Social Likes help your Google Rankings

Social media is changing the way our websites achieve rankings on the search engines. And it makes total sense. In the “old days” one of the game makers were incoming links to our website. All these links would count as a vote that our content was considered good enough, or relevant enough to be linked to. A search engine would then reward you by showing up your content first when a search was performed. This principle still is the crux of SEO, but now the votes come in new, additional shapes and sizes. They are now also likes, tweets, share buttons and comments. They are true refelctions of content being relevant to us and people like us, and search engines are changing their algorythms to reflect this. Google Panda update earlier this year was a clear message that content farms that send out links to anywhere are loosing their reliability and relevance. As a result the power of Article Marketing has reduced significantly. The introduction of Google + and the ability to +1 (like) a piece of content is a sign of the new shift where search results are personalised by this type of social data.

Content Participation

As brands this means an even greater incentive to create content that people are likely to Like, ReTweet and Share and +1. It gives consumers a much bogger voice over what is relevant to them and should therefore be served up higher in a search result. Creating a link back to a website has a high threshhold, but liking or sharing content is a very easy thing to do. That is where social is so powerful and its value to SEO is becoming stonger every day.

Value of a Retweet

New SEO

This now means that an SEO strategy can no longer be seen as seperate from your social strategy. They are closely interlinked and your ability to create content that people can participate in, and the level of engagement of your audience will be game changers for your success.

A client asked me the other day if submitting your website to 1000-s of directories was still useful?

For those that do not know what this questions means; one way to get links to your site is to submit your site to as many directories as you can find. In the offline world you might only refer to Yellow Pages, but online there are more directories than you can poke a stick at. If some (or all) of the directories provide a link to your site, then that is something many marketers (should) want. Links to your site are like a vote of confidence, not just to prove you exist but also to say you are “alright”. If you get lots of votes, your site will be easier to find and appear higher on the google page. There are many strategies to get these votes (links), and directory submissions is one of them.

The short answer could be, “no it hardly seems worth it”. Submitting your site to a directory is insanely time consuming (as I strongly advise against automated tools) and the success rate of directory submissions is only 7%. Pretty shocking right?

Best course of action would be to only choose worthwhile directories. Ones that are highly rated and have a high Page Rank themselves (like Yahoo, True Local, BOTW, Hotfrog etc) and ones that are specific to your industry. Relevance and authority are key.

However, you need to also consider this. The algorithm would be suspicious if all your links came of sites that have a PR of  7 and higher. Links need to look organic and realistic. So, yes your link profile needs to look “normal” Some links will be from low authority websites, some from high authority websites. Some links will be nofollow, most links would not.

So my conclusion is to still spend time on directory submissions, just don’t make it your sole focus. Let me know if you are interested in hearing about the other ranking techniques, I could put something together if anyone would like that.

You can easily end up with hundreds even thousands of keywords when you do keyword research for your website. How do you decide which ones to use for your site?

I will not go into the technical aspects of keyword research too much. I am going to try and explain the principles to you in what I hope is an easy to understand way.

After you have done your research and have that super-duper long list in front of you, you need some sort of method to decide which ones will make it to the final shortlist, right?

The norm is to calculate what SEO nerds call a”Keyword Efficiency Index”, or KEI. Key phrases with a high “KEI” will generally be presented as the ones you should pick for your shortlist. KEI is a number based on the total number of searches for a word in a given month (^2) divided by the total pages that you are competing with on the web for that word. In non-techie terms that means that you could find that for the words “where to buy spices” there are 1900 people searching for that term per month but that there are 13,200,000 other pages with those words on it. The KEI for that keyphrase is therefore so low that you would ignore that phrase and hunt for another one with a higher efficiency.

I have found that KEI not good enough. I also calculate what David Viney has introduced as a “Keyword Opportunity Index”, or KOI. This is a number based on total monthly searches again, but this time focuses not on all pages on the web, but just the ones that are trying to rank for that keyword, your direct competition therefore. Its a game changer. Back to my non-techie explanation. The key phrase “where to buy spices” seemingly had enormous competition, but upon closer inspection we find that only 728 pages are actually trying to rank for that keyword. 728!! That’s a hell of a lot better than 13,200,00. Therefore the Opportunity Index is very high and shows you it will prove relatively easy to rank for that key phrase.Shortlisting keywords with a high KOI is therefore a much better methodology than only using KEI.

Capiche?

If you had only used KEI to shortlist your keywords you would have never found this opportunity. It’s hard enough to rank these days so best to aim for something you have an “opportunity” of ranking for.