Search Engine Optimization

Posted by randfish

When I started in the SEO field (circa 2003), the job responsibilities weren’t easy, but the list was relatively small. Over the next 5 years, those responsibilities increased, but it was primarily in tactical and knowledge sorts of ways. A 2003 vs. 2008 rundown might look something like:

(Notes on image above: There’s some over-simplification in this list, and some items cross the artificial 2003 barrier a bit)

The last 2.5 years, however, have made for some fairly substantive changes. We’re facing large-scale, industry-shifting trends that have upset the classic model for search engine optimization, including:

• Google’s Vince update and others like it where search engines are biasing toward brands over smaller, lesser-known sites.
• Panda and the focus on user behavior, trust and authority of sites based on their look/feel/content style/etc. has changed what it means to do SEO, just as the Florida update did at the end of 2003.
• The shift in web user behavior toward social media – more than 20% of our time spent online is spent on social.
• Fragmentation of the social media market: LinkedIn just passed MySpace to become the #2 social network in the US, and Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, StumbleUpon (and soon, Google+, IMO) all have 10million+ active users. FourSquare also just passed that mark.
• The powerful increase in content creation as a marketing tool for businesses. 57% of companies in Hubspot’s recent survey run an active blog!
• An overwhelming increase in mobile and, thus, local search/web usage leads to portals like Google Maps, Bing Maps, Yelp, Citysearch, UrbanSpoon, FourSquare, etc. offering massive potential value to local businesses and service providers.
• The recession in 2008 caused a massive change in how businesses think about employment – human resources are nearly the last thing companies will add to their costs, and while that’s generating amazing profits, it’s having a rough impact on employment. As a part of this trend, SEOs have been asked to shoulder many new and heavy burdens.

Thus, we’re faced with a picture where the responsibilities of SEOs looks more like this:

(Note: Some of these are due to changes in SEO itself, and others due to the additional expectations placed on those performing SEO)

If you’re in the SEO field, this shift is both a positive and a negative. If you can keep up with the workload, manage all the metrics, reporting, data and platforms AND perform effectively in all of these spheres, you’re likely able to charge outsized fees (or earn a much higher salary). If you remain tactical and niche, you’re either going to be undervalued or you’ll need to find ways to make that specialization and the ROI you can earn visible to your clients/managers.

The job of an "SEO" is so much more than what we think of and talk about as the basics of classic "Search Engine Optimization" that it almost feels as though we deserve a new title… and probably a raise

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by dohertyjf

Google announced the +1 button in March much to the enthusiasm and confusion of webmasters and SEOs the world over. "What’s the point?", people asked. "Why should I +1 a site? Should I implement it on my site?"

It seems the answer now is clear, with the launch of the Google+ "social experiment" last week that has kept me from getting work done as Google continues innovating and brilliantly drawing me back to Plus everytime that little notification indicator turns red.

I’m not here to talk about that though, because we’ve put together a bit of data for you today about +1 integration and social sharing statistics. This post originally was conceived by Tom Critchlow and I before Google+ was launched, so it has gone through some iterations.

We wanted to get outside of our typical SEO circles though and see how the general public is adopting the button. To keep things interesting, I also gathered some well-trafficked SEO sites and their social numbers. What I have done is gathered the Technorati Top 100 sites and their RSS feeds. Then I pulled their 20 most recent blog posts (both before and after Plus was announced) and grabbed their +1, Twitter, and Facebook share data thanks to an awesome script by Tom Anthony.

The data got interesting pretty quick. Here are our findings.

Technorati Top 100 Stats

Since we were interested to find the rate of +1 adoption by the Technorati Top 100, we pulled the numbers before Google+ was launched and after. I removed the Gawker sites since their RSS feed is all-encompassing and skewed the numbers terribly. Here are the numbers for the other 95 Technorati sites:

The numbers changed thus: Pre Google+, only 22 had implemented the +1 button. After the launch of Google+, that number increased to 25. 22 of the sites had +1s, but 8 of those sites did not have the +1 button implemented! These were predominately technology sites, which is no surprise, but also two LA Times blogs (The Opinionator and L.A. NOW) as well as entertainment site TMZ. Takeaway: If you own or have a client who owns a technology, opinion, or entertainment site, you should implement the +1 button.

Average +1s per article, Pre and Post Plus Launch

As you can see, the average number of +1s per article for the Top 100 almost doubled. The number of +1s per SEO article also increased by about 30%. It is not surprising that SEO sites have more +1s than the Technorati Top 100 on average, but the increase is especially interesting given the next two charts.

Average Facebook Shares per Article and Ratio of Plus to FB Shares

Here are the average shares from the Technorati sites as well as SEO sites:

We must note that the Facebook share numbers went down for the Technorati sites, but increased for the SEO sites. One possible explanation for the SEO sites is that SEOs were sharing Google+ news on Facebook, but this is simply a hunch and not proven. Here is the most interesting statistic I found, the ratio of +1s to Facebook shares on the Technorati sites:

The number was cut almost in half. Perhaps we could guess preliminarily that the launch of Google+ has adversely affected the amount of information shared on Facebook? With the rise of the number of +1s and the decrease in Facebook shares, as shown by the last graph, I think this could be a safe assumption, at least with this limited data set. This graph might also support this hypothesis:

This graph shows that before Google+ was launched, there were 2 Facebook shares for every tweet given to articles on the Technorati Top 100. Post Google+ the ratio is almost even, with tweets being more prevalent than Facebook shares!

What do we do with this data now?

There are certainly some takeaways from the data presented. There are certain niches where it makes sense for us as SEOs to encourage our clients to implement certain sharing features. On other sites, especially in dodgier or more regulated industries, social share buttons do not make as much sense. One of the most interesting bits of information that came out of the data was the number of sites that have +1s, but do not have the button implemented on their site.

• 10 Technorati sites without the button have +1s; and
• all of the SEO sites I looked at have +1s, even though only 2/3 have implemented the button.

Based off these discoveries, I’d recommend that if you have an SEO site, it should have a +1 button. Even if +1s do not count for rankings at this point, they are displayed in the SERPs and therefore probably help with click-through rates. If +1s are used for rankings in the future, which I am not convinced of but still remains a possibility, then you will be one step ahead of the curve. Also, if you or a client has a site in one of these niches, you should probably have a +1 button on your site:

• Technology
• Opinion (Political or other)
• Celebrity gossip

This discovery is also interesting because it means that people +1d these from the SERPs, which is something we all wondered how we would do, and more importantly if people would do it. It appears that people do. I think this discovery reinforces that we as webmasters/SEOs (we are often both, after all) need to find ways to track social engagement around our sites. If we see engagement, we need to encourage it. Google has recently helped us accomplish this goal by adding +1 tracking to Analytics.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Oh, and you can Follow @dohertyjf if you want.

Happy Optimizing!

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by Aaron Wheeler

 A site can be a lot like a mullet: business in front, party in the back. How do you muss it all up and keep a site in style? Any given website naturally attracts a broad set of visitors, and herding that diverse audience onto the right pages is a huge undertaking (as you know, it’s something to consider when doing site infrastructure SEO, etc.). This funneling gets even more difficult when there are some pages of a site that are pure linkbait, completely divorced from relevance to the rest of the site. This week, Rand discusses site infrastructure – how and when to homogenize a site, and when to keep things separated. Let us know your thoughts and strategies in the comments below!

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re talking about mixing your viral content with your business content. Now, what we mean by this is really you have some content on your website that is primarily meant for your business, for your customers, for people who are researching your products or your services, and then you have this other content on your website that is often more marketing focused. It is designed to drive new traffic, to get links in, to get social shares, to have all these good things happen around your website. That’s a big part of what content marketing and all of organic and inbound marketing is about.

So, I want you to imagine that you are this guy – Mr. Pest Control. Now, Mr. Pest Control has a great variety. He offers services, he has products. You can buy little bug traps from him. You can call him up and he will come to your place of business or residence and help you with your bug problems. Mr. Pest Control is a pretty awesome guy, and he has a great website. But he is trying to decide, boy, you know, I have these two kinds of content. I have this content, in orange here, the Bug Catcher 3X7B, which is a phenomenal bug catcher. I just scratched that bug. Let’s just scratch him again. See, we’re trying to eliminate bugs. You can see it is a square box with four prongs, so that must do a great job of catching bugs. My illustrations aside, this content is really designed for like, "Oh, I am looking to learn about this product. I want to see how this service works." It is customer focused. It is not the kind of thing that is usually going to generate a lot of links. Yeah, someone might find that page and hopefully he has done a great job of making it a very compelling page. It has good pictures and images, better than the ones I have done here, good content. So, people might link to it.

But what he does have is things like, oh, you know, I am running this blog and I write about things that are interesting to me as a pest control guy, including things like Top 10 Cities with Bad Bug Problems in Hotels. There are hotels, there are some bugs, and they are invading the hotel. It’s kind of adorable. My illustrations, you know, they get the point across. These two buildings don’t have any windows. That’s a little sad. Maybe they’re, I don’t know, penitentiaries or something.

But, in any case, this type of content and this type of content are really two separate things. So, Mr. Pest Control might think to himself, oh, I know what I am going to do. I am going to have two different websites, or I am going to have a different design. I will just do a WordPress installation and throw them on there. Mixing the two in smart ways is a hard thing to do, and a lot of people get it wrong. That is why this Whiteboard Friday is here to help.

So some less ideal things that you can do, some things that I would really recommend or bias against. Separate subdomains or separate domains. If he goes with blog.MrPest.com, let’s say MrPest.com is his domain, eh, not great. I would kind of tell Mr. Pest, "If you can, get it over there to that subfolder." Mr. Pest’s blog? No. Just out. One of the things that people do is they think to themselves, well, you know, it is important to get external links. So if I have this separate domain, I will just build up the link authority to Mr. Pest’s blog.com, and then all I have to do is link from MrPestBlog to MrPest, and that will pass all my link juice. What they forget is that does not give you a whole lot of domain diversity, right? I don’t want to have a situation where I have one domain with lots of other links pointing to it and then that’s the only link to my main site. That’s a terrible idea. This is not going to earn you rankings. It’s not going to get you the traffic you want. All the good metrics and signals are going to exist on this site, not this one. That sucks. You don’t want that. Same story with separate design and navigation. If the orange content, which remember is our business content here, has, oh, you know, there is the left side bar and it has this nice bug logo across the top, but then you get to the blog and it’s a different logo or a different layout and different navigation style and the blog content sits in here. It is really off putting. The problem is that people will start to feel like, "Oh, I like the blog, but I don’t like this business content." When they switch context between the two, either way, business customers would come over and look at the blog or blog people who come over and look at the business content, it is not compelling in a branding sort of style to suggest to them, "Hey, I am in the same place. I am on the same site. It is written with the same voice. It is the same people. I can trust it. If I enjoy the blog, I am going to like the business content. If I like the business content, the blog might be interesting for me." You want to cross-pollinate and really have one site, not these two separate systems.

Finally, obviously manipulative cross-linking. So many times I see this where people are like, "Oh, I’ve got my blog, so I am just going to pepper in these anchor text rich links here and here, and they are going to point back over to these pages on the business side." No. What are you thinking? And it is always one way, right? It always points from the viral-type of content over to the business content. This (A) it is obvious to Google. It is obvious to users what you are trying to do. People are going to like your blog less, which defeats the purpose of having it in a lot of ways. People are not going to be coming over to the business content from there. Nobody clicks these links and really follows them unless they are hyper relevant and high quality, in which case maybe they should exist for some reason. So, as an example, like, oh, in the Top 10 Cities with Bad Bugs Hotel, I will talk about the fact that the Waldorf Astoria in New York has eliminated their bug problem and maybe in parenthesis note, "Thanks in part at least to our 3X7B," shameless plug. It’s sort of cute. It is appropriate. It makes sense. You’re recognizing that this nice hotel actually did really use their product. That’s cool. That’s a fine way to do it. But to have a list of anchor text rich links on every site on every page linking over to the pages, you’re trying to push too hard and you’re clearly manipulating for SEO purposes, not to help users.

So, let’s talk about some good things to do. Do you see how I made that switch, Casey? Are you proud of me? Aw, he’s so proud, because normally I might go like this and then I get off the screen, and it is terrible. The mechanics behind Whiteboard Friday are remarkable.

So, more ideal kinds of things. Keep it on the same domain. Use subfolders. MrPest.com/blog. Awesome. Great. Good job. You could go with MrPest.com/articles if they are less frequent. MrPest.com/resources if you’ve got other content. MrPest.com/marketplace, if you’ve got some postings that other people can submit content to and there are different participants in that realm. Q&A, right? Whatever kinds of content you’ve got, it’s fine. I would really recommend the subfolder. Same design with a well integrated UI so that when I am going across, I am not getting the sense, as a human being, not just as a search engine, right, we’re not just optimizing for search engines. Remember the search engines are trying to achieve what humans want. So we have to make it good for humans, because search engines are getting so sophisticated that it is not enough to just optimize for the crawler.

Same voice. You want that brand consistency. If I feel like, "Man, I really, really enjoyed this article. You know, this content in here was just phenomenal. But I went over here and read the Bug Catcher 3X7B, and where was that humor? Where was that good-natured, friendly openness that I felt when I read this article?" Or on the other side, "Where was that sort of brilliant snarkiness that this article brings? It is nowhere in there. It is like it is completely different." Meld those two voices. This doesn’t have to feel exactly like it, but it shouldn’t feel like a different company wrote the two pieces of content. That’s when you are going to get into branding problems and cross brand issues.

Link across intelligently. By intelligently, I don’t just mean the examples I was talking about before where, oh, okay, this hotel mentions the 3X7B, so I am going to link over there. But I mean link both ways. If this article is saying, "Hey this is something used by some of the world’s finest hotels," that might be a link that points over to the blog post and gets people out of the pure context out of, like, oh, okay, I am just buying and shopping, but oh, cool, they have this content that kind of engages me, entertains me, and educates me. Building that trust with your audience, my god, that’s so much more effective at selling whatever you are trying to sell or capturing an email address or improving the browse rate, getting people to look at more pages. Whatever your goal is, that consistency is going to make a big, big difference.

One of the last recommendations I’ve got is to not just stick to business content and blog content. Hopefully, you can see down here. So, the business content, these pages in orange and the blog content are great. But if you’re going to actually mix it up a little bit and have some of that evergreen content as well, things like a permanent resource on, hey, this is the how to for DIY basement elimination of bugs or how to check for bedbugs in hotel rooms. Here is the step-by-step process with video, pictures, images, graphics, that kind of stuff. Those evergreen resources that sit across that also earn inbound links that show the search engines and show the rest of your audience, hey, it’s not just the blog that’s good here. They have some legitimate evergreen content, some product content. Hopefully, you have a few things that people are really interested in. Maybe you have some super cool new invention or you have a video where you literally take apart a bug trap and you show people how it works. Fun stuff like this, so that people aren’t just collecting and linking to one part of your site. You don’t want to create that bias of we have an information site and we have a blog. Even in the sense of where people go and what people link to, not just in the sense of where it is located on the domain.

All right, everyone. I hope you have enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I am looking forward to some great comments and questions. If you have sites that have that separation between informational and blog content and you’ve got questions about how we can help out or how we might optimize those, please feel free to put them in the comments. Look forward to reading them. Take care. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by Jason Stinnett @ Internet Exposure

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

As you may have heard, Google recently launched a new feature called Search by Image. While experimenting with the feature, I identified three scenarios where search by image has a distinct advantage over traditional approaches for finding link opportunities.

First, some background. To explain it simply, you can now use images (either a URL of an image, or one you upload) as your search term. The goal is to point you to websites that are related to and/or contain information about the image. More background can be found at the Google blog.

1. Get Background on Industry Influencers and Linkerati

As Rand often discusses, identifying people’s interests and using them to create connections are a great way to get on influential people’s radar. If done right, this will also result in exposure and links.

Some of the most influential people in the SEO space are also the best at personal branding. Ross Hudgens recently wrote a YOUmoz post on how to make your brand more consistent on and offline. Ross is someone who I’ve been reading and been influenced by a lot lately, and he’s also very consistent about using the same picture of himself, so I figured I’d use him for our first example.

When I tested the new Google Search By Image feature using his profile picture, I found many of the image results are attached to comments Ross has left:

Searching by Image, I quickly learned that Ross is active on several blogs about personal philosophy and self improvement. This is something I could use to connect with him on in the future.

Search By Image offers a distinct advantage because it provides a more filtered and targeted result set than simply wading through the backlink profile on RossHudgens.com.  

2. Identify Link Opportunities by Searching for Popular Guest Posters  

In the SEO community, Ann Smarty is the person who is the most synonymous with guest posting. Not just because of her site MyBlogGuest.com, but also because she’s a prolific guest poster herself. Ann has many projects she promotes in addition to My Blog Guest, including ViralMom.com and SexySocialMedia.com.

Ann’s also someone who’s great at maintaining a consistent personal brand, so this makes searching by her profile image a great place to look for guest post opportunities:

This screenshot shows a couple different blogs that Ann has guest posted on that we could investigate and potentially approach about guest blogging there as well. And that’s just scratching the surface!

Since Ann has multiple websites she promotes, Search by Image again provides an advantage over wading through backlink profiles because it allows us to find guest post opportunities that link to different sites.

3. Find Coverage That Didn’t Result in a Link

Another way you can use Search By Image is to mine for press coverage and participation in offline activities that didn’t result in a link. Searching by brand logos and "stock" CEO photos are a great way to find pages where a company or employee is getting highlighted.

For this example, I looked at the Fortune 500 and tried to pick a company in an industry that didn’t seem too social or internet savvy, but would probably have a traditional PR presence. I went with Caterpillar and discovered the current CEO is Douglas Oberhelman. A quick (traditional) image search showed one photo that appeared again and again, so I figured that would be the best one to use to Search By Image.

My search resulted in a number of places that an SEO at Caterpillar could ask to get a link from. The two I pointed out above are places Mr. Oberhelman has spoken, which should be on the easier side to get links from given the existing relationship. In fact, the page that highlights him as conference chair has "www.caterpillar.com" with blue text and underlined, but it isn’t a working link!

Search by Image has a distinct advantage over other research tools because it can identify significant coverage of your client or company that doesn’t already include a link.

Bonus reason #4: Visually Similar Images Results Can Be Pretty Funny  

Humor is always a nice way to break up a day of research: 

No wonder this feature isn’t already part of Open Site Explorer!

All jokes aside, give these techniques a try and let me know what you find in the comments. You can also give me a shout at the Internet Exposure blog or via our Twitter at @iexposure.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by Cyrus Shepard

The mystery began on July 3rd when Google Realtime Search went dark. The next day we learned that the underlying cause was Google losing access to its special Twitter data feed.

The source of the disagreement is unclear, but the effects have been immediate. Realtime Search disappeared – all of it, not just the part that relied on Twitter. This included Realtime results from Google News, Blog Search links, Facebook fan page updates and more.

No Realtime results? What if it took the world hours, instead of minutes, to learn about the tweet below?

To gain perspective on what’s at stake, consider the example of journalists and protesters staying abreast of current events during the recent government upheavals in the Middle East.

Yes, this s#&t matters.

For the past two years Google used Twitter not only to power Realtime results, but also for faster indexation of content and, we believe, to calculate Author Authority for use in their ranking algorithm. Google says they plan on reinstating Realtime with the power of Google+. But the network will have to grow significantly before this works.

In the absence of the Twitter Firehose, can tweets still influence rankings? What about Google+?

Test 1: Firehose On

Last week, before this happened, we had the pleasure of working with Shari Goetsch of SeeYourImpact.org on a social media campaign for their terrific nonprofit organization. SeeYourImpact is a hardworking and unique charity that SEOmoz has worked with in the past.

The goal of this campaign was to create buzz around a single, previously unindexed URL on the target website using only Twitter. A tweet was created and followers of SeeYourImpact were encouraged to retweet as much as possible.
 

Within a few short hours of the campaign kickoff, the URL was tweeted 300+ times. As a secondary effect, the URL also received a handful of additional Facebook likes and LinkedIn shares.

By early afternoon the page ranked #2 in Google for its targeted phrase, “Assist a Mom.” The URL reached #1 status by day’s end. As of this writing it remains the number one ranked page for this target keyword phrase.

The Twitter effect was in full power.

Test 2: Firehose Off

After Google announced that they no longer used direct Twitter data, Rand created a previously unindexed webpage and tweeted it to his followers.

Within 10 minutes, Google picked up a tweet scraper, but not the original post.

After an hour we realized a mistake. We had inadvertently included a meta NOINDEX tag in the head of the webpage. Doh!

After quick removal of the tag, it took Bing a full 6 hours to index the original URL, but still no Google. Not until 8 hours after the original tweet did Google index our URL. Eventually it ranked #1 for its targeted keyword phrase.

Even with our mistake, Google appeared significantly slower than it used to.

Test 3: Twtter vs. Google+

Twitter

The next day we created two unique pages to test the ranking power of Twitter vs. Google+. Rand then shared one page on Twitter and the other on Google+.

This time, the Twitter URL performed much better and faster in the SERPs. Within 13 minutes it ranked #1 for its keyword phrase "Euclidean Taeniasis of Galapagos".

Rand noted that the ranking coincided very neatly with our URL’s appearance in Topsy, which may be where Google found it. It makes sense that the Topsy 100 is crawled and indexed much more frequently than Rand’s Twitter profile.

Even more revealing was how tweets not only helped indexation, but also appeared to boost rankings. The first hour the page appeared in search results, it ranked 10th for the phrase Euclidean Perry and number 8 for EuxliswN Darwin. In the time it took for the number of tweets to double, the rankings rose from 8 and 7 respectively.

Tweets still help with indexation, although maybe not as fast as they used to. And tweets appear to boost rankings, although the exact degree is unclear.

Caveat: We noticed the URL was shared through several Linkedin accounts. Many people, including Rand, have their Twitter profile set up to automatically post to LinkedIn whenever they share. We believe this had a minimal influence on the experiment, but can’t be discarded.

Google+

Rand shared the second page through his Google+ profile. He likewise encouraged folks to share it through Google+, but not through Twitter, Facebook, direct linking, etc. Within minutes the post was shared dozens of times.

Two hours later, this test URL ranked #1 for it’s keyword phrase in Google search results – this time without a single Twitter scraper in the results.

A check of shared count shows it was tweeted 0 times, although there were 4 Google Buzzes that appeared. Is this the effect of the +1 button?

Two hours is a long time to wait for real time results. If Google wishes to replace Twitter with Google+ in a meaningful way, they have a long road ahead of them.

At this time, I haven’t found direct evidence of improved rankings with Google+ beyond basic indexation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the phenomenon existed.

Twitter is Still Relevant: 4 Takeaways

Even without the Twitter firehose, it seems the Twitter effect still finds ways of maneuvering into Google’s search results.

1. Aggregators & Scrapers Play an SEO Role

Without Topsy and the countless Twitter scrapers, it’s unknown how fast our pages would have been indexed. The aggregators and the scrapers contain two features which undoubtedly helped our URLs to rank in each Twitter experiment:

• Optimized Title Tags for the target phrase, i.e.
  <title>SeeYourImpact.org » Assist a mom, change the world – english | Twitmunin</title>

• A prominent followed link to the target URL near the top of the page.

2. Retweet – Retweet, Repeat

The more retweets a link receives, the better it seems to perform in search results and the more visibility it obtains with the social media aggregators referenced above.

With Topsy, for example, a URL that makes it into their top 100 list achieves much more visibility than a single tweet.
 

3. Social Authority = Ranking Potential?

“Who” tweets your content used to be just as important, or more so, than the number of people retweeting your content. Can Google still calculate this in any meaningful way?

It’s interesting to note that Google still shows Twitter sharing data in personalized search results, as seen below.

Whether this sharing data translates into author rank remains to be seen.

4. Traditional SEO Still Rules – For Now

Lately, I’ve talked to a lot of folks who are genuinely confused about the new role of social factors in search engine optimization. We in the SEO industry have contributed to this with our wall-to-wall coverage of Facebook likes, Google+ and articles like this one about Twitter. Ian Laurie wrote an excellent article on the topic. This attention has caused some people to believe that social media has displaced traditional SEO. This is far from the truth. Let me be clear:

Social media doesn’t replace traditional SEO. It helps it.

Each of these tests contained a URL optimized for the targeted keyword phrase and the target page was optimized for the keyword, including the URL, title tag and on-page text. All of these factors undoubtedly helped it to rank.

Traditional SEO practices including content creation, external link building and on-page factors still lay the foundation for long-term ranking success. Take a look at Rand’s SEO Pyramid below, where social media rests atop the other bases. Although the social aspect may be larger today than depicted in the past, we need to be careful not to flip the entire pyramid on its head.

SEO Pyramid created by Rand Fishkin for SEOmoz

Tweets or Google shares alone don’t yet equate to long term ranking nirvana. Employing a synergistic combination of social media and technical SEO savvy provides the best recipe for success.

Do you like this post? Yes No