Weekly roundup of the best search marketing advice and news from around the web.
Can’t Buy Love – Rand Fishkin’s Presentation From 2012 Searchlove Conference
Rand Fishkin’s slideshare presentation from this week’s Searchlove conference on the topic of how to earn your marketing and customers. Rand presents his 22 lessons learnt at SEOMoz, the highlights include:
- Empathy + creativity = great content
- Innovation doesn’t always trump improvement
- Branding may be more valuable than links and traffic
- Co-citation may be the next “anchor text” – pages ranking without the keywords in the title, body or inbound link anchor text
- On Twitter, links between text seem to get the highest CTR and retweet ratio vs links with @mentions, hashtags, etc
Google unleashed Panda update #21 earlier this week – the first Panda update in 5 weeks. Very little movement in the Google UK SERPs has been noted despite the 0.4% general queries affected. US SEO professionals have suggested that the latest update is a roll back of the previous Panda update – with SERPs reducing in quality.
Jon Cooper introduces over 50 search professionals and asked them one simple question:
“What was the most creative way you, or someone you know, got a link?”
The result is a list of creative link building techniques and inspiration for discovering new link building opportunities. Chris Countey shares a particularly actionable way of finding bloggers using Followerwonk.
Insights from SEO’s Leading Algorithm Hunters
The SEO industry’s leading Algorithm chasers discuss the future of Google’s algorithm and potential updates in 2013. Some of the highlights of this insightful post include:
“Google is a coder culture, and they want elegant, algorithmic solutions, not to flag domains and manually penalize people. That’s just not scalable. So, I don’t think their definition of quality has changed so much as their ability to translate quality into something a computer can quantify and evaluate has.” – Dr Pete
“On the algorithm penalty side, I think over the next year, we will see Google probably target yet another usability factor in their algorithm. We had Panda and the page layout algorithm, we also had page speed. I’d look at an additional usability factor to be targeted with a Google update.
In the ranking algorithm side, I’d think we would see more social (Google+) come into play not just in personalized search but in weighting certain pages – if not in 2014, then for sure by 2015.” – Barry Schwartz
Google Releases PageRank Update
Despite PageRank data is largely outdated it is worth been aware that many sites will have their PageRank affected in the past week.
Google’s UK Search Share Dips For The First Time In 5 Years As Bing’s Rises
The Guardian reports on data from Hitwise showing that Google’s UK market share dropped to 89.33% in October from 90.74% in September. Whilst the Guardian article speculates that Bing could overtake Google by 2016, the most likely cause of this dip is the introduction of Windows 8 and the complications using Google on the new operating system.
How Do You Perform “Awesome” Keyword Research for a standard website with limited content
Richard Kirk introduces a new methodology for building a keyword list for a relatively standard site with limited amounts of content. Read on to see how you build a keyword list and then optimise individual pages for individual terms.
Location, Location, Location – Blogging for Local SEO Rankings
Chris Silver Smith proposes the use of blogging to provide the ongoing, consistent online promotion activities required for local SEO.
