What better way now than to look at all the shares, +1s, tweets and likes to determine what the people are voting for?

That was the topic of this morning’s SMX London 2012 session, Social Shares: The New Link Building. Danny Sullivan led a panel featuring Verve Search CEO Lisa Myers, Bauer Media‘s James Carson and AOL’s Simon Heseltine.

Social as a Ranking Factor

In terms of links Google first looked at the quantity pointing to any one site and then progressed to judging a link’s quality by looking at the authority and relevance of linking pages. But, coming back to Danny’s point, social provides a new opportunity to understand quality ‘votes’ for each page. When Lisa Myers stood up to the SMX mic earlier she gave a bit of background on backlinks and went on to discuss social media as a new ranking factor.

Google wants to count social since it provides good quality democratic ‘votes’. But is this happening? And, as Danny pointed out, since Google don’t have easy access to Facebook and Twitter data, how are they managing to incorporate social in their algorithms?

This is largely where G+ becomes useful. In yesterday’s keynote, Amit explained Google+ was launched to help users find everything they want in one place (namely social results!). But the G+ launch becomes more understandable once we understand the value of social data in serving the most relevant search engine results. Google can use data on Google+ and +1s across the web to help inform their rankings.

Lisa pointed to SEOMoz’s 2011 study on social shares as a ranking factor and to Tasty Placement’s infographic. Before the launch of Google+, Facebook shares seemed to influence higher rankings more than any other social signal, but more recently it seems as though G+ followers leads to higher ranks.

With the release of SPYW social data has been brought right into search, making it easier to share and to find shared content. More importantly, it demonstrated how social can massively influence rankings.

Image: Bas van den Beld, State of Search

Amit also noted yesterday that these author profiles increase CTR, making it important for brands to implement rel=author and have a prolific and trusted G+ page.

Beyond that, there are ways to measure social signals in order to emphasise them and begin to create more signals pointing to your site(s).

Measuring Social Signals

The second presentation in this session was from James Carson. He focused on how to measure and create social signals. In effect, this new method of ‘link building’, or ‘share building’, as I suppose it would be.

James noted that he thinks links are more equitable than shares, but that sharing is undoubtedly a powerful new social signal.

He also pointed out that Facebook has a much larger audience, but that when you create a social strategy you really need to think about your audience. The examples he gave were that Facebook is better for entertainment brands, Twitter and G+ are better for technology/news and Tumblr is good for fashion or anything more visual.

One of the most important points James made was that the quantity of followers you have, like with links, doesn’t always equate to quality. It is therefore better to isolate influencers and form a strategy around getting your content or shares noticed.

According to James you can find them:

• on Google+ (people with a robust G+ strategy are also likely to have robust social strategies in general)
• on FollowerWonk
• on Klout
• Later in the day Kevin Gibbons suggested using findpeopleonplus.com to find influencers as well.

Once you have found the influencers you can put them into spreadsheets, divide them up into tiers and decide who to target. A useful way of doing this is by using Google Ripples, a really nice new tool which shows how your social content spreads between influencers. By looking at this chart you can target secondary influencers and try to ripple your content between different tiers of friends and colleagues.

Image: Visual News

Creating Social Signals

On Social Sites

Hand in hand with measuring social signals is creating them. You can do this on social site themselves, on your own site, or by combining a mix of two. James pointed out how Branded3 used their Competwitions (where you have to retweet to enter) to create strong signals on Twitter. As part of a related study Branded3 reported that if you receive 7500 retweets on an URL it is likely to rank in the top 5 for Google, which is an interesting statistic.

By leveraging relevant Twitter trends (James suggested looking at trendsmap.com) you should also be able to create urgent social content which is more likely to be shared.

When it came to Facebook James gave a list of ways you can influence user engagement and ultimately show up in people’s news feeds. You should:

• Post games and trivia
• Interact with your users
• Intergrate wall apps
• Post relevant photos
• Comment on current events
• Post videos
• Post great content
• And of course include links to your site.

• Create research and write whitepapers
• Write ‘How To’ articles and blogposts
• Break industry news
• Make infographics
• Run competitions
• Conduct interviews

Long term, on the other hand, you should create a community within your site. Lisa emphasised that a large part of this is creating a reliable  blog which is a hub for articles, whitepapers and comments. Lisa suggested that blogging is the most powerful tool for social media.

In the Q&A session Lisa answered a great question about whether brands should allow employees to build their personal social profiles on work time. Lisa said it would happen and should happen; that brands can profit as employees become prominent and reliable. Yes they might leave, but you can get a long way by attaching your name to a sociable person in your industry, whether they’re a current employee or an ex-employee.

Integration

Simon Heseltine, from AOL, talked about their acquisition of Huffington Post and the tactics they have used to become prominent in social media. As with the other two presenters he emphasised the need to track virility and cause, rather than generic numbers of followers. They actually create their own metrics and ways of measuring these for custom insight.

Since the Huffington Post began their social campaigns they have received 150 million comments on their site. Simon and his team have implemented some really interesting ways of engaging their visitors.

Whenever people make a post or comment on the site they include their social details so users can continue their discussions off the site on the social media networks.

Huffington also implement gamification methods, something James mentioned. Here they give away badges to active moderators in the community, people who post often, users who have lots of friends etc. This makes them feel special and rewarded. Something else interesting is that they allow users who have unlocked moderator badges actual deletion privileges, proving that they trust them.

As James emphasised that you need to judge which networks to use, the Huffington Post realised that users might want to listen to very specific feeds. Therefore they’ve created different profiles for different news sections and verticals.

Some key takeaways from Simon were:

• Don’t measure shares so much as virality. But they do measure tweets, retweets, likes, shares, comments, click actions on page, page views etc. so they can see their current trending articles and understand what’s working.
• Ask who you are engaging with and fine tune this until it works.
• Leading on from this: know your audience.
• Also, something that James agreed with, there is no best time to tweet for everyone. It depends on your vertical and on what will resonate. You should check this by analysing your statistics.

On to SAScon

I hope you have enjoyed the tweets coming live from SXM London 2012. Thanks to Danny, Lisa, James, Simon and all the speakers and organisers who made SMX a great event.

After the final Q&A session today the Linkdex team will pack up and move on to SAScon for tomorrow and Friday! If you are going to SAScon, try and say hello. We would love to meet you.

He was the perfect person to begin a leading search conference. The interesting Q&A was led by Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman, who took it in turns to ask Amit questions about his history, his goals, Google Panda and Penguin updates, G+, search relevance and more.

Growing up as a boy in Uttar Pradesh, India, Singhal remembers watching old Star Trek episodes on his black and white TV, dreaming he could one day he could have ‘the Star Trek machine’, which you can talk to and receive any information you want. It was this, he says, that drove him to re-write the Google algorithms. And after studying with Gerard Saltan, who some deem the father of modern search, this goal became much closer.

Of course, as we all know, this dream is not quite realised. As Amit said in the Q&A, “computers don’t understand ‘things’, but work on ‘strings’”.

From his background in Information Retrieval, Amit soon recognised that search engines had to implement stemming. That is, focusing on the root of each search term to understand what is basically being talked about. From here Google could move on to synonymy and then Universal Search (incorporating videos, images etc. to give the user everything they could want). All of this is in the pursuit of having search engines actually ‘understand’ your request and provide you with relevant and helpful information based on that.

Amit acknowledged that Google are now investing in ‘things’, or ‘entities’. This is why they bought Freebase (aka Metaweb) back in 2010, which had 12 million entities in their database at the time.

Amit Answers Some Questions

After the introduction Danny and Chris took it in turns to ask Amit some questions. He gave a mix of both revealing and politically guarded responses to some great points, as could be expected from a leading Google chap. Here are the topics they covered and the Q&A specifics:

Universal Search

Danny first wanted to lead on from Amit’s mention of Universal Search. Despite the flak from the press (especially since the launch of G+), he assumed ordinary users must be benefitting from Universal, since Google’s market share continues to grow.

Amit explained the thought behind Universal Search was to give users everything they wanted in one window. Whether that be images, videos, new articles, products or information. This worked to some extent, but Universal was ultimately incomplete since it didn’t include information shared between your private networks.

The motivation behind SPYW was therefore a system where they can index and serve your information privately, to help serve relevant and helpful information in one place. The product is essentially the first step towards indexing everything in your universe, from news articles to pictures of your friend’s dog. From their perspective SPYW allowed them to build a great infrastructure to build on. As Danny suggested, Amit said he has seen that users like the social results, despite press complaints.

They have seen CTR increase in searches with personalised results present and, with one click, you can remove personalisation. Amit reinforced that the product is changing and developing behind the scenes.

The Filter Bubble

Chris Sherman raised a good point, invoking Eli Pariser’s book, The Filter Bubble, he asked Amit whether too much information restricts your ability to read relevant material. Does personalisation give you information you’re actually looking for?

Context and personalisation were the two aspects, Amit responded, that come into play here. Context is critical, otherwise search returns irrelevant results. If you are in New York searching for pizza you don’t want to find results from Roman pizzerias. The second aspect, personalisation, helps make that information relevant to you. Do you know any friends who recommended pizza in NY? What do the experts say in comparison?

Amit agreed, however, that there should be serendipity. Personalization should not overtake the SERPs, but it should be present.

Be Sociable

After some back and forth about user testing (to be returned to later) Chris raised the point that personalisation obviously plays into social. Bing recently announced that they have separated social more than Google, who focus more on integration.

From Amit’s perspective relevance is king. The key problem with personalisation is that no one can judge the relevance except for the user, once the results have already been served. Then Google and SEOs are left looking at engagement metrics to determine, ‘was that result good for this individual user’? and ‘What can that tell us going forward?’

Where Bing separates search and social so you can “interact with friends and experts without compromising the core search experience”, Facebook argues that this is core to the search experience.

Facebook and Twitter

Chris brought up the point that Bing now incorporate Facebook results. What have Google done and what do they plan to do along these lines?

Amit noted that Google can’t crawl Twitter at the rate it produces information and that they don’t have a deal with Facebook. It has therefore been tough to build a system to deal with this. Earlier this year when Google launched G+, Twitter blocked them for a month to experiment with other options. But they now have access again and are trying to deal with the information in a relevant way. Amit sidestepped specifics, so there wasn’t really anything new to takeaway here.

Experimentation

Chris and Danny asked some questions about how Google decides what to focus on and how changes are experimented with before they’re rolled out (perhaps to protect against ‘did you even test Penguin/Panda’ questions?!).

In his response, Amit said that ideas are born from listening to the community, thinking of how to solve their problems and then writing something they can put through internal testing and experiments. After internal testing they do blind A/B testing to see how the idea could impact the SERPS. They send this to human raters and mix it up so no one rater can decipher upcoming algorithms. From these results they can judge the success.

Penguin

After some brief technical difficulties which had Danny and Amit shouting at each other and at us, Danny brought the issue to the inevitable topic of Penguin. This is the most recent from Google to eliminate spam tactics.

He asked, how do you know if its going to work? How do you test the algorithms and how do you judge the outcome?

Wanting to answer the last question first, Amit said that at the end of the day users will go back to the search engine that’s most relevant. That is who judges whether relevance is up.

In terms of Penguin, like Panda, things have gone well (this is according to Amit, remember!). Google’s objective is to reward high quality sites, to reward users and to reward authors of great quality content. With these Penguin changes they have, reportedly “significantly improved” the quality of sites appearing. In terms of independent testing, the search engines that can take well tested results (using the methods mentioned earlier) can best understand what Google likes and fine tune their algorithms better than competing engines.

Social Shares as the New Links

This is a popular topic emerging on the circuit. Danny noted that one of the big changes is that Penguin goes after bad links. Historically Google stood out initially because they counted links as votes, but now we see increasing abuse of this system, have we gone as far as we can with links? Will social signals become more important?

According to Amit, Google use a number of signals, combined at once with a unique algorithm. Apparently they have “more than 200″ signals. They want to make sure sites are high quality, they get links, the content is great and that there are social signals coming from the page.

Rather then link signals being the most important, Amit said that the reinforcement of various signals is how Google determine relevance and quality.

Beyond the Link Graph

Chris suggested that everyone in the industry understands the link graph, but wondered whether the knowledge graph is the next step in the evolution? That is, the relation between objects/entities etc. This also ties into direct answers, since Google have started reporting answers to certain questions at the top of the SERPs. Does Google plan to keep promoting Direct Answers?

In Google’s quest to answer user queries, says Amit, they first have to understand meaning. This is where entities and semantic search comes in. Once they understand this, they have to find them on sites and serve them up as answers.

An audience member later came back to this and asked a very valid question. If Google are going to take content from our sites to provide their own answers, how do they reward us? Amit said that the only thing an SEO can’t create is time. When a searcher can find information straight away, they have more time to spend looking at other more complex questions or asking new questions. Whilst this presumably doesn’t help CTR, I imagine it might help the length of visits.

Sponsored Box

Danny wanted to know more about Sponsored results and what it meant, how it came about etc. Amit reiterated that Sponsored isn’t really an advert because sometimes no one pays for the information to appear. But they wanted to be honest about it, since sometimes people do pay for inclusion. It is basically a deal between select brands to help relevance. They think it works well and Amit didn’t rule out the possibility of it appearing in other sections of Google.

The Spoken Word

Finally (have a cookie if you made it this far!) Amit bounced off a question from Danny, explaining that he hopes to expand spoken search more in the future. This will evolve as more queries come in and they can fine tune the results.

Amit closed the Q&A by asking the audience how they would do things differently if in his shoes. But apparently we’re not allowed to put our own sites at number one!

More from the Search Conference(s)

Thanks to Danny and Chris for putting together a great event. I can’t wait to cover more from the floor at SMX! And of course thanks to Amit for providing some great information about how Google works and what it has in store for us. Keep your eye on the blog for more information out of SMX and SAScon later this week.

At the moment the Linkdex team is busy getting ready for not just one, but two upcoming expos. In addition to attending SMX London next week, we are happy to announce that we will be exhibiting and speaking at this year’s SAScon: the Search, Analytics and Social Media Conference taking place at The Hive in Manchester on the 17^th – 18^th of May 2012.

Join us for 2 days of insightful keynotes, panels and networking sessions to meet and greet some of the finest from the digital industry. The not for profit conference put together by SEMPO, Manual Link Building and Manchester Digital is now in its third year running. It once again promises to provide the digital community with panels featuring some of Europe’s leading search and social experts, including Kevin Gibbons, Dixon Jones, Judith Lewis, Martin Macdonald and Jon Myers.

This year’s opening will be hosted by Twitter’s Bruce Dailey who is guaranteed to share his thoughts, insights and expertise with an audience of 200 digital marketers.

Linkdex’s VP of Product Matt Roberts will share his expertise on two occasions at SAScon:

• On the 17^th of May from 3:30-4:30pm Matt will be joined by Nick Garner (Unibet), Ben McKay (moneysupermarket.com) and Stefan Svensson (SearchMe) to share his insights on “Building an In-House SEO Team”.

• On the 18^th of May from 11:25-12:25pm you can find Matt, Peter Young (Mediacom), Jon Quinton (SEOgadget) and Martin MacDonald (Expedia) at their panel discussion on best practice “Link Building”.

So get ready for 2 days of non-stop expert insights, observations and debates (or 4 if, like us, you’re also attending SMX!). We would like to hear from you so make sure you come and see us at our stand!

Make sure to participate in conversations designed to debate the latest issues and move the digital industry one step further. There will be plenty of learning and sharing for you to take away.

We are happy to announce that Linkdex will be exhibiting at SMX and we would love to meet you and share some of our insights and find out how we can help you to optimize your web presence.

Our team is already very excited about SMX’s keynote which will be held by Google Fellow Amit Singhal (left). Since 2000 he has been the brain behind Google’s core ranking algorithms. So you can look forward to meeting the man whose team created Search Plus Your World as well as keeping the SEO industry on its toes with Google’s Panda updates. To top it all off Amit will be joined on stage by Chris Sherman and Danny Sullivan, so definitely a date to be saved in every SEO’s calendar!

Save the Date: 15th-16th of March at London’s Chelsea Football Club.

We are looking forward to seeing you there! (And stay tuned for more event-related news).

For me this is a mistake. Defining the keywords you want to be found for correctly means optimal volumes of keywords need to be tracked, not minimal. I say this because not doing so stops you planning and executing a project based on plans created on the back of data insights.

To illustrate why I think defining and measuring your optimal keyword universe is important I’ve divided a typical project into phases:

Phase 1 – Finding & Defining Your Keyword Universe

• List & Segment – Segmenting your large and carefully researched list of keywords into groups.

Once you’ve done this you have the foundations for building out a campaign.

How Linkdex Helps You Do This

Linkdex has been developed to help you define the keyword universe a business should want to be found for, value it, benchmark performance against competitors and improve performance through time by optimizing existing content, originating new content and help create trust and authority by generating links and social signal.

The three building blocks we’ve added to make it easy to do the first part, “define your keyword universe“, are:

1. Keyword Research – Give you access to the Google Adwords research tool and allow you to see which suggestions you’re rank checking currently and which might be good new additions.
2. Analytics– We’ve noticed that Google Analytics reports lots of keywords you’re found for but not rank checking. To help you get the best of these keywords inside your Linkdex project we tell you about the number of searches last month on that keyword and whether you’ve had any conversions from it. Once you’ve found your opportunities you can select the keywords for rank checking, add them to keyword tag groups and into your target universe, and begin the process of being found and making money from them.
3. Adwords – Adwords campaigns and their ad groups usually contain thousands of keywords and include a wealth of information on which keywords make you money. This information is often overlooked and we wanted to make it easy to access the data and use it. So we’ve pulled in this data including information on impressions, clicks and conversions and marked the keywords that you have and haven’t got ranking data for. Once again, we’ve made it easy to pinpoint the best of your keywords, select them, group them with tags, then rank check them.

What you should have after using these three combined sources is an expansive, highly relevant list of keywords with great revenue potential, and all curated into relevant keyword groups using tags.

Phase 2, 3…8

Once you’ve got your universe Linkdex helps you complete lots of the next stages involved in building on these foundations, including:

• Assess Potential – Calculating potential group value based on metrics like searches, potential monetary value and conversion
• Measure Gap – Benchmark performance against competitors to understand the gap
• Audit Content & Links – Look for SEO content weaknesses and content development opportunities
• Plan – Create a detailed plan that includes competitor analysis, objectives, strategy and clear deliverables and desired outcomes (something I call “the experiment”)
• Execute – Planning only points you in the right direction, doing is the only thing that builds rankings, traffic and revenues – which in most cases means developing content on and optimised website and building link and social signal
• Measure – When you complete the tasks needed to carry out your experiments, yon need to monitor whether the keyword and their groups have had their performance affected in the desired way – our SEO reporting dashboards are perfect for this
• Repeat – Because you focused your efforts, defined your experiments, executed and measured the results, you’re now in a position to refine and repeat. Dropping what appears not to work and increasing your efforts on what is working.

If you’ve not spent the right about of time on Phase 1, Phase 2 becomes impossible to do well.

Then last June this process received a healthy injection when Bing, Google and Yahoo! banded together to launch Schema.org, a collaborative project which aims to create a common vocabulary of structured data tags. In their words:

“By adding additional tags to the HTML… you can help search engines and other applications better understand your content and display it in a useful, relevant way.”

Similar to existing projects, such as microformats.org, Schema offers a far more flexible and easy-to access vocabulary of markup terms which webmasters can reference with the microdata, microformats or RDFa languages.

But which of these three formats are people using to mark up their data, if at all, and how attractive is Schema following recent developments in Google such as social and Search Plus Your World (SPYW); direct answers; recipe search and semantic search?

Structured Data and Schema.org

Schema attempts to create a common markup vocabulary and standardise the microdata format for HTML5 so that the search engines will be able to easily read the semantic meaning behind websites in the future. They apparently chose microdata because it finds that Goldilocks zone between its alternative formats; the more complex RDFa and the oversimplified microformats.

At the moment the search engines still support these other structured data formats and serve up rich snippets for microformat and RDFa marked sites. Last November they did announce they would try to start using RDFa, but if microdata is their primary focus then it could be worth learning this markup language and using it as per Schema’s advice.

For those that don’t want to learn microdata, microformats are much more accessible and quick to use. Handy if you have a ton of HTML to markup on multiple sites. A couple of weeks ago Glenn Jones of Madgex gave an insightful presentation at BrightonSEO entitled Microformats and SEO. Since I had been planning to write about structured data anyway, it was a well-timed lecture! Glenn focused on microformats and he didn’t seem to think webmasters need fear it being phased out. In fact, at the moment it looks like most people are using microformats because of its relative simplicity. Until microdata becomes the standard, there doesn’t appear to be any harm in using microformats.

How and why should Webmasters use Structured Data?

Rich Snippets

There are definite benefits to marking up your HTML as structured data. First of all, Google and the Gang display rich snippets for some (but not all) webpages which have correctly marked up the attributes outlined in Schema’s vocabulary.

If you are familiar with rich snippets you will understand their potential. They make your listings more visually attractive and more informative, including detailed information and sometimes even images. Here is a rather delicious looking snippet for a Banana split recipe. What would otherwise be a static article practically becomes an advert:

To see just how this differentiates a listing in the search engine results pages (SERPs), take a look at this eyetracking image from Moz’s Dr Pete:

It’s interesting to see just how eye-catching the snippet it, even more so than the top result. Last week in Glenn’s talk on microformats he referenced the industry disagreement about how influential rich snippets really are on the SERPs. He pointed out Paul Bruemmer’s article on Search Engine Land which reported seeing a 30% increase in click through rate (CTR) with structured markup in place and compared it to Richard Baxter’s piece on SEO Gadget which ‘only’ saw a 5% increase. Glenn gave his own approximation, suggesting that rich snippets probably increase CTR by around 10-25%.

Because of the visual attraction of rich snippets and the potential effect they have on CTR, SEOs constantly need to be aware of their presence in the SERPs. That’s why Linkdex has started to report on this when benchmarking your keywords.

In terms of actually marking up your content, if we take the banana split from earlier we can run the HTML through Google’s rather handy Rich Snippet Testing Tool to see the underlying markup:

Here the author has used microdata to markup their HTML but has referenced data-vocabulary.org, an older alternative to Schema (it looks like this was published a while back in ’05). Note the different recipe vocabularies for schema and data-vocabulary. You can see they have marked the reviews, provided a summary and linked to a photo, but they haven’t referenced ingredients or cooking time.

Note also the ability to link to a Google+ profile. Author information in the search results is something Google are pushing with rel=author (instead of the older, more general rel=me). As social signals continue to become a stronger ranking factor thanks to SPYW, tying in your existing content (especially those that render rich snippets) is a great way of spreading your content across the search and social channels.

To help you mark up your HTML Schema lists the vocabulary types and properties and gives instructions and examples on their website. For those just getting started with structured data it might be easier to look at microformats, as Glenn suggested, by going to their wiki and looking through the types and properties of the language.

Here is an example from the Schema website of a recipe marked up correctly with microdata. Note the use of itemtype, itemscope and itemprop, the main attributes of the language:

<div itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/Recipe”>

<span itemprop=”name”>Mom’s World Famous Banana Bread</span>
By <span itemprop=”author”>John Smith</span>,
<meta itemprop=”datePublished” content=”2009-05-08″>May 8, 2009
<img itemprop=”image” src=”bananabread.jpg” />

<span itemprop=”description”>This classic banana bread recipe comes from my mom — the walnuts add a nice texture and flavor to the banana bread.</span>

Prep Time: <meta itemprop=”prepTime” content=”PT15M”>15 minutes
Cook time: <meta itemprop=”cookTime” content=”PT1H”>1 hour
Yield: <span itemprop=”recipeYield”>1 loaf</span>

<div itemprop=”nutrition”
itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/NutritionInformation”>
Nutrition facts:
<span itemprop=”calories”>240 calories</span>,
<span itemprop=”fatContent”>9 grams fat</span>
</div>

Ingredients:
– <span itemprop=”ingredients”>3 or 4 ripe bananas, smashed</span>
– <span itemprop=”ingredients”>1 egg</span>
– <span itemprop=”ingredients”>3/4 cup of sugar</span>
…

Instructions:
<span itemprop=”recipeInstructions”>
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Mix in the ingredients in a bowl. Add the flour last. Pour the mixture into a loaf pan and bake for one hour.
</span>

140 comments:
<meta itemprop=”interactionCount” content=”UserComments:140″ />
From Janel, May 5 — thank you, great recipe!
…

</div>

Last week Google also updated rich snippets to include products and to allow HTML inserted into the Testing Tool, which means you no longer have to publish a page to test your snippets, making it easier to play around and test your markup.

One obvious downside of marking structured content is that it can be time consuming. The question is whether the rewards outweigh the effort and how the return compares with other time-consuming tasks in the SEO checklist. If an SEO has numerous clients, all with extensive sites, it would be impractical to markup everything and unfortunately automated markup is “error prone”.

Still, the benefit of having rich snippets for some of your key pieces of content, especially when found in the top 10 for competitive searches, surely makes it worthwhile in these cases. But what about when Google doesn’t covert it into rich snippets? Is this simply wasted time? Well, going forward it will become more important for other aspects such as semantic search.

Semantic Search

Rich snippets are an example of how search engines can better understand and present your data. As they continue to invest in semantic search, this will become increasingly important. Rather than relying on URLs, keywords or tags, with structured data search engines will increasingly be able to see the structure of your pages and how they relate semantically.

Google have even started to experiment with customised results panes for recipe searches, as in the below image.

Look at the pane on the left which allows users to further segment their results by certain ingredients, cook times and calorie counts. Now, remember I said that the banana split rich snippet didn’t mark up these elements? If you tick the ‘vanilla ice cream’ box on the left, which the recipe does include, the listing disappears from the SERP because the markup is incomplete.

This only reinforces the importance of marking it up fully – preferably with microdata – and raises an interesting point going forward. If Schema expands their vocabulary it will surely put increasing pressure on webmasters to go back and update their markups. Similarly, if microdata becomes the standard, will old microformat code become useless or incomplete further down the line?

For the moment Google renders rich snippets for microformats, but there’s no telling what will happen with semantic search. I also imagine that these custom panes will become more prolific as they expand the Schema vocabulary, which means that – even if you don’t publish recipes – this could still affect your site.

Direct Answers

Another part of semantic search is direct answers. Despite the ranking possibilities semantic search offers, some SEOs and webmasters worry that Google will access their marked up data and use it to bypass their sites altogether, as in the following example:

If this is the way Google are going then the ‘head in the sand’ approach probably isn’t the best method. If they aren’t drawing semantic information from your website then they will be happy to draw it from a competitor, complete with a referencing link at the top of the SERPs.

When you consider how click-worthy you can make your pages with rich snippets and consider ‘the Wikipedia Effect’ of answering one question only to ask another (I too am a victim of endless hours lost in the maze of Wikipedia), the effect of direct answers will likely be minimal. In the meantime webmasters can reap the rewards from rich snippets and receive additional conversions, links, shares, favourites, brand loyalty etc., all by helping Google understand their content.

User Experience is King

Google and the other engines want structured data and semantic search to work because it will arguably improve the user experience. And at the end of the day, this is their focus. Look at SPYW, look at recipe panes, localised search and direct answers – the SERPs are going to become more fluid and flexible and if webmasters don’t consider future-proofing and marking up their HTML with Schema’s semantic vocabulary (and probably with the microdata language) their competitors could further entrench themselves as authorities.

Going forward semantics might even evolve and play a more important role in rankings, alongside social. But at the moment all we know is that markup efforts are rewarded with rich snippets that increase CTR and that structured data helps the engines reference you as an authority.

If you have the resources to implement microdata then it’s worth it, otherwise it might be worth marking key articles with microformats, especially for competitive searches where you can distinguish yourself with rich snippets and set yourself up for developments in schema and semantic search.

With these kind of things there are too possibilities: either the early adopters waste resources on something that has surfaced too early, or they profit the most by getting there first. With semantic search and Schema I tend to think the glass might be half full rather than half empty.

The inspiration for this sketch came from my interactions with clients as well as many of my comrade’s interactions with their clients. Portions are a bit exaggerated, but it provides you with a general idea of what can happen with too much information.

With the vast array of information available online and the ability to subscribe to multiple updates, clients are being educated and at the same time inundated with varying insights. Unfortunately, it is hard to determine what’s fact and what’s fiction. Oftentimes, this can lead to confusion, over-questioning and a huge investment of time on the professional’s part.

By building trust with a client, over time it calms their uneasiness. The more a client can trust, the more they will let go and allow you the time to do what you do best.

My name is Charlotte and I’m the Linkdex User Champion!

I am now responsible for our web account users, for helping you get the most out of the platform and for improving our service and support to you. I have been dissecting the current sign up process and our communications with web account users and am working with the rest of the team to make various changes that should make using Linkdex even easier and even more effective for your business. Mostly these changes are more logical than ground breaking but I think you’ll like them:

Create Account – it’s so easy to do and we’re delighted to see so many new customers each day. I want to help each new customer understand what they’re signing up for and what they expect to achieve. With 7 years’ experience in B2B sales, I know that understanding and managing expectations is vital to any business relationship.

Communication– There is a vast amount of educational and support material on the site to accompany each of its very clever features and tools. It’s all there; we’re not hiding anything from you! But I will be taking steps to improve how we communicate this information to you, how we make it accessible on the site and how you can get in touch with us with support queries and feedback.

Support and Training – Over the coming weeks you can expect to see additional tutorials in video, image and text format available on the site. I will also be contacting you about regular Webinars and new Q&A sessions we’ll be hosting. Let me know what areas of the platform you’d like help with and what questions you have about any of its tools and functionality.

Surveys – We really are interested in what you have to say, not only as valued customers but as other SEO professionals. I will be contacting many of our web users over the next couple of weeks with some short surveys and will look forward to your responses.

Price Plans and Usage – With 10 different price plans you may not be sure which one is right for you. I intend to make the choice easier for you, but more importantly I will be implementing ways to identify whether you are getting the most out of your account each month and alerting you if we see that an alternative becomes more suitable for your usage.

Linkdex Gurus – “SEO – you’re doing it right!” I will also be in touch with those customers that I identify as making particularly good use of their account and the Plan that they are on. Linkdex is here to help you increase your rankings, traffic and revenue. If you’re doing that, you’re part of our continuing success story. If there is still room for improvement, we’re here to help you understand and to get more out of the platform. Have you added and tagged all the keywords that you think define your market? What competitors and keywords are you benchmarking yourself against? What progress are you making with Tasks you’ve created for yourself and other users you’ve assigned to your account? If you’re ticking all the boxes you should be really happy with the results and in an ideal position to share your expertise. Fancy being a Linkdex Guru? I’ll be looking at ways to reward our “Guru”-status users for referrals, recommendations and for helping others.

If you have any comments or suggestions about any of the above I’d be delighted to hear from you. Please email me at Support@Linkdex.com

Lee started by talking about how content is shared across hubs and really emphasized the point that content needs to be relevant to your customer and matched to the buying cycle. He then went on to talk about how influence and trust are key to SEO and social media harmonization.

Know your target audience and optimize for customers

The visual below was just one of many slides that showed the increasing importance of optimizing for customers and user experience. This was really interesting when you compare it to just a common emphasis on search engines.

Technical SEO is timeless best practice but now we must also write web copy that is highly relevant and useful to what our customers are looking for. Meaning that now we are not just chasing the most popular, but the most relevant keywords as well.

I asked Lee how Social and Search can work best together and his response was to “use social to find out more about your audience and conversations, topics and interests that help you build more relevant keyword targeting”.

Another great part of the presentation highlighted the ever increasing growth and development of social and the impact it has on SEO. He provided us with some very insightful UK social statistics that I would like to share with you:

UK in 2011

• 82% use the internet
• 48% use Facebook
• Business to Consumer Ecom accounts for £100 million

UK Search

• Google now accounts for 91.5% of the search market share
• Bing for 3%
• Yahoo for 2.5%
• Ask for 1.4%

UK Social

• Facebook accounts for 56%
• Youtube 19%
• Twitter 2.6%
• Yahoo! Answers 1.9%
• Gumtree 1.4%
• LinkedIn 0.66%
• Tumblr 0.53%

It’s important to highlight the fact that 23% of time online is spent on social networking sites!

Main Takeaways

1. Segment customers
2. Develop an editorial map
3. Optimize and socialize content
4. Monitor KPI’s
5. Measure business goals – see below
6. Refine and Repeat

What’s more, Lee was kind enough to offer me two more pieces of advice:

“Always ensure that you look at who influences your target audience and optimize around this. Then place this into a comprehensive editorial plan”

When I asked about links Lee made a great point: “it’s not just about looking at where links come from it’s also who they come from”, hence the importance of authorship.

The first thing I will be doing once back home is to buy Lee’s book ‘Optimize‘ which is all about how you attract and engage more customers by integrating with them via social media channels, content marketing and SEO.

A big hat tip to Andy Betts for arranging the interview and thank you to Lee for giving us his time (and permission to use his pictures!) For further reading on this topic please see 7 New Ways to Think About SEO Converged Media Metrics.

Platform Design Evolution

The layout of all pages has evolved. To put it in the words of one of our team “it feels a lot more like a platform than a website”.

You’ll notice we make more of the left and right hand space in your browser. The left hand navigation can now scroll when the lists are long and we’ve lost the ‘one too many’ scroll bars in tasks, amongst other smaller improvements.

To experience the interface re-design as best you can, we recommend using the platform in either Firefox or Chrome.

Keyword Research Update Part 1

Keyword research is a part of Linkdex we’ve wanted to return to and enhance for a long time. Today is the first of a series of releases that sees our vision for this area take shape.

We want to accomplish a number of things in the first part of the release.

1.    Keyword Research – To give you access to the Google Adwords research tool and allow you to see which suggestions you’re rank checking currently and which might be good new additions.

2.    Analytics – We’ve noticed that Google Analytics reports lots of keywords you’re found for but not rank checking. We wanted to make it easy to do this.

Part 2 of this release won’t be too far behind and amongst a host of other features will include:

3.    Adwords – It’s amazing how most businesses bid on many more keywords than they rank check. So we wanted to make it easy to access these keywords and associated data and bring them inside Linkdex.

In the meantime comments and suggestions are welcome.

Site Optimisation Enters Beta

At ionSearch tomorrow we’re going to show off our new ‘Site Optimisation’ features, which are currently in beta and being slowly rolled out to our users. We would hope to provide all our users access to this technology over the coming weeks so please be patient. So what can you look forward to?

As well as discovering website issues, we wanted to make it easy for you to discover where your performing content and underperforming content is and make informed decisions on how to improve pages and site architecture, not just generally but by keyword themes!

We also wanted you to be able to discover more about your competitors’ websites and what they are doing to compete against you with their content. Not just at one point in time but through-time, like we do with our link analysis.

With this in mind the new site crawler reports on everything you’d expect and a few things that you won’t but we think you’ll like.

The things you’d expect

• Tier – The tier a page is found in the site architecture
• Page Excluded – By robot.txt or No-index meta tag
• Server Errors – Like 500 and 503’s
• Page Availability Issues – Like 403 and 404’s
• Redirects – Like 301 and 302’s
• Canonical Tags – To other ‘non-self’ internal pages or external pages
• Duplicate Content – Page titles and descriptions
• Missing Elements – Page titles, descriptions and headings
• Meta data length – Short and long page titles, short and long descriptions
• Broken links – Both internal and external
• Headers and images – Covered in the ‘more details’ report section

From here on it gets more interesting

• Internal Link Counts & Anchor Context – To find relative page prominence defined by internal link counts is not new, but add the context of the anchors pointing at the page and it starts to make your analysis more meaningful. But internal links are only half of the link story so we have another layer of data about external links.
• External Link Counts & Anchor Context – To find a page’s relative importance as defined by external link counts and the context of the anchors pointing at the page. Which means you can look at the context of the links pointing internally and externally to any page of a website.
• Rankings – The number of keywords being found in the top 3, top 10 or top 20 positions for each page. Answering the question – is this page ranking for any of the keywords I am rank checking. But rankings aren’t everything. What about traffic?
• Traffic – We’re reporting natural search traffic to each page according to Google Analytics, including the unique search phrases used.

The addition of more link, rank and traffic data allows you to pinpoint pages that are performing, those that have link equity and those that are just making up the numbers before deciding on how best to optimize your site. But what if you had a financial services comparison website and wanted to find all of your site pages on a specific subject like “credit cards”?

A new way to search your website’s content

You’re probably used to using search operators like intitle: so we’ve utilized the operators you know and added a few you’ve never been given to allow you to search through content on your website.

intitle:keyword
inurl:keyword
inheading:keyword
inintanchor:keyword
inextanchor:keyword
indesc:keyword
infolder:keyword
inalt:keyword
inpage:keyword

So getting back to the example I gave earlier and you had a financial services comparison website and wanted to find all of your site pages on a specific subject like “credit cards” you might use intitle:”credit card” inurl:”credit card”.

You could then narrow the list further by finding pages that have keywords in internal or external anchors.

You can then see the pages that have rankings and / or traffic, and links and start to make decision on whether to optimize or redirect pages.

Add a task, dismiss our suggestions or simply comment

Where we’ve highlighted potential issues you can add a task or if you’re OK with what’s been found, e.g. the page title is short but you’re OK with it, you can dismiss it and we’ll not flag it again.

You can also add more general site optimization tasks and assign them to team members e.g. content to be written or edited or technical changes.

And don’t forget you can see whether what you changed worked with our task annotations.

If you want to record a history of a particular page you can do it on the comment wall. Something I think that’s useful, as remembering what’s happened, what you were thinking or what was said about a page is never easy but very useful.

What can you find out about your competitors on a crawl?

What about crawling competitors’ sites to find the depth of content they have on specific keywords?

Because we set a crawl on a 30-day timeline you can see which pages are new every month and what keywords you think they are targeting.

Finally

As always, all feedback is really welcome. I hope you enjoy today’s and the forthcoming updates being phased in over the next few weeks.