It's the New Year and I can guarantee there will be a ton of new people at my gym this week ready to work on their resolutions (and generally getting in the way </grumbling>). In SEO, some resolutions might include working on personal sites (I might have a few abandoned sites...) or writing more blog posts. Resolutions have never really worked for me though. So instead of giving you SEO resolutions for 2011, I'd like to inspire some exploration in the New Year when it comes to your search marketing campaigns.
The following five areas are either up and coming, or becoming major cornerstones to every search marketing campaign. The first is my personal “to-do,” and the others are always on the “I need to look into that” list for most search marketers I know. Each has a clear impact on optimization, traffic and conversions. After all, the end goal still is and always will be the conversion, whatever it is for you.
I'd love to hear what it is that you want to work on in 2011. Maybe you'll inspire some YOUmozzers or SEOmozzers to write some posts to help you out. Or just maybe ... you will be the one writing a post.
Exploratory Tactic #1: HTML5
This new way of coding is cleaner and allows designers to do things that HTML 4 and CSS (which are preferred by most SEOs) could not do before. HTML5 is changing the way sites are designed, crawled, and used by consumers. Long gone are the days of Flash, Tables, and other code hogs.
Here are a few sites that are utilizing HTML5 elements to enhance the user experience and increase search engine understanding of the site. Not saying learning and using HTML5 will rank your site better or increase your indexation rate, but depending on what you were using before it just might.
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And our very own RIchard Baxter's SEOGadget and he has a great post on HTML5 as well.
As are most SEOs I know, I am a self-taught coder and very dangerous. I am sure with some fun nights of coding (some yelling will be involved), studying sites using HTML5 and begging the members of WebmasterWorld for help, I can get this new stuff down pat. And so can you.
Exploratory Tactic #2: A/B Testing
My good friend Joe Hall brought this one up on Twitter. As a frequent panelist on the Landing Page Optimization panel at PubCon, I know there are many people that always want to try A/B testing but never find the time to do it. So much can be learned with testing and many more conversions made.
This year if you are still finding a lack of time to test landing pages, here are some things that might help.
1. Hire an intern
Interns are plentiful if you work near a university. I got my start in search marketing in college and that gave me a nice lead on most other marketing graduates. An intern can be hired at a small cost ($10/hour) for 5 hours a week to put together tests and collect the data. That's a mere $200 per month! Think about contacting the local university and look into the computer science, advertising, and business school for possible candidates.
2. Use Google Website Optimizer
It's hard to take the time to come up with ideas, build the pages, and track everything. In comes Google Website Optimizer, which automates the much of the work for you. And best of all it's free!
3. Use a service like Ion Interactive
These systems are easy to use testing grounds for landing pages but specifically for marketers, not developers. You can change things about a landing page using their WYSIWYG editor and test the changes immediately without the need to involve developers or your IT department. How you ask? These pages are hosted on the service's servers (sent to your chosen subdomain) so there is no need to involve your IT department until you're sure you have the version you want.
Exploratory Tactic #3: Microformats
Local search marketing is all the rage because the global community is looking more to their local area than ever before. The search engines are responding by changing the way search results are displayed. If they see that users' intent for a search is to find a local provider, they are showing integrated local results. These results are outranking and being mixed in with natural search results. The result are natural looking listing that have more items like location markers and stars from review ratings that draw the users' eye to those listings.
For local businesses, coding your website with microformatted data will allow for better information updating in the search results. For businesses that provide reviews of local businesses, microformats of those reviews can provide another way to gain traffic from local searchers looking for the lowdown on local businesses.
Google has helped by providing a guide to microformats and a handy code-checking tool that can tell you if you have implemented microformats correctly.
Exploratory Tactic #4: Guest Posting
We all hate link building, and yes it has gotten harder to do. The best way to gain backlinks is still good old fashioned marketing, but guest posting (done right, not spammy) is another good way of gaining some links. If you take a look at my own personal site's backlinks (on OSE), you see that most of my links come from guest posting and being a part of other people's postings.
Guest posting allows you to not only link back to your own site, but also give others the attention they deserve. That is the key here, linking to others. Link karma is real, if you send out the links, they will come back to you. That link to your own site is usually at the bottom and could be discounted someday (if bad guest posts get out of hand). My coworker at Distilled, Justin Briggs brought this up recently in another SEOmoz post.
But links are not all guest posting is good for. It also allows you to display your knowledge on a specific topic. Becoming an authority on your chosen topic can not only give you more links down the road, it would further your own career. In addition, the sites you guest post for get the content needed to rank well. The better you write for them, the more popular the page will be, and the stronger that link will be for you and everyone else. Guest posting is the best win-win-win around.
Have I mentioned YOUmoz? *wink*
Exploratory Tactic #5: CRO
In the end are conversions. We all are online for a reason, to get conversions of any and all kinds. Your conversion can be a lead, sale, click to advertising, awareness, or retweets for just a few examples. There are so many kinds of conversions, the one thing you need to think about is “what do I want out of creating this website.” Once you have that, all of your future decisions should be based on that goal.
Conversion Rate Optimization is the idea that everything you do in your marketing should increase good conversions. From your PPC landing pages to your unused and unloved thank you pages, conversion rate optimization is utilizing your entire site and marketing offers to increase your bottom line. If something like ranking #1 for your favorite keyword isn't converting visitors, then that time and effort needs to go into something new.
The pinnacle of CRO is tracking conversions on every marketing effort. Know what your conversions are and how much you want to be spending for those conversions. After that is set, start testing away. Be sure to test for a good time period and keep the rash decisions at bay. All CRO decisions should be made with a valid set of data. Making a decision after a week is probably not statically significant.
This new year, test new things, push new boundaries, and don't worry about what the engines think (to a degree). They care about the end users and so should you. Once your site is set up with the right SEO foundation of good code and structure, focus on getting good traffic and converting that traffic. Y'all have a great new year!
2011 and Open sign images compliments of Shutterstock
We definitefely have to pay attention to HTML5 althought I don't believe that it will be supported by all browsers in the near future. But you always have to stay up to date with all newbies.I personally like the Microformats and plan to use them more often next time. I hope that there will we a wider range to apply them. And yes, I do plan to write a YOUmoz post the next time.I wish all a Happy New Year, too.
Thumbs up for the YOUmoz announce :)
Can't wait to see the YOUmoz post and thanks for the comment. I too am never sure of browser support, but you are right, as SEOs we do have to keep up on all the new advancements. Have a great first week of 2011!!
I think SEOs definitely do but I also think front-end developers should also keep up with the latest in SEO!! I'm a front-end developer (and designer, extraordinaire) and I love keeping up to date with SEO because it means I can apply the latest technologies with the latest SEO techniques for my clients. As I often say, I'm not primarily and SEO, I just have a strong interest in it.
So it's definitely not a one-way street, it's a "vice versa" situation.
I don't think we need to worry too much about browser support. Javascript fallbacks mean we can begin to use the technology immediately because, in my opinion, it is more to do with semantics than functionality.
Ditto the thumbs up for the upcoming YOUmoz post Petra.
Great post.
I think HTML5 is going to be massive in the next few years, particularly during 2011. My reasoning behind this is that it's not just an advancement in technology, but also a huge advancement in semantics which is fantastic for browsers and also for the user!
Personally, I've been using HTML5 and CSS 3 for a little while now and am quite comfortable to use it on every site that I create. Afterall, there's no reason not to, providing that I'm not going a bit mad with the CSS 3 effects such as animations — I'm more of a subtleties kind of guy. I'd really recommend taking suit and coding all of your sites in HTML5 in the future, it'll give you a lot of experience in the syntax and semantics of the code. Whilst it's far more flexible than HTML4 and XHTML, in my opinion there should still be a sort of strictness to the way we code in it so we aren't too lapse with our habits.
I always add a conditional statement to my documents which allow certain CSS 3 selectors and pseudo classes to work and also so HTML5 elements are created and the structure works — though things such as <canvas> will still not work in anything less than IE9. The scripts that I use are as follows:
As soon as you start using HTML5 you'll love it. It's a bit confusing at first but everything is incredibly obvious!!! If you're a bit concerned, there are a couple of books I'd heartily recommend for your literary pleasure:
If anyone needs any help with anything, let me know. I'm murderin' for some thinking after this ridiculously long holiday. Just shoot me a tweet, email or even give me a call. I'm friendly.
Thank you!! Awesome comment with some great resources. Luke, you're my new favorite person. :)
Hey trax! Nice to see you back in action. What say you treat us to a YOUmoz post on HTML5? :)
Perhaps... ;-)
I'll have to have a think about it. Got a few plans for the beginning of the year, including a YOUmoz post which will take a little time out of my already busy schedule. However, the offer still stands for anybody who would like a helping hand with anything HTML5. I'm happy to help and advise :-).
LOVE those book references! Thanks Luke! I am currently stumbling through designing Wordpress and CSS, I am definitely dangerous. It would be nice to learn HTML5 and actually KNOW it, rather than just muddle through things.
They are very good books. I haven't had a chance to fully digest HTML5: Up and Running yet but I've read a few chapters and it's great. HTML5 for Web Designers is like a dream come true... Jeremy Keith has done a great job of writing something easy-to-understand and I recommend getting a hard copy of that book. It looks and feels amazing too if you appreciate book design.
Ahhh, WordPress is a great system to design for. Once you get the knack for it, it's really easy to use... I use it for pretty much every project now if I get the chance to and having an understand of CSS and front-end development in general will help one to become a better designer and understand limitations or the lack of limitations.
To be honest, I think a part of learning something is having to muddle through it... I wouldn't be where I am today had I not muddled through DreamWeaver and Freewebs (what I thought was "real" design) and learnt HTML bit-by-bit followed by a bit of CSS then eventually XHTML. It's the same process I'm taking with HTML5... I still have a lot to learn but my understand of the semantics improves every time I use it. :-).
https://www.lynda.com/ is a great place for video lessons on HTML5 and CSS3
Great Information. Thank you .
Ciao Kate,
has we tweeted, HTML5 and CSS3 are going to be an experiment field for me too this year. I will experiment it safely in some of my personal domains so I will see if it can help for personal branding purposes.
On the other hand, I would like to explore the world out of Google, even though it is The Search Engine in Italy and Spain. As I am interested in International SEO, I think I will especially explore SEO for Yandex, with more reason now as it was launched few months ago Yandex in English. Baidu... the language is and the "editorial politics" behind it make it less appealing.
Then, I would like to start exploring correlations/causation of Search in the Social Media World, therefore how SEO can influence visibility in Social Media.
Love this idea! I've been working with some larger clients on international expansion and while we know that Baidu and Yandex are two to pay attention to, we have yet to do much exploring there. Yandex will be easier (English version and all) so I am hoping someone else can give us the finer points of Baidu. Regardless, the world outside of Google is a good focus to have in 2011.
I've yet to explore any international engines yet G., but if I had a product that could sell well in Russia, then Yandex would definitely be where I'd be spending time.
And I agree with you about wanting to avoid Baidu. With it's history of blocking websites and censoring topics, out of principle, I would want nothing to do with it.
I know... but it will be something we will have to do anyway. To left out more than 500 million internet users (and growing) and a good % of them with "high spending" potential should be a business crime.
Great idea about exploring the impacts of social media and SEO. Rand spoke about how social media has impacted SEO in a couple of his posts a month back, I believe. Will you be looking more closely at Bing's search engines too? What is your views on their collaboration with Yahoo and Facebook?
Thanks for the post Kate.
I am going to work on getting guest bloggers for a client of mine that sells furniture from the interior design world. Should produce great articles that will help both the store and the designer.
HTML5 and CSS3 are on the books also. Probably take a week vacation and dive back into https://www.lynda.com/
Link building and CRO are also on the calendar for this year.
I have been using micro formats, but don't see that as effective as links with good anchor text. But always best practice ;)
Thanks again for the reminders
I'm excited about HTML5, and how it will change the web experience.
I love to see things on this list that I'm already doing at work. It gives you an excited feeling in the pit of my stomach as we face the new year. Microformats and HTML5 are the most daunting to me at this point. Nothing remains the same, does it!?
Thanks Kate for this nice post. This is the first wonderful post I read in 2011. Hope to have more similar posts from you throughout 2011 and wish you a very happy new year.
Good post, Kate.
We're hiring interns this week, so we're keeping up with your list already! But there's another benefit. When you hire someone, especially an intern, you do need to spend a fair amount of time teaching. When I spend time teaching I often learn more and retain more. Teaching someone else what you know gives you the opportunity to interpret all the information you've gathered about your field and often leads you to some "a-ha" moments - moments you would not have experienced without the introspection that comes from giving to others. Happy New Year
Great post, Kate. You're right about conversion optimization and about using quality content to build links.
Guest blogging is something I could definitely do more, but it's so damn time consuming if you're to write quality content.
I agree - we all know the value of blogging for SEO but putting out something completely new and compelling each time, whether posting on our own blog or as a guest blogger, is tough to juggle with our real work of optimizing.
Hey Dejan! This is like old home week between you and Luke commenting.
You are so right about guest blogging being time consuming, but then what part of link building isn't? It's one of the many reasons link building is one of my least favorite activities.
Couldn't agree more... Writing blog posts for your own blog is bad enough, but when trying to write a guest blog post for someone is just hassle.
My suggestion is to try and get a regular spot somewhere where you can see a lot of value for it. I've been writing weekly blog posts for a friend for the post four or five months and it's helped me work on creative writing skills more than ever!
The single most important advice i give to business owners is to network and engage with your target audience and potential linking partners. These two factors alone can overcome multitude of crawlability, accessibility, credibility and usability issues and can result in lot of back links, tweets, facebook likes and conversions. I have noticed several times (in analytics) that in case of two websites with equally strong products and link profiles (or one with weaker link profile) the one with stronger user engagement and networking always gets more conversions. High user engagement leads to tons of qualified direct traffic and reduces the depedency on search engines and refferal sites for traffic, sales and leads which in turn reduces the cost per conversion. So when i look at a website with very poor direct traffic (less than 15%) i know it has serious user engagement issues. So my seo tactic to explore in 2011 is 'networking and user engagement'.
Networking and engaging is important Himanshu, to be sure. But I respectfully suggest that Usability/Conversion Optimization is at least as important, if not more (IMHO of course)
Don't forget, if you're going to hire an intern - interns have friends! Uni's full of indebted students are the perfect place to source guinea pigs for guerilla usability testing to help with testing and optimizing the UI. Use tools like https://silverbackapp.com/
Ed!! What's up? Yes, interns so have friends and are great for testing. I just ask that anyone hiring students, please pay them if at all possible. And their friends. But students are one of the best kept secrets in SEO. :)
LOL! Reminds me of poorer "Will work for Food" days.
I've been getting into Guest posting on sites completely unrelated to my industry (there aren't any decent driving school blogs.. not really a very exciting space), so I write about what I know: marketing, seo, business strategy, and though the links I get from these posts aren't contextually brilliant, they are still high quality links with targeted anchor text and this has helped my rankings significantly.
@noyellingds
It may help your site temporarily, but as you continute to post to unrealted blogs in your industry the latest Panda updates will notice that these links you are generating will not be as valuable. If you havent heard the saying before - The SEO world can be summed up as...If content is King, then relavence is Queen. Best of luck with your link building in the near future. One of my blog sites got SLAMMED by the panda.
Shout out for hiring interns! That is one of my fav tips ;) Awesome post, thanks for the encouragement on HTML5!
Thanks for these great tips! I can't wait to give HTML 5 a try. If you're looking for some more internat marketing tool that might help improve organic rankings in 2011, you can check out our the internet marketing tools on https://www.getfoundbygoogle.com
Thanks Kate,
How do you feel about local microsites with keyword strategy focused on long-tail local phrases and perhaps including microformats for the SERP's? This would be appropriate for corporations with offices in several cities or regions. Or are microsites going the way of traditional backlinking strategies?
Best,
John McTigue
@jmctigue
Thanks sharing for your seo information.. great seo tactics.
You are correct with guest posting. It's very useful. I have worked with one company and most of our works are centered in guest posting.
-Sarah, blogger from San Jose Internet Marketing
Hi Kate,
Interesting post...I quite often find that the companies I meet are obsessed with ranking 1-3 on Google, but haven't done any conversion optimisation. Of course getting to the top of Google is a worthy aspiration, but not to the exclusion of the low hanging fruit that can give much quicker results.
As for link building, what can I say? Everybody hates it, nobody quite knows where the line is between ethical and non-ethical and yet it's a fundamental part of what we do...strange!
Useful tactics for SEO Analyst.....Keep on Sharing...Thank You Kate..
Very good points to consider and implement in 2011. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for a great article!!
I belive Conversion Rate Optimization is one of the most overlooked subjects in online marketing. I deal with so many business owners who sign up for various SEM and SEO program based on the latest sales pitch, and completely forget to pay any attention and track results from these marketing efforts.
Tanya Bennett
www.logicmediazone.com
Thanks for your information Kate....I am new to SEO it is useful to improve my knowledge in Search Engines....
CRO is huge. I have doubled sales with a small change such as repositioning links and improving site navigation. Analytics plays a huge part but experience saves time and money.
You need to know what to change from the start. Many sites are poorly optimzed for conversions and if you spend months making small changes and tracking analytics then a lot of money can go to waste while trying to gradually improve conversions. It does take a high volume of traffic to see if a change is good or bad and some sites don't have the volume over a short period of time. This can lead to overlooking a great improvement because you did not give it a chance.
Experience is key and anyone offering CRO should have a specialist on board.
Great post Kate and thanks for the ion shout out!
I can’t stress enough how important it is to A/B test. With out A/B testing you’re missing out on opportunities to create very different landing experiences and testing them against one another. The upside to this over MVT is that A/B testing allows you to find big winner due to completely different landing experiences, opposed to minor changes with MVT – although both styles of testing can be extremely valuable.
Thanks again for the shout out :)
Kate, thanks for a really nice post. Like with manish.chauhan, it was the first interesting article on SEO and SEM I read in the year 2011. I adore Microformats and unfortunately only now trying to implement them. There is, though, one thing that I can’t still make myself to believe in and that is what you call ‘link karma’. I think if you have poor content on a website you will never make others to link back to it, no matter how often you link to other sources.
Hi Kate,
A perfect 5 for the list to explore and give attention to in 2011.
HTML 5 is something no web developer or SEO can ignore in this year.
A/B testing also has been and will continue to be a constant endeavor for all over performance linked to SEO and CRO.
Microformats and Guest posting already have got the due importance from mid 2010 (atleast I have started focusing on it )
CRO is also something which needs to be focused on but for that as mentioned you need a set of relevant data and co-operation and understanding of the client. For that again I think we need to do a lot of explanation on how SEO is much more than rankings and the overall visibility of the site on all search options as well as on various other platforms of the web. We as SEO companies have to help them create an online brand and an online reputation which will surely help them in CRO which many time may or may not be possible to measure and quantify in numbers but will gradually help them to gain the confidence needed for conversions and a high CRO.
As The social fabric gets woven more and more into search the guidance and training of how to use the social media effectively is also one of the SEO deliverables today. ( I just completed one session now. trust me its easier said than done)
You always have great comments Bharati. Reading between the lines of your comment, my take away is that as SEO's, we have to do much more than just the technical aspects. A/B, CRO, Branding, etc. should be an integral part of our job functions as a holistic part of the package we provide. And to that I say...thumbs up.
Thanks @goodnewscowboy
Really Great
Good post, most already on top of ;)
Also think social media integration and optimization is a good one for 2011.
Good point. Social media optimization is already very important and will continue to be so. We can never forget the word of mouth marketing that we now get to participate in. :)
I think I disagree a little here... Social media was a big estimation during 2010 and we didn't really see anything from it... Personally, I doubt we'll see too much from it because it's too easy to manipulate. I think the "social graph" will continue to be an interesting thing.
However, we'll wait and see... Someone from the SEOmoz team was tweeting about things which may influence ranking through social media profiles the other day :-).
New year Gift For Seo. Good job done.
Microfromats... yeah they are great and so on, but for now Google is pulling microformated data to the local listings only from "trusted" sites. The chance one small business website to become trused is... well almost zero. Keep that in mind.
No offence, but I think this is a bit of a non-point... The fact that it's only on trusted sites shows that it is something that's being used but is not widespread at the moment. It's not something to deter people from making a very minor change to their code. There are more than just SEO benefits to using microformats you know.
Besides, you want to be prepared and have the best structure on your site possible!!! There's nothing better than a site with great code.
Any good developer will be able to put one microformat on your site within 30 minutes. You should be able to grab a decent developer for about £25 - £35 per hour.
Microformats are simple and you can use them with almost no knowledge and very low skills. I'm just poiting that they are not very benificial for local SEO (now and in the near future) although Google says that microformats are very useful and the bots use them a lot.
Time to learn html 5!
#3 on Microformatting:
Is it just me or does anyone else see something wrong with the way Google Places or Google Local Results seem to come up with a random selection of local businesses?
My personal experience in this space leaves me frustrated as I can't seem to figure out how Google gives weight to the results sorting.
On one search you will find a business at the top who has 17 reviews (good or bad makes no difference) and then on another search a business that has 24 reviews will not show up until page 4 with all other listed businesses preceeding it having no reviews at all, and these businesses have not even claimed their listing when the one with 24 reviews has.
Apart from the obvious here, that users are going to be confused as to why they are seeing some business listed first, I think that one of the side benefits for SEO's and the natural results is that the satisfaction rule is going to have people bypassing this Places thing in favour of the natural if for nothing other than the poor quality of the randomly selected Places winners.
Am I missing something here, a confused SEO or do others feel the same way?
Curious...
The changes in Google Places happened in October 2010. We wrote a post about the changes in the new Google Place Search.
What used to be a 7-pack is now a 0-pack. Listings are clustered in with organic search results for anything that is deemed local. It looks like Google has put more emphasis on listings that have a website, and that website is properly optimized and SEO-ed. If you didn't have a website while you saw your listing at the top, then you might have saw some drop in the listing.
In terms of review, Google rolled out a new feature called HotPot, which can add some juice to your Places listing, but I haven't tested it yet to give any statistical data. Has anyone?
Great article Kate!
HTML5 is definitely going to be a hot topic in 2011 for SEO-ers.
From what I've read, including microformat is a best practice on local business websites. Do they apply for international sites as well (businesses that compete on an international scale)? And where would you suggest placing the microformat for a company (on the contact page or in the footer, which appears on every page?) My thought would be in the footer AND contact page, but would like to hear your thoughts :)
Great post, in besides social networking for business will be one major keyrole for 2011!In between social netwoks search results also taking a place for better business prospect, Like Linked in,Twitter and Facbook search...
another major role is for micro sites or mobi sites..where opimizations will be different ratner than regular one..
Finally made it to the bottom of the comments Kate :) This is my last day off before I'm back to the grind, so I went hog wild in my commenting to comments. And this without coffee!
I can't add anything much more than I've already said in the comments other than to say that of your 5 SEO tactics to explore, my vote is that A/B and CO become mainstream throughout the world of SEOers. There are so many websites out there that need help. Serious help.
PS - Thumbs up for a great 2011 inaugural post.
Hi Kate,
Thanks for sharing this wonderful article which will definitely be helpful in making better seo strategies in the coming year.
Really great ones,
especially for local business optimization
thanks