Since the inception by Google of the Penguin Analysis, the bar level regarding the content and quality of search engine optimisation, has been raised a significant extent. The frustration experienced by millions of searchers on the Internet, trying to find the correct information, has been and will continue to be greatly reduced.  However, for many website owners who have been including irrelevant content, particularly relating to keywords, to direct traffic to their sites, the ‘Penguin’ could prove a formidable factor. It could be to the extent whereby, for acceptance on the top search engines, a site will require the expertise of a professional SEO agency, to ensure the SEO copywriting meets the determined levels of content and presentation. Site engineering optimization, is not merely, a quickly constructed piece of advertising to attract visitors to your website. It should be designed to provide a combination of various elements related to the site. SEO copywriters have the knowledge and ability to create influencing factors that provides your website with high-quality content, relevant to the product or service offered by the site. An SEO agency could, in association with a digital marketing agency, ensure your website earns visibility on primary search engines, by the provision of the best answers to queries from searchers. Depending on whether the programming and layout of your website has been completed correctly, the primary factor is to make your site rank significantly on the search engines. SEO copywriters have the capabilities to provide the content and particularly the right keywords to achieve this. As neither photographs nor graphics are visible on search engines, SEO copywriting relating to the text quality is critical. The top ranking websites will be those that are well written, with content that is professional, relevant, with well organised keywords. Search engine spiders and users are attracted by significant text. If your website is poorly written, not updated or critically not relevant to the subject, your site is neither search engine, nor user friendly! SEO copywriters, utilise influencing words or phrases that searchers could use, relative to your site.  The missions of the primary search engines such as Google, are to make searching its database a helpful, effective experience. It should be realised, poor content is also a reflection on the search engine, which provoked the now highly regarded Penguin Analysis.

Yesterday I went to the first ionSearch Search Marketing Conference in Leeds, where I attended a mix of both speaker talks and expert panel sessions. Overall it was a really great first conference with some really interesting debate and discussion around current and future industry issues and best practice. I attended a total of 10 talks and expert panels and have summed up what I believe to be the main take aways from each session below, with a few common themes coming out: With Panda and the recent updates to Google’s linking algorithm exact match anchor text can be risky if over used, with the context of the surrounding content now more important. The lines between SEO and Social are blending further and social should be part of all content strategies Blogger outreach and relationship building is becoming more key than ever to link building efforts Expert Panel: SEO Content Strategies Use social media to look for up-coming trends and plan your content development around them Measure closely the link between rankings and traffic to judge content success. Plan your distribution first, focusing content writing on what network, sites or blogs find the most useful. In boring industries look to humanise content to add context. look at building content around more interesting subjects and relate that back to your original site. Expert Panel: SEO for eCommerce Users buy at product level, develop your SEO campaigns to start from product level up. E.g. Product Detail > Sub Category > Category > Home Page. Look at what competitors are targeting that you are not for opportunities. Error management (404’s, 505’s, 301s) is important for site and link stabilisation, use tools such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider, Google Web Master Tools & Xenu to identify them. Out of stock messages naturally lead to high bounce rates, look at how you can capitalise on these pages with related products and data capture for pre-order. Don’t ignore customer demographics take time to drive meaning from Google Analysis and your CRM system for content ideas. Think about page titles from a gender perspective and match them to your market. Men like bold statements, women like answers to questions. Look at improving the CTR of your SERP’s using schema.org mark up Reviews are becoming more and more key to SERP CTR You have to work for reviews, make sure you chase your customers for them, rotating through different review sites. Video is cheaper to produce than you think and can improve both conversion and dwell time, both of which are metrics that Google is focusing on. Google shopping ranks price with delivery included Reviews also play a big influence in Google Shopping, further showing their growing influence. Ideally look to update sitemaps as often as possible, daily if achivable. Google can deal with pagination, but ideally look to implement ether rel="next"/"prev" or using rel canonical tags to point back to a ‘view all’ page. Don’t share any bespoke product text with affiliates, use manufacture text. Physical stores should always have a dedicated page rather than any dynamic pages, making sure you mark-up addresses with schema.org. Speaker Talk (Tim Grice): Link Building in Competitive Industries Bad link are those which are low in quality, un-relevant and contain large amounts of exact match anchor text. Look at turning your link profile into a graph, comparing the number of links to the quality and see where the most links are held, looking for unnatural spikes. Target landing pages not keywords, focusing on between 10-15 keywords per page. Look to mix anchor text and don’t have exact match links that make up more than 15% of your back link profile. Social signal can be a catalyst to justify link quality in Google’s eyes. When creating content for both social sharing and linking bear in mind these can be two different types of people, target those who both share and link for the best results. ‘Fresh Rank’ is becoming more important, links in old ‘High PR’ page may not be as effective as they once were; look to develop links in fresh content. Competitor Analysis, rather than just matching competitor link profiles look to discover why competitors are gaining links. Develop a content production process such as that used at Branded3 (See slide 6 here) . Develop content for the network, website & blogger rather than for your-self, going beyond the ‘build it and they will come’ approach. Find your social influences and develop brand champions. Speaker Talk (Jon Alderson): Symantec HTML Schema.org is helping blend the lines between the information web and data web where extrapolating data from written information has previously been difficult. Use html mark up to maximise Google’s ability read your website e.g. Marking up an address for restaurant using schema.org. Think about what your mark-up tells Google about your content? are using it correctly? Speaker Talk (Roland Dunn): SearchBots! Don’t ignore your server logs, they can tell where GoogleBot is visiting on your website. Segment and graph the data to understand if GoogleBot is getting lost on your website and not hitting the pages important to your SEO strategy. Compare GoogleBot’s visits to other user visits to see if they differ and identify if your structure or navigation is causing Google to visits areas your uses don’t. Speaker Talk (Ralph Tegtmeier, AKA Fantomaster): Turning Black into White - Auto Content Generation for SEO. Automatically generated content has now advanced to the point where you can’t distinguish between it and real content. Depending on the hat your wearing, high quality machine written copy can provide real benefits for scalable content production. If your providing readable, usable, non-duplicated content for sites where thin content is an issue is it really black hat? Speaker Talk (Dave Snyder): Content Marketing in a Post Pander World. The content matters as much as anchor text now, if not more. Authorship can help add authority to content. Look at how words relate semantically. Create content with depth, that doesn’t just mean words: mix content with pictures, video and audio etc… Think about how you curate your content, look at where you are going to published it Many social network offer adverts for promoting your content e.g. StumbleUpon, or Reddit offer cheap but effective content advertising channels. Expert Panel: Creative Link Building Reverse engineer your link strategy, think about where you’re going to get them and who’s going to give them to you, then develop your content around that purpose. Understand your audience and what they share or link to. Use Google ImageSearch to find where you infographic has been syndicated to optimise those links Build outreach networks and relationships for syndicating content, keep these relationships strong. Use services like myBlogGuest to find guest posters for your own sites to develop brand advocates. Paid guest post still happen but if you guest post is of a high enough quality bloggers will accept for nothing Create a link building process, covering industry review, blue sky ideas, relationship building and promotion. Find out your clients pain threshold e.g. how risky or controversial can your link building ideas be? The more pain the more likely you are to get links. Track news and social and try, riding the back of those waves to drive traffic and links from your content. Link your creative to KPI’s e.g. traffic, sales, links Audit your company’s assets, what can you do with them from a link prospective. Create websites or content around debate that has some form of relevance. Create blog posts for un-live products to drive buzz and links, using rel=canonical to transfer link juice once live. For small agencies doing link building focus on developing blogger outreach networks, using tools such as MyBlogGuest, Exact match anchor text is dead, the context of content surrounding links now carries equal weight Expert Panel: How to use Twitter, Facebook & Google+ for SEO When doing social for SEO your dealing with real people and as such are representing the brand and must understand the responsibilities that go with it. Your content needs to be on point with your brand making sure your discussing the same subjects that are being talked about socially and in other channels. Measure KPI’s from what social activities e.g. ranks etc… Schedule content/social updates around events and weekends, allowing you to be re-active to comments/retweets etc… A StickyEyes study showed the ranking correlation between social and SERP’s is strong with sites that have high keyword positions often have a solid social footprint. Consider moving brands onto Google+ as Google integrates more services with it, potentially even Google Maps. Expert Panel: Future Proof Your SEO Holistic SEO is future proofing, making sure you cover all the angles from social & structure to content production and html mark up. Eliminate bad links from the backline profile where possible. Prime link elimination efforts should focus on removing duplicate content and scraper conten.t Audit client backlink profiles as part of proposals to avoid dealing with legacy SEO issues. Social vs. Links profile should look natural. Building links without social mentions could be risky and result in unnatural link vs social footprints which Google may penalise.

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