SEO BESTPRACTICEGUIDEby CLOUDSPOTTING

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SEO is the widely used acronym for ‘search engine optimization’. It is the practice of designing, building and producing content for websites which serves to increase the authority and relevance of that site; with the simultaneous aim of ensuring the site also appears more highly ranked on search engine results pages (S.E.R.P’s).

When the phrase ‘search engine’ is used, largely it refers to Google because while there are other search engines available, like Bing and Yahoo! for users to use, Google still holds the largest share of the search engine market, estimated at somewhere between 65-70% of the whole (imforza).

What is SEO?

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Pandas and Penguins

That statistic alone means you need to know your Penguins from your Pandas if you’re going to be successful in handling your SEO strategy, regardless of whether you outsource that strategy or handle it in house.

The Penguin algorithm focuses mainly on identifying and penalizing sites that are engaging in activities like using: link spam, paid links, link farms and overly optimised anchor text. Penguin is concerned with your sites CREDIBILITY.

The Panda algorithm focuses on targeting low quality, thin and duplicate material. So of course, Panda is concerned with your CONTENT.

I check your CONTENT

...and I check your CREDABILITY

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Pandas and Penguins: The good, the bad and the downright unnatural

Interflora lost visibility in a huge way in February 2013, to the extent that they no longer ranked in Google for their own name, let alone their most valuable keywords: flowers, florist, flower delivery and flowers online! It later transpired that Interflora’s SEO team had been acquiring paid links through the method of sending a free product to bloggers.

This is a classic example of engaging in unnatural or ‘Black Hat’ back link building which means it was the Penguin algorithm that Interflora fell foul of.

On the other hand, YouTube gained visibility with the last Panda refresh and largely it’s unsurprising as the site relies heavily on user generated content which is therefore relevant to users and unlikely to be duplicated or unnatural (interestingly, it’s also one of Google’s companies). However Wabauto.de is a German site, unaffiliated to Google that also saw an increase in visibility after the last Panda refresh, they recorded a rise in visibility of 132.77% (Orchid Box).

So, a change in Google’s algorithms should not be synonymous with a negative effect on SEO, if you’re playing by the rules.

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Which hat are you? The distinction between White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO is widely debated and has even led to the suggestion of a third type; Grey Hat SEO.

White Hat SEO refers to a method of search engine optimisation that is generally approved by search engines. These methods look to improve the rankings of a website in an ethical manner by staying within a search engine’s terms of service. In simple terms, this means the website is designed, built and optimised in a way that will naturally appeal to search engines rather than attempting to

bluff or deceive them. White hat SEO tends to produce successful long term, highvalue and low risk search engine rankings.

Black Hat SEO refers to methods of search engine optimisation and promotion that are considered to be unethical or that contravene a search engine’s terms of service. Such techniques will often create a poor user experience or present content in a different or non-visual way. Examples include keyword stuffing, invisible text and doorway pages. Black hat SEO can be described as a short-term and indeed short - sighted solution to a long-term problem as websites using such techniques will eventually be banned (either temporarily or permanently) once the search engines discover what they are doing, making black hat SEO high risk, short term and low value.

Finally Grey Hat SEO refers to SEO strategies that (as the colour suggests) fall in between Black Hat and White Hat SEO. As such, so called Grey Hat techniques can be legitimate in some cases and illegitimate in others.

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Our philosophy

To give our opinion, there is no Grey Hat SEO, Penguins and Pandas are black and white as are all SEO techniques. They fall either in to the Black Hat SEO camp or the White Hat SEO camp. By clearly distinguishing between the do’s and don’ts of SEO and choosing not to acknowledge the grey areas it makes it easier to ensure your practices are low risk and search engine friendly.

Back link building has been a large contributor to the arguments for positing the category of Grey Hat SEO. Indeed some definitions of White Hat SEO would state that full service white hat SEO includes link building services which involve:

• article marketing • social networking • online publicity • directory submission • video marketing• blog commenting • local profiles • blogging

Google’s official position is that back link building is a Black Hat SEO technique.

With that in mind, we turn to some guidelines which you should apply to ANY links you have pointing back to your site:

1. Ensure the links are quality, as opposed to just large in quantity. It’s the age old distinction between quality and quantity and as is most common, quality wins!

2. Build a concurrent social media presence that is strong and well connected to support any backlinks you may gain. If we are aiming to keep Google happy then of course this social media building should take advantage of Google+.

3. Continually produce content for your blog, your social sites and your webpages that is high quality, well referenced, original and use this to build your SEO strategy above any other tactic. Great content will draw in links naturally rather than requiring the active building of backlinks which Google frowns upon.

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How we would approach the development of a Content Marketing Plan for a client

ResearchData

Preparation & assessment

Prospecting

Creating & Promotion

Assessment

Indeed, content marketing is a growing trend in the search industry with 54% of B2B companies intending to increase their content marketing spending in 2013 (Content Marketing Institute). So adapting your content marketing to also include SEO is a great way to streamline your whole marketing operation and make content production more successful long term.

We recently published our Content Marketing Guide for business which you can access here in full:

CONTENT MARKETING GUIDE

However here is also a quick example of how we would approach the development of a content marketing plan for a client:

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To conclude our philosophy

To expand our philosophy of SEO further, we could go as far to say that SEO is not even about ‘White Hat’ versus ‘Black Hat’ techniques; SEO is about low value versus high value, high risk versus low risk and long term versus short term techniques.

Low value SEO is most commonly recognisable as the use of SPAM, however a point to note is that not all low value SEO techniques are illegal and not all are necessarily unethical depending on your views, but all low value SEO techniques are done purely to affect and theoretically benefit an SEO campaign.

High value SEO techniques are those that are employed not only to serve the need of SEO but to also provide the site and site visitors with either beneficial material or a favourable experience.

Black hat tactics certainly, and even some ‘grey hat SEO’ tactics have become considerably riskier than they once were, that means you need to be able to afford to lose if you’re going to make a risky move. With the latest Panda and Penguin updates, affording to lose is a much bigger decision that it once was.

Deciding on the difference between using short term and long term SEO tactics is very much dependent on your business. If you know your business is only functional in the short term for example if you are targeting a particular trend or event relevant within a specific time frame, like Movember perhaps, then you can take risks and use short term, techniques relatively safely, that other more long term business can’t.

What can be generally inferred from the examples of other companies is that if you play the SEO game purely to win SEO points, you may win a few rounds, but you will ultimately lose the game.

SPAM

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The lesson to learn...The lesson to learn: Once Google sets a Panda or Penguin loose on the low value SEO tactic you’re using you’re dead in the water. By their very nature, low value SEO techniques do not provide for the future and consider SEO only in isolation.

So, the best option is to conduct a long term, high value and low risk SEO strategy because, even if you are affected by a Google algorithm change at some point, because your SEO strategy is focussing on improving the user experience as well as your S.E.R.P placement, you will be using a diverse range of techniques to do this.

Thus whichever one technique an algorithm may pick up on and penalize you for, you’ll have another technique they are not penalizing you for. Essentially ensuring you never go back to square 1.

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The 3 C’s f SEO: quality content, clean code and link credability

This serves to illustrate that when it comes to your SEO strategy, you do as Google says not as Google does.

1. Do not produce low quality/ thin content

2. Consolidate any pages that are similar to minimise duplicate content.

3. Any offending pages should be moved to a new domain or 404’d

4. Provide Google with a site map to help them learn the structure of your site and increase their coverage of it to help your users find the content they need.

5. Create content that is: useful, information rich, clear, and accurately described.

Using Parked Domains with excessive advertising above the fold is not recommended.

Sadly, (and no doubt deliberately) the Google Ad Layout tool doesn’t seem to allow you to test a Google search query page, no doubt because if it did you’d see that there is an excessive use of advertising appearing above the fold. At a quick glance, about 80% of content above the fold on this page is advertising. Tut tut.

6. Use the keywords you are aiming to rank for within your on page content to increase your sites relevance.

7. Use text not images where possible

8. Try to ensure advertisements don’t affect search engine rankings. You can use Google’s AdSense or DoubleClick to do this as they are blocked from being crawled.

9. Make pages primarily for users not search engines

10. Make your website stand out especially from others in your field

#1: quality

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#2: clean code

1. Stuffing title tags, Meta tags, anchor text and navigation links with keywords is another method Google penalizes websites for.

2. Vary anchor text again avoiding duplicate content.

3. When using an image make use of the ALT atribute to include a snippet of descriptive text.

4. Make sure these ALT attributes and <title> elements are both descriptive and accurate.

5. Check and correct any incorrect HTML.

6. Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header, this will alert Google if your content has changed since they last crawled your site.

7. Use the robots.txt file on your webserver to indicate to crawlers which directories can and cannot be crawled.

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#3: link

Cloaking: This is a form of search engine subterfuge whereby visitors are not shown an indexed web page when they click on the link to it in Google. Cloaking can work in either direction in that, the visitor is cloaked from Google and Google’s indexed content is cloaked from the visitor. What cloaking achieves is to attribute a high PageRank to content that would normally receive a low PageRank. However an important point to note is that cloaking is not necessarily illicit, i.e. a specific form of cloaking can be used to deliver ISP tailored or web browser tailored pages to a user which is perfectly legitimate. (SE Partner).

Using redirects is a tactic which sends a user to a different page from the one they actually clicked on in the search results, often the page they are redirected to, is less relevant than the link they clicked on suggested. (Paul de Sousa).

Doorway pages: Similar to using redirects, doorway or entry pages as they are also known, send visitors to an entirely different site than the destination they thought they clicked on in the Google S.E.R.P’s. (SE Partner).

Using affiliate sites. This is borne from affiliate marketing whereby one business rewards one or more affiliates for the business it receives which is brought about by the affiliates marketing efforts. When it comes to SEO, having affiliates can boost PageRank through associations, the least orthodox methods of using this method is having affiliates publish product reviews and services offered by one another. This is similar to the practices that got Interflora in to trouble.

Build high quality and relevant links to your site and simultaneously delete, destroy or dilute suspected low quality links your site (Relevance of Disavow Links tool).

Cancel or remove any unnecessary footer links from your pages.

Be conservative with internal linking.

Avoid or limit buying sponsored links: organic is better.

Design and build a site with a clear hierarchical structure complete with text links. Every page in the site should be accessible from at least one static text link.

Keep links on any given page to within a ‘reasonable number’ (sadly, there is no real, specific guideline as to what this reasonable number is.

Check and repair any broken links.

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In a nutshell... 1. Test your site

2. Optimize load times, this keep in line with Google’s aim to provide users with the best user experience they can and fast sites increase user satisfaction.

3. Don’t deceive users.

4. Avoid tricks to improve search rank.

5. Avoid: automatically generated content, link schemes, cloaking, sneaky redirects hidden text or links, doorway pages, scraped content, affiliate programmes without sufficient value, irrelevant keywords, malicious behaviour like phishing, installing viruses Trojans or other ‘bad ware’, abusing rich snippets and sending automated queries to Google.

6. Engage in good practices like monitoring your site for hacking and remove hack content ASAP and preventing and removing user generated SPAM on your site, the most common example of this being left typically as blog comments loaded with links.

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References 1. http://www.imediaconnection.com/article_full.aspx?id=33313

2. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

3. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/important-seo-habits-to-adopt-for-post-pandapenguin-era-survival/59415/

4. http://www.seo-haven.com/google/seo-in-2013-future-of-backlink-building/

5. www.redalkemi.com/glossary.php

6. http://martinmacdonald.net/interflora-seo-penalty/

7. http://www.thedrum.com/news/2013/02/22/interflora-seo-rankings-penalised-google-itloses-top-search-spot

8. http://www.webpronews.com/panda-hubpages-google-2011-04

9. http://www.orchidbox.com/post.php?title=Google_Panda_Update_Goes_Global_But_What_is_The_Effect

10. http://mysalontools.hubpages.com/hub/link-building-link-wheel

11. http://www.seroundtable.com/google-page-layout-penalty-14612.html

12. http://searchengineland.com/new-york-times-exposes-j-c-penney-link-scheme-that-causesplummeting-rankings-in-google-64529

13. http://www.separtner.com/SEO-glossary.html

14. http://www.pauldesousa.co.za/seo/glossary

15. http://www.imforza.com/blog/8-seo-stats-that-are-hard-to-ignore/

16. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-build-a-content-marketing-strategy.