435 Digital » search engine optimization

435 Digital Seminars kicks off with PPC and SEO

Austin Brown — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 21:51:39 +0000

After much planning and excitement, the team kicked off 435 Digital Seminars with talks on Paid Search (PPC) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) — the first of many digital marketing seminars in 2013. These two- to three-hour seminars are designed to help businesses in Chicago understand all areas of digital marketing. It would only make sense to start with an Introduction to Digital Marketing seminar, focusing on PPC and SEO. In case you missed the first seminar, I will share a recap of the topics covered by our own Rich Funk and Carolyn Shelby.

Carolyn Shelby, Director of SEO

Paid Search

First to present was PPC Specialist, Rich Funk. Here are the four main topics he covered:

Effective Keyword Lists
Keywords are the most important to your account because that is how you choose where your ad is seen. Having the wrong keyword list is usually worse than having no keyword list; consider it a better investment to throw money down the drain.

Advanced Targeting
The people you target and where they are can be just as important as your keyword list. Efficiency is key here. Putting your ad in front of people in the wrong place or the wrong time can be wasteful. Effective geographic targeting is important to the campaign.

Proper Account Structure
Make it easy on yourself. If you have an account that is messy and disorganized, any changes you make will take longer and work less effectively. Being organized will help you make quick changes to your campaigns and give you more time to optimize.

Effective Ad Copy
Your ad copy is how you present yourself to your potential customers. If you have the wrong message you could alienate potential clients. Ad copy testing will help determine the most effective messaging. You can do this by creating A/B tests on a regular basis.

Search Engine Optimization (Organic)

Here’s what Director of SEO, Carolyn Shelby, covered:

What Search Engines Do
Search engines want to refer each user to websites most relevant to the user’s search query. This relevancy is determined by a number of factors – all designed to ensure authenticity. Search engines do not support underhanded tactics and tricks to get to the top.

Multichannel Optimization
We can’t always control what types of results appear (blended/universal, news, images, video, etc.), so we need to optimize all of our digital assets. We also need to keep our messaging (the voice and style of our brands) unified across all channels (social media channels, web, print, broadcast, etc.). Every time a consumer is exposed to our brand, we want that exposure to reinforce our message. Unified messaging builds and reinforces branding and helps train the customers to search for you by the terms YOU want to be found under.

Business Considerations
Before getting submerged in SEO, your business needs to determine its goals on the web and make sure your web development/marketing team understands your business model. The most important question (that everyone on the team should be able to answer is): How do we make money? Do we sell impressions? Do we only make money on conversions? How do we define a conversion? Who are our customers?

Build out the right type of website functionality and content to suit your business needs.

On-Page SEO Best Practices
Many factors go into SEO and their value collectively can improve your search rankings. Carolyn discussed metadata, good and bad coding, how to brainstorm for keywords, and the importance of developing quality content for your website.

Whoa, that’s a lot to cover in one session!

Yes, there was a lot of information covered in the Intro to Digital Marketing seminar. If you were unable to attend, we hope you will join us at an upcoming seminar in April. We will be covering Social Media, Advanced PPC, and Advanced SEO. So whether your business is just getting started in digital marketing or your team has successful experience, we are here to provide the most recent updates and strategies for success.

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SEO Seminar Recap: What You Missed

Austin Brown — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 15:00:38 +0000

I recently had the opportunity to take my knowledge of digital marketing to the next level by attending the Introduction to Digital Marketing seminar hosted by 312 Digital on January 22nd. 435 Digital’s SEO Director, Carolyn Shelby, presented the SEO portion of the seminar and passed on some of her expert knowledge to digital marketers and business owners from various industries who attended. Lucky for you, I take a lot of notes and am here today to share some of the big takeaways from Carolyn’s presentation, specifically about SEO theory.

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.

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SEO Your Content: 7 Tips to Boost Rankings

Christy Grant — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 17:55:19 +0000

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for any website content involves many factors beyond the words on the site. There are coding standards, tags, the architecture of the site, navigation, and page titles — many components. Yet when it’s time for you to write a piece for your site — whether it’s a blog post, an update to the About Us page, or any other collection of words — you need to know how to SEO your content so that people will find you.

7 SEO Tips To Improve Your Website’s Search Engine Ranking

Original Content
The number one important thing is to write unique and relevant content. Put the most important content near the beginning. Remember that your words sometimes appear out of context, so be specific. For example, instead of writing “snow shovels,” say “North Pole Gear snow shovels.” That helps search engines identify you and helps people know you.

Also, be sure not to duplicate content from other pages of your site or from any other site. Google is highly suspicious of duplication and will penalize your site for this. Always write something original and valuable. Search engine optimization helps people find your content. Providing something of value keeps people on your site.

Keywords
This part goes into the content that you write. After doing your keyword research, use your chosen keyword throughout your content as it naturally fits. You can vary it to use singular and plural versions of the words, use acronyms or abbreviations. Just use it as relevant and as it fits. Those keywords will help Google find your page and display it in the search results, and it will help people click through to your page when they see you have the subject they’re searching.
Page Title
This is the title that the search engines read and that people see when searching a relevant subject. Most likely, you are using a content management system and a portion of the page title will be automatically created. As long as it sounds good, frontload your page title with your keyword or keyword phrase. The page title should be a max of 66 characters, including spaces. Be sure to write it so that it sounds like a title written by a person, rather than a machine-generated string of words.
Meta Page Descriptions
This is the brief description that appears with the page title in search results and helps people decide whether to click the link to your page. It’s a great idea to include keywords, but more importantly, it needs to be compelling. The max length should be 156 characters — or slightly longer than a tweet — with no quotes or non-alpha characters since Google removes those. So write a slightly long tweet and include information not already in the page title.
Article Title – H1 Tag
This is the title of the actual piece you write. This is your heading to alert people to the main subject matter of your article. Be sure it is brief and clearly conveys the main point of your writing. Use your keyword one time within the header and be sure this is in the H1 tag in your page code.
Internal Page Linking
This is your chance to take advantage of all the other content you have on your site, to share relevant information, keep users on your site, and show search engines that your relevancy is strong. It is a great opportunity for users to explore other areas of your site, so definitely offer that.

Be sure to use real and relevant words as the actual links. The words “click here” are generic and not relevant to your subject matter. See the links in this post as examples of relevant words to use as the links to other relevant content. All you need to do is link a phrase that is naturally part of your writing.

Images
Almost all content benefits from having images along with it. Just be sure to always include alt attributes within the image tags. Search engines read alt attributes, and anyone who uses a screen reader can hear the alt text.

Image names are also valuable for having your images — and therefore, your site — found in image searches. Accurately describe each image in the file name and alt attribute. Use a keyword if at all relevant. Use dashes between words, rather than underscores. And do not use non-alpha characters.

SEO Your Content: In Conclusion

So go write about what you know. Write unique content. Be compelling and provide value. With the tips above, you can include the pieces that help search engines show your excellent content to the world, helping people find it and choose to read it.

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Flickr: SEO for photos from ’30 Second Social’

AmyGuth — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 21:37:41 +0000

On Flickr, SEO can be improved many ways. By optimizing each photo, users improve their visibility in search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo.

In this episode of “30 Second Social,” Amy Guth explains simple ways to make your Flickr photos more visible to search engines.

Flickr: how to optimize photos for search engines

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Twitter: 10 types of tweets you should know

scottk — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 15:42:52 +0000

Making your message count in 140 characters or less is a vital part of your business strategy. When you use Twitter, you can either send the same types of tweets all the time and risk blending into the social media universe or you can mix things up and be that go-to person everyone’s talking about.

Your choice. Assuming you picked the second, here are 10 types of tweets that will help you be a Twitter superstar in no time.

Boring
Snore. Tweets that give Twitter a bad name such as “I am eating a sandwich.” This type of tweet is uninteresting and doesn’t encourage interaction. Twitter started this trend by asking the world a boring question: “What’s happening.” They should have started with “What has your attention?” That could be the difference between tweeting “I’m eating a sandwich” and “I need your help to find the best burger in Chicago.” Which of those tweets interests you more?

Introductory
Introduce a Twitter user to either another user or a group of people. Example include: “I’d like everyone to meet @soandso, who is new to our team here at the Tribune” and “Hey, @Suchandsuch please meet @soandso, who is also an avid golfer.” Introductory tweets are a great way to build community quickly on Twitter.

Spammer
Trust me. You don’t want to be viewed this way. Spammer tweets aren’t necessarily tweets that come from an automatic spambot feed. Sometimes, spammy tweets can come from a user who only seems to shill for his or her own projects or products. An often cited formula for avoiding being a spammy twitter user is to follow the Rule of Thirds: Talk about your own products a third of the time. Share other links and ideas in your niche for another third. In the final third, reply to people, answer questions and ask questions of your followers.

Quote
Consist of an attributed quote and that’s all. Example: “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life. It goes on – Robert Frost.” This type of tweet is common, but should be used very sparingly because it generally does not encourage interaction with others.

Retweet
Retweets (or “RTs”) are simply re-sharing the content sent from another user. These can be done by hitting the “retweet” button to share the original tweet and automatically source the tweet (“RT @scottkleinberg Today…”). The retweet can also be accomplished by sharing a link obtained from another user, recreating a version of the tweet, and including “MT (modified tweet) or via @username” in the tweet.

Marketing
Let’s talk about these. In and of themselves, they are harmless, straightforward communication about a product, deal or brand. For example: a hardware store twitter account could tweet “This week only: all BrandX paint and rollers 50% off” and that would be an example of a marketing tweet. The problem arises with marketing tweets when that is all or the majority of tweets posted by a given account. This isn’t likely to be a problem if the tweeter follows the aforementioned Rule of Thirds. Sticking with the hardware store example: this account could also share how-to guides and tips, relevant industry news, and address customers service and/or advice questions. Everyone buying paint wants to know how to get it out of the carpet.

Giveaway or Benefactor
Tweets giving “insidery” info on deals, freebies, contests and other giveaways. Most giveaway tweets are designed to go viral by being widely retweeted to share the information.

Link
Tweets sharing links to compelling or entertaining articles, images or blog posts. Such links can be original content from the user, or outside content he or she wishes to share with followers. Be sure to mix link tweets with other types of tweets for maximum impact.

Question and Answer
User asks a question of his or her followers and this hopefully results in answers. Question tweets can range from rhetorical questions (which can be entertaining, but generally aren’t extremely useful because they do not encourage interaction) to polling followers about product and purchase recommendations (Buying a new dishwasher. Any recommendations?)

Customer service
Can be either from the customer raising an issue with a service or product, or from a company acknowledging a widespread customer issue, or working to satisfy an individual customer’s issue.

Watch “30 Second Social,” the web video series hosted by Scott Kleinberg and Amy Guth, for more tips and tricks about Twitter and other forms of social media.

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Twitter: Search engine optimization with Twitter bio keywords from ’30 Second Social’

scottk — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 17:50:00 +0000

On Twitter, one easy and proven way to boost search engine optimization is to write a proper bio. When edited correctly with keywords up front, Twitter SEO is greatly improved. In this episode of “30 Second Social,” Amy Guth explains how easy this is.

Twitter: Search engine optimization with Twitter bio keywords

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Save $250 on our SEO & Social Media Masterclass

435 Digital — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 19:05:25 +0000

After the success of April’s 435 Digital bootcamp, we are doing it again. Renamed 435 Digital Masterclass, it is an all-day seminar designed for business owners and communications professionals.

The 435 Digital Masterclass will be held Friday, July 22 at Tribune Tower in downtown Chicago. Topics covered include website development, search engine optimization (SEO), and social media strategy. The individual sessions will be taught by myself and my colleagues at 435 Digital, including Brent Payne. See below for a complete itinerary.

The Masterclass will also feature a panel discussion with Chicago business leaders who excel at social media. Confirmed panelists include Geoff Alexander, executive vice president Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises and managing partner of Wow Bao; Lindsay Avner, executive director of Bright Pink; and Mari Luangrath, owner of Foiled Cupcakes. You can learn more about them on Twitter at @geoffalex @bebrightpink and @foiledcupcakes respectively.

Both a catered breakfast and lunch will be served during the Masterclass. It will run from 8:30 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. on Friday, July 22. The entire event will take place in Campbell Hall, which is located inside the historic Tribune Tower.

Space is limited to 45 people to ensure an intimate learning environment. Participants are encouraged to bring their latops to follow the presentations, and free Wifi will be available. All particpants will also receive PDF copies of each presentation given during the Masterclass.

But wait, there’s more! The 435 Digital Masterclass, which is a $500 value, will be offered as a Daily Deal on ChicagoBreakingDeals.com. Instead of paying the full $500, you will be able to purchase a ticket for $250. To do so, please visit www.chicagobreakingdeals.com on Tuesday, June 14. The deal will go live at 12 a.m. on Tuesday, June 14. Again, space is limited to 45 people. Once those deals sell out (and we’re pretty sure they will), that’s it.

Should you have questions, you can email me directly. If you are interested in registering for other 435 Digital classes, please visit our SEO and social media classes page.

435 Digital Masterclass Itinerary

Friday, July 22 | Tribune Tower’s Campbell Hall

8:30 a.m. Registration & breakfast

9 a.m. Introduction to Website Development, SEO & Social Media

9:30 a.m. Building A Better Website

11 a.m. SEO for Business

12:30 p.m. Catered Lunch

1 p.m. Social Media for Business

2:45 p.m. Panel on Social Media Strategy (featuring Wow Bao, Bright Pink and Foiled Cupcakes)

4 p.m. Q & A session

4:30 p.m. End of Masterclass

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How social media can help drive your SEO campaign

435 Digital — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 16:24:08 +0000

As we talk to different small and medium-sized businesses throughout the country, I am asked one question again and again: Does social media impact search engine optimization?

Yes. In fact, social media can make a huge impact on your SEO campaign very quickly. Here’s why.

At its core, SEO is based on three elements: popularity, authority and relevance. Popularity is the sheer number of inbound links to a website or webpage. Authority is quality links received from sites or pages that have a lot of links going to them. Relevance is the on-page, off-page, URL and anchor text relevancy in correlation to the search term enter by the searcher into Google.

Social media can be the quickest way to drive the popularity aspect of SEO. That’s because social media drives a lot of links to your website or webpage quickly. The links may also have some authority to them, but usually it’s just a high number of links of lower value. Google, Bing and Yahoo have stated publicly that they utilize signals presented in social media to not only rank items in real-time search, but to also determine which pages are being heavily discussed in social media.

I also have had a few conversations with some Google Engineers both while abroad and in the U.S. that provided some great insight. Overall, I’d recommend a few things though if you really want your social media to drive your SEO.

Popular audience: Work on the number of retweets (Twitter) and reposts (Facebook) you receive for your content. The search engines are looking at the number of retweets/reposts to help them determine how popular the shared content is online. The more the content (i.e. tweet, facebook update) is retweeted/reposted, the more important the content is perceived by the search engines.

Authoritative audience: Create a strong following in social media not only by sheer number of people following/friending you, but also by how many of those people have a high number of friends or followers. The search engines prefer content that is not only authoritative by the author but is retweeted/reposted by authoritative people.

Yes, you are judged by the company you keep and the more powerful your company the more powerful the search engines will perceive you and the content you create/share.

Relevant audience: Not only do the search engines pay attention to the type of content you create/share online, they are also paying attention to the content created/shared by those that are connected to you as well.

If you wish to have your content perceived by the search engines as being very relevant for SEO, PPC, reputation management, etc. then you will need to have in your timeline/history a lot of content that relates to SEO, PPC or reputation management. If then, the people that are also well known for SEO, PPC or reputation management share your content on their profiles then that specific piece of content will gain even greater relevancy.

Lesson here? Just because it may be fun to post a lot of random stuff on Twitter or Facebook (which I am very guilty of), it may be best to stick to your core competencies in order to improve your overall relevancy for the products/services you do hope to be successful in online. I know, it takes some of the fun out of social media but if you truly wish to grow your relevancy, restraint is suggested.

Social media should be open: The search engines are going to mainly pull publicly accessible information. While Bing has stated it may pull information from behind a wall (i.e. Twitter protected profiles and Facebook walled content), Google has stated that they only access information that Googlebot can access. Thus, it is best to have an open profile and hopefully have friends/followers that also have open profiles.

This will provide the maximum opportunity for ease of access to the content from the search engines and a greater ability for the search engines to interpret the intensity of the popularity, authority, relevancy of the content. Google has even gone so far as to announce they will shut down all private Google Profiles this summer, citing the point that social media should be open.

As most of you may be aware, I keep all of my social media profiles completely open. I do so partially to help the overall impact my social profiles have on SEO. However, it is also because it is a way of life I have chosen and find great joy in being so free online.

Hopefully, this gives you a taste as to how the search engines view social media, as well as a few tips to help you improve your social media. Social media and SEO will only continue to merge together as they both mature as online marketing components. You can either choose to start building a proper social media profile that is useful for SEO now or risk having little audience, authority or relevancy in the future.

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How LinkedIn can help you at your current job

435 Digital — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 17:45:19 +0000

LinkedIn is an undervalued social network.

Where Facebook has more than 500 million users worldwide, LinkedIn has less than 100 million users. Granted, Facebook appeals to (almost) everyone and LinkedIn is specifically for professionals. Still, basic logic tells me that more than 100 million professionals exist worldwide.

What’s more, I still hear how many people refer to LinkedIn: “It’s the website you sign up for when you need to find a new job.”

Yes, it’s that website. But LinkedIn can also help you thrive at your current job. Here are five ways LinkedIn can help you right now.

Improve your personal search results

Your LinkedIn profile is already optimized to appear in search engines. This means that when someone Googles your name, your LinkedIn profile will be one of the first results that shows up. I Googled my own name and found that my LinkedIn profile appeared on Google before my bio page on 435Digital.com.

Amy Ravit Korin, the owner of InteractiveAmy.com LLC, agrees about LinkedIn’s SEO strength.

“There’s no such thing as a blind date or a blind meeting–people are going to Google you before you get together,” Kronin says. “That’s why you want to have it all ‘together’ yourself online. LinkedIn is the perfect place to start doing that from a professional perspective.”

LinkedIn is also a great alternative if you are not publicly listed on your company’s website or if your company does not even have a website. You want a prospective client to be able to easily find you online. If he can’t, he might go with the competitor who was easy to find online.

Share your accomplishments with your colleagues

Ideally, your boss will be your biggest champion and share your accomplishments with your colleagues. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always happen. If that’s your situation, you’ll need to toot your own horn and remind your colleagues of the special value that you bring to the company.

Of course, modesty is key and that’s where LinkedIn can work wonders. It’s a neutral platform that focuses on the facts and also lets others write recommendations about you. If a happy client wants to thank you for a job well done, ask if she’ll post a recommendation on your LinkedIn profile. I gurantee that your colleagues will notice.

On the flip side of the coin, having a LinkedIn profile that your colleagues can see will keep you honest.

“If you talk about how wonderful you are on LinkedIn, then what happens when you walk into a meeting and just sit there?” asks Jason Seidan, co-founder of Ajax Social Media and the first trainer to be certified by LinkedIn itself. “You set yourself up to be screwed. You create inconsistencies between what you’re doing and the message you’re sending.”

Let your business contacts find you easily

Business cards are great, but they are easy to lose and can quickly become outdated. Think of LinkedIn as your virtual business card. If someone you’ve previously met needs to contact you, he may not still have your business card or you may have switched positions. Yet if you have a completed LinkedIn profile, he should be able to quickly find you.

Also, when you do switch jobs, you won’t need to email all of your business contacts to tell them the news. You can simply update your LinkedIn profile and they’ll know where to find you next. (Of course, it’s still a good idea to email your closest contacts and tell them the news personally).

Turn social contacts into professional contacts

LinkedIn Groups are a free feature that act as discussion boards. Anyone can create a LinkedIn Group around a specific topic or interest.

“Groups are a great way to stay abreast of the industry you work in and bridge the gap between professional and personal,” Korin says. “For example, you might meet someone socially through volunteering. Well a lot of non-profits also have groups on LinkedIn, giving you the chance to connect professionally with someone you might have met in a social setting.”

Brand yourself as a subject expert

LinkedIn Groups can also build your reputation as an expert on a specific topic. “Not too many people talk every day in a LinkedIn Group, so if you want to be the biggest voice in a group, it’s pretty easy to do,” says Barbara Rozgonyi, owner of WiredPRWorks and author of the popular blog post Top 10 Ways to Quickly Becoming a Recognized Subject Matter Expert on LinkedIn.

“Being a part of a LinkedIn Group can really enhance your real-life group as well,” Rozgonyi adds. “People will know who you are before you go to an event and your relationship is that much stronger.”

The post How LinkedIn can help you at your current job appeared first on 435 Digital.

Ask an SEO: The Flesch-Kincaid Score’s potential impact

435 Digital — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 18:19:28 +0000

Q. Does the Flesch-Kincaid score impact SEO?

This is a great question and one that was recently discussed at SES Accelerator San Diego, a new conference for SEO experts.

In short, the Flesch-Kincaid score measures how difficult it is to comprehend a piece of content. When you hear that a newspaper is written at the fourth-grade reading level, for example, that’s based on the Flesch-Kincaid score. By contrast, the Harvard Law Review is written at the university reading-level.

I think that the Flesch-Kincaid score could very well have a major impact on search engine optimization. Why? Mainly because it is easy to process a score on content using the Flesch-Kincaid algorithm. If it was possible to do it on a 435DX2 processor (look that bad boy up, it’s about as powerful as the processor in your wristwatch…if you even wear one today), then it is definitely doable on a large scale by the racks and racks of computers that collectively make up Googlebot.

In fact, I believe the Flesch-Kincaid score may be one of the core components of the early Google algorithms. This would mean that it is as important as the three pillars of SEO: popularity (number of inbound links), authority (strength of the inbound links) and relevancy (how relevant is the content to the search query).

Regardless, Google is now paying more attention than ever before on the quality of content. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, blogged on Jan. 21 that his team’s new focus is “’content farms,’ which are sites with shallow or low-quality content.”

Still, high-quality content isn’t everything. Even if your content may “score” better than your competitor’s content on the Flesch-Kincaid scale, that doesn’t mean that’s all you need to do. You will still need to make sure you are getting lots of links, quality links and relevant links from relevant pages. You will also need to do your keyword research to make sure you are using the words on your page that the right people are searching for in Google.

But just as my high school language arts teacher was impressed much more with my book reports after I made some edits to jack up my Flesch-Kincaid score, Google may be impressed as well. It’s an easy metric to monitor and an easy requirement to ask of your content creators or when writing your own blog posts.

You can be sure that I’ll do lots of research on this and will pick the brains of many of the other SEOs in the industry to get their take on it. Stay tuned for more on this topic.

Have a question about SEO? Let us know via @435Digital or in the comments below, and Brent may answer it next week.

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