Sound Advice from Google’s Matt Cutts

A great article recently on USATODAY gives and insight into improving natural search rankings in Google. Matt Cutts provides the insight and invaluable tips on ethical, white hat techniques to improve your site’s ranking.

ARTICLE
You have a website and can’t figure out why it’s not showing up at the top of Google’s search rankings. You go to Google.com for some guidance but get lost trying to find answers.

Certainly, achieving visibility in Google’s search rankings can be a mystery. To help solve the riddle, USA TODAY sat down with Google’s Matt Cutts, an engineer and active blogger, who has five easy tips on how to “optimize” your site so Google and the rest of the world can find it.

More and more businesses are turning to the Web to find customers: $5.8 billion was spent on advertising in the first quarter alone, up 18.2% from the prior year, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Google’s share of Internet searches continues to rise as well — to a record 61.8% in May, according to measurement service ComScore Media Metrix.

If you haven’t “optimized” your site, here’s how:

1. Spotlight your search term on the page.
“Think about what people are going to type in to try and find you,” Cutts says. He tells of meeting a chiropractor from San Diego who complained that his site couldn’t be found easily using Google search. The words “San Diego chiropractor” were listed nowhere on his site. “You have to make sure the keywords are on the page,” Cutts says. If you’re a San Diego doctor, Des Moines architect or Portland ad agency, best to let people know so immediately, at the top of your page.

2. Fill in your “tags.”
When creating websites, Internet coding language includes two key tags: title and description. Even if you don’t know code, which is used to create pages, software programs such as Adobe’s Dreamweaver have tools that let you fill them in in plain English (rather than “<title>San Diego Chiropractor</title”). Tags are crucial, Cutts says, because what’s shown in search results most often are the title and description tags.

If Cutts’ chiropractor had properly tagged his Web page, a search would have returned something like this: “San Diego chiropractor. Local doctor serves San Diego community. There’s also a third tag, to add keywords, or search terms, but Cutts says Google doesn’t put much weight in its rankings on that one.

3. Get other sites to “link” back to you.
Google says it looks at more than 100 pieces of data to determine a site’s ranking. But links are where it’s at, once your search terms are clearly visible on your site and the title and description tags correctly marked.

In a nutshell: Google ranks sites based on popularity. If authoritative sites link to you, you must be good, and therefore you get to the top of the list. If you can’t get top sites such as USATODAY.com or The New York Times to link to you, try your friends. And what if they don’t have a site? They probably do. Read on.

4. Create a blog and post often.
Cutts says blogging is a great way to add links and start a conversation with customers and friends. It will cost you only time: Google’s Blogger, WordPress and others offer free blogging tools. With a blog, you can link back to your site and offer links to others. It’s also a great way to start building content, Cutts says.

5. Register for free tools.
Google’s google.com/webmaster offers freebies to help get your site found. You can upload a text-based site map, which shows Google the pages of your site (create it at www.xml-sitemaps.com). Once that’s done, you’ll be registered with Google, where you can learn vital statistics — including who is linking to your site and how often Google “crawls” your site for updates.

Google’s Local Business center (google.com/local/add) is the place for business owners to submit a site so it shows up in local searches, with a map attached. Savvy consumers who use Google for searches know that the first 10 non-advertising results often are from Google Maps, so if you have a business and haven’t submitted it, you’re losing out on potential customers.

Don’t overdo it
When weaving keywords into a main page, Cutts says, some zealous Web publishers will use the term over and over again. That’s called “keyword stuffing.” It’s a big Google no-no that can have your site removed from the index.

“After you’ve said it two or three times, Google has a pretty good idea — ‘OK, this page has something to do with this keyword,’ ” he says. “Just think about the two or three phrases you want to be known for and weave that in naturally.

For blogger newbies, Cutts knows that writing (for example, posting new material) doesn’t always come easy. He suggests finding ideas by visiting social news sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon, to see what people are saying about your particular topic.

Aside from that, Cutts says, new material falls into the common-sense category: It’s all about your business. “If I’m a plumber in Iowa, I may want to write about some of the strange things that happen to me on the job, or the five most common ways to fix a toilet,” he says. “That kind of content can get really popular, and it’s a great way to get links.” Folks will post your piece on one of the social media sites. And with links comes higher Google rankings.

Finally, Cutts says, there is one big misconception about getting Google visibility that he wants to clear up: In order to be found at the top of Google’s rankings, you do not also have to advertise.

“One thing doesn’t have to do with the other,” he says.

ENDS

SEO Consulting on the Rise

An interesting article from The Times Online highlights the rise in the number of firms using reputable search engine optimisation companies to drive ‘Natural Search’ traffic to websites. We have published the juciest bits of the article below for Betwixt readers to digest:

Searching to get to the top of Google
THE hotels website Superbreak had a problem three years ago. The volume of traffic arriving at its web pages was worryingly low. Surfers were confused by cybersquatters trying to pass themselves off as the business and, to make matters worse, it shared the same name as a popular brand of American rucksacks.

Search-engine optimisation (SEO) proved to be the answer.

Part crystal-ball watching, part trial and error, it is the practice of improving lacklustre internet commerce by getting a firm noticed on the results pages of search engines. And it is perhaps the fastest-growing sector in the marketing industry. Cracking the code of how search engines like Google work is forecast to be a £400m industry in Britain alone this year and it is growing at 60% a year.

Superbreak called in the experts to ensure its name rose to the top of search lists when users tapped in queries for “short break” and “hotel break” into Google or other search engines. The plan involved redrawing every web page to focus on the word “break”, simplifying its design, and making information more sharply relevant to weekend trippers.

“It was like replumbing an entire city,” said David Ranby, Superbreak’s internet-marketing manager. The benefits of coming top of search lists are clear. Although click-through rates vary from query to query, results that make the second page or lower of a Google search stand only a 1% chance of being clicked on. Not surprisingly, the top result on the first page gets perhaps half of all clicks.

Revenues at Superbreak’s hotels division have risen to £154m a year and Ranby says the SEO programme is responsible for 35% of the increase in online revenues over the past three years. It is no easy task to work out how to get a website to the top of the results thrown up by a search engine. Google — which with 85% of the search-engine market in Britain is by far the dominant player — keeps tweaking how its algorithms read web pages and indexes them.

“There are 200 signals that determine a page’s relevance,” said Matthew Trewhella, Google’s developer advocate. “Imagine it as a big wall of dials with a bunch of people turning them slightly every day.” While Google offers plenty of guidance and advice, it won’t tell companies exactly how its system works.

Such results mean that spending on SEO grew faster than pay-per-click online advertising — also known as paid search — for the first time in Britain last year. SEO addresses “natural” search results that appear in the left column of the Google page, while pay-per-click relates to keywords it auctions to create the sponsored links ranked on the right-hand side and often shaded at the top. For a decade, these have been the moneymaking meat of the search industry.

The specialist online site E-consultancy said spending on SEO rose by 68% to £250m in the UK last year, compared with a 56% rise in pay-per-click spending to £1.97 billion. Microsoft, which last week souped up its own search site with an easier-to-use system, thinks that pay per click in Europe, Middle East and Africa could grow by only 20% next year. There are two reasons for this.

First, pay per click is extremely buoyant compared with traditional media and its cost is rising quickly. Search marketers argue there is little point in, say, banks paying £15 to Google every time they want to be connected to a customer that has entered “credit card” into a search form. With a conversion rate of one in 100, it takes a long time to earn a return. Even more targeted searches, say for “student credit card”, have shot up in price.

Firms have also worked out that more than half of all web searches do not involve a transaction. To appeal to window shoppers, they are better off polishing their reputation and profile with future trade in mind. And then there are increasingly shrewd customers to contend with. They often take against being spoon-fed overtly commercial messages by never clicking on a result from the right side of the page.

“Big firms are looking more at SEO than pay per click because they realise that consumers are becoming aware the listings on the side and top of the page are paid for and that natural listings are in some cases more credible and more relevant,” said Rebecca Jennings, principal analyst at Forrester Research. Her firm forecasts that spending on pay per click in America will increase between 2007 and 2012 by 125% to $10.1 billion (£5.1 billion), compared with SEO soaring 365% to $8.9 billion.

As well as using appropriate vocabulary, a website also needs to be well-networked to gain traction. Links to esteemed websites such as the BBC or a national newspaper act as advocates for its content, boosting its ranking with Google.

Historically, boosting a site’s volume of web links has been easy. But Google has been clamping down on “link farms” — machine-generated websites created purely to connect with the central site to make it look more popular than it really is.

Offenders have had their rankings reduced on the back of such exploitative behaviour in the past. Google went so far as to suspend the carmaker BMW from its search index for two days in early 2006, although the carmaker denied any wrongdoing.

“The vast majority of SEO firms are good,” said Trewhella at Google. “But it is a constant battle. They will do one thing; we will discover it; they will do something else.”

While Google welcomes SEO for making searches easier and findings better quality, it doesn’t make any money from the left column of listings. Instead, it hopes better searching means more use, yielding it its fair share of clicks on paid-for links. Fredrick Marckini, the chief global-search officer at Isobar, part of the media buyer Aegis, said SEO was no threat to the search engine’s business model.

“There are no $10m SEO engagements but there are many $10m, $20m and even $100m pay-per-click search-advertising engagements. SEO is a necessary and critical component.” Marckini argues that the shift in spending patterns is beginning to better mirror consumer behaviour. He cites research that shows 72% of web users click on natural listings and not on the paid ads.

“The European market seems to spend money on search marketing in a way that is inconsistent with the way the audience is using search engines,” he said. “European marketers must place a higher priority on natural SEO to more successfully target their audience.”

Of the two, SEO was invented first, with the concept of paying for positions in search results introduced only a decade ago by Goto.com, now part of Yahoo. Its renewed importance is only set to grow.

“This presents a great evolution opportunity for the advertising agencies,” said Chris Dobson, acting boss of Microsoft’s online UK business. “It shows you need a human touch to add value to technology platforms on behalf of clients.”

Google Webmaster Guidance on Paid Links

Following on from a couple of previous posts we have made on the subject of acquiring paid links, Betwixt reminds its blog readers of Google’s guidelines on buying links:

Google’s policy on paid links has long been the same: it does not approve of buying or selling links for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings. Links that use the “nofollow” attribute or some sort of redirect to prevent the passing of PageRank are fine with them. Google employee Matt Cutts comments: 

“Our goal is to provide users the best search experience by presenting equitable and accurate results. We enjoy working with webmasters, and an added benefit of our working together is that when you make better and more accessible content, the internet, as well as our index, improves. This in turn allows us to deliver more relevant search results to users.”

“If, however, a webmaster chooses to buy or sell links for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings, we reserve the right to protect the quality of our index. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank violates our webmaster guidelines.”

Reporting a Paid Link
Sign in to Google’s webmaster console and use the authenticated spam report form, then include the word “paidlink” (all one word) in the text area of the spam report. If you use the authenticated form, you’ll need to sign in with a Google Account, but your report will carry more weight.

Use the unauthenticated spam report form and make sure to include the word “paidlink” (all one word) in the text area of the spam report.

Paid Links – Too Much, Too Soon

The article below illustrates the perils of trying to buy your way onto the first page of Google in a short space of time.

However, a quick note:
Whilst we don’t doubt the integrity of the Google index, there have been previous instances of big car insurance brands being turfed out of  first page Google results, only to be allowed back in, in a relatively short period of time.

Two cases of this are MoneySupermarket.com and Endsleigh – both companies were found out trying to (allegedly) cheat their way to the top of the Google rankings for the search term ‘Car Insurance’, using dubious or black hat SEO techniques. However, both websites are now back ranking very high (page 1) in the Google natural search results, for the ultra competitive search term car insurance.

Let’s all keep an eye on both GoCompare.com and Kwik Fit to see how quickly they rise back up to the top of the Google rankings for the search term ‘Car Insurance’?!

ARTICLE:
A couple of major UK brands in the insurance sector have recently been penalised by Google for boosting their rankings by buying paid reviews and paid links.

Last week, car insurance aggregator Gocompare.com was dropped from the number one slot for the term ‘car insurance’, and sent to the relative obscurity of page six of Google.

Its big mistake was to attempt to boost its search engine rankings by buying paid links and reviews, increasing the number of links into the site. This enabled the relatively new car insurance aggregator to reach the top of the natural search rankings.

The company achieved this in just over a year, which may well have raised alarm bells at Google, as such a rapid rise in the rankings is unusual, especially for such a competitive search term.

A similar penalty was imposed on Moneysupermarket.com last year, while the most recent victim of Google’s penalty has been Kwik Fit.

Kwik Fit is better known for tyres and brake pads than car insurance, but it has recently moved into the market, and was hovering between pages one and two of Google for the term ‘car insurance’ before being punished by Google for buying paid links.

Now Kwik Fit has moved down to page 5 on Google for the term, so it seems this strategy has not paid off for the company.

Google’s penalties can have a serious effect on web traffic – a recent Hitwise article showed that traffic to Gocompare.com from this search term had fallen by 87% in the weeks after the penalty.

It is likely that there are more brands using these SEO tactics, something which Google is keen to weed out, so we can expect more such penalties in the coming months.

What is Google Everflux?

In the summer of 2003 Google switched to a “fresh crawl” process to make their results as relevant and as fresh as possible. It runs each day. The purpose of the daily fresh crawl is to update Web pages in the index that change regularly.

This allows Google to provide results that are up-to-date with current events, generating much smaller day-to-day changes that some people called everflux.

We have qualified below various other descriptions of search engine updates. Provided by Matt Cutts, Google:  

Algorithm update: Typically yields changes in the search results on the larger end of the spectrum. Algorithms can change at any time, but noticeable changes tend to be less frequent.

Data refresh: When data is refreshed within an existing algorithm. Changes are typically toward the less-impactful end of the spectrum, and are often so small that people don’t even notice. One of the smallest types of data refreshes is an:

Index update: When new indexing data is pushed out to data centers. From the summer of 2000 to the summer of 2003, index updates tended to happen about once a month. The resulting changes were called the Google Dance. The Google Dance occurred over the course of 6-8 days because each data center in turn had to be taken out of rotation and loaded with an entirely new web index, and that took time.

Google Moves into the Newspaper Business

After colonising cyberspace Google is now moving headlong into the newspaper business. The leading search engine is currently in discussions with several newspaper publishers to sell space in their pages to its online clients.

Google Print Ads is an extension of Google AdWords, the auction system that lets companies bid for a slot that appears alongside specific online word searches. Instead of an auction, advertisers pick a newspaper online through Google and enter a bid for available advertising space on a given page and day.

Rather than offering to pay the list price, customers say what they are prepared to pay. Publishers can chosse to accept or decline the offer. Google takes a slice of the advertising revenue from every completed deal. Google even offers to design the ad if the advertiser does not have the capability to do it alone.

Google’s UK advertising revenue rose roughly 40% to about £1.25 billion this current year (2007), comfortably overtaking the publisher Trinity Mirror’s income. Google has already overtaken Channel 4 and beaten ITV1 in the third quarter. Google commands around 75% of the market for search advertising in the UK. 

Black Hat SEO

If you are a webmaster or more generally tasked with overseeing the performance of your company’s website in the search engines, quite possibly you have come across the term Black Hat SEO. 

Definition(s)

1. Techniques considered unethical, or contrary to the Terms of Service of search engines.

2. This term refers to using deceptive techniques to gain high search engine rankings. Some examples are hiding text (ie – white letters on a white background) and cloaking.

Note: The lines are often blurry, with some maintaining that any form of SEO is an artificial attempt to rank highly.

Black Hat search engine optimsation techniques usually include one or more of the following characteristics:

• Breaks search engine rules and regulations
• Creates a poor user experience because of the black hat SEO techniques utilised on the Web site
• Unethically presents content in a different visual or non-visual way to search engine spiders and search engine users.

We have listed below a brief overview of the most commonly used black hat seo tactics:

• Keyword Stuffing
• Cloaking
• Invisible Text
• Doorway Page
• Spam Page
• Interlinking
• Selling PageRank
• Buying Expired Domains

Link Building Using Online Directories

Here is an interesting e-mail received recently into the offices of Betwixt. The correspondence came from a well known online business directory (identity removed).  

Hi Paul,

We are discontinuing the xxxx section of the xxxx.com Directory.

We do appreciate the support that we have received through the years, but after an extended period of struggling to develop a viable local and online business directory, it became apparent that the number of listings were not going to reach the point where the xxxx Directory could compete with other online business directories.

Added to that was the recent crack down on paid listings by the search engines. We were advised that continuing to host our directory of business listings could be viewed as providing e-commerce sites with a back door entry page and paid links.

Despite our arguments that the xxxx section provided a valid service to our uses and clients, the algos could not be engineered to see our point of view. To avoid problems with the search engines and preserve the health of the entire xxxx.com Directory, we made the decision to eliminate the offending section.

It was not an easy decision. We realize that many of our clients depend on these listing for a steady stream of convertible traffic. Shortly after we removed the copy referring visitors to the xxxx registration pages, our Yahoo! and Google referrals improved drastically, confirming our suspicion that hosting the xxxx pages was in fact hurting our overall performance.

We had many years of hard work and development and quite a bit of revenue invested in
the xxxx.com xxxx Directory. However, under the circumstances, we really had no choice.

We do offer direct advertising, which does not truly replace the benefits of the xxxx listings, but still allows commercial sites to be an integral part of the xxxx.com Directory. If you are interested placing a text ad in the main xxxx.com Directory, please visit xxxx for additional details.

Quality Score for Google Adwords Pay-Per-Click

Many businesses who advertise with Google through their Adwords Pay-Per-Click Network are unaware of the ‘Quality Score’ elements now applied by Google.

Most marketers undestand the concept of buying/bidding for placement on search engine results pages for a flat (bid) price. In today’s world however marketers need to understand how to manage both bid prices and relevancy targeting.

Quality Score for Google 
Quality Score for Google is a dynamic metric assigned to each of your keywords. It’s calculated using a variety of factors and measures how relevant your keyword is to your ad group and to a user’s search query. The higher a keyword’s Quality Score, the lower its minimum bid and the better its ad position.

Quality Score along with quality-based minimum bids, are clear indicators that Google evaluate many factors, such as your ad text and click-through rate (CTR) to determine the minimum bid for your keyword. Recently Google have incorporated a new factor into the Quality Score – the landing page.

Tip for Increasing Your Quality Score
Add the keyword into your ad. Common sense, although you would be surprised how often this is overlooked. With the keyword in your advert, a user is more likely to click on your ad, thus increasing the click-through rate (CTR) - an important Quality Score (QS) factor.

Google Updates Information on Paid Links

We noticed a recent post on Google Blogoscoped which outlines and illustrates a change to Google’s guidance on Paid Links.  Webmasters who buy and/or sell links to boost (Google) PageRank on their website need to take heed of the following:

OLD
“Buying links in order to improve a site’s ranking is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”

NEW
“Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”

Further information and assistance for webmasters can be found over at the Google Webmaster Help Center.