Post Panda the internet has changed quite a bit for SEOs. As marketers, SEOs need to know how to write Panda friendly articles instead of the normal spam articles or spun content they’ve gotten used to generating. Traditionally SEOs would use various free article spinning tools such as spin profit, to recreate articles just unique enough, to be deemed ‘original’ by search engines. Unique content is one of the primary criteria of search quality.

Distinctive content adds value to the SERPs, while duplicate content reduces value. The purpose of a search engine is to present new knowledge and valuable information, so a user can enrich their knowledge, experience and lives. If Google is to survive amongst its competitors, it should reduce duplicate content and increase unique content for the user. It follows that spun articles should be removed from the index and their value restricted.

SEO Spinners

Spinners SEOs use, are based around Markov chain algorithms, whereby sentences and synonyms are rearranged to create upwards of ten, twenty or sometimes fifty articles. These articles would then get distributed to a blog network or guest post networks where they would link back to the target website, with a few keyword rich anchor text in the bio. SEOs would exploit this channeling of “link juice” from article directories and automate the syndication process either by using subscription based websites such as submit edge, or by using software such as submiteaze. It is thought that manual syndication lends to more “stickiness” of syndicated articles (actually get published) as it is likely automated tools have difficulty fulfilling html form requirements, such as private domain email addresses, instead of free accounts which can be exploited on Gmail or Yahoo or Hotmail.

Content Aggregators

Google will always have difficulty determining the quality of a content aggregator, because content has always been syndicated across the web, be it digg, yahoo, or redit. This is why article syndication still works, but will eventually move away from spun or spam articles to higher quality articles with synthetized social proof. Low grade articles will still work as part a larger mix, a strategy that covers bread and butter SEO tactics; PR distribution, social bookmarking, directory submission, but there will be a move away from creating the broadest distribution or spread of articles, to generating synthetic social approval for quality content with a narrow distribution. Although Google can ascertain unique content with relative ease (as it only has to pattern match words against it database cache), “quality” as a signifier, is a property that even humans have difficulty defining themselves.

Social Proof

What is content? Content is information that provides value. What is quality? Quality is excellence in relation to other things of that kind. Every website, thought leader, or expert is trying to produce quality content that attracts social proof naturally. This social proof, such as retweets, likes, digs, act as quality signifier for products or services, which Search Engines take into account when ranking a site. They “used” to do this through links, in future they will do this through social proof. Once more relative social proof has been attained, search engines will perceive quality. If the quality signals or social proof of a web page, article, press release, have been manipulated or synthesized with fake social profiles this could also convince people into perceiving quality with fake social proof, which is already a thriving marketplace.

Will it be possible for Google to determine false social quality signals against real quality signals? Google will always have to determine algorithmically quality signals, due to the sheer scale of the job. Social spamming will be the new battleground for Google, a battle which will be more difficult to win, now that Facebook has armed Bing’s algorithms with social data.

I’ve been looking at the quality of various outsourced articles and although it is cheap, the quality is mediocre. This can be changed with a few quick edits, which can make the content more valuable. This article’s topic is about agency versus inhouse SEO, and although makes a moderately interesting read, there are word count fillers such as “generally speaking” and “upper hand” which all help to bolster the length of the piece. I’m not sure of the validity of the piece either, most just seems to be conjuncture and opinion but hey, the true purpose of this article is just to keep the blog fresh. I added the h2 tags. Anyway.. let the article begin:

Finding the right SEO is essential for any business that relies heavily on online promotion to increase their revenue. Companies want to find the most efficient way to increase the relevance of their web page, make it more attractive to their consumer base, all while making sure that their page can be easily found through online search engines and indexing softwares. The question is, do you hire an agency SEO or do you opt for your own in-house SEO? We can compare an agency SEO and the in-house SEO so we can make our decision:

Agencies have a greater understanding of the SEO industry

• Though agency SEO specialists are not entirely focused on one single field like the in-house SEO, they do have much more experience when it comes to spotting algorithm shifts, such as the panda and farmer updates, new market trends among different websites, and seasonal trends within the client’s specific market. Agencies also tend to have a better comprehensive view of the overall SEO industry and can track both a competitor’s and a client’s search engine rankings using such tools as SEOMoz, WebCEO, Raven or SEObook’s rank checker.

Agency SEOs are more experienced

• Setting up an in-house SEO can be difficult if business owners are unsure as to what types of skills they should be looking for when hiring. Do they require commercial soft skills, or hardcore technical programming skills? When seeking out an in-house SEO team, business owners need to learn extensive knowledge about digital marketing, and allocate time in familiarizing themselves with their competitors, Google insights and trends, ranking and analytics data before they can make their decision. By directly outsourcing their SEO needs through an agency, business owners will be able to save time and unnecessary effort.

Greater Return on Investment

• It is always best to bear in mind business expenses when deciding on the right SEO. Generally speaking, it is much more cost-effective to hire an agency SEO, rather than an in-house SEO. With agency SEO, companies will be able to get their hands on the maximum resources and desired services, all under one single fee. An in-house SEO, however, requires the business owners to put out money for both services, as well as the costs of the necessary supplies.

SEO Testimonials

• One of the advantages of an agency SEO is that business owners have the ability to look into the agency before making a decision. They can research the agency’s prior track record, look into their success rates, and overview testimonials before choosing the right SEO. Directly hiring an in-house SEO could pose as a risk for business owners, since they are less experienced, and cannot always guarantee high success rates. In the end, leaving your SEO project in the hands of a professional is the better option. Agency SEO services are much more reputable and reliable, and definitely have the upper hand when it comes to experience.

Just having a look at the upcoming SEO conferences and can’t believe the cost of some of these conferences. Nearly one and a half grand for an all access pass at SES London, which, seeing as SEO is learnt from the internet, the price tag seems a little bit steep - my broadband is little more than 30 quid a month! I’ve been to a few of these, written speeches for some of the key note speakers, most of which is just knowledge gleamed from the internet. Check it out if you have money to burn. If not.. why not click on some the blogs and sites on the right hand side, you will learn just as much

The release of Google Search Plus has coincided with the release tomorrow of Facebook’s Open Graph Actions. The roll out of Search Plus Your World seems like Google is upping the anti by trying to force users onto Google + so it can get it’s hands on the valuable social data that Facebook possesses. As Microsoft (bing) and Facebook are expanding their partnership, the combination of bing’s search algorithms and facebook’s edgerank could potentially be a Google killer; which must the reason for the aggressive roll-out of Search Plus Your World.

This is also an incidental test to rank for a combination of the two keyword phrases.

Probably one of the best ways to get links quickly that has a visible effect on your SERPs. What you do is write an article that is about the thing you are trying to promote. Imagine you are promoting an estate agent. Write an article on say, moving house which is around 350 – 400 words. Once you have your article, write a little paragraph that sums up the article and the website you are trying to promote, and place around 2 – 3 links in the paragraph which contain the keywords you are trying to target. Some article directories will alow this in this in the bio - others will only allow links in the bottom paragraph. Here is a list of article directories to submit your articles to:

Artcle Syndication Sites:

http://www.article-submission.net/
http://www.article-submission.us
http://www.articlesup.com/
http://www.articleset.com/
http://www.articlenetworks.com/
http://www.articlenic.com/
http://www.articlemaniac.com/
http://www.articleclick.com/
http://www.articleblotter.com/
http://www.myfamilyliving.com
http://expertsarticles.com/
http://article99.com
http://articles.directorygold.com/
http://article-spot.com

Normally when starting a SEO campaign the client will require a preliminary research phase so the SEO can assess how hard or difficult the campaign is going to be. This will normally be comprised of:

Keyword Analysis
A thorough analysis of the keywords which are typed into the search engines to find the client website. Keywords will be carefully selected in order to attract relevant traffic through all of the major UK search engines.

Reports and analysis of these keywords should be communicated and selected before any site op-timisation work is carried out.

• Identifying keyword phrases specific to the target market.
• Analysis of each keyword against major SEO factors and competitiveness.
• Niche areas, levels of traffic and convertible phrases will be identified.

Then comes:

Competition Analysis
An analysis of competing websites for the keyword search terms selected during the keyword analysis will be conducted. This will provide us with a good guideline for phrases to target. For example some phrases might have steep competition, high proportion of links, high page rank, high number of websites with keyword and competing title tags. Once this has been assessed against the competition you can determine which keyword phrases to target.

• Identify the amount of keywords, titles, links and PageRank of competing websites.
• Provide a conversion sheet for keyword research to proportion ROI.

And finally Ranking Benchmark

• Provide a rundown of your website’s position in all major Search Engines, Google.com, Google.co.uk Yahoo & Bing.

The difference between a redirect and rewrite is:

• Rewrite is a Server-Side operation
• Redirect sends an immediate response to the Client

When creating a new page you should always either 301 redirect or rewrite from the old page. A 301 redirect tells a Search Engine that a page has been permananetly moved, so all the “link juice” or pagrank from the old page is eventually redirected from the old page. Imagine if you got lots of links from different websites to an old page, you then rename and delete the old page, all those links you got would be wasted. Consequently when your rewrite engine is on you should follow this protocal and let the Search Engine pass on all that link juice to the new page:

So in the .htaccess at the root of your website save:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^website.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.website.com$
RewriteRule ^olddirectory\/file\.html$ “http\:\/\/www\.website\.com\/newdirectory\/ fileinnewdirectory\-remember\-to\-escape\-hyphens\-and\-fullstops\.html” [R=301,L]

This is a quick way to control all your rewrites. If you want to do static ones on a php page:
<?php

// Permanent redirection

header(”HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently”);

header(”Location: http://www.website.com/”);

exit();

?>

Looks like html5 may signal the death knell for flash..

When starting to analyse your site, the best place to start with is the meta tags. All title tags should be unique for every page and should accurately describe the page’s content. They should be no longer than 11 words long and they should should not repeat your key keyword anymore than twice. A great title and description tag scanner and aggregator is xenu link sleuth, where you download your title and description tags for every page and there rewrite each title and description tag from there.

The next stage when analysing your site would be to have a look at the amount of backlinks your website has. You can do this with backlinkwatch or back link analyser from seobook. You should then compare the amount of links your website has with your competitors website.  If they have a higher number of of that keyword rich backlink you are trying to get to number one for, you should try and match that, to your competitor.

The next stage would be to look at the number of pages your website has. You can do this by going to yahoo site explorer and typing site:http://www.mydomain.com This will give you the amount of pages your site or any competing site has. You should try and match your competitor’s number of pages.

Running an SEO agency can be time consuming, there’s clients to see, presentations to create, websites to audit, keywords to research, the list goes on. But I must remember to blog, these things are important you see, because if I didn’t blog about running a SEO agency how else would I get to the top of Google for such terms as SEO Brighton agency.

Still I’m looking forward to the next #Brightonseo meetup with the Brighton SEO community which should be fun. Kelvin at sitevisibilty has organised it so there should be lots of lovely presentations by various agencies, freshegg, propellernet icrossing and other grovvy seo marketing people.