SEO, Social Media News & Domains
10 Team Management Tips – Social, SEO and Content Marketing Teams
Dec 6th
In recent times I find myself managing more and more employees, with these new employees comes the opportunity to run a large team effectively. More recently I have taken to managing a broader team of SEO, Link building, Social Media and Content Marketing professionals.
(These tips are designed for people who manage teams of around 2-10 people)
I have decided to put together a list of 10 tips for managing teams, this is by no means a sure fire list of management tips, I have recently done 4 day corporate management course. I thought I would put together a post to provide some basic team management skills for people managing smaller teams.
Tip 1 – Set up Google Docs files for team members weekly work.
Make sure that you set up a Google documents sheet with all your teams tasks for the week and up coming weeks.
- It is advisable to make sure that all team members have their weekly tasks in a Google docs file, you can also use other team management software for tasks but from a cost point of view Google docs can work effectively.
You can sign up to Google Docs here: docs.google.com
Tip 2 – Make sure you have weekly catch ups (1 on 1′s with team members).
Make sure that you have set up weekly catch up meetings with each of your team members.
- My advice is to set up a weekly on going meeting for 15-30 minutes with team members.
- I also find that having your weekly 1 on 1′s out side the office can be good, get some fresh air and go and have a coffee.
Tip 3 – Make sure you have weekly Group meetings (with your initial team).
- Make sure that you set up a weekly group meeting where every one talks about the up coming weeks tasks, it is good to collaborate with team members because some may have less work on you can delegate work to other team members, it is also a good chance for team members to talk about any key events in the up coming week.
Tip 4 – Get to know your staff better.
- Try to get to know your staff better by going to events if they invite you, such as birthdays and BBQ’s. I think the best way to meet a new team is by going out on social ventures we usually have monthly events where people invite you out for birthdays, make the effort to go to them.
- Another thing you can do is organize team days out for half a day, where you go and do a team event for half a day, it can be any thing from a game of soccer, canoeing or even learning how to surf together.
Tip 5 – Give credit to team members when it is due!
- Make sure that you give credit to your team when credit is due, if you receive a compliment from a client or senior management be sure to pass this on to your team members, if it means sending a group all email then do it.
Tip 6 – Get employees to set up a personal blog.
- Try and get your employees to set up their own blog and blog about what they do in their job or talk about something they are interested in, in my eyes setting up a blog is a key to learning SEO and also developing content in which your employees love, in the end of the day it does not have to be a blog about work it can be a blog about an interest they have.
Tip 7 – Use time Tracking software
- Get your team to use time tracking software, its something important because if you want to show senior management how busy your team management, that is if you require additional team members you can effectively plan this way.
- A good example of time tracking is Freckle, it can be used quite effectiely: letsfreckle.com.
- Benefits of freckle is that it allows you to use graphic overviews of your team members capacity, it also shows who is working and who has time let on projects.
Tip 8 – Motivate your team members!
- Motivating team members is very important, if you are not setting your team members up with motivation on a daily and weekly basis them they may be left de-motivated.
- Challenge team members with new projects.
- Let them be involved with a big business pitch
- Let them test their skills on new business with some small clients.
- Provide training for them so they have the skills set to move to the next level.
Tip 9 – Follow up a negative with positive comments!
If you have to say something negative to a staff member, make sure you follow it up with some positive points at least 3. Everyone makes mistakes every now and then but be sure to follow up the mistake with some positive points.
Tip 10 – Setting Personal Development Plans for Staff
Set personal development and goals for your employees, employees need goals to work for examples of personal development goals can be the following:
- Setting long term goals for promotion.
- Setting training goals which you company may offer
- Setting Google tests as part of the development.
- Setting ROI based development on clients total spend.
- Setting feedback from clients on how they feel the specific employee has developed over time with them.
Finally remember to have fun when you are at work, it is important to enjoy what you do and get along with the people you are working with.
The surge in Mobile Apps and the Basics on how to promote your Mobile App!
Nov 27th
Mobile apps are a great tool in today’s society; Apps provide businesses with new and exciting marketing methods, internal and external assistance, brand awareness, brand loyalty, promotions, increasing user accessibility, user engagement and much more. On the opposite hand, apps provide users with entertainment and education that make every day living easier and more enjoyable. But how do we make people aware of our apps, how do we make them want to download it, how do we keep them using it month after month?
mobile apps
There are over 700,000+ apps currently in the app store and you wouldn’t be surprised to see this figure get close to the one million mark by this time next year. How on earth are you able to make a successful app with that much competition? It’s not as simple as uploading it to the app store anymore. You have to implement certain marketing tools, not only for pre-app release but ongoing as well. With this in mind, will the app still be successful?
Let’s take a step back for a second, back to the development. When developing your app, regardless whether it’s for yourself or for your company, make sure you know who’s developing, designing and testing your app. Staying local is always a safe option, often the initial quote may be more expensive than off shoring, but over the complete project it’s often cheaper and of a higher standard. It’s crucial to have clear communication with the development company; miss communication can result in the longest game of Chinese whispers you’ve ever played. Not only will it be frustrating but it will be time consuming, a waste of money and at the end of the day the app most likely won’t be what you had in mind. Finding a company that will be able to provide constructive criticism towards you’re app, demonstrates passion for success. If you take onboard the advice given to you by your developer the more likely the app will be successful. It’s very easy to say yes sir and develop this crazy app, which the client has in mind but realistically it won’t flow, resulting in a huge mess.
Your app has been designed, developed and is currently in the testing stage. It’s now time to implement these marketing tools. So what are they? There is no right or wrong way to market your app, this is still a very new process within this industry. First question should be, what’s my budget? If you have money to market, great, if you don’t, that’s okay. I will be focusing more on those with little to no budget. Next question, who’s your audience? Don’t market to the world if that’s not your audience, it’s a waste of your time. Have a catchy, relevant and straightforward name, don’t be alternative.
Provide a clear description of what the app does, what features it has, who’s it targeted at, possibly some testimonials if you have them. The description should implement key words related to your app, this will allow your app to be displayed in more searches both via Google and the app store. This increases your app awareness and SEO. The description should be supported with a tutorial video and screen shots, 9 out of 10 times users will skip to the screen shots so make them demonstrate the app clearly.
Set up a social platform for promotion. Twitter or Facebook are most common, this will be used for marketing pre-release and support post release, keeping users informed on any movements within the app. Get your users involved sharing high scores, pictures, posts, reviews or whatever it is relevant to your app, user engagement will increase your monthly users while also increasing your market reach. Micro sites are often used for a similar purpose, focusing on the support side.
Form partnerships, who with? The more people you know, the more people you potentially have using and talking about your app. Form strong partnerships with journalists, bloggers and app reviewers. These partnerships will allow your app to be widely discussed across the net, resulting in app enthusiasts reading and potentially using your app. An app without reviews or ratings looks terrible and usually reflects on the standard of the app; ensure you don’t fall into that category.
Develop a solid press release with relevant pictures, description, the story behind the app, who’s your target audience, why your app is better than competitors, a link to the app and correct contact info, distribute this to relevant publishers. Don’t limit yourself to the large publishers, focus on specific regional newspapers and newsletter; these are free to get involved with and often a lot easier to get published in.
There are plenty of other marketing tools to be mentioned, such plenty of other offline and online methods. Regardless of all the marketing your willing to implement, it comes down to the development of the app, make a quality, well written, good looking, user-friendly app. Don’t let it crash! Preferable keep the project (design, developed and testing) internal.
This is a guest post from Chris Hackett who works as a Sales Manager at www.buuna.com in Sydney, Australia. Chris can be reached by email on: chris@buuna.com
How will the Click Frenzy Australia Website go down tonight?
Nov 20th
Today is an interesting day in Australian retailing because we will see the first combined “online” deals day. Basically what this means is we will see a “Cyber Monday” in the Australian market. I first noticed this website a month ago when a buddy of mine in the retail space said if I have ever heard of the website “click Frenzy”? at the time I said I have never heard of it! (see image below when I first started talking about this site in October)
I did some background checks and it seems Power Retail was behind it, Smart move by them as from my estimations on costs they have done very well from this website, it apparently costs between $500-$10,000 to get listed on this site, depending on how much presence you want (so especially they have made over 100,000+, sure website set up and hosting will cost a bit but its easily going to turn a big profit. Another question many users are asking is if the site will actually stay live during the launch and many estimate it will do down due to sheer influx of visitors!
Click-Frenzy-Twitter
Now I have looked at some of the metrics behind “Click Frenzy” too see what type of traffic they are getting and it seems if you bench mark them next to a very large Australian brand Optus they are gaining quite good awareness in the market.
With the top search terms to the click frenzy brand been:
1. Click Frenzy
2. Click Frenzy Australia
3. Click Frenzy Online
4. Click Sale
click-frenzy-trends
Another funny thing is all the brands who have used the “Frenzy” line in their advertising, some examples from the paid search below, the best one by far is Treadmill Frenzy, followed by Deal Frenzy and Christmas Frenzy. I am suprised they have not registered the Click Frenzy trademark with Google as every brand has free game to bid on these terms.
Treadmill-frenzy
Overall it will be interesting too see if this website lasts till next year? Will we see the same thing in the US where Shop.org started as clickfrenzy.com.au and then all retailers set up a date to basically offer the deals and “leak” the deals online.
I will be shopping at 7pm tonight and on the look out for a deal or too, if you are shopping tonight please post below:
Further Questions with an Ex-Search Quality Team Member Andre Weyher
Nov 15th
Over the last few weeks we have received many questions from readers on this blog and I also received several messages on Twitter to do a follow up interview with Andre (the Ex Google Search Quality members) to answer some questions and provide clarification towards specific points from his last interview here.
Andre-Weyher
Question 1. How have you found the last few week’s after the article went viral, have you been contacted by many parties has Google contacted you?
The week after the interview went live was absolutely crazy. I never thought that it would cause such a stir. The reactions varied from enthusiastic to weird and even bizarre. I learned that the outside world is very divided in it’s opinions about SEO. It’s not that weird if you think about it, being an SEO is not a protected title and if I were to compare the opinions and reactions it stirred, I would almost compare it to a religion. Very sensitive, people can get extremely upset when they hear something that they don’t agree with or goes against their experiences. I think that many people forget that there is no magic formula and believe that they have found the holy grail. I also noticed that a lot of people easily forget the big picture. They are so focused on dissecting every single letter and using it to their benefit, instead of focusing on actually giving the users something interesting to read about which will in return help their rankings grow. So I believe that SEO’s should look at their field as a long term project and not as a “quick win” solution.
Also, an interesting thing I’ve noticed: many people interpreted my comments as a sort of “SEO is dead” statement. This is absolutely not the case. SEO is and should be an integral part of any online marketing campaign. It’s just an element that should come as second nature for someone who is truly passionate about the topic of his or her site. On page SEO is something that needs to be done pro-actively and intelligently. But the content part should flow more naturally instead of being looked at as a mere tool to increase traffic.
As far as contact is concerned, I was approached by many people in the industry to comment on some of the answers. Google commented on the article on Search Engine Land and I was given the opportunity to react to their comments as well, so very fair play by Danny Sullivan.
Question 2. Users on the blog have asked if you can please define further: “Commercial” for anchor text/keywords?
Absolutely, I saw this question come up quite often in the forum threads. It’s very simple really. A “commercial” keyword is a high volume and/or high value keyword! There is no official list of these words but you can make the judgement yourself very easily. Any keyword that has high commercial value like “cheap flights” or “car insurance” would be seen as commercial. People tend to over complicate this issue when in reality it’s very simple. If 90% of the anchor texts on your backlinks are commercial keywords, it’s a dead giveaway of a spammy profile, especially if the links run in to the tens of thousands. This would never occur “naturally”. So ensure you have non-commercial keywords anchor texts in there too – like the url of the website and long tail keywords.
Question 3. Users have asked if you have any examples of directories Google deems as high quality?
Good question, I’ve seen a lot of confusion about this topic and I want to be as clear as I can about it; there is no magical list of quality directories out there. There are, however a few guidelines that you can keep in mind when doubting about the quality of a directory. Pay attention to the following;
1) Does the directory demand a reciprocal link before they accept your submission? If they do, it’s a sign that something fishy might be up.
2) Perform a simple snippet search. Take a random entry, perform a “quotation” search on Google with a random sentence in the entry, are there hundreds of directories with the exact same sentence? You do the math! 
Apart from these 2 simple giveaways, remember the value of moderation and specialisation. Directories with a clear niche or with a very active moderator are for more likely to have value. Also, the SEOmoz list of directories is pretty up to date and good.
Question 4. You mentioned last time when I met you that META Keywords for SEO are still worth including, can you elaborate on this if possible?
Funny you should ask. I tend to mention META keywords as an often overlooked element and this causes a look of disbelief in the faces of the more experienced and “corporate” SEOs. There has been a lot of speculation about this and I appreciate the chance to expand on this topic. Part of the SEO community is of the opinion that META keywords are worthless and can be overlooked. The other (smaller) part thinks they are some kind of magic weapon. The truth lies in the middle in my opinion. It’s obvious that having correct META keywords will not make you rank on the #1 position in a competitive field. But that doesn’t mean that they will not help Google understand what your site is about! Even if Google totally disregards them from a ranking perspective, they are still being seen by the algorithm, and they can’t do you any harm, so why not include them and tell Google what your site is about?
Having said that, you shouldn’t overdo it. I see a lot of sites with a huge amount of them in the META data. Webmasters need to remember that the more of them you have, the less each one of them is worth! The less of them you put in your META data, the more powerful each one of them becomes. They might not make a difference in the battle for the #1 position for the keyword “cola” between Pepsi and Coke, but they might give a head start to the bakery around the corner, competing for the keyword “bakery in Brooklyn”.
Question 5. Finally you have been living in Sydney for a few months now how have you found the city would you recommend it?
I absolutely LOVE this city. I’ve been travelling for the last 10 years and lived in a good few places. All of them have their charm but as far as I’m concerned, Sydney combines them all. The people, the climate and the city itself, it has all the good elements from the places I’ve been before. Not to mention that there is an amazing tech startup scene here. There are a lot of very clever people working on interesting new projects. I’ve had the chance to be a part of it and it’s fantastic experience. Speaking of which, I’d like to invite all your readers to check out my new blog on http://netcomber.com/blog The amount of questions that my first interview generated has motivated me to start my own Q&A blog. I’ll be telling people about my new service and about an ex Googlers view on SEO. I’ll also give people the chance to send in their questions about search, so hope to see you all there!
Finally I would like to say thank you to Andre for doing the two interviews.
Andre will also be attending a new monthly meetup running in Sydney on the 22nd November, so be sure to sign up now here: Online Marketing Sydney
Great use of Experiential Marketing Lamborghini Taxi
Oct 31st
Lamborghini-Taxi
Today when I was at a meeting in the city and on the way back from the meeting I noticed an interesting piece of Experiential marketing for the Need for Speed game. A $400,000 Lamborghini had been converted to be a taxi, now the sad part of the story is that you can no hail the taxi down you can only enter the car if you are a “competition winner”, we were actually trying to get a taxi when the Lamborghini drove past.
The interesting part of the campaign is that EA who runs the computer game is promoting this campaign and has pushed users online to use to the hash tag on Twitter: #mostwantedtaxi as we can see from the analysis below the tag is slowly starting to gain traction and when you monitor Twitter many tweets about the campaign do not contain the hash tag.
Twitter-mentions
Overall I feel this is a smart way to use experiential marketing to promote a product.
Reasons why Quality Exact Match Domains are still working for SEO
Oct 25th
Recently I was browsing online forums in the domain world, as I am personally really interested in domain names as I have been buying and selling domain names for over 8 years. For as long as I can remember domain names and SEO have pretty much gone hand in hand with SEO, as does web development with SEO. I found and interesting discussion a Sydney based web developer and Domain name seller by the name of Scott Nugent had engaged in. Basically Nugent had been calling up numerous end users who were Digital Marketing Managers to say that he has some domains for sale related to their business. A quote from Nugent below about his calls:
Out of the 8 I called, 3 of them all said the same thing: “I’ve been told exact match domains have zero value these days because Google penalizes you so I wouldn’t be interested”.
Now to further this quote from the end users, I also saw a very well known SEO company in the australian market put out this statement on Linkedin yesterday
Now that Google no longer gives you an SEO boost for exact match domains, what are the best ways to choose your new domain name?
Now these two quotes from various groups of individuals in the online marketing world has kind of baffled me, from some one who has been working in digital market I highly disagree that Exact Match Domains weight in search engines has been totally wiped out, I think a better statement to make is: Exact Match domains are still worth while if you create a quality site from them with good quality content and a decent link profile to match.
I will show below with some live examples of exact match domains still ranking well, whilst these domains are examples of quality exact match domains it is still evident their is a slight boost in these ranks for the EDM, I mean if you have a branded exact match domain people will naturally link to the website using the match link anchor text for the given keyword!
A quick search in the Australian market I can find several examples of EMD (Exact Match Domains Ranking)
1. Do a search for “Car Sales” and see carsales.com.au (current rank 1st position.)
Note from keyword: Whilst Car Sales is a very well known brand running on an EDM, it can be said that Drive has a stronger link profile yet it ranks in second position.
2. Do a search for “Credit Cards” and see creditcards.com.au (Current Rank 3rd position)
Note from keyword: Competitors such as Credit Card Finder rank lower but the important point is that Credit Cards the exact match domain still ranks strongly.
3. Do a search for “Lawyers” and see Lawyers.com.au (Current Rank 2nd position)
Note from keyword: Competitor which is branded and has a strong link profile such as Slater & Gordan is out ranked by the EDM.
4. Do a search for “personal loans” see personalloans.com.au (Current Rank – 1st position)
Note from keyword: Outranks strong competitors, domain authority is lower, competing banks not currently out ranking for the term.
5. Do a search for “loans” and see loans.com.au (Current Rank – 5th position)
Note from keyword: competitors such as yes loans have a stronger link profile yet loans.com.au still ranks higher.
6. Do a search for “Leather Jackets” and see the partial exact match domain leatherjacketshop.com.au (currently in 1st position)
Note from keyword: Competitors such as Viparo have a stronger link profile yet leatherjacketshop.com.au still ranks higher with the partial exact match domain, even looking at Viparo’s link profile you can see they have been targeting leather jackets heavily.
7. Do a search for “Jobs” and see the exact match domain Jobs.com.au (currently in 2nd position)
Note from keyword: From looking at the serps, it is evident that some of the government websites are very strong yet the EDM domain jobs.com.au is still ranking in 2nd position.
Another point to back up Exact Match Domains:
Now from my recent interview with Andre Weyher the Google search employee he provided the following insight into Exact Match Domains:
Choose your domain name wisely, having a good URL can give you a head start in the race. Good domains are still expensive and for a good reason.
Now you can take an educated guess from the statement about and the facts on hand and see that “Good Domains” usually means Exact Match Domains in high competition markets.
Now what can we say about the above research?
- Looking at keywords such as “Loans” and “Personal Loans” and “Jobs” in the Australia market it is evident that the EDM (Exact Match Domains) has some authority still in the ranks, the point is low quality EDM domains have been targeted after the last update. If you have a exact match domain I feel it is still worth investing in it but make sure that you have quality content related to the domain and build a quality link profile behind the domain.
Can Online Marketers please not make silly comments that Exact Match Domains now have no authority or benefit what so ever, it is clearly not true.
Want to meet up with me at a networking event?
To meet with me direct and talks to other Online Marketing experts in Sydney come along to our Free monthly meet up: http://www.meetup.com/Online-Marketing-Sydney/
Please let me know your thoughts on this post in the comment section below:
An interesting case in Social Media Brand Management with Thomas Cook Holidays
Oct 18th
A very interesting social media story out of the UK today, where we saw a man by the name of “Thomas Cook” leave a comment on “Thomas Cook” (the travel brands) Facebook page, saying that he had received years of ridicule for sharing the same name as the holiday company. He said as payment for his years of ridicule he asked Thomas Cook for a free holiday to Paris. (Read the full comment below)
thomas cook holiday
Now what also happened is a company called “LowCostHolidays” saw this as an opportunity for a fantastic PR by giving “Thomas Cook” the free holiday to Paris. the brand experienced a great increase in Facebook likes and positive comments, every one is now asking for a free holiday too.
The tables have turned on Thomas Cook and customers are now leaving angry comments one in particular was “lowcostholidays, because no one wants to be Thomas Crooked” (refer to image below)
Thomas Cook angry customers
Now the funny thing is lowcost holidays ran a promotion on Reddit in the past where they were actually sued for asking people if they had been “Thomas Crooked” refer to article here.
This provides an interesting insight into brand management on social media, brands can look at it the following Options:
Option 1. You give the free holiday to the customer then every one wants a free holiday.
Option 2. You can see the chance to give a free holiday to a customer, lets say the holiday costs $800~ how much does media cost in today’s market?
Option 3. Even giving free flights to Paris to the customer as part of a PR stunt, lets say the cost is $200~.
If the brand has a huge media budget and PR, which I am sure Thomas Cook does, then these costs can some times be very small to the bottom line and can potentially provide a huge amount of positive buzz for the brand.
Overall I would possible advise the brand with option 2 depending on their PR budget, yet this is also an unfair case for thomas Cook I must admit their page managers are handing it quite well in terms of response to customers, but I also notice the original comment has now disappeared from the page.
Let me know your thoughts on this case below:
An Interview with an EX-Member of Matt Cutts’s Search Quality team!
Oct 15th
Today we have something special for the readers of JamesNorquay.com, I have an exclusive interview with Andre Weyher. I first met Andre at a Search Industry event in Sydney and was intrigued too see why some one who use to work with Matt Cutts had moved to Sydney, if he could possibly share any “secret information” and also to talk about his new project which we will also talk over.
Google-Search-Quality-Member
Question 1: Tell us about yourself Andre, how long did you work in the Google Search Quality team?
I’ve been in Google for close to 5 years, after spending 2 years in the AdSense and AdWords teams (and some shameless self promotion) I got the chance to join Matt Cutts’s Search Quality team. A great experience as there are much less people in his department and the experience and knowledge I got are quite unique. Matt is a great guy and the atmosphere in the team is fantastic, you get to investigate the deep and dark corners of the internet, keeping the search index clean from spam and blackhat SEO. It’s also great to see the exact other side of the coin now!
Question 2: What were your daily roles in the search quality team?
The teams main focus is fighting spam and keeping Google’s search results clean so that the user gets the best possible experience. This is a very important thing for Google if you think about it. Google’s entire earning model relies on the good quality of the organic results, if people didn’t trust organic, they would stop using search and not click on ads anymore. Everyone in the team gets a market or a specialisation. I was mostly busy with content quality and back link profile, making decisions on the quality of pages and the links pointing to them and if needed, applying a penalty based on the severity and nature of the violating behaviour. The job also entailed creating reports about the current spam “situation” on a particular market.
Question 3. What are your thoughts on the recent algo updates penguin and panda are more on the way?
Absolutely, from what I have heard, there are still plenty of tweaks to come in the future. I think the message that Google is sending is very clear, they are fed up with people breaking the guidelines on an industrial scale and are coming down very hard on webmasters who do. Everyone knew that Penguin would be pointed at links, but I don’t think many people expected the impact to be as large as it turned out to be. At this stage a webmaster is out of his mind to still rely on techniques that were common practice 8 months ago. Purchasing links was always risky but resembled a game of roulette, you could get caught but many people also got away with it. Today it’s not a question IF you get caught, it’s merely a question of WHEN you’ll get caught. Not only this but take PR for example, getting a link from a high PR page used to always be valuable, today it’s more the relevance of the site’s theme in regards to yours, relevance is the new PR.
Question 4. What are common trends you looked for to determine a spammy site?
These can be divided into a few categories; On page signals like keyword stuffing, hiding things under the CSS or silly techniques like making a keyword rich text in the same colour as the background of the site. The second category would be content quality, it’s important to remember here that Google does not judge the nature of your content, only it’s authenticity. So any type of scraped, synonymised or obviously poorly written text would be a clear spam signal. The third would be backlink profile.
Question 5. What are common trends you looked for to determine a spammy link profile?
There are a good few elements taken into account here, like how many links are there in total? A very important one; what is the quality of the pages they come in from? Do the pages look “real” or are they just there to host the links? What anchors are used? The commercial vs. non commercial ratio of the anchors. In reality it’s very easy to recognise a blackhat profile, all you have to do is imagine what anchors would have been used if the linking happened completely naturally and compare it with what is going on in reality. Anyone can do it, just think logically and keep in mind which keywords convert to money.
Question 6. From your time in Google what are 3 on page tactics that you recommend?
Very good question, on page tactics are often overlooked, while in reality they should be a key element in your SEO strategy. First of all, choose your domain name wisely, having a good URL can give you a head start in the race. Good domains are still expensive and for a good reason. Second, be very thorough about your basic elements like titles, descriptions and H1/H2 headers. People are so focussed on putting the most expensive fuel in their car (link building) that they totally forget about the basics like putting wheels on it (on page elements). Of course you can’t over-do it as Google now also penalises for over optimisation, so don’t putt more than 2 commercial keywords in your titles or Google will frown upon it. Third, and most important, focus on content quality. Try to work on your website as if SEO was not part of your plan, create content out of a sincere interest and enthusiasm for the topic of your page. This is what Google and your users want form you, I know it’s tempting to think about financial gain but remember that Googles primary concern is valuable information!
Question 7. What are 3 off site (link building) tactics that you recommend?
Off site link building has dramatically changed since the recent updates. Anything that you can do automatically or at scale putts your website at risk. So keep the following in mind; Link building has changed from an almost purely technical process into something that resembles a relationship management campaign. Building a network with owners of sites that are related to yours for example. If your website is about cheese production, reach out to people in the milk industry, like I mentioned before, relevance is the new PR. Second, don’t dismiss directories completely. I have heard people talking about directories being altogether bad and advise people to avoid them. This is not the case, good quality, moderated directories, or niche directories are still worth looking in to. Third, to stay focussed on quality of pages linking in to you, Google judges your link profile by the quality of pages linking to your site, getting 3 links from authentic pages will do much more than 1000 links from splogs, so invest your time into getting quality, not quantity.
Question 8. Are there any other secrets or tips you can give to SEO’s from a search quality member?
This is a hard one… There are many secrets in Google’s sauce. I am aware that this might disappoint you but what I tend to tell people is the following; if you want to please Google with your SEO, then forget about SEO. Google wants you to create a site as if you don’t intend to manipulate their algo, but as if you are doing it because your passionate about the topic of your site. If you really are, your content will be great and your target audience will love you, this will do the best possible SEO you can imagine. Apart from this, follow Matt Cutts on Google+
Question 9. What are your thoughts on the trend towards social in search is more social integration on the way?
The change is definitely in the air, I think we have all seen signs of this happening already. It also looks like Google is moving towards more localised versions of search instead of a country wide version. Social will surely play a huge part in this. Integrating Google places into Google+ was a clear sign of the direction in which they are heading. I can only guess how it will look in the future but you can bet on Google+ being a very important part of it. I don’t think Google will let go of their social network any time soon so if you don’t have a profile for your site yet… don’t wait.
Question 10. Tell us about your new project Netcomber.com, how can it help SEO’s?
Netcomber is a brand new project that I have been working on, together with my business partner. We are planning to make it into the world best fingerprinting website. Our system uses over 3000 factors to calculate which websites are owned by the same person who’s website you submit. We use signs like account IDs, hosting information and even coding style to determine ownership clusters, so it will also show hidden relationships that normally would not be shown because of anonymization of data. Search engines always used this data in their fight against spam, checking the quality of a network, or even taking down an entire (spammy) owner cluster. The data was always internal only, we have made it external! SEOs can use it in many ways e.g. checking if a directory is of good quality (if the same owner has 500 of them in the same template, you might want to watch out), getting new ideas for potential linking partners, or simply keeping an eye on the competition and much more… Currently the tool is based on 20 million sites, in a few short weeks we will finish a crawl of over 200 million sites, so we are in BETA and the tool is free to use for now.
Thank you to Andre for taking his time to answer these 10 search related questions.
For more check out Andrea on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/andre-weyher/4/524/859
And be sure to check out his new project Net Comber here: netcomber.com
About the Author: James Norquay is a well known Australian digital marketer, with over 7 years experience. James deals with Enterprise level projects from some of Australia & Asia Pacific’s largest corporations. You can find him online via: Twitter, Google+ and Linkedin or posting on his other blog backlinks.com.au.
Facebook hits 1 billion users!
Oct 4th
Facebook has hit over 1 billion active users on the website which was announced today!
This is interesting for a website which started from a dorm room in college to a be a huge global company with over 1 billion active users. Facebook has released a special video for the 1 billion users and Mark Zukerberg has appeared on the news for interviews.
