Most search engine optimization (SEO) agencies are now accepted as an integral part of their customers' wider marketing strategy -- and that's because it's increasingly obvious that SEO underpins every other online promotional tool.

In fact, my recent post "How to achieve excellence in joined-up marketing" showed how SEO can work with many other marketing tools in order to make marketing spend work even harder.

Despite this, some SEOs just don't get it. I was chatting to a young, bright, up-and-coming SEO at a conference recently about the strategy he was employing to boost an already-popular website.

He explained that he was writing some "keyword-heavy guides" for the site's pages, which interested me because he had no copywriting experience.

"Oh, it doesn't matter about the quality," he explained. "For this content, Google is the only customer."

Google is Never the Only Customer

Now, this guy isn't an employee at my company, so he didn't have to sit through the usual lecture I roll out at this point.

Suffice to say, in our industry, Google is never the only customer because it's humans who search, humans who visit the pages after they have been crawled by the spiders, and humans who use the content on those pages to form opinions on the company that supplied it.

It isn't impossible to create articles, guides, news stories, blog posts, and landing pages that are both useful to people and attractive to search engines. You just need skilled, informed writers with a firm grasp of SEO principles.

Google is Evolving

The most successful search engine in the world is so successful because it gives people want they want -- and they don't want keyword-stuffed garbage.

Yes, your website content needs to include relevant search terms because you need to show Google and other search engines that your page is relevant to the customer.

However, Google wants to give people useful information. Google's engineers are constantly working to refine its algorithm to make sure that's what it does.

If you want to future-proof your SEO strategy, you'll make sure your pages are useful and not just "optimized" by having a bunch of keywords crowbarred in.

You Risk Damaging Your Brand

There's a real danger that having poor quality copy on your website damages your brand in the eyes of any humans who stumble across it.

Your website is the equivalent to your shop front, your office reception, even your staff's attire in client meetings -- it's how customers form opinions of your brand.

Poor quality, keyword-stuffed, useless content lowers your brand's value in the eyes of the customer. The customer is the only customer -- not the search engine that brought them there.

Poor Copy Won't Convert

Whatever your website's purpose, poor quality content won't help you achieve it.

Whether you're trying to garner support for a cause, enhance brand engagement, or simply sell a service or product, your content needs to promote that end.

You can't have some copy on the site that you hope humans won't read. Those searchers who do land on it will quickly leave your site -- often with a lower opinion of your company than before.

You Won't Get Any Link Love

A low-quality, keyword-crammed guide on your site might attract the attention of the search engine spiders, but it won't get any humans particularly excited.

However, a well-written, informative industry guide could easily be tweeted, shared, and linked to. That encourages natural traffic and aids your website's optimization, so it's a double win.

Why bother with useless, brand-damaging, short-term copy when a little extra effort could bring you all these benefits?

See the full story at: www.searchenginewatch.com

For more information about S.E.O, e-commerce web site design, e-mail marketing, web site design service and website development, just visit us at www.7strategy.com

Search engine optimizers know what makes a good link. It looks like this -- cheap Viagra -- and it links through to your client's page selling Viagra.

But half the job of good SEO is also keeping on top of what the search engines look for when deciding what's important. The rules are always changing.

How Many Contextual Links Really Look 'Natural'?

There's a slight problem with doubting the importance of quality links with clear anchor text: they work. Without a doubt, the most important element of improving your natural search ranking is to get quality inbound links with anchor text that reflects your target keywords. SEO is still a numbers game at its heart -- do enough of the right things and you'll rank number one.

But this is where SEOs need to think about what the search engines see when they manually check what results are being served and decide if the best suppliers are ranking well, or if it's just the biggest spammers.

What Makes a Link Relevant, Important, and Contextual?

There are plenty of examples of links created by SEOs with great anchor text. But if a gas and electricity link near the bottom of an article on cooking is actually "contextual," then I'm the Pope.

The dictionary definition of "contextual" just to labor the point, means "relating to, dependent on, or using context."

Clearly, anchor text doesn't always make a link contextual. We've all seen examples of irrelevant articles with links at the bottom. This is bad practice, bad for the user, and ultimately bad for SEO.

A truly quality contextual link in real life may not even have specific anchor text. What's more important: a PR4 link with "laptops" as anchor text from a blog about cats, or a URL link from a PR4 website about laptops and the best places to buy them from?

You can certainly make the case that links with relevant anchor text are all that matters -- that "Google isn't actually as clever as you think" -- and the SERPs will back up that view in the vast majority of cases. But staying ahead of the curve is just as important as finding ways to enhance your ranking in the first place. If Google is planning an update to reduce the power of spammers, then this is where they should start.

My Recommendation

Monitor and manage the spread of URL versus keyword-rich links across your client's profile and don't be afraid of getting really high quality links that only use your client's URL.

At a broader level, it's also important to try and build a database of the most important and relevant sites, and even individuals in each sector you target. Try to genuinely engage with them, through direct contact, through affiliate and display deals, and by using other more creative methods (where appropriate) to build strong business relationships online that add value to users and provide SEO value for the engines.

See the full story at: www.searchenginewatch.com

For more information about S.E.O, e-commerce web site design, e-mail marketing, web site design service and website development, just visit us at www.7strategy.com 

Remember the days, a few years ago to be exact, when you would hear the common mantra, "We're managing Web 2.0 quite effectively. We have a blog." This was a part of the mentality of "everybody is doing it, so we sure don't want to fall behind."

While some didn't enact a blog on-site for logical reasons, such as the lack of time, resources, proper blog management, or the inability to provide proper content, others ran wild with content thrown to this site section in hopes of catching readers or a viral trend.

The simple fact is that your blog must accurately portray your company and site's message, as well as online intentions, to render it effective and to not cause damage to your search engine optimization (SEO) or other online efforts.

Most often, generating SEO-friendly, keyword-targeted blog posts will draw traffic to your site. These pages often rank well in long tail SERPs.

Also of benefit is the ability to promote blog posts in social bookmarking sites for low value but quick link credibility. With this, you can often captivate readers to the point of receiving inbound links.

However, while all of this seems great, if the content and inbound linking aren't geared toward the overall keyword theme of your site, then search engines will perceive your site as greatly flawed. Is your blog getting off topic? Let's look to Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics for some SEO considerations.

Keyword Significance

If much more site content is housed in your blog posts rather than in your site, this can often lead to an overall keyword relevance for terms other than the top keyword terms desired for the site. You don't want a search engine deciding to rank one of your site's top terms in the SERPs if the majority of the site doesn't speak to your intended keyword theme.

• See how this affects you: Take a moment to review your Google Webmaster Tools account. Using the Assess Your Site on The Web>>Keywords section, analyze the significance of keywords on your site. Are they your site's top terms? Is your overall site content delivering the right content?

Anatomy of Inbound Links Across the Site

In a perfect world, we want to have the greatest amount of links traveling to the home page and then see deep links which follow a hierarchical flow to deeper site pages. Too much attention to your blog and not your main site pages can leave you with blog pages holding more inbound links than important site pages and maybe even gasp! the home page.

Another consideration that must be met is the anchor text of links coming to your site. Are they relevant to your targeted keywords or related more to the random blog post titles you might have?

• See how this affects you: In Google Webmaster tools, analyze Your Site on the Web>>Links to your Site. When viewing link amounts by site page, where does your blog main page or posts sit in comparison to the home page and top-level pages of the site? Is there a deep linking hierarchical flow, or are there more links to the blog section than the home page? Next, within this page, look at the most frequently used anchor text of inbound links. Do they match your targeted keywords?

How Blog Visitors Digested Your Content

This can help you gain a better understanding of how on- or off-topic your blog content can be with the rest of your site and the goals of your site.

• See how this affects you: In Google Analytics, drill down in the Top Content section to filter only visits from /blog (or the name of your blog directory) to assess some key factors. What is the bounce rate overall of organic visitors to the blog section of the site? Is this percentage higher than 60 percent? How many pages per visit? Even with amazing calls to action and proper blog main navigation you still won't pull wanting readers into the rest of your site if it's completely irrelevant to the blog post page they began with.

Assess Your Goal Conversions

What percentage of visits performed a desired action? This information lets you ultimately decide, if not for accurate link building, draw of quality site visits, or a branding effort, what your blog is doing for you. A rogue blog will show up throughout your site analytics, whether it's increasing your overall bounce rate, exit rate, or decreasing your time on site, pages per visit, or simply clouding your ability to gauge the effectiveness of your organic efforts by filling your data with irrelevant keyword referrals and organic landing pages.

While I've tried my best to scare the hell out of you, for the most part the above will likely affect smaller sites instead of large sites. Larger sites usually have a vast amount of links to top site pages as well as a large amount of content to pages outside of the blog section to counter against an overpowering site blog.

Regardless of site size, it's still imperative that you realize the goals and intentions of your blog and not let it take over your site for all the wrong reasons.

See the full story at: www.searchenginewatch.com

For more information about S.E.O, e-commerce web site design, e-mail marketing, web site design service and website development, just visit us at www.7strategy.com 

This question plagues many publishers. They know they need to compete, and it's a dog-eat-dog world. However, they also know that the search engines provide guidelines for what they consider acceptable practices, and if you violate their guidelines they reserve the right to downgrade the rankings of your site, or even remove it from the index.

You want to be as aggressive as you can, but you don't want to be too aggressive, so to speak. So where is the dividing line?

The answer happens to be my favorite answer to all search engine optimization (SEO) questions: It depends. Not very satisfactory perhaps, but definitely accurate.

However, there is a way to do some analysis and get a sense for what you can and can't do. Fair warning, this post represents my speculation on the topic, and I can't declaratively state that the speculation is accurate.

The Basics

Search engines use hundreds of signals to clue them in on how to rank a given web page. One thing a search engine does is break down segments of different markets to understand typical behavior in each market. In other words, to help it decide how to rank a site in a particular market segment (for example, sites about vitamins) the search engines look at other sites in that same segment to examine their behavior.

It's quite possible that they use this information to decide what represents spammy behavior in a given market.

An Example

Consider an issue that used to be the subject of much discussion, keyword density. Crudely measured, you can think of the number of times a particular keyword phrase is used divided by the total number of phrases of the same length on a page. SEOs don't speak that much about keyword density any more because the days of massive keyword stuffing on web pages is (thankfully) largely gone.

But, like most things in SEO, I'd bet that there's still a penalty for excessive keyword use. Consider a page that has a certain three-word phrase in the title, in an H1 header, is the lead phrase in several other heading tags, and repeated use of the key phrase throughout the text, and perhaps the page also doesn't make much use of synonyms for the phrase, because the publisher is so focused on that one search term.

In all likelihood, you're over the line at this point. So where is the line then? It depends on the behavior of the other sites in your same market segment.

Continuing our example, it most likely depends on what the most authoritative sites in the vitamin market segment are doing. A site that is rightfully thought as an authority in the vitamin market is likely to be one that the search engines want to rank in high positions for lots of related queries.

Possible Role of Authoritative Sites

So even if the site that is considered an authority in a market pushes the limits a bit, it would be undesirable for the search engine to punish them for that behavior, because it's still the best search result for many related queries. I'm not saying that search engines don't punish authoritative sites that engage in spammy behavior, because it happens, but they have a strong disincentive to do so.

So if the authoritative sites tend to push the limits in certain ways, such as much higher keyword density then is typical in other markets, is that spammy activity, or the new norm for the vitamin market space?

Certainly, there are still limits as to what they can do. Even Google Japan can be penalized, so there are limits. I believe those limits move, however, based on the behavior of authoritative sites in a market segment.

Purely algorithmic ranking algorithms don't have an inherent understanding of what the norm should be for a market segment. So they rely on the significant players in that segment to help them figure that out.

When you're trying to figure out what to do with your own site, consider what other players in the same space are doing. Bear in mind that an authoritative site is likely to get more latitude than your site (unless it is seen as the authoritative site), so copying their behavior isn't always good idea, but seeing what they're doing can give you some boundaries on the things you might consider doing with your own site.

See the full story at: www.searchenginewatch.com

For more information about S.E.O, e-commerce web site design, e-mail marketing, web site design service and website development, just visit us at www.7strategy.com 

In part one of this series, we talked about how to measure search engine optimization (SEO) success. But those measurements are predicated on understanding our organic rankings in search engines for the search terms that drive revenue or leads to our site.

However, some recent changes to the data that Google now offers dramatically changes the way we think of "search rankings" and really underscore the notion that search engines continue to focus on user experience as they improve their ranking formulas. This article summarizes what these changes mean to an SEO campaign.

How Personalization and Localization Changed the SEO Game

Much of what the data tells us is what we have guessed for some time now, but this is the first time that there's hard data to support some of the assumptions. In previous years, search rankings across the engines were more or less static for the same phrase. However, localization and personalization have been affecting the Google ranking algorithm for some time now.

As we look at the changes of the recent update and those in other recent updates, we find that where you search for something and who you are makes a profound difference in what you see in Google for any given search query. Additionally, Google's new infrastructure allows for the engine to make ranking changes much more frequently. And so, Google's new data set available in Google Webmaster Tools, and specifically, the "Average Rank," is now the most accurate metric that illustrates organic ranking performance.

Why 'Average Rank' is an Important New KPI

SEO professionals have historically relied on automated software like WebPosition or WebCEO for "rankings reports," which detail where a particular site ranks on a given keyword in a particular search engine. However, with Google's current environment, these reports end up being a snapshot in time of how a local data set looks for a particular keyword. They may or may not be indicative of the general trend in rankings for this query for most users.

This type of reporting isn't really reliable for judging performance and is no longer suitable data to make business decisions with. Google's average rank is a much better metric because it accounts for all of the variances listed above, namely, personalization, localization, and changes over time.