I sat down this morning to write a proposal for a perspective new 
client. It just struck me in how much I had to change to define our business and how to redefine SEO. SEO really has mutated and no longer can it be compartmentalized as it has been in the past.
When I redid the website, I started to look for graphics that might help people understand what we do in a quick way. I found this raw graphic, put my own spin on it and I think it sums it up.
I think as marketers we talk a lot about SEO. There was a a time when you could hire a web designer and have a site built. Then go add some keywords to your page and it would rank. I still have some old sites of ours that do just that. SEO now is dependent on a great web site design and I don’t mean what the site looks likes.
Beyond that regardless if your a small company or a large corporation you have to decide on your brand. I think when we started here I wanted to help people. Our logo’s are designed to let people know what our niche is and what we do. Web Hosting for Idiots continues to be a HUGE brand for us. It conveys what we are do and who we help. When I added the SEO411 brand a few years ago, people immediately knew what we did and know we are leaders in the SEO industry. Google is now looking for those signals. If you have a strong brand, you will appear in multiple places. You may see the company helping community members, just as we did after 911 and Hurricane Katrina, but on a small scale, we help our clients with Blood Drives, School Supplies and other community outreach events. All of that helps develop a brand. No matter how small all business owners need to worry about this.
Then there is social media. I always say most people don’t know how to do Social. I personally thing Williams-Sonoma is one of the best at an effective social media campaign. Some day I’ll talk just about this, but for now know that Social Media is not about hanging cats and happy TGIF posts. Videos also need to be used and will become more and more important. (just put this here because its a prediction)
And lastly, always Google yourself. See how the world views your company or your brand. You may be surprised but if you don’t have a strong presence, you need to make sure you have strong Reputation Management programs.
I know, I know. I’ve been falling behind here. Well in part it was because I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and so far it hasn’t. We were all were warned and advised that the flip to mobile was going to be harmful to sites if you didn’t heed the warning and adjust your sites ahead of time.
Well so far one week in and I know its just one week in, all our rankings have gone up regardless of if the sites were responsive, a one page mobile site or not mobile friendly at all. To me that was all good news. I know more peril is on the horizon of course, but for now in week one, I’m very happy to report the state of our clients is great.
We made a lot of changes to our servers, to help improve how fast Google can grab a page. There were some pre-caching mechanisms that we put in place and they have helped dramatically. Over all our customer benefitted from our SEO expertise, something most web hosts don’t have.
We for years have all know that bad web hosting has a bad effect on web sites. Slightly off topic, I went to Pubcon last week in Austin and one of the points iI kept hearing over and over was how bad or cheap web hosting has a very negative impact on SEO and even more so web search. They recommended dedicated servers and companies that provide those services. I found that interesting because we’ve run our stuff here much differently, we run everything here as if it was dedicated and we often do things like tweek the servers so that they meet the Google standards, in this case a 200 millisecond load time. Yes you read that right. So that’s what we did here. I cant find any of our competitors that have that standard.
Anyway back on topic…
One thing that I did notice is that the breadcrumb trail seems to have taken on a new prominence. Google is showing more and more of that type information in both the desktop SERPs as wells as the mobile ones. Most of all it seems that Google is still showing the most correct listing far more than if the site is what they deem mobile friendly. Our non mobile friendly sites that had strong breadcrumbs, seemed to actually move up and even outpace ‘mobile-friendly’ sites. In one case, i have the top 2 spots and the first mobile friendly site is #3.
I have samples quite a few terms off multiple platforms and the ranking seem to be consistent. If you built your site with the great content and the user experience in mind, it seems that you came out of Mobligeddon, Mobilepocolyse or what ever you want to call it just fine.
My class topic (HWCOC Class) for today covered SEO mistakes. I see them so often that I thought it would be a good idea to put them out in a way that people can use them and start to avoid issues.
1. Website and Navigation Errors –
- People are using a subdomain of a big corporation and that doesn’t work well ever.
- Pages with great content can’t be navigated to.
- Robots files are blocked and/or the site can’t be spidered right
2. Words
- Not using the right words on the page for the page to rank
- Not identifying the proper keyword for the page to rank
3. Link Building vs. Marketing
- Forcing link building and ending up with a bad link profile
- Not using good Marketing Techniques and Channels to build links
- Not posting good content
- Be more brand-minded and not just link minded
- Interact more in your community
4. Titles and Descriptions
- Don’t forget to put a title on every page
- Make titles compelling (sorta like a headline)
- Write strong descriptions so Google may pick it up and improve your click-through
5. Use Webmaster Tools etal
- Learn about the tools that keep your site in good health
- Webmaster Tools
- Screaming Frog
- Stay up-to-date with Google Guidelines
6. Avoid Gimmicks
- Don’t spin content
- Don’t Steal Content
- Don’t Register 50 domains with keywords
- Don’t Create Microsites, (which was a gimmick)
- Don’t Cloak your page, or whats on your page
- Don’t go all-in on a trend (infinite scroll sites)
7. Keyword Stuffing and Anchor Text
- Don’t stuff keywords into your content
- Don’t over optimize a page adding anchor text on keywords everywhere
- Do this where it makes sense or it helps the reader
- There is no longer a formula like the old days
This is just the highlight reel of what to do and not to do. SEO mistakes are very common and some can be quite costly. Link Schemes, Bad content and bad execution on running the website can be lethal to having a good SEO presence.
Yesterday I was in a meeting and was asked about this concept of newsjacking as a ‘new’ way to gain traffic because your piggybacking yourself to hashtags and things that are trending, and building a Tag Cloud geared towards that. Well, I stopped and thought about this for a minute and looked over the paper that I was given, and my answer was this:
I think we have all been newsjacking for a long time if we’ve been writing content for our sites for any extended period of time. When we blog, like I am now, I think about what is in my most recent vision, often I use customer experiences or questions that I receive as my initial framework. I think about what they have asked me and is this something that is relevant to the present day, and most times it is. I’ve told my classes that there is often a treasure trove of blog or content ideas just sitting in our mailboxes.
I find at times my blog posts are a little longer than what I would advise others to do, but at the same time, if the page is relevant, easy to read and informative, I don’t have an issue with length because my post is for the benefit of my reader and not the benefit of SEO credit. And as one that teaches SEO, this is probably one of the hardest things in the world to get across to people. Say what you need to say. Then figure out how you can use it for SEO credit and adjust keywords from there.
So from a newsjacking perspective, I venture to say every article that comes across your desk and you have an opinion on can probably be formulated into a blog post. After all, that’s what your blog should be, your opinion and your experience. When you do that, you inherently capture the trend and can bolt your site to the side of the hashtag.
So in the conversation yesterday with the client, this was the take-away. Be yourself when commenting on news items and don’t do it solely for the SEO value of it. Do it to build great content that has value and that people want to read. Everything else will follow. And really, this is nothing different than what we’ve all already been doing if we’ve been running our sites properly. Its just a fancy name for it.
