The Duplicate Content Penalty

Treefrog Editorial Team / March 24, 2017

Be warned: if Google finds duplicate content, a spike will come out of the internet and impale your website horribly.

Frightened? Many are. But they shouldn’t be.

Duplicate Content Is Necessary

Let’s consider for a moment that Google, or at least some of the higher ups that hold sway at Google such as this guy, state that every website in the universe has some form of duplicate content on it. Think of press releases, blog quoting, product descriptions between manufacturers and dealers… some duplicate content is just natural. If Google were to drop the hammer on all of this content—i.e. implement a “duplicate content penalty” for any duplicate content it came across—it would make a whole lot of content syndicators really grumpy. Google often doesn’t care about making people grumpy—what it does care about is user experience, because users are the ones who click on ads.

On that note, it’s frustrating for a user to see a bunch of webpages in a search result with exactly the same content. Users like to see diverse angles and opinions on a given topic.

It comes back to user experience. We have to think of why the content is duplicated. Is there a logical and justifiable reason? If so, Google will most likely understand. Google has also given us a number of tools to use to properly outline why the content is duplicated.

The Duplicate Content Penalty

A myth that needs to be cleared up is this: there is no “duplicate content penalty”. Although in extreme situations, websites with a ton of duplicate content (hundreds of pages) have been the victim of a manual action. If Google thinks your site is trying to hone in on ranking by posting myriad pages all about the same topic, with identical content, then the skies may open up and Google will smite thee.

If you have content on your website that is the same as other pages on the same site—a paragraph or two let’s say—then you needn’t worry. As long as there is a clear and logical reason for that content to exist, you’ll be fine.

That being said, Google provides us with the necessary tools to identify and categorize our content so there’s no question about why it exists. I’ve listed some examples of these tools below.

Where Canonicalization Fits In

What the blue hell is “canonicalization”? Well, let’s say you have a product that comes in various colours. Your website may have a different webpage for that product in each colour available, which would make for several pages with the same text (describing the product) with minor differences. To keep this organized, it makes sense to define one solitary page that you wish to show up in a Google search for that product. In this case, it is best to use a practice that no one can pronounce, called “canonicalization”. N.B. I’ve actually heard this term referred to as “chocolization”, and I didn’t have the heart to correct the client.

Canonicalization basically means picking a leader. Consider a clone army. You have a bunch of clones (webpages with the same content, only minor differences, like colour red versus blue) and you only want one to step up to the plate and represent. So, you’d canonicalize all those other peon clones towards the leader. The leader will get all the authority, and she’ll be the one putting herself out there in a search result for the world to see. You’ll need to go through the leader in order to get to all of the other clones. If Google has to choose between too many webpages as the authority, it will just get bored and go acquire another company.

Point being, canonicalization will help define for Google the reason for the duplication. You have a better shot of ranking with the one authoritative leader than with several identical pages all competing for the same keywords.

Canonicalization for Pagination

Let’s say you have an article on your website that spans multiple pages. There’s a tag you can implement to tell Google that you want the first page of the article to rank, not all of the subsequent pages.

The tag is used to signal to Google that there’s a logical sequence to the order of the content.

Users wouldn’t benefit from seeing all the internal pages of an article in a search result; why would you want to start reading an article on page 3? The pagination tag allows you to indicate to Google that you’re aware the article has multiple pages, but you only need page one (the leader) to show up in a search result.

301 Redirects?

We’re not going to get into explaining 301 redirects here, but I mention them simply to point out that canonicalization and redirects are two very different things.

Put simply, you use a redirect if you want to route users and search engines to a new location for the content (a change of address). You use canonicalization when you need all the pages to still be accessible by users. The canonical tag is meant to indicate to search engines that you’re aware the content is very similar across those pages, and you only want the “leader” to show up in a search result.

Key things to remember

We need to keep in mind that canonical tags are a recommendation to Google. Whether Google actually follows this recommendation or not is another story. In other words, I can recommend that a train not hit me if I’m standing in the middle of the tracks, but there’s no guarantee it will listen. In Google’s own words, these tags are used as “hints”, not absolute directives.

Is there a good reason for the duplication? If you’re asking whether something will be perceived as duplicate content, put yourself in the mind of the user. Would someone expect the content to be there? If there’s a good reason for the duplicate content to exist, then we should be in good shape. Where we can apply one of the above tags as a hint to Google, then let’s do that.

There is no duplicate content penalty. Google will not shoot your website in the face if it crawls duplicate content. Will SEO tools pick up on duplicate content as a potential negative ranking signal? Sure. But again, let’s think of why the content is duplicated in the first place. If there’s a perfectly good reason for it to be there, then we should be good.

Unique, original content is always best. There are some cases where you may feel compelled to duplicate content. I’ve seen some clients copy and paste text from a source and use it on their own site. I would not ever recommend you do this. Best case scenario is to write your own version of that content so it’s original. Cite the original source of the content with a genuine link. That’s far more natural than simply copying the content.

Thanks for reading! Let me know if you have any questions.

More quality reading about canonicalization

Search Engine Changes and How They Affect Your Content

Treefrog Editorial Team / March 3, 2017

Updates in Search Engine Optimization have brought content marketing full circle. Nowadays, Google actively abolishes websites that include keyword stuffing, multiple thin pages, misleading information—in essence, Google is encouraging us to be better writers.

But isn’t this the way it should have always been?

When you are able to develop content that is genuinely useful and interesting to your audience, that same audience is more likely to engage with your material, increasing the success of your website and business. This type of content will then also naturally improve your websites SEO results, as well as improve the quality of your online presence.

Below we explore this, as well as some other major search engine shifts, which directly affect how you should be approaching your website content. Understanding where search engines are headed will not only help to keep your website competitive, but will also ensure your message is reaching the audience it is intended for.

So with that, let’s dive in!

A Mobile-Friendly Shift

Is your website mobile-friendly? You’ve likely already run into this question many times.

Updating their Search Quality Ratings Guidelines, Google has recently given extra emphasis on the importance of having a mobile-friendly website. As users are more frequently using their mobile phones and tablets (over laptops and desktop screens) to search for information, websites that are not mobile-friendly may fall behind. When people are unable to access, navigate, and read all of the information on your webpage with ease, they are likely to lose interest and abandon the site.

To have a mobile-friendly site means that when a person accesses your web content on their handheld device, they aren’t forced to “pinch and zoom” to get at the content. Google also recommends having a design that is responsive to the size of various screens, which is the preferred route to having a separate site for mobile devices and a separate website for desktop.

Google’s shift to mobile-friendliness affects content by forcing us to think about how someone is consuming content via the medium. After all, mobile devices have smaller reading screens, and people consuming content on mobile are often opting for a quick ‘snack’ rather than a full course meal. While content developers could still write the same detailed content as they always have, mobile users are not likely to keep scrolling and scrolling down, committing to read a long post in its entirety. When most people go looking of for an answer on their phone, they want a quick and tightly packaged response. So – while large-screen webpages have much more physical room for the development of information, writers have had to adjust to the idea of keeping marketable content as concise as possible. Content writers have also been forced to articulate an answer within the first paragraph of content – ensuring a reader receives what they’re looking for before losing interest and leaving the page to look somewhere else.

Long-form content still has a place on mobile, there’s no doubt. If it didn’t, there would not be such wide adoption of e-books on mobile. However, the medium encourages us to focus heavily on our target audience. Are they likely to consume this piece of content on a smartphone? If so, then perhaps we should consider length, the images we opt to use, our desired calls to action, etc. We not only need to think about the reader, but also consider how the reader will best engage with the content we’re putting in front of them.

Link building as PR

It’s no longer common practice, nor is it particularly effective, to purchase or incentivize links that deliver a user to content. Even asking for links is often now considered outdated. It’s far more applicable to acquire links organically; in other words, have people come across or land on your page because they want to, not because you’re asking or positioning them to.

So – how do you receive these organic engagements? Hard work. Link building isn’t what it once was—it’s now essentially a Public Relations strategy. This practice involves reaching out to bloggers and industry publication editors as an expert in a specific field, providing links to applicable sources that may benefit that organization’s developing stories. Positioning your webpage as a reliable resource validates your page as useful, and drives traffic to your site. By acquiring links from media sources naturally—because they were genuinely interested in linking to your article—the next time Google crawls from those outlets to your content, it will give your website that much more credibility, and thus improve SEO.

Engagement VS. Keywords

Traditionally, the importance of populating a webpage with keywords for search engine ranking took precedence over user happiness. SEO departments worked vigorously to compile data concerning which words, when optimized, would lure the most users to a page. SEO would pass this data on to content writers for keyword-focused content to develop.

However, a major shift has occurred. No longer are SEO specialists identifying keywords for the use of content developers – the value of content itself, is now taking priority.

Web developers realized that keywords were getting traffic to a webpage, but that content, which was created only for the purpose of including a keyword, was not providing customer-focused information. Without creating content with user intent in mind, people would stray from these pages quickly – damaging the website’s SEO performance.

Searchers normally have one of three main reasons to conduct a search online: transactional (want to buy), navigational (want to go to), and informational (want to learn). Businesses must now think of content not only in terms of the audience that they’re trying to reach, but also in terms of matching that audiences’ intent. The more you are able to focus your content on what the searcher wants, the more effective you will become at solving both reader and customer problems.

Voice Search Is on the Rise

Siri. Love her or hate her, there’s a lot to be said about what she can do. Siri, Apple’s on-board automated assistant, can help with tasks such as remembering a date, booking an appointment and sending a text message to a friend.

What is of increasing interest is how people are using automated assistants like Siri to search the web. If you ask Siri a question she can’t answer, she’ll take to a search engine (Siri uses Bing)—and that query data gets tracked. Similarly, Google Now will track voice searches from Android device users in the same way as text-based queries are tracked.

The main difference is in the way that people search via voice. They are more inclined to use natural language—including stop words like “and”, “if”, even “please” in their query. This has necessitated a search engine to decipher the true meaning of a query, while sifting through far more specific information. For example, we’re not typing “cheetah running speed”, we’re asking a search engine: “OK Google, how fast can a cheetah actually run, in kilometers per hour?”

These spoken questions are very specific, “long tail” queries. The issue is that they don’t hold enough search volume to gather trend data from. You’d be far more likely to get search query volume for something like “cheetah running speed” rather than the longer variation.

The beauty of the long tail query is that it is so specific that you have a great chance of ranking highly for it. For example, if you were to create a piece of content called “How Fast A Cheetah Can Run In Kilometers per Hour”, and you optimized the heck out of it, your chances of your content ranking when someone searched for that query would be very high.

How does this effect content? Google is pushing a shift for content to adapt to the: who, what, where, why, and how questions that audiences are asking – providing more user-friendly and immediate answers. This then challenges content writers to use alternative methods of communicating information, such as blogging, as a way to specifically target searcher intent – developing content based on common user interests and concerns.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-peggs/how-voice-search-is-changing-seo_b_8926708.html

Search Ads Disguised

You may not have noticed, but Google has been transforming their small search result “Ad” indicator.

Over the course of AdWords history, Google got rid of the yellow backdrop (sometimes called the sandbox), introduced the small “Ad” icon, changed the icon from yellow to green, and most recently changed the icon again to be an outline; arguably even more indiscernible.

While these new design shifts may seem small, the change holds great significance. Basically, Google is trying to blur the lines between what is a paid and what is an organic search result.

It would seem that Google has done this to intentionally blend and disguise paid ad results with organically listed results, making the difference between the two less obvious. This is likely to increase visits to paid-for ad sites, as many users previously became accustomed to skipping past advertisements – noting the yellow indicator and moving to the organic green results instead.

It is then more important than ever to have engaging content on your web pages, increasing the flow of natural traffic to your site, as well as positioning your brand in a competitive place on Google’s result list.

With great content, organic users will spend more time on your site, increasing your popularity. It is also becoming critical to invest in SEO research, understanding how to make your website competitive with other paid-for advertisements.

As Google continues to improve its algorithms, it is important to keep your website’s content up to date and on trend. More than ever before, businesses must work to understand their customer demographics through detailed analysis, to get a clearer sense of what these users might be searching for. Our web content needs to be informative, helpful, and engaging for our audience, otherwise people just won’t bother reading it.

While it may seem hard to keep up, the team at Treefrog is passionate about keeping on top of industry shifts. Should you need us to help navigate your business through these changes, we’d be happy to help.

Close up of hands. One is typing, the other holds a pen.

Creative Strategy

5 Ways a Content Audit Will Revitalize Your Website

Treefrog Editorial Team / February 13, 2017

Content marketing is all about creating and sharing information online in a strategic way to generate interest in your products or services, develop awareness for your brand, and build trust in you and your company. You can target the information and the way you share it to reach your ideal customers, whether they’re actively searching for you at that time or not.

Generally speaking, the content you share out into the world should bring readers to your website and make them want to connect with you and ultimately do business with you. If you want to engage them and keep them coming back, your content has to be relevant and current.

So, how’s your online content?

Having a comprehensive and engaging online presence has become key for successful marketing, but building quality content takes time. And time can change the relevance of content you’ve written in the past.

When was the last time you really looked at the content on your website? Is there outdated information on it? Are there holes in your content that you need to fill? Is your best content buried and difficult to find? Are you out of content ideas and looking for a way to re-engage? Do you know if your content is bringing visitors to your site and is it resonating with them when they do see it?

Enter content auditing.

A content audit involves reviewing and assessing the information on an existing website to identify flaws, errors, and areas for improvement and growth. An audit can revitalize your online presence by refreshing and re-organizing content, identifying new potential, optimizing search results, and preparing for the future by thinking ahead.

Refresh

Keep them coming back for more with updated content

A content audit will help to ensure your website’s content is up to date and relevant to the marketing goals you are pursuing. If you built your site years ago, and you haven’t worked on it since then, odds are you have content that has expired or is no longer applicable to your current services.

When performing a content audit, content marketers will take note of various ways they can help to refresh your individual pages by adding and highlighting new features, removing or updating outdated information, and looking for opportunities to amalgamate redundant or “thin” content. Search engines aren’t keen on lightweight pages that don’t provide value to users. Sometimes you can combine information from multiple pages to create one high-value page instead. Auditors will also review your content for any grammatical errors or spelling mistakes made by the original publisher.

Having a fresh perspective and a new set of eyes to analyze your content will help to fill in any gaps your content has, as well as to help develop a more user-friendly flow.

Organize

Good content is a good start, but it must be found to be appreciated

It is also a content auditor’s job to find new ways to improve the organization of your website content. You may have the best content going, so it may not be necessary to re-write the material itself, but readers must also be able to find it easily as they navigate your website.

Do you have a dedicated place on your website for blog entries or articles? Where can users access that in your menu structure? Sometimes minor adjustments to how you organize your information and even how you label it can make a big difference in how often readers find it, read it, and connect with you, generating leads for your business.

Discover

Mining for gold in your website content

The day to day of running your business probably includes countless conversations with your clients. They ask questions, and you use your expertise to inform and advise them. You probably don’t realize what a goldmine of content exists in your experience and your day-to-day interactions.

Your website and social media have the potential to have those conversations 24 hours a day when you have the right content. The content marketers who audit your site can help to identify opportunities for new articles and posts that will proactively share the information your customers and prospects are seeking.

These opportunities could include highlighting key advantages in your services pages, or it could mean coming up with new topics for your blog.

A good content auditor will also look ahead to consider all areas for potential growth, including new pages or articles to write, optimizations for your existing content, and opportunities to build connections within your content with linking strategies.

Optimize

Making sure your content finds the people who need it

Content marketing differs from traditional marketing in the way that people tend to seek it out, wanting to consume it, rather than being pressured or forced to consume it. When someone ends up on your website page, it’s usually because they are searching for information related to what you offer. It is then content’s job to keep that potential customer on the page, convincing them of why they should do business with you and not someone else.

However, landing on your page doesn’t happen purely by chance – there is a reason people end up on your website and not someone else’s. A lot of this has to do with SEO or search engine optimization – the process of increasing the visibility of a website or webpage in search engine results for specific keywords.

Your auditor will use their knowledge of SEO and your target audiences and keywords to develop to optimize your content for the right terms in the right way. When done well, there is no “stuffing” of keywords – it’s a subtle blend of the right words, written in a way that users will want to read.

Content marketers also think beyond your website and search results to other ways you share your content. The topic and tone may be adjusted depending on whom you’re talking to and how you’re reaching them, whether through search engine results, social media sharing, or email marketing.

Plan For The Future

Think ahead

A content audit will not only benefit you in the now but will help you to better prepare for the future. Following the completion of your content audit, you will receive a list of recommendations along with a proposed plan to implement the suggestions into your website. It may result in a few content formatting fixes, or it may suggest adding articles or blog entries to your digital presence.

In competitive markets, it is essential that you look ahead. It is important to note that creating engaging content for your website shouldn’t be a one-off event. Content marketers can work with you to format material that can be consistently augmented and updated, such as creating a blog and posting a new content article every week or month. Allowing for regular content updates will keep your business’ online presence fresh, organized, optimized, and relevant as new trends continue to emerge.

Anytime is a good time to spring clean your website content. Let’s talk about your content concerns and put you on the road to content marketing success.

Marketing Strategy

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Treefrog Editorial Team / August 26, 2016

101 Information

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is essential for having a prominent web presence and attracting more visitors to your website. People primarily use search engines to find what they need on the web, including your products and services. You need to be visible on search result pages in order to be found by prospective clients.

SEO is about maximizing the quality of your web pages on multiple levels so that they can be properly indexed by search engines. Search engines have a variety of criteria they look for in a website. Google’s search ranking algorithm changes over 500 times a year, to give you an indication of its complexity.

Ultimately, search engines are looking for the best answer to a searcher’s question. If your site provides the best answer, and it is also technically sound, and if several other websites are linking to it as an authority on a given subject, your changes of ranking will be higher than a site that has none of these things going for it.

The SEO Process

There’s no way to summarize all the intricacies of SEO in a single post. That would be like fitting War and Peace onto one piece of foolscap. The following general tips can help you to attain higher organic search engine raking and maximize traffic to your website.

Determine the best keywords to win relevant traffic. Keywords are the words and phrases that people use to search for information, so you want to select terms that are specific to your business, and write content to reflect those terms so that people can find your pages.

Create original, quality, useful content for all web pages. Use your keywords naturally and with an appropriate density (i.e. use them in a meaningful way; search engines don’t like overstuffed keywords). Including keywords in page titles can also be advantageous to your ranking. If your content is good enough, then other sites may even link to it, and these backlinks can be beneficial to search engine ranking.

Continuously add new and fresh content. Encourage visitors to come back again and again by giving them something new to read. Post multiple articles offering information about your products in a way that informs and educates. This content increases your site’s depth and expands potential visibility of your primary keywords.

Don’t forget the Metadata. Create unique, informative Meta Tags and Meta Descriptions for each page, so that you entice searchers to click on your page from search results.

Create on-site links. Make sure you have sufficient links from your content text to relevant pages throughout your website. This helps users find pages they may not have seen otherwise, and it helps crawlers identify authoritative pages on your site that are linked to often.

Navigation matters! Have a solid architecture to facilitate easy understanding and navigation, so that visitors and search engines can easily move around your site and find what they are looking for with as few clicks as possible. Adding a site map to your website is also recommended.

You should also submit the site map for your content-rich site to search engines or directories to make them aware of your site.

Professional search engine optimization (SEO) strategists use various tools to monitor ranking performance. As the search engines keep changing their search algorithms, SEO strategists have to be on their toes all the time, constantly monitoring the keywords and reworking the information, analyzing your website to keep it competitive in ranking results.

Among all other forms of marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) is integral in getting traffic to your website. Combining SEO engineering and quality content is the best path to ranking success.

Marketing Strategy

Why Are SEO Discovery and Audit Services Important?

Treefrog Editorial Team / June 24, 2016

Effective SEO isn’t solely about how your website ranks in an organic Google search

Search engine optimization (SEO) is vital to your company’s online presence. The purpose of SEO is to obtain high visibility for your website on Google, Bing, Yahoo! and elsewhere by ensuring it ranks on the first page of the organic searches people perform. In other words, SEO makes it easy for your customers to find you online.

An oft-misunderstood online marketing tactic, SEO is an increasingly vast and complex methodology, and it’s one of many crucial elements comprising a holistic digital marketing strategy. Search engines rank websites based on multiple factors; no one digital marketing method alone will rocket your website to the top of Google’s list and keep it there indefinitely, and that includes SEO.

The effectiveness of SEO is reliant on many other components and services including:

Keyword analysis
Social media marketing
Effective email campaigns
Strategic content campaigns

Done well, SEO can improve your search engine rankings, thereby increasing your website’s organic traffic, and in turn, helping you score new customers, earn more revenue, and realize a high return on your SEO investment. But understand SEO isn’t only about your site’s ranking. One of your webpages may be ranking well for a keyword you’ve identified as relevant to your business, but if visitors to that webpage aren’t finding what they need quickly upon arrival, they’ll “bounce” or go elsewhere. Thus, user engagement is a major factor in Google’s determination of the value of any website. If large volumes of visitors are leaving your website rapidly, it will hurt your overall SEO ranking in the long run.

Research from multiple sources has quantified the value SEO provides for companies in both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) industry verticals. For instance, when conducting online procurement research an estimated 89% of B2B professionals start with a generic search. From a B2C perspective, about 72% of consumers who perform an organic search for a specific product or service visited a store or business within 8 kilometres of their location, and four out of five consumers use a search engine to find businesses in their vicinity.

However, like all things within the realm of business, there is no magic wand to wave that will produce instantaneous results. SEO involves research and analysis. Among the first steps to improving your site’s SEO ranking requires what’s known as an SEO discovery and audit session. It helps to determine which of your webpages are ranking as per targeted keywords, which ones aren’t, and what needs to be done to improve overall performance.

“Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.”
– ALBERT SZENT-GYÖRGYI DE NAGYRÁPOLT

Learning about Your Business and Customers

Before an in-depth site audit is performed to gauge the health of your website’s current SEO ranking and how it can be improved, a pre-audit discovery session is required. An integral part of an effective SEO strategy, the purpose of a discovery session is straightforward: it sets the stage for an organized, useful, and strategic audit.

There are five things an SEO discovery session should include:

A comprehensive client interview. We need to learn about your business and industry and your products and services. We need to know who your existing, and prospective customers are, the lexicon you and they use, how and where they connect with you online, and what’s driving online conversions or sales today.
Determining what your goals are. A goal without a plan is but a wish. Setting realistic, executable goals serves two important functions: it clarifies what it is you want to achieve with your website, and how compiled data should be measured.
Access to real-time analytics. Assuming your company uses Google Analytics to track how online traffic arrives at your site, how long visitors dwell on your webpages, and whether they buy or bounce. The more historical data you can provide, the better it is during the audit phase and for plotting your future. If your business uses or has used Google AdWords, the data it can provide helps paint a more complete picture of your website’s performance to date.
What keywords you think are best and why. Forget about your current SEO ranking for the time being. In the discovery session, we need to have a clear understanding of the keywords you think are relevant to your business, and why you think your customers would use those keywords to search for your products and services.
The quality of your site’s current content. How often do you refresh your website’s content? What is the quality of the content on your site? Your content needs to be well-written, impactful, and it should accurately and succinctly articulate what benefits your business and products provide. If it’s rife with spelling errors, poor grammar, and rambling, incoherent jargon, it will severely diminish your SEO ranking.

Auditing Your Website

With the discovery session complete, we conduct a thorough SEO audit of all of your web properties, and subsequently, provide you with the details of that review and our strategic recommendations that are tailored to your company’s needs.

Our SEO audits and assessments typically include:

Competitive intelligence on your competitors
Keyword analysis and recommended targeted keywords
Reconfiguring your Google Analytics and AdWords to reap more insightful data
Local search optimization for Google My Business and other directories
Gauging your site’s mobile responsiveness and how mobile search impacts your SEO
The usefulness of your inbound links versus your competitors’
Recommendations about your site as a whole to improve engagement and increase visitor conversions

An in-depth SEO audit and discovery session takes the guesswork out of what resonates with your existing and potential customers, and it helps to determine a path forward based on data and your business’s strategic goals. It also lays the foundation for building your ongoing marketing plan to ensure you’ve got inspiring and effective content and messaging, a high-quality, responsive web presence, and above all, a compelling reason for the world to land on your pages first and foremost.

Do you have questions about SEO and its effectiveness in conjunction with other digital marketing methodologies? Talk to us. Whether your company is big or small, a startup or a recognized brand, we have the expertise and the experience to optimize your site and boost your website traffic.

Marketing Strategy

Do Keywords Still Matter?

Treefrog Editorial Team / March 5, 2015

Anyone who’s been following developments in the SEO world may be quick to say things like “keywords are dead.” Well, that’s just ludicrous. How can content be king and keywords not matter? Keywords are, in fact, words. Is content not made from words?

You know what is dead? Keyword stuffing and gaming search engines. Search engines surpassed human intelligence like… two years ago. SEO’s don’t game the system anymore. Those that do are beheaded by Google. And then Bing comes along afterwards and gives their beheaded corpses a kick in the bum.

There’s a fundamental difference between keywords for search engines’ sake, and keywords for users’ sake. But there shouldn’t be. Content should be created for users first, there’s no doubt. But there’s also no reason that content can’t also perform well from a search engine ranking standpoint.

Keyword Optimization: The Modern Filing System

Here’s an extremely basic explanation. Think of a search engine as a database, and your website as a file within that database. If your website doesn’t contain the words that someone is searching for, how will it ever be found?

Even more basic: what do you do when you file papers into folders and put them in a filing cabinet? You’d organize the papers by topic, and then label the folders with that topic, right? Think of including keywords and optimizing your webpage somewhat like labeling the topic so that it’s easier to find. On the other hand, if you’re like me you just stack everything together and dump it into the filing cabinet in a huge papery mass. If I need that piece of paper later, I simply try to forget the reason I needed it in the first place, and then move on with my life.

Don’t be Stuffy: Write for User’s Sake

Back in the day, SEOs used to beat the keyword/labeling concept to death. They’d repeat a select keyword numerous times on a page — to the point of annoyance — rendering the page text unreadable. Well, this doesn’t cut it anymore. Actually, it didn’t cut it in 2011.

So what can you do? Luckily, there are still some tried and true tactics to content building that you can employ to help with search engine visibility. Search engines still pay attention to your META page title. They still pay attention to headings and on-page content that is relevant to your topic. They still pay attention to the intended visibility of your webpage; that is, whether you have it prominently displayed and/or linked from a site-wide menu. They pay attention to whether that page is distributed on social media, and whether people click on it and read it. They care about how many other websites are linked to your content, and whether those websites are relevant to the topic. Search engines also care about relevance, and user engagement. Actually they care about this last one most of all.

You need to also keep competition in mind. For example, do your competitors have a page on their website that is ranking well for the topic you’re planning to write? Are those competitor pages written well? Do your competitors have a large social media presence? If so, then it will be much more difficult for your content to rank. It’s not that your content isn’t as good or better, it’s just that your competitors may have been at the game longer.

“Play the Long Game: Think Like the Mighty Tortoise”

Will your new webpage take a long time to start performing well? Sure it will. In some cases, it will take six months or longer. You can jump-start the page’s visibility by sharing it on social media. If you have a client e-mail list (people who have opted-in, of course!) then throw a teaser blurb about your content in there and link to it. Link to it from other pages on your website, and make the anchor text in-line with the topic heading.

All of the above tactics can be factored into your content, and you’ve not had to stuff one keyword. You’ve simply selected a relevant topic to write about, and you’ve done all the right things to make sure it will eventually rank well when someone researches that topic. The fact that the topic contains what could be defined as a “keyword” is merely coincidental.

So, do keywords still matter? They certainly do, if they are used for the right reason. Keep in mind: users first. Organizing the keywords and optimizing the page is really only making the job of the search engine less difficult. But the whole reason you’re doing this is to get more eyes on your content, and then get those eyes to convert into sales.

Actually, you want the people to convert into sales. Actually, you want the people to remain people, and buy stuff from you willingly. You get the idea.

Need help? It just so happens that Treefrog is in the business of getting your users to convert into sales. We’re here for you!

Marketing Strategy

Five Essential Parts of SEO

Treefrog Editorial Team / December 25, 2014

What is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a magical art, created in the center of an active volcano by a colony of friendly yet mischievous gnomes.

SEO can’t be seen, it’s hard to quantify, it’s not altogether tangible, and it’s constantly shifting and moving around like the smoky essence of the universal ether.

SEO has had a tainted history. In the past few years, snake oil salespeople have been pulling their wagons into town and offloading their wares on the unassuming villagers. SEO was packaged and sold as the way to get to number one on Google. In the past, there were some questionable ways of making this happen. Evil SEOs of old employed backlinking magic, keyword stuffing, and various other wayward tactics to fool the poor Google. And it worked. But then the Google woke up, and it was angry.

With the release of several major upgrades to its algorithm, Google changed the rules for SEOs everywhere. Instead of ranking well for using dark tactics, sites were penalized. Some companies woke up one morning to find their websites had completely fallen off the radar. Since these major shifts in the industry, the world of SEO has become a completely different place.

The Google Effect

You may be aware of the fact that Google changes its algorithm over 500 times a year. Let me put that in perspective. Think of doing something 499 times this year. Google changes its algorithm more than that. That’s more often than some people shower. Every time this happens, the SEO industry feels it. Sometimes the changes are subtle. Sometimes they are major. Either way, a big part of SEO is ensuring your website makes the grade—that is, stays in line with Google’s ranking criteria. There are forums on the Internet where SEO engineers do nothing but debate what Google is going to do next, and what it means. Deciphering Google is a full time job.

Google gets over 60% of search engine traffic

Also, let me clarify. I use the term “Google”, but what I really mean is “search engine”. Everyone knows there are other search engines out there. I think. There’s also Bing, and there’s… Bing. Fact: Google gets over 60% of the search engine traffic on the web, so for the purpose of expedience, I’ll probably just keep saying Google when referring to search engines.

As for the explanation of SEO, I have come to think of it in five distinct sections.

Technical

Technical SEO deals with applying attributes to web pages which happen on the back end, where most mild-mannered content creators choose not to venture. Technical SEO changes can include improving page load times, applying microformatting, validating the W3C markup, and various other techniques.

Search engines acknowledge the effectiveness of a website from a technical perspective, so it’s an important aspect to improved SEO. But once those technical changes are applied, they don’t keep awarding your site points with Google. Even though these updates are important, the SEO work is really only just beginning.

Content/Creative

This is the most important part of SEO. Content should be at the core of your SEO strategy. Whether it’s articles, images, videos, infographs or a collection of all of these, the more relevant and helpful your content is, the better your chances of it being found on the web.

Tactical

Tactical SEO refers to optimizing websites on a page-by-page basis, in order to ensure they make the grade for popular search engines.

Tactical SEO involves the effective insertion of keywords into on-page content throughout a website. This may sound simple enough, but keywords are different for every industry, every company, and every individual.

The wrong keywords will draw the wrong kind of traffic to a website. If the keyword is too broad, you’ll get tire-kickers. If it’s too specific and exclusionary, you may be cutting out part of your audience. Keywords use a balance, and it’s ongoing. Basically, tactical SEO involves strategic content insertion on a continual basis.

Social

Social is a great way to pull traffic to your website organically. It stems from having great content and staying engaged with your audience. Ideally your audience will share your content, comment about it, and give you feedback. All of this activity drives traffic and calls attention to your web presence.

Reporting

This is the science of SEO. Through custom reporting, SEO managers can determine whether a strategy is working. Because one client’s goals are different from the next, SEO strategies should be tailored to fit specific needs. It isn’t all about getting to number one on Google (something we’ll cover more in depth soon), it’s about identifying a client’s key performance indicators and doing everything you can to meet expectations.

As SEO Manager at Treefrog, this will not be the only article I write about SEO. It’s such an involved topic, there are hundreds of angles to cover. In fact, many of the topics brought in this article are grounds for more explanation, which I plan to provide as we go forward. In the meantime, please feel free to email your questions or flag me down on Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn and I’ll be happy to help however I can.

I hope that you will enjoy following along this incredible journey as we learn and experience together. In the meantime, I’ll be hanging’ with the gnomes.