SEO for Small Business: Easy SEO Strategies to Get Your Website Discovered on Google (2015)
Chapter 3. GO VIRAL
If you are familiar with the phrase “Is the dress blue or gold?” or any one of a large number of cat videos, then you’re probably familiar with the concept of viral content on the Internet. Whether content goes viral depends on two important factors: the quality of the content, and how it’s shared. These days, the majority of viral content sharing is done through social media networks. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and other platforms allow for quick and easy sharing. So to reach the ultimate SEO goal of going viral, it’s critical to have an active social media presence. But first let’s look at several strategies you can use to enhance the quality of your content, making it more likely to be shared in the first place.
AMAZING INTERACTIVE ELEMENTS
Interactive elements include features such as infographics, as well as interactive tools and games. Social media is also considered interactive. People enjoy engaging with these components on a site because it personalizes the experience for them. Sites with interactive elements are favored by users, and are likely to gain higher search engine rankings as a result.
CREATING INFOGRAPHICS
People have been creating infographics ever since we discovered we could draw on boulders and cave walls. The ancient Egyptians’ hieroglyphics were a kind of infographics—images used to tell a story in a way that was both informative and beautiful.
In contemporary terms, an infographic is, essentially, a chart or graph that categorizes, tracks, or explains data. The term linkbait or clickbait is sometimes used to describe infographics, because they are designed with the goal of being visually appealing and eminently shareable. Science, math, statistics of all sorts, and depictions of data that fluctuate over time are subjects that lend themselves well to this type of treatment.
Including quality infographics on a site goes far beyond simply compiling data into a visual format. Infographics engage visitors and are considered interactive when they involve details such as mouseovers (scrolling over an area shows a picture, or provides additional data), panning out, or zooming in. Infographics are often colorful, and put a lot of information into a concise form that invites users to view them, then process the information to reach conclusions on their own. As we’ve already learned, shareable, popular, and interactive media build links. Creating effective clickbait can make the difference between your site going largely unnoticed, and a surge in traffic and social media attention. Simply put, Clickbait rules social media.
The best infographics meet the following criteria:
They are able to stand alone. You should not need to add additional images or copy outside the borders of the graphic to explain it further or make your point clear. You may include a text summary, however, making sure to include keywords that will get your page crawled and indexed.
They present information in a concise way that improves comprehension. If you think of a complete article, it’s often written to center around a few large ideas, then examples, descriptions, and sundry details are added to “fluff” the content into a fleshed-out story. Infographics pull out the large ideas, bring them to the viewer’s attention, then use visual cues or pictures to fill in the descriptive elements.
They carry a message. As with the most engaging charts and graphs, a central theme or lesson holds all the data together. In a well-created infographic, the takeaway message is obvious.
They are appealing to the eye. Jarring color schemes, hard-to-read fonts, and tiny print do not make for shareable graphics. If you are finding it difficult to fit all your copy on the infographic without using a miniscule font, consider what you need to say, then edit it down to make that point clear in fewer words. These interactive elements should be short, to the point, and fun to engage with. When your readers have to squint at their phones or computer screens to read your infographic, they are not having fun.
They have their own pages. For both aesthetic purposes and efficiency in page loading times, infographics often work best when they have their own designated pages within your website.
FIGURE 3.1 Detail from “The Hidden Value of Long Tail SEO” infographic. See the full version at www.bitrebels.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/long-tail -seo-guide-infographic.png.
OPTIMIZING YOUR INFOGRAPHICS FOR SEO
Infographics are meant to be appealing, engaging, and sharable, and there are a few points to keep in mind that will go a long way toward turning your visuals into viral superstars.
•Infographics that function with, or are accompanied by HTML, CSS, and image files can be crawled more easily.
•Avoid large file sizes that take a long time to load—don’t leave your visitors waiting.
•Make a catchy title for your element, preferably with a relevant keyword.
•Devote a whole page to your infographic. Otherwise, it could overwhelm the appearance of other copy on the page, look cluttered, or simply not fit.
•Summaries, overviews, and additional copy outside the borders of the infographic can make that page more crawlable. These added pieces should be brief, concise, and allow the visual element to be the star of the page.
•You may include the address of your website on the infographic. If this graphic goes viral and ends up with a multitude of backlinks, interested users can then see where it originally came from and visit your site using the URL.
CREATING AN INTERACTIVE CONTENT STRATEGY
Interactive content is more than just infographics and visual details. Maps that allow the user to input locations and receive region-specific results are great examples of interactive elements, as are polls and games. All social media that involves making personal profiles and sharing content are interactive. Websites with these added components are an SEO goldmine. So how can you make your site more interactive?
•Adding reader comment sections under blog posts allows followers to actively participate in the site content by discussing posts, asking questions, and, in a sense, contributing to the site itself.
•Polls serve the dual purpose of both engaging users and learning about what they like, need, or want to see more of. Use polls to ask about their interests, their demographics, and how they landed on your site.
•Newsletters can be sent through emails to people who subscribe to your site or follow you on social media. Links included in the newsletters give readers the opportunity to click through to different site content and provide extra locations for you to include videos, audio profiles, polls, or games.
•Anything that can be personalized, should be. For example, if you have a website that sells women’s clothing, interactive elements in your emails, newsletters, social media, and website could match customers with a “build-a-style” profile that takes their measurements and preferences, and provides suggestions for outfit combinations.
Interactive tools and games offer opportunities for building additional site copy and content. For example, you can always reuse the data on an infographic to create a text-focused blog post or conventional article. Just because the infographic or media piece makes its point does not mean you cannot expand on it to develop even more useful material. Always keep in the mind that the goal of SEO is to spread as much relevant content as possible across as many channels as you can.
SETTING UP AN XML SITEMAP
A sitemap plans out all the crawlable pages on a website. Sitemaps send search engines significant details about updates and information about hierarchy, or which pages are more important. There are a number of services available to help you build your sitemap. Google recommends www.xml-sitemaps.com.
SEO-FRIENDLY URLS
URL is the abbreviation for Uniform Resource Locator—your Internet address. A URL is a series of letters, numbers, and/or symbols of 2,048 characters or fewer that enable computers to get in touch with servers. They are what we type into our browser’s navigation bar to reach a website, and describe to search engines what content is on a page.
As with most aspects of site optimization, clarity, user friendliness, and simplicity are desirable for creating searchable, SEO-favorable Web addresses. URLs that describe in easily readable language—especially using keywords—what a user will find on a page can have an advantage simply because those addresses make sense and seem relevant to people surfing the Web. Research by Microsoft has found that people often choose which pages to click on based on URLs that match page titles and seem relevant to their queries.
Excessive and deliberate overuse of keywords, or URLs that seem discordant with the title tags that show up on a SERP, can make a Web address seem spammy and less clickable. While keywords are a great way to attract people to your site, cramming a lot of them into a URL can be counterproductive.
Shorter URLs are preferred to longer ones, because they are less unwieldy and easier to remember. Since Web addresses often get copied and pasted as a way of linking and sharing, the longer the address, the easier it is for user error to creep in. While copying a URL, the user may accidentally miss a letter—or three—at the end of the address, resulting in a broken link. Since broken links lead users nowhere and cannot be crawled, they also fail to increase traffic and are unable to be successfully indexed. Short URLs are easy to remember and simple to copy and paste into social media, emails, and other Web sites.
STATIC VS. DYNAMIC URLS
URLs come in two variations: static and dynamic. Both types can be searched and indexed by search engine bots, but there are a few things you should keep in mind to maximize the SEO benefits of each.
Dynamic URLs are used when a site’s content is pulled from a database to be delivered to an individual user at the moment they request it. Dynamic content is variable, changes often, and may even be slightly different from visitor to visitor. For example, an e-commerce site that sells shoes and wants to display a constantly rotating stock of merchandise on their front page may use a dynamic URL. Certain sites can also make the same content available at different URLs by using session IDs or other URL parameters. A session ID is a string of numbers added to a URL path, creating a custom page for the particular user who’s looking at it. On a shoe website, for example, you may be able to filter by shoe type, size, color, or brand. These filters appear as parameters to the original URL, often containing a jumble of letters, numbers, and symbols such as question marks and ampersands.
RESEARCHING THE COMPETITION
You can learn a lot from a Google search of sites similar to your own. See what rises to the top of the results page and examine how their URLs are put together. Are their Web addresses primarily dynamic, or are they static? Dynamic Web addresses frequently include questions marks, so look for this clue when doing your research on URLs.
Dynamic URLs are best for frequently updated sites such as online shops, blogs, and content management systems. Static URLs identify and locate content that does not change. These URLs usually look neater, with a few keywords, sometimes separated by hyphens. Static addresses have generally been thought of as easier to be crawled by search engines, but Google has made progress in that area, and you can always use their URL Parameters tool to tell a search bot how to filter through the URL’s parameters.
Static URLs have somewhat of an advantage in terms of clickthrough rates, because they’re easier for users to read. While you can sometimes remove noncrucial parameters to make your dynamic URL look nicer, it’s not recommended. Editing your dynamic URL to make it appear static may cause search engines to miss valuable information. Instead, the key is to keep your URL short—and let the spiders do the rest.
WINNING ON SOCIAL MEDIA
We’ve discussed the significance of social media throughout this book, but now it’s time to focus on the specifics. Major social networking sites offer huge opportunity for reaching a large audience quickly and easily—as well as the potential for your original audience to share your content with others, thus expanding your network of online followers.
Social media can be defined as any interactive site where people come together to share links and information in a fast-paced and constantly changing way. Networking hubs such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are generally concerned with what is going on right now. As these resources have evolved, individuals have come to rely on them for up-to-the-minute news and information about topics that interest them.
The social media workhorses that have achieved outstanding Google ratings include:
•YouTube
•Tumblr
Other smaller, niche sites exist to connect communities of users who have more specific interests. They include Catster and Dogster for pet lovers, Goodreads for voracious readers, BlogHer for women who blog, and many others. Reddit has steadily gained popularity among IT aficionados and those who work in the tech industry.
Since people choose their friends and make personalized profiles on these sites, content they are shown is easily customizable. So what we see on social media depends on who or what we “follow” and what links, graphics, or articles our friends post, share, or “reblog.” This allows active members to filter out much of the material they find irrelevant and would not choose to read or interact with.
FIGURE 3.2 Social Marketing for SEO
BUILDING A SHAREABLE ONLINE PORTFOLIO
Freelancers, and even business entrepreneurs working in fields such as the arts, design, consulting, and—of course—technology, should not underestimate the importance of a portfolio that can be linked and liked on social media platforms. If you work as a contractor doing residential electrical wiring and just one happy customer shares your profile with their friend network, accompanied by a glowing review, your business can effectively be marketed to hundreds of people in the blink of an eye—or, more accurately, the click of a share.
The added traffic that happy customers direct to your website, as well as the new source of reputable backlinking, can help bump you up in search engine ratings. This will make it even more likely for individuals searching for electrical installation services in your region to easily find your website without necessarily needing to see a referral, link, or social media share.
Social media sites serve as their own types of search engines, in the sense that people use them to find new types of information, products, and services constantly, all day long, every day. As a well-positioned and authoritative entity in its own right, strong rankings on Facebook equal strong rankings on the Web, period.
When people visit your professional Web portfolio or social media profiles, they should find:
Relevant information: If you own a store or restaurant, what are your hours, phone number, and address?
Mission statement: What do you do? Why do you exist?
Attractive images: Show pictures of what you offer, your employees, your happy customers, or yourself at work. People like to see representations of what they will be getting. It’s reassuring, and establishes your brand.
Branding: Every single thing you post on a portfolio or social network has the potential to contribute to your branding. The content and mood of your posts should represent how you want your customers to view the overall identity of your business. For example, if your small business installs solar panels, posting pictures of your employees participating in a litter pick-up day or planting trees will help develop your brand online.
USING SOCIAL SHARING BUTTONS
Online portfolios should include embedded links to social media. This enables your visitors to quickly like and share your information. These links are typically square or rectangular buttons featuring social media logos, and can be found in the headers, footers, or sidebars of your favorite sites. Place them so they are visible and easy to find on each page, but not overwhelming or ugly.
Facebook, arguably the axis on which contemporary social media culture revolves, took an old standby of positive affirmation, the thumbs-up, and made it into an icon. Literally. The thumbs-up has become synonymous with an on-page, clickable button that indicates content users enjoy viewing, would like to see more of, or would recommend to their friends. The thumbs-up button is commonly placed on websites as a hyperlink, along with the option to “like us on Facebook.” Web-savvy marketers, understanding the power of social media, do not pass up the opportunity to garner more and more likes on this networking superpower.
FIGURE 3.3 Social media buttons bar
Google+
Due in part to the ubiquity of the Google name, Google+ appeared on the scene in 2011. At first glance, Google+ seems like many other social media platforms—it allows users to share Web-based articles, videos, and media among users. Contacts are imported through users’ Google accounts and organized into friend “circles.” However, unlike other social media platforms, Google+ enables users to organize circles by specific interests, grouping individuals into communities. In other words, if you have interests in both cooking and reading, you can decide whom to share your posts with so that the people in your reading group won’t have to see your posts on your latest attempt at creating the perfect pasta bolognese.
For a time, Google+ members whose sites appeared on SERPs had their Google+ profile names and photos displayed, through Google, next to their links on results pages. The photo feature was discontinued in 2014, due to a general desire to reduce the appearance of clutter on SERPs. However, names remain on title tags. A byline is never a bad thing, and this kind of branding can contribute to the growing phenomenon of Internet celebrities—people whose faces, personalities, or work goes viral. Instead of likes, G+ features the +1 symbol.
On Twitter, users both tweet about what they’re doing and get tweets from people they choose to follow. Ideas, news, gossip, and teasers are broadcast via tweets of 140 characters or less. These tweets can contain useful information or refer users to other media outlets where they can access additional material about a topic. Google indexes tweets so that when people or entities who are also active tweeters are searched by Internet users, links to their Twitter accounts will appear on SERPS. Google is biased toward Twitter users who have huge numbers of followers. Celebrities and world-famous organizations with a million or more followers are more likely to see their tweets indexed. However, creating optimized Twitter content carries great marketing and branding potential for everyone. As your business, fan base, or audience grows, so does the possibility of indexing based on tweets. Keyword-rich tweets are more likely to be indexed. The first 42 characters of your entry will show up on the title tag, so keep it snappy and make it memorable.
Pinterest is an image-focused network where users “pin” pictures that appeal to them, as well as products they are interested in purchasing or learning about. Pinned images can include anything from colorful food displays, to cute disposable diapers, to as-seen-on-TV gadgets. Account settings on Pinterest carry a “search privacy” option, which can be clicked off to allow search engines to have access to your information. Business accounts are available for entrepreneurs, and optimizing these professional Pinterest boards involves using your business’s full name in both titles and your URL. A brief “About” section will allow you to describe your offerings in a 200-words keyword-heavy paragraph. Using the 500-character limit, try to describe each of your pins with concise, natural-sounding language that incorporates keywords.
FIGURE 3.4 Niche social networking sites bring together people who share specific interests. Goodreads is a popular network for avid readers. It enables individuals to leave comments about books they have read, in a running dialogue format. Some Goodreads pages for books include excerpts.
WEB 2.0 BLOGS
The term Web 2.0 refers to user-generated content. Examples include all social networks, file-sharing sites, forums, and message board communities, as well as blogs. While the Internet has always been considered a venue for people to gather, write, communicate, and build virtual communities, improvements in the use of RSS has helped propel interactive web-based media from largely static content to the dynamic content that blogs and social media depend on for rapid updates.
RSS stands for Rich Site Summary, also known as live web. It’s a format for delivering constantly changing Web content directly to users. Readers subscribe to the RSS feeds of sites they are interested in, so they do not have to check these sites for new pages or blogs; that information is automatically downloaded and saved for them. RSS uses mobile-friendly technology, such as Facebook alerts sent directly to users’ phones. You can find free tools available online, such as Dapper or Yahoo! Pipes, that will help you convert Web pages to RSS feeds. Often, all that is required is copying and pasting a desired URL into the tool, which will then generate the feed automatically. Some services are more complex, or give the user more control over what content is delivered to the feed.
FORUMS AND MESSAGE BOARDS
Online forums and message boards form around groups of people with shared interest in a particular topic. People can participate on boards that discuss sports, knitting, finance, politics, pets, cooking, housekeeping, or nutrition. There is not a topic out there that you will not be able to find some type of forum built around. For example, if you do a Google search about a type of medicine you have been prescribed, that medication’s website will pop up among the top listings, and you are also likely to see some message board links where people discuss their experiences using it. Like social media, people are always contributing to active boards and the conversations may be updated frequently.
If you’re looking to promote your niche-interest website or product, forums can offer a good opportunity for self-promotion, linking, increasing social media contacts, and establishing yourself as an authority on your subject matter. Just as in real life town hall–type meetings, message board community members come to depend upon certain individuals’ personas, backgrounds, and knowledge to carry on conversations, refer others to useful resources, and develop the culture of the forum. Forums can take on a life of their own, and sometimes people who meet on these message boards become real-life friends, mentors, or clients.
In the same way that well-known social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter allow site owners to market their wares and spread their messages, forums encourage people with common interests to build constructive relationships centered around learning and working online. From an SEO standpoint, any form of networking carries great potential, and message boards are no different.
SITE DIRECTORIES
Website directories might be thought of as contemporary versions of the Yellow Pages. Editors or webmasters review and catalogue Web addresses alphabetically according to what types of information they provide and how useful it appears to be. The sites that are stored in directories are grouped together by subject matter, and links must be changed within their categories by hand. A webmaster must add, remove, or alter links when they are outdated or no longer relevant, so some sites found through directories can become outdated quickly, but still remain active through the directory.
Site directories have a long history in the online world, and have been valuable resources for targeted Web browsing since before search engines came into casual use. Older directories are respected by Google, have achieved strong search engine positioning, and provide backlinking opportunities that will increase traffic flow.
PRESS RELEASES
There was a time when press releases held a respected spot in the arsenal of many SEO gurus. Distributing a press release on online newswires could result in that release receiving attention (and links) on high-ranking news outlets. As people realized how powerful this was, they churned out more and more releases of varying quality and relevance. To say that there was an oversaturation is an understatement. It became more difficult to separate real news from marketing hype, and highly biased online “news” services gave the good old press release a bad name.
Despite this reputation, press releases still have some value in SEO. With newer innovations in personalized search results, which show tailored results based on user history and preferences, relevant press releases are more likely to find their way to the appropriate interested parties. Well-written and keyword-smart copy always has the potential to earn links, attract followers, and get the word out. But be aware this method is simply not as effective as it once was.
With RSS and more people receiving mobile alerts and feeds from sites that interest them, site owners are likely to receive more immediate benefit from creating well-written newsletters and emails to send directly to their subscribers. These can include press release–type information about new products, launch dates, events, and any exciting or fresh news relating to your company or site. Feeding valuable details to people who already know and like your offerings provides bursts of traffic, additional backlinking opportunities, and social media shares.