In the presentation I covered the basic understanding of how SEO, Social Media and Pay Per Click can play an intricate role in building a photography business online. Some good questions came from the group after the presentation so clearly our photographers in Cape Town have a growing knowledge of web based marketing. The big takeaways from the evening are the need for links and basic strategies behind link building (competitor analysis being the focus). We shouldn’t be focused on directory links but rather building solid relationships with others in the industry. The other is to understand the return on investment, that 1.5% of traffic are going to convert, well that is the benchmark at least. We should be trying to increase this percentage to at least 5%.

I’ll hopefully have the audio for you to listen to as well. Our technicians are working on this..

Over the last two weeks or so Google has changed its algorithms slightly; or at least we think so. Those who know the basics about SEO know that title tags and incoming links (anchor text) are important. Title tags are still very important for on-site optimisation and I can’t see that changing anytime soon. The areas in which changes have occurred are with visitor tracking within the website, and from the source of the incoming links.

Site Performance: For those highly competitive keywords that you are targeting, measuring a website’s speed is an important aspect of SEO if you want to beat your competitors.  When you look at short tail keywords such as cars, property, news etc, they are all highly competitive keywords having thousands of searches per day. If we said that there are 100 000 searches per keyword with an average CTR (click through rate) of 75%, you would need to return this page at an average of 250 milliseconds to be able to handle the load for optimal speed and efficiency. If you return at a rate over 1000 milliseconds, your speed will be too slow to deliver a reasonable experience.

Bounce Rate: First let’s start with a definition of what it means. There are two possible definitions to the bounce rate:

1) The amount of time the user spends on your site. For example, if they are on the site for less than 15 seconds, it is considered a bounce.

2) The number of page views by the user during their visit to your site. For example, if they see only one page and leave, it is considered a bounce.

A search engine cannot pick up on how many pages you visit (unless, using Google as an example, they leverage the Google toolbar or Google Analytics data) but the search engine can tell if you made a query, visited a site, and came back to the search engine to make a query again five seconds later.

Do search engines use bounce as a signal? The possibility is very good. One must remember that the more data a search engine can collect, the better and they have a variety of ways in which to collect this data.

If they do use it as a signal, various filtering methods would need to be applied. For example, they would look at sites placed within the same industry. If the Nike website has a higher bounce rate than Adidas’s, it might mean that the Adidas site is a better site. However, you wouldn’t want to compare the Nike site to the Amazon website. Their target market and website goals are just too different. So search engines compare data within industry categories comparing website competitors rather than all websites as a whole.

Incoming Links: The much spoken about link building algorithm is believed to have changed slightly over the last week or two. Anchor text has always been a favourite for the popular search engine, Google but it seems to be changing. More focus is being placed on actual on-page content and title tags from where links are coming. The change is believed to have taken place because many webmasters and SEO’ers were paying for their incoming links and if one is able to buy links then they also have the power to demand what their anchor text should be. So Matt Cutts and his web spam team have possibly once again refined the Google algorithm.

Another important area for successful SEO is a RSS feed. Google is putting weight onto the amount of RSS subscribers you have. So once again a blog is critical for successful SEO. Take a moment and visit Google Webmaster Tools; you will notice that Google is following the amount of RSS subscribers. This platform can have amazing implications on the ranking of your articles.

Recently conducted tests have shown that having a large subscription can shoot your articles rankings up. It seems that having a subscribers list of over 25 will give you a competitive advantage. Again it depends on your competitors – every industry is different.

So where do we focus our SEO campaigns for the coming months? Thinking out of the box to gain incoming links is a must. Although most social media sites have the no-follow rule implemented, bloggers hang out in these communities to find quality articles that they can link to. If you are producing quality content bounce rates will be low, organic or natural linking will be easy to gain and additional social media exposure will be made possible thanks to your loyal followers. The fact remains that achieving third-party incoming links is becoming increasingly difficult, so ensuring your content is the best in your industry will put you ahead of your competition and make finding those links so much easier.

Here’s a list of areas that you should target for additional exposure:

• - Blogs
• - Social bookmarking sites, such as StumbleUpon and Digg
• - Social chat engines, such as Twitter
• - Facebook — eventually things will be crawlable by search engines!

The more refined search engine algorithms become, naturally the better the search engine results will also get. With Matt Cutts and his team of spam killers doing such a good job at devaluing ‘Page Rank‘ to any site that adopts black hat SEO techniques, the search results are becoming more aligned to the searchers needs. We can see in the below image where internet users are clicking when they arrive on the 1st page of Google.

From position 1 to 5 the click volume decreases gradually. There is a slight showing of clicks on the right – hand column, which is Google’s Adwords (paid advertising). From positions 6 to 10 very little clicks have been detected by the heat map. The heatmap is producing the typical ‘F’ formation, which top designers implement when creating a website.

This visual heatmap explains graphically how important it is to be in the top 5 or more importantly to be #1 in Google otherwise your website is losing out in significant traffic.

In my last post, Google vs Yahoo vs MSN – Part 1, I discussed in brief the differences in what Google and Yahoo look for in a website, with regards to search engine optimisation of course.

While doing research last night on MSN’s algorithms I came across an article written in SEO Book’s website. This article covers everything one needs to know about the three major search engines. In the beginning it gives a brief overview of Google, Yahoo and MSN’s algorithm. It then goes into much more detail explaining the pros and cons of each of the three search engines.

Here’s the link: Google vs Yahoo vs MSN

I may be a bit lazy by referring you to another website but why recreate the wheel? SEO Book’s description is the best I have found on the internet and I don’t think I could of done a better job at explaining the differences. Enjoy.

With popular bloggers receiving high traffic and Google rewarding them with high page ranks, it is imperative that SEO’ers add commenting to their list of to do’s when marketing client’s websites. The ultimate link is from a post that has quality optimised links into it. This will prevent the page from losing serps after 4-7 days, which happens so often with blog posts.

Bloggers form communities between themselves, it’s a ‘you rub my back, I rub your back’ relationship i.e. if I am commenting on a blog, there is a good chance that the blogger will reciprocate by commenting on your blog (once again, providing you have worthy content to comment on).

The nofollow rule… what is this you ask? rel=”nofollow” stops search engine spiders from visiting the respective link. So if you thinking SEO then always check if it’s a nofollow comment (you can check in the page source) otherwise you are wasting your efforts.

I have found that signing up for Google Alerts – blog entries – has helped me understand client industries in more detail so my comments are becoming more relevant over time. It’s a win-win situation whether you are a webmaster or a professional search engine optimiser