SEO Blog

I’ve received another interesting email enquiring about the value of social networking plug-ins for site content. The truth is, in pure SEO terms, that the benefits are negligible.

A few ‘likes’ on Facebook and a retweet or two aren’t going to propel you up the search rankings unfortunately. Social networking sites pass on little or no inherent link value, not simply because they are nofollowed, but also because most also block search spiders. So why would I feature a ShareThis button on this blog?

Well, not everything in SEO is about going after the obvious gain. If I approach Site A to get a link and they oblige, then that is going to provide a decent boost – particularly if Site A is related to my industry and has a strong link profile itself. Unfortunately, it’s not always that simple.
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It’s all well and good telling somebody that using keywords within their site content is good, but this generally creates more questions than it does provide answers. How many keywords should each page have? Should you use variations? Where should they be included?

The issue with keywords is that if you get it wrong, it can be costly. If you think it’s a good idea to cram as many on one page as is humanly possible, then you’re wrong. Similarly, if you’re of the opinion that a couple scattered here and there will work a charm, SEO probably isn’t for you.
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Over the weekend, you may have noticed that some of your pages have received a little helping hand in the PageRank department. Although, if you’re anything like me, it will have had little or no impact on anything that you’re doing.

PageRank is a strength metric, nothing more. Google gives you a number from 0 – 10 based on a number of factors – most notable of which is your inbound link strength. The toolbar figure hadn’t been updated (universally at least – there were a few small updates) since April 2010. Therefore, all those figures you have been looking at since then could well be an absolute nonsense right now.

But the good news, if it can be deemed as such, is that we can now get a more accurate reading for many sites. I say ‘many’ purely because it is not yet confirmed that this is a total update or just a widespread one – the joys of Google silence. But whatever the outcome, it shouldn’t have much of an impact on what you’re doing in SEO.
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There’s a popular school of thought that would suggest you shouldn’t continue using the same anchor text for all your inbound links, particularly when sourcing a high number simultaneously. This certainly has a fair amount of credence. However, you don’t want to start confusing the search engines when it comes to defining the context of a particular page. So what’s the answer?

Well, the simplest answer is that you need to mix it up a little. Pages tend to rank for a number of keywords, one of which is the primary term. When you’re assigning anchor text you want to make sure that a good solid percentage are for this main keyword, context is king after all, but you shouldn’t be afraid to try other things too.
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Big aspirations and big budgets don’t always necessarily go hand in hand. Sometimes your online dreams simply can’t be achieved on a shoestring. Certainly not instantly at any rate.

What you really need is to prioritise your work. Find out where your strengths are, what will bring the highest early yields (both in terms of search engine rankings and financial income) and make sure that you get ever second or penny to count.

Anybody can throw money at an SEO company and hope for the best. But this won’t necessarily get you where you want to be and it certainly won’t be the cheapest option.
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If you’re an SEO agency offering dodgy promises, the last thing you want to do is shine a light on anything that exposes just how empty they are. Unfortunately this advice clearly hasn’t been heeded by all.

I was amused to read about just one such company recently on Search Engine Roundtable. In their post, Don’t Force Google’s Hand, Especially If Your [SIC] Sketchy, there’s an abridged overview of a tit-for-tat exchange between Matt Cutts and the alleged owner of a company offering guarantees on Google – even claiming to have some form of affiliation with the search engine.

Matt Cutts, if you’re not already aware, is the head of the Web Spam team at Google and therefore spends much of his time educating SEOs on what is and isn’t acceptable optimisation. He’s a pretty well-known figurehead and reasonably influential as a result. So not exactly a good man to get into an argument with, particularly if you’re a dodgy SEO.
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When it comes to SEO benefit, videos aren’t exactly ideal. Google can’t just watch it and glean information from the content as it would a written piece. In fact the only optimised aspect of a video is often the title. However, this doesn’t mean that you should simply abandon it out of hand.

In the past I’ve written a great deal about link bait, which is essentially creating content with the purpose of getting a little link love from your visitors [see: Fishing for Link Bait]. In this regard, videos can be extremely good.

Sometimes people get bored of reading. There’s so much content out there on the Internet, who realistically has the time to sift through it all to find something interesting? With this firmly in mind, why would you continue to follow the same well-trodden path when it comes to your on-site content?
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If you’re fed up with writing articles and sending them off to the same old submission sites and want to try something a little different, why not consider guest blogging?

It’s such a painfully simple concept, but one that can really get results. All you have to do is find blogs within your industry or specialist area that accept guest submissions, contact them to see if they would consider an article from yourself and if so, get writing.

If it seems a little counter-productive writing content for somebody else’s site, think again. Whilst you may not be benefiting from hosting content on your own domain, there are so many benefits besides that this issue pales into insignificance. Let’s take a look at a few of these:
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Following on from yesterday’s post on content vs. Links for a new website I received an interesting question from regular contributor, Chad Walls, relating to the amount of content required on each page. Well, there’s no one size fits all answer to this, but let’s take a quick look.

First and foremost you need to have a page set up for each product and category on the site. This will provide you with the basic framework from which to optimise. The more pages you have, the more terms you can target; however, that doesn’t mean that you should get carried away. So How many words does each page need?

An SEO purist will probably tell you that a page needs at least 300 words on it. There’s an element of truth to this too. The more content that you have on a page, the more context that you can create for your primary keyword. However, by writing expansive content you run a number of risks.
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The ultimate catch 22 for any new website owner is understanding where exactly you should start. You know that both content and links are incredibly important, but which should you focus on first?

Assuming you don’t have endless resources as well as a whole team of link builders and copywriters on your side, it’s often a case of focusing on one before the other. So which is it to be?

Breaking it down into the component parts, links provide the strength that gain rankings and content gives your pages the context that allows search engines to understand what you’re targeting. So in this sense, it’s something of a chicken and egg situation – both are needed and it’s not easy to work out which should come first.
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