Before I start, it’s probably prudent to explain why I think outsourcing is the way forward for certain kinds of SEO tasks. In short, and as I said during my presentation, 90% of what we do is easy. This isn’t about spamming people or turning to the dark side, it’s about taking the boring processes that already exist in your business, turning them into a step by step guide, and then finding a less costly way of getting stuff done. A prime example of this is research.

Outsourcing Research

I use oDesk, a lot, and have been doing for the last 3 years. Why?

1. It’s cheap.
2. You can hire and fire quickly.
3. You can easily track what people are doing.

Let’s take an example. You have a client in the pet industry and want to find sites that are related to dogs, cats or small animals. You’ve used a mixture of blog lists, advanced search queries, the Citation Labs prospector, a custom scraper that you may have made (Ade and I have come up with one that’s going to be given away during LinkLove) and any number of other sources to get a massive huge list of sites that you think are of a decent quality. But what next?

Yes, you can use scripts or something like BuzzStream to pull in contact data but – in my opinion – there’s no replacement for good old opposable thumbs. Human intelligence, for the most part, still beats machines almost every time.

To show how effective my process is, I did an experiment. Here’s how it went:

Posting the Job

Hi,

We need someone to help us research contact information for a list of websites. For this job you will need to be able to use Microsoft Excel, Read English and Browse the Internet.

When applying please include the phrase “I have read the description and can start immediately”.

Looking forward to your application,

Matt

As you can see, the application process is fairly straightforward but the important bit here is the fact that your new employees need to copy and paste a phrase into their application. By doing this you’re separating the people who just apply for everything with a copy and pasted cover letter with those who actually read and understand the job description. After all, you don’t want a researcher who can’t be bothered to read things, do you?

What happened when this job was posted?

Within 7 hours I had 154 applications and out of those only 75 copy and pasted my phrase of choice. The cheapest bid was $0.54/hr and there were more than 20 applicants at less than $1/hr. Yes, that’s right, you can hire someone for a whole day at less cost than buying a beer in London.

You’ll notice there that, in theory, I had 154 applications to read through… but here’s a really handy tip. Get someone else, that you’ve hired through oDesk, to check your job applications for you. This is possible because my selection process is so simple:

1. Order by cheapest;
2. Check they’ve copy and pasted the phrase;
3. Click ‘hire’.

You’re really not worried about getting the highest quality of individual for these tasks because, as you’ll see in a while, there are ways of easily checking their work. At this point it call comes back to being a numbers game – something Paul Madden talked about at SearchLove last year. He’s at the point where he’s got managers on oDesk doing pretty much everything for him, which isn’t something I’ve done, but it shows how immensely powerful this can be.

At this point I knew that I needed 8 people to check my list of sites, which I’d broken out into four separate spreadsheets (200 in each) and added included the following columns:

• First Name of Site Owner
• Last Name of Site Owner
• Email Address of Site Owner (if you can find it)
• URL of Contact Form (if there is one)
• Is the site about dogs? (Yes / No)
• Is the the site about cats? (Yes / No)
• Does the site have a blog? (Yes / No)
• How nice looking is the site? (Poor, Average, Good, Very Good, Excellent)

I also had a set of instructions that told me new members of staff what they needed to do (in a step by step guide), why they were doing it (to give context) and when it was needed by (with the empty threat of rejecting their timesheet if they were late).

At this point the more awake of you are probably thinking ’4 spreadsheets but 8 members of staff?’. Well spotted! Because we’re using such inexpensive resource it’s worth getting two people to check the same site, and then use some VLOOKUP magic in excel to check them against each other. If they’ve both found the same info, chances are it’s correct… if they haven’t you can just get it triple or quadruple checked, verify it against WHOIS, or use any number of other APIs – TextWise, Alchemy, etc. – to help make sure that your data is really, really accurate.

The End Result

Less than a day later I had my 800 sites double checked and it had cost me a whopping $33.14.

Long Term Resource

It’s important to note here that not everything I do on oDesk is about really cheap resource. There’s one person in particular that I’ve been working with for about 4 years and, in a way, has helped me grow my various businesses hugely. She gets fairly regular pay rises, is always happy to get involved with different kinds of tasks, and is one of my very closely guarded secrets as I would hate to see someone steal her!

Next up: Content

This is where it gets a little more tricky because the quality of your written content needs to be high. I’ve tried oDesk for this and, for the most part, you get fairly awful writers applying and it’s only now and again that you find someone good. Even worse, when you do, they tend to be quite expensive. The solution? TextBroker.com.

This site basically works by allowing you to upload a content request which is then put into a pool. Writers choose the jobs they want to complete, have a set time that they need to be finished in, and submit their content for review before that timer expires (otherwise the job goes back into the pool for someone else to select).

For us there’s also the added benefit of being able to create your own teams of writers, submit ‘Direct Orders’ to people that you know are good, and bulk upload requests via a CSV when required to save the time and effort of doing each one individually. Finally, and most importantly, you’re able to easily select the quality of writer depending on your budget. The screenshot below shows the interface (I’ve moved this around a bit to make it smaller but you’ll see what I mean):

My top tips for TextBroker?

1. Write a detailed description, with bullet points, of what you’re looking for.
2. Wherever possible, select 4* for quality. You’ll find that the writers are good, it’s very cheap, and there’s enough competition to make sure that you get your content back quickly.
3. Don’t be afraid to reject poor quality submissions but give constructive feedback so the writer is able to change things around and do better next time.

One important thing to mention here is that you should always be checking and editing the content that comes back. This isn’t a miracle fix that could replace a really good in-house writer – it’s a technique that lets you get decent written content done quickly and cheaply. We always edit this to make sure it fits with the tone and style that we’re looking for, add in any relevant links, and generally just tidy things up.

Design

Moving onto Design it starts to get even more difficult to outsource great quality design ‘on the cheap’ and it comes down to trial and error. I’ve had great success with:

• 99designs.com
• Finding design students looking to expand their portfolio
• Hunting for design resource in places like Eastern Europe

The first of those is quick, easy, and will usually give you great results for relatively little cost. Again, for those that don’t know, 99designs works on a ‘bid’ system whereby you upload a request and then go through the process of giving feedback to designers and – at the end – selecting the one that you like the most. You also have the option of rejecting them all and receiving a refund if you’re really not happy, although – so far – that’s not something I’ve had to do.

When you find a good designer, make sure you realise how lucky you are. For example, the designer I use most but together the dog names infographic on Pet365 for somewhere in the region of £200. So far, has picked up over 40 linking root domains, done really well on Social Media, and will continue to provide visits and links for as long as the site is up and running. The person that designed this is always paid on time, has his emails responded to as soon as I possibly can, and I generally try to keep him as happy as I possibly can simply because I know how lucky I am to have him on board.

Outreach

This is where things start to get really juicy, especially if you’re playing the ‘numbers game’ when it comes to outreaching content and guest posting opportunities. This will probably have Wil Reynolds shouting at his screen and James Agate thinking “I’m way better at this than him” but this process is one that’s worked for me over the last few months and, so far, has saved me an absolute fortune.

Basically, the key is personalisation and segmentation.

For this example, let’s suppose that we’ve produced the dog names infographic that I mentioned earlier and are now trying to outreach it to as many dog related sites as possible. From our research we have a big list of domains that we know are about dogs, and have a blog attached to them. We’ve also use SEO Tools for Excel or the SEOMoz API to pull in a load of metrics – Domain Authority, Page Authority and MozRank being the key ones – so have a good idea of which the most popular sites are. But how do we then outreach to them?

Some would say that you need to personalise absolutely everything, but you get to the point of diminishing returns on your time investment by doing that so let’s break things out into buckets.

• Top Priority: Domain Authority 60+
• Medium Priority: Domain Authority 35+
• Low Priority: Domain Authority 35-

This is oversimplified as you may also want to take social metrics into account but you get the idea. Basically, top priority we don’t outsource anywhere. These are the site that you want to build a relationship with so start interacting on Twitter, make friends, and generally get involved, as much as you can, with the people that own those sites.

Medium priority will be a mixture of outsourced work and sites that you want to get in touch with yourself. Either way there should be a fairly hefty amount of personalisation done on any emails so you’re not going to want to use resource that’s really cheap. Again, use oDesk, but spend more time finding the right person. Send them a list of 10 sites and get them to send you an example outreach email (based on a rough) that they would send to that owner. If the first attempt is crap, don’t give up – give them feedback and try again.

Finally, low priority – for the most part – can be contacted using a template with some basic personalisation. Again, you don’t want ultra cheap resource doing this and they need to have a very good grasp of English but it’s far simpler than the medium priority technique.

The key to all this is to not SPAM, do everything manually, but use tools like BuzzStream to speed up your processes. Give your oDesk resources access, set up the templates, assign tasks and sites to different people, and track what they’re doing. At this point you’re no longer doing the legwork yourself – you’re managing a team – so make sure that people are happy, understand what they’re doing, and keep an eye on how many links each individual is building vs. how much you’re paying them. If you find someone that’s great, reward them by increasing their pay. If they don’t perform, work to help them improve… or remove them from your team and find someone better.

It sounds cut throat but that’s how oDesk resourcing works.

Coding

I’ve been outsourcing most of my development for a very long time, have tried a few different options, and always come back to the same conclusion: find someone you can work with, make sure they do high quality work, and stick with them. I’ve tried India: in my opinion the timezones and difference in culture make it very difficult. Russia? Better, but still not quite there… Ukraine is where it’s at!

My team started on a tiny project of just a few hundred dollars and since then have worked on anything up to $100,000. They work hard, are easy to explain things to, and – most importantly – can be creative when needed. Finding a team can be tricky though, so again I’d advise going to elance or oDesk with a small project and seeing how things go. If you’re happy, try a slightly larger task but to start with always get a 2nd opinion on the code that’s being created if you’re unsure.

Do your best to get a fixed price quote, make sure you have a proper tech spec, and take into account that if you change your mind the cost is going to increase… so don’t fight it – just accept that it’s your own fault, agree how much extra you owe, and get on with it. Also, make sure that you pay on time as it makes a HUGE difference to how you’re perceived and how much goodwill is carried forward from whoever you’re outsourcing to.

Also, remember that you need to manage things closely and having technical knowledge will really help with this. I hear time and time again of people who don’t know anything about coding or site builds that try to outsource and end up in all kinds of trouble. If that’s you, find someone that knows their stuff and get them to help you manage the project – it will make it easier (and save you money) in the long run.

Finally… if you feel comfortable managing a project and want an introduction to a team that will look after you feel free to contact me directly and I’ll do an intro.

That’s about it…

I know that some parts of this have more detail than others but, to a point, you need to work out what’s going to be best for your individual situation. As with anything in the SEO industry it’s all about relationships so manage your team as best you can, remember that they’re people, and – even if they’re costing you virtually nothing – look after them as best you can.

Questions? Ask below or fire me an email.

The post The Big Guide to Outsourcing appeared first on Matt Beswick - Milton Keynes SEO Consultant and Web Designer.

What I really want to do is give some tips to people who’re looking to start speaking at events, and also say thanks to a few people who’ve helped me out.

So, as I mentioned on Wednesday, I’ve been lucky enough over the last year or two to speak at a few different events, and have a few others lined up which include BlogPaws 2013 in Washington, but this one was different… Distilled are one of the most trusted agencies in the world, those who follow them know their SEO, and speaking to your peers is an entirely more frightening experience than speaking to people who have very little idea what you’re talking about.

Learning to Present

By nature I’m quite a shy person and it’s taken me a long time to get over that (I’m talking going back to when I was at school and decided to take drama more than half a life ago) so don’t for a minute think that you need to be a real extrovert to start doing this kind of thing. Just build up your confidence slowly, watch yourself on video if you can, and make sure that you really know your subject… getting that bit right, for me, is half the battle. After that you’ll find that you can just talk naturally and with authority about your topic.

One important thing to remember, though, is that when you’re on stage you’re selling. Not a product. Or a service. You’re selling you and your knowledge.

Before pitching yourself to the industry make sure that you have some speaking experience; the last thing you want to do is make a complete arse of yourself by stuttering through a slide deck infront of the people in your industry! Whether it’s in front of small business network groups, going back to your University to present to students, at blogging conferences, giving free seminars… to be honest, anything that gets you in front of people is worth doing.

Again, I’ve been lucky enough to get myself invited to a few events in the past (from those listed above to Facebook developer conferences back in the early days of Hidden Pixel) and it really is just practice, practice, practice.

I’m way under-qualified to teach anyone to be an amazing speaker though, so I’d suggest you read these posts by the wonderful Hannah Smith.

Finding Opportunities

My first piece of advice for anyone wanting to start talking at industry events is to actually go to them. There are loads of Meetups in London every month – including those run by Distilled, SearchLondon and OMN - and plenty across other cities across the world… just get yourself to meetup.com and see what you can find. Primarily they’re great for a free couple of beers, a few nibbles, and the chance to meet people within the industry.

To be honest though, doing that isn’t why I was given this chance. The real reason is that I’ve been to more distilled conferences than I care to remember, went to the speakers dinner before SearchLove last year, asked Wil Reynolds and Will Critchlow for advice on speaking, and then a little later spoke to Lynsey and Lauren about letting me get on stage.

So, I guess what I’m trying to say is that you need to make friends. But not because you want something… because you really love what you do. I don’t think I’ll get any work from speaking at the meetup – if anything I gave my competitors an insight into how to make their processes better and increase their margins – but that’s what it’s all about… helping people and sharing knowledge.

Finally, a bit about the night

Although this isn’t a write-up of the night, it’s probably prudent to mention that the stuff that Tom Anthony and Marcus Taylor talked about was all really, really interesting – particularly Tom’s breakdown of the percentages of ‘safe’ and ‘risky’ content that you should be working on (full set of slides here). I hadn’t met Marcus before but it was an absolute pleasure – if you’re in the music industry and need some marketing I’d definitely advise getting in touch with him!

Feel free to ask any questions in the comments, drop me an email directly, or look me up on twitter – @mattbeswick.

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This is what I like to call the Wikipedia effect.

The Internet’s de facto encyclopaedia of everything doesn’t even have social buttons embedded on the page. Yes, there are almost certainly other reasons for the lack of a Like button (privacy, anyone) but surely if they were that important to rankings, and therefore traffic, these would have been included?

But this page has 27,000 Facebook Likes and ranks first, I hear you say. Well…

Correlation != Causation

via http://xkcd.com/552/

Even though there’s a high correlation between socially popular sites and high SERP position, it doesn’t necessarily follow that all those social indicators are the reason for their success. In many cases, the momentum created by social sharing leads to a website inevitably building up a positive and in-depth link profile, which leads to high domain authority and PageRank, in turn meaning great SERP position.

Look at it this way:

via http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ci700332k

Do you really think that the amount of Lemons imported from Mexico made a blind bit of difference to the road fatality rate? It’s very unlikely.

Social Doesn’t Signify Superlative, at Least Not Yet

If you want your Twilight fan fiction website to pick up visitors from the endless collection of Social Networks it pretty much goes without saying that it’s important to have a lot of engaged Facebook fans and Twitter followers. Nevertheless, don’t expect this to help you rank on Google if your content is crap and you’ve just copied and pasted everything from teamedward.com.

One of the drawbacks of using social cues for ranking purposes is that they can be manipulated easily using sites like Fiverr. Despite Wikipedia’s lack of tools for tapping into the supposed power of social cues such as widgets, it still manages to dominate top spots for pretty much any search query you could ever think of. How? Content and links.

Wikipedia doesn’t want social signals to be used heavily in ranking schemes because they don’t matter for them and would be counterproductive. More traditional cues beyond social popularity such as the quality of the written word, along domain authority and PageRank have a far greater and more consistent impact than any social network could ever dream of having. Think about it: if social metrics ran search all you’d ever get would be videos of cats that like water.

The Future of Social Media SEO Integration

Now, SEO will increasingly depend on social signals… but not in the linear way that some have been expecting. Yes, social data from Google+ is going to be used more and more (after all, Google need the big + to succeed), but that’s about as far as I think it’s going to go. Social is all about generating traffic, readership and community. It lets you converse with your customers, generate new ones, gives you the chance to dream about going viral, and – if something works – the chance to show off a bit.

A final mention has to go to Facebook’s new Graph Search which is pretty much the epitome of why using social metrics to run a search engine just doesn’t work. Quite scary invasions of privacy are just the start. In the traditional sense it adds very little real world value… although might help with getting a date and is mildly entertaining (just like funny cat videos).

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When Things Go Wrong

When a site is hacked you’re not usually lucky enough to get advanced warning that something has gone wrong – it generally hits you like a silent freight train moving at a hundred miles an hour. Whether it’s your site suddenly being taken offline or, like the two sites that I had to deal with, something more subtle. In my opinion the latter of those is far more dangerous because the problems can sit there and fester until a trigger of some kind alerts you. Quite often by that time it’s too late.

The first of these was Pet365.co.uk – one of my own e-commerce projects – that had no exterior signs of harm. The first we knew of the hit was when checking a product page and, for no apparent reason, seeing the dreaded ‘The Website Ahead Contains Malware!’ warning. This kicks in when any given site is picked up and blacklisted by any number of data providers, usually Google, and propagates to pretty much all browsers. The result? Your users instantly see a big red warning message that screams ‘VIRUS!!!’ and you instantly lose their trust.

This can happen very quickly, meaning that you won’t necessarily see any warnings in Webmaster Tools (although these will appear shortly afterwards), so don’t assume that just because Google hasn’t told you there’s an issue that it’s a false positive. Also, if you search for your brand name then chances are that you’ll see a ‘This site may harm your computer’ note next to your listing on the SERPs.

At this point, in essence, you’re (at least temporarily) done for.

The other site that was affected by a hack, Havoc Store, didn’t get any of this fun – it just lost all of its product and category pages (no issues with the blog as that runs separately and the homepage stayed where it was). As this happened at the weekend I didn’t notice and, due to illness, the guy that runs it didn’t either. For two days. Two. Whole. Days.

What did that mean? Lots of pages crawled and deindexed, when potential customers tried to go and buy things they just ended up on a 404 page, massive drop in traffic, and no easy way to recover quickly. Again, a complete nightmare.

The Unexpected

Before I go into details about recovering from this, there are a few very important things to note about the potential effects on your SEO:

Embedded Infographics

Until our little ‘incident’, this had never crossed my mind as being a potential issue but has resulted in a complete change of process when putting together infographics. When we were hit by the Malware warning ANY page that had embedded one of our infographics also received the same warning because they were sharing content that was hosted on a blacklisted domain.

Blogs that had recently shared a graphic had their homepage affected meaning that the issue was extremely obvious and, because the pet blogging community is so tight knit, there was a real risk of losing two years worth of work building up goodwill (and a huge amount of amazing links). Fortunately I class a lot of the people who were impacted as friends, which leads me onto the next unexpected result…

Understanding and Support

As soon as I realised what was going on I uploaded all of our graphics to an Amazon S3 instance, refreshed the embed codes, and sent out an update to anyone I could find that had been affected. The response: “Okay, no worries”. Honestly – I was amazed. People like Chris Bern and Barb deserve a big thanks here. They could, rightfully, have ripped us apart but were absolute stars.

With Havoc, the support was quite different as it was someone we were writing a guest post for who told us about the issue. Instead of removing a dead link to a category page he just emailed us letting us know that something was wrong and offering to change the link if required. Again, lots of people wouldn’t have bothered, so it just illustrates how much people who run sites actually look out for each other.

Adwords Ban

Because of the Malware, our Adwords account was suspended even though we had paused all of the ads. The surprising thing here was that it didn’t automatically get reactivated when the issue was resolved – instead, we had to submit a support request and wait for a reply from Google. The other thing to watch is that you can’t easily see that your ads aren’t running in Adwords as there’s no alert message until you get to individual keywords. You do receive an email to your Google address but, as I rarely check my gmail hadn’t see it. Needless to say, I’ve now fixed that!

Speed of Recovery

Pet365 got picked up by Google at around 7pm. Around 15 minutes later I’d stopped swearing, poured myself a massive Whiskey, and sat down to work out what had gone wrong. 2 hours later the Malware was removed and I’d submitted a Webmaster Tools Malware Review Request (note that this is different to a reinclusion request and has to be done from the Malware page in Webmaster Tools). By 2am UK time we were back up and running. For me, that’s surprisingly fast.

How to Recover

To lessen the impact of a site being hit time is definitely of the essence. You really need to do whatever you can to lock your site down, get rid of the threat, make sure it isn’t going to happen again, and then reactivate everything. As a quick checklist, here’s what you need to do:

1. Contact your support team and, assuming you’re running WHM or something similar, run a full Malware scan on the whole server.
2. Check StopBadware.org to see if you’ve really been blacklisted.
3. Don’t be proud – find someone that can help you. I recommend Sucuri because, in short, they’re amazing.
4. Turn off any paid advertising as quickly as you can so that you’re not wasting money.
5. If you can, return a 503 code on your whole site (PHP example at the end of this post).

Through our malware check we were fortunate enough to find a number of files that had been compromised. There was an easy pattern to follow as any file that contained the word ‘config’ had been injected with a line of PHP code that tried to insert a browser hijacking script. To be honest, we’d got lucky as it was fairly low level and easy to remove, but the fact it got there in the first place was a real worry.

Sucuri would have found this if I hadn’t but it was a busy day for them so it took 3 or 4 hours before they got to my ticket. In that time I’d found the issue, removed it, and requested that Google check we were clean. As I’m no security expert I couldn’t guarantee that this wouldn’t happen again which is where the Sucuri guys really helped as they hardened off our server, closed some gaps that were completely unrelated, and generally stopped by bottom from twitching The best thing? They now do this on an ongoing basis so if we ever get hacked again we’ll hopefully know before Google does. Not bad for less than $100 a year!

On the Havoc side of things it was a simple hack that renamed .htaccess to 1.txt. By the time John and I had sat down and worked on things for 20 minutes or so the site was back up and running… nice and simple!

Morals of the story…

Prevention is better than cure so having your sites well protected in the first place can save a huge amount of stress. As a site owner, SEO, or web designer it’s your job to protect the investment of you or your client so should be on everyone’s radar. Set up some security monitoring, check for downtime using a service like Worm.ly, ensure that you’re doing daily off box backups, only upload files using SFTP, use strong passwords that are changed regularly, and make sure that your own Desktops and Laptops are virus free. Simple as that!

How to return a 503 status code

A 503 status code tells search engines that you’re having temporary issues, or are performing maintenance, on your site. The ‘Retry After’ header basically says “Come back in 86400 seconds”.


header('HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable');
header('Status: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable');
header('Retry-After: 86400');


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As SEO’s, when we set out to tackle any short or long-term project, we must now take into account the power of relationships when plotting our overall strategy; at the end of the day, the relationships we nourish and strengthen are what really make a difference in the pursuit of our end goals. The “social” in “social media” for SEOs is all about creating strong networks of support. The old adage of ‘content is king’ only goes so far – without a kingdom you’re nothing.

In my opinion, you need to immerse yourself in any niche that you’re lucky enough to work in.

Yep, that’s right – you need to understand that working for a client is a privilege. They’re trusting you, someone that they often haven’t met, to develop the online presence of their business. It doesn’t matter whether you’re doing outreach for a link building campaign, writing content for guest posts, or coming up with the entire SEO strategy: you have to care. That includes understanding the ins and outs of the business, the industry, and the influential members of that community.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling hosepipes or accountancy services, there are always people that you could – and should – be building relationships with.

The Exponential Power of Link-Building

In the arena of link-building, your relationships with prominent bloggers, movers and shakers, SEO professionals and other web ninjas are crucial. As Google’s Panda and Penguin have shown, the trend in the search engine field has shifted towards link quality over quantity. The rubber is finally meeting the road as far as link and web page authority is concerned.

Building trust is vital, and it can take quite a lot of groundwork to make that happen. It’s a lot easier to screw up that trust than it is to build it, so be careful and treat your contacts with respect; they’re not just there to help you – they’re actual living, breathing people who run sites and have families… so don’t go out to get what you want and then never call again. SEO isn’t a one night stand.

Doing Social Networking Right

The hot trend in just about every industry is to cram the importance of a shotgun approach to social media down the throats of every man, woman and child. Just “friending” everything with a pulse and a profile isn’t really the right way to do it. Aside from just connecting with peers in your niche, it’s also quite important to build a presence through value creation. Pop onto Quora every day and chime in on a question that’s relevant to your area of expertise. Create a group on LinkedIn and put some genuine effort into making it a forum for honest discourse. Write blogs posts that don’t stink. In short… add value.

Giving up your time and expertise freely on sites like Quora and Facebook without thinking of any payback that’ll directly benefit you or your client is an important thing to do. Part of this approach is all about improving the general well-being of your industry. It will also establish you as an authority, which is much more valuable overall than mere fleeting connections. But a bigger part of it is developing autonomy, which keeps you flexible as you navigate the swirling tides of SEO in your particular sphere.

A real world example where this had made a difference to me is a writing slot that I was offered on Technorati. This didn’t happen overnight, and for most SEOs who just go out to build links would have been out of reach, but because I could demonstrate that I (kind of) know what I’m talking about and able to add value I was accepted… with the help of a Tweet or two to the right person. Writing for that site, to me, is a big deal and not something I’m doing for SEO reasons; I’m doing it because I love the industry that I work in, and that’s an ethos I carry forward to each of my clients.

Being a Good Neighbor

Some may dump on the idea of Karma, and it’s true that individual good actions don’t necessarily pay off in the long run. Still, the feeling that you get at the end of the day from doing something altruistic improves your mindset and makes you better in your own work. Helping out your fellow SEOs through referrals, word of mouth promotion even a link or two is doubly important if it also helps out your clients. Use your connections to support the contacts most deserving of it, and the love will eventually find its way back to you.

It is, however, important to remember that if you’re building relationships to get yourself some links that you actually need to build those links. It’s all too easy to write lists, make friends and forget the end goal. James Agate wrote a post about this a while ago and it’s something I stumble across every so often and make myself read every time I do. Life is all about give and take, so remember to take every now and again

Finally…

As an SEO, you expect your work with current and potential future clients to be the most taxing part of your life. Oddly enough, it often turns out that networking with people in industries that, up until now, you really didn’t care about is far more challenging. Ultimately, you live and die by your connections with your (client’s) industry cohorts. Cherish and cultivate your relationships with those whom you share a vocation, because they’ll be the ones who can help or hinder your efforts.

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10. Vince

Like the protagonist from Entourage, Google’s Vince left a bad taste in more than a few people’s mouths. Arriving on the scene in February 2009, it appeared to benefit large corporate brands in the results disproportionately. The idea was to punish charlatans looking to piggyback on the recognisable identity of big companies and cut out shoddy sites with marginal content from the first page of the SERPs. Though unpopular, it ultimately improved search for end users and has fed into the modern concept of authority: if you’re not a brand, become one.

9. Emanuel

The latest rumbling to shake the SEO firmament, the Emanuel or DMCA Penalties update hit the scene in early August 2012. Named in honour of the infamous talent agent Ari Emanuel, the update removes copyrighted material from search results upon request. Piracy impacts Google’s bottom line, even though it’s often via an indirect route as with BitTorrent. If unoriginal content isn’t securely attributed to its creators, it disincentivises the creation of the best content possible online. That’s bad for Google, creators and users as well.

8. Jagger

Launched in October 2005, Jagger really represented the first of what we’ve come to recognize as a “classic” algorithmic sea change. It was in many ways the spiritual godfather to Panda much like Neil Young was to the grunge movement. Tenuous simile? Yup. Regardless, Jagger in some cases halved the organic referrals seen by many “thin” sites that were affiliate-based or simply lacked quality content. Even back in 2005, gaming Google’s algorithms was in vogue. In essence, Jagger tweaked how backlinks could be used to boost PageRank and SERPs positioning.

7. Schema.org

Despite fierce competition in web search, it’s not unusual for the top competitors to come together and jointly agree to use neutral standards for some things. That’s where schemas like sitemaps and standardized HTML markup tags come in. The Schema.org update of June 2011 relied on the collaboration project that is the schema.org website to deliver a uniform set of guidelines for indexing raw data on the web. Ultimately, it provided the foundation on which all future updates will rest.

6. Venice

For an algorithm update that actually impacted results for everyday users to a greater extent than most, it’s actually surprising that Venice didn’t get a lot of press or recognition. Rolling over 40 updates into one compact package, it focused on refining local search results that are highly dependent on the national and regional location of the searcher. Released in February 2012, it was largely overshadowed by what would eventually become Penguin. Regardless, it improved search quality and overall user experience for the average Joe and Jane.

5. Google Instant

In addition to being a helpful search tool for those who don’t know what they’re searching for, the Google Instant update of September 2010 brought some interesting changes to SEO. The initial fear among marketers was that long tail keywords would be hurt if searchers couldn’t ever get to see obscure terms in the first place. While that was true to some extent, the bottom line is that Instant saved searchers time, made results more relevant for many and didn’t impact niche marketers and smaller sites that continue to prioritize quality.

4. Places

Late to the social media party, Google got in the game with its own version of Yelp. Rolled out in April of 2010, the Places update made Google Places more than just an adjunct to the already full-featured Maps. Eventually incorporating the accumulated expertise of Zagat in user-generated review feedback, Places would go on to become a real threat in the social sphere. The important point with Places’ official coming out party was that local entrepreneurs and marketers gained an important ally in the SERPs game.

3. Universal Search

Though Google was really the first company to do search the right way, their approach was becoming dated by May of 2007. That’s when the Universal Search update, aka “Google 2.0″, crashed the party and completely rejuvenated the search market for the second time. The Universal Search update brought us the concept of vertical search, which locates all manner of content from blogs to images to articles on any specific, narrow topic. Basically, Universal benefited end users without massively inconveniencing site owners.

2. Penguin

While the problem had been building since the early days of search, the gaming of the entire PageRank system had reached a critical juncture not too long ago. SEOs began to wonder what PageRank was even worth any more. Penguin gave them their answer. Debuting in April 2012, Penguin made authority relevant again, kiboshed a million link schemes, sneaky cloaking tricks and keyword-matching shenanigans that hurt honest SEOs and site owners. It did, however, bring negative SEO to the forefront of everyone’s thinking… so wasn’t all good!

1. Panda

Also known as the Farmer Update, Panda was Google’s first sledgehammer of an update in years and, for me, the most important of all time. In February of 2011, it hit both honest marketers and underhanded shysters like a freight train by down-ranking sites with weak content and low value to end users. Using human testers to evaluate the results, Google was able to leverage Panda to effectively squash “content farms” from dominating the SERPs.

Affecting an initial 12% of all sites, it was the biggest algorithm tweak seen in a very, very long time. Why was it more important than Panda? Because it’s all about content – something that we, as site owners, need to take far more seriously than building links. As Rand says – stop building links and start earning them.

What Does It All Mean?

Since Google became a ‘big boy’ company half way through the previous decade, it’s become far better at managing how its upgrades roll out. By necessity Google has to keep SEOs on our toes because, for all that is good in our vastly misunderstood industry, there are a hundred spammers who will do pretty much anything to take advantage of gaps in the algorithm.

In my opinion, it now seems like they’re starting to strike a balance that’s satisfactory. Still, if Google’s updates prove one thing, it’s this: their primary goal will always be to deliver the most relevant results possible while making as much cash as they can – something that we should all be very careful to remember.

Got a favourite? Think I’ve got it wrong? Let me know below…

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To add a bookmarklet in Chrome (other Browsers have a similar process), make sure your bookmarks bar is showing, right click it, then click ‘add page’. Name it whatever you like and add the code you want to use as the URL. Alternatively, just drag the handy link that I’ve provided below to the bookmark bar and it’ll do all the hard work for you.

Oh, and if anyone has a bookmarklet they’d like to add to this list just leave a comment and I’ll update this post.

Rich Snippet Preview

If you’d like a quick way to get an instant ‘rich snippet’ preview of the page you’re on, this will be of help:

javascript:void(window.open('http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url='+window.location.href,'_blank')); Add Bookmark

Ahrefs.com Check

Next up, for anyone who uses ahrefs.com for link and keyword analysis, this handy bookmarklet opens a new window with analysis of your current page:

javascript:void(window.open('https://ahrefs.com/keywords/overview/exact/'+encodeURIComponent(encodeURIComponent(location.href.replace('http://',''))),'_blank')); Add Bookmark

OpenSiteExplorer Check

This one fires up OpenSiteExplorer in a new window for the page you’re currently browsing:

javascript:void(window.open(%27http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?source=external&site=%27+window.location.href,%27_blank%27)); Add Bookmark

TextBroker Direct Order

Finally, for anyone that uses TextBroker and has a list of favourite authors that they send content to regularly, try adding a new folder to your bookmarks bar and then creating a new entry for each one. The only thing you need to change is the author id, which you get from the URL when placing a direct order:

https://www.textbroker.com/c/DirectOrder.php?aid=AUTHOR_ID_GOES_HERE Add Bookmark

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Nowadays, Facebook boasts a variety of methods for advertisers and brands to monetize their following online. The tried and true Facebook Contest is one of the best ways to increase traffic and attract new fans. It also enables brands to capture analytics data and perform market research that’ll benefit them in the future. In terms of overall ROI, a Facebook Contest is one of the smartest social media moves one can make. Starting a contest on Facebook is easy, but mastering the technique is tougher than it looks.

Facebook Competitions 101

The first, and most fundamental of the Facebook competition rules is that they can’t be directly run from one’s own Facebook Business Page. Rather, they must be administered through a third-party app. Adhere to this simple rule and you’ll eliminate 90% of all potential problems that you may encounter down the road. If you ignore this simple rule, your Business Page may be shut down permanently. There are tons of third-party apps available, so finding one that suits your Contest shouldn’t be difficult.

Preliminary Considerations

Before kicking off a Facebook Contest, you’ll need to quickly peruse, understand and abide by Facebook’s Promotions Guidelines. It’s pretty standard stuff. Once you’ve digested that, you’ll need to carefully design a Contest focused on your desired target demographic. There are plenty of different types of Contests to pick from – the easiest route to take is the user-submitted content promotion. Once you’ve chosen a particular promotion type, the last piece of the puzzle is selecting the right contest app to run your promotion.

Easier Contests Through Software

Since you can’t run a Contest directly from your Business Page, an app is a necessity. There’s not exactly a dearth of options to choose from, but some of the more popular programs include OfferPop, WildFire and Shortstack. OfferPop is best for those who want a dead simple experience and incremental pricing. WildFire features somewhat similar pricing, though it all depends on how many followers you have and plan on attracting. Shortstack allows users to craft custom promotions with the maximum amount of control. There are plenty of other fantastic apps available, but these three examples are arguably the best.

Tips & Tricks for Success

Before you get started, make sure to plan out your promotional strategy for your Contest. Advertise through banners on your website, via Twitter and Facebook announcements and through your own blogging efforts. Your Contest will only appear as a Tab on your Page, so you’ll need to do some legwork to get the word out. Make sure you’re honest with your fans about how the Contest works, what the prize will be and what you’re looking for in responses. Lastly, make sure to keep the contest fairly uncomplicated and make the prize appealing and relevant.

What Not  to Do

It’s quite easy to foul up and break the fundamental rules of Facebook promotion, so be aware of the major blunders that many commit. First off, don’t tell users to Like or Follow your Page in order to enter. Doing so is against the Facebook Competition rules. Have followers enter the Contest through the app you’re using to run the promotion. In addition, don’t contact Competition winners through Facebook Walls or through any avenue that’s directly related to the main site. When in doubt, use OfferPop, WildFire or a similar app to do all the heavy lifting for you.

Moving Forward

Like any social media promotion, the Facebook Contest is rife with opportunities for astounding success and catastrophic failure. To make a Facebook Contest work, you’ll need a solid game plan and a keen eye for details. If your promotion isn’t a smash hit at first, you’ll have to go back to the drawing board and rejigger your formula. As long as you do your homework beforehand, offer a compelling prize and respect your audience, your Facebook Contest has a good chance of success at the end of the day.

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Milk

The March 16th buyout of Milk, Inc. was more about acquiring Kevin Rose and friends than it was about purchasing a social media company. Their Oink app took ranking the real world to another level, and it’s obvious that Google plans on incorporating their knowledge into Google+ over the coming year as the brewing war with Facebook heats up.

TxVia

If you’ve never heard of TxVia, you’re not alone. For five years, the PaaS-based payment processor has been toiling in obscurity. On April 2nd, their persistence paid off big time when Mountain View decided to scoop them up. As the mobile payment space becomes more lucrative and competitive, their expertise will become invaluable to projects like Google Wallet.

Meebo ($100m)

Prior to their acquisition, Meebo had already earned quite a bit of web credibility with their ad-supported IM client. Their hundreds of millions of users were reason enough for Google to acquire the company on June 4th, bringing to a close a successful 6+ year run online. Google plans on incorporating their know-how into their rapidly growing Google+ platform.

Quickoffice

Mobile office suites like Polaris Office and Documents to Go are all the rage with hardcore multi-taskers. Quickoffice is arguably one of the best. As of June 5th, their code and their coders are now officially part of Team Google. Faced with a looming challenge in the enterprise sphere from Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface, Google’s decided to get their office house in order.

Sparrow ($25m)

Hailed by Apple enthusiasts as one of the best email clients available for iOS and Mac OS X, Sparrow broke some hearts with their July 20th sale to Big G. In light of Gmail’s lackluster debut on iTunes, Google knows that they need to put out the best iOS email client possible to remain competitive.

Wildfire Interactive ($100m)

Widely recognized as a startup that had largely perfected social media marketing, Wildfire Interactive’s August 1st buyout for $250 million isn’t surprising. Google needs to nail social media and mobile marketing to remain relevant and avoid losing market share to Facebook. Their flagship social marketing app, now re-branded as Wildfire by Google, should prove to be worth that price tag.

Frommer’s ($23m)

Much like Zagat, which Google also recently acquired, Frommer’s has a long and distinguished history of guiding consumer purchasing decisions. Google’s August 13th acquisition of the travel giant will help them to further improve Google Maps and Google+. As a trusted provider of travel information and advice, the Frommer’s brand is an incredibly valuable asset to possess.

VirusTotal.com

Building an anti-virus program from scratch is a daunting undertaking and it’s not exactly Google’s wheelhouse. With their September 7th purchase of niche security firm VirusTotal, they hope to solve some of the vexing problems that Android has experienced lately with malware. It’s not difficult to conceive a future where Google uses their recently acquired security software to actively scan Android phones for viruses.

Nik Software, Inc.

Much like Instagram, Nik Software’s Snapseed is a powerful and user-friendly way to shoot and edit beautiful photos on the go. Google’s September 17th takeover of Nik Software, Inc. will go a long way in improving the flagging Picasa platform. Unless Google paid a billion dollars for Snapseed (like Facebook did), this particular deal appears to be a smart move overall.

Viewdle ($45m)

Thanks to the widespread adoption of smartphones by the general public, augmented reality apps like Viewdle have become increasingly popular. Google purchased the mobile app on October 1st, securing one of the hottest companies in the emerging industry. It’s the perfect app to complement the Android experience in the real world and Google will no doubt leverage the platform for greater advertising revenue.

Google’s Long Game

It seems like summer is the season when Google’s fancy turns to picking up promising startups and absorbing their intellectual talent. Their most recent picks in the web startup lottery should keep them competitive as search becomes more social and mobile. Though it’s too soon to tell, these selections should serve them well in the years to come.

The post The Top 10 Google Acquisitions of 2012 appeared first on Matt Beswick - Milton Keynes SEO Consultant and Web Designer.

1. Deliver Long-Lasting Value

Quality content is the cornerstone of your SEO success online. You can’t effectively promote garbage that’s lacking in substance. Put in the time and effort to produce peerless prose, viral video and addictive graphics a la the Oatmeal that are truly compelling. Of all my SEO tips, this has to be the most important in today’s Search landscape.

2. Field a Rich Content Mix

Page after page of text-based blog posts aren’t enough anymore, no matter how well-written they may be. Mix up your content by including plenty of images, videos and interesting layouts to appeal to a broad spectrum of users. Google’s Panda algorithm was designed to reward sites with great content, so make the most of it.

3. Select Keywords Intelligently

Choosing the right keywords and phrases is the cornerstone to dominating your niche. Carefully picking and choosing the search phrases you’d like to target is best accomplished through tools like the Google Keyword Tool and third-party utilities like Ubersuggest.

4. Mind the Technical Details

A good portion of effective SEO is purely technical – and as a bit of geek this is something that you’ll see from the majority of my posts containing SEO tips. Ensure that your website is impervious to malicious hacks by hardening your security. In addition, optimize the mobile version of your site to guarantee a uniform experience for users on all devices.

5. Write for Humans, Optimise for Machines

Ultimately, human beings are going to be reading and interacting with your content. Craft it with your audience in mind and don’t allow SEO practices to degrade their experience. Remember, it’s reader first, SEO second. I’m not going to spout the old ‘content is king’ adage – the most important thing is your readers – but bear in mind that anything you do should make a statement. Whether that’s being amazing, controversial, or downright offensive… just make sure that your audience will react how you want them to.

6. Choose Your Software Wisely

Today’s highly competitive SEO landscape requires constant attention to detail to stay in the game. Helpful apps and platforms like the Yoast SEO for WordPress, SEOMoz, SEMRush, Majestic SEO, Raven, Buzzstream and Ahrefs are invaluable tools that’ll save you a lot of grunt work. Spent time choosing the one that’s best for you and harness your new-found power.

7. Keep Your Meta Data Current

There haven’t really been that many SEO changes in the realm of meta and title tags in the last couple of years, other than the recent release of the ‘news keywords’ tag. Regardless, they’re still important to your SEO because the META Title and Descriptions act as your advert on the result pages. One SEO tip that people often neglect here is ‘Don’t be boring’. Write something interesting about your page (in less than 150 characters) that people will actually want to click on!

8. Rich Snippets

This particular consideration is important enough to warrant its own bullet point. Rich Snippets are a type of meta data that give web searchers a quick peak at your site’s content by displaying product information, author bios, reviews and event information directly in the SERPs. They don’t take much time to implement and are invaluable when it comes to making your site stand out on the SERPs.

9. Ditch the Web Spam

Don’t covertly spam your readers by using an avalanche of keywords to disguise poorly written content. Readers will quickly catch on to the ruse. More importantly, the search engines will eventually punish you in their rankings. Yes, remember to use keywords (‘SEO Tips’ anyone?) but do this as an afterthought – as I said earlier, humans first.

10. Stress Link Quality Over Link Quantity

Once upon a time, Google’s SERPs rankings could be gamed with an ocean of low-quality backlinks from article sites, SEO link directories and paid links pages. Thanks to the Penguin update, those days are over. Only build relevant links to your domain from respected and high quality sites. Industry news, niche directories (that will actually send you traffic), related blogs and places like that are a great way to get started.

11. Reinforce Your Brand Identity

Nowadays, your identity online isn’t just a function of your website’s domain name. If you haven’t heard already Exact Match domain names are going the way of the dodo, so you’ll need to focus on creating a brand that resonates with readers. Do some investigation into ‘Author Rank’, understand it, and realise that it means your entire online persona influences how well your site(s) do in the search engines. Forget this at your peril.

12. Don’t Skimp on Hosting

The responsiveness and dependability of your site is important. For one, it improves the overall user experience for your audience. Furthermore, Google and Bing factor in server response times in their rankings. As such, it’s worth it to spend a little extra on quality web hosting to make sure that the fundamentals of running a site aren’t hurting you.

13. Build a Deep Social Web

Your website’s social popularity is slowly but surely becoming an important indicator of quality to the likes of Google. Even a little social media promotion can substantially boost traffic, raise brand awareness and increase high-quality organic links pointing to your website.

14. Make Extensive Use of Internal Links

Inbound links from outside domains are fairly critical from an SEO standpoint. However, you can also demonstrate the value and quality of your website to Google with a lot of internal links between your various pages. Internal linking also increases user satisfaction by allowing visitors to get more out of your site.

Getting in Gear

Each year, the exact makeup of a winning SEO strategy becomes more and more difficult to ascertain. There are so many variables to juggle that it’s impossible to do everything perfectly. Regardless, the tips and tactics outlined above are a great starting point.

The post 14 Long Lasting SEO Tips (That Actually Work) appeared first on Matt Beswick - Milton Keynes SEO Consultant and Web Designer.