If You Were An Seo Of A Large Company what would you include in your 2011 strategy?

[yordan 10]

Have a look at this video :
http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

If you were an in-house SEO of an advanced level, within a large corporation, what 3 things would you make sure you had included in your 2011 strategy? in-house seo, NJ

Mat Cutts, in charge of Google anti-spam team, answers this, have a look, you could be surprised.

[mahesh2k 0]

Matt cutts only gives general information and from his information nothing can be concluded. Take example of branding and how google is weighing for it. But how can they answer to autoblogs that are created by copying content from other sites ? Even Xisto's content is ripped into small blogs to generate backlinks by opaque. You can guess plagiarism if someone else tries to attempt the same by copying data from our site or even from asta posts. Google is giving high rank for such sites. Google is also putting their own google base and other products at higher position. Which i guess is monopoly issue. Their search results right now are garbled. You can search for something specific and results that are returned are some old blog or forum posts. Is that improved search quality in 2011 ? I don't think so. I'm using bing for now because i'm not getting what i want from google. I mean seriously if we are searching for wordpress related queries, results are from 2006-08 pages. This is 2011, how relevant are those results with current day queries ?I don't take SEO advice from him anymore. I prefer to listen to him for webmaster related advice, like crawling. That's what he's good at. SEO advice from him is BS, and only g fanboiys are going to see some content in his talks. I failed to find any at all.

[Ahsaniqbalkmc 0]

Matt cutts only gives general information and from his information nothing can be concluded. Take example of branding and how google is weighing for it. But how can they answer to autoblogs that are created by copying content from other sites ? Even Xisto's content is ripped into small blogs to generate backlinks by opaque. You can guess plagiarism if someone else tries to attempt the same by copying data from our site or even from asta posts. Google is giving high rank for such sites.

Well I had the same complaint with google but after the recent algo update, the issue is reducing and I have witnessed it. I remember quite a while ago I searched for a keyword and in the top 10 search results, 3 consisted of the same article copied on 3 different domains. Now when I search for the same keyword, I dont get the results like that. Yes I do agree that the recent update may have done more bad than good for sites like ezinearticles and for people who use such sites extensively but for a common searcher atleast something has improved. I hope that issues like these will be resolved in future and you will return to google.

Google is also putting their own google base and other products at higher position. Which i guess is monopoly issue. Their search results right now are garbled. You can search for something specific and results that are returned are some old blog or forum posts. Is that improved search quality in 2011 ? I don't think so.

Yes that is something I don't like about google. They put a lot of non relevant stuff from sites like youtube in their top search results. Because of this, lot of webmasters find their websites ranked on the second page of search result instead of first. That is one thing google needs to think about.

I'm using bing for now because i'm not getting what i want from google. I mean seriously if we are searching for wordpress related queries, results are from 2006-08 pages. This is 2011, how relevant are those results with current day queries ?

I have been using google from the time I started on the internet. I have no experience with bing. I am getting the info I need about 95% of time by using google but after seeing your comments, I think I should give a try to bing to check it out. If it is better than google, why not use a better search engine.

I don't take SEO advice from him anymore. I prefer to listen to him for webmaster related advice, like crawling. That's what he's good at. SEO advice from him is BS, and only g fanboiys are going to see some content in his talks. I failed to find any at all.

A lot of people hear the advices of people like matt very carefully because he is an official google employee. So although he might not be good at SEO, he is still a google official and he has a responsibility to speak the tru;th

[mahesh2k 0]

You're missing the point. After new google update almost every site is affected. Try searching for creative keywords like 'phoenix haiku' and tell me what you get on results. A map for restaurant, address to some place and few other sites which pick up word phoenix but ignore 'haiku' which is the main keyword ? Not just content farm like eza but even your and my sites are affected. If you're not noticing this big change then there is something wrong on your part of observing SE. Think about it, all the keywords are showing some advertisers pages or results rather than valuable pages. This is seriously wrong move by google. I don't mind affiliate or product owner sites but they're showing sites of their adwords clients. This is not good, because that's like manipulation of search for profits when they claim value and no evil on other side. Matt cutts talks a lot of lies in his talks. You can debunk his talks in one minute. For example, he says copied content is penalized or syndicated content farms are going to get penalty. Now tell me why 'bird cages for sale' and 'metro advice' keywords are ranked by autoblogs ? I can give you 100 such sites which dominated google and are stealing content from other sites. What will you do tomorrow if any theif steals your content and rank ahead of you saying he's using your feed ?. Just because matt cutts is from google doesn't mean he's telling the truth. He's showing guidelines to put people on the line and to benefit their firm, he's not giving solutions now. I know myself included many people hear his advice but it's past now. I found advice of black hat seo people more interesting because they know how to crack google without getting penality (obviously if anyone makes mistake then they'll end up like JC Penny or other slapped sites). But still black hat seo people know about SEO gaming more than matt cutts.

[Ahsaniqbalkmc 0]

I didn't wanted to make a point about the discussions of matt cutts. I have no concern whether he speaks the truth or not because I don't follow him. What I wanted to say was "because he is a google official a lot of people hear his advices very carefully and try to implement them into their websites or whatever". Now you can't disagree with it because a high percentage of webmasters try to rank well on google and for this they are ready to do anything. To rank well, they think that they should follow matt cutt's advice (which they take as official google advice).I would also like to comment of black hat seo thing. I don't think there is an effective white hat seo method that can provide results quickly. According to google itself, links are the most important part of SERP and all incoming links should be natural. Now in white hat seo you cannot do much with your off-page optimization. (apart from directory submissions or few others). All you have to do is with you on-page optimization and it may take you years to rank well for some competitive terms. Black hat methods are always with quick results and that is why you and I follow them.You said that with recent updates, the quality of search is decreased. I don't think I agree with you. Yes you might be right in saying that google is trying more and more to bring its own products and affiliated sites on top in the organic search results but still the results are good enough to provide quality user experience. Google with all its shortcomings, still provides better results than yahoo, bing, ask etc. I can back this statement by the percentage of visitors that go to google instead of yahoo bing or ask. Suppose there are two shops which sell meat. The price on both shops is same (just suppose) but the quality of meat on one is better than the other. So for obvious reasons, the one with better quality of meat will get more customers than the other. How many times would you have seen a relatively poor quality product (when all other things are same) recieving more customers than a good quality product. You cannot deny this fact.

[mahesh2k 0]

Most of the new webmaster who have no clue of SEO manipulation and think google is great-follow matt or other google blogs. There is life without google which many of us are now detecting because of this new update which smashed many good and bad sites. If you're checking some traffic stats and if there is any traffic coming from UK and India to your site then you'll see some drop this week. They're now rolling regional update on search engines. So your results from pakistan google will now be similar to weird results on google US. I don't think You and I follow black hat stuff. But more of gray hat stuff, because we're not spamming with automated tools like xrummer and some other spamming software. We're not spammers and hence no black hat stuff involved in our off-page SEO. We are doing manual backlinks, which is close to natural linking anyway. Just because percentage of people still using google doesn't mean google is still giving good results. I can give you plenty of keywords that are on high CPC and carry the largest traffic on the web are now getting garbage result on SE. Most of the people who are tech savvy are switching back to some other search engines which gives results based on sorting of data from mutliple other search engines. So your analogy is not applicable in that case. Only to those who are new to internet and are taught to use google. I don't care what they rank me on google. My question is that quality of google search is distorted. You don't want to see map of restaurant for the poem query or amazon product which is totally irrelevant. Do you see such results on yahoo and bing ? I'm not a fanboy so my preference is always with a shop (search engine) that gives me what i want, isn't it ? That was my point. We're getting garbage result from google and that's the truth.

[Ahsaniqbalkmc 0]

There is life without google which many of us are now detecting because of this new update which smashed many good and bad sites.

Yes there is a life without google and may be it is a far better life but what I want to say is that for an average webmaster like me, who dont't have much investment to make (if any) to live without google, the life becomes very hard. If I am not investing to bring referral traffic or I am not investing to make my website brilliant enough to compel visitors return to it (I can't do it myself because I am just an average webmaster and not a brilliant one), how am I going to survive. You will have to agree with the fact that traffic coming from search engines is the easiest and cheapest traffic to obtain for average websites. My stress is on "average websites". I am not discussing the case of facebook where the product is itself brilliant enough to attract huge amounts of traffic. Websites of such quality and magnitude can afford to live without google (I am speaking on behalf of conditions today) because they don't need the traffic coming from search engine. People know these websites by name and don't search for them on search engines. But in case of my website, people don't come to mananatomy.com. People come looking for "what is human anatomy?" or "The functions of skeletal system" etc. They don't know what mananatomy.com is. Even if mananatomy.com offers brilliant content on what are the functions of skeletal system, who cares about mananatomy. A person wants to know the functions of skeletal system, he is very very unlikely to return to mananatomy.com looking for the functions of skeletal system again because he got what he was looking for. On websites which can afford to live without search queries, people need to come back again and again for example to see what their friends are doing, what are the latest news etc. The most a brilliant website, based on topics such as mine, can do in bringing traffic back is that someone bookmarks the site and when an info similar to the first is needed, the visitor returns and takes the info and disappear. For this very reason the percentage of new visitors on my website is always above 85%. Now tell me when I am totally dependant on search queries, how can I live without google even if I build a good audience. For websites of my type, one person will view one page only once and not again and again. So if I am dependant on search queries completely, I have to care about the service (google) where more than 60% of entire internet's searches are made. No matter the service (google) is bad or good or whatever. What I need is search queries giving me traffic. If google gives me 100 visits per day and bing gives me 30, who am I supposed to care about more. Obviously I should care about google more than bing inspite of the fact that google has a monopoly to improve its own products, bad search results, unrelated content in searches and blah blah blah. I mean who cares about this all. As far as google is bringing me traffic more than anyone else, it is good for me and I should care about what it likes and what it doesn't.

[mahesh2k 0]

Not true point on traffic, ahsan. If this update is going to put us on page 2-3 or 4 then that's equal to traffic from the secondary search engines. It's going to be hard in either case. You can invest in your site to get visitors but google will allow users to filter sites irrespective of that. In such cases you are going to get less traffic anyway. I hope you know about that google addon ? That is going to help many people to filter bad sites (as per them), many black hat owners are starting gigs on microworkers to block the competitor sites. isn't this mayhem ? I mean competitors will now give money to average search engine users to block us ? what's the point of using google then ? Still all is not lost, atleast some pages are on page 2, 3 or 4. Imagine how much loss hubpages, xomba, squidoo got after this update. How average site that you hold is not going to affect in that case ? Afterall you're ranking for medical keyword and ehow, livemind, livestrong are in way to knock you down, isn't it ?60% traffic percentage of google are going to decline soon because of their current quality of search engine. So its not going to be the same. You know the wave in technology industry, if few people start to switch to other search engines, rest follows. It is happening right now. By following guidelines of any one search engine religiously hardly helps. I mean seriously many brand sites or blogs don't follow standards of google and they don't get much traffic from them either. Still their traffic is sustainable to earn them money. My point is even if that helps i;m not going to follow fanboi pattern for google when black hat sites without following any rules of google earning more. I can understand your analogy with facebook, but unless you become brand this one is going to be tough fight. I mean there are some strong competitors are there against you and google will always favor those instead of you, isn't it ? So brand and social media power should be your tool isn't it ? That's my point. I know you think google traffic is free or cheap and easy to acquire. But point is if you get slapped in this update to page 4 or so. What's the difference it's going to make between your site's traffic coming from say yahoo or bing or blekko ? nothing. My point is there is hardly any point in monetizing for google. If you're dependent on google for search traffic then you need to change your strategy. Because as i said previously, any other competitor can knock you down by all possible ways or even by building a brand. I know that your bounce rate is 85% and it's helping you but do you think you're earning from it to sustain hosting, or the earning goal that you need ? If it is then by all means rely on google. If you're getting less than 2$ per day from google then you need to diversify. Relying google for earning is one big mistake. That's my point. Anyway, rest is your call.

[Ahsaniqbalkmc 0]

If you're dependent on google for search traffic then you need to change your strategy. Because as i said previously, any other competitor can knock you down by all possible ways or even by building a brand. I know that your bounce rate is 85% and it's helping you but do you think you're earning from it to sustain hosting, or the earning goal that you need ? If it is then by all means rely on google. If you're getting less than 2$ per day from google then you need to diversify. Relying google for earning is one big mistake. That's my point. Anyway, rest is your call.

Ok I got it.I am now coming to understand your point. The basic thing I understood from our discussion uptil now is that you are trying to tell me "Don't rely on Google alone because its growing bad by each passing day"
Although I don't feel like some other search engine will replace google in near future, I have tried to do a little research on the reputation of google and I have found a lot of people saying things similar to yours. I can now say that you must be saying the truth because after all you are more experienced and more educated than me in this field.
Ok so suppose I say that I am going to decrease my dependance on Google. Now what should I do? I mean where should I start?
I have tried to make a point in my previous post, which I want to elaborate here again. I said that the websites of my type must depend on search engines because of the nature of visitors. More than 75% of visitors only come once and they don't like to return, not because the website is of bad quality but because they got what they required and they don't need anything else. In such case, referral traffic etc is not going to work because even if I have a lot of referrals, the visitors coming from them will also come only once, not again and again. And because receiving traffic from search engines require less investment than from referrals, search engines are a better way of getting traffic for websites of type similar to mine. (Please correct me if I am wrong)
I must say that in addition to search engines, I can get a lot of traffic from social media (which I am getting currently) and this can increase to a great deal with time, but still the traffic from search engines provide me much better results as compared to traffic from social media.
Now if I have to depend on traffic from search engines majorly, what should I do if I am to become independent of the monster: Google. I researched the ways of getting on top in yahoo and bing search results and I was unable to find any major differences. All three main search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) have almost the same requirements with some minor additions or substractions. For example Google considers links as the prime factor for linking and Yahoo and Bing also give a huge weightage to links.
However when I see the results for my website, I don't understand what is happening. My website is ranked on the first page for the keyword human anatomy on google however it is on the 5th page on both bing and yahoo.
What I want to ask you here is that what should I do to get better results on Yahoo and Bing. Please provide me a few guides if you can.

[yordan 10]

I would say it differently.I would say that the basic thing is focusing on the content of your website, and on the way to make visitors stick on it.And not rely on the way you think that Google algorithms want you to put links from or to other websites.Because most of what you guess from Google is probably false and would not lead to make more users come and visit your site.Of course, this is only my opinion, and I am quite not an expert concerning SEO. But I'm also a standard user, and you have to take care of standard users too.

[Ahsaniqbalkmc 0]

I would say it differently.I would say that the basic thing is focusing on the content of your website, and on the way to make visitors stick on it.
And not rely on the way you think that Google algorithms want you to put links from or to other websites.
Because most of what you guess from Google is probably false and would not lead to make more users come and visit your site.
Of course, this is only my opinion, and I am quite not an expert concerning SEO. But I'm also a standard user, and you have to take care of standard users too.

IT was really nice hearing from you @yordan. You are right in saying that you are a standard user and I should look to take care of standard users. I spend a good amount of time taking care of standard users but then again I have to say that first of all I need to bring standard users to my website. If I cannot bring any users, what is the point of investing time in making user experience better. I mean first of all I need to have some visitors through whose behavior I can judge the quality of my website. Once the specific amount of visitors start coming, i will get useful data about my website and by comparing the data with that of my competitors, i can conclude the performance of my website.
I must tell you here that I do have brought enough traffic to my website to get that basic data and when i compare the data with that of some of my competitors, I find my website not very far behind them. Yes there are some corrections and optimizations to be made but still the website is going good. Now my target is to invest my time in bringing more users until I reach 10000 visits a month. After that, considering the data I am getting from the analytics services, I will make changes and optimizations to my website to improve the user experience.
Please comment on this approach and If you can suggest a better approach, I would be really thankful.

[mahesh2k 0]

Ok so suppose I say that I am going to decrease my dependance on Google. Now what should I do? I mean where should I start?

Social media. You need to make connection with real people on facebook, twitter and other social media sites. By relying more on social media you never run out of traffic. People always prefer to search within their favorite social networks than opening another page just for results. Social media, direct traffic, guest blogging, traffic buying and few other methods should be your prime concern now.
Why ? Because see it this way. You've demand media, about.com, webmd and few other medical sites with better credential than yours to compete with. Your site stands nowhere when it comes to credential. In order to get that you need more social votes. How to get that ? social media. (i'm not talking about fb like, but preference). Because if people prefer more of the mainstream sites then you'll starve for getting first page position on google. More clickstream data will restrict people from going to your site. So you will only get few newbies to your site and your bounce rate will be more. Your site will then require huge amount of social vote, content with credentials. It's easy for media sites to crush you on competition level with their SEO strategies. You do know about brand and credential thing in this google panda update, don't you ?

Bing and Yahoo rely on social votes and on page SEO. They also track clickstream data and in-network data.

Okay, so this was my bit of contribution for solution.

Because most of what you guess from Google is probably false and would not lead to make more users come and visit your site.

No. Black hat SEO people are going to help anyone to make that exact guess. Almost every black hat trick works to get SEO domination, unless google spots that method by some means, till then it works.

[Ahsaniqbalkmc 0]

Social media. You need to make connection with real people on facebook, twitter and other social media sites. By relying more on social media you never run out of traffic. People always prefer to search within their favorite social networks than opening another page just for results. Social media, direct traffic, guest blogging, traffic buying and few other methods should be your prime concern now.

Ok so I got the point that I need to work more on bringing traffic from social websites instead of search engines, because (according to what I have understood from our discussion uptill now), once traffic start coming into my website, and they perform actions which prove the quality of my website, then search engines will automatically follow me and the ranking of my website in search results will get better and better.(Please comment on the above paragraph)

After getting a solution for the question I asked you in my previous post that where should I start to become independant of search engines?, the next question I am going to ask you is:

Which social media sites should I target and how to get traffic from them?

I know that the most famous social websites out there are Facebook and Twitter. I have never used these websites to bring traffic into my website, however, I have read in a lot of places that social websites especially twitter can bring you a lot of traffic, which might sometimes exceed than the traffic coming from search engines. I can think of some plan at the back of my mind to work on to get traffic from such websites but I am not sure about it and I want you to explain the strategy to me in detail.
I can think of different plans for facebook and twitter. I am going to explain them in the lines below but please comment on them in detail and explain the strategy as you explained during our discussion on Article Marketing.

For Facebook:
First of all I need to join pages and discussions similar to the topic of my website. Then When I make useful additions to these pages and groups, I can make some friends (real people) there who have some interest in the topic. After making some reputation, I will create a page for my website and share them with all the friends that have interests similar to the topic of my website. Once I get a good number of friends to the page, I will start posting updates and stories to the page with links to related pages on my website. But I have to post regular updates to keep the traffic coming in.

For twitter:
Well I should say that I don't know how to make people follow me on twitter. That is why I don't have any plan for it. I can do a bit of research on it but if you can explain the strategy to me directly here, it can save me a lot of effort.

I would also like to hear about more social website that i can effectively use to bring traffic to my website so please be generous with me.

[mahesh2k 0]

Yes. You're right about that first paragraph. What i mean with that approach is, more human visitors prefer your site. Less search engine dependency you'll have and google can't ignore site which is independent of their boosting. For example, amazon is independent of google, so google likes such sites which are authority in their own business. So in such case social media websites help get more human votes and traffic to site and later make it authority. Mind you, this will take longer time than you planned. This is not push button theory that is going to be overnight success or 1-2 week hard work but consistent work for year or even more. Amazon/ebay took decades to establish that authority. Second question, which social media site ? Oh yeah, this one is not so simple. You need to assess the traffic and topic of your site. Which site is useful for your topic ? i mean twitter and facebook will help 25% of social media efforts because they're generic and not dependent on any one topic or you can say restricted to one topic. Do you know any social media site which is focused on medical topic ? or forums which also qualify for few pecentage of social media traffic in your niche ? if so, use them. I'm more interested in mixing multiple sites in this theory. Not sure what are those sites in your niche. But do concentrate on facebook and twitter at the start. Later you can expand it for other social media sites or forums. I do think of your strategy of facebook and twitter being good, you just need to get things done quickly. Just make sure you put your stuff slowly into them to avoid spamming, but that aside get your presence for profile as quickly as possible. If you're targeting newbies in your niche, then it's better to open some social channel on your site asking them for contribution. This is much better strategy but will require more efforts from your site.

[Ahsaniqbalkmc 0]

Yes. You're right about that first paragraph. What i mean with that approach is, more human visitors prefer your site. Less search engine dependency you'll have and google can't ignore site which is independent of their boosting. For example, amazon is independent of google, so google likes such sites which are authority in their own business. So in such case social media websites help get more human votes and traffic to site and later make it authority. Mind you, this will take longer time than you planned. This is not push button theory that is going to be overnight success or 1-2 week hard work but consistent work for year or even more. Amazon/ebay took decades to establish that authority.

This means that I have got the basics right. But let me ask you more specific questions because from your discussion, you seem to have great experience of working with social media.I want to ask specific questions about facebook because I have heard a lot about the potential of it in bringing fortune. Suppose I create a page on facebook for my website. How should I use this page? I mean what should I add on the page that can bring targeted traffic back to my website. I don't think that just stuffing it with links to my pages can bring me some good traffic. I was searching for the strategy to work on twitter and I found some articles with a number of working strategies. It was written that instead of just posting a link to your webpage, use a questioning strategy to get peopl'e attentions. For example instead of saying "Hey, I have added a new page to my website. You can see it here......." use something like "Do you know who is the most famous personality of 2010. The answer is here ......"
(I need your comments on this)
But I want to ask you that will this work for facebook or not. Because I think that facebook is entirely different from twitter. So please explain to me that how should I use the facebook page to get traffic to my website. Further more tell me that how and what should I add to the facebook page to make it more involving and attracting so that people can return again and again.

Second question, which social media site ? Oh yeah, this one is not so simple. You need to assess the traffic and topic of your site. Which site is useful for your topic ? i mean twitter and facebook will help 25% of social media efforts because they're generic and not dependent on any one topic or you can say restricted to one topic. Do you know any social media site which is focused on medical topic ? or forums which also qualify for few pecentage of social media traffic in your niche ? if so, use them. I'm more interested in mixing multiple sites in this theory. Not sure what are those sites in your niche. But do concentrate on facebook and twitter at the start. Later you can expand it for other social media sites or forums.

I once submitted some answers on thescienceforum.net, it brought me some good number of visitors so I think this will also be a good place to work on. But the main problem I have with this strategy is that I have to work continuously on it. And I cannot work continually. During exam days, I cannot work for about 3 months and during this time the whole work may be spoiled. So I need to make a balance between the continuity of my work and make sure that all my hard work that I have done before that is not spoiled.I have never heard of a social media site concentrated on the medical topic. If you can help me on how to find such sites, I will be really glad.

I do think of your strategy of facebook and twitter being good, you just need to get things done quickly. Just make sure you put your stuff slowly into them to avoid spamming, but that aside get your presence for profile as quickly as possible. If you're targeting newbies in your niche, then it's better to open some social channel on your site asking them for contribution. This is much better strategy but will require more efforts from your site.

What do you mean by opening a social channel on my website. I don't get it. I have no idea of how to do it. Please explain this in detail so that I can understand how its done and what are its uses.