Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can propel your business to the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) if you know how to do it correctly. Rand Fishkin is an expert on SEO, and is also CEO and co-founder of SEOmoz – a leading community in SEO info. We were lucky enough to have him on a recent edition of #prwebchat for a crash source in SEO and ended up slaying the SEO dragon. You can get tons of resources from Rand by following SEOmoz on Twitter or by visiting his personal handle.
- Social media absolutely impacts SEO. Google and Bing look for certain social signals to help rank regular search results. Here is how Google and Bing use social data from Twitter and Facebook. And it’s not just direct impact; social media brings content, links, plus user and usage data signals too–all help SEO. Here’s more on Facebook and Twitter’s influence on Google search rankings. Also, be careful not to build all your equity to you Facebook and Twitter pages–get some juice to your website too! Google associates keywords with a tweet or naked link on a social network by using context around the link and the title plus the content from the page, but no direct anchor text signal. It isn’t crucial to use a targeted keyword in a tweet, but try to do it if possible. For SEO nerds, the primary goal of a tweet/share should be to encourage virality.
- Conduct keyword research. The Google Adwords tool is the industry standard. Google Insights for search is also one you should check out. Interesting fact: Google is dominant in nearly every country except Russia (Yandex), China (Baidu) and Korea (Naver).
- Multimedia increases engagement and SEO. PRWeb did a study which concluded that multimedia increases time on page by an average of about 30 seconds. Rand also shares some tips here on his to increase the SEO of videos you post on the web. Video is such a great thing: upload it to YouTube, embed it on your site, send Google the video XML sitemap and get traffic to your site—it’s not as difficult as it seems. For example, see http://www.google.com/search?q=local+seo+basics– note the video result. That’s via Video XML Sitemaps. I highly recommend Wistia – they automatically create/submit video XML sitemaps to get your vids in Google.Note: there’s probably no big SEO impact when deciding to do a press release first then a blog, or a blog first and then a press release—it’s more about your PR strategy and what your reporters want. But craft your blog post differently than your press release—you don’t want duplicate content.
- How to adapt to the Google algorithm changes. Google’s farmer update (Panda) means a greater focus on content quality, page layout and user experience. Extra advice: the update is largely not about links.Link tip: When thinking about the Google bot, bit.ly and indexing links, remember: bit.ly measures clicks from apps + mobile, which Google Analytics treats as “direct.”
- Retargeting: try it. Retargeting detects visitors to your site then shows them ads as they wander around the web. Here’s how to use it. It’s amazing for branding to your core audience on sites you’d never reach them otherwise. A good platform recommendation? Retargeter.
- Get your bookmarks ready–best SEO resources: Search Engine Land, SEO Book, Search Engine Roundtable, SEOmoz, TopRank and more.
(Photo – Flickr Creative Commons: maggie loves hopey)
