Why Links Are Content Too
The age old debate among search engine optimisers is whether or not links or content is more important to achieve high search engine rankings. The “content is king” crowd says what you put on your pages is infinitely more important. The “links are grand” crowd says it’s all about link building. Who is right?
Most SEOs, thankfully, fall somewhere in the middle of those two extremes. That is, they practice a little bit of both.
I’ve always believed that links were themselves a form of content. Off-page content, but content. And if you’ll bear with me a little bit, I’ll explain why.
Most link builders will tell you that what is important about inbound links to your website are:
- Anchor text
- Relevance to the page linking to
- Age of the link
- Age of the linking domain
- Authority of the page linked from
- Diversity of links in your portfolio
And that’s just to name a few. But if you look at all of those criteria, they each have something to do with content.
Anchor text is verbiage. That’s content. Relevance is content on the page being linked to. Link age is indirectly related to content. Domain age is likewise related to content. Page authority is a reference to content. And link diversity is a reference to the diversity of the content from which pages are linked to. It’s all about content.
Content is really a catch-all word to describe anything you publish online. Whether it has links or not. Photos are content. Videos are content. Apps are content. And so are links.
When it comes to ranking your web pages for search traffic, don’t categorize your content in terms of “content” and “links.” Make all your elements work together for the common good.
Is Google In Violation Of Antitrust?
It’s possible that we might see at least one country within the next couple of weeks start an antitrust investigation into Google over its ranking practices. The primary concern will be Google+.
A group of engineers at Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace have gone public with a bookmarklet that allows users to see what Google’s web results would be without the influence of Google+. The claim is that Google boosts its own social network content above the content of its competition and that this is unfair. The bookmarklet is based on pretty solid data.
It’s hard to argue with it, either. When you see that certain celebrities have hundreds of thousands of Twitter and Facebook users and share content on those services daily but have few, if any, Google+ users where they haven’t shared any updates in months and their Google+ profile appears at the top of the search results while their Twitter and Facebook profiles are buried, well, what do you make of that?
Furthermore, if you were a searcher and you were looking for those celebrities, which social profile would you want to find?
This doesn’t look good for Google. It certainly doesn’t look good for searchers. Even if you are a Google+ user, when you search for information, don’t you want to find the best and most relevant information for your search query rather than the information that the search engine itself prefers that you find?
I predict that even if an antitrust lawsuit isn’t on the way Google will still make changes to its algorithm to bury some of those Google+ profiles that don’t deserve top rankings. If they don’t, they should.
What do you think? Is this good search policy or harmful?
What Social Search Really Means
For the past 13 years, search has largely been based two things: on-page content and links. To varying degrees, these two elements (on-page and off-page) have driven the lion’s share of search results for every business that has attempted to earn its place in the Google rankings.
At certain times, Google has emphasized the on-page ranking factors more prominently. At other times, links and other off-page factors have been more important. All of that is changing. Has already changed.
We discussed Search plus Your World. Now we’re discussing it again.
Billed as “social search,” a term that is not exactly new, Search plus Your World is Google’s attempt to control link spam. What it means to every business online that is fighting to achieve higher search engine rankings is that you must now trade your link value for social value. Inbound links will no longer be the Holy Grail of search engine optimisation.
Instead, social ranking factors will begin to play more prominently and boost content to higher search engine rankings.
What I’m talking about specifically are +1s, shares and reshares, and other significant social signals. Google+ could very well kill social metric tools like Klout.
There is really only one thing you can count on when it comes to search engine marketing. Everything changes. And that’s a constant state of being. You can expect search to be different one year from now than it is today.
With that in mind, Google has raised the stakes in the social media wars. It’s almost inevitable now that Facebook will have to try to figure out a way to gain a foothold in search. Whether that’s deepening its relationship with Bing or developing its own search engine to compete with Google plus Your World, that’s a big question.
I’m curious to hear your thoughts. Are links dead? Are they as important as they used to be? Will social signals rule search engine optimisation from here on out?
Google+, Blogger, And Your Ayrshire Business
Google+ is in a constant state of development. The latest development is an annotation in the SERPs that lets searchers know how many +1s a particular page of content has received locally.
In other words, if your business has received 100 +1s and 50 of those are from people in and around Ayrshire, Scotland, then when someone searches for information related to your business and your content appears in the search result, the searcher could very well see how many people in the same geographic vicinity has +1ed the content. So how does that help you?
It helps in a couple of ways. First, people are more likely to +1 content if they perceive it as already valuable. And if there are plenty of +1s, then it will be perceived as valuable.
But another way it can help your Ayrshire business is it serves as a useful metric for your local effectiveness.
Another development is Google is disclosing who shares content via Blogger. That could make Blogger a much more valuable platform for sharing and posting content.
Both of these developments indicate that Google is serious about making Google+ relevant. It could soon be much more valuable than people are giving it credit for being.
Google’s Algorithm Changes – How Do They Do It?
It’s nice to read about Google’s algorithm changes, and it’s even nicer to get a well-written in-depth analysis of them when they happen. But how often do you get that information directly from Google itself?
Google makes about 500 different algorithm changes every year. Some of them affect you, but many of them don’t. The question for online marketers, however, is What are the thinking processes that go behind each algorithm change? The below video answers that question and it answers it from the mouths of Google’s own top-level employees.
Why 85% Of Your Budget Should Be SEM
If you’re like most website owners, then you’ve likely noticed that 85% of your website traffic is coming from the search engines – probably Google and Bing. Given that information, you’d get your best marketing bang for your buck if you allocate 85% of your budget toward search engine marketing activities and the rest of it to non-SEM activities.
Search engine marketing is typically defined as pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimisation, and content creation. Non-SEM is everything else (social media, display advertising, etc.).
So how do you get that 85/15 mix?
Let’s assume your online marketing budget is $1,000. That means $850 of that should go into content creation and SEO activities. One of the best uses of that money is often a blog. You can usually hire a ghostwriter to write your blog and still have money left over for other content activities. You can also purchase articles and other website content. You may even be able to squeeze some PPC into that.
Now what do you do with the other $150? For $150, you can often have a basic social media strategy and you could even have an iPhone app designed for you, but you might have to think outside the box on budgeting ($150 X 10 = 10 months of your budget, for instance).
If you are in doubt about how to spend your Internet marketing budget, consult with a professional and see where it leads you.
The Hidden Danger Of Adsense On Commercial Sites
There are a lot of commercial websites around that include Adsense ad units as a form of secondary income. One of the biggest examples of this is eBay. Check any of their listings and you will see Adsense ad units below each list of available products. For some businesses, it does draw secondary income, which makes sense. If a visitor is not interested in your product, then you may as well make a few pennies as they leave.
If you are paying for traffic, however, you need to be very careful you are not supplying competitors with cheap sales. A click from Adwords pay-per-click ad may cost you 90p, but if that visitor spots a competitor’s ad that has the same product for a cheaper price, they may be tempted to click through. In many cases, to prevent click arbitrage, the ad on your site will be of lower quality, thus only drawing perhaps 20p in Adsense revenue.
For your business, that’s a net loss of 70p. For your competitors, they have received traffic that’s cheap and highly targeted. Not only that, that visitor has seen your site and your product and can now compare prices and quality. If you’re lucky, they may come back and buy from you – in most cases, they will stay and buy the cheaper product from your competitor.
It is a challenging situation for a number of reasons. First, you don’t know what ads are being shown to individual visitors. Secondly, if you prevent ads that are competitive in nature, then you will significantly drop the conversion rate, perhaps to a point of making those Adsense ads redundant in terms of income generation.
Adsense can generate a secondary income for some businesses, however, you do need to keep a careful watch on your traffic to be sure you are not costing yourself business.
Will Google Continue To Dominate Pay-Per-Click Advertising?
Google’s Adwords has been the number one pay-per-click advertising option for many years. They are not the only players with Yahoo! and many of the smaller search engines also running successful pay-per-click programs. With Facebook starting to overrun Google in many countries, will they become a better pay-per-click advertiser to deal with?
At present, it is hard to see Facebook giving Google too much grief in that department. Facebook has a number of negatives that it needs to address before it will become a serious player in the market. One area where Google and the other search engines beat Facebook hands down is in contextual placement of ads.
Facebook limits filtering of advertisements to age, location, and interests. The search engine models filter advertising based on the context within a page. If Facebook does introduce contextual advertising, and they can get the targeting precise, then it may well become a real player in the market.
Where Google may find more competition is through Yahoo!’s merger with Bing. Yahoo! has long been a preferred advertising channel for some niches, especially when it comes to shopping and specific products. If the Yahoo!-Bing merger starts to eat into Google’s traffic, then you may well see an increase in interest in their pay-per-click option.
Google has the benefit of millions of publishers worldwide and a reasonably good algorithm for placing contextual ads. While not perfect, there are millions of fairly happy users of Google’s pay-per-click model. Facebook is not in a position to challenge, even with the large traffic flows it receives. Will it change into the future? Who knows, but until they accept that contextual advertising is the way forward – they won’t.
Do You Really Need Adwords As Part Of Your Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing means many things to many different people. There is no doubt that paid search is an integral part of search engine marketing and with Google’s Adwords taking the lion’s share of the market, it’s often seen as the go-to place. But do you have to?
On a video post published on WebProNews, Christine Churchill suggests that, to be successful, marketers need to have a presence on Google. I am assuming from the general conversation that this is related to Adwords. To be fair, Adwords does command around 70% of the market with Yahoo!/Bing taking the remainder. There are a lot of little players around, but their shares are tiny really in comparison.
To a certain extent, she is right, but like all generalities, there are a lot of exceptions. There are some niches where Yahoo! has, in the past, outperformed Adwords by a big margin. The hard part was testing to see if you were in one of those niches. Those niches where Yahoo! did well, the ROI was often so slim through Adwords that many marketers concentrated solely on Yahoo!, discontinuing their Adwords campaigns.
In all search engine marketing programs, the key is to test, test, then test again, and to continually test your campaigns. To say this works and that doesn’t is often too simplistic since what works this week/month/today may not work next week/month/tomorrow. Testing, analyzing, and tweaking is at the heart of any marketing campaign if you are going to get the best results.
Yes, you can succeed without Google Adwords. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you stop all activities. It often pays to return on a regular basis to see whether or not there have been any changes. It’s all part of the testing routine to get the best value for your marketing money.
So Google’s Being Naughty Again
There’s not a month goes by that someone somewhere hasn’t got a major beef with Google. This time, it’s a little closer to home: The European Union, and their complaint (or is it really Microsoft’s?) is that Google is pressurizing advertising publishers and not allowing free trade. They also claim that Google is suppressing search results from its competitors.
Let’s see – free trade is in the eye of the beholder. Exclusive deals are commonplace in almost every marketplace and normally follow the line of “deal with me alone and get a better rate” – it’s the publisher’s choice. If they don’t want exclusivity, then they don’t take the offer. I’m not saying Google is using this line, but no one is saying any different either.
The problem with the EU chasing Google in this way, especially at the behest of Microsoft (who are normally on the EUs receiving end), is that for most businesses, nothing will change. Search marketing will still cost the same and search results will pretty much stay the same. If the EU do prove a case against Google, it will be a fine that feels like a mild slap – then it’s back to business as usual – and that’s if they do find a problem.
Believe it or not, Google stands as the one big lesson on internet marketing life. You are never going to please everyone, no matter how big you are, how important you are, or how hard you try. But imagine one thing, where would we be now without Google?