Advanced search engine optimization stratgies to improve your search engine rankings and drive well qualified traffic to your website. Presented by John Thyfault, VP of Search Engine and Social Media Marketing, Beasley Direct Marketing

1. Advanced SEO Workshop
Keeping Up With The Engines
#OMS-AdvSEO
John Thyfault
Vice President, Search & Social Media Marketing
Beasley Direct Marketing, Inc.
Twitter: @JohnThyfault
Silicon Valley Convention Center | Room F 1

2. Workshop Agenda
• State Of Modern SEO
• Panda and Penguin - Cuddly animals gone bad!
• Domain Management
• Advanced Information Architecture and Technology
Optimization
• Advanced Onsite Content Optimization
• Advanced Offsite Factors Including Link Building &
Maintenance
• SEO & Social Media
2

3. About Beasley Direct Marketing
Beasley Direct Marketing, Inc. provides copywriting,
design, programming, and consulting services for the
following direct marketing channels:
• Search
(PPC
and
SEO) • Catalog/eCommerce
• Email
Crea3ve,
Design,
Deliverability
• Brochure,
White
Paper,
and
Guide
copy
Audits,
and
Broadcast and
design
• Direct
mail
(with
and
without
PURLs) • List
Building
and
CRM
Database
• Landing
Page
Design
(with
and
without
Management
PURLs) • Telemarke3ng
• Mobile • Transla3on
for
all
of
the
above
• Video • Execu3ve
Dashboard
Tracking,
Repor3ng,
• Social
and
Lead
Assignment
• Website
Design
3

4. It’s Not Your Father’s SEO!
What
are
the
Panda
and
Penguin
updates
and
how
did
they
change
search
engine
op4miza4on?
4

5. What Was Panda To You?
A
major
change
to
the
Google
Algorithm
in
February,
2011
that
wrecked
havoc
on
the
SEO
world:
Designed
to
lower
the
value
of
“thin/poor”
content
pages
and
sites
-­‐
site
wide
penalIes
Leading
to
lower
traffic,
devalued
links,
less
site
revenue,
rains
of
fire,
cats
and
dogs
living
together.
Real
Old
Testament
Stuff!
5

6. What Was Penguin To You?
An
algorithm
update
on
April
24,
2012
that
aimed
to
clean
out
“over
opImized”
sites.
It
targeted
link
text
metrics
and
relevancy.
Not
nearly
as
vicious
as
Panda,
but
sIll
reaped
havoc
across
the
SEO
world.
6

7. Panda Changes
• Designed to eliminate the value of content farms,
duplicated content and paid links in the SERPs
• Look at pages that have excessive ads, no links, lots of
poor in-bound links and poorly written content
• Looks at pages on site as a group and not individual
pages. i.e. if page A has links from Page B and page B
is low quality, page A gets dinged!
• Looked at bounce rates/pogo sticking for sites
• Released into the wild at roughly the same time
Demand Media had their IPO
7

8. Penguin Changes
• Looked hard at relevancy of sites for in-bound links
• In bound links are measured on both relevancy of the
individual page content and the niche of the site
• Penalized over optimized anchor text, exact match in
anchor text across different sites killed results
• Google is trying to stop the gaming of anchor text
8

9. Panda Results
• Large E-commerce retailer that had been
successfully doing white hat SEO since 2001
• 15,000 product pages optimized
9

10. Panda Fallout
10

11. Panda Fallout
11

12. Panda Fallout
12

13. Penguin Fallout
Google is moving from anchor text matching to niche/
content relevancy for linking site as signal of primary link
relevancy/quality
13

14. Penguin Data - 60% of in bound links
Microsite
Masters,
Penguin
Analysis:
SEO
Isn’t
Dead,
But
You
Need
To
Act
Smarter,
hRp://www.micrositemasters.com/blog/penguin-­‐analysis-­‐seo-­‐isnt-­‐dead-­‐but-­‐you-­‐need-­‐to-­‐act-­‐smarter-­‐and-­‐5-­‐easy-­‐ways-­‐to-­‐
do-­‐so/ 14

15. Penguin Data
Microsite
Masters,
Penguin
Analysis:
SEO
Isn’t
Dead,
But
You
Need
To
Act
Smarter,
hRp://www.micrositemasters.com/blog/penguin-­‐analysis-­‐seo-­‐isnt-­‐dead-­‐but-­‐you-­‐need-­‐to-­‐act-­‐smarter-­‐and-­‐5-­‐easy-­‐ways-­‐to-­‐
do-­‐so/ 15

16. Penguin Data
Microsite
Masters,
Penguin
Analysis:
SEO
Isn’t
Dead,
But
You
Need
To
Act
Smarter,
hRp://www.micrositemasters.com/blog/penguin-­‐analysis-­‐seo-­‐isnt-­‐dead-­‐but-­‐you-­‐need-­‐to-­‐act-­‐smarter-­‐and-­‐5-­‐easy-­‐ways-­‐to-­‐
do-­‐so/ 16

17. Penguin Data
Microsite
Masters,
Penguin
Analysis:
SEO
Isn’t
Dead,
But
You
Need
To
Act
Smarter,
hRp://www.micrositemasters.com/blog/penguin-­‐analysis-­‐seo-­‐isnt-­‐dead-­‐but-­‐you-­‐need-­‐to-­‐act-­‐smarter-­‐and-­‐5-­‐easy-­‐ways-­‐to-­‐
do-­‐so/ 17

18. Penguin Data
Microsite
Masters,
Penguin
Analysis:
SEO
Isn’t
Dead,
But
You
Need
To
Act
Smarter,
hRp://www.micrositemasters.com/blog/penguin-­‐analysis-­‐seo-­‐isnt-­‐dead-­‐but-­‐you-­‐need-­‐to-­‐act-­‐smarter-­‐and-­‐5-­‐easy-­‐ways-­‐to-­‐
do-­‐so/ 18

19. How To Deal With Changes In The
Algorithm
• Look at your basics with a critical eye
–Domain, Information Architecture, Site
Technology, internal site link structure, external
link profiles and development,
–Look at time on page (clicks of the back button)
–Existing site content and offsite content
distribution programs
–Social signals/validation
19

20. Review Your Domain
• Age of the domain still matters
• Do you have a keyword in your domain name?
• .com is still the major TDL unless you can get
a .edu or .gov
• Once you burn your domain’s rep, it takes a long
time to get back in the good graces of the
engines
• For new sites, can you buy a domain that fits
above
20

21. What’s Your Hood?
• Can you host your own servers?
• If not, are you on a shared server or on a virtual private
server?
• Are there bad players that are with your hosting company?
• Are you taking advantage of load balancing and remote
caching?
– Google likes fast loading pages!
21

22. Information Architecture
• Have a well organized site with pages and topics
that relate to each being grouped together on the
site
• Have this order support the menus and in text
links
• Use logical keyword rich names for directories
and files
• KEEP IT CONSISTENT!!
22

23. Internal Linking
• Be consistent with how you create internal links
–Both at user visible and source code level
• Focus internal link traffic to top pages on site
–Make sure these top pages have great user
value
• Keep the generic words out of internal links,
“Support,” “More”, “Click Here”, etc.
23

24. Content Is King
• If your content is currently more focused on keywords and
less focused on good writing
• Have topics that support one another within your site, link
the most similar topics directly and the dis-similar topics
through others
• Make the content on your pages actionable, ask the user to
complete your site goals
• If your site is poorly written, it does not matter where the
keywords are
24

25. Content Is King
• Be specific and then be more specific
• Make your headlines for the web and not for print
– Drunk gets nine years in violin case
– Drunken man gets a nine years sentence in stolen violin
case
• Create pages that are easy to read and skim
– Bulleted and numbered lists are a wonderful thing
– A ordered list draws crawler attention to the content with
HTML
• If your pages are low quality, kill them or move them to
another domain
25

26. Query Freshness
Google looks at the query volume around phrases and will
change your ranking based on how fresh the query is
26

27. Page Level Metrics
• Time on page, less than 15 seconds is bad (if they go back
to Google)
• Number of pages visited on your site, deep user exploration
as measured by Google toolbar and Google sign-in
• How many of your visitors are first time users?
• Exit rate and bounce rate – Do people find the answer and
exit or do they go back to Google for another site
27

28. Links To Your Site
• Make it easy for partners, customers and colleagues to
link to your site. Provide varied anchor text and targets
• Add links with varied, quality anchor text to any outbound
communication
– Apply good SEO techniques to the following outbound
communications
• Blogs
• Tweets
• Facebook/LinkedIn
• Press Releases
28

29. New Links
• Create compelling content that has value over and above
SEO
• Social links can be broken into two sets, both important
– Primary – original
– Secondary – re-tweets, shares, likes
• Google & Bing are giving increasing prominence to social
signals
• Pay attention to the niche that the target site is in
• Authority of social signals
• Domain authority
• Author authority
29

30. New Links
• Look for new links that do not come from the same IP C-
block
• Look at Domain level authority when hunting for new links
• Look at hosts for incoming links and try to weed out bad
actors
30

31. Social Media
How Does It Tie Into Search
• Google, Bing, Yahoo and all other search engines
have worked social media signals into their ranking
algorithms
• The signals are broken out into two categories
–Volume and timeliness
–Social reputation and influence
• There is overlap between these categories
• All search engines are paying attention to this
communications channel
–Sunday, January 8, 2012 - Tim Tebow sets new
Twitter record after winning touchdown pass during
wildcard game. 9,420 tweets per second 31

32. Social Media
How Does It Tie Into Search
• Tuesday, January 10, 2012
– Google launches “Personal Results” - An initiative to tie
user’s personal social networks into real-time search
results
– It is no surprise that Google+ dominates a most of the
results initially.
– Twitter complains that their results are not being
featured prominently in the new Personal Results
• Twitter had ended an deep crawl agreement with Google last
summer
– Twitter, Facebook and other social sites TOS prohibit
deep crawling and indexing of their content
– Facebook is keeping quiet right now on the whole thing
32

33. Social Media
How Does It Tie Into Search
• Signals to watch
– Share of voice
– Sentiment
– Awareness
– Engagement
– Influence
– Volume
33

34. Social Media
How Does It Tie Into Search
• Facebook postings, shares and likes
• Tweets and re-tweets
• Yelp reviews
• Google+’s
• YouTube votes
• Structured curation sites such as Pinterest & Snip.it
34

35. Social Media
How Does It Tie Into Search
• Social signals in search are measured at two levels
– Author authority
– Authority attributed to individual Tweeter, Facebook
Page, LinkedIn profile
– How much influence and reach does the individual
have?
• Domain authority
– Very similar to individual but applies to whole domain
and is more relevant to blogs and target pages in social
media stream
35

36. Forrester/Groundswell Social Ladder
30
36

37. Social Media
Who Do We Target?
• Creators - roughly 1-2 % of universe
• Critics - roughly 3-5 % of universe
– Creators & Critics are your primary targets
• Collectors - roughly 20% of universe
– Collectors are a close secondary target
• Joiners and Spectators - roughly 40% of universe
– Don’t ignore them, they can make or break your
campaign. They are the ones who ultimately use your
product.
• In-actives - roughly 20% of universe
37

38. Taking Advantage Of Social’s Influence
On Search
• Three things that you need to know to be successful
– Who’s talking about your product, marketplace and the
problems your product offers a solution to
• Identify the Creators and Critics and where they are
having their conversations
– How are they talking about it? What is the language that
they are using.
• Not just keywords but the tone of voice in the
conversation
38

39. Taking Advantage Of Social’s Influence
On Search
• Three things that you need to know to be
successful (continued)
– What is important to the Creators and Critics
• Straight facts
• Center of attention / ego boosting
• Solving problems for others
39

40. Taking Advantage Of Social’s Influence On
Search
• Understanding their language
– Starts very similarly to a SEO/PPC research project
• Good strong tools such as WordTracker, Keyword
Discovery, AdWords Keyword Tool, SEOmoz,
SpyFu.com, etc., can give you the guidance on
keyword list development and potential
• Start inputting your identified keywords into your
34
social tools from the last slide. You will start to
discover new sites, blogs, postings and people to
target
40

41. Taking Advantage Of Social’s Influence On
Search
• Start a listening campaign
– Look-back listening
– Current listening
– Always listen first before you start to participate
41

42. Taking Advantage Of Social’s Influence On
Search
• Start sharing resources, content and ideas from a number
of different sources
• Target each conversation separately, different messages
for different people
• Start your own conversations once you’ve established
some credibility
• Blogs, Tweets, Facebook pages, etc.
42

43. Taking Advantage Of Social’s Influence
On Search
• Start creating unique content to share
• Increase your individual and domain authority
• Assign someone within your organization to be the
social champion
• Lay out acceptable rules and guidelines for what can and
can not be shared
43

44. Taking Advantage Of Social’s Influence On
Search
• Make your contributions INTERESTING!
– Short, snappy headlines that promise info but don’t tell the
whole story
• “Top 5 ways to drive social traffic”
• “The 8 most embarrassing moments in baseball”
– You’ve done the keyword research, now use them in any and
all postings
• Headlines
• Body Text
– Always include a link to your site/blog/product/profile in any
and all postings
– Find the critics and try to be the first to share/re-tweet/post
their content. They will notice you and do the same for you
44

45. Things To Remember With Search & Social
• Search engines are using social media signals in every
ranking algorithm
• Social signals are surpassing other media as a primary and
secondary source
• Social media is a good traffic in and of itself
• If your content isn’t interesting, compelling or unique the
social world will ignore it
45

46. Things To Remember With Search &
Social
• Use the language that the other participants in the social
conversation use. You can very rarely impose your own
language on top
• It takes time and effort to create a good social campaign
46

47. Conclusion
• A lot of the advanced work you will do to roll with the
algorithms comes down to doing detailed work on the
basics.
– GO THE EXTRA MILE
– It won’t be fast but hunting the details down and dealing
with issues that you let go earlier will pay off in the end
47

48. Optimize Your Landing Pages With This
Guide
• Optimize your landing pages
with this 10-page, hands-on
guide offering tips on:
– Design
– Personalization
– Offers
– Usability
h"p://www.BeasleyDirect.com/LandingPagesGuide.html
48

49. Learn How to Optimize Your Emails
Learn how to optimize your emails for
delivery through spam filters and for
consistency across email browsers in this
handy guide. Learn how to:
– Get your email around spam filters
– Make your email look consistent
across browsers
– Optimize your design for blocked
images and preview pane
h"p://www.BeasleyDirect.com/Email_marke?ng/EmailAuditGuide.html
49

50. New Guide on
Multichannel Marketing
Hot off the press, this new guide
offers tips on how to save money
and optimize effectiveness
h"p://www.beasleydirect.com/mul?channel_marke?ng/mul?channelmarke?ngguide.html
50

51. Thank You!!
John Thyfault
http://www.beasleydirect.com/search_marketing.html
jthyfault@beasleydirect.com
650-323-1881
@JohnThyfault
51