Author Archives: Daniel Page

Google Cracks Down on Deceptive Native Advertising

In a post on the official Google News Blog, Google has warned publishers that publishing content that fails to clearly discriminate between editorial and advertising may harm their ranking and Google News SEO.

The decline of traditional advertising revenue has forced publishers to devise new methods of generating income from their content. One method that has rapidly gained popularity in recent months is native advertising.

Native advertising is akin to the traditional advertorial. Publishers publish promotional posts with much of the same context as editorial content. Such articles might include a subtle note stating they are promotional content. However, they look almost exactly like the regular content of the site.

While bloggers are well acquainted with the promotional guest post

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SEO, Content Marketing, and Social Media: The Best Of March 2013

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Spring is on the way, and as always it’s a great time for growth, renewal, and reflection. SEO is a constantly shifting endeavor, so we need to keep on top of the newest thinking, ever ready to exchange worn out strategies for the newest and most effective techniques.

We like to help our clients keep on top of the buzz so they can adapt to changing time, so here’s our end-of-the-month roundup of the most interesting content we’ve come across.

SEO

5 Strategies for Better ‘Link Building’ and Improving Your SEO

The digital marketing world has seen more changes in the past two years than over the last 10 years combined, thanks to the release of Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm updates. Both have changed online marketing best practices, including everything from how sites should be built to how “backlinks” should be created. Links that go from another site to yours are called backlinks because they point back…
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The Human Side of SEO: Building Connections That Matter!

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Back in the day, SEO was all about discovering what the algorithms liked and creating sites that tickled them in just the right spot. Nothing made the algorithms happier — to indulge in a bit of anthropomorphism — than to see lots of keywords and lots of links with lots of relevant anchor text.

The natural result was sites that appealed to algorithms, but weren’t quite up to snuff for human beings. Over the years, however, Google has become better at determining what it is that human beings like in their SERPS, and many of the previously successful SEO methods have fallen by the wayside. Continue reading →

Why Content Marketing Dominates on Mobile Devices

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For traditional advertisers, mobile is a bit of a head-scratcher. Display advertising revenue is in decline generally, but with the restricted screen real estate on mobile devices, there’s not a lot of space for advertising. Forms of advertising that rely on spatial dimensions, like banner ads, are not well suited to mobile platforms. Temporal advertising is more successful. That is, advertising that takes advantage of a viewer’s time, using the whole of the mobile display. Examples include interstitial ads in text (as seen in apps like Flipboard), or the pre-roll advertising that has become ubiquitous in popular videos.

These forms of advertising are missing a trick. They often don’t aspire to virality; instead, they piggyback on the virility of other content, taking advantage of the popular rather than targeting popularity for themselves. However, while users will tolerate a small portion of larger screens being taken up with advertising, they are much less willing to put up with interruptible advertising.

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Is Outsourcing Your Social Media Management Worthwhile

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Many small businesses find getting to grips with social media to be a troublesome aspect of online promotion. They often oversell and alienate potential followers, go overboard with sharing to the point of spamming, or set up a Facebook page or Twitter account, send a tweet or two, and then completely forget about it.

Social media for businesses is a marketing tool, and as with all marketing tools its use has to be consonant with overarching business goals. But, it’s not as simple as filling a page with products and declaiming how awesome you and your team are.

In creative writing classes, students are often told that the number one rule is “show, don’t tell”. The same rule can be applied to social media. Brands need to demonstrate their value to potential followers and sharers, rather than declaring it in overwrought PR speak or heavy product promotion. Authenticity is key. Continue reading →

SEO And The Elusive Controlled Experiment

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Over on Search Engine Land, the perennial discussion of the benefits and disadvantages of using subdomains vs. directories has recently been reignited.
In his post, 5 Whopping Lies That Keep SEO At Status Quo, Ian Lurie, presents as his 4th most egregious lie:

“We Can Put The Blog On A Subdomain. It’s Fine.”

The conversation on this issue has been swinging back and forth for a long time, with people on both extremes and quite a number in the middle who claim that it doesn’t matter at all for SEO. which is also Google’s stated position.

Micheal Martinez, of the excellent SEO Theory blog responds in the comments that:

“You and [Rand] Fishkin are completely wrong on the subdomain issue. It’s a shame this kind of misinformation is still being shared on major SEO Websites like Search Engine Land.” Continue reading →

SEO, Content Marketing, and Social Media: The Best Of February 2013

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February may be the shortest month of the year, but that doesn’t mean there’s any less of the awesome content marketing, social media, and SEO content that we love to share. So, for your delight and edification, here’s some of the most informative and actionable content that we’ve come across this month.

SEO

18 Meta Tags Every Webpage Should Have in 2013

Let’s get back to basics. If I’m to be honest, flashbacks of arguments with copywriters in ad agencies turn me off to the discussion of metadata. However the reality of the situation is that as Search and Social continue to rapidly converge, it is us SEOs that are left to pick up the technical end of the stick and metadata continues to land on our plate. The most …

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How the Hilltop Algorithm Impacts SEO Rankings

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When Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the Google search engine, their core insight was implemented as the PageRank algorithm. Put simply, PageRank determines where a page should rank in the SERPs based on the PageRank of incoming links from other sites — it’s a recursive algorithm. The higher the PageRank, the greater the assumed authority of a particular site. That authority can then combine with a keyword analysis of a page. Then, they use this combination to devise a ranking of pages in response to a search query.

Thus, PageRank is a proxy measure of authority. Google’s algorithms, in their early days and even now for the most part, couldn’t determine a page’s authority for a specific search query by just looking at the content. PageRank significantly improved upon previous methods, as early search engine users remember. However, it wasn’t perfect. This imperfection created opportunities for manipulating the system through various link-building tactics.

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Does Keyword Density Matter? The Data Says No.

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Keywords are at the heart of any SEO strategy. They are the thread that links sites to customers via their search terms. Over the years there has been a huge amount of focus and speculation about how precisely keywords should be used in on-page content to signal relevance to search engines and to rank to well.

Historically, much of the talk about keywords has been of the “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” variety: where should they be placed in the content, how many words should there be between the start of a page or heading and the keyword, what is the optimum ratio of keywords to other text, and so on. Some (not very good) SEOs strive to produce content that contains an exact percentage of keywords, often with the result of producing content that isn’t very readable to humans. And some stick to the old tactic of writing as many pages as possible stuffed with keyword variants and synonyms to cover all possible long-tail searches. Continue reading →

SEO, Content Marketing, and Social Media: The Best Of January 2013

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The first month of what promises to be a year of change in the SEO industry is drawing to a close. As usual, we have for you the content that we have found most interesting, informative, and entertaining during January.

The debate over the value of content marketing seems to be shifting away from straightforward cheer leading or nay saying towards a more nuanced dialogue. We expect that continue as the year progresses, and of course, we’ll continue to share with you the high-points in the inbound marketing landscape.

SEO

Why Executives Should Care About SEO, and How You Can Help Them

When I began my career in search marketing, organic search was often times a last minute consideration. It was more of the rule than the exception to have SEO brought in after content had been created and/or after a website had already been developed. And many times, once the cost of reverse engineering the damage was identified, stakeholders in … Continue reading →