Category Archives: SEO

Preparing your website content for Google’s Hummingbird algorithm

With voice-to-text going mainstream on mobile phones and tablet PCs, more and more people will be using longer search expressions – something like asking questions in natural language – rather than using smaller keywords and search terms. Google’s Hummingbird Algorithm takes care of this rapidly evolving search trend even for its primary web search engine. It’s the biggest algorithm update since 2009. This was the time when they introduced “Caffeine”. The recent update, according to Google, impacts around 90% of the searches.

How does it affect your search engine rankings? How should you prepare your website content for this new ranking algorithm?

Isn’t it similar to what we have already been talking about, the longtail search traffic? To an extent, yes, but the Hummingbird algorithm uses the intelligence Google has been able to gather over all these years drawing inferences and conclusions according to the language used by its users. This Search Engine Land example illustrates it better []:

“What’s the closest place to buy the iPhone 5s to my home?” A traditional search engine might focus on finding matches for words — finding a page that says “buy” and “iPhone 5s,” for example.

Hummingbird should better focus on the meaning behind the words. It may better understand the actual location of your home, if you’ve shared that with Google. It might understand that “place” means you want a brick-and-mortar store. It might get that “iPhone 5s” is a particular type of electronic device carried by certain stores. Knowing all these meanings may help Google go beyond just finding pages with matching words.

In particular, Google said that Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query — the whole sentence or conversation or meaning — is taken into account, rather than particular words. The goal is that pages matching the meaning do better, rather than pages matching just a few words.

Creating your content for Google’s Hummingbird algorithm

The best way of creating content for Google’s Hummingbird algorithm is not to create content for that and just focus on quality and the message that you want to deliver to your visitors. As you can read in the above quoted text, Google will no longer focus on keywords; taking care that it processes the entire meaning of the query or the long search expression that the user has used in a natural language. So if you search for, “Where can I find a content writer for my web design company around my area?” Google will try to find information exactly according to this question rather than simply throwing a page containing “content writer”, “web design company” and “my area”. This is because sometimes people randomly create articles and blog posts to cover different keywords without meaning to convey what actually needs to be conveyed. In order to find such information Google already has data about the user so “my area” is already known to Google and it throws up results accordingly.

To further stress the point – chucking the keyword business out – every search on Google will be secure now so the various analytics tools won’t be able to find out for which keywords you get your traffic.

So if you want to leverage Google’s Hummingbird algorithm prepare meaningful content that provides the right information to your prospective visitors. Don’t just create pages and blog posts for the sake of using your keywords. Here are a few things to focus on:

Concentrate on answering particular queries and questions: Provide answers in a human language without overtly worrying about keywords. Keywords are important, after all they are words people are going to use, but they must relate to each other and they must make a sense according to the query being made or the question being asked. Remember that your keywords, your language should satisfy the context. According to the new algorithm, quality really matters along with the context.
Be more specific with the title: Titles of your blog posts and webpages are still important. It hasn’t been proven what impact they will have according to the new algorithm, but it’s better to create them according to the expressions you expect people to use in order to find information that you are trying to impart.
Develop your authorship influence: This has direct relationship with the quality of content that you publish on your own website, on social networking websites and on other forums. As an authority on your subject people respect you, watch for your content and share your content among their peers. This increases your influence and makes your content more trustworthy.

Again, creating content around probable questions and queries doesn’t mean you resort to creating content that doesn’t really have a meaning but repeats these queries and questions again and again. Focus on meaningfulness and provide real value. Google’s Hummingbird algorithm works on understanding the entire meaning of your page rather than individual keywords and search terms.

Image source

What type of content should you publish for an effective link building campaign?

Leave a reply

Content writing for link building

Link building is an important part of improving your SEO because it helps Google gather all the “real” recommendations and validations and then evaluate your website or blog accordingly.

You can call it ranking outsourcing.

What is link building?

Link building explained

Many online marketers and SEO experts confuse link building with getting lots of websites to link to your website.

Although, in theory, this is the exact meaning, actually what it means is, having so much valuable content that people want to link to you as a good source of information, or any other form of valuable derivation.

Google, and also some other search engines, realized that it is very easy to manipulate search engines because after all they are a collection of algorithms, and whenever you have algorithms, you always have people who can beat them.

So they started taking human help.

In order to improve your rankings, it is important that more and more people link to your website in appreciation of the content you have published.

Benefits of link building

As mentioned above, search engines like Google want some sort of validation. If many people are linking to you, the search engines assume that you must be publishing great content. This is one reason.

The second reason is that link building creates multiple traffic streams for you. Once you have traffic coming from different sources you no longer solely have to depend on search engine traffic.

Finally, it helps you reach out to more people and people begin to recognize you as an authority figure.

Pitfalls of link building

Pitfalls of content marketing

Link building is a double-edged sword – it can work in your favor and as you must have seen after Penguin and Panda updates, it can also bring disaster to you. It all depends on with what intention people link to you.

So while you’re working on your link building campaign, make sure that your links don’t come from spammy websites because this can totally drop your search engine rankings instead of improving them. Another indication that you may be running a less than legitimate link building campaign is suddenly lots of links coming to you within a few hours or a couple of days. This can also adversely impact your search engine rankings.

From where does content come in and why it is important

As I have repeatedly written on this website don’t create content for just link building and SEO. Your content should provide information about your business or organization. It should explain what your products and services stand for and how your customers and clients benefit from them. The compelling and great traits of your website content are:

It addresses concerns of your prospective customers and clients
It establishes you as an authority
It provides information about your business or organization
It turns your website or blog into a specialized source of information
It gives Google and other search engines more pages and blog posts to crawl, index and rank
It helps you create buzz on social media

Quality content leads to legitimate link building

Since the basic purpose of taking backlinks into consideration while ranking your website is to know how valuable your content is, the most natural way of building back links is creating that valuable content.

Suppose you sell Samsung mobile phones from your website. Do you merely list your inventory or do you also regularly publish blogs and articles explaining why people should purchase these mobile phones, what their salient features are, how they fare better compared to other brands and how various problems can be solved once people start using these phones. Explain to them how they can increase the battery life of their mobile phones, how they can upgrade their operating systems, from where they can get useful apps, how they can make various configurations, and such. This way, whenever someone wants to link to a website containing comprehensive information on Samsung mobile phones, he or she will know it’s your website.

Instead of approaching bloggers and webmasters to link back to you just so that you can improve your search engine rankings (it never works), create enough quality content to encourage them to link to you on their own. This is the real way of link building.

But how do they know about your content? In order to link to your content, first of all they have to find it.

This is where blogger outreach and social media interactions can help you. Initially, when you don’t enjoy good search engine rankings (due to various reasons) it will be difficult for people to find your content and then link to it if they appreciate it. Interact with more and more people on social media, on blogs and on online forums. Don’t just wait for things to happen. You will have to create a schedule. You may even have to hire people to increase your level of networking and interaction. Whenever you create a new blog post or a new article on your website, post it on Facebook, Twitter and Google plus. Encourage people to read it. Pitch your links whenever you think it makes sense (again, don’t spam people’s timelines and blog comment sections).

Why it’s important to search engine optimize your content

Leave a reply

Lee Odden in a blog post titled The Truth About Content Marketing and SEO aptly says:

What good is great content if no one can find it? How useful is findable content when it doesn’t engage and persuade?

and then he says:

The only thing worse than no SEO at all, is ALL SEO.

This is where we have to be very careful. Most content writers and content marketers don’t know where to draw the line.

My main point of interest is the first highlight, that what’s the use of writing and publishing great content if nobody knows of its existence, if nobody is able to find it?

If you are popular, no matter how lousy and senseless your content is, it’s going to rank well; I’ve seen it myself. Being popular means more people link to you, more people talk about you and more people are going to share and forward your updates.

But what if you are not popular? What if nobody knows you and nobody even cares what you write and publish? You need to build your presence from ground up, and this you do by not only creating great content, but also creating it in such manner that search engines can easily crawl it and rank it for the right keywords. This is where search engine optimization helps you.

Of course you shouldn’t obsess about it. Excess is always bad and the same goes for SEO. You may like to go through the following links on the same topic:

Why you can’t ignore content marketing as an SEO expert

Leave a reply

The title of this blog post comes with a touch of irony. I address you as an SEO expert and then I try to explain why you cannot ignore content marketing. But it is not a complete irony – I still come across well-meaning SEO professionals who think that content is important, but it is optional and good search engine rankings don’t necessarily depend on good content. So this blog post is for them.

You may also like to read Why SEO companies are putting more stress on content writing?.

What exactly is SEO? Is it merely getting good search engine rankings? I remember once a client came to my office and requested me to set his website as my homepage so that every time I loaded my browser, it would increase his visitors count. I asked him what he was trying to achieve by that, and he said, it would instill confidence in his other visitors. When I asked him what effect a higher visitor count had made to his business, he flatly said, “None.” SEO hadn’t become a buzzword back then and nobody on this planet had heard of social media.

Why your SEO needs a healthy dose of content marketing?

I’m not an SEO expert but over the past 12 years that I have spent eking out a living on the Internet I have found out that there are 4 things that decide your search engine rankings

The quality of your content
General well-being of your website
The quality of your incoming links
The level of competition you face

The recent addition, the fifth thing that has an impact on your search engine rankings, is your author rank – how much social relevance your name enjoys on the Internet.

The relation between content marketing and SEO

What are people doing when they are using the search engines? They are looking for content in the form of information or entertainment. They seek information to keep them aware, to educate themselves, for researching, to find product or service they need, and to make good buying decisions.

Suppose you get good rankings for “garden sprinkling system” but when people come to your website they cannot make out what you are trying to do. The content is not convincing. Or it is full of errors. Maybe you haven’t highlighed the greatest benefits of the sprinkling system. Are you merely providing information or you want people to buy from you? And if they should buy from you then why? Just because you have got good search engine rankings or your sprinkling system is actually better than the others? People don’t do business because of your search engine rankings; they buy from you when your written content, your copywriting, is able to engage them and convince them.

This is just one aspect of content marketing. Once you have written credible and convincing content you also need to make it accessible to as many prospective visitors as possible.

The relationship between content marketing and quality incoming links

The days of paid links are gone, or going. Google heavily penalizes websites that aggregate incoming links by either paying for them or through link-exchange schemes. People should link to you for the value you provide, in terms of content or branding. Two legitimate ways of getting quality and reliable incoming links are:

Website owners, authors and bloggers voluntarily linking to you
You write for other websites and blogs and your link appears in the small bio or profile on the same link as credit

In both the cases you need high-quality content. If people voluntarily link to you then they must find something worth linking to. If you write for other blogs and websites then too, they won’t publish your blog posts and articles unless they are of a certain standard.

So you can see, whether you are focusing on onsite or off-site SEO, ultimately it’s the combination of the quality of your content and a well-coordinated content marketing strategy that decides what sort of search engine rankings you are going to experience.

What sort of content gets you good Google rankings?

Leave a reply

You create content for your users and visitors, and not for search engines, and this is a good strategy. But it does you no harm, if Google likes your content too. This blog post on Copyblogger talks in detail how Google these days gives more importance to the quality of content rather than its quantity or the number of websites and blogs linking to it.

Despite scores of updates by the end of the day Google wants to present high-quality content to its users. What makes your content high-quality? If you are able to create and publish such content it not only pleases your visitors it also pleases search engines like Google.

The primary attributes of high-quality content are:

It is informative
It is topical
It is useful
It is relevant
It is well-written and well-formatted
It is engaging

How do you achieve these attributes? To be frank I never like to put content writing within various boxes, but according to tried and tested observations, the following types of content can get you good Google rankings aside from pleasing your audience.

Compilation of useful resources

There is a ton of useful information on the Internet but people either don’t have enough time to scour the web or don’t have the right tool to reach the right content. Why don’t you provide quality resources within one single blog post or article? Something like “50 Killer Tips On Content Writing From Best Writers On the Web”, or “15 SEO Resources You Cannot Live without”. These types of articles and blog posts rank well on Google because they pack lots of information at a single place and this information can actually help its users.

A list of things

The year 2012 was often called the year of lists in the circle of content writers because practically everybody was creating them and almost every list was going viral on social networking websites. This also fetched them higher search engine rankings. Lists still do great because, again, they provide lots of useful information at a single place. An example of a useful list would be “25 Ways to Lose Weight Without Eating Less”.

Product or service reviews

Well-balanced useful reviews help your reader decide what they should purchase and how they should spend their money. Therefore, this sort of content is highly useful and relevant. Often it is also vertically focused and hence easier for Google to rank.

Interviews with industry leaders

Interviewing industry leaders not only provides highly valuable insight to your readers, it also increases your search engine rankings naturally. Most of the industry leaders these days publish their own blogs. They already enjoy high rankings on Google. They have hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter and fans on Facebook. When you publish an interview of one of them he or she will surely mention it on Twitter and Facebook and if you’re very lucky he or she might also create a small blog post linking back to your interview. This will give you an immediate boost over Google.

Content that goes viral on social media and social networking websites

All types of content, including the ones mentioned above, can go viral on social media and social networking websites such as Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus, and there is no set formula. Again, the key is, creating highly useful content that people would like to share. You can also create attractively presented infographics.

News

Industry-specific news is quickly picked up by Google because millions of people are constantly looking for such information.

This is just a broad representation of the sort of content you can create for your website or blog in order to improve your Google rankings that are immune to the various algorithmic updates the search engine keeps on introducing every few months.