I first came to Red or Blue Digital two months ago as an intern (although to be honest, I’d never actually heard of SEO), and as promised in the job advert, I was taught “everything there is to need to know about SEO”. I now realise that no one ever really knows everything about SEO but that’s what makes it so exciting. Anyway, the guys in the office taught me a lot and it’s hard to believe I’ve only been doing this for such a short time.

Outside of work, I can usually be found talking to my cat, Chicken (I’m not mad, I promise), or cooking up a storm in the kitchen. By living, socialising and now working in Shoreditch, I’m rapidly developing a fear of the outside world and have heart palpitations each time I’m on the tube. I’m definitely not a hipster – my love of Boyzone probably proves that, and I hate cycling. I also enjoy making stuff and my origami hobby is perhaps what got me the job in the first place (long story).

I’m really pleased about being the newest addition to the team at Red or Blue Digital, and really looking forward to the exciting times ahead in the ever-changing world of SEO. Now – time to pester Kun for a MacBook Air.

 For a good email marketing campaign there are many key points that should be kept in mind and designing a HTML email is one such. If you are conducting an email marketing campaign, then you should pay at most importance to the design of each email. Below is a list of such design practices that will help you improve your results and increase your subscription list:

1. No room for pretty pictures
A designer might be tempted to create some attractive picture or your company’s logo at the top of the email, be aware this is not a good tactic to follow. The top of your email might be the only preview section for most for your readers, where there is not much room for the whole email to be displayed. A user will not always open your mail and read each and every line of the mail. You do not have much time; your email should begin with your striking message or something that increases your value proposition. Then you can place your logo or other graphics.

2. Targeted subject line

Make sure your subject line is such that it attracts the attention of the receipt and entices him to read more. A short and targeted subject line is important in getting your emails opened and thus greatly enhancing your campaign performance.

3. Design for wireless devices as well
Although a vast majority of your people will be subscribing through their desktop PCs but there is no denying the fact that the number of people using the wireless devices such as mobiles and tablets are increasing at an alarming rate. And in a matter of few years there will be whole lot of customers in this section.
Design your HTML pages so that they can be easily viewed on mobile devices and tablets. You should also keep this in mind that mobile screens are relatively smaller as compared to the screen of desktop PCs and your email should be displayed as such the message is clearly displayed. If the mobile version of your email is full of links then your user will leave your email without even clicking on them.

4. Avoid using complex tables in your emails
Although tables allow the designers to have more control over the layout of the email but you should not be tempted in using complex tables. Creating tables is a good practice while designing emails but stick with the simpler tables.

5. Avoid fancy links
While designing emails for marketing try to suppress the urge to add links that are of no importance compared to your email. These practices are not suitable for the marketing and may hamper the number of subscribers.

6. Exclude any disabled images
If you are using images in your email marketing then you should positively remove all the disabled images. If the assigned images are not displayed properly then a huge white space is left vacant or an empty space with jumbled up texts. Make sure your email is readable and your images are properly displayed and if not try removing all the images.
Email is and will continue to be the most profitable marketing. If you work in sync with your designer on the points discussed above then you will definitely create an email that is more meaningful and your email may end in one of the inboxes of your subscribers.

A few weeks ago right after the Venice update I was running some local queries to try and put together some evidence for a post I was writing.  I was picking random services and businesses and searching around merrily when I saw this result for “Plumber” with my location set to London:

I had no idea what the hell was going on with that.  I took a screen grab and made a note to look into it further when I had more time.  Skip forward a day and I started mucking around with local searches again.  This time my hypothetical locks needed changing so I entered “locksmith London”.  Imagine my shock when Clapham’s favorite curry house popped up again in the local box!

This warranted a bit of investigation.  The places page had some total bizarreness going on as demonstrated below:

According to Google Places, the categories are sort of right apart from the supermarket bit (more on that in a minute).  It’s when you glance at the “at a glance” section it starts to get odd.  What William Wilberforce, the slave trade, and Stephen Tomkins have to do with a curry house ranking as a locksmith I had no idea, but then looking at the description I noticed that Google had taken the text straight from the Clapham Wikipedia entry.  And if any of you are familiar with the Clapham sect you will know why these at a glance details were shown.   Anyway, It would seem from the local box details that Google thinks that this curry house is in fact Clapham itself.

What about ranking for these odd terms?  I had a quick look at all the basic stuff (links, on-site etc) and there was not a single mention of locksmiths/plumbers, or any anchor text bombing that I could see.  After a quick lol I moved on with life , sort of forgetting about it until this morning when I came in and read Danny Sullivans article evaluating search quality.  It made me think of Clapham Tandoori so I did the searches again to see if it was still ranking.  Here is what I saw:

Not only was it still ranking, but apparently they had now expanded their operations and become the Clapham branch of Tesco.  Marvelling at this small restaurants abilities to rank for completely unrelated (but competitive) terms, me and the guys in the office had a look to see if they were ranking for “london curry”, which you would assume would probably convert better.  They didn’t rank for this, but Google made sure my search wasn’t wasted by showing me something interesting:

Searching for London curry gave me PPC ads for locksmiths.  This was the first search I had done in Incognito, my colleague James also got the same ads but I haven’t been able to get them again.  Anyway like the rest of this scenario it was odd.  I don’t really know how or why Clapham Tandoori ranks so well in local for plumber or locksmith, and I have no idea why Tesco has suddenly been linked to their places page.

As entertaining as the thought of people ringing up a curry restaurant asking them to change their locks is, it’s truly baffled us here at Red or Blue.  We’re unsure if it’s an ingenious, if pointless bit of blackhattery, someone having a laugh, or  a glitch from Google.  Either way we’d love to hear from you if you have any thoughts on the matter (or if you have had a curry from Clapham Tandoori)!

1. Bing cares more about the speed that content’s shared at than the overall quantity of sharing that occurs. – Dave Coplin (Microsoft)
2. Use Rel Finder to see how subjects are connected, semantically, across the web. – Philip Sheldrake
3. When considering a brand, work out how its perceived by consumers rather than by the brands employees. – Sam Noble
4. Use microformats over microdata or RDFA most of the time because its quicker/simpler to implement – Glenn Jones
5. Sites being found rich snippet spamming will not receive ranking penalties – Pierre Far (Google).
6. Make sure that universal search is covered off in your content strategy so that you can dominate the SERPs from all angles – Charlie Peverett.
7. If using BusinessWire for press releases, don’t fill in the site URL and Blog URL boxes because then you can add followed links to your press release – Lexi Mills
8. Use DuckDuckGo for link prospecting because it’s less spammed up than Google – Analytics SEO
9. Use reverse image searches on your competitors banner ads to easily found really relevant link targets – Analytics SEO
10. Visualise yours and your competitors’ link vulnerabilities so that you know the level of risk you’re playing with – Stefan Hull
11. Sell SEO in terms that Market Director’s care about – revenue, ROI, vanity and traffic. – Chelsea Blacker
12. Don’t spend all your time obsessing about rankings – spending time altering calls to action in meta descriptions can often yield a nice bump in CTR. – Tony King
13. Author Rank is vertical based so don’t reuse personas across verticals – James Carson

Presentations can be downloaded here:

• Future SEO Vistas
• (Re)Launching a Brand or Product online Effectively
• Microformats and SEO
• Searchbots – Lost Children or Hungry Psychopaths?
• It’s Only Words? Working with A Content Strategy
• Advanced Search Queries for SEO
• 20 Tools You May Not Have Heard of But Should Be Using
• Sell the Sizzle Not the Search

Thanks to Kelvin and everyone involved with organising BrightonSEO; a really fantastic conference.

WARNING: This is a bit of a read – you might want to get some tea and biscuits. If you’re in a hurry, read our thirteen key takeaways from BrightonSEO.

After a very bizarre Starbucks experience including an old man in a shiny pink suit with a handlebar moustache we arrived to find a huge queue, which is always a good sign:

Kelvin (Site Visibility, @kelvinnewman) kicked the day off in style by handing out rock and bus branded mugs to whoever had travelled the furthest.

Ask the Engineers Panel Session

The first session was a panel session featuring Pierre Far (Google, @pierrefar), Dave Coplin (Microsoft, @dcoplin), Martin McDonald (Expedia, @searchmartin), Rishi Lakhani (@rishil) and Tony Goldstone(Fresh Egg, @tonyboney).

The first topic was whether SEO is dying – universal agreement that no – SEO is safe. Rishi recognised that the industry has an image problem though – and put it down to the lack of any standards body or specific qualifications.

Question two was based around the recent spate of de-indexing. There was shared frustration at trying to work out what links are just poor quality versus what links are bad enough to be a ‘bad link’ in the reconsideration request sense.

On whether Google would just ignore bad links once reported Google refused to be drawn. Google did suggest that firing your SEO might help when entering a re-inclusion request though.

In some more helpful advice, Rishi suggested keeping a log of all the emails you send requesting link removals. Even if a site owner doesn’t respond, or refuses, you can screenshot those emails and include them as attachments in your re-inclusion requests to show you’ve tried.

Google acknowledged that there’s a huge amount of spam in the PPC (porn, pharmacy, gambling) industries and explained that if everyone in an industry’s buying links then your not running as high a risk buying them yourself then you would in a ‘clean’ industry. It was nice to see Google being open about this rather than putting up the normal ‘paid links are bad m’kay’ shield.

Question 3 moved us on to the subject of content and how to shape a content strategy.

Pierre refused to say whether rich snippets were, within themselves, a ranking factor, but it was certain that everyone’s really in favour of adding them.

Question 4 got a big laugh - by asking for the story behind Google’s latest redesigns - apparently she’s been really hating them. Pierre directed her to Google’s forums to make UI feedback/suggestions.

Question 5 took us back on to the issue of social first brought up in question 3.

Bing suggested you be ‘bloody good at social’ – by which they mean Facebook and Twitter.

“…be really bloody good at social. The more engaged they are and the bigger the following the better they’ll rank…. The number of fans or followers is a factor, but not as important, its more about how quickly content is being shared” Dave Coplin, Bing

For Bing, it would seem the speed that content is shared at is more important than the quantity of sharing that occurs.

For question 6,  keyword ‘not provided’ traffic was brought up. Google’s original response was to use webmaster tools. Pierre seemed genuinely surprised when there was general agreement that Webmaster Tool’s data is really poor. Pierre argued that users make a far clearer choice to connect with a company when they click on an ad-words ad over an organic result; which I must admit to not properly understanding and didn’t find all that persuasive.

Google tried to make a big play about being at the forefront of protecting its users – conveniently forgetting the privacy concerns of Google Search Your World and the far higher privacy provided by DuckDuckGo.

In a shameless attempt to curry favour (which definitely worked) Bing changed its homepage image for today to Brighton pier:

Phillip Sheldrake – Future SEO Vistas – the Semantic Web and the Internet of Things

Philip Sheldrake - Meanwhile - @sheldrake

Philip set out his idea of the future of SEO – what others have been calling semantic search or web 3.0.

His version revolved around a few strong principles – presentation, discoverability, machinability and usefulness of data.

Philip linked to Rel Finder, which looked like a great way of exploring the semantically connected web. Apparently the UK government is leading the world on public sector semantically marked up data online – which is great news.

He then went on to start inventing words live on stage – Inernetome, for example, refers to the manifestation of the internet of things. Overall, Phil thinks it’s really important that we move beyond content for content’s sake. The lasting thought was to spend time thinking about your audiences needs, how you’re servicing them and how you can push that angle in a semantic way that search engines will appreciate.

Sam Noble – How to launch or re-launch a brand or product online effectively

Samantha Noble - Digital Marketing Director - Koozai - @koozai_sam

Sam ran through the story of how Koozai became Koozai in May 2011. It took over a year of effort, but gave them a unique identity that they could (and have) really developed under. She was attacked throughout by a moth so insistent that by the end of the day it had its own twitter handle!

Koozai was rebranded due to brand confusion, but other reasons to rebrand include an overcrowded marketplace, buy-outs or mergers or because of a new product/service.

Sam explained how it’s most important to consider what consumers think, and connect with, your brand rather than how you view, or would like to view, your brand. Your brand name needs to be something that will make sense long-term as you wont want to go through the rebranding process for a long long time to come (if ever again)!

Once you’ve done that:

• find the right branding agency
• make sure the name’s easy to spell and memorable
• check domain availability
• check social profile availability with Knowem
• choose a go live day that’s not a Friday
• build a checklist of properties that need to be updated
• Prepare a press release and blog post ready for the go live day

Koozai thought the name ‘Guava’ stood out and it inspired them to come up with a unique name of their own that stood out in the industry.

Sam talked about the importance of registering your brands trademarks. It’s important to consider whether you’ll need the rights provided by registering the brand. For most companies, the rights provided for unregistered trademarks under the Trademark Act 1994 will be enough.

She stressed the importance of not going live on any important project until it’s absolutely ready. Also, that going live on a project on Friday is never a good idea as the buzz around it will die over the weekend.

One nice tip was the idea of using reverse image searches to find existing uses of your old logo to build up a list of sites that need to be contacted when you change your logo.

Adam Lee – Killer Market Research for Peanuts

Adam Lee - Managing Director, No Pork Pies - @noporkpies

Adam went deep in to making sure you really understand your target market.

He quoted a study, which emphasised the importance of keeping sites simple and uncluttered.

Adam set out three different approaches to conduct market research on the cheap:

1. map your audience to particular personas – creating a detailed understanding of ‘who’ your target audience is, how they interact online and what they care about
2. conduct questionnaires and polls with your existing audience
3. analyse the behaviours of your existing audience to build up a better understanding of their habits and how you can involve your brand in them.

Words from Sponsors

We then moved in to presentations from Searchmetrics and Linkdex

Searchmetrics

Searchmetrics had a great graph showing the effect of Panda on ciao.co.uk – which was an impressive example of the tools power:

Linkdex

Linkdex won the ‘freebie’ crown at BrightonSEO by handing out mini baseball stress-balls. On stage, Tom from Linkdex cut straight to the chase and gave us another rendition of their great cartoon ‘Zeus’:

Microformats and SEO

Glenn Jones - Founder, Madgex - @glennjones

Glenn talked through Microformats, Microdata and RDFa providing examples of each.

Glenn suggested using microformats over microdata or rdfa most of the time simply because its quicker and simpler to implement.

A lot of Glenn’s presentation centred around ranking Yorkshire Puddings which, just before lunch, got a lot of people’s stomach’s rumbling.

He suggested using the Google Rich Snippets testing tool to make sure your microformats are setup correctly.

There’s always a little bit of a debate as to quite how much rich snippets increase your click-through rate and Glenn suggested it would normally be around 10-25% – which seemed fair.

An audience member asked about spam in microformats. This has increasingly been popping up and is becoming a real issue. The Google representative reminded us of the reporting procedure and said that if they found anyone spamming rich snippets that they’d block the snippets showing for them. I’d always assumed this would include a rankings penalty because – after all – you’ve just been caught spamming Google. Apparently there’s absolutely no rankings penalty applied for spamming rich text though. I was surprised and don’t necessarily think Google’s got it right on this one – for many sites they’ll be little downside in spamming the snippets.

Searchbots: Lost Children or Hungry Psychopaths? What Do Searchbots Actually Do?

Roland Dunn - Partner - Refined Practice - @roland_dunn

Roland talked about how little most SEOs know as to what searchbots are doing on their site. He went through an approaching of digging in to server-log files to find what pages are being visited frequently and which aren’t.

Roland described how, for the large site he looked at Google spent almost all of its time looking at two pages.

To help craft the journey of searchbots and increase your crawlability he suggested looking at:

• altering your internal navigation
• robots.txt out pages (in extreme cases); and
• rethinking your URL construction to put the most important pages near the top

A Word From… Magic!

To finish off the sessions before lunch, Manual Link Building hired a magician:

Then it was off to lunch in what was turning out to be a really nice day in Brighton.

Charlie Peverett – It’s only words? Working with Content Strategy

Charlie Peverett – Content Strategist - iCrossing UK - @cpev

First up after lunch was Charlie Peverett. I’ll admit to having missed the start of Charlie’s presentation. It was a beautiful day in Brighton and a lot of people’s lunches overran.

Charlie hit out at the rise of people putting ‘great content’ down as an anonymous item on an SEO to-do list. This has been a bug-bear around the Red or Blue office for a while – creating great content’s one of the most challenging activity we undertake and few people go in to the detail as to how to come up with great ideas.

Content strategies need to go further than just addressing written articles – attack universal search by generating pictures, video, audio and all kinds of media based content.

He also suggested ‘Content Strategy’ by Christina Halverson. It’s not a book I’ve read personally, but it seemed to get quite a good reception in the hall.

How you can get BIG links from BIG media sites

Lexi Mills - Online PR Consultant, Distilled - @leximills

Lexi gave a great presentation on the interaction between PRs and SEOs as well as how to get links in more traditional publications.

Her speech was all about actually getting on the phone and pitching your stories. Too many people are frightened to call, concerned with asking for a link and scared of really pushing.

She spent a little time talking about the friction that can often exist between the two. Whilst I’ve not seen this myself I liked her suggestion of providing the PR teams you’re working with a report showing the SEO effect of their work that they can include within their own reporting – making them look good whilst building bridges.

Lexi explained that, no matter how negative a reply to an email she gets she always follows it up as any response is a possible opening.

Asking for keyword anchor text in your link can sometimes rattle journalists so Lexi advised usually going for branded links. If you’re too embarrassed to ask for a link at all then pass the buck and claim your boss asked you to ask for one.

If you get one article published by a media outlet, but they don’t link to you don’t burn the contact. Go back to them next time, but don’t give them full details until they promise the link.

She was really keen on making the link seem like a natural, obvious inclusion – referring to it as a credit or further substantiation of an article.

Lexi mainly uses PR NewsWire and BusinessWire for her press releases online. She describes the links they provide as marginally above directories, but good in bulk.

For BusinessWire you can only get a link if you don’t fill out the URL and blog URL boxes when filling in your press release – a non-obvious tip she only found out by having drinks with the devs.

Lexi recommended tracking #prfail #prwin and #journorequest on twitter.

Maximizing your SEO Agencies

James Owen – SEO Manager, Hotels.com - @jamesoseo

Hotels.com have been working with a whopping 10 SEO teams. Plotting their activities on a graph, it looks like the localisation team managed to give the largest push , which is something we’ve found at Red or Blue – pursuing local traffic has massive ROI.

The key points were:

• audit before an agency begins work
• monitor progress against KPIs throughout
• Segment all your analysis based on brand v non-brand

It’s important to pass marketing collateral to an agency as early as possible so that they can learn from what has and hasn’t worked in the past as well as to remove the possibility of a workflow bottleneck.

I was really impressed at how good hotels.com approach to ringing the most from their agencies is – no surprise, then, their phenomenal rankings.

Words from Sponsors

Next up was AdInsight and Analytics SEO.

Analytics SEO

Stephen Lock  - @stevejlock

Stephen SEO suggested using DuckDuckGo for link prospecting as it has a lot less spam in it than Google.

In what I’d class as one of the stand-out tips of the entire conference though, they also suggested using reverse image searches (like TinEye) on your competitors banner ads. That way you can see where they’re advertising and you have a list of really relevant sites to go after for link building. So, whilst your competitors are paying for presence on that site you might get yourself some nice free advertising through a guest blog post etc.

Search marketing – from Panda to Black Swan

Stefan Hull – Insight Director - Propellernet - @stefanjhull

Stefan showed us an image of a turkey farmer, which I’m still pretty convinced was him, and invited us all not to be those farmers. His point behind the image, though, was simple – SEOs are constantly shocked by the changes in Google’s algorithm - and we shouldn’t be.

He suggested planning strategies around creating great users experiences rather than just what’s trending at that moment. That way, when the next algorithm change occurs it’s likely to benefit you not penalise you.

“Chase after your best interpretation of what users want” – Matt Cutts

He talked about buying links as a risk you need to manage. Visualise the amount of risky links you have to graphically show how vulnerable your link structure is. By doing this you’re more likely to get sign off on a less explosive, but better in the long-run, white-hat campaign.  If you know what percentage of your competitors’ links are vulnerable you also know how risky you can be. This lead to some interesting research:

• 60% (of respondents) pay for links
• 67% of those think their paid links are producing results
• 10% of those haven’t mentioned to their boss that they’ve bought links

20 Tools You May Not Have Heard Of, But Should Be Using

Kevin Gibbons - Director of Strategy, SEOptimise - @kevgibbo

Kevin unfortunately couldn’t be at BrightonSEO, but was good enough to publish his slides online. It contains a bag of lesser-known SEO, social media and project management tools. Check it out below:

Before moving on to the 20/20 presentations they decided to have a game of  Tetherball. Despite Kelvin nearly destroying the ball, Dom still won:

Sell the Sizzle, Not The Search: Tactics for Appeasing Marketing Directors

Chelsea Blacker – Search Manager - SEOptimise - @chelseablacker

Apparently SEO’s not as measurable as PPC, cute as social or glamorous as TV – I say Chelsea’s not seen Red or Blue’s SEO .

Chelsea talked about the importance of being really positive when selling concepts; using positive words and smiling even when on the phone.

She suggested talking in terms that marketing directors really care about. So, move away from the technicalities and closer to revenue, talking closer to the way a PPC team would because marketing directors tend to ‘get’ PPC a lot more. Based off of this, make PPC comparisons – how much could they be saving by investing in SEO rather than spending on PPC?

Enterprise SEO Titties

Tony King – Head of Search Marketing - FindaProperty.com

Tony gave a speech about  Tools, Tips and Technique (or TiTTies) for Enterprise SEO.

He gave us the great acronym ‘FIRST’ – Findable, Indexable, Rankable, Sustainable and Trackable.

There was a nice tip to remember as it’s easy to miss out when planning dev work – if you’re going to have any down-time on the server for upgrades etc, let the PPC team know so they’re not running ads during that time! A nice piece of inter-agency thinking.

Beyond the race for rankings, Tony’s found altering calls to action in meta descriptions one of the easiest ways to increase click-through rate and, in doing so, increase traffic.

SEO & PPC Working Together in Harmony

Tim Ireland - Jellyfish

Tim perhaps like zooming in and out more than any man I’ve ever met. His presentation’s pinned here. It was a fantastic, though fast, psychological look at search – well worth a read.

I Believe Authors are the Future

James Carson - Bauer Media - @mrjamescarson

James explained what author rank is and how it may affect search.

Whilst James strongly believes in author rank, he’s yet to see an uplift in traffic on any of the Baur properties from it. This is because rel=author is a great way for journalists and other experts as it helps to reinforce their position as experts over and above ‘amateurs’.

He’s not had any problem implement rel=author – in his experience, the most difficult part of getting rel=author setup is convincing journalists to get Google+ accounts.

AuthorRank is vertical based so it’s important not to reuse personas created for one vertical in an unrelated one. This could harm that personas author rank as their relevance plummets.

Mobile Serendipity: How Google Plans to Send Search Results to Users, Before You’ve Even Thought to Look

Nichola Stott – Founder & Director - theMediaFlow - @nicholastott

According to Nielson data, there were over 2 billion searches in the UK in February alone.

Nichola tracked what she called ‘serendipitous search’ through the years via comments by Marissa Myers. This is all about Google personalising search and more accurately guessing at what content a users needs or what answer they’re looking to fulfil in a way that I’d describe as ‘automagic’. We’ve definitely seen this occurring with GSYW, search suggestions and Google beginning to provide proper answers within the SERPs so this is definitely something everyone needs to consider going forward.

I appear to have started a sweetshop (and advertising company)

Dom Hodgson - CEO - EmberAds - @thehodge

Dom explained the dilemas involved with opening a sweet shop online. Should you include a picture of a squirrel? Yes – always. Is there a risk that people might think it’s a monkey. Unfortunately, yes. What did we learn?

We wrapped up by Kelvin giving away AN ARCADE MACHINE to a woman who hadn’t previously really known what SEO was:

Finally, on to the pier for drinks, karaoke and lots of networking. Thanks go to Kelvin and all the speakers for a great BrightonSEO.

When I first started in SEO I found it a bit disheartening hearing about how great guest posting was, but never actually finding many opportunities myself.  After a bit of experience and picking up a load of pointers from all the other fantastic articles I’ve read/talks I’ve been to etc this process has become a lot easier, and more rewarding.  I will show you a few of my favourite tools to find guest posts below:

Advanced Search Operators

With a few advanced search queries you can get a great list of potential blogs, which have featured relevant guest posts before.  Some examples of basic search queries are:

“guest blog” + keyword

“guest post” + keyword

“guest author” + keyword

It is key to remember the speech marks as they mean stop Google returning results with guest etc in all sorts of random places.  This is the very basics, advanced searches go far far deeper and rather then try to explain I will point you to this article by Ann Smarty which I use every time I am doing searches.  These operators should give you all you need to do a comprehensive search through the SERP’s however if you are feeling tired (or lazy), there is even the Solo SEO Link Search Tool that has all the searches pre-loaded, and clickable for you.

Citation Labs Link Prospector Tool

I have had limited use of this tool but will be petitioning that we get a full account from my experiences.  This tool takes keywords, location, and desired target and then goes off to compile a report coming back with a huge list of potential targets.  It takes a bit of trawling through, but everytime I have used it I have come back with a healthy list of link targets.

Google Alerts

Setting up Google alerts for all your keywords gives you a great chance to not only see where relevant articles are popping up, but can give you an insight into competitor strategy.  As most of the alerts are brand new articles, I usually insert the blog into my linkbuilding CMS with a note of the date and the article, and then I can propose a follow up article a few weeks later.

Competitor Link Analysis

A great way to find guest post blogs relevant to your niche is by looking at competitors back link profile.  If they have been using a heavy guest blogging strategy you will be presented with a nice list of blogs that accept posts that couldn’t be anymore relevant.  We use Linkdex for this, which makes it even easier as they will break down links by site type for you!

MyBlogGuest

MyBlogGuest is a community of blog owners and authors coming together to help each other find what they are after.  The sites are mainly US which isn’t so good for us Brits, but never the less I have got some really nice links through finding people on there.  The amount of success will vary depending on what niche you are working in, and I wouldn’t rely on it totally as many of the sites are taking huge numbers of guest posts all the time but if you are selective it can be a nice place to pick up a few good guest post opps.

BloggerLinkUp

BloggerLinkUp is a similar concept to MyBlogGuest only a lot more simplified.  You sign up and 3 times a week you get an email straight to your inbox with a list of blog owners looking for posts, and authors looking to place some content.  I don’t find the quality of blogs as good as MyBlogGuest (for niches I am working in), and have only placed a couple of posts but for the 30 seconds it takes me to look at an email it is well worth being a part of.

FollowerWonk

Followerwonk is a great tool for finding influential Twitter uses to establish contact with and offers up some pretty deep features.  Even in it’s most simplest form, using it to search in author bio for keyword + blog always turns up a good number of leads for me, and direct access to their Twitter giving some useful information and easy outreach.

Google Blog Search

As I use advanced search so heavily I often overlook the value of blog search.  It is always getting better and is well worth chucking some keywords and some time at every so often.

So those are some of my favourite methods, and by using them I have managed to build some nice guest post links for a number of clients.  Hopefully this will give you some ideas and allow you to find some quality links!  I will write another post soon detailing how I classify all the guest blogs I have found, and the way in which we make it scalable for outreach.

Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.

They also mentioned a new system to improve local results saying: 

Improved local results. We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.

The effects were immediately noticeable with local results appearing more prominently in the SERP’s for big search terms and changing depending on location.  Kevin from SEOptimise did a write up on this here.  The thing that was personally interesting, was when I went into Linkdex and looked at the rank tracking for one of our clients:

#Winning

This is the rank tracking for “laser hair removal London”.  As you can see, on the same day Venice was implemented it jumped 7 places to a respectable position 5, and then further up to 4 in the SERP’s. As much as I would love to claim that amazing white-hat link building got these gains, looking at their back-link portfolio shows about 5 guest post links and a few directories over the last few weeks., It’s a relatively competitive keyword so it’s unlikely that anything other then an algorithm caused this sudden boost. The spike a couple of weeks earlier looks suspiciously like Google running an early test of the change.

So why is this important?  Venice or one of the other changes gave the site a good boost, so what? Looking at historic data, the site had always ranked around tenth for the term, but had never previously appeared in the local 7-box.  As a business and website, this was probably for two reasons:

• They are a small business competing in an competitive market, which is full of big businesses pursuing concerted link building campaigns.
• They are targeting London, but are about 5 miles outside the center; all the competitors are far more central.

It’s wasn’t all doom and gloom though, on the plus side:

• The on-site SEO is good.
• Although the link numbers are low in comparison, they have some good links.
• They’re otherwise relatively well optimised for local.

So back to the ranking change.  When you run the query “laser hair removal London”, with location set to London you get:

It had gone from nowhere in local to ranking position 2, which meant when Universal was triggered it was position 4 overall. The Linkdex data hides how large the move was by not distinguishing between the standard SERPS and local. Search Metrics showed that, prior to the appearance, the website had been in position 102 before – a massive jump. Meanwhile, the page in the standard SERPs that Linkdex had been monitoring had disappeared to be replaced by the local listing.. This disappearance of the organic page in the SERPs was true for all the local results on this page.  I thought that perhaps Google had removed any page that was associated with a top ranking local page from organic results.  However, after some research I found some pages that were ranking in the 7 box, and had the same page ranking in organic on page 2.  I have yet to find one on page 1 though, which makes me think Google is combining the results so there is no duplication between Places and Organic on the first page.  In effect the page that you have connected to the places page doesn’t get included in page 1 organic.

One change I was glad to see was that a site that had always ranked 2 in the local box because of an exact match domain, and central address (literally nothing else, the site was bare) had dropped considerably!  Gold star for Google!

Deeper Waters

I thought I would dig a bit deeper so I decided to run some queries and see if I could uncover some more information as to how Venice is acting on local and universal results.  I wanted to see if I could prove what had changed to cause such a dramatic change in local rankings.  I selected a number of queries, then ran them through Search Metrics and looked at the local, universal rankings for the week before February 29^th and comparing it to now.   I found 10 sites that had experienced a massive gain, and 10 that had a massive loss, and then looked at a number of factors that were taken from the David Mihm top 10 local ranking factors (and my own knowledge) to try and find a correlation.  My findings are outlined below:

Proximity to Centre

• As I knew North Wood Clinic had good local and always seemed to struggle due to proximity I immediately tested this.  I found some supportive evidence in an “electrician London” result that had experienced a huge local gain and was quite a way out of the city centre.  Unfortunately I also found a number of results that had experienced big wins that were already in the city centre.  It definitely had an impact, but perhaps wasn’t the massive, glaring single reason I was after.

Previous Organic Ranking

• I looked at how the sites had been ranking in organic for the selected keyword before 29^th Feb.  I had a thought that perhaps if they had been ranking well (or badly) Google had factored it into how they ranked in local.  I found most of the sites had lost out, were ranking very poorly in organic but then a lot of the winners were as well so it discounted this theory somewhat.

Local Search Ranking Factors

• I made a list of the top 10 from local factors referenced in David Mihm’s report.  I went througha all the winners and the losers noting which of the criteria they met in order to see if there was a pattern.  The main correlation were that 8 of the losers didn’t have a crawlabe address or local phone number on the page , where as all but one of the winners did.  That said, I have found it difficult to explain why the 2 that did had such a huge drop, I had an in depth look at their sites and nothing jumped out.

Reviews and Links

• I looked at reviews in order to gauge whether these had affected the big winners and losers.  This was only a skim job to see if there was any obvious correlation.  There wasn’t.  North Wood has only 3 reviews, and others with significantly more had been dropped down below it.  The same went with links, although I didn’t conduct a full back link profile, a look over Linkdex’s excellent link analysis didn’t show anything that jumped out and smacked me in the face.  

Random Observations

• A couple of other things to mention before I move on to my takeaways is this.  I saw some crazy, seemingly inexplicable local results during my searching.  I will be writing another post on this very soon.   The other point is that these changes could be a combination of factors, or another one of the 40 changes listed.  I just wanted to include the word gondola in my post title so chose to look at Venice.

Takeaways

Based on my very limited research there are a couple of things you can takeaway.  Obviously the Venice update has made local search more important then ever.  As well as the swapping of organic results, we have also noticed some big winners and losers in the 7 box (which probably isn’t actually anything to do with Venice).  Without having any conclusive evidence as to what exactly has caused these (and I expect it’s a whole host of reasons) I can safely sit on the fence and say that being well optimised for local is paying off even more.  Following advice for local best practice seems to be working better then ever (groundbreaking advice right there)!  Making sure you have a crawlable address and local phone number on your local landing page seems extremely important, and in North Woods case being a bit out of the city centre has become less of a hindrance.

Another takeaway from all of this is the apparent merge of results on page 1.  There is no more doubling up on if the page associated to the places page was also ranking top 10 before.  The strategy here is to do as a few others have, and get yourself special local pages to attach to the places page, and then get another page for the search term ranking well by building links/having appropriate content on it.

I realise my research throughout this article has been very limited.  In an ideal world I would like to run hundreds of tests to see if I could find some concrete evidence but I simply don’t have the time.  Still I hope you have found this interesting and its given you a few things to consider at least.   If anyone wanted to ask any further questions, or is up for collaborating on some further tests either comment or tweet me @Andy_Cooney!

Note:  As I was uploading this I noticed a very comprehensive evaluation of local ranking factors here.  They actually ran more then 10 queries and seemed to use some madness called science to work out how important local ranking factors are.  Well worth learning from.

Turns out, that post was kind of prophetic in a way that I hadn’t quite expected. Here’s a snapshot of our search traffic terms since I wrote that post on the Red or Blue Digital blog:

So…that was unexpected. “Lego” is now our top trafficked keyword to the site, above even the universally dreaded “not provided”. I can’t quite work out why we should be getting this traffic, as we don’t rank anywhere for the term at the moment. However, there was a spike around January, so it is possible we suddenly, and relatively inexplicably, ranked somewhere at that time, and then dropped.

So the moral of the story is…well I’m not sure. I found this little anomaly pretty entertaining, and have been meaning to write a short post about it ever since I first noticed it. I suppose the lesson to be learned is that you can sometimes pick up traffic to your site or blog from unexpected sources just by making a bit of well-optimised content around a massively trafficked keyword! Also: NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF LEGO.

“What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO. We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.” *

*Quote taken from SERoundtable article.

So what is he actually saying here, and how concerned should SEO’s be about it.  The first point about trying “level the playing field a bit” is interesting.  Google’s goal (aside from world domination) is to provide the best possible results for every search that could ever occur, but in reality it’s usually the sites with the best SEO that are dominating the rankings.  In some cases this is great because the great SEO that these sites have directly correlates with some great content on the site.  In a lot of other cases it is simply because they have the biggest budget or best SEO team, so naturally a lot of great content is buried in the SERP’s so from what Matt is saying here, Google is making advances to stop this being the case so much.

So what will the changes be?

Of course I can only speculate as to what the actual changes will be.  The fact that he mentions relevancy, and reciprocal links makes a nod towards large scale link exchanges losing value.  Sites with a massive percentage of reciprocal links could start to see a drop, as could people who have built links from sites that are in no way relevant to their site.  The problem with either one of these  is,as Paul Madden said on twitter earlier, that a manipulative individual could pay for a load of these links to be pointed at a competitors site and Google would devalue it.  I would lean more towards them discounting these links rather then penalising them for this reason.

In regards to keywords, I think sites that are trying way to hard to rank for too many keywords without the relevant content might get stung.  If GoogleBot has got a bit smarter and can see when there are keywords for the sake of keywords on a page then sites might have to rethink how their content is written.

So who should be worried?

I think the only people who are going to be worried about these changes are those doing bad SEO.  If you have a natural link profile, with good content on your site you probably won’t be negatively effected.  Like all changes to the algorithm those with a good SEO strategy are the least worried.  Also remember all my predictions are 100% guess work, the only people who know what is going to happen is the team at Google.  Paul Madden actually tweeted another nice point earlier when he said the SEO world is guilty of overanalysing.  Rather then speculate over something we ultimately don’t know, we should get on with trying to build rankings for our clients.  And on that note I will get back to work.

This is important as it helps personalise the search result, adding a human edge to the website and increasing click-through-rate. If implemented properly, you’ll see the below in the search results:

So how can you do it?

First of all you will need a Google+ account with a photo. Secondly you will need to link your article posts to your Google+ profile. To do this you will need to add two tags to the head of your website’s source code.

The first looks like this:

<a href=”https://plus.google.com/108061065454579782550” REL=”ME”>James Finlayson</a>

You have to enter the tag into your webpages ‘About’ page or – if you’re writing on a multi-author blog – the user’s profile page. You substite your own Google+ URL link which can be found by clicking on the icon in the top right hand corner and profile. What this does is inform Google that the author of all this content is the same person as the Google+ profile.

If you are a WordPress user, the link can also be added very easily. Firstly, log in to the back-end, then click on to ‘menus’, which is under the ‘appearance tab’. Then click on the screen options in the top right hand corner. A series of tick boxes will then fold-out;  tick the box ‘Link Relationship (XFN)’

Once this is done you are able to edit your menu options to include ‘author’ which will cause the rel=author tag to be added to it.

After this is completed you will need to add an author box at the bottom of each blog post – most themes support this automatically. If you need to do it manually, then edit posts.php adding, after the end of the post: ‘’Written by <a rel=”author” href=”../authors/JFinlayson”>James Finlayson</a>’’.

To prevent just anyone doing this, you need to link your Google profile back to any websites you write on. You can do this by going into your profile editor and adding a link under the links section back to your site.  The links back and forth should look a bit like this:

Why you need to implement it?

Well there are many positives to implement the ‘rel=author’ tag. Whilst the tag doesn’t yet affect search rankings yet, it may do so in the near future as Google continues to push the integration of its social media with its other services. As well as this the likelihood that someone will click on your search is much higher as consumers love to put a visual face to an article. This increases the personality behind your brand and, in doing so, makes your brand more human.

• It’s easy to implement
• A higher CTR, tests have shown an increase in 38% CTR with an Author Rank addition
• It boosts your company’s credibility
• Author attribution helps people recognise your content more easily
• Reduces the risk of your work becoming plagiarised
• When people read an article they like they want to learn more about you
• People will psychologically feel as though they are dealing with a human being, who they ask questions and theories

After you have successfully added the tags, it may take up to a week before you begin to see your Google+ image next to your searches, so be patient.