SEO Advice for 2015

[Halcyon Yachts]

Does anyone have any good tips for SEO in 2015?

Many of my new clients find me through search engines. Any suggestions as to how I could improve my seo would be appreciated!

Many thanks,

Pete

 

[directmarketingadvice]

Any suggestions as to how I could improve my seo would be appreciated!

Check out this thread:

http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/threads/new-online-seo-course-by-tin.333410/

Steve

 

[branddesignexperts]

Keep reading searchengineland, searchenginejournal and moz blogs. They are following search engine algorithms quiet closely.

If your clients found you through the organic search then implement the same structure for your clients

 

[HazelC]

content content content

 

[altonroot]

content content content

What is Good content and which type content ranks? Its not necessary that good content always ranks. I think we should adopt some Hummingbird algorithm techniques to write the content. Content should include core concept of "context". Co-ocurrence, co-citation, topical and semantic search terms have now greater impacts.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Good content is stuff that is written naturally by people who know what they are writing about. get that bit right and you are half way there.

 

[neils3]

Find out what pages on your website attracts visitors, see what position they rank in Google and see what you could do to make them better to rank higher.

 

[arunthomas203]

For SEO, always content is the king. The webpage should have the targetted keywords repeated. Also backwards links are very important.

Cheers
Arun

 

[arunthomas203]

@arun that approach us a little put of date.

@msharron do you mean this approach is out dated.

 

[arunthomas203]

@msharron What would be your suggestion for SEO. What should I do to bring my website in page#1 for competitive keywords.

 

[arunthomas203]

Thanks @msharron Will check that in detail.

 

[arunthomas203]

Can you help me in the following

1. How to know backlinks of a website? I usually search in google for "link: domain [dot] com" for backlinks. Is that the best way?
2. Is there any application (preferably open source) to know the current position of keywords for our domain? I usually do with moonsy, but need an application for that to know the rankings on daily basis to generate reports

Thanks
Arun

 

[fisicx]

Entity search
Topical Ragerank
Latent semantic analysis
Outreach
Links

What are you blathering about?

Note: LSI has never worked properly. Semantic Indexing works but not LSI. The processing overhead to create the SDI matrices are beyond even Google's capacity.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Topic Sensitive PageRank has been around a LONG time and has been used a LONG time, have a read here for some interesting stuff http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~taherh/papers/topic-sensitive-pagerank.pdf .

Something people should be far more aware of but appears to have slipped under the wire was a combination of elements, mainly block level link analysis and the way google moved from a normal text based crawler to a full on visual browser.

Google know actually renders pages and uses a sub algorithm to award page rank, not only on a topical basis, but far more on a set of values based on that page rendering.

There are loads more elements that matter and I would love to go into the LSI ans emantic indexing, but I can't help burt smile as 8 years ago I had this very same conversation on a forum.

I mentioned then that certain things will change, OK it took Google 8 years to catch up and do what I predicted with block level link analysis and page rendering but bless em they got there in the end

http://www.smallbusinessbrief.com/forum/showthread.php?t=9594

Oh and this is where it all started really. http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/Google-Buys-Applied-Semantics-16713.asp Google bought them for Adwords, but pretty quickly the organic guys wanted a large slice and pulled semantic relevance into their algorithm. I argued for years that on topic links were worth more and was told I was talking pony poo

 

[arunthomas203]

@msharron thanks a lot.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Structured data is an essential part of SEO, the simple success of normalising name Address Telephone data across the web shows how much weight Google places on it.

The Patents pretty much the basis for the Google trust rank, which they also included manually seeded 'authority hubs' (based on the HITS algorithm modified) http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/html/htmledition/hubs-and-authorities-1.html This is one reason why linking out to quality sites lifts you, while linking out to poor resources hurts you.

I hope that anwered the actual question you asked and that I haven't got the wrong end of the stick

 

[fisicx]

@fisicx would you be up for a skype chat or phone call to swap some ideas next week?

OK...

But read up on SI (or Semantic Annotation) and LSI first and you will see the clear difference between the two. One is about the assigning of entity metadata to entity descriptions and the other uses singular value decomposition to create a series of matrices. Both have been extensively researched and are mathematically possible but they are not the same thing.

 

[UKSBD]

Semantics is more about them than us.

It's not so much about deciphering what is on our pages but more about deciphering what the searcher has searched for.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

In the early days I often mixed up the two a bit.

The process of it is great in theory, but when you look at processing power you realise that it just isn't possible to put into practice on a live search, so it has to be broken down into stages. LSI is the method for equating 'distance relationships' to keywords and groups of keywords.

Google are getting a LOT better at it a search for 'bridal gowns' showing 'wedding dresses' bolded out shows you the algorithm understands these terms are close enough as to be deemed the same.

This of course is another reason for penguin picking up un-natural linking patterns.

 

[fisicx]

As UKSBD says, it's all about what the search engines do with the data, it's not something you can influence (in any meaningful way). And as OWG says, to even fully semantically annotate the billions of webpages would grind the indexing propcess to a halt. LSI even more so as its all about the meaning of things rather than just the realtionship between entities.

 

[UKSBD]

It's why the heavily targeted niches lose rankings.

It's not that Google is penalising these, they are just getting cleverer at distinguishing what the searcher is searching for.

Using OWG example of Wedding Dresses

A site heavily targeting that exact phrase would rank well for someone doing an exact search

As Google gets cleverer at understanding searchers looking for similar phrases are still looking for Wedding Dresses it dilutes the power of the site that is heavily targeting the phrase.

Basically what this means is all the sites that are selling Bridal Gowns which are better than your site will start to outrank you for Wedding Dresses

 

[OldWelshGuy]

yes, I have and have always used the term 'dragging yourself into a cluster' as clusters is a word many people can grasp. I normally explain it as Google will cluster sites for a search term and if you are not careful you can end up in the wrong cluster (Google use the term neighborhood) . trying to explain a complex system in a non complex way often means having to describe it incorrectly to a point, but once they grasp that bit, it is then possible to put more meat on the bones to correct any possible misunderstanding.

A man is judged by the company he keeps, an undercover police officer, looks to the rest of the world like a drug deal or gang member (assuming he is undercover there), and is as likely to get hurt as the rest in that gang. However if he was in uniform the relationship between him, the gang(s) and the casual observer would be completely different.

Apologies for the waffle

 

[OldWelshGuy]

It's why the heavily targeted niches lose rankings.

It's not that Google is penalising these, they are just getting cleverer at distinguishing what the searcher is searching for.

Using OWG example of Wedding Dresses

A site heavily targeting that exact phrase would rank well for someone doing an exact search

As Google gets cleverer at understanding searchers looking for similar phrases are still looking for Wedding Dresses it dilutes the power of the site that is heavily targeting the phrase.

Basically what this means is all the sites that are selling Bridal Gowns which are better than your site will start to outrank you for Wedding Dresses

And those that have anchor text and natural use of the mix of related words across their site, e.g.

bridal gowns
bridal gown
wedding dress
wedding dresses
wedding gown
wedding gowns
bridal dress
wedding attire
bridal attire
brides clothes
brides clothing
brides dress
brides gown
etc

Are more likely to survive any algorithm that is looking for unnatural linking or 'fake copy' where fake means written for a search engine for a specific phrase.

 

[fisicx]

Structured data I understand and use. What im experimenting with is seeding freebase and creating sameAs associations to trigger the knowedge graph.

And the more that people do this (for SEO) the less power it will have - Google will tweak the algo to reduce the effectiveness of the links. In exactly the same way every other great idea has been hijacked by people trying to beat the machine.

 

[UKSBD]

Freebase is shutting down and transferring data to Wikidata - https://plus.google.com/109936836907132434202/posts/bu3z2wVqcQc

 

[amac]

I searched through my bookmarks as I remembered an interesting infographic on this topic. It ranks SEO attributes though I'm unsure who the source is or how accurate it is. Nevertheless, I think it's clear there's two really important things; social, and website structure. If you get these right, you will perform well.

 

[iiisark]

To get noticed by both - SE and visitors you have to offer something your competitors don't. For example if you run a moving company, you can create Moving cost calculator, How-to guides & Moving checklists...Good useful content is and always will be the magic ingredient to marketing success. Apart from great content make sure you have clean site architecture and design so users can easily find what they're looking for. Also Importance of social signals is increasing with time so building a strong social-media presence is a good way to go. That will not only help you with the SEO process but can also drive direct traffic to your website.

 

[StevePoster]

SEO Advice for 2015 will always be creating a content for the users, but not just content, content, content interesting and engaging content will be the best medium to reach your targeted audience. We help search engines to reach our site's content by optimizing it to the users.

 

[techielab.net]

Its all about the relativity of the content and how accurate it is!

 

[quickfirerob]

My recommendation would be to focus less on 'classic' SEO techniques and more on generating good, linkable, authority-style content. The days of cheap tricks and anything even close to resembling black-hat SEO are long gone.

Backlinks are still of value; however they need to be high quality, meaning relevant, and most importantly real. Google cracked down on a lot of private blog networks recently and took out swathes of page-one sites, so the only workable tactic is the longer (but ultimately more rewarding) road of producing solid content on a regular basis.

The harder you work, the luckier you get.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Black hat SEO is alive and kicking, hell it is as easy as ever. BUT it is for instant gain churn and burn, and can't be used for a 'business' website.

I don't do black hat for clients so please don't contact me with this regard. i DO use black hat on non commercial test sites (that I own) to test . It works just as well as ever.

 

[quickfirerob]

Interesting; I had a client try it out a year or two back (with a test site as you mention), and they said that the black hat tactics worked short-term, but over a period of six months, the rankings dropped drastically.

It seems to me that for business owners looking for long-term solutions, black hat should never be an option. Have you ever seen long-term results with black hat methods?

 

[fisicx]

Most of the junk SEO companies seem to do ok using black hat to promote themselves.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Interesting; I had a client try it out a year or two back (with a test site as you mention), and they said that the black hat tactics worked short-term, but over a period of six months, the rankings dropped drastically.

It seems to me that for business owners looking for long-term solutions, black hat should never be an option. Have you ever seen long-term results with black hat methods?

Have a read of what I wrote again as we are in agreeance. Black works on a churn and burn basis it isn't a long term viable option for a business website.

There are still a few black hat methods that work fine (my test sites haven't been hit). But I wouldn't advocate the use of BH unless it is for immediate short term one off hits and the eyes are wide open.

Again I state I am not at all interested in black hat work, negative SEO etc. It isn['t something I do other than for testing.

 

[ZeroDouble]

I hear a lot of people mention content, and I agree that you should put the best content on your site that you can, and that it should provide the best user experience possible.

I also agree that you should optimise that content for the search engines (why wouldn't you?).

However, one thing I rarely see people write is that (IMHO) unless you're in the business of building a library, the only content you should be putting on your site should be content that is going to convert (or at least work towards converting) your visitors to take the desired action.

Whether that be clicking an affiliate link, picking up the phone, filling in a form, or whatever...

I'm of the opinion that just adding content (no matter how good it is) for the sake of adding content, probably isn't going to see you get the best return on your time / investment.

 

[ZeroDouble]

It seems to me that for business owners looking for long-term solutions, black hat should never be an option. Have you ever seen long-term results with black hat methods?

I agree, using 'blackhat' methods on a branded business site is reckless and will most likely only end up badly.

However, one thing I've never understood is why it always seems to have to be 'one or the other'?

I mean, (and I'm sure that others will disagree) why can't you use every method at your disposal to promote your business - maybe have the main site that you treat with kid gloves and then a load of lead gen sites that you're a bit more aggressive with to feed you with enquiries?

 

[fisicx]

I'm of the opinion that just adding content (no matter how good it is) for the sake of adding content, probably isn't going to see you get the best return on your time / investment.

Hear Hear.

Which is why you need to plan, test and review your website content. Get rid of the bits that don't work and keep the bits that do. I want customers so I make sure the stuff I publish leads to a conversion. Which makes it good SEO advice for 2015. If your customers like it then Google will like it.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

When you sit down and decide you want a website, you then decide WHY you want a website, and decide what that site should do foir your business. (review regularly of course).

From that point on the ONLY thing that should go on your website is stuff that helps get towards the preset goals and purpose of the website. NOTHING should get in the way of the core reason for existence of your website, and every single page on the site should fit into the reason for existence.

If it doesn't, it shouldn't be there

 

[antcrid]

There are two SEO websites that i find really useful and they are searchengineland and Moz Blogs they really do come in handy.

 

[mike fouse]

Hi All
I have found this thread very interesting but also think most of what has been discussed will go over the average business owners head. The OP seems to have many conflicting answers to his question. There seems to be so many different view points on the best ways to beat Google that it gets very confusing for business owners to know what to do.

So I would say this, there are many ways to get BUYER traffic to a site but what happens to that traffic when it gets there should be of greater importance. Far to many companies worry about appearing on page one they seem to neglect the fundamentals of what happens to that traffic when it arrives.

There are many processes to convert a visitor into a buyer and most would be buyers will look for a review of the company or product first. All businesses big and small MUST have some form of lead capture in place. At least then you have the ability to sell to them in the future.

Whilst good content, structured inbound linking (soloing), external back linking all play an integral part in pleasing the big "G" you definitely shouldn't overlook social signals as this is one way Google can tell how popular your site/product is.

Regarding black hat methods. Never try anything out on your money site. There are many ways to use black hat methods that work extremely well not only in the short term.