The Hierarchy of Web Presence Optimization

Much has changed in the SEO landscape and the practice of search optimization over the past year – from the ongoing Panda and Freshness updates to the introduction of Google+ and Search Plus Your World. Then Google started encrypting a vast majority of keywords referred from organic search, and now Google has indicated that websites guilty of “over optimization” are on their radar.

If you’re a marketer you must be thinking, “How do I know if we are maximizing our SEO investment given all the changes Google has introduced?” If you’re an SEO or marketing consultant, you’re probably asking yourself, “How do I sell my services and prove value to my clients?”

Although a lot has changed, two aspects of SEO remain certain:

1. SEO isn't dead, nor will it die in the foreseeable future. Billions of marketing dollars are invested every year into “being found” organically in the search engines and this trend will continue. With more than a billion Google searches performed worldwide every day, SEO isn’t going away.
2. The way we perform and measure SEO has to change and is changing. Blatantly building out backlinks and optimizing on-site content isn't enough. Measuring only rank and position isn’t enough either. Today organic search is about fresh, relevant, findable, optimized content that generates leads.

A New Theory: The Hierarchy of Web Presence Optimization

The idea of building out a hierarchy of web presence optimization (WPO) comes from the belief that basic fundamentals are required before organic search success can be achieved. The purpose is to visualize how the execution of SEO and the services required to perform SEO have evolved due to Google’s algorithm enhancements, and to maximize your SEO efforts and investment.

There are five different tiers in The Hierarchy of Web Presence Optimization:

1. Technical SEO Fundamentals & Foundation

If you're serious about being found in Google and optimizing your entire web presence, it's important to start with a strong baseline or foundation. A strong base layer will accelerate your efforts in the higher tiers by ensuring your web presence has a strong infrastructure, can be effectively indexed, and is identifiable.

Technical SEO Fundamentals & Foundation accounts for approximately 10 percent of the SEO efforts often consisting of one-time tasks such as:

• Setting up robots.txt, 401 redirects, sitemap, title tags, etc.
• Configuration and cross referencing of a blog presence and social accounts including: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, Google+ and any other industry-specific social media or sharing sites.
• Implementation of social sharing icons throughout the main web and blog sites.
• Backlinking from respected industry and local directories.
• Setting up Google Places listings.
• Understanding web page load time and server details that may affect rankings.

This isn't an exhaustive list and is bound to change as Google continues to tweak its algorithm to serve up the most relevant search results.

2. Keyword and Competitive Research

At the core of every organic search strategy are keywords. Coincidentally, at the core of Google’s organic search algorithm is relevance for keywords. There will be constant competition for every keyword you are trying to rank for – guaranteed.

The Keyword and Competitive Research tier is an on-going process that will expand and evolve as you venture deeper into your organic optimization strategy. It is important to understand that the keyword phrases your prospects use will change as they progress through the buying cycle.

Approximately 25 percent of your SEO efforts should be focused on continually understanding the keyword phrases that drive targeted traffic and conversions.

Before advancing any further up the WPO pyramid, become very focused on your keywords and your competition for those keywords. To get started, determine a shortlist of (two to four) unbranded keyword phrases your prospects are actually searching for to find the products and services you are selling. Only after you develop a keyword list should you scale your efforts into the next tier.

3. Optimized Content Marketing Plan

Content marketing is experiencing a lot of buzz lately, and it should be! Content marketing isn't new, but “optimized content marketing” is.

Optimized content marketing is at the intersection of organic search optimization, social media, all the recent Google algorithm changes, and content marketing. Planning and creating your optimized content accounts for the majority of your SEO efforts - approximately 55 percent.

The Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs interviewed 1,092 B2B marketers in August 2011 and found that 60 percent plan to increase their content marketing budgets in 2012. Also, 40 percent are using SEO rankings as a measurement of the success of their content marketing campaigns.

So what would the impact be to your organic search rankings, impressions and clickthroughs if you optimized your next major piece of content for the keyword discovered in the previous tier?

An optimized content marketing plan addresses four major Google algorithm changes from the past year:

• Freshness Updates – Google favors fresh, relevant content in the form of press releases, blogs, case studies, news and events.
• Panda Updates – Optimized content distributed to valid, reliable sources will assist in building strong backlinks that are less likely to be penalized.
• Google+ – Social networks and social media are about relationships and relationships prove relevance. Google’s social network, Google+, is indeed factored into its search algorithm. Build your Google+ presence and circles and start sharing your content today.
• Search Plus Your World – Most importantly, when you share your content publicly in Google+ it has a broader reach and a longer life than any other social network including Facebook and Twitter.

Additionally, an optimized content marketing plan will provide you with sustenance for other lead generation techniques such as paid search campaigns (i.e. Google AdWords and banner ads) and email marketing. And you need content to be successful at generating social signals, which is the fourth tier.

4. Publish, Socialize & Share Content

Now that you have effective, optimized content that your prospects want, you need to tell them about it. Distributing your content effectively and frequently should occupy about 5 percent of your SEO effort. Here’s where to publish your content:

• Corporate website and blog site
• If a blog post, then to industry specific blog sites that your prospects will visit
• If a press release, then through a newswire such as PRWeb or Marketwire
• Social channels including: LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Facebook (with Twitter the content should be tweeted multiple times over a specified period of time)
• Subscribers and client base via email marketing

The distribution of your optimized content marketing is key because it accomplishes the following goals for your SEO campaign:

• Backlink building
• Indexing by Google so it can ultimately be found
• Social signals creation (Tweets, Retweets, Likes, Shares, Views)
• Beginnings of a sales conversation with prospects

5. Measure & Improve

In order to improve a content marketing campaign for further execution, not only must you master the previous tiers, but you must measure, benchmark, tweak and repeat. This is the final and ultimate tier – the remaining 5 percent of your SEO effort.

But how do you measure the success of an SEO campaign? Compare the following metrics to other marketing campaigns (i.e., Google AdWords, email marketing, banner ads):

• Impressions
• Click-throughs
• Conversions
• Social signals
• Backlinks
• Keyword rank

Conclusion

As organic optimization and the services required to “get found” evolve, so too must our tools, techniques and tactics. The Hierarchy of Web Presence Optimization can be used by marketers to guide their in-house SEO efforts, as well as by agencies in their sales conversations and implementation processes.

source:-http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2169476/The-Hierarchy-of-Web-Presence-Optimization?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

4 SEO Recommendations to Target the Long Tail

DigitalMarketingContest2012

While the practice of search engine optimization (SEO) is constantly evolving, one thing remains unchanged: clients always want to rank for a priority list of marquee, highly competitive terms. That's understandable. What is problematic is that they usually base their conclusions around how successful their SEO program is by how well they rank for those highly competitive terms.

While it should be the goal of any website to rank highly for competitive terms, the real gauge of targeted SEO success is overall/total search traffic. Some would argue success is determined by conversions and revenue, but many of the factors that contribute to conversions fall outside the scope of SEO (messaging, competitive pricing, page design, and layout, etc.).

One interesting thing that I have seen working with enterprise companies, usually the lion's share of search traffic comes from "long tail" traffic and not from "fat head" keywords. This is true even when the company ranks well for the “fat head” terms. Therefore, I thought it would be valuable to briefly define what long tail traffic is, explain why it is so important, and detail a couple techniques that may help you increase your long tail traffic.

What is Long Tail Search Traffic?

Rather than beat a dead horse, let me quote Ian Lurie, who offers a good, succinct definition of long tail search traffic:

"Specific, niche search phrases, usually more than 2 words in length, that offer a low competition, low search volume and high searcher intent."

Lurie’s article goes into a lot of detail about what the long tail is.

Why is Long Tail Search Traffic so Important

My favorite story that illustrates the concept is about one of the sub-brands of a former clients. This client sold software. They had a well-recognized name for their software that was different than their company name (for the purposes of this article, we’ll call it Dive Bomber Software).

This Dive Bomber software was one of many different software products they produced. So in evaluating which software titles were receiving the most traffic and should be prioritized within the context of our campaign, we analyzed the total monthly traffic generated by each of the software titles.

The phrase “Dive Bomber software” only generated about 300 users a month. Not very impressive compared to other titles. However, when we analyzed the long tail permutations of Dive Bomber software, (e.g., “Dive Bomber software version 1.3”), we found that there were more than 20,000 related searches a month! That obviously changed our perspective on how important Dive Bomber software was.

The same trend is evident when analyzing the traffic patterns of our other enterprise clients, many of whom have significant rankings for highly competitive words. Even with the advent of instant search, auto-fill, spell correction, and other mechanisms that had an effect on reducing the number of long tail searches, the majority of keyword traffic for most of my clients (for both brand and non-brand related searches) are based on long tail permutations of their targeted keywords. This is why targeting long tail traffic is so important.

So with that understanding, let's discuss some SEO practices that can effectively help target the long tail.

1. Understand the Keyword Landscape

Be aware of the common long tail permutations. Understanding the most popular permutations of your competitive keywords, as well as common patterns people use, helps you to optimize around those keywords and patterns.

Using your own analytics data, PPC data, internal search data, competitive intelligence and tools like Google AdWords Keyword Tool and Wordtracker to define your keyword landscape is a good first step. Understanding patterns can be important.

For example, if you sell T-Shirts and you see that there is some search traffic around "red t shirts", it stands to reason that you would also optimize around all of the other colors that you sell. It may warrant creating a page about “Red T Shirts” if you have the inventory to support that kind of a page.

Alternatively, you may find that just adding the different color names to your high ranking page about T-shirts does the trick. In many cases, adding long tail keyword permutations to body copy of a page that ranks highly for a fat head term can produce significant results. It just depends on how competitive the long tail permutations are.

2. Create Meaningful, Descriptive Page Titles

I have never been a fan of page titles that are limited to 65 characters in length. While it's true that only the first 65 characters will be displayed in search results, it is equally true that keywords found after the 65th character will be recognized and counted in the ranking algorithms of major search engines.

Therefore, if I place less important words (long tail permutations for example) after the 65th character with the understanding that I need to capture the users attention in those first 65 characters, I am able to target more keyword permutations as well as give the search engines more information about what the page is really about.

As long as the page titles read well and convey appropriate and relevant information, they are useful for both users and engines. I typically make my page titles about 8 to 13 words, ensure that they read intelligently and rarely ever use the same word more than once. Using this method, I have never been flagged in Google Webmaster Tools for having too long of a title (nor I have been flagged for having too short of a title).

Here are some more tips on how to write title tags.

3. Infuse Your Content & Internal Links With Keyword Variations

Whatever long tail keyword permutations you want to target need to exist in the content of the page that you want ranked for those permutations. Additionally, it's wise to vary the internal link text that points to any given page.

Including a variety of internal site links with different long tail keywords pointing to the page that targets those keywords is good practice. They should be linked from other pages on your site that are relevant to those specific long tail keywords.

Keep in mind that only the link text from the first link found in source code between any two pages is counted in Google's algorithm. Any pages that are linked to from your global navigation template won't benefit from these variations found in content because the global navigation links will usually be found first in the source code. It may still be worth doing however from a user experience perspective.

4. Leverage User Generated Content

Find creative ways to infuse your pages with user-generated content (comments, reviews, etc.). This type of content naturally targets long tail keyword permutations. Users typically will include many long tail variations as they make relevant comments about your page content.

User-generated content can be an amazing source of long tail keywords including model numbers, color variations, specific applications, or problem issues. And it helps to distinguish your content and makes it more valuable to users and engines.

Conclusion

These are some of the tactics that can help you successfully target long tail traffic. Hopefully they provide you with some actionable recommendations that will help you increase the amount of total targeted, organic search traffic to your projects.

Source:-http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2166510/4-SEO-Recommendations-to-Target-the-Long-Tail

SEO MOZ Launched Industry Survey of 2012

Seo Moz as you are aware of it, if not here are the link Seo Moz, is one of the most traffic generating sites for Seo related stuffs like videos, blogs, content etc. 

If you are interested in SEO, Social Media, Pay Per Click, Content marketing, Digital Marketing, then here are quit informatic for you.

Seo Moz has recently launched Industry Survey of 2012. This is a followup to their large 2010 study of 10,000 people in 90 countries.

When you have about 20 minutes to spare, you can take the 54 question survey here. It covers:

• Your work in the industry
• Questions for consultants, freelancers, and agencies
• Learning and improving Internet marketing skills
• Internet and inbound marketing scope and process
• Inbound marketing tools and tactics
• SEO tools and tactics
• Social media tools and tactics
• Predictions/opinions for Internet/inbound marketing

SEOmoz is also promising some prizes to a few lucky participants, including a 16GB Wifi iPad 3 and assorted gift certificates. Full rules here. 

“If you're able, a tweet, Google+ share, Facebook share, or blog post of your own would be incredibly appreciated,” according to SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin. “It's our goal to reach as many professionals as possible and share something truly remarkable from the data.”

for Digital Marketing Contest news visit my blog:- DigitalMarketingContest2012

sources:- seomoz.org