL STRUCTURE

All of this starts with keyword strategy and understanding the clients core goals.  Once that is established you want to dial in on how the keyword assignment will reflect the titles and description in the SERPs as well support the page content.  For example, a title tag that simply uses keywords may rank high but might not be as compelling as the result around it in the SERPs that may have a better “marketing message”.  I have seen both work quite well so it most likel will vary from site to site and industry to industry. 

I have also heard people say that title should not mirror H1 exactly but I have seen this work well too.  From a marketing and conversion optimization perspective, the page title (or H1) should be representative of the title tag itself which is what will appear in the search results.  This goes back to the marketing message and being consistant.  For example, if you are running a PPC camaign and use a specific call to action in your titles, the landing page used to support that link should have a direct keyword association and reflect the message in the title.  The same could hold true for SEO title tags. 

From a ranking perspective the variation seems to not matter much but from a marketing perspective the two should at least be a close mirror of one another in my opinion.  This of course also depends on how you use the H1 one, where it is on the page, and the page design (as far as call to action is concerned). 

conclusion

There is value on both sides of these arguments which is why this stuff takes constant testing and researching to find what works best in a myriad of different circumstances.

So what does social media have to do with SEO anyway?  Other than being a fantastic way to build brand equity and communicate with current and potential customers, social media is an amazing compliment to search engine optimization.  SEO has a few crucial elements that affect both the on page and off page efforts. 

Two crucial elements:

• Content
• Link popularity

One of the best ways to address content development on your website is to have a blog.  Blogging is easy and a great way to add value for your visitors.  By next year approximately 70% of the “Internet population” will be engaged in user generated content such as blogs and social platforms. 

Hubspot recent did a great case study and compared about 700 companies that blog, to 700 companies that don’t.  The results were astounding!  Basically, of the companies reviewed, those that blog had 55% more unique visitors, 97% more inbound links, and 434% more indexed pages.  For example, Internet Marketing Inc’s website is about 97% blog.  Most corporate sites are fairly small and under 50 pages.  So why not build out the site continually with great industry related content?!  Your visitors will stay on your site longer and you are more likely to have advocates wirte about your brand and link to you. 

As for the off page SEO efforts, social media performs a similar function.  All of the great content and assets your brand has or can develop should be spread out across all of your online platforms.  The content should include blogs, articles, videos, whitepapers, case studies, etc.  The most great content you have, the more value you are providing your user base.  The greater the value, the more likely you are to gain links.

We recently ran a case study for one of our cleints, the US Army.  By using social media and SEO strategies over a 6 month period, the efforts resulted in about a 20% increase in unique visitors and time one site.  The return visitors increased and those that come through social platforms like Facebook averaged about 10 minutes per visit. 

In efforts to put all this together, we need to understand why link building is so difficult (Link building done the right way that is).  Its difficult because Google is getting smarter and better at recognizing quality links.  You can spin your wheels and shoot for specific numbers of links each month, but that strategy alone will not take your site to the next level.  You have to go after the RIGHT links.  In the end, you will get great links when you deserve great links.  That is why providing great content through social media channels and blogging is so important.

We have all heard the saying “Content is King”.  Unique content, both on page and off page, is one of the key factors for implementing a strong ongoing organic search engine optimization campaign.  That said, Internet marketers and companies seeking a professional Internet marketing company always want to know what the formula is for SEO content writing and proper use of keywords.  There really is no true formula but there are guidelines to be followed to ensure the use of best practices and avoid getting penalized.

• How much content is required? Again, there is no formula for this and achieving good rankings will depend on the industry, competitiveness of keywords, competitor rankings, etc.  You really can’t have too much content but it must be valuable, well written, and use keywords properly.
• How many keywords should be used? The best practice is to focus first on well written content that is easy to read and offers true value to the user experince.  Even if the content is in a “resources” section that doesn’t get much traffic, you need to pretend that the Google spiders are readers that want to see value.  Use keywords three to five times per page.  If you do more than this it can cause keyword stuffing filters to activate and the page will not be seen as relevant.  You can also look at it as a percentage.  About 5% of the total words on the page should be keywords.
• How many different keywords can be used on a page or in a given article? The best idea is to use one or two keywords (or phrases) per page.  You do not always want to use the same exact keyword but rather use variations of that word or phrase.  If you try to diversify the keywords too much on a given page the search engines will not know what to put value on and skip over the page.
• Where should the keywords appear in the content/on the page? Keywords should be evenly scattered throughout the content.  You can have keywords closer to the top of the page through the proper placement of title tags, H1,H2, etc.
• What pages should content be placed on? A good Internet marketing campaign using SEO will have both on page and off page content.  On page content can be displayed in a few different ways.  There should be content on the pages you want to place in the SERPs (and the page where you will be performing the bulk of the SEO).  You also should have other articles, blogs, etc. throughout the site that use keywords that link back to the page that the content is supporting.  For example, if you have a page selling backpacks you should have content on that page relevant to the product.  You could also have blogs or articles on other pages that use keywords relevant to the product.  Those keywords can then be linked back to the page you want to rank.  We will discuss back linking more in another blog post.  The off page content can come in the form of press releases, forums, and blogs from other sites.  This content should follow the same practices and use keywords sparingly.  For them to be effective, the proper use of backlinking is imperative.
• How well written does the content need to be? As good as possible.  The search engines are getting smarter by the day so the better the content and the more value it adds, the safer you will be…and the happier the Google spiders will be!