Chris W. Smith

Google Rewrites Page Titles To Push Brand Over Keywords

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(originally posted on DesignBigger)

The Google+ expert, Mark Traphagen tweeted a link to an article that talked about how Google seemed to be testing yet another method of rewriting the page title, or that somehow, colons in the title could be a new ranking factor. Other Twitter people reported seeing it as early as Friday.

Now, we’ve known for a long time that they’ll craft a new page title if they think what’s there isn’t relevant enough. That’s nothing new. But, to explicitly pull out a brand name and put that in front of everything else is certainly new, and much bigger than just a test. Take, for example, our own site.

Page title in HTML.
Here’s the title in the current HTML.
Page title in SERP
Here’s the page title as it appears in the SERPs.

I’ve had discussions as early as two years ago about how brand would be extremely important in the SERPs; even back then it was pretty clear when they started automatically segmenting B2C-centric results by brands. At the time, those happened to be major brands. Now, that’s not a direct connection to this particular issue, but it was certainly indicative of where their mindset was, and where they’d be headed in the future.

So, should you start re-crafting all of your page titles? As of now, I say no. I don’t believe that changing from “Keyword Text – Brand” will be better than “Brand – Keyword Text”. At least, not yet. What they display and what they see as valuable has often been two very different things, and there’s no concrete evidence to start switching. However, it would certainly behoove you to test this.

It’s becoming clear (as if it hasn’t been already) that Google is pushing business to build their brand. That means we have to move beyond the anchor-text heavy link building and start going after things that actually matter. Beyond the obvious Moz metrics, imagine the weight that a branded link from a major news source would carry. I’d be interested in seeing how valuable that link would be versus an anchor text link from the same source.

 The verdict? It’s not a test. Get on board and start building your business’s brand, or you’re going to get left out to dry.

90% of Webmaster Tools Alerts Are Black Hat Related

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(originally posted on DesignBigger)

In the thousands of Google Webmaster Tools alerts and messages that are sent each month, about 90% of those are estimated to be black hat related. Another stat that’s interesting is about 3% are notifications of a hacked site; chances are, you’ve seen pharma spam in the SERP results that lead to a normal-looking page. That same 3% covers malware-infected sites, too. Check out the video for Matt Cutts’ take on these alerts.

What we’re interested in knowing is what percent of notifications are for non-spam/non-black hat issues? Does this mean that webmasters are doing better at keeping a solid, optimized site? Is the popularity of good CMS software helping site owners adhere to standards easier?

What do you think? Let us know in the comments below!

7 Steps to Google Places Phone Verification

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This article has since been outdated by changes to Google Places, but left for “historical value”.

(originally posted on DesignBigger)

Stop the presses, and get ready to clean up your business listings in Google Places!  It appears that a new year has brought a few new things along with it, and one of those is phone support for local verification issues in Google Places. If you are like me then you probably have a few local listings that are still pending verification, and you have probably sent out those pesky postcards at least 3 or 4 times with no success. Maybe it’s Google’s fault or maybe it’s just the postman’s fault, but one things for sure, they aren’t making it to their destination!

Below is a step-by-step guide of what you need to know if you are having a problem verifying your business and need to take advantage of the new phone verification option:

The 7 Steps to Google Places Phone Verification

  1. Login to your Google Places account
  2. Go to: I’m having a problem verifying my listing(s) troublshooter
  3. Select, “I tried PIN verification for a single listing“
  4. Next, select the “postcard” for “Which verification option did you most recently use?”
  5. Next, select “yes” for “Have you waited 15 days”
  6. Next, hit the hyper link for “call us“
  7. Next, you will be taken to a call back/contact form

Within about 15 seconds or so after you completed the process above,  you will receive a call from an automated machine which will prompt you to press 1 for support. It will then quickly transfer you to a live english speaking person.

This is a new service and is of course still something that is rolling out so we will see how Google continues to implement and develop it. What is actually being offered right now is phone support for any business that is pending verification (that has attempted the 15 day process). This is being offered via a US based, english speaking individual.

This is a valuable and costly investment by Google, and should show us that they are and will continue to focus attention on local. As SEOs we all need to make sure that we are paying enough attention to our customer’s local needs as well.

Analog Keyword Research

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(originally posted on DesignBigger)

When it comes to keyword research, I’m guilty of doing the same old thing; I open up the AdWords Keyword Tool and start pecking away, hoping to take a few general head keywords and turn it into something workable. I’m pretty sure every other SEO on the planet starts out keyword research pretty similarly, if not the exact same way.

Most of our customers are traditionally paper and pen kind of businesses; the digital landscape is pretty new to them, and subsequently, they may not really have many online assets (service manuals, documentation, whitepapers, etc.). It kind of struck me today that while getting these things online and working in our benefit might be extremely costly, we can still take advantage of them for the initial brainstorming phase (not to mention content fodder down the road).

Here are some non-electronic assets you should absolutely be looking at for keyword research and content generation:

1. Product manuals

Typically, manuals exist for everything from CD players to industrial equipment costing thousands of dollars. Most manuals contain professionally-written content about the exact item you’re trying to market, and probably address (in the instructions or specifications) features that might be selling points. “Bar length = 20” can easily turn into “20 inch gas chainsaw” for a pretty solid keyword to bid on or build a product page around. It seems simple (and it is!), but it’s quite effective.

2. Tech Support/Customer Service/Receptionist/Sales

Ask any of the phone-answering employees in your company, and they’ll be able to tell you what the top 3 things people call and ask about are. These are get things to write FAQs about, and will give you keyword ideas for pages that could be built out or improved upon. If you want to get really tricky, use a service like CallRail and record your calls, and have them transcribed by an outsourcer inexpensively. Use the resulting data to generate a word frequency list. Pull out the winners and research the surprising outliers.

Better yet, parse your helpdesk and customer service emails for this information; if you use a CRM system, this functionality might even already be available to you.

3. Sales Literature/Contact Cards/Trade Show Materials

Yes, finally, there is a use for those cards you’re made to fill out before you can get a free t-shirt. Where there’s a greater than 100% chance that John Doe isn’t going to buy from you, you probably got some information in the way of his job title (and it might even be real!), problems that they’re looking to solve in their business, and location.

If John Doe’s a chemical engineer in Seattle, and he’s looking for pollution control devices, targeting “thermal oxidizer manufacturer seattle” might be a good idea. It’s going to be insanely cheap to bid on (if you’re doing PPC), very targeted for content, and will bring in buying traffic versus researching traffic.

As far as sales literature, of course, review your own first. However, your next step should be poring over your competitor’s information to see where you might’ve missed something. Perhaps they use a slightly different term for something that might be familiar to customers, and if so, addressing that term will bring in extra, already interested, traffic.

These aren’t groundbreaking new sources of keywords, and they won’t replace what we currently do. But, they’ll give you ideas for things that you can’t find in the AdWords Tool or WordTracker, especially when you’re in an industrial or technical niche. Glean some solid starting phrases, and then build on that success. You’ll be ahead of the rest of the people who keep doing the same thing they’ve always done.

 

3 Ways To SEO Someone Else’s Site (And Benefit From It)

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(originally posted on DesignBigger)

All the time, we’re told that all of our efforts should push traffic only to our site. We should be building links to try to raise domain authority, take advantage of referral traffic, and building up rankings for our site. While we can’t abandon those ideas altogether, sometimes there are moments where stepping outside of that thought pattern can really help us in the long run.

1. Great PR, Bad SEO

If you’re doing content marketing the way you should be, chances are, you’ll have some writeups in various publications. Ideally, if you get a great review from the local newpaper calling your business the best in town, you’d want that to show up when someone searches your brand name, right? Unfortunately, most of the traditional-media-turned-online-media are still pretty bad at search optimization.

Getting a branded search to show that glowing writeup will do great things for your conversion rate, so take some time to point some branded links towards that resource. You’ll help build up the link profile (and the authority) for that page, which hopefully will flow back down to your site. But, more importantly, that site will show up for someone searching for information about you, and perhaps be a little more convinced that you have what they’re looking for.

2. Pass The Authority

Sometimes there are keywords you really want to go after, but they’re just too competitive, or you’ve got a brand new site that hasn’t quite taken off yet. That doesn’t mean that you’re left high and dry. Just because your site doesn’t have the weight to show for that keyword, there are plenty of properties you can control that do.

This is where social media properties can be a great asset. Not just your company page on Twitter and Facebook (although properly optimizing those can help out), but the “second tier” stuff like Eventbrite and Slideshare. If you do ANY sort of presentations, upload them to Slideshare. You can control nearly any aspect of the page, and optimize it pretty nicely. If you get a fair amount of action on that Slideshare presentation, you’ll show up on the front page of the site. That will get your presentation ranked for some pretty competitive keywords, and in turn, drive some educated and interested traffic back to your site.

You could do something similar for Eventbrite if you’re in a business that does events. Create your event invite, and optimize the page for the keywords you’d like to rank for. Tying the Eventbrite into your social networks will promote action on that page, and in turn, will push it up, giving it a solid chance to rank well.

Here’s where it starts getting even more meta: guest posting. If you don’t have much in the way of blogging, or an already established authority, it might be a little more difficult, but if you can swing it, it’s worth it.

Find a blogger that ranks well for your niche, particularly, a keyword or two you’d like to rank for. Offer a guest post, but don’t ask for a link back. Yes, you read that correctly. You’re much more likely to get a “yes” to a guest post if you make sure that you aren’t asking for a link. You simply want to provide an awesome post that’s associated with you and your brand name (an unstructured citation). When you’re shopping for guest-posting opportunities in the future, this will give you a leg up on the link-hungry wolves going after every blogger out there.

3. Six Two Degrees Of Seperation

This is a little bit of the first tactic, mixed in with a little bit of black-hat tactic, but cleaned up a bit to keep your site safe from harm.

Sometimes, you’ll get what should be a great link from a great, high-authority site. But, you’re just not getting the traffic you think you should from it. Maybe it just wasn’t a relevant or a popular idea yet, and kind of got buried in the noise. It might not have even been indexed. If it’s on a high-authority domain, it may be worth it to point some links at it to give it a bump. Once you help it get indexed and show the search engines a little bit of traction on it, often, it’ll start to inherit some of that high authority and begin to rank much better. It’s a great case for re-posting on your social media profiles, dropping a comment on a forum you frequent already if it’s a pertinent article, or (and here’s the little bit of black-hat for you) testing out that directory that you aren’t really quite sure about yet.

Just remember though, what goes around, comes around. Don’t get crazy and blast it with spammy links. As Wil Reynolds could tell you, that sort of thing can come back to haunt you.

Finally…

This all boils down to one idea: increasing and enhancing the rankability of other sites that can directly affect you in a positive way. The better those guys do in search, the more business that’ll be pushed your way. Search engine marketing sometimes takes some odd and unique ideas, and this is one that can work for you.

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