New blog

I don't blog often, but when I do it's now at http://blog.semeosis.com.

Here I've written about some of the things I've looked into recently (last couple of years) including:


The star schema benchmark for benchmarking database performance against star schemas (in particular getting this working with SQL Server
Erlang (in particular an intro for people from a C#/Java background)
Setting up

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Convert Facebook Newsfeed into Excel Spreadsheet

Here is an excellent application for Facebook. One of the best Facebook applications. Actually with this application you look more professional when you check your Facebook profile at the office, because allows you to check your Facebook newsfeed into something that is similar with an excel spreadsheet. All of this is possible thanks to HardlyWork.in. All you have to do is just click at “Gimme Dem Spreadsheets”, add you profile information and convert your account (Facebook newsfeed) into excel spreadsheet.

This application is very useful for those people that use Facebook secretly from their chiefs. It looks very professional and helps you to be in touched with. Facebook news every moment. The only weakness of this application is that you can not view photos in original size, but if you work in conditions of this kind of limitation, this application can help you a lot!

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How to target and rank high for low competion keywords

How to target and rank high for low competion keywords Don’t try to optimize your website with keywords that have too much competition. As an example. If you did a google search for the keyword “SEO” it returns a result of 716,000,000 pages! You don’t need be a marketing genius to realize that there is a lot of competition for this keyword and that it is going to be extremely hard to rank for this term. So instead concentrate your efforts on keywords that are much more attainable and easier to rank for.

By now you understand the importance of doing proper keyword research. So you probably want to know how you do this.  Well it is important to point out that, people have different methods and tools for achieving this research. In the first instance I believe that your primary goal is to find and optimize your website for ‘Low competition keywords’.

‘Low competition Keywords’ are those keywords that have a good monthly search volume but relatively low competition. I classify good monthly search volume as anything over 1,000 searches per month and preferably 3,000 searches. By low competition I mean that the sites occupying that first 10 places in Google can be beaten.

Good monthly search volume + Low competition = SEO success.

High monthly search volume + High competition = SEO failure.

Now is it easy to find these ‘low competition keywords’? The answer is no! The internet is extremely competitive, when other seo firms find these ‘low competition keywords’ they take advantage of them for clients. However that is not too say that there aren’t still a lot of excellent ‘golden keywords’ still to be found.

Start with understanding, that the goal of proper seo keyword research is uncover keywords that have a good monthly search volume and relatively low competition. When I am conducting keyword research I look at it as a process or in stages.

Firstly I decide upon a niche or business category that I might want to get into, this could be something like  ‘NY commercial Insurance’ or  ‘home renovation’.

Secondly, I use keyword research tools to ascertain the interest in the niche or category and look at keywords and search volumes. Then I look at the bigger picture, i.e.: how competitive is the niche overall for certain keywords?

Finally I look at the top 10 websites and ascertain what my chances of out ranking them. After all ultimately your goal is to be no.1 on Google, or at least on 1st page. So in reality the only real competition are the 10 websites that occupy the position on the first page.

Ok lets look at each stage in more detail.

Stage 1 – Deciding What keyword Category To Get Into

Really this is a decision that you have to make on your own. You might be really passionate about a particular business sector or subject. You’d be really surprised at what interests other people share as well. One tip is to check out Google Trends. You can see what is popular at the moment and you can also see a chart of topics popularity. Initially it doesn’t what matter what niche or category you choose because you’ll soon find out whether there is any market for it.

Stage 2 – Determining if there is a market for the category

Once you have decided on the business category that you want to get into you need to ascertain whether there is a market for it. Now, there are many different ways to do this but the easiest way is to use the Google Keyword Tool or the free wordtracker keyword tool. Use the tool to analyze monthly search volumes. As mentioned if the monthly search volume is over 1,000 then it might be something that you want to get into. You want to get a list of keywords related to your business ready for stage 3.

Stage 3 – Looking at the ‘bigger picture’ for certain keywords.

Once you have your list of keywords, you now need to have a look at the bigger picture. This will help you get an idea of the chances for ranking. This does take quite a lot of time and effort but believe me it is well worth it.

*Note this information I am about to give you is the real juice of seo keyword research.

I am assuming that from stage 2 you have a list of keywords that get over 1,000 monthly searches. Take the keyword and type it into Google and do the following:

Step 1 – General Search

Type the keyword into Google and make a note of the results. There are no hard and fast rules, use your own judgment. If the search results return over 100,000,000 pages then the chances are that the keyword is quite competitive. Conversely if the results are less than 1,000,000 then it is possible that the competition is not so bad. Use a general search to get a feel for the size of the competition.

Step 2 – Perform “inanchor” search ** very important**

The next step is to perform the following search into Google.

inanchor:”keyword”

The inanchor search command shows us how many websites have the keyword as anchor text pointing back to their website. We may assume if they have the exact anchor text pointing back to their website that they have done some sort of linking building campaign for that keyword. Therefore it is logical to assume that they are the competition.  Generally a result of under 1,000 is good and definitely under 100,000 search results.

Step 3 – Perform “intitle” search

The next step is to perform the following search into Google:   intitle: “keyword”

This result will reveal how many websites have the keyword in the title tag. It is generally accepted by most seo professionals that the title tag is extremely important for seo, as it is one of the first things that the search engines look for. This command can help give us an approx figure of the number of website competing for this keyword. Granted some websites may have put these keywords in their title tag by accident but the majority have put it there for a reason; i.e., they want to rank for a particular keyword. No hard and fast rules about the numbers, obviously the lower the better.

Step 4 – Perform “intitle” and “inanchor” search

Now you want to perform both the inanchor and intitle search term. Input the following into Google

intitle:”keyword” inanchor:”keyword”

This will give you an approximate result of serious SEO competition. Smart SEO marketers will have the keyword in the title tag and will be building backlinks using the keyword as the anchor text. Therefore I think this helps to give us a fairly good idea of the competition. Remember the lower the search results from this command the better. Results of less than 1,000 may indicate to us that we can beat them with a relatively small amount of back link building. The higher the number the more competition.

Stage 4 – Analyzing the top 10 websites for your keyword

That concludes stage 3. Hopefully by now you have chosen a keyword that has a good monthly search volume and relatively low link building competition. However we can’t stop there. You now must analyze the top 10 website on page 1 of Google. So far we have only compared the number of competitors. However we haven’t looked at the strength of the competitors. It is my opinion that you only need to try and beat the first 10 website after all your goal is to rank number 1 or at least get on the 1st page for the keyword. So we now need to analyse the strength of these top 10 competitors.

Step 1 – Type keyword into Google

The first step is simple, type your keyword into Google and make a note of the top 10 results.

Step 2 – Take each site and have a look at its backlinks.

The second stage is to have a look at the backlinks that each site in the top 10 results shows. Now as I have mentioned before I believe that it is impossible to get an exact result on the number of backlinks that a site has pointing to it, however we can still get an idea.

Try going to Yahoo site explorer or One Utility. Enter the domain name and have a look at the number of backlinks the site has pointing to it. The more backlinks means the more backlink building competition for you.

Step 3 – Have a look at the age of the domains.

Most seo pro’s believe that older sites are more trusted by Google. Do a quick search to ascertain the age of the domain.

Step 4 – Have a look at the onpage optimization of each site.

For each site go to the homepage and then right click “view source.” This will allow you to see the source code. Check to see if you can find the following:

A. Keyword at the beginning of title tag.

B. Keyword in the keyword tag

C. Keyword in the description tag

D. Keyword in the h1 tags.

E. Keyword sprinkled throughout the page.

An absence of these might indicate that the site isn’t properly seo optimized and could mean that you could take advantage of this. It is my opinion that it is ‘offpage’ factors, i.e., the number of backlinks that a site has pointing to it that is the most crucial!

Step 5 – Analyze if any sites have your keyword in the url.

The search engines put some weight on keyword rich domain names. If one of the sites in the top 10 results has the exact keyword you want to rank for as the domain name then it may be harder for you to beat it.

Step 6 – Check the Page Rank of the domains.

Page rank is a way of Google showing us how important it thinks a web page is. You want to have a look at the page rank of the top 10 websites. Now it is quite possible to outrank a site with a higher page rank than yourself, however it is useful to help build an overall picture of the domains strength.

Step 7 – Check for prominence of Web 2.0 properties

A SERP (search engine results page) that has a lot of web 2.0 properties (e.g.Squidoo,Flixya,Hub pages) may indicate to us that we are going to be able to rank well. Unless the web 2.0 properties have been heavily backlinked, then with our own back linking tactics we have a definite chance of beating them.

Perform all 7 of these steps and you should be able to get a good feel of your likelihood of getting your site on 1st page of the top 10 websites. This is a lot of information to take in, especially if you are just starting out in seo. Hopefully by now you can see the importance of it. So before you do any search engine optimization make sure that you perform proper keyword research. Visit our blog for more information.

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5 Reasons to Blog Anonymously (and 5 Reasons Not To)

This guest post is by Phil (not his real name) of somehighschoolblog.

It used to be impossible to run a business anonymously. Sure, some authors could pull it off, but if you worked at an office, what were you supposed to do? Go to work with a bag over your head? But today anyone can accomplish this, because anyone can author a blog (and you thought I was going to tell you to work with a mask on, or something).

Copyright Ovidiu Iordachi - Fotolia.com

Depending on your motives, you may or may not have considered blogging anonymously. You probably didn’t contemplate blogging anonymously if:

• your only motivation is to become “famous”

• your blog connects to another part of your life

• you are blogging to build more connections with your friends or boss.

You should consider blogging anonymously if:

• you’re planning on touching on a sensitive or taboo subject

• you don’t want to be identified with your blog

• you are worried about negative real-world consequences that could arise from your blog.

If you’ve already started your blog, it is too late to change to an anonymous persona (but you can always create another blog). However, if you are thinking of blogging anonymously, you should consider these points.

Reasons to blog anonymously

The concept of anonymity has always held a special enchantment for some people, and, for others it is purely practical. Whatever your blog topic, there are a five strong reasons to blog anonymously.

No pressure

If no one knows the “real you,” then they can’t tell you, in person, any thoughts they have on your blog. This means that no one will be able to make fun of, disagree strongly with, or ask to be featured on (using peer pressure) your blog. If your blog is a total flop, you won’t be publicly embarrassed.

While I wouldn’t advise disregarding your manners and morals, you don’t have to worry about close acquaintances or family members being offended by your posts.

A fresh start

Creating an anonymous identity also allows you to create a new character, if you so choose. Let’s say you are working full-time as an auto mechanic, but you are trying to create a blog on entrepreneurship. Your readers might not think you could be an authority on this subject as an auto mechanic, but an anonymous identity removes this doubt.

Instead, you could create a back-story to fit your blog; for this case, it could be something about how your latest entrepreneurial project is to build a blog anonymously.

You’re shy or unsure

Were you one of those people who is unwilling to put yourself on a blog for all to see, you should choose to blog anonymously. This way, you can hide behind a fake identity and not worry about what others think (similar to there being no pressure). You could also use anonymity to discover how people will react to your content before associating yourself with your content.

It’s a gimmick

Blogging anonymously might fit your content. For example, if you were to start a blog involving content that you received anonymously. Also, blogging anonymously places a shroud of mystery around the author and limits your personality to how you network and write your blog.

Additionally, you could make it into a marketing scheme, such as offering to reveal your true identity after reaching a certain number of subscribers.

Reasons not to blog anonymously

As an anonymous blogger who uses a pseudonym, I’ve been able to experience many of the negative aspects of choosing to remain anonymous firsthand. However, I have not yet encountered any one thing that was impossible to work around or ignore, so I have remained an anonymous blogger.

It’s harder to build traffic

Some of the initial things that many blogs recommend new bloggers do to build traffic cannot be done anonymously, and, thus, must be ignored or adapted to anonymity. For instance, many of the tips here and around the web encourage you to put your link in your email signature.

The only thing I use my anonymous e-mail address for is my blog, so this is redundant (it would be odd to have it in my real email). Also, linking to your blog from your Facebook page or Twitter account ruins your anonymity.

And, while you can (hopefully) trust your family not to share your blog’s identity, you can’t tell your friends or acquaintances to check out your blog and to spread the word, which is a great initial traffic builder.

More pressure

This is the exact opposite of “No Pressure,” but depending on what type of person you are, blogging anonymously could actually be more stressful than blogging as yourself.

You have to constantly watch yourself to make sure your anonymous identity never reveals your true identity (even in something as simple as signing your name to an e-mail) and vice-versa. Often, extra measures must be taken to ensure anonymity, and, while I won’t delve in to all of those, you must always check when giving any real information that it is not easily accessible.

Take this into account when creating user profiles for services or when registering a domain name (but you can choose to keep your information private for an extra $10 in this case).

No real-life connection

Since you can’t tell your friends about your blog, you can’t ever reference your blog in conversation.

You will need to depend on the digital world for feedback, and there will be no “Did you like my last post?” conversations. Instead, you will have to rely entirely on comments to gain a sense of how your readers feel about your blog.

The truth always appears

In such an interconnected society, if enough people put effort into it, they will discover your true identity. If/when this happens, you need to consider whether or not your readers will feel betrayed or angry towards you. You should consider this even if you plan on going public with your identity yourself at some point.

Feeling a loss of accountability

Many people think blogging anonymously protects them from whatever they write, so they are incredibly rude, untruthful, or worse. You should always know that people can find your true identity, and it is just plain useless to write this way. After all, no one will want to read it.

Furthermore, though, (and I can attest to this) it may sometimes be easier to excuse not posting for an extra few days, or not pursuing a guest-posting opportunity, because no one holds you accountable but yourself (no inquiries from friends or family). Therefore, you must be responsible and motivated to successfully blog anonymously.

Should you blog anonymously?

While there are both pros and cons to blogging anonymously, I feel that the negatives don’t outweigh the positives in certain situations. Each blogger is different, but, in my case, it is the lessened pressure combined with the creation of a new character that led me to blog anonymously.

Also, because it is harder to build initial traffic with previous connections, I think it is more challenging to build an anonymous blog (therefore, any experienced bloggers looking for a new project should try building a blog with an anonymous persona, disregarding any previous connections they’ve accumulated).

Do you have any experience, or advice for those thinking of blogging anonymously?

Using the pseudonym of Phil, Phil is a high school freshman who writes for, markets, and manages a humor blog about all aspects of high school life. Phil is unsure of what career he wants to pursue, but a few possibilities can be found here.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

5 Reasons to Blog Anonymously (and 5 Reasons Not To)

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How Google's Panda Update Changed SEO Best Practices Forever - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by Aaron Wheeler

It's here! Google has released Panda update 2.2, just as Matt Cutts said they would at SMX Advanced here in Seattle a couple of weeks ago. This time around, Google has - among other things - improved their ability to detect scraper sites and banish them from the SERPs. Of course, the Panda updates are changes to Google's algorithm and are not merely manual reviews of sites in the index, so there is room for error (causing devastation for many legitimate webmasters and SEOs).

A lot of people ask what parts of their existing SEO practice they can modify and emphasize to recover from the blow, but alas, it's not that simple. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand discusses how the Panda updates work and, more importantly, how Panda has fundamentally changed the best practices for SEO. Have you been Panda-abused? Do you have any tips for recuperating? Let us know in the comments!

 

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, we're talking about the very exciting, very interesting, very controversial Google Panda update.

Panda, also known as Farmer, was this update that Google came out with in March of this year, of 2011, that rejiggered a bunch of search results and pushed a lot of websites down in the rankings, pushed some websites up in the rankings, and people have been concerned about it ever since. It has actually had several updates and new versions of that implementation and algorithm come out. A lot of people have all these questions like, "Ah, what's going on around Panda?" There have been some great blog posts on SEOmoz talking about some of the technical aspects. But I want to discuss in this Whiteboard Friday some of the philosophical and theoretical aspects and how Google Panda really changes the way a lot of us need to approach SEO.

So let's start with a little bit of Panda history. Google employs an engineer named Navneet Panda. The guy has done some awesome work. In fact, he was part of a patent application that Bill Slawski looked into where he found a great way to scale some machine learning algorithms. Now, machine learning algorithms, as you might be aware, are very computationally expensive and they take a long time to run, particularly if you have extremely large data sets, both of inputs and of outputs. If you want, you can research machine learning. It is an interesting fun tactic that computer scientists use and programmers use to find solutions to problems. But basically before Panda, machine learning scalability at Google was at level X, and after it was at the much higher level Y. So that was quite nice. Thanks to Navneet, right now they can scale up this machine learning.

What Google can do based on that is take a bunch of sites that people like more and a bunch of sites that people like less, and when I say like, what I mean is essentially what the quality raters, Google's quality raters, tell them this site is very enjoyable. This is a good site. I'd like to see this high in the search results. Versus things where the quality raters say, "I don't like to see this." Google can say, "Hey, you know what? We can take the intelligence of this quality rating panel and scale it using this machine learning process."

Here's how it works. Basically, the idea is that the quality raters tell Googlers what they like. They answer all these questions, and you can see Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts were interviewed by Wired Magazine. They talked about some of the things that were asked of these quality raters, like, "Would you trust this site with your credit card? Would you trust the medical information that this site gives you with your children? Do you think the design of this site is good?" All sorts of questions around the site's trustworthiness, credibility, quality, how much they would like to see it in the search results. Then they compare the difference.

The sites that people like more, they put in one group. The sites that people like less, they put in another group. Then they look at tons of metrics. All these different metrics, numbers, signals, all sorts of search signals that many SEOs suspect come from user and usage data metrics, which Google has not historically used as heavily. But they think that they use those in a machine learning process to essentially separate the wheat from the chaff. Find the ones that people like more and the ones that people like less. Downgrade the ones they like less. Upgrade the ones they like more. Bingo, you have the Panda update.

So, Panda kind of means something new and different for SEO. As SEOs, for a long time you've been doing the same kind of classic things. You've been building good content, making it accessible to search engines, doing good keyword research, putting those keywords in there, and then trying to get some links to it. But you have not, as SEOs, we never really had to think as much or as broadly about, "What is the experience of this website? Is it creating a brand that people are going to love and share and reward and trust?" Now we kind of have to think about that.

It is almost like the job of SEO has been upgraded from SEO to web strategist. Virtually everything you do on the Internet with your website can impact SEO today. That is especially true following Panda. The things that they are measuring is not, oh, these sites have better links than these sites. Some of these sites, in fact, have much better links than these sites. Some of these sites have what you and I might regard, as SEOs, as better content, more unique, robust, quality content, and yet, people, quality raters in particular, like them less or the things, the signals that predict that quality raters like those sites less are present in those types of sites.

Let's talk about a few of the specific things that we can be doing as SEOs to help with this new sort of SEO, this broader web content/web strategy portion of SEO.

First off, design and user experience. I know, good SEOs have been preaching design user experience for years because it tends to generate more links, people contribute more content to it, it gets more social signal shares and tweets and all this other sort of good second order effect. Now, it has a first order effect impact, a primary impact. If you can make your design absolutely beautiful, versus something like this where content is buffeted by advertising and you have to click next, next, next a lot. The content isn't all in one page. You cannot view it in that single page format. Boy, the content blocks themselves aren't that fun to read, even if it is not advertising that's surrounding them, even if it is just internal messaging or the graphics don't look very good. The site design feels like it was way back in the 1990s. All that stuff will impact the ability of this page, this site to perform. And don't forget, Google has actually said publicly that even if you have a great site, if you have a bunch of pages that are low quality on that site, they can drag down the rankings of the rest of the site. So you should try and block those for us or take them down. Wow. Crazy, right? That's what a machine learning algorithm, like Panda, will do. It will predicatively say, "Hey, you know what? We're seeing these features here, these elements, push this guy down."

Content quality matters a lot. So a lot of time, in the SEO world, people will say, "Well, you have to have good, unique, useful content." Not enough. Sorry. It's just not enough. There are too many people making too much amazing stuff on the Internet for good and unique and grammatically correct and spelled properly and describes the topic adequately to be enough when it comes to content. If you say, "Oh, I have 50,000 pages about 50,000 different motorcycle parts and I am just going to go to Mechanical Turk or I am going to go outsource, and I want a 100 word, two paragraphs about each one of them, just describe what this part is." You think to yourself, "Hey, I have good unique content." No, you have content that is going to be penalized by Panda. That is exactly what Panda is designed to do. It is designed to say this is content that someone wrote for SEO purposes just to have good unique content on the page, not content that makes everyone who sees it want to share it and say wow. Right?

If I get to a page about a motorcycle part and I am like, "God, not only is this well written, it's kind of funny. It's humorous. It includes some anecdotes. It's got some history of this part. It has great photos. Man, I don't care at all about motorcycle parts, and yet, this is just a darn good page. What a great page. If I were interested, I'd be tweeting about this, I'd share it. I'd send it to my uncle who buys motorcycles. I would love this page." That's what you have to optimize for. It is a totally different thing than optimizing for did I use the keyword at least three times? Did I put it in the title tag? Is it included in there? Is the rest of the content relevant to the keywords? Panda changes this. Changes it quite a bit.

Finally, you are going to be optimizing around user and usage metrics. Things like, when people come to your site, generally speaking compared to other sites in your niche or ranking for your keywords, do they spend a good amount of time on your site, or do they go away immediately? Do they spend a good amount of time? Are they bouncing or are they browsing? If you have a good browse rate, people are browsing 2, 3, 4 pages on average on a content site, that's decent. That's pretty good. If they're browsing 1.5 pages on some sites, like maybe specific kinds of news sites, that might actually be pretty good. That might be better than average. But if they are browsing like 1.001 pages, like virtually no one clicks on a second page, that might be weird. That might hurt you. Your click-through rate from the search results. When people see your title and your snippet and your domain name, and they go, "Ew, I don't know if I want to get myself involved in that. They've got like three hyphens in their domain name, and it looks totally spammy. I'm not going to get involved." Then that click-through rate is probably going to suffer and so are your rankings.

They are going to be looking at things like the diversity and quantity of traffic that comes to your site. Do lots of people from all around the world or all around your local region, your country, visit your website directly? They can measure this through Chrome. They can measure it through Android. They can measure it through the Google toolbar. They have all this user and usage metrics. They know where people are going on the Internet, where they spend time, how much time they spend, and what they do on those pages. They know about what happens from the search results too. Do people click from a result and then go right back to the search results and perform another search? Clearly, they were unhappy with that. They can take all these metrics and put them into the machine learning algorithm and then have Panda essentially recalculate. This why you see essentially Google doesn't issue updates every day or every week. It is about every 30 or 40 days that a new Panda update will come out because they are rejiggering all this stuff.

One of the things that people who get hit by Panda come up to me and say, "God, how are we ever going to get out of Panda? We've made all these changes. We haven't gotten out yet." I'm like, "Well, first off, you're not going to get out of it until they rejigger the results, and then there is no way that you are going to get out of it unless you change the metrics around your site." So if you go into your Analytics and you see that people are not spending longer on your pages, they are not enjoying them more, they are not sharing them more, they are not naturally linking to them more, your branded search traffic is not up, your direct type in traffic is not up, you see that none of these metrics are going up and yet you think you have somehow fixed the problems that Panda tries to solve for, you probably haven't.

I know this is frustrating. I know it's a tough issue. In fact, I think that there are sites that have been really unfairly hit. That sucks and they shouldn't be and Google needs to work on this. But I also know that I don't think Google is going to be making many changes. I think they are very happy with the way that Panda has gone from a search quality perspective and from a user happiness perspective. Their searchers are happier, and they are not seeing as much junk in the results. Google likes the way this is going. I think we are going to see more and more of this over time. It could even get more aggressive. I would urge you to work on this stuff, to optimize around these things, and to be ready for this new form of SEO.

Thanks everyone for watching. Look forward to some great comments, questions, feedback in the post. I will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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New Google Products Will Impact SEO

Google recently completed their Inside Search event where a number of new products were announced and presented for demonstration. This recap discusses some of the products that may impact the future of SEO.

Search by Image

Perhaps the most exciting and interesting development from Inside Search was the announcement of Search by Image. Users may upload, drag and drop or paste the URL for images that Google will then treat as a search query.

The demonstrator searched Google by uploading an old picture near a beach. Google determined where the picture was taken, and returned the top result of a Wikipedia page on the location, followed by “similar images” of the surrounding area. In another example, the “y u no” guy (an Internet meme) was dropped into the search. Google returned two results about the image, in addition to a few similar images.

How does this impact search engine optimization? Optimizing images to be found by search engines is an often underrated organic SEO tactic. Image search volume is likely to increase due to the new Google features. While the majority of image searches will continue to be informational, an increased number of users may be searching with purchase intent.

Suppose you are an online retailer selling shoes. A buyer goes into a shoe store and takes a picture of the shoe itself in order to find more information. As users become more familiar with Search by Image, this kind of activity will likely become increasingly common.

The prospective buyer may be searching for competitor pricing, reviews or additional information. Depending on a multitude of factors, your product page and/or image may appear, and you increase your chance of a link and/or sale – even if they don’t buy from you until next time.

Businesses can increase their chances of showing up for standard image results and Search by Image through keyword-targeted filenames, alt text and optimizing surrounding text. In addition, having multiple angles of the same product will be more likely to trigger Google’s “similar” image results on Search by Image. In the world of online retail, multiple product views are almost always a good thing, and Google’s new service makes multiple product images a worthwhile goal.

Google Instant Images

Again, image optimization is a rarely discussed method of bringing relevant users to a site. Image visitors can raise your site’s visibility, spread your brand and attract links that may otherwise be impossible to obtain.

Even if a user has typed in two letters, Google will begin showing images. If your images are eye-catching, users may pause queries or stop their search because they have found what they were (or weren’t) looking for. There is only one piece of advice I can offer for taking advantage of Instant Images: investing in quality, attractive images is more important than ever.

Google Voice Search (for Desktop)

The vast majority of Google voice searches in the past have been performed on mobile devices, but, with the announcement of Google Voice search for desktops, that may change. In my experience, people tend to search using very different queries when speaking and typing. With a six-fold increase in speech-assisted queries since May 2010 (according to Google’s presentation), there will likely be slightly fewer broad search queries and a slightly increased volume of “long-tail” keywords to optimize for.

Obsessed With Speed

If Google is “obsessed with speed,” and they have found that faster speeds lead to improved user experience, perhaps we, as website owners, should be obsessed with speed. Specifically, we should be obsessed with the time it takes for a user to find what he or she is looking for. This is good advice for both conversion optimization and organic SEO.

Google has, at several points, mentioned that they are concerned with the user experience of pages within search results, though the method of measuring the user experience and the impact on rankings is still a matter of speculation. Whether user experience is measured directly through user metrics or algorithmically, a bad user experience is increasingly bad for SEO, and a bad experience has always meant fewer natural links. SEOs would be wise to suggest and implement improvements related to page load time, navigation and a better user experience.

What announcement are you most excited about? Do you see any of Google’s other new products having an impact on how we do SEO?

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How Google's Panda Update Changed SEO Best Practices Forever - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by Aaron Wheeler

 It's here! Google has released Panda update 2.2, just as Matt Cutts said they would at SMX Advanced here in Seattle a couple of weeks ago. This time around, Google has - among other things - improved their ability to detect scraper sites and banish them from the SERPs. Of course, the Panda updates are changes to Google's algorithm and are not merely manual reviews of sites in the index, so there is room for error (causing devestation for many legitimate webmasters and SEOs).

A lot of people ask what parts of their existing SEO practice they can modify and emphasize to recover from the blow, but alas, it's not that simple. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand discusses how the Panda updates work and, more importantly, how Panda has fundamentally changed the best practices for SEO. Have you been Panda-abused? Do you have any tips for recouperating? Let us know in the comments!

 

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, we're talking about the very exciting, very interesting, very controversial Google Panda update.

Panda, also known as Farmer, was this update that Google came out with in March of this year, of 2011, that rejiggered a bunch of search results and pushed a lot of websites down in the rankings, pushed some websites up in the rankings, and people have been concerned about it ever since. It has actually had several updates and new versions of that implementation and algorithm come out. A lot of people have all these questions like, "Ah, what's going on around Panda?" There have been some great blog posts on SEOmoz talking about some of the technical aspects. But I want to discuss in this Whiteboard Friday some of the philosophical and theoretical aspects and how Google Panda really changes the way a lot of us need to approach SEO.

So let's start with a little bit of Panda history. Google employs an engineer named Navneet Panda. The guy has done some awesome work. In fact, he was part of a patent application that Bill Slawski looked into where he found a great way to scale some machine learning algorithms. Now, machine learning algorithms, as you might be aware, are very computationally expensive and they take a long time to run, particularly if you have extremely large data sets, both of inputs and of outputs. If you want, you can research machine learning. It is an interesting fun tactic that computer scientists use and programmers use to find solutions to problems. But basically before Panda, machine learning scalability at Google was at level X, and after it was at the much higher level Y. So that was quite nice. Thanks to Navneet, right now they can scale up this machine learning.

What Google can do based on that is take a bunch of sites that people like more and a bunch of sites that people like less, and when I say like, what I mean is essentially what the quality raters, Google's quality raters, tell them this site is very enjoyable. This is a good site. I'd like to see this high in the search results. Versus things where the quality raters say, "I don't like to see this." Google can say, "Hey, you know what? We can take the intelligence of this quality rating panel and scale it using this machine learning process."

Here's how it works. Basically, the idea is that the quality raters tell Googlers what they like. They answer all these questions, and you can see Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts were interviewed by Wired Magazine. They talked about some of the things that were asked of these quality raters, like, "Would you trust this site with your credit card? Would you trust the medical information that this site gives you with your children? Do you think the design of this site is good?" All sorts of questions around the site's trustworthiness, credibility, quality, how much they would like to see it in the search results. Then they compare the difference.

The sites that people like more, they put in one group. The sites that people like less, they put in another group. Then they look at tons of metrics. All these different metrics, numbers, signals, all sorts of search signals that many SEOs suspect come from user and usage data metrics, which Google has not historically used as heavily. But they think that they use those in a machine learning process to essentially separate the wheat from the chaff. Find the ones that people like more and the ones that people like less. Downgrade the ones they like less. Upgrade the ones they like more. Bingo, you have the Panda update.

So, Panda kind of means something new and different for SEO. As SEOs, for a long time you've been doing the same kind of classic things. You've been building good content, making it accessible to search engines, doing good keyword research, putting those keywords in there, and then trying to get some links to it. But you have not, as SEOs, we never really had to think as much or as broadly about, "What is the experience of this website? Is it creating a brand that people are going to love and share and reward and trust?" Now we kind of have to think about that.

It is almost like the job of SEO has been upgraded from SEO to web strategist. Virtually everything you do on the Internet with your website can impact SEO today. That is especially true following Panda. The things that they are measuring is not, oh, these sites have better links than these sites. Some of these sites, in fact, have much better links than these sites. Some of these sites have what you and I might regard, as SEOs, as better content, more unique, robust, quality content, and yet, people, quality raters in particular, like them less or the things, the signals that predict that quality raters like those sites less are present in those types of sites.

Let's talk about a few of the specific things that we can be doing as SEOs to help with this new sort of SEO, this broader web content/web strategy portion of SEO.

First off, design and user experience. I know, good SEOs have been preaching design user experience for years because it tends to generate more links, people contribute more content to it, it gets more social signal shares and tweets and all this other sort of good second order effect. Now, it has a first order effect impact, a primary impact. If you can make your design absolutely beautiful, versus something like this where content is buffeted by advertising and you have to click next, next, next a lot. The content isn't all in one page. You cannot view it in that single page format. Boy, the content blocks themselves aren't that fun to read, even if it is not advertising that's surrounding them, even if it is just internal messaging or the graphics don't look very good. The site design feels like it was way back in the 1990s. All that stuff will impact the ability of this page, this site to perform. And don't forget, Google has actually said publically that even if you have a great site, if you have a bunch of pages that are low quality on that site, they can drag down the rankings of the rest of the site. So you should try and block those for us or take them down. Wow. Crazy, right? That's what a machine learning algorithm, like Panda, will do. It will predicatively say, "Hey, you know what? We're seeing these features here, these elements, push this guy down."

Content quality matters a lot. So a lot of time, in the SEO world, people will say, "Well, you have to have good, unique, useful content." Not enough. Sorry. It's just not enough. There are too many people making too much amazing stuff on the Internet for good and unique and grammatically correct and spelled properly and describes the topic adequately to be enough when it comes to content. If you say, "Oh, I have 50,000 pages about 50,000 different motorcycle parts and I am just going to go to Mechanical Turk or I am going to go outsource, and I want a 100 word, two paragraphs about each one of them, just describe what this part is." You think to yourself, "Hey, I have good unique content." No, you have content that is going to be penalized by Panda. That is exactly what Panda is designed to do. It is designed to say this is content that someone wrote for SEO purposes just to have good unique content on the page, not content that makes everyone who sees it want to share it and say wow. Right?

If I get to a page about a motorcycle part and I am like, "God, not only is this well written, it's kind of funny. It's humorous. It includes some anecdotes. It's got some history of this part. It has great photos. Man, I don't care at all about motorcycle parts, and yet, this is just a darn good page. What a great page. If I were interested, I'd be tweeting about this, I'd share it. I'd send it to my uncle who buys motorcycles. I would love this page." That's what you have to optimize for. It is a totally different thing than optimizing for did I use the keyword at least three times? Did I put it in the title tag? Is it included in there? Is the rest of the content relevant to the keywords? Panda changes this. Changes it quite a bit.

Finally, you are going to be optimizing around user and usage metrics. Things like, when people come to your site, generally speaking compared to other sites in your niche or ranking for your keywords, do they spend a good amount of time on your site, or do they go away immediately? Do they spend a good amount of time? Are they bouncing or are they browsing? If you have a good browse rate, people are browsing 2, 3, 4 pages on average on a content site, that's decent. That's pretty good. If they're browsing 1.5 pages on some sites, like maybe specific kinds of news sites, that might actually be pretty good. That might be better than average. But if they are browsing like 1.001 pages, like virtually no one clicks on a second page, that might be weird. That might hurt you. Your click-through rate from the search results. When people see your title and your snippet and your domain name, and they go, "Ew, I don't know if I want to get myself involved in that. They've got like three hyphens in their domain name, and it looks totally spammy. I'm not going to get involved." Then that click-through rate is probably going to suffer and so are your rankings.

They are going to be looking at things like the diversity and quantity of traffic that comes to your site. Do lots of people from all around the world or all around your local region, your country, visit your website directly? They can measure this through Chrome. They can measure it through Android. They can measure it through the Google toolbar. They have all this user and usage metrics. They know where people are going on the Internet, where they spend time, how much time they spend, and what they do on those pages. They know about what happens from the search results too. Do people click from a result and then go right back to the search results and perform another search? Clearly, they were unhappy with that. They can take all these metrics and put them into the machine learning algorithm and then have Panda essentially recalculate. This why you see essentially Google doesn't issue updates every day or every week. It is about every 30 or 40 days that a new Panda update will come out because they are rejiggering all this stuff.

One of the things that people who get hit by Panda come up to me and say, "God, how are we ever going to get out of Panda? We've made all these changes. We haven't gotten out yet." I'm like, "Well, first off, you're not going to get out of it until they rejigger the results, and then there is no way that you are going to get out of it unless you change the metrics around your site." So if you go into your Analytics and you see that people are not spending longer on your pages, they are not enjoying them more, they are not sharing them more, they are not naturally linking to them more, your branded search traffic is not up, your direct type in traffic is not up, you see that none of these metrics are going up and yet you think you have somehow fixed the problems that Panda tries to solve for, you probably haven't.

I know this is frustrating. I know it's a tough issue. In fact, I think that there are sites that have been really unfairly hit. That sucks and they shouldn't be and Google needs to work on this. But I also know that I don't think Google is going to be making many changes. I think they are very happy with the way that Panda has gone from a search quality perspective and from a user happiness perspective. Their searchers are happier, and they are not seeing as much junk in the results. Google likes the way this is going. I think we are going to see more and more of this over time. It could even get more aggressive. I would urge you to work on this stuff, to optimize around these things, and to be ready for this new form of SEO.

Thanks everyone for watching. Look forward to some great comments, questions, feedback in the post. I will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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