Since this was meant to be an Introduction to Digital Marketing, Carolyn started by explaining what SEO is and what it isn’t. Many people have heard the term SEO, but get confused on what SEO really means.

• SEO IS – the process of “packaging” your message in a format that the search engines understand best.
• SEO is NOT – cheating or gaming the system, and it is not paid search (PPC). You can’t buy your way to the top.

To clarify the difference between PPC and SEO, here’s an example of how Google organizes their paid search results (ads) and their organic search results (SEO):

The red box represents organic search results and the green boxes are where you’ll commonly find ads in search results. The important thing to remember is that Google doesn’t always display ads for every search, so you’ll need to look closely before you assume something is or is not an organic search result.

The Importance of Relevancy

One big takeaway from Carolyn’s presentation is that search engines love relevancy, which can be determined by a number of factors, including:

• Content on your site – topic of the site, text on the pages, menu items, titles, and descriptions need to be aligned.
• Performance of your site – Does everything work the way it should? How fast does your site load?
• Authority of your site – Do people reference your site elsewhere or link to it?
• User experience – Is the site easy to use and do people like to stay on your site?

If you’re doing all of these things right, your site should be attracting natural inbound links and traffic, and people will spend time interacting and engaging with your website. All of these things will have a positive impact on your SEO efforts.

Personalized Results: What You See May Not Be What I See

When you’re keeping track of how well your website is doing in search, many people focus on the search engine rankings for certain terms. Unfortunately, not everyone knows that the way Google displays search results is not constant — Google personalizes the search results for *you* based on what they think your intent is, where you’re physically located, and what kind of device you’re searching from. So not only might you see something different than what I see, but you could even get different results on your own different devices.

Some of the factors that can impact the results you see are:

• Geographic location
• The device you’re using to search (phone, computer, tablet, etc.)
• Whether or not you are logged into your Google account (Gmail, etc.)

This can sometimes make looking at search results with your SEO Specialist a little confusing, but it’s Google’s way of trying to feed you the most relevant results based on your personal factors.

Why is it important to know about personalized search results?

The reason it’s important to understand how search rankings vary by person and by device is to keep you from getting too stressed out about exact rankings. For many businesses, especially those who only serve one specific geographic region, the average rankings you’ll get from rank monitoring services don’t tell you the whole story. You’ll find that monitoring your analytics to see which keyword phrases are actually driving the most and the best qualified traffic will do more for your optimization campaigns than simply relying on rankings.

Types of Search Results And How to Optimize For Them

The organic search results that we talked about earlier aren’t the only kind of results you can find on search engines. There are also news, local, video, images, and blog search results that could use your attention. One important thing to remember with this is that you can’t always control what types of results will appear, but you can optimize the content that you have for each category to make sure that the the engines understand what content you’re offering, and that you’re making it as attractive as possible to the engines.

Here are Carolyn’s tips for optimizing for these different types of results:

• Have a mobile version of your site – Mobile-friendly sites are more likely to be served in results for queries made from mobile devices.
• Optimize your non-text content – Non-text assets are things like images, PDFs, and videos. Add appropriate attributes and surrounding context so they can be properly indexed.
• Use Rich Snippets and RDFa – especially for ecommerce or data heavy sites.
• Diversify Your Assets – It’s usually easier to rank a video on the first page of the universal or blended results than create a new, standard web page and have it get to page 1 of the SERPs. If possible, try to offer more than just plain jane HTML pages — videos, images, PDFs, etc. will all help diversify your inventory.

Upcoming SEO Seminars

Keep in mind that I’ve only summarized one section of Carolyn’s presentation. There’s a lot more to learn. If you’re interested in learning more, I have some additional opportunities to hear Carolyn talk SEO that I can share with you. The first being a radio appearance on SEW Weekly on WebmasterRadio.fm this Thursday, February 7th, at 11am central.

The second chance to learn more from Carolyn is a SEO seminar with 312 Digital entitled “(Not Exactly) Intro to SEO.” This seminar takes place on March 20th, 2013 and registration is already open. Carolyn’s section of the seminar will be covering on-page optimization including:

• Domains
• Content types and styles
• On-page optimization factors
• Keyword research
• How to write optimized content

Use the promo code “435Digital” to save $100 off the registration price. Visit 312 Digital’s Eventbrite page to register today.

The post SEO Seminar Recap: What You Missed appeared first on 435 Digital.

Have a great weekend!

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As a young crusader for all that is right and just, I was ready to throw my hat in against the tyranny of Facebook and all of the evil practices they’ve seemed to be involved in over the past year or so. A few months back, word got out that if you have a Facebook page for your company, only 16-18% of your fans were seeing the updates you put up. Predictably, outrage ensued. Community managers and online marketers shouted “If someone chooses to be a fan of my page, who is Facebook to decide when they do and do not see our updates?” from the rooftops. And for a while, I was one of them.

Things got even stickier with Facebook’s rollout of Promoted Posts. For as little as $5 per post, you can show your page’s updates to most/all of your fans, not just the usual 18%. This really set my Spider Sense off, especially because at the time all this was happening, Facebook’s new IPO was struggling, mostly because investors were concerned about the relatively low amount of revenue Facebook was generating through advertising when compared to their stock price.

It seemed like the plan of a second-rate James Bond villain:

Step 1: Facebook restricts the number of fans that see each update
Step 2: Facebook offers a solution that allows advertisers to reach those restricted fans…for a price
Step 3: PROFIT

I COULD NOT LET THIS STAND. For weeks, I read articles and bookmarked links, forming a scathing argument in my head. Facebook was going to be exposed, and I was going to be the one to do it.

That vigor and determination lasted all the way until I sat down this morning and thought about it from a distance. I realized that I, like many others, was just looking to rail against a straw man that I had mostly formed in my head for the sole purpose of tearing down. I had created my own machine to rage against.

Is Facebook restricting the number of fans your messaging reaches? Absolutely.

My advice? Deal with it. Let it motivate you. See that what they’re doing really isn’t that bad. Work around it. Let Facebook’s restrictions be your Apollo Creed from Rocky III, a former adversary that will push you to be the best you can.

1. Facebook Is Only Doing What Your Fans Are Already Doing

Last month, FastCompany published an article about how Facebook fans are already hiding your posts at an alarming rate. This is mostly because either the content fans are seeing isn’t relevant or it’s being presented in the wrong way. That’s why Facebook fanbases shouldn’t be judged on quantity alone. Rather than trying to get to 10,000 fans of any kind, connecting with 3,000 fans that are actual fans and not liking you just for promotional reasons will show much more return in the long run.

2. Make Your Updates More Interesting

Unless you want to wander down the expensive road of Promoted Posts (which do have their own time and place), you just have to accept that your Facebook posts are only going to reach about 20% of your audience on a good day. So how do you work around this? Make sure that you’re giving your fans something good enough to seek you out. Just because a fan doesn’t see your post in their news feed doesn’t mean that you’ve dropped off the face of the Earth. If you’ve got engaging and interesting content on a regular basis, the 80% of your fans that don’t see your posts in their news feed will still seek out your Facebook page to check for updates. You know how there are those friends you have on Facebook that always have something entertaining to say and you check their page daily to make sure you didn’t miss anything? Try to be like that friend, but offer deals and promotions instead of funny cat pictures.

3. Reaching 18% Of Your Audience Isn’t Bad

Let’s say that there’s a marketing avenue where fans of your product say “Yes, I would like you to contact me and let me know what you’re up to from time to time. You have my permission.” Let’s say that you would only reach about 18% of that audience with each update. Sounds pretty bad, right? Sounds just like the Facebook situation I’ve been describing that everyone is up in arms about, right?

Well it is. But I was actually talking about email marketing, where an 18% open rate is actually pretty good. So why is everyone so mad at Facebook for duplicating the same results?

The bottom line is that you have to make your messaging better and the quality of your fans better. In an ideal world, each of your Facebook updates would be inscribed on a gold plaque and hand delivered to each of your fans. But we’re not in that world. And guess what? If you’re spending time lamenting not being able to reach over 80% of your fanbase’s news feed, your competitors are thinking of new and innovative ways to work around that, because everyone is in the same boat.

Be like Rocky. Let Facebook be your master motivator. Just keep the pictures of you and Facebook Apollo Creed running shirtless down the beach to yourself.

The post Let Facebook’s Restrictions Motivate You To Improve appeared first on 435 Digital.

One of my favorite ideas from Chris Boggs’ presentation was the idea of comparing diagnostic SEO to triage at a hospital – figure out who to treat or fix first. In most hospitals, triage sorts patients out so that those with the worst injuries get treated first. However, Chris says that we should treat SEO diagnostics more like a military triage: treat the least injured people (or fix the less-broken areas of your site) first, so that they can get out there and start fighting again.

Also according to Chris, if you ever notice a sudden drastic drop in rankings or traffic, first check with IT to make sure they didn’t mess anything up. In his experience, sudden losses of rankings or traffic are usually due to IT messing up something like the robots.txt file or the redirect list. Then, once you’ve checked out all technical problems, you should look at on-site content issues, such as tags, titles and meta descriptions, and internal links. Finally, check your backlinks and off-site promoting efforts.

Grant Simmons gave a very interesting presentation about how to use Google itself as a tool to diagnose the SEO health of your website. The best thing about using Google as an SEO tool is that it’s completely free and available to anyone, and you can use it for all kinds of things, from checking site structure and internal linking problems, to indexing issues and other potential problems.

Grant’s list of SEO Uses for Google

• Use Google Suggest to see what comes up when you search for your brand, or when you search for one of the primary keywords you’re going for.
• Google Instant Preview: One of Google’s ranking signals is now page layout, with sites that have a lot of ads or not-useful information above the fold ranking lower than sites that don’t. Check out how Google sees your site with Preview.
• Do a brand search and see what percentage of the SERP you show up for. You should see your website and your social media sites at least.
• The “site:” operator is an SEO’s best friend.
  • You can search for “site:yourdomain.com” and “site:www.yourdomain.com” and compare the number of results Google finds. The number of results should be about the same, otherwise you might have some canonicalization problems.
  • Do a “site:” search of your domain, and go to the very last page. If it says “[x] number of results have been omitted because they are very similar to the results displayed,” you might have a duplicate content issue you need to look into.
  • You can check explicitly for duplicate content on your site by copying a sentence or two that you suspect is duplicate, put it in quotation marks, and search your site with “site:”.
  • Just do a “site:” search for your domain without any keywords and see what comes up. Your homepage should be first, followed by other important pages. If some obscure page like your privacy policy is high in the results, you may have an internal linking problem.
• Check the titles and snippets that show up. If the snippet doesn’t really match the keyword very well, or isn’t interesting or descriptive enough for people to want to click through, see where the snippet is pulling from and change it. (Often, the snippet is the meta description.)

This presentation showed that you can really do a lot of SEO sleuthing with very minimal tools.

The post SES Chicago: SEO Diagnostics for the Skilled Search Engine Mechanic appeared first on 435 Digital.

Do you have a person in your office who is obsessed with a particular snack food?

We do, too.

This is Rich.

Rich loves Takis. You know, these things:

How much does he love Takis? About this much.

Luckily for Rich, today we brought him some Takis.

Alas, Rich decided to work from home today.

So he could watch his sister’s dogs.

So we are eating the Takis.

Sorry, Rich.

The post Why You Should Never Work From Home appeared first on 435 Digital.

And while we don’t have any photos of today’s birthday lunch for SEO’s Dario, we do have this old photo of him cleaning out the office fridge.

Happy Birthday to all the 435ers celebrating this week!

The post Birthdays Abound at 435 Digital appeared first on 435 Digital.

As you can imagine, few things in the age of the internet have gone viral faster than Tom Hanks performning slam poetry about 90s sitcom “Full House.”

Come on, it’s everywhere you look.

The post Tom Hanks + Slam Poetry = Have Mercy appeared first on 435 Digital.

Have a great weekend!

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As an SEO I always love Flash mobs, especially these ones that play out like the video above, since they remind me of scenes that play out in site traffic.

In this flash mob, 2 people start off playing a great version of the Star Wars main theme, which builds into a gigantic orchestra attended by hundreds of onlookers, whose numbers increase exponentially as the concert continues.This type of viral activity reminds me of the behavior and trends you can see in the Google Analytics traffic of a website that has released a popular piece of content. A few initial sources send traffic, and then boom, it takes off with viewers pouring in exponentially.

Anyway, an awesome video that brightened my day, and reminds me to go out and buy that Boba Fett costume that I want to wear daily for Halloween.

The post Viral Video Thursday: Star Wars Flashmob appeared first on 435 Digital.

435 Digital’s Director of SEO and Search Strategy Carolyn Shelby has long been a fixture of the SEO conference scene. She is a veteran speaker and panelist, and 435 Digital is proud to have Carolyn represent us at this years PubCon in Las Vegas.

Carolyn’s spotlight session today will focus on preparing for some of the worst case scenarios for web site owners. Topics covered will include how to recover quickly after site failures, deal with server crashes, combat hacker exploitation, and move past other woes that can befall you if you don’t take proper precautions. Carolyn’s spotlight session is sure to provide attendees with a great set of skills that will keep them out of the danger zone should disaster strike.

435 Digital’s Senior Social Media Specialist Julie DiCaro is speaking at the YMCA’s IT Manager conference in Estes Park, Colorado. Her presentation “How to Use Social Media to Engage Your Constituents” is aimed at helping IT managers find the most effective methods of reaching out to their audiences.

Julie’s knowledge and experience with Social Media outlets and how to best use them is a great asset to the 435 Digital team. Julie is well known in the blogosphere for her managing of Aerys Sports the only online sports network run entirely by women writers.

The post PubCon Las Vegas and YMCA IT Managers Conference appeared first on 435 Digital.