For SEO practitioners, it’s so easy to see why many people view SEO as some kind of dark mystery.  Personally speaking, there are a lot of small details that can have profound effects on your websites’ SEO, so the reputation isn’t completely undeserved.

However, as much as these mysterious bits of knowledge might be, the difference for some websites in ranking in the top 3 for a particular competitive search phrase or keyword (the true art of SEO) really isn’t about the black magic behind-the-scenes, but more so, it’s about the study of the user that you’re trying to specifically target.

The reason I say that is because ultimately – it’s the user whom decides what the profile of a top ranking site should be.  Google, Bing, and other search engines have historically spent millions (if not billions) of  US Dollars on trying to create the best information retrieval system (algorithm) for humans who are looking for information, based on common search phrases.

They spend a huge amount of time, energy and resource trying to understand what these users want based on the words they type into their search boxes.  The more successful they are at providing those users with exactly what they want, the more money that they make.  It’s the treasure at the end of the rainbow.

So it’s the users of the search engines that drive the algorithmic refinements that continue to evolve what factors are used in determining which digital asset is the best asset (web page, video, PDF document, etc.) for a particular user for a particular search.  This is definition of true SEO success.

UNDERSTANDING THE USER

As SEO practitioners and consultants, our job is to understand the subset of these Internet users we’re targeting; what keywords they’re using to find what they’re looking for, and what information we can provide them that will make our digital assets the best choice for those users.  It’s all about matchmaking and supplying the most relevant information to the demand.

Additionally, we must then be familiar with the signals that search engines use to make that determination and to ensure that the site we’re optimising for is effectively sending those signals to Google and Bing.  But many SEO workers spend an inordinate amount of time focusing on trying to send signals to the engines that they deserve to be listed for certain keyword phrases without spending enough time ensuring that the site meets the criteria of actually being one of the best resources for the users they are targeting.  So you might search for ‘Telecoms in Manchester’, you may get a company who offers managed P2P connections, when you really wanted a few mobile phones for your company.   That listing is irrelevant to you and chances are, you’ll leave the site as quickly as you found it.

The first question that any SEO practitioner should ask when targeting a particular keyword phrase (especially a competitive one), is “what information is the user looking for and does my site provide that information in way that differentiates it from all of the other websites competing for the same phrase?”

Another way to explain this is to ask the question “why would a user searching for the term in question think that my site provides a superior digital experience and is the depth of the information provided sufficient enough that my site truly deserves to be in the top 10 of Google or Bing for this term?”.  Deserving to be ranked in the top 10 for a particular search phrase doesn’t guarantee that you will be there, but it does make the process of getting there much easier.

IS THERE A CONTENT STRATGY IN PLACE?

The second question that needs to be answered in the SE optimisation process, is to define the ongoing content strategy.  This strategy must allow for production of new and authentic content that will augment the position as an industry leader for the term(s) that are targeted.  Content is king, so the more of it you have, the more ‘Spider Food’ you have for the Search Engine spiders that will crawl your website and index accordingly.  Consistent fresh content will alert the Search Engines that you are authoritative and always providing up-to-date information.  The Search Engines will rank accordingly (after all, they want to offer their users the best and most relevant information).

Getting to the top of the search rankings is really only half the battle though. Staying there in the face of your competitors takes a persistent effort that is focused on constantly providing users with the most up-to-date and relevant information that satisfies their query, but does so in a way that is superior to your competition. Defining an ongoing content production strategy given the resources available for the project is a key stage in creating a winning foundation for your SEO campaign.

By addressing these two questions upfront in the optimisation process, the rest of the SEO equation will become a lot clearer. Experienced SEO consultants will use this reverse-engineering method to maintain focus and efficiency in the SEO compaign.  Having superior content that succinctly addresses the needs of your users allows you to get links from credible sources, makes your social media activities far more compelling (and with higher engagement levels), makes your press releases much more likely to be picked up by significant distribution and fully-augments your brand by providing your users with a better overall digital experience.

Are we selecting the right keyword for our campaign?  Is the keyword campaign driving the traffic that we are looking for?  The reason for our dissatisfaction might be that you have not targeted the right keywords.

Google Trends  might now seem advantageous for your SEO keyword campaign.

Google Trends allows you to search the popularity of different keywords.  It comes up with a search box where you can insert relevant keywords/items you want to search for, separated by commas.  Google Trends also comes up with two additional columns, ‘Hot Topics’ and ‘Hot Searches’.

Both these terms: Hot Topics and Hot Searches may seem confusing at first, but to elaborate;  Hot Searches is what everybody searches for in Google everyday.  Hot topics are the popular topics that come up in the news, Twitter, FriendFeed and other social/messaging services.

With Google Trends, you can also see how frequently a particular item has appeared on Google.  Lets say we want to know popularity of important keywords for a website for ‘child nurseries’.  If we put in the search items in the following order : (nurseries, baby nurseries, child nurseries,pre school,preschool) and hit the ‘Search Trends’ button, Google Trends displays us with a map.  The Search Volume Index highlights the popularity of the search for each of the different items in different regions, cities and languages.  The Alphabet index in the map points the events that drove the searches.

The News Reference Volume indicates how often the term(s) have appeared in the Google news stories.

Google Trends for Websites gives more specific information about the traffic i.e, from where the traffic is being driven from, the sites they have visited and the topics they have searched for.  Maybe an example might bring more light about the use of Google Trends for Website tool.

EXAMPLE OF A GOOGLE TRENDS SEARCH

If we type in ‘bbc.co.uk’ into the search box and hit the ‘Search Trend’ button, the search result displays the graph of the Daily Unique Visitors to the site.

It also tracks other relevant information about the visitors like which region they belong to, other sites they have visited and the topics they have searched for.

So, never be late to succeed in targeting the right keywords to drive more traffic to your website.  We aim to use this on every one of our SEO projects and we suggest you do the same.

It has been noted recently that Google wants us to think PR doesn’t matter anymore, but here at PSM digital, we think otherwise. For more than 10 years, Google has been trying to retrieve this metric back from the attention of webmasters and SEO workers and has stopped pushing regular updates to our Google toolbars.  This is just one of the many steps in the strategy to convince you that PageRank doesn’t matter anymore.

But let’s think about it more. Let’s delve into looking at some more of the signs they feed us to try and prove it no longer matters.

PageRank wasn’t unknown to webmasters in Google’s in the late 90′s, but the search giant really spilled the beans on PageRank in December 2000, when it released the ‘Google toolbar’ that included the ability to check Google PageRank (which it still describes today as “the basis of Google’s search technology”).

Google knew that the measurement tool would be of vital (and viral) interest to webmasters and webmasters not only flocked to install the toolbar, they began using the metric for link swapping, selling and buying. It made PR manipulation so much easier when you could easily see Google’s estimation of the importance of a page and check it after an SEO campaign.

Google has been back stepping ever since. Unhappy with the manipulation of PageRank that was greatly enhanced by the ability to see the PR on any page, (but apparently unwilling to withdraw entirely the prime reason to keep the toolbar installed on your browser), Google fought back with a publicity campaign and with tools that often backfired.  For example, in 2005, Google introduced the ‘nofollow’ attribute in an aim to conquor comment spam and encouraged web owners to add it to their blogs. Not long after, they demanded that anyone selling text links had to use the nofollow attribute to discourage ‘selling’ PR.

This little attribute opened (yet another) can of PR worms for Google, as webmasters quickly learned how to apply to sculpt PageRank within a site and Google engineers had to change the way that Google divides links on a page – an attempt to prevent webmasters from re-assigning it with the use of nofollow.

Google stopped pushing data to the toolbar in late 2004 and established something of a measly quarterly schedule of updates with the hope  that outdated PR would devalue the commodity anyway. “The PageRank that is displayed in the Google Toolbar is for entertainment purposes only,” Googlers reportedly announced in December that same year.

Moving forwards to October of 2009, the ability to see the “importance of a page” was removed from Google’s Webmaster tools in the search giant’s ongoing campaign to take the focus off PR, and 6 months later in April ’10, released what appears to be the last quarterly update. Webmasters report updates to toolbar PR often with no pattern, as though updates are now simply random and sporadic.  Is it trailing off we wonder?

Google does seem to have effectively rendered the toolbar more useless than not, and  it’s common to hear many webmasters insist that PageRank is no longer important.  You only have to read SEO forums and webmaster discussion groups to read scores of people claim that ‘why do you care about PR’?

But hey, if PR wasn’t still a central factor in Google’s algorithm – or as Google puts it, ‘the basis of their technology’ — why would they go to all this trouble to hide it?

Google’s Matt Cutts has now addressed the subject of exactly how much influence Facebook and Twitter has on it’s search engine listings, with help of a new video uploaded to Googles’ Webmaster Help Channel.

“We do use Twitter and Facebook links in ranking as we always have in our web search rankings, but in addition we’re also trying to figure out a little bit about the reputation of an author or creator on Twitter or Facebook,” says Cutts. “I filmed a video back in May 2010 where I said that we didn’t use that as a signal, and at the time, we did not use that as a signal.  But now, we’re taping this in December 2010, and we are using that as a signal.”

Now, this doesn’t mean that suddenly Twitter and Facebook links are the main ranking factor determining where your content is showing up in organic searches. If anything, Google seems to be tiptoeing into the waters in this area.

“The web search quality team has a lot of different groups in a lot of different offices, so people including the original Blog Search team, people who worked on Realtime Search…have been working on using these sorts of things as a signal,” explains Cutts. “So primarily, it has been used a little bit more in the realtime sort of search, where you might see individual tweets or other links showing up, and streaming up on the page. We’re studying how much sense it makes to use it a little more widely within our web search rankings.”

To reiterate, you’ll still see this playing more of a role in realtime search, but Google is “looking at it more broadly within web search as well,” according to Cutts.

“Now, there’s a few things to remember,” Cutts warns. “Number one is: if we can’t crawl a page (if we can’t see a page), then we can’t really assign PageRank to it, and it doesn’t really count. So if we’re able to obtain the data, then we can use it, but if for some reason a page is forbidden for us to crawl or if we’re not able to obtain it somehow, then we wouldn’t be able to use it within our rankings.”

This would appear to mean that links within Facebook will not mean a whole lot when the user isn’t sharing their updates with everyone. Many Facebook users have their privacy settings adjusted to only share with their friends. While Facebook may have far more users than Twitter, privacy settings will greatly reduce that number in terms of links that will potentially help your search rankings.

“This is something that is used relatively lightly for now, and we’ll see how much we use it over time depending on how useful it is and how robust it ends up being,” says Cutts. “The one thing I would caution people about is don’t necessarily say to yourself, ‘Ha. Now I’m going to go out and get reciprocal follows, and I’m gonna get a ton of followers,’ just like people used to get a ton of links. In the same way that PageRank depends on not just the number of links, but the quality of those links, you have to think about what are the followers who mean quality. Who are the people who actually are not just bots or some software program or things like that.”

Would you like to see Facebook/Twitter links carry more weight in organic search or not?