SEO is Finally Coming Full Circle Around All the Way Back to Regular Marketing. How to do SEO in 2014 Google updates PageRank.

When people ask me "why is your SEO different than others?" I never had to think about the answer because it was the ultimate terms of freedom I do an honest job and hard work pays off. I do the right way the first time. No cheating. No Black hats. With all the changes going on with Google search engine I always knew Marketing would return to its roots. Ask your SEOs question and make them show you proof of prior work. Call the previous clients. Keep in touch with them and ask them about anything that you have concerns with. 

Back to the point...

The latest trend in SEO seems to be change. Changes in the way Google evaluates signals, changes in the way brands are treated, changes in the way we all have to approach what optimization actually means in a new landscape.

The uncertainty of it all can turn any of us into some SEO version of Dr. Doofenshmirtz trying to take on a Google-shaped Platypus. Now, it’s not because we’re a bunch of inept fake-Germans with questionable accents. We’re smart, if maybe a little inevitably clueless about how to attain the ultimate victory over our foes. To arm ourselves we only have indicators, guides, and best practices but we don’t have silver bullets or a giant optimiz-inator to help us take over the world.

A Shifting Market

Search engines have always been a business. Their function is to help us navigate the vastness of the internet to find precisely what we are after. The fact that being at the top of the list could make someone a whole lot of money just presented an impetus to game the system. We focused on the quick wins and easy scores, because if you knew the right moves it was quick and relatively easy to play in the big 10. And then Google would make it rain.

It used to be amazing how frequently you’d see a whole first page of search results for a really popular product like sneakers, or jewelry that wouldn’t even include names you’d see at the mall. A lot of the established brands took their time embracing online marketing while small businesses sprung up and flourished on little more than SEO. But that time is over, and looking for anything now that is “quick” or “easy” is an exercise in both futility and frustration.

More Parts to the Equation

To quote my boss, links used to be the “800 pound gorilla in the room” when it came to rankings. Now, links may still be a sizable primate, but they’re not all that matters. There was, and in some cases still is a sort of perception that links are a magical elixir that the right one, in the right place, with the right anchor text means total rankings domination. But in any equation, both an augend and an addend are needed to make a sum. That means it has to be links plus other efforts to get a result. And honestly, it’s not even as simple as an addition problem.

This past year (and arguably for several years leading up to this) we’re dealing with problems that look a lot more like the kinds of complex algebraic equations that convinced me math was just evil by nature. Links matter. Technical SEO still matters (yes even though certain short cuts may be shut down, SEO is still alive and kicking), authorship is coming into play; in-depth articles have gotten their own schema. Then there are Social signals that can't be counted out, user data like CTR, return visitors aka customer loyalty, pogo sticking, and of course, his highness, king content that all factor in.

There may have been a time when links could push you forward in spite of these other factors. But the new math isn't; old links plus more links equals winning. There are more constants, more variables, the occasional exponent, some parentheses, and no scientific calculators to make it all easier. We have to do it the hard way.

Old School Marketing is the New Online Marketing

Sometimes moving forward means going all the way back to the beginning. For a time there was a real distinction between SEO and online marketing. SEO focused heavily on technical proficiency, but it also became an umbrella term for every trick, tactic and strategy for getting higher rankings. Even if the tricks are dying out the, technical aspects like speed, structure and optimized hierarchy still matter. That doesn't mean the definition of SEO is shrinking, just the opposite actually, its expanding, and quickly.

With the changes we've seen, I'd posit that brand power and recognition are very much a part of SEO, but they are also the foundation of marketing online and off. Even before the internet, if you wanted to sell your stuff, people had to know who you were.

So there came marketing, advertising, Madison Avenue, Don Drapers, and culture-changing sayings like “Where's the beef?” or “I'm not going to pay a lot for this Muffler.” They had to be creative and innovative. Then came Google and suddenly there was this whole other way of getting customers that didn't require creative ingenuity. All it took was taking advantage of the latest loophole before it got shut down. So the quest for that beautiful bounty of inbound buyers turned into a really ugly dog fight. But the need for more traditional marketing didn’t die.

Remember word of mouth? Well, that's social media now. Billboards still exist on the information superhighway, but they are 2-inch jpegs instead of 50-foot signs. Fliers come into your inbox instead of a mailbox. Coupons get Tweeted instead of clipped. Tried and true, real marketing practices are still applicable online and sure, they take longer and don’t always affect your rankings, but they can grow your business and really, isn’t that the point anyway?

Bring on the Mad Men!

A part of the new world of SEO is as basic as going to our marketing roots. There’s no way that building relationships through networks is going to bring you more search engine traffic as quickly as 200 directory links did three years ago. Expecting the same results from the old techniques or new ones is only going to lead to a lot of giving up on things that “seem” like they aren’t working. We need to change our expectations. We have to stop thinking about search engines as something we can still manipulate to avoid more traditional forms of marketing. The only difference is the way we leverage those techniques from a technical standpoint to bring the maximum benefit.

Today’s SEO isn’t about finding a way around the arduous task of brand building; it’s about mastering it.

Shared Via:http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2317491/The-New-SEO-is-Plain-Old-Marketing

Read More

How Many Links Should We Have on a Page? What does Google Suggest?

There has been a rule of thumb for many years that you shouldn’t have more than 100 links per page. While the webmaster guidelines have changed to state that link should be keeping to a “reasonable number,” many webmasters still keep to the 100 links per page as a precaution. Matt Cutts is tackling the subject in his last webmaster help video.

How Many Links Should We Have on a Page? 

First, Matt shares some background about why the whole 100 links per page rule started and how Googlebot actually did interact with that maximum number of links per page.

“It used to be the case that Googlebot and our indexing system would truncate at 100 or 101k and anything beyond that wouldn’t even get indexed. And what we did is we said, ‘Okay, if the page is 101k or 100k, it’s reasonable to expect roughly one link per kilobyte and therefore something like 100 links per page.’ So that was in our technical guidelines and we said this is what we recommend, and a lot of people assumed that if they had 102 links or something like that, that we would view it as spam and take action. But that was just kind of a rough guideline.”

However, these guidelines were put in place 10 years ago; obviously the web has changed significantly, as well as the kind of content on sites and how it is presented. Fortunately, Google has also changed with it in terms of how Googlebot interacts with websites and any amount of content it indexes.

“The web changes, it evolves; in particular, webpages that have gotten a lot bigger, there’s more rich media and so it’s not all that uncommon to have aggregators or various things that might have a lot more links. So we removed that guideline and we basically now say keep it to a reasonable number, which I think is pretty good guidance. There may be a limit on the file size that we have now, but it’s much larger -- at the same time the number of links we can process on the page is much higher.”

Matt also cautions webmasters against diluting their PageRank by having so many links on the page. If you want your PageRank to flow to the ones you link to, PageRank gets divided by the number of links you have on the page, so the fewer the pages, the higher the PageRank that those linked pages will gain. However, if flowing PageRank or lack thereof isn’t a concern, just follow the reasonable link number guideline, rather than trying to cut back as many links as possible.

“When you have PageRank, the amount of PageRank that flows through the outlinks is divided by the number of total outlinks. So if you have 100 links, you will divide your PageRank by 100; if you have 1000 links you will divide that PageRank by 1000. So if you have a huge amount of links, the amount of PageRank flowing out on each individual link can become very, very small.”

The thing to consider is the fact that having a huge amount of a links can still be considered spammy, even if there isn’t a hard set rule on how many links that might be. Instead, Google looks at it from a user experience perspective, and if have the links present could be spam, such as paragraphs upon paragraphs of nothing but links.

“The other thing is that it can start to annoy users, or start to look spammy if you have tons and tons and tons of links. So we are willing to take action on the web spam side if we see so many links that looks really, really spammy. But if you compare our old guideline with 100 links and you look at what the web looks like now, it is quite common to have two or three or 400 links on the page, as long as the page is long, it has value add, there are substantial amounts of substance and real stuff on that page.”

Overall, as long as you’re presenting your content with links in a user-friendly way and your content adds value to the web, you don’t need to worry about restricting yourself to the hundred links per page.

Shared Via: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2316757/Matt-Cutts-on-Linking-Guidelines-How-Many-Links-on-a-Page

Read More

HERSHEL Dies on The Walking Dead midseason finale spoilers, Governor kills Hershel in Epic Death Scene Screenshot

Yes the Governor is "Too Far Gone" on the walking dead episode tonight. The Season 4 mid season final was crazy. Hershel gets his head sawed off!

Rick approaches the fence and tries to reason with The Gov, suggesting he doesn’t need hostages since he has the tank. The Gov counters that he does since he really doesn’t want to blow holes in what he sees as his “new home.” He gives Rick and his people until sundown to vamoose in spite of the fact that Rick says there are sick kids inside who won’t make it. This newsflash seems to disturb Tara. The Governor merely reiterates that he has a tank and he’s still willing to let Rick and his people walk away...

Read More