WDTalk

Reverse SEO? Does it mean – trying to get listed lower in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS)? Of course not! Reverse SEO is interpreted in a couple of ways though.

Some say it’s about – researching your competitor’s SEO efforts – analyzing their title tags, meta description, PR, links to their domain and links to a URL found via a search query for specific keywords or keyword phrases. Does their site have quality, relevant and compelling content? Is it updated regularly? Are they using social media? In short, what separates their sites from your site? This method of SEO emcompasses attempting to emulate success. I use this method daily to analyze what others are doing to rank high in the search engines.

Others believe that – reverse SEO means trying to do damage control. What happens when a search query returns results that are not advantageous to your firm or organization (or you)? Believe it or not, there are companies that will perform online damage control – by attempting to push those unfavorable results down to page 2, 3 or 4 where they won’t be so readily noticed. How? By posting a ton of positive reviews to counter anything negative.

Another take on reverse SEO is – to just not do any SEO. The angle here is to design sites for the users and not for the search engines. This sounds great in theory, but viewing patterns very clearly indicate that you need to be on page one, and the closer to number one, the better.

I read a ton of articles, threads and posts from SEO experts everyday. Why?

Because just like everyone else, I want to increase sales online. For years, SEO practitioners preached a mix of link this and content that, or touted banner advertisements or AdSense ads. Since the onset of search engines, techniques to outwit them to rank higher in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) have basically evolved beyond simply obtaining backlinks, providing lots of content or optimizing keywords and meta tags.

FREE versus Paid Traffic

Organic traffic is traffic you receive from free click-throughs in search engines (not sponsored) – the higher your site ranks, the more traffic you receive, thus higher revenues on the backside. Paid traffic would be traffic obtained via banner ads or programs like AdSense. Bottom line to increase profits – reduce overhead – increase productivity. So how do you make your website more productive without forking out a ton of money on paid advertising?

Google Algorithms Put to the Test
For years, I’ve been reading about how complex Google algorithms were. We’ve witnessed a number of cycles or shifts in how Google analyzes and ranks sites, but if you tie in Google’s history of acquisitions and free tools, their core emphasis (today) lies within three (3) PRIMARY variables – all driven by human activity. Much like Bing, they’ve transitioned from being a search engine to being a decision engine.

So What is this ‘FREE Traffic” Big Secret?
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen the phrase, “Content is King” or “Content is King Kong.” I’ve said this myself in a past life. The real KING today is Organic Search Traffic!! Think about this for a second. What does paid advertising get you – a position on a page with the expectation that being seen at the top of that page will result in a click through to your site.

Viewing Patterns Take Center Stage
Numerous studies have been conducted by leading SEO firms to determine viewing patterns and projected click through patterns over the years. Going back to the early 2000’s, banner advertising worked very well, drawing over a 30% click through rate. When banner advertising fell out of favor, the trend evolved to link building, but a ton of black hat SEO strategies forced Google to revise their algorithms.

So what do today’s viewing patterns tell us about paid ads?
Very simply that organic traffic is growing and paid is declining. Here’s a question for you – when you do a search query on Google, do you read the sponsored ads at the top of the page or the ads on the side bar? Studies have shown that those viewers who do read them is on the decline. Consider this – sponsored ads were only drawing 5% of the click throughs in their prime, and even less now. So where are the other 95% of the click throughs occurring?

The answer is in Google’s organic listings – the FREE ones!! Banner Ads don’t even register and sponsored ads aren’t much better. Currently, paid listings that appear above the organic listings receive only 2 to 3 percent of the available clicks with those on the side receiving a paltry 1 to 2 percent. To verify this, you simply have to use Google’s own internal Traffic Estimator Tool.

Organic Traffic is KING
Not only is organic traffic FREE, but it also receives the majority of all traffic. The first organic listing receives over 40% of the available traffic, while the second, or number two, receives nearly 20%. Let’s say you’re running an AdWords campaign and you’re getting 1000 clicks per day (multiply those clicks by your cost per click – OUCH). Compare that to number one in Google’s organic listing at 40%. Your paid 1000 clicks translate to 8000 FREE organic clicks. And viewing patterns indicate the first ten organic search positions outperform even the number 1 paid ad on the same page. OK, you’re saying that you know it’s important to rank high in SERPS, so how is this a big secret?

What does Google look at today to rank organic listings?
While Google doesn’t divulge their algorithms publicly, they do post recommendations and guidance. We do know they look at content, which is essentially the domain name itself, certain meta tags and so. They still look at links, both inbound and outbound, assigning authority to those links. And this should be no surprise – they look at the human element – activity. This consists of traffic, RSS subscriptions, comments on blogs, updates to your site and so on.

How do today’s algorithms differ from years past?

I think we all remember PageRank. Up until about 2003, Google counted the number of inbound links to a site, applied a ranking score to each (based on quality), and the sites with the most quality inbound links ranked highest.

When Google introduced Adsense, a shift to content ensued. The focus was to create a ton of pages with content – then place Google’s ads on them. When visitors to those websites clicked thru on the ads, Google split the ad revenue with the site owners. What happened?  For a few years, content worked well, but the SERPS began to be overrun with spam. Another shift was incorporated to regain relevancy, going back to a more robust emphasis on links. This was quickly countered with SEO tactics like link wheels, irrelevant comments on do-follow blogs, robotic article rewrites that were posted everywhere linking back to a main website.

Enter Google Current Algorithms
Essentially, Google now rewards activity and freshness, meaning more relevance is given to sites that routinely update their content. They still factor in link juice and volume of relevant content, but human activity (social media) is the prevailing trend across all industries.

Over the years, Google has invested heavily in technology that measures HUMAN ACTIVITY. Think about all the programs and businesses they’ve invested in, many that never turned one penny in profit. Why? As long as SEO practitioners could automate strategies to exploit Google’s algorithms, their rankings and AdSense revenue was diluted.

Going Forward
Consider this – with the addition of FeedBurner, Chrome, Google Analytics, Google’s Toolbar and on and on, user statistics are being sent to Google on a massive scale. Google’s algorithms are updated frequently though – with primary emphasis on traffic. Note – avoid automated programs. Google has garnered a wealth of information about human trends and SEO tactics over the years, and can see through most attempts to exploit their services.

It’s best to create organic websites that are highly relevant to the service or products you offer, then create activity on that site by embracing social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc), incorporating a do-follow blog (moderating comments and disabling spam links), then tweak your site as needed.

If done properly, your website will not (realistically) leap to number one overnight, but will rise in Google’s rankings over the first 30 to 90 days. Back links and quality content are still important, but my recommendation is to emphasize ACTIVITY.

As you search the Internet for squeeze page strategies, remember that the rules (Google algorithms) were changed recently, and many once successful one page squeeze pages fell by the wayside. But before I get ahead of myself, what exactly are squeeze pages?

By definition – Once upon a time, squeeze pages were defined as a single web page with the sole purpose of capturing information for follow-up marketing. The ultimate goal of the page was to obtain the visitor’s email address. Why? To build a list of highly targeted prospects (seems fairly simple).

Times have changed – To avoid penalties and drops in SERPS (search engine results pages), squeeze pages are now being designed across multiple pages, each with relevant content. The goal however remains the same – to build a list that affords you the opportunity to present visitors with multiple sales messages over time, develop relationships, and cross-sell other products.

Conversion Strategies – will vary depending on your goal. The best conversion strategies focus on benefits and solutions. These can be either short or long term. Success stories work well, as do freebies – but we need to backtrack again. With the onslaught of spam, convincing anyone to give up their email address means your sales copy has to be compelling and you have to convey trust.

The Trust Factor – is huge, and I contend it’s the most important element of your site. Prospects buy from sales reps, businesses and organizations they know, like and TRUST. So how can you demonstrate trust online?

• Add Your Picture
• Add Your Signature
• Proofread your copy for spelling and grammatical structure
• Have a Privacy Policy
• Use Color Psychology

Successful Squeeze Pages – often use a short video and opt in form at the very top of the home page for visitors who want to sign up immediately, followed by content that essentially explains benefits and solutions in greater detail – with another opt in form at the bottom.

Google makes over 400 changes to their algorithms each year, and this year is no different. If you’re performing SEO for your own site or as a professional service for your clients, it’s essential that you keep up with these changes.

Fortunately, Google routinely publishes a list of these changes on it’s  Official Search Blog, but it seems as though no one knows that this blog exists. I’m always seeing threads on web hosting forums where members ask about Google’s Panda updates, and the variety of replies astounds me.

Below is a list of changes they listed for February 2012

• More coverage for related searches. [launch codename “Fuzhou”] This launch brings in a new data source to help generate the “Searches related to” section, increasing coverage significantly so the feature will appear for more queries. This section contains search queries that can help you refine what you’re searching for.
• Tweak to categorizer for expanded sitelinks. [launch codename “Snippy”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] This improvement adjusts a signal we use to try and identify duplicate snippets. We were applying a categorizer that wasn’t performing well for our expanded sitelinks, so we’ve stopped applying the categorizer in those cases. The result is more relevant sitelinks.
• Less duplication in expanded sitelinks. [launch codename “thanksgiving”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] We’ve adjusted signals to reduce duplication in the snippets forexpanded sitelinks. Now we generate relevant snippets based more on the page content and less on the query.
• More consistent thumbnail sizes on results page. We’ve adjusted the thumbnail size for most image content appearing on the results page, providing a more consistent experience across result types, and also across mobile and tablet. The new sizes apply to rich snippet results for recipes and applications, movie posters, shopping results, book results, news results and more.
• More locally relevant predictions in YouTube. [project codename “Suggest”] We’ve improved the ranking for predictions in YouTube to provide more locally relevant queries. For example, for the query [lady gaga in ] performed on the US version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in times square], but for the same search performed on the Indian version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in India].
• More accurate detection of official pages. [launch codename “WRE”] We’ve made an adjustment to how we detect official pages to make more accurate identifications. The result is that many pages that were previously misidentified as official will no longer be.
• Refreshed per-URL country information. [Launch codename “longdew”, project codename “country-id data refresh”] We updated the country associations for URLs to use more recent data.
• Expand the size of our images index in Universal Search. [launch codename “terra”, project codename “Images Universal”] We launched a change to expand the corpus of results for which we show images in Universal Search. This is especially helpful to give more relevant images on a larger set of searches.
• Minor tuning of autocomplete policy algorithms. [project codename “Suggest”] We have a narrow set of policies for autocomplete for offensive and inappropriate terms. This improvement continues to refine the algorithms we use to implement these policies.
• “Site:” query update [launch codename “Semicolon”, project codename “Dice”] This change improves the ranking for queries using the “site:” operator by increasing the diversity of results.
• Improved detection for SafeSearch in Image Search. [launch codename "Michandro", project codename “SafeSearch”] This change improves our signals for detecting adult content in Image Search, aligning the signals more closely with the signals we use for our other search results.
• Interval based history tracking for indexing. [project codename “Intervals”] This improvement changes the signals we use in document tracking algorithms.
• Improvements to foreign language synonyms. [launch codename “floating context synonyms”, project codename “Synonyms”] This change applies an improvement we previously launched for English to all other languages. The net impact is that you’ll more often find relevant pages that include synonyms for your query terms.
• Disabling two old fresh query classifiers. [launch codename “Mango”, project codename “Freshness”] As search evolves and new signals and classifiers are applied to rank search results, sometimes old algorithms get outdated. This improvement disables two old classifiers related to query freshness.
• More organized search results for Google Korea. [launch codename “smoothieking”, project codename “Sokoban4”] This significant improvement to search in Korea better organizes the search results into sections for news, blogs and homepages.
• Fresher images. [launch codename “tumeric”] We’ve adjusted our signals for surfacing fresh images. Now we can more often surface fresh images when they appear on the web.
• Update to the Google bar. [project codename “Kennedy”] We continue to iterate in our efforts to deliver a beautifully simple experience across Google products, and as part of that this month we made further adjustments to the Google bar. The biggest change is that we’ve replaced the drop-down Google menu in the November redesign with a consistent and expanded set of links running across the top of the page.
• Adding three new languages to classifier related to error pages. [launch codename "PNI", project codename "Soft404"] We have signals designed to detect crypto 404 pages (also known as “soft 404s”), pages that return valid text to a browser but the text only contain error messages, such as “Page not found.” It’s rare that a user will be looking for such a page, so it’s important we be able to detect them. This change extends a particular classifier to Portuguese, Dutch and Italian.
• Improvements to travel-related searches. [launch codename “nesehorn”] We’ve made improvements to triggering for a variety of flight-related search queries. These changes improve the user experience for our Flight Search feature with users getting more accurate flight results.
• Data refresh for related searches signal. [launch codename “Chicago”, project codename “Related Search”] One of the many signals we look at to generate the “Searches related to” section is the queries users type in succession. If users very often search for [apple] right after [banana], that’s a sign the two might be related. This update refreshes the model we use to generate these refinements, leading to more relevant queries to try.
• International launch of shopping rich snippets. [project codename “rich snippets”]Shopping rich snippets help you more quickly identify which sites are likely to have the most relevant product for your needs, highlighting product prices, availability, ratings and review counts. This month we expanded shopping rich snippets globally (they were previously only available in the US, Japan and Germany).
• Improvements to Korean spelling. This launch improves spelling corrections when the user performs a Korean query in the wrong keyboard mode (also known as an “IME”, or input method editor). Specifically, this change helps users who mistakenly enter Hangul queries in Latin mode or vice-versa.
• Improvements to freshness. [launch codename “iotfreshweb”, project codename “Freshness”] We’ve applied new signals which help us surface fresh content in our results even more quickly than before.
• Web History in 20 new countries. With Web History, you can browse and search over your search history and webpages you’ve visited. You will also get personalized search results that are more relevant to you, based on what you’ve searched for and which sites you’ve visited in the past. In order to deliver more relevant and personalized search results, we’ve launched Web History in Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Morocco, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Estonia, Kuwait, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Nigeria, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Bosnia and Herzegowina, Azerbaijan, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Republic of Moldova, and Ghana. Web History is turned on only for people who have a Google Account and previously enabled Web History.
• Improved snippets for video channels. Some search results are links to channels with many different videos, whether on mtv.com, Hulu or YouTube. We’ve had a feature for a while now that displays snippets for these results including direct links to the videos in the channel, and this improvement increases quality and expands coverage of these rich “decorated” snippets. We’ve also made some improvements to our backends used to generate the snippets.
• 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.
• Improvements to English spell correction. [launch codename “Kamehameha”] This change improves spelling correction quality in English, especially for rare queries, by making one of our scoring functions more accurate.
• Improvements to coverage of News Universal. [launch codename “final destination”] We’ve fixed a bug that caused News Universal results not to appear in cases when our testing indicates they’d be very useful.
• Consolidation of signals for spiking topics. [launch codename “news deserving score”, project codename “Freshness”] We use a number of signals to detect when a new topic is spiking in popularity. This change consolidates some of the signals so we can rely on signals we can compute in realtime, rather than signals that need to be processed offline. This eliminates redundancy in our systems and helps to ensure we can continue to detect spiking topics as quickly as possible.
• Better triggering for Turkish weather search feature. [launch codename “hava”] We’ve tuned the signals we use to decide when to present Turkish users with the weather search feature. The result is that we’re able to provide our users with the weather forecast right on the results page with more frequency and accuracy.
• Visual refresh to account settings page. We completed a visual refresh of the account settings page, making the page more consistent with the rest of our constantly evolving design.
• Panda update. This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web.
• Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.
• SafeSearch update. We have updated how we deal with adult content, making it more accurate and robust. Now, irrelevant adult content is less likely to show up for many queries.
• Spam update. In the process of investigating some potential spam, we found and fixed some weaknesses in our spam protections.
• 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.

Have you ever wondered why Google loves WordPress sites, and why they seem to get indexed faster than other sites?

Even Alexa shows greater movement in traffic trends for new WordPress sites. New sites are currently ranked at about 21,000,000 on Alexa (not good). Put just a little traffic on a WordPress site though, and it’ll jump to the one million mark in a couple of weeks.

What helps generate that traffic? The answer is the blog’s ability to PING.  Its an incredibly powerful tool.

Whenever a blog pings, multiple background processes happen which get your blog quickly indexed by search engines as well as bringing traffic from many other sources.

There are tons of blog directories and ping services which accept pings. When you add a new post on your blog, it sends a ping to all these websites saying, “Hey, I’ve just added a new post in my blog”.

The downside is that every time you edit a post on WordPress, it pings that revision (by default) – and that can get you banned from ping services (not good).

How do you prevent this? Download and activate MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer 3.0. It’s been tested through the current version of WordPress. This plugin will manage your pings so you won’t get banned.

The ping services we use on WDTalk are listed below. Once you’ve activated the plugin, simply insert the following services and save – and you’re off to the races.

http://1470.net/api/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rpc.blogcatalog.com/
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.wasalive.com/ping/
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://rpc.odiogo.com/ping/

What is Google looking for – pretty simply, results that are helpful (in the user’s locale or their peer groups). When their raters are researching queries and landing pages, they want to find useful relevant content.

We all hear about Google’s algorithms, but what’s the big picture? In the basic framework of rating a site, if your landing page is off topic or contains useless content, you won’t score many bonus points (and maybe lots of negative points).

If you site is deemed to be of little benefit to very few or no one, or gets flagged as “maybe” spam (or straight up spam), has porn or malicious content – don’t expect to rank very high in SERPS (search engine results pages).

Google doesn’t just look at the query. They look at the intent of the query. The same query in different locations can mean very different things. A great example would be American versus UK football.

Sometimes, their interpretation of a query will be very clear, but more often than not, it’ll fall into a general or common interpretation. What they look for is intent, in terms of action, information or navigation.

Tip: If a query’s intent is determined to be directed to your official (desktop) website, but instead takes the user to your mobile site, that’s not good.

Google has changed its algorithms – over 200 times recently, in an effort to return the most relevant results to search queries. Link farms are in their cross-hairs now. In the headlines, J.C. Penny and Forbes.com were both penalized, the former for using paid links to advertise their website and the latter for selling links.

What worked well in the past – will not necessarily work well going forward, especially if you used the following methods to increase the ranking of your website:

• Keyword stuffing
• Fully automated, unrelated and centralized link farms
• Cloaking
• Pages loaded with irrelevant content
• Hidden text
• Made for AdSense sites that consist entirely of scraped content
• Hidden links
• False redirects
• Link wheels

Who wins with this most recently tweak – of Google’s algorithms?

• First, Google wins because HUGE advertising revenues are at stake, and this makes them more relevant and marketable.
• Searchers win because they’ll receive more relevant results to their search queries.
• Ethical website owners win because they’ll receive a more targeted audience open to the products and services they offer.

What should you focus on going forward? On page and off page SEO optimization remain as primary ingredients in any marketing strategy. Optimize your existing web pages, title tags, H1 tags, meta descriptions, keywords and content. Follow that with steady growth of organic (high quality) inbound links from relevant sites.

Google’s take on link farms

Your site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity. However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results. Examples of link schemes can include:

• Links intended to manipulate PageRank
• Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
• Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)
• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank

The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it. Before making any single decision, you should ask yourself the question: Is this going to be beneficial for my page’s visitors?

It is not only the number of links you have pointing to your site that matters, but also the quality and relevance of those links. Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the buzzing blogger community can be an excellent place to generate interest.