Search results, like warm cookies right out of the oven or cool refreshing fruit on a hot summer’s day, are best when they’re fresh. Even if you don’t specify it in your search, you probably want search results that are relevant and recent. We completed our Caffeine web indexing system last year, which allows us to crawl and index the web for fresh content quickly on an enormous scale. Building upon the momentum from Caffeine, today we’re making a significant improvement to our ranking algorithm that impacts roughly 35 percent of searches and better determines when to give you more up-to-date relevant results for these varying degrees of freshness.

This is company from Google who has been working very hard to clean up their results from fresh [...]]]> Amit Singhal, head of Search Quality at Google, wrote on the Google blog Thursday about Google’s latest update of its search algorithm. Singhal says, “Google’s new Freshness Update affects 35 percent of queries. It prioritizes recent and timely results, and it’s based off their Caffeine infrastructure.” So what’s does this mean? In the Google blog post announcing his change we are told:

Search results, like warm cookies right out of the oven or cool refreshing fruit on a hot summer’s day, are best when they’re fresh. Even if you don’t specify it in your search, you probably want search results that are relevant and recent. We completed our Caffeine web indexing system last year, which allows us to crawl and index the web for fresh content quickly on an enormous scale. Building upon the momentum from Caffeine, today we’re making a significant improvement to our ranking algorithm that impacts roughly 35 percent of searches and better determines when to give you more up-to-date relevant results for these varying degrees of freshness.

This is company from Google who has been working very hard to clean up their results from fresh spam. Now, it seem that the sites that can produce the freshest results are being rewarded with good rankings. What about trust and authority?? The post goes on to state:

Different searches have different freshness needs. This algorithmic improvement is designed to better understand how to differentiate between these kinds of searches and the level of freshness you need, and make sure you get the most up to the minute answers.

Google has stated that the Caffeine updates are algorithmic in nature, which means the recent Panda updates were different and more of elimination of content farms. Here are some examples of how the new change will effect certain queries:

Recent events or hot topics. For recent events or hot topics that begin trending on the web, you want to find the latest information immediately. Now when you search for current events like [occupy oakland protest], or for the latest news about the [nba lockout], you’ll see more high-quality pages that might only be minutes old.

Regularly recurring events. Some events take place on a regularly recurring basis, such as annual conferences like [ICALP] or an event like the [presidential election]. Without specifying with your keywords, it’s implied that you expect to see the most recent event, and not one from 50 years ago. There are also things that recur more frequently, so now when you’re searching for the latest [NFL scores], [dancing with the stars] results or [google earnings], you’ll see the latest information.

Frequent updates. There are also searches for information that changes often, but isn’t really a hot topic or a recurring event. For example, if you’re researching the [best slr cameras], or you’re in the market for a new car and want [subaru impreza reviews], you probably want the most up to date information.

So, you can see there are many queries where freshness makes total sense. There are many queries where this will not make sense. So, hopefully Google’s caffiene algorithm was constructed in a way where they all makes sense, because if not, many websites could lose dollars.

When an SEO firm provides an SEO audit, keep in mind that it is pretty easy to “hole punch” any SEO effort. So, be sure to take any audit with that in mind. If you are using this audit to double-check the work of an in-house SEO or to audit another agency, there are always going to be things that an SEO can find to “do better”.

To fully prepare for an SEO Audit, your search team will require the following:

A good, organic link profile needs to be diverse.  It’s important for the search engines to see links from various types of sites.  While these sites need to be relative to your industry, the diversity helps the inbound links to appear naturally populated.  Some of the link types you should include in your mix are:           

Membership and Partnership Links.  Leveraging current relationships with partners, vendors, suppliers and even customers is an easy way to build relative links.   Companies usually want to display links to their customers, etc. because it helps show their standing in the industryand in the meantime it gives you a good link.  Local chambers of commerce will give a link if you are member.  So will other community memberships and these also give you a [...]]]> Anyone who understands how valuable link building is also understands how important it is to have a natural (organic) link profile.  It’s no secret that this takes time.  The amount of time needed to get the results wanted can seem never-ending.  It helps to stay focused and keep eyes on the bigger picture and primary goals.

A good, organic link profile needs to be diverse.  It’s important for the search engines to see links from various types of sites.  While these sites need to be relative to your industry, the diversity helps the inbound links to appear naturally populated.  Some of the link types you should include in your mix are:           

Membership and Partnership Links.  Leveraging current relationships with partners, vendors, suppliers and even customers is an easy way to build relative links.   Companies usually want to display links to their customers, etc. because it helps show their standing in the industryand in the meantime it gives you a good link.  Local chambers of commerce will give a link if you are member.  So will other community memberships and these also give you a local citation at the same time.

Links form Local Review Sites.  These not only give the local citation but add the social signals as well.  You may even offer an incentive to get customers to give a review.  Now don’t misunderstand.  If you offer an incentive for a review, it’s just that.  A review.  Meaning it could be bad or good.  You definitely don’t want to be known for bribing customers to give positive reviews only.  The incentive needs to be for the participation and the time it takes to complete the review.  Nothing more.

Blogger Outreach and Other Social Links.  Social links are important and blogs are hot spots to get them from.  While some relationship building time is needed here; searching for blogs that are industry related and not stingy on the outbound links is key.  Gaining links from Twitter and Facebook and traffic driving social bookmarking sites, such as StumbleUpon, can help as well.

Industry Related and Resource Links.  The best way to find these types of links is through your competitors.   Take a snapshot of their link profiles and see which sites you also need to requests links from.  You may even find some more membership sites you should join.

Cause Marketing Links.  When you join a local charity’s cause, for example, you not only show your socially responsible side and help out a great cause, but you usually also score some good links and extra PR out of it.  The charity will push the drive as well and give lots of credit, including link credit, to its vendors, sponsors, etc.

There are several resources out there for good, quality links that will help with your organic link building and other SEO goals.  Remember it’s also important to give other site owners a reason to link to you.  Keep your site updated, compelling and informative.  Offer things like widgets and infographics that can easily be shared.  What can you tie into a current event or latest hot topic?  Something seasonal?  Just stay on top of things, be patient and you will be rewarded with the results you are looking for.

I had never been to an SES before, and looking back on the show, there were a lot of things about it that surprised me. Oddly, the thing that may have surprised me the most was the number of times I heard the term “content is king”. Between search engine reps, speakers, and attendees, the phrase kept getting tossed around the show, like a beach ball in the bleachers at a baseball game.

It probably sounds so silly to be surprised by something like that, but think about it for a second; here we are at a show dedicated to the newest tactics and techniques in search, and you keep hearing this cliche that’s practically as old as SEO itself. It’s like going to a car show where people keep talking about an ’89 Yugo.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe in great content as much as anybody. It’s just that, the longer I work in search, the more I find the phrase “content is king” to one of [...]]]> Has it already been a month since SES NYC? What a fantastic show! It certainly did not disappoint, with four great days chock full of the latest and greatest in SEO and search marketing.

I had never been to an SES before, and looking back on the show, there were a lot of things about it that surprised me. Oddly, the thing that may have surprised me the most was the number of times I heard the term “content is king”. Between search engine reps, speakers, and attendees, the phrase kept getting tossed around the show, like a beach ball in the bleachers at a baseball game.

It probably sounds so silly to be surprised by something like that, but think about it for a second; here we are at a show dedicated to the newest tactics and techniques in search, and you keep hearing this cliche that’s practically as old as SEO itself. It’s like going to a car show where people keep talking about an ’89 Yugo.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe in great content as much as anybody. It’s just that, the longer I work in search, the more I find the phrase “content is king” to one of the worst things to ever happen to SEO.

Why is “content is king” bad for SEO? For me, it boils down to two reasons. First is good old-fashioned cynicism.  I know search reps didn’t coin the phrase, but they do use it a lot, and it makes me nervous. This is probably due to the fact I’ve always believed listening to search reps talk about content is a little too much like listening to a priest talk about sex.

Secondly, and more importantly, “content is king” is bad for SEO because it takes the attention away from where it really needs to be, the person doing the searching. Focusing on “content” draws the focus of the campaign inward when it really needs to be outward. For SEOs, what is truly paramount is the searcher, why they’re searching, and what they want out of the transaction; not the content you’re hoping to put in their way.

It’s the searcher that’s the king, not the content.

Isn’t saying “content is king” really talking about the searcher? You’d think so, but I don’t think that’s the case. At one point it may have been true, but from a practical perspective, the “content is king” mantra has resulted in too many SEOs and marketers trying to generate “good” content with as little incremental effort as possible. The searcher has been removed from the equation, and now it’s simply about crafting something that will just rank.

This is completely the wrong mindset. The SEOs who are successful today and down the road realize that content can’t exist in a vacuum; they need to figure out what searchers want when they use specific keywords, and much be able to help their clients (or themselves) meet those needs while differentiating themselves from the other sites on the search results page.

That’s the key to good SEO and that’s the stuff more people need to be talking about.

The Google Wonder wheel is a search option that you can use to find out what keyword phrases Google is currently associating with your web site. You can also use it to find related keyword phrases to a keyword phrase you’re targeting, but in this search engine optimization tip I’m going to look specifically at VizionInteractive.com, and see the keyword phrases that Google thinks is related to that domain name. Here is how you use this search engine optimization technique:

1. To access the Google Wonder wheel, you will first need to perform a search at Google like this:

2. Click on the “Show options…” link and you will see [...]]]> This is Search Engine Optimization tip number 35 in our continuing series of Search Engine Optimization tips. All of these search engine optimization tips are meant to be specific in nature, they will not take that long to review, and are directly to the point. This search engine optimization tip has to do with finding using the Google Wonder wheel, a part of the search options Google announced (a while back)  to find out what Google thinks about your web site.

The Google Wonder wheel is a search option that you can use to find out what keyword phrases Google is currently associating with your web site. You can also use it to find related keyword phrases to a keyword phrase you’re targeting, but in this search engine optimization tip I’m going to look specifically at VizionInteractive.com, and see the keyword phrases that Google thinks is related to that domain name. Here is how you use this search engine optimization technique:

1. To access the Google Wonder wheel, you will first need to perform a search at Google like this:

2. Click on the “Show options…” link and you will see options displayed on the left side.

3. Click on the “Wonder Wheel” link on the left side.

4. You will then see what is called the “Google Wonder wheel”, as displayed below:

As you can see from this, there currently are two phrases being shown that are related to “vizioninteractive.com”, which is “agency” and “search engine”. So, some of the keyword phrases that we would want to target for this web site might be “agency” and “search engine”. Or we could also target phrases that include the word “agency” and the word “search engine”. As a comparison, let’s take a look at the Google Wonder wheel for “Amazon.com”:

I am kind of surprised that Google relates Amazon.com with Target and Walmart, because I first think “books” when I think of Amazon. But, as we can see, there are lots of other products being sold through Amazon, and most likely this is why these other online retailers are showing up in the Google Wonder wheel.

I personally like to use the Google Wonder wheel for a domain name search first just to make sure that there aren’t any keyword phrases being shown that we don’t want to show up there. If there’s a keyword phrase that shouldn’t be there, then that might indicate another problem, perhaps with the links to the web site. That would require further investigation.

Perhaps a better use of the Google Wonder wheel might be using the Google Wonder wheel for search engine optimization purposes like doing keyword research. For example, let’s look at which keyword phrases show up on the Google Wonder wheel for “search engine optimization”:

In this case, you will see several keyword phrases, and what intrigues me the most is “search engine optimization pricing”, which might indicate that someone is looking for the price of search engine optimization services. If you are a search engine optimization firm, you might want to investigate that keyword phrase more, as it might be people searching for the prices, and it might be people looking to hire an SEO firm. By the way, search engine optimization tips are there, as well, and that’s certainly something that you’re reading right now, aren’t these SEO Tips great?