Natural Search Blog

Are you an SEO Superhero?

Chris — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 23:34:27 +0000

I was tickled to see these SEO Superhero t-shirts that Covario was giving away to attendees of the SMX West conference in Santa Clara this week:

Naturally, I got my t-shirt sporting the SEO Superman-esque logo! I don’t wear t-shirts a whole lot, but this is one I’ll definitely wear sometimes.

It felt odd not to see Stephan Spencer, VP at Covario, at the SMX conference, since he’s been such a search marketing juggernaut over the past few years and his book, The Art of SEO, just came out. But, I understand that he may be hitting some other conferences, and these speaking gigs can sap the energy out of one really quickly.

There’s not a lot of companies that could pair themselves up with an SEO superhero promotion and still be taken seriously, but I think Covario can do it. I know from formerly working with Netconcepts that their automated SEO solution, GravityStream, is an awesome service, and pairing it up with Covario’s analytics makes for a very strong combination. As a technologist, I certainly think it’s best to simply program a site to have excellent optimization for search rankings, but I’ve seen time and again when large companies are unable to get past bureaucratic IT development processes to roll something out in a timely fashion. For those companies, GravityStream is a really good solution.

For all of you who also attended the SMX West conference, did you get your SEO superhero t-shirts? How often will you wear them?

Guerilla Marketing & Google Maps

Chris — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:51:13 +0000

My article on “Six Odd Tactics For Getting Ads Into Google Maps” posted today on Search Engine Land, and I believe many of my regular readers should find it moderately entertaining. The piece covers how some elements of guerrilla marketing have found their way into some Google Maps advertising patents, and also how some others have used creative means to get messages into Maps via “roofvertising”, “skywriting” and more.

Those familiar with Natural Search Blog may remember some of my similar past work here outlining laser graffiti ads on buildings, roofvertising, marriage proposals in Google Maps, “earth art” geoglyph ads, and sponsoring town names as an Ultimate Local SEO tactic.

It’s not surprising to see guerilla marketing tactics finding their way into Google Maps. Not only does Google itself seek to introduce disruptive technology innovations, but I expect that as Satellite and Aerial photos may get more frequently updated in such interfaces we’ll be bound to see a whole lot more efforts from people trying to get messages conveyed through the Maps interfaces.

The real question I’m left with, is if Google resells ad space on pictures of people’s rooftops and billboards, would they owe anything back to the original property owners?!?

Exciting News — Netconcepts Acquired by Covario

Brian — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 19:12:33 +0000

Happy New Year Natural Search Geeks!

As some of you know, for the past five years I’ve worked with Stephan Spencer building up the Netconcepts‘ search marketing and SEO technology business. Today it gives me great pleasure to announce a very special event: Netconcepts is merging, through acquisition, with the leading search marketing software company – Covario!

As part of Covario, I’m very excited for our people and our clients to be part of what is the leading search marketing software and services organization. Together, we have nearly 100 combined clients in key industries, including high-tech, ecommerce, consumer electronics, financial services, media and consumer packages goods, with many Fortune 500 brands.

Our combined SEO technologies, which include Organic Search Insight and GravityStream, promise advertisers the first end-to-end industry solution that spans the entire search optimization process: keyword research, recommendations, execution, and ongoing reporting. GravityStream is a pioneering technology for automating the execution piece. And now even more is possible.

Analysts expect marketers to increase their SEO spend by 100% over the next 5 years, to $5.0 billion by 2014. By leveraging our leading technologies and world-class SEO expertise, we will continue to improve performance and ROI for leading brands across organic and paid search, on a global scale.

(And on balmy, single-digit temperature days like today in Madison, I’m also excited to spend a bit more time out at the new San Diego headquarters)

As the world of search continues to evolve, these are exciting times indeed!

Brian Klais
Chief Operating Officer
Netconcepts

Increasing The Scope Of Existing PPC Campaigns Effectively

Ravi — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 21:13:57 +0000

The complexity of Google Adwords is always on the rise and it takes time, skill and effort to achieve good results with PPC campaigns in terms of finding the sweet medium of increased conversions and reduced costs.

If you have an existing PPC campaign and it is performing decently, you can still increase its scope and hence improve its performance by targeting more keywords in the niche you are running your campaigns in.

You have to be logged into your Adwords account. The Opportunities tab in the Adwords interface is a great way to find out the keywords you are not targeting in your campaigns. The keyword ideas for each active campaign is listed and you can download them and analyze them in detail.

If your campaigns are targeted primarily to the US market, the Opportunities interface throws up keyword ideas which you can use straightaway. You can simply click the Preview button beside a campaign name and add suggested keywords straight into your live campaign.

For those outside the US, the best way to get a list of new keywords would be to click on the Keyword tools under the Tools section on the left column. Choose your location and language of choice and export the listed keywords as a CSV file and examine them manually.

You can compare them with the keywords in your existing campaign and after filtering the duplicates (along with keyword match type), you can manually add them into the relevant campaign.

A screenshot of the Keyword Tool screen is produced below.

For example, if I am running a campaign for Auckland seo here in New Zealand, in the box titled Word or Phrase, I would key in auckland seo. There is an option for choosing the location and language, traffic estimation and filtering keywords using boolean operators as in

The keyword tool results for the search term auckland seo returns the following results.

A few things to keep in mind when you add new keyword opportunities to your campaign:

In the event that your PPC campaigns have been running for some time, if you look at the campaign’s performance over the past 4 to 6 months, look at keywords that have not recorded a single impression in that period. You could pause them before actually adding new keywords to your campaign.
By pausing poor performing keywords, you can improve the CTR of your existing campaigns.
Please remember that Google maintains a history of all changes made to your campaigns since their date of inception. If you delete the poorly performing keywords, in future, you may want to reinstate them. Deletion of keywords and subsequent inclusion does not enable them to start on a clean slate. They will still maintain their account history.

In conclusion, the keyword opportunities interface clearly shows where you are leaving money on the table in your PPC campaigns and you may very well take cognizance of this and improve the scope of your keyword targeting.

On a different note, Google has been tightening the noose on affiliate marketers on the Adwords network. Many Adwords accounts have been banned over the last month with no specific reasons given. This could be due to the recent FTC rules pertaining to affiliate marketing.

Some affiliate marketers feel that promoting shady products or products with names like Google Cash or Google Money Tree may be the reason for their accounts being banned though they had promoted such products in the distant past.

This is a clear warning for every advertiser that Google does maintain track of all Adwords activities. Your actions today can bit back in future even though you may be ignorant of the consequences of your current actions.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland ppc service provider offering both seo and ppc services to their customers in New Zealand and Australia.

LinkedIn, But NoFollow Link Love

Brian R. Brown — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 15:46:52 +0000

We all knew it was only a matter of time, but still secretly hoped that the honeymoon would last forever. It does appear that LinkedIn has started nofollowing public profile links…but with a strange twist.

I’ve been so heads down in client audits that I didn’t discover this until, ironically, doing another audit for another client. However, I also don’t recall seeing many blog headlines in my Netvibes, so perhaps this one has rather floated under the radar a bit. Even a quick scan in Google doesn’t turn up much beyond this post, ‘Linkedin adds rel=”Nofollow” to profile links‘ over at Kingpin SEO, which dates this change around early-mid November. Based on my recent audit schedule, would make this about right.

But what about the twist? Well, it appears that the nofollowing isn’t absolute. There are profiles with custom anchor text and default anchor text that have nofollowed links and those that are still followed.

There are basic free profiles and, as far as I can tell, at least some version of paid accounts that are nofollowed. This is probably smart; otherwise, if the paid accounts would earn followed links, they might run risk of scrutiny from Google for essentially creating a system of paid links.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, there are profiles both within and outside the “industry” that are nofollowed, so it doesn’t appear to be just targeted at SEOs.

The real twist however is that there are profiles that even have a mix of followed and nofollowed links. It will be interesting to see if nofollows are eventually rolled out to all profiles and all links.

While the true value of these links and the juice they past may have been questionable, it was nice knowing that they did provide an opportunity to try to pass some value back. It also meant that people were more likely to link to their profile pages without nofollowing the links, even when they may have nofollowed every other external link. Perhaps this means that LinkedIn may have also indirectly cut off some of the link juice they received as well if people start nofollowing links back to their profiles.

Regardless, these links are still important and I would still advise clients and individuals to take advantage of them. These links continue to provide an opportunity for discover, if not for bots, for the ultimate audience, the humans who click them.

The good news is, if you now find your links nofollowed, at least you know you are in good company:

Perhaps LinkedIn should offer up an alternative button though for people to place on their websites, one for followed and one for nofollowed

Relationship Between Link Growth And Indexation

Ravi — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 22:32:58 +0000

With every passing day, the number of websites and hence the number of web pages are growing at an explosive rate on the internet. This can cause a major headache to the search engines as they gear up to meet the challenge of crawling and subsequently indexing the new sites popping up everywhere in the cybersphere.

Today, when a new web site is launched, it will take a while before its pages get crawled and indexed in Google. With the increasing strain on hardware and resources due to the rapid growth of new sites, Google has become very strict in its policy of admitting sites and retaining web pages of sites in its index. It is a case of survival of the fittest in cyberspace.

Some of the basic facts to be borne in mind when looking at the issue in its entirety are:

The Page rank is proportional to the total number of pages in Google’s index
The page rank gained by a site depends on the number of inbound and outbound links to that site
To increase its page rank, a site must build more pages and increase its virtual real estate

When a new site is launched, the number of backlinks to that site is negligible unless the business is well known and has a credible following offline and is launching its brand online. The average site owner has to set about building an external link profile by submitting to directories, guest blogging on well established industry relevant blogs, providing a platform for user generated content on her site, promoting site badges etc etc.

All this takes time and effort and it is a slow and steady natural growth. There are several link building software programs that promise instant deliverance by helping you build multitude of links in no time. The problem with this approach is that an average human cannot acquire 100 links in a day (read 8 hours of work time). Google also knows this and it is an easy recipe for raising a red flag.

Coming to the crux of the issue, creating and growing the number of pages on your site is relatively easy as you, the site owner, have full control over it. If you are passionate about your industry with good working knowledge, you can build lots of content over a short span of time. But this alone will not make the cut in today’s circumstances for making it into the Google index and being retained and ranked over time.

The most powerful links that can be obtained today are editorial links. When another site owner regards your site content as one of high quality and decides to link to from her blog or site, it is clearly a double thumbs up for your content and Google will also consider it seriously. A great linkbait program can help your site gain lots of natural inbound links from the linkerati.

If you have votes from other sites in the form of backlinks to the various pages of your site, this is crucial in Google retaining those pages in its index. Again, you cannot produce top quality content across all pages of your site as the subject being discussed can be limited in scope or not very popular in the eyes of users.

I have been noticing of late that even powerful domains with several product pages with wafer thin content and footer heavy links do not pass muster to be admitted/retained in the index. It is becoming increasingly clear that each individual page must attain a certain pagerank threshold to be retained in the index. This clearly proves that things cannot be taken for granted. Also, well established sites cannot afford to rest on their laurels any more.

To achieve a minimum pagerank threshold, internal linking can help to an extent and you as the site owner can do your bit to this end. But it is very vital to get a link from external unbiased sources to derive some link juice that can boost the pagerank of the page in question.

If the momentum on “natural” external link building profile of your website is maintained at a steady level from the inception of your website to its current state, you can expect Google to maintain a decent indexation level of your site and update its index regularly with the fresh content and growing number of pages offered by your site.

Rand in his Whiteboard presentation on Link Growth Patterns explains the relationship between link growth patterns and indexation levels.

Eric Enge in his post on The Disproportionate Value of Deep Links talks about improving the pagerank flow to hitherto areas of the site where there was no link juice flowing before.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland seo firm offering both search engine optimisation and ppc services to their customers in New Zealand and Australia.

Inbound Deep Links Benefit Page Rank Distribution Sitewide

Ravi — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 21:20:52 +0000

Many a time, you would have come across sites (especially the large ones) where the deeper you dig into the site hierarchy, you can see the Pagerank toolbar grayed out or having a value 0. In general, the home page is the starting point for a website and it accrues the maximum Page rank.

The entire domain’s authority and trust is reflected by this page rank value. The home page then tends to distribute this page rank to the first level (categories), the second level (sub-categories) and the third level product pages which we often refer to as link juice. In general, the first level pages tend to derive the maximum link juice from the home page. But in a site with excessive number of sub-categories and product pages (money pages), the pagerank distribution is not proportional with some gaining link juice and a large majority not gaining any.

I am not delving into pagerank sculpting which was the rage of the SEO industry not long ago. This method was adopted to make certain areas of a site more powerful by flowing link juice from the home page preferentially to pages of interest (possible commercial intent). The internal linking architecture is altered from its natural form to highlight more important pages than the rest on the site.

In my opinion, internal linking with appropriate anchor text can be used to improve the ranking of pages within a site but this has its limitations. Integrating a blog with the main site so that it forms part of the global site template is vital. The different posts on the site blog can point to different pages of the site to flow some much needed link juice to prop select pages up and assist them in getting indexed by Google and ranked on the SERPs.

Eric Enge at Stone Temple Consulting has done some research in regards to distribution of domain authority and trust to pages on the lower level pages of a site. Let us assume you have a site selling products. You have the home page, many categories with respective sub-categories and product pages in that order. Let us consider an example where you sell Canon digital cameras as shown below.

The specific product page in question is listed on Page 4. You are not happy as this product page has not recorded any page rank. If it does not have the requisite page rank, there is a possibility that it will not gain entry into the Google index.

In this scenario, it is evident that the site despite a great PR of 6 is not able to flow link juice into this specific product page. Eric has found out in his experiments that an inbbound link to this deep page with appropriate anchor text (in this case EOS D7 Canon Digital Camera Review) from an external site is a huge help to get this product page into the index and help get it ranked. The link may not be of superior quality yet it helps a great deal.

As we all know, every inbound link is a vote to the site and the search engines recognise this as a strong signal. The search engines adjust their algorithm accordingly to flow more internal link juice into the page which has gained inbouind links. The more the merrier seems to be the case.

In our example, the Canon EOS D7 product page ends up gaining link juice thus helping it enter the Google index and get ranked over time. Deep inbound links help a site distribute more authority and trust to pages that receive such inbound links. This is a classic case of an inbound link triggering a tunnel of sorts to flow a site’s internal link juice to select pages at a lower hierarchy level.

In summary, you do not need masses of links to get your third level or product pages indexed and ranked on the SERPs. Just a few inbound links will facilitate better flow of the site’s domain authority and trust (read link juice) to the specific page recipient of the inbound links in question. You can read the post on impact of deep inbound links on a site’s lower level pages on Eric’s site.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search engine marketing company offering both seo and pay per click services to their customers in New Zealand and Australia.

New Tool to Annualize Google Keyword Data

Brian R. Brown — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:33:37 +0000

Do you use Google’s AdWord Keyword Tool for your keyword research? If not, you might be missing out. Like all keyword research tools, it may not be the end all be all, and it isn’t without its own little quirks, but it is still rich keyword data whether you use it on its own or in relation with the other keyword tools you are using.

Google has modified the tool over time, and one of the great additions was the ability to see the monthly demand via a small little bar chart. This can be very useful for factoring in seasonality or growing demand for certain phrases. Wrapping your head around the actual numerical data is a bit more challenging. The Local number is just for the most recent month while the Global number is a monthly average. This is further complicated in that the Global number includes the world essentially while the Local number may factor in your campaign settings and locality (based on your AdWords campaign configuration).

To help tighten up data and provide a little more insight into the Local numbers, I just released an Excel spreadsheet that can take your Google Keyword Tool’s export and annualize the Local demand numbers. In some cases, this may dramatically change the order of importance of keywords to target.

Best of all, this tool is free to use so give it a play. The link below will take you to the download page for the tool as well as more detail about how it works and an example.

Google Keyword Tool Annualizer

How To Breathe Life Into A Lacklustre PPC Campaign

Ravi — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:09:05 +0000

PPC or Pay Per Click campaigns are a sure fire way of attracting traffic to your website almost instantaneously without the rigors of an SEO campaign that is required to bring your site on top of the SERPs. The most important thing to be aware of when it comes to a PPC campaign is understanding the rules to play the Adwords game.

Google’s policy of serving relevant ads in response to user queries coupled with complex factors like quality score can make Adwords a minefield for a novice or intermediate level practitioner so much so that a lot of money is coughed up to elicit a poor ROI (Return on Investment) or not the best bang for your buck in layman terms.

If you are in a position where you have set up PPC campaigns and they are not doing well, then you could use the following guidelines to fine tune their performace to achieve optimum results. Let us get cracking.

1) Relooking at Opportunities:
There is a good chance that you would have done keyword research relevant to your industry before setting up your PPC campaigns. If you are finding that your campaigns are not doing well, then you will have to do a more indepth keyword research and dig deeper to find the “money keywords” - keywords that have decent amount of traffic (ideally 1000 searches per day or more) and less competition (50,000 and below).

If your site has been in existence for some time with Analytics installed, then your Analytics account will provide you a wealth of information. You can look at the keywords that are bringing in organic traffic and you can use these as the seed keywords for your keyword research and build on the opportunities presented in your domain of business.

2) Targeting and Relevancy:
These are the two mantras you have to keep in mind when setting up a new campaign or reorgainising an existing campaign. If you have a group of keywords that are well related to each other and can be grouped into a relevant ad group targeting an underlying theme, that is the first step of achieving relevancy.

The ad copy for that ad group must reflect the same idea as the keywords themselves. When writing the ad copy, make sure you include the representative keyword in the title and include it once in the two lines that make up the ad copy description.

Always your ad must show a clear benefit and it should have a clarion call to action. If you do not ask users to take action, they probably never would. Do not waste precious ad copy space by using words like Click here.

If you are stating in your ad that your blue widget would do something, then make sure that the landing page which that ad leads to dwells at length and explains clearly that benefit. Never mislead users by staing something in the ad and having a landing page that is totally different. If you get all the above correct, then you are well on your way to improving relevancy and targeting which plays a huge part in the optimisation of the quality score.

If your current PPC campaigns are not doing well, then you must ensure the relevancy of keywords in the ad group. For example, if you are a builder and you build both industrial and residential buildings, you must have two distinct ad groups, one each for Residential Buildings and Industrial Buildings. Though they are both buildings, they are distinct types of construction and you must differentiate between them.

Try reorganising your campaign at the granular level and accord each and every distinct keyword the respect and value it deserves. Avoid lumping unrelated keywords together. You can bet that these keywords will be rejuvenated and gain a fresh lease of life and start performing really well.

3) PPC Landing Page
You have improved the targeting and relevancy of your PPC campaigns. The next important criterion is the landing page for the ads that display triggered by the keywords in your campaigns that match the searches made by users on Google.

The landing page plays a very important role in determining the quality score, a mystery component that is evaluated by the Google algorithm. Human nature is such that when something is shrouded in secrecy, the human mind tries to analyse it to the maximum possible extent.

I like to keep things simple. In my opinion, I do not worry about the quality score excessively. All that you need to do is get the targeting and relevancy spot on and the landing page near perfect. The quality score takes care of itself.

Ensure that your landing page is in total sync with the keywords and the ads that lead a user to it. Your landing page must contain the representative keyword in its title tag, meta description and h1 tag to start with.

Your copy must also include variations of the representative keyword (in other words, the other keywords contained in your ad group targeting this specific landing page) when defining the benefits of your product or service.

Sell the benefits of your product/service and keep features to a minimum. If your product/service is solving a problem, then go ahead and lay it out for the whole world to see. Users are looking for solutions to problems. When a great solution is found, a user automatically ends up a buyer.

Have clear calls to action and embed them as anchor text on the landing page. By highlighting the call to action as a clickable link, you are getting the user to focus on the blue underlined text and at the same time, you are able to gain value in terms of improving quality score for your keyword phrase by making it part of the anchor text.

The common belief is to have a tight sales funnel. I myself do not like to divert a user’s attention much when she lands on a landing page. I tend to remove the global site template from landing pages. The reason is two fold. It is possible to accurately track the user’s path from the moment they land on the landing page. The second reason is to minimise the user distraction.

You are paying for every user that lands on your optimised landing page. You want to capture their focus and lead them on through the sales funnel and this is achieved by making them take action (in our case, click the link) and take them to buy your product or sign up for your newsletter or whatever it may be on the following goal page.

But for the purposes of quality score, you would be well advised to have links on the landing page. You can have links like Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy at the bottom of the page. At the top, you can have links to Resources and any other information laden areas of your main site. From the user perspective, this also gives the user the feeling that she is not hemmed in and led like cattle to the final desired goal.

Again, if you are getting a user to fill a form, please do not make the user sweat it out. Have a form with just 3 or 4 fields where you capture their name, email address, phone number and comments. Then call them or email them to prove you are a human operating a business and take your sales process to the next level.

If you sell products and have a shopping cart, please make it a simple and intuitive process for the user to go through the sales cycle. Have a clear call to action with a button saying Add to Cart or Buy Blue Widget. Do not make the user jump through too many hoops that would result in frustration and make her leave your site.

4) Analyzing Results:
Once you have reorganised your PPC campaign, it is vital to have an eye on the results as much as you can. If it is an existing campaign, you should get a clear sign of the trends in a week or so. If it is a brand new campaign, it will take atleast 3 months to get a clear picture.

Just as in real life, even your keywords are all not created the same. You will find a few keywords that are foot soldiers. They will bring in good load of visitors but not necessarily convert. You are going to have a few lynchpin keywords (royalty kind) which can convert like crazy. These are the superstars.
You will find dummies that just do not fire up.

If you find that certain keywords are not recording any clicks over 3 months, then there are two ways to look at it. Maybe they need to be checked for better targeting and relevancy. Else, there is no demand in the market for the product or service that the keywords in question represent.

Group them into a distinct ad group and see if they fire up. Wait for another couple of months. If nothing happens, pause them. Please do not delete them. You can read my earlier post titled Taking On An Existing PPC Campaign - Things To Be Aware Of explaining the PPC account history.

5) Cutting down Costs:
This is not directly connected to the optimization of a PPC campaign but it is handy if you are not loaded with money. Adwords is Google’s revenue generating flagship. Click costs are only going up everyday. There is no way the CPCs (cost per click) are going to tank in future like the stock market. The best thing you can do is run your campaigns on Adwords for atleast 3 months.

You can easily pick out the winners at the expense of paying a “good” price as CPC even after using the above techniques for optimizing your PPC campaigns. After 3 months, start advertising on Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter with the winning keywords. You are going to pay less than what you would pay on Adwords.

If you are happy with the response from these two big networks, you can either switch off the Adwords campaigns and concentrate on improving your site’s position on the organic SERPs. You can also have the luxury of paid traffic albeit at manageable budget levels.

Ravi Venkatesan (on Twitter) is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland pay per click marketing company offering both seo and pay per click services to their customers in New Zealand and Australia.

Good Practices SEO With A Tinge Of Creativity

Ravi — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 21:45:16 +0000

Search engine marketing is increasingly becoming popular with people from all walks of life and businesses of all hues adopting the web in a big way. The global recesssion has clearly thrust SEM into the spotlight as a great way to drive targeted traffic that is measurable and also making a huge difference to the bottomline of any company, the $ generated in revenue.

Search engine optimisation(SEO) and Pay per click (PPC) marketing are being accorded increasing importance as affordable means of tapping the market potential by reaching a targeted audience on the web compared to the traditional TV and/or newsprint advertising which are more expensive and the results are hard to measure. It is all the more imperative that SEO practitioners adopt more white hat creative methods to improve the visibility of their clients’ sites.

1) On page optimisation:
The search engine algorithms in place today are way more sophisticated than what it was a few years ago. This makes SEO such a dynamic field that SEO techniques which worked well no so long ago have lost their charm in the present.

With the incredible level of testing and research being done today by the likes of the amazing team at SEOmoz, the only on page factor worth its salt in terms of pure SEO value and ranking on the SERPs seems to be the title tag. The alt tag is making a comeback. The header tags have diminished in their SEO value and are now more useful to describe the information hierarchy on a page. Some of the other factors like well formed URLs and internal linking can help but to a certain extent.

All in all, in my opinion, I would conservatively attribute the impact of on page SEO factors to be between 30% and 35% when it comes to ranking well on the SERPs. The majority of the action clearly takes place outside the website and hence outside the sphere of influence of what a site webmaster can tweak on her site.

2) Top Quality Content:
Content is the currency of the web. The more unique it is and higher its value in disseminating valuable information, the more powerful it is and gets traded heavily on the web by being passed around.

Even top shelf companies who are a force to reckon with in their domain of business get so clouded in their vision of their industry that they either get too technical in their content delivery or just are not in tune with the demands of their market. Everything evolves in life and so do consumers as they search for products/services using search terms that are not technical or even colloquial.

All that needs to be done is to do a keyword research to find out what prospective customers are searching for. A look at Google Trends, Amazon and Twitter will also reveal what search terms are hot in a particular industry and pretty much the talk of the town at a given point of time.

The next thing to do would be to go to industry specific forums related to the keyword and read posts wherein users are asking questions related to the industry using these popular keywords. You must remember that not everyone who surfs the web is looking to buy a product/service. Everyone has some problem or the other and people are looking for solutions to solve their problems.

What starts off as a search for general information leads a user to looking for more specific information, then research and review of the products/services available and culminating in the purchase of the relevant product/service.

The content developer/webmaster can focus on topics that target these most searched keywords and develop content that provide solutions/advice to the pressing problems in that industry in sync with the targeted keywords.

Every piece of content written on the web does not have the propensity to go viral. Creating viral content is one of the most bandied terms on the web. It is not easy. You can get it right only after many attempts. So it is wise to dwell on topics that are popular in the present term (and relevant to your niche) and develop content towards that end.

You would be wise to avoid the curse of duplicate content within your site. This can arise due to two versions of the domain in existence, namely http://www.site.com and http://site.com You can also have the case of multiple distinct URLs leading to the same content. Canonicalization can help reduce this problem.

In the case of scrapers stealing your content and getting indexed first where they appear to be the original creator of content, I am sure Google would be able to find out over time as backlinks to your site’s content would be a strong signal for it to recognise the true owner.

If you post on your blog, the blog and ping feature should alert the bots straightaway. You would be well off tweeting the post/article on Twitter. Google scours the Twitter landscape for new content and is sure to pick up your tweet thus confirming the ownership of the content.

In my experience, I have found that personal experiences invoving trials and experiments in a particular niche that lead to well defined results seem to be quite popular and have a good chance of getting great link love. Readers on the web are discerning and can easily separate the chaff from the wheat. I have dwelt at length on unique content and its seo implications in a previous post.

3) Social Media:
Let us be honest about this. Social media is not suitable to all businesses selling products/services. It is very powerful tool to leverage in businesses like travel sites, music and video sites etc. Twitter is the darling of the cybermasses today and undoubtedly has captured the imagination of millions of users worldwide.

The general belief is that to sell products or services on Twitter, one must have lots of followers. This means the same person has to follow others in order to make the others follow her. She ends up with thousands of followers and in turn follows thousands. When she has a critical mass of followers, then she can promote her services/products. I totally disagree with this.

I bet you will agree with me that when you have thousands of followers, you will not have the time to read all the tweets and follow links. Your twitter screen will be utter pandemonium with messages trickling in every minute or so. If you are struggling to keep up with your tweets, imagine the plight of your followers. They are in the same boat as well. There is no focus and it is a virtual free for all. It is well nigh impossible to get any message through to your followers in this scenario.

Judicious use of social media involves building relationships. If you are in the field of manufacturing baby nappies, then there must be like minded people out there in the hundreds (and not millions) who will be interested in your product. You would be well off building a good laser focused community on Twitter or Facebook or any other popular social media platform to leverage your position as a domain leader in the baby nappies industry and then disseminate information and/or sell products/services to an interested community.

4) Backlink Profile:
At this point of time, links are a singular source of authoritative signals to the search engines. If your site has an impressive backlink profile as a result of hard work put in over the years by you, the website owner or due to outsourced link building efforts of an industrious SEO professional, it has a huge impact on your site’s ranking on the SERPs of all the major search engines as it is not easy for a site owner to manipulate this.

Again. all links created are not equal. This may sound cliche but it is very much true. The key today to a successful link building campaign is the the number of unique domains linking to your site. The higher the domain diversity, the more powerful is your site’s influence in the rankings on the SERPs.

It is equally important for a site to link to its other authoritative peer sites as this strengthens the notion of the site’s good neighborhood aspect. It is also natural to invite some spammy links in the process as a site owner does not have control over who links to her site.

Some of the other important factors to consider are:

Variation in anchor text of incoming links
Smattering of domains ranging from strong to weak provides for a natural linking landscape
Synergy in topicality of linking domains

In conclusion, the real time response of the web through social media and instantaneous response from users by way of blog comments etc gives anyone the opportunity to streamline the operations of their domain of buisness (niche) and helps them understand what their specific market is demanding which makes provision of what is required all the more easier.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search engine optimisation company that offers both natural search and paid search to its clients in New Zealand and Australia.