What does SEOVI stand for ?

 Greetings again from #Frankie2Socks in St. Lucia Estuary village in KZN South Africa.

SEOVI is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization Value Indicators or the variables used by search engines when useing AI (Artificial Intelligence) to investigate and interrogate your online content for purposes of matching SEARCH QUERIES to SEARCH RESULTS (SERP) and displaying a Search Results Page. 

SEOVI are very strange things and each carries different weighting factors in different marketing scenarios. EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust) is the biggest issue here,  as these signals each carry different sets of link tools in their associated carry bags. Good online marketing teams have HTML CODING SPECIALISTS who insert specialist code segments that add value to your inpage search engine optimisation tactics and tools. The biggest one is the addition of PageTitle, Page description and  PageKeyWords as well as  #LinkAttributes in all outbound links, both internal and external.

Search Engine Optimization is rather complex as there are many issues that need to be considered in both the <  BODY > and < HEAD > sections of your InPage HTML CODE.

To get best results the HEAD section and BODY section of your HTML CODE need to agree with each other and be semantically similar, and use the same terminologies or semantic toolboxes

So SEOVI is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization Value Indicators and needs to be understood to have direct links to page discovery and page index issues within online search.

Search Engine Optimization Value Indicators need to be added to your out bound links in as many ways as makes sense for the purpose of the particular page in question and then the subset of pages, the supper set of pages and your site or blog as a whole or single multilayered entity. Semantics has strange ways of being singular, but also being puristic and inclusive.

Most folks do not use the term SEOVI in any shape, manner or form when discussing online marketing issues.

I post about online marketing issues from a FUFISM BASED perspective here  https://x.com/info4u2use?t=ToawvTFIEfOlrlZoYcRNJw&s=09

FUFISM is a marketing philosophy where search issues and public perception of issues resulted to the subject St hand are important due to social media fluidity and related marketing chaos.

Sobdo not create toooo much chasoband be sure to smile all the while.

Enjoy life and take care.

Updated 8December 2024 

#Frankie2Socks 

What is the purpose of your online strategy and why should it be documented?

What is an online strategy?

During my research for the book I am writing on FUFISM I have spoken to many folks, in a variety of different environments from random folks in shopping malls, to focused online communities where SEO and online marketing are discussed in the most serious ways you can think of.  The question posed here  "What is the purpose of your online strategy"  always gets a strange answer.

Most ask do you not mean your online marketing strategy, and my stock answer is NO I am not talking about online marketing, I am talking about your online strategy and why you have an online presence in the first place.  Online marketing is only a small portion of your online presence, what about all the associated stuff like customer service,  public relations, event management, research and other business related issues?

So what is the purpose of your online strategy?

Sure sales and marketing are part of the mix of reasons for having an online presence, but they are not the only reasons that you need to have an online presence.  As you document the purpose, aims and objectives for your online presence, many more issues will come to mind, and these can then be added to your documented planning for your online presence.  An unplanned online presence is a very dangerous affair for many different reasons, and  these will surface as you progress through the methodology of setting up your online presence, documenting the procedure and actions as you go along.

From a #FUFISM based  marketing perspective,   planing and documenting your plans is one of the core elements that need to be addressed,  and done right, because your entire online marketing effort will hinge around and be influenced by these documents and associated activities.

Having an online strategy is the first step in your online marketing efforts, as this documented general online strategy will  inform your online marketing strategy, and discuss how your online marketing efforts will dovetail and mix with your off line marketing strategy. Understanding how your off line marketing and online marketing mix and influence each other is also a very important part of your planing strategy.

Before you formulate your online marketing strategy you need a clear understanding of all the components of an online marketing campaign, and a very deep understanding of SEO or Search Engine Optimisation.  Remember that SEO is the primary issue that needs to be integrated into all your marketing efforts both online and off line. Other components are more subject matter intensive, and require deeper planing around the issue at stake.  An online marketing campaign should, at least in my mind have the following components as bear minimum

1)  a website
2) a blog
3) a social media platform
4) a documented  off line marketing component
5) a documented management strategy
6) a documented collaborative strategy to ensure cross media and cross platform integration.
7) an SEO strategy that links this campaign to your other online work.

These seven basic components need to be well integrated, and shared across company divisions and marketing departments, both online and offline.

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation has three distinct layers that need to be clearly understood, with a proper focus on how they need to be integrated  into your marketing strategy, both within the off line as well as the online environment.  I have discussed these issues before  in the 4u brand blog, and you can read these posts later by following the links at the end of the article.

From a FUFISM based\ marketing perspective the three SEO layers are

1) IPSEO or In Page Search Engine Optimisation
2) OPSEO or Off Page but still online Search Engine Optimisation.
3)OLSEO or Off Page and also off line search engine optimisation

These three layers of search engine optimisation all have the same target market audience, and the target market research done should be shared by all three layers.  Each of these three layers also needs to be documented and shared across platforms, across media and across departments. The two main purposes here, are to ensure that research is not duplicated in silos, and that any silos within your marketing structure are removed and reduced to common shared documentation.

The online environment has changed radically over the last few years, and the introduction of the Google Hummingbird algorithm, along with its cousins in other search engines, has changed the online search environment in more ways than most people could possibly imagine.

 Search went form strings and links to now include this list and many other seemingly unrelated  issues.....

• strings, 
• links,
• things, 
• context of content,
• people, 
• places, 
• activities and 
• many other  hidden issues as associated \with semantic footprints and related human social media  issues.

The old set of SEOVI or Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicators that search engines used before Google introduced the HUMMINGBIRD algorithm did not vanish or become redundant,  but are still very much part of the primary search picture. What did how ever happen is that a brand new set of search variables or  SEOVI were introduced which run along side the old variables, and are factored into new and updated search algorithms which  enhance and contextualize the old variables so that your online content may be better matched to search queries

SEO or Search Engine Optimization now includes  a vast array of new SEOVI (search engine Optimisation Value Indicators) and understanding the Google Hummingbird algorithm will help you better recognize these new SEOVI so that you can deal with them in the most appropriate\manner, as they are very varied, and pop up in un-thought of locations, such as the new Google Collections, which has  many folks debating a host of related\ marketing issues that have come to light through the use of Google collections.  see link at end of document.

From a FUFISM based\marketing perspective you have three elements  that make up search, which need to be addressed\in your SEO. these are

1) your online content and all other world wide online content
2) the search engines
3) the world population which includes your target market audience

It is the function of a search engine to match search queries to online content in ways that satisfy the end user who typed in or other wise placed a search query for the search engine to reply with a SERP or Search engine results page.

It is your duty as a publisher, author or marketer to ensure that a search engine is supplied with the necessary tools and knowledge to  enable the search engine to construct a bridge between your desired target market audience and your online content,  with well laid out approaches and road\ maps that make it easy for your target market audience to access your online content across these bridges, (read SERP's) in high traffic volume loads.


So when drafting your document discussing the purpose of your online presence you need to be clear on your online marketing needs and aspirations, so that this may be introduced to the rest of your staff in ways that they can understand the match between your purpose of being online and how much of this is for marketing.  You must also be clear to mention the other purposes of your online strategies, along with how these will interact with,  and influence your online marketing strategies.

Take your time and do a good job here.  Remember that this document is a living document that needs to be revised and updated\ on a regular basis, with a minimum of One month between updates or revisions.  If there have not been enough changes to your marketing structures or your target market research, then just say so in your monthly update, but be sure to do this at least once every month.  The middle of the month is in my opinion the best time to do this, as it is usually a bit quieter and there is no demand for reports on success / failure of your various marketing efforts at this time.

Once you understand what you want to achieve within the online environment, and have documented this clearly in ways that all staff members can read and understand, you will be ready to start drafting your online marketing policies, along with who is responsible to ensure that your SEO is integrated into all your marketing plans, both online and offline.

Remember that your online strategy  is a live growing document, and keep it updated and relevant.  

You documented online strategy needs to be very clear and have a minimum of the following issues discussed in detail, the more you add here the better your online marketing results will be.

• The purpose of your online strategy
• the aims of your online strategy
• the objectives of your online strategy
• a guide line to your online policies for 

• your web site
• your blog
• social media
• internal office use  
• research issues
• online marketing
• Integrating SEO with 
• your web site
• your blog
• your social media  marketing
• your print media marketing
• your radio marketing
• event planing and related marketing
• other  marketing strategies such as hashtag marketing

Discovery of your online presence is a very complex and complicated  matter that has many twist,  turns and strange deviations.  There are basically three avenues that your online content can be discovered by your intended target market audience. these are listed here.......

1) BY PURE ACCIDENT  WHILE SURFING THE WEB

2) BY MEANS OF YOUR ADVERTISING, either online or off line.

3) BY FINDING YOUR CONTENT IN A SERP (SEARCH ENGINE RESULTS PAGE)

The first, discovery by accident,  is not a good option, the second, discovery through your advertising / marketing efforts,  is a bit better, but can be very costly, the third, using a search engine,  is the best option. Unfortunately this option  requires lots of understanding and co-operation from many different folks in a  wide range of separate disciplines. 

For these folks to have an understanding of how they need to cooperate and  work together as a team they need to understand your online strategy, and where their efforts fit into the picture, as well as how their work will impact on others efforts so that they can maximize these different areas, which each will impact on their own associated SEOVI as well as other independent but related SEOVI (Search engine Optimisation Value Indicators.)

This documented purpose of your online presence will inform many different activities, actions as well as  interactions and then ensure that every marketing project, whether online or offline,  knows how their efforts are impacting on your online presence, what needs to be done to improve both the project in question and your online exposure in general with a focus on the specific project.

From a FUFISM based  marketing perspective the purpose of your online strategy is to improve your visibility both within the online environment and the off line environment and ensure that your intended target market audience  discovers your online presence, then follows through and completes your desired CTA's or Calls To Action within your online content, be it 

• in the social media,
•  within the pages of your blog,
• within your  web pages,
•  in an online forum or 
•  in any other online resource, or off line area where you may be active with your supplemental  marketing efforts

LINKS  to related  blog posts discussing SEO related  issues.

what is FUFISM and why should you care http://4ubrand.blogspot.com/2015/06/what-is-fufism-and-why-should-you-care.html

  

 +fufism   http://4ubrand.blogspot.com/p/fufism-functional-user-firendly.html

What is OLSEO ans why should you use it http://4ubrand.blogspot.com/2015/04/what-is-olseo-and-why-should-you-know.html

Is SEO important to your company http://4ubrand.blogspot.com/2015/05/is-seo-important-to-your-company.html

key words versus query: what is the difference?  http://4ubrand.blogspot.com/2015/04/key-words-versus-query-what-is.html

Link to a google collection where #FUFISM, SEO and semantic search are the core focal element https://plus.google.com/u/0/collection/UqTcX

 Semantic value of a Google plus collection http://4ubrand.blogspot.com/2015/05/semantic-value-of-google-collection.html
Googlwe collections as an SEO tool http://4ubrand.blogspot.com/2015/05/google-collections-as-seo-tool.html

Is SEO important to your company ?

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the toolkit that you supply to the search engines so that they may build bridges between your online content and your intended target market audience.

 

If your SEO is done right then the search engines will be able to build  bridges with Good well mapped access points that allow free flow of high volume traffic between the search engine and your online content for your end users.

 

Doing SEO right is such a difficult task, as there are so many different components that need to work together as a team, with many that are in a constant state of flux.  Understanding these different components and how they interact within each other is the key to good well managed information flow patterns that are used by your marketing team to ensure a constant demand for  your products, services and related information.

It thus follows that SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the most vital component of your online marketing, as if this is not done right your online content will not reach your intended target market audience. 

The power of SEO or Search Engine Optimisation to influence your  online penetration must never be underestimated. Over the last few years the SEO industry has evolved from a purely technical in page only issue,  to now include all your marketing channels, and invade every corner of your marketing environment, both online and offline.  We need to get you to understand that  SEO now has three primary focal areas that need to be well integrated into your total marketing plan.  If this integration does not take place then you will have very poor  penetration within the  online marketing industry.

These three focal areas of SEO are 

1) IPSEO or In Page Search Engine Optimisation

2) OPSEO or Off Page (but online) Search Engine Optimisation

3) OLSEO or Off Line Search Engine Optimisation.

IPSEO or In Page Search Engine Optimisation is all the technical stuff that is hidden within the HTML code of the page in question,  as well as a host of other related issues that are both seen and unseen by your intended target market,  when they consume the online content made available to them,  through your page in question.   There are many folks that do a wide variety of different things here, but it starts with   a marketing brief from the marketing manager.  The list below is a partial list, and only includes some the more important In Page issues that need to be addressed after target market and keyword research has been documented and shared with the relevant folks.

• the textual content or copy writing
• any images
• any audio files
• any video files
• navigation structure
• internal links
• out bound links
• the page lay out and colour scheme
• micro data added to improve contextual issues
• meta data in the page <HEADER> section
• java scripts or any other hidden scripts

OPSEO or Off Page Search engine Optimisation is the next step, but some of this may need to be done prior to actual publication of your page to ensure proper information flow patterns.  OPSEO is all the online marketing done that links to the page in question, as well as associated online information which is called by a variety of different names as in the partial list below.

link building

relationship marketing

content marketing

search engine marketing

social media markleting

email marketing

These marketing channels are sometimes seen as independent marketing channels, but that is a misconception that needs to be addressed at the top level within your marketing structure, as these all have a very significant impact on a variety of different STFSEOVI or Semantic Trust Factor Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicators.  Google as well as most other Search engines are now using these so called Semantic Trust Factors and Semantic Footprints in a number of different algorithms that impact on the SERP's or Search Engine Results Pages.

OLSEO or Off Line Search Engine Optimization is  the art of applying psychological tactics to plant semantic seeds in your intended target market audience's thinking patterns and thought processes, through the use of off line marketing channels such as but not limited to:

news papers

magazines

radio

Television 

road shows

speaking events

These SEMANTIC SEEDS then need to be germinated and nurtured through clever use of your OPSEO or Off Page, but online search engine Optimisation tactics, so that your intended target market will use your desired key words within their search queries. It thus follows that these three different layers of Search engine Optimisation need to be properly understood by your marketing team, so that each person within your marketing team can understand where their efforts fit into the picture, and how their individual efforts need to be integrated into the total marketing picture for best impact on the SERP's

 watch this HOA  (BILL and AMMON's BOGUS HANGOUTS) with +Bill Slawski  and +Ammon Johns for some great tips on SEO issues.

What is OPSEO, and why should you care?

OPSEO or Off Page Search Engine Optimisation is the true driver of impressive Search Engine Results Pages more commonly referred to as  SERP's

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is divided into two separate parts, the first is #IPSEO or In Page search Engine Optimisation and the second is  #OPSEO or Off Page Search Engine Optimisation.  

IPSEO is all the coding and HTML work, as well as the related image issues,  copy writing stuff  and other issues that are found directly within the page.

OPSEO is all the other stuff that happens off of the page in question, and included a wide variety of different issues, most of which are not easily interpreted as being directly related to a search engine in any way.

 Off Page Search engine Optimisation is very poorly understood, and when Google introduced the Hummingbird algorithm in August / September 2013 things got even more confusing because they introduced a whole new range of OPSEOVI (Off Page Search Engine Optimization Value Indicators) ,  where the STFOPSEOVI (Semantic Trust Factor Off Page Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicators) were totally ignored in the beginning because we as online marketers did not realise the value that Google and other search engines placed on these very sneaky and ultra devious new range of Search Engine Optimization Value Indicators

When Google attempted to force all authors to make use of the *REL = AUTHOR* tag within their online work we as marketing folks did not understand the value that they had attached to this, and many simply ignored this, and quite a large percentage of folks out there were very anti the FORCED MOVE,  and refused to take part in this exercise.  This along with the fact that the G+ or Google Plus Social media network was also not taking off as many folks thought is should,  set the Google authorship program back a lot more than most folks realise.

Google was forced to take other measures to calculate and measure topical author authority, and its connections to the value of specific online content.  These were the early days during which many of the new algorithms defining topical author authority and relevant publisher authority as #OPSEOVI (Off Page Search Engine Optimization Value Indicators)  were developed and tested.  Today Author authority and publisher values are used extensively within many different algorithms that focus on the issues around social media signals and SMSEOVI ( Social Media Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicators)

Author value on its own is worth didly squat (NADER ZERO) just as publisher value on its own is worthless    That being said these two values of Author value and publisher value are two of the most importnat issues when dealing with all web pages, blog posts and social media posts within both the IPSEO (In Page Search Engine Optimisation)  and the OPSEO (Off Page Search Engine Optimisation) calculations, that form  the core value indicators for each and every social media search engine optimization value indicator that is algorithmically calculated and later used in other search related algorithms.

One needs to remember that Google currently uses in excess of 250 different variables in their many different algorithms that calculate and then  make use of a vast host of different SEOVI (Search engine Optimisation Value Indicators) to match a search query to a SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

Page rank, site rank and domain rank are three of the most critical SEOVI (Search engine Optimisation Value Indicators) that need to be understood when it comes to author and publisher issues, as these three variables are all different and each has an impact on the other two within their calculations, that are done through feed back loops that run until a stable value for each is established, using extreme mathematics that use calculus and derivative limits, where author values and publisher values are also part of the equations.

Domain rank is for the whole domain.  Site rank is for the actual site, which may be  a sub web, a sub domain or the actual domain itself, depending on how your web master has set things up. Page rank is the ranking value for the specific page in question.  Here one needs to remeber that every blog post is deemed to be a stand alone web page,  and every social media post is also deemed to be a stand alone web page with its own URL (Uniform Resource locator or web page name)

This applies to all social media posts including Facebook posts, twitter posts, Google plus posts, Pinterest pins, Instagram posts, linked in posts and any other social media platform that you can think of..  The page rank, . site rank and domain rank all have a big influence on your other Search Engine Optimisation variables, where once again the mathematics involves a means to calculate limits through integrated and derivative methods within the calculus world.

Every single OPSEOVI (Off Page Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicator) is generated by an author,  or a publisher, and as such carries the semantic relevance attached to that specific author or publisher or both, as determined by the search engine during the information evaluation stages, where the online information is evaluated and worked on to set up the preliminary stages of setting values for secondary  SEOVI (Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicators) which will be used by the next stage search algorithms, to calculate and store a new set of SEOVI that will be used to match a search query to a set of results in the form of a SERP (Search Engine results Page) in subsequent algorithm activities.

How you as an author use the social media, other web sites or blogs to link to the information that you want found within the SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages) is carefully evaluated and studied by the search engines, where a host of different things are evaluated during the OPSEO process and include but are not limited to questions like:

who you are
what do you normaly write about within the social media (all platforms)
is your social media post, blog post or other web page on topic when compared to
     the information that you are linking to
     the in image meta data of any images within your online content
    other related posts that you have made linking to the same domain, the same site or the same page
how often do you post within this specific social media platform.
how often do you post on other social media platforms
Do you comment on posts in this social media platform, and if so how often
do you comment on posts in other social media platforms, and if so how often
do you post to any blogs
    are these blogs related to each other semantically
   are these blogs related to your post in any way at all
   does this specific post contain relevant semantically linked content

There are so many more questions that are addressed and answered,  then these answers are used in  extreme mathematical equations to determine the relevant SEOVI  for this stage, and the values that will be pushed through to other algorithms that will check and compare these results for quality and correctness before storing the values for future use in the next stages of the search process.

It thus follows that ones author value along with the associated semantic trust factors that are connected to you as an individual in the form of your SEMANTIC FOOTPRINT are important issues that need to be well manged and properly understood.  Failure to interpret these issues properly and address issues that have a negative impact on your author and publisher values thus have a negative impact on your OPSEO (Off Page Search Engine Optimisation) efforts, which will cause all your other online work to feature less prominently within any SERP (Search Engine Results Page)

Now the trick here is to understand the values associated with public and private shares within the social media and how these impact on your OPSEO (Off Page Search Engine Optimisation)   Private shares are blocked from being included in the search indexing process, and so have a ZERO value to your OPSEO (Off Page Search Engine Optimisation).  The only place that private shares have any value within Google Plus (G+) is when you are logged in to Google, then your private shares and all your public shares as well as a host of other stuff such as your other Google activities including Gmail,  your Google calendaar, your Google docs and so many other Google related issues are considered.  This includes the issues of all those within your contact lists, your G+ Circles and where you have commented on any private posts as well.

You do need to understand the very big difference between a search in Google while you are logged in and a search in Google when you are logged out.   Many do not know that there is a vast difference, as they are nearly always logged into Google through Gmail, Google Docs or some other Google service..

Now getting back to Off Page Search Engine optimisation......  OPSEO is all the work that your entire marketing team, and their many partners  do, which is both off line and online to promote your online work within the search space.  Many marketers forget that the print media, the radio, television and any other media forms part of their SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) tactics.

  I here you asking what does radio have to do with SEO.... 


Well to answer where RADIO advertising /marketing and the print media  as well as other off line marketing tactics fit  into the SEO world we need to understand WHAT IS SEO.

SEO or Search engine Optimisation is all the work done by your entire amrketing team, along with all thier partners to ensure that
1) your online work is indexed by a search engine
2) the search engine lists your online content in their SERP's (Search Engine results pages)
3) your selected target market discovers your online content when searching online
4) your desired target market audience actually clicks on the your link in the SEREP's (Search Engine results Pages)
5) your target market selects and acts on a CTA (Call To Action) within the page he / she selected from the SERP (Search Engine Results Page)

So the question arises how do you influence your intended target market audience to type those specific keywords chosen during your target market research and related semantic information into a search box ?

This is done by sneakily using the Television, radio, print media and other offline marketing platforms to use psychological tactics and put these specified key words into your interned target markets thinking patterns,  and talking styles,  to ensure the use of these words and the language that they use in general conversation,  with their family, friends or work colleges within their search query.   This step is the most vital part of any good SEO campaign especially if you are using #HASHTAGMARKETING in any way.

Many online marketers do not use this step, and have very little or in most cases ZERO input into any off line marketing campaign.  This is a very big error, which can be eliminated through the use of a #FUFISM based marketing management style.

So in conclusion #OPSEO or Off Page Search Engine Optimsation is all the off  Page work done by your entire marketing team to ensure that your intended target market uses the correct terminology and semantic terminology when using a search engine to surface your online content within the SERP's, and then select your online content as a result of the relevant search snippet showing within the SERP (Search Engine result Page)

You need to care about your OPSEO or Off Page Search Engine Optimisation, as this is the most appropriate  way that you can influence a search engine to take your online content seriously, and influence a search engine to apply the best snippet that matches a search query, to entice your intended target market to select your online content from the results displayed in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page)

Below is a list of pages discussing related issues including semantic search.  each of these posts will add some value to your understanding of the issues around OPSEO and what you can do to get better at doing Off Page Search Engine Optimisation.

READ THE COMMENTS IN THESE POSTS

http://www.convinceandconvert.com/digital-marketing/do-social-signals-drive-seo/
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JasonDarrell/posts/PrNxt4xeFn4
https://plus.google.com/+SergioRedondo/posts/56nQK53kTTS
http://www.kayakonlinemarketing.com/blog/does-social-engagement-affect-search-results
https://plus.google.com/+RandyMilanovic/posts/gMH9yFqia4d
https://plus.google.com/+FrankGainsford/posts/VWoJQWPRFEr
https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/103079475562443214899
https://plus.google.com/+FrankGainsford/posts/AEe4ePWRziy

Issues around #IPSEO or In page Search Engine Optimisation

I have a collection of infographics discussing  SEO or Search Engine Optimisation at
 https://www.pinterest.com/info4u2use/seo-search-engine-optimisation/

This article adds value to the pin found here https://www.pinterest.com/pin/100275529176554919/ which discusses On Page Search Engine Optimisation.   I prefere the term of In page Search Engine Optimisation so that one can differentiate between IPSEO and OPSEO

#IPSEO or In-Page Search Engine Optimisation is the primary stage of the SEO process which starts with a marketing brief, then flows through product / service / event research into target market and key word research.  The next stage of  the seo process is  #OPSEO or Off Page Search Engine Optimisation,  which is well covered in this article, (http://www.razorsocial.com/blog-promotion/ where the orignal infographic is used.    OPSEO comprises of  the essential online actions of marketing your online content to your intended target market audience through the utilization of OPTE (Other Peoples Time and Effort) as you convince them to share your content to their audiences. OPSEO also covers many other areas such as print media, radio, television if your budget allows, road shows, and any other marketing that you may do within the off line media of all types.

The shares to the social media audience of others is where the search engines start to gather the semantic trust factors and semantic footprints of those who interact with your post, where the engagement issues play a very important aspect.  These engagements with your online content in the form of social media signals such as face book likes and shares, Google plus PLUS ONES, comments  and shares, twitter posts and re-tweets as well as many others all add to the trust factor #SEOVI (Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicators)

This article talks of ON Page SEO, but I like to talk of it as In page SEO so that it can be differentiated from Off Page SEO.    using the terminology of #IPSEO and #OPSEO allows to explain the differences and why each of these two SEO sectors are important and how they interact with each other, as they both target the same target market audience, but serve very different functions within the #FUFISM based marketing philosophy.

FUFISM or Functional User Friendly Integrated Social media  is a marketing philosophy where the social media is used to promote the OPSEO factors of your online content in a very well managed and properly co-ordinated manner so as to leverage the most powerful SERP"s (Search Engine Results Pages)

The off line space is very critical to your SEO process, though many SEO professionals will beg to differ and say that the off line space has naught to do with SEO   Search engine Optimisation is actually very dependent on the off line space to be of any functionality at all, as this is the space where you do the physiological work of getting the desired search terminology into the thinking patterns and thought processes of your intended target market, through news paper articles, radio discussions, bill boards, flyers  and any other means at your disposal that can be accommodated by your budget.

Without some prodding and pushing of your desired search terms within the offline space where your intended target audience lives, plays or works, how would you induce or perhaps even trick your desired target market audience to use your selected keywords, topics and hash-tags within the online search environment?  It is vitally important that online marketers understand this, as this gives them the tools that they need during their target market research, so that they may then use the data obtained during the target market research phase to develop well thought through  topics and related criteria which will then be fed into the keyword research stage of your SEO process.   It thus follows that your online marketing must be aligned with and work closely together with your off line marketing to ensure that your intended target market audience used the correct terminology and associated sentence structures within the efforts to find your online content in online search.

Copywriters and other content creators thus need to work very closely with the IPSEO team, to ensure that their content fits the many different criteria for the in page search engine optimisation process, ranging from using the correct syntax, the correct terminolgy, the correct image visualization aspects, the correct audio aspects, the correct colours and so many other issues that would impact on the intended target market  audience firstly discovering the page in search, and then  opening your link within the SERP's and then following through and completing the first part of the conversion process by clicking on one of your selected CTA's (Call To Action) within the content that has been discovered through search, or actually consuming the content as desired.

The biggest issue that needs to be addressed here is the *BOUNCE RATE* as this is used in very complicated calculations to determine the trust factors as associated with, the page in question, the author and other contributors, as well as  the publisher of the content in question.  The bounce rate is not a signal on its own, but is a factor that is used to generate trust signals, so you do need to ensure that the trust signals associated with your content are addressed during the SEO process.  Bounce rate is one of the minor factors, but it can influence many other areas, so your target market research must be of high quality, to ensure that only properly qualified searchers would use the search terms,  syntax and language structure in their online queries, as you do not want to generate any false positives that result in your target audience leaving your page early.  keyword and target market matching are thus critical issues during the keyword research stages, where you need to ensure that your target market is narrowed down  to only properly qualified groups.

What is the value of a comment within the social media?

Comments within the social media have been  getting quite a bit of coverage during the last few weeks with many discussing the value of comments in terms of their impacts on your SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages) and your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) tactics, with a focus on the semantic relationships between those who comment on a social media post or other online article and the content that elicited the comments.

+Randy Milanovic  wrote a great article where he requested input from others to discuss the issues around
determining the value of the ongoing conversation that may or may not take place within the comment stream of a post within the social media, on a blog or other online resource.  This conversation was quite interesting and had many influential people within the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) industry passing comments and discussing the implications of comments on your Search Engine Results Pages.

Randy Milanovic posed this question : 

Does Social Engagement Affect Search Results?

This question is not a new one, how ever search engines have been evolving and growing their algorithms progressively as they gather more data about us from a variety of different sources.  The many different search engines are now using this data in meaningful ways that link individuals to specific social media  profiles, which can be identified and linked to comments made across a wide spectrum of web sites, especially those web sites that use social media plug ins to register users before they add content or comment on the content already published within that specific web site.

Following His discussions with those who chose to interact with Randy's Google plus post he wrote a blog post using that discussion to elicit a much deeper  and more meaningful conversation,  covering the many sneaky and devious issues around the semantic value of comments and the impact of this potential semantic value of comments on  other related SEOVI (Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicators)

This all came about following a comment I left using the DISCUS PLATFORM on an article that Randy Authored in the   Kayak Online Marketing Blog    

Social engagement takes on many different forms across the various social media platforms, web sites, blogs and other online resources available within CYBER SPACE, but I am only going to discuss comments further here.  Comments are a very important aspect of the social media or social aspect of any online platform and allow for ongoing conversations hopefully discussing the topic that was introduced in the original post, or  article, from a few different perspectives within the marketing industry.  This discussion will focus on the issues around search and the impact of comments on the SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages)

On going discussions within the comments of any post or article have many impacts on a variety of marketing issues, and these are commonly called engagement issues.  Engagement issues cover a wide spectrum of issues including but not limited to 

•  network building
• link building
• content marketing
• inbound marketing
• OPSEO (Off Page Search Engine Optimisation)
• Public relations issues
• customer care issues

This article will focus exclusively on the #OPSEO or Off Page Search Engine Optimisation issues, but that does not mean that the other issues associated with the value of comments are not important or significant, because they are,  and many of these issues have sneaky and devious positive feed back loops that add some serious SEMANTIC SEOVI (Search engine Optimisation Value Indicators) to any links that may placed within the comments, and increase the depth of the associated semantic footprints of all identified individual digital entities who comment or are mentioned in the comments associated with the post or article in question.

Search engines collect a vast quantity of data about us all the time, and use this data in VERY LARGE SCALE DATA to evaluate so many different aspects of who we are, what we do, which sites we visit, what we write about, which people we associate with online, what field of expertise interests us, and where we as individuals are deemed to be knowledgeable and so many others.

Individual people are identified, and associated with separate identifiable digital entities such as web sites, blogs, social media profiles and many others. Each digital entity has its own SEMANTIC FOOT PRINT which is much like our human fingerprints, and is unique to that specific digital entity. The more often one uses the internet the bigger the data that is collected about you, and the more accurate these calculated profiles become. For those who have concerns about online privacy these matters must be a night mare, as web sites use cookies and many other devious and dubious tracking techniques to follow our every move.  Search engines are the worst at this and they really try all tricks in the book and then a few extra to extract as much information about each online individual as they possibly can.

This information is used in many trust factor  calculations as well as in assessing your digital footprint, and the traces that one leaves where ever they visit online, are all factored into the various algorithms which pre-populate certain databases that are used in calculating the next stage algorithms which places SEOVI or Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicators at the disposal of the next stage algorithms.  Google does not let us know how many stages their algorithms have, but it is at least10, though many say it is much more.  each of these preparatory stages  prepares data for the next stage, and the final stage is calculated when the end user (the searcher) presses the enter button or initiates the search by other means, such as through speech in the newest mobile devices.  The algorithms like PANDA and PENGUIN are done at the early stages just after your online content has been indexed, but are run many times over, and each iteration adjusts the SEOVI in question, and these algorithms are repeated until a limit is reached and the changes within the various SEOVI are small enough to ignore. 

Trust factor algorithms are run later, and the results of these are then fed backwards into the system and the process is repeated again until the results stabilize, then this is repeated again til these impacts of the trust factors also stabilize.  Now one must remember that every social media post is viewed as a stand alone web page within a sub web (your profile / page profile) within the specific social media platform.  This is seen very clearly seen  by the way that your profile on any social media platform is structured.  For instance my personal pinterest profile is https://www.pinterest.com/info4u2use/  where pinterest.com is the domain, and info4u2use is the sub domain, and individual pins of images  are the separate pages.  Your G+ posts are seen the same way by Google. Comments that are added to any web page are thus an addition which is deemed to be an edit by a search engine, and so the process of adjusting the associated SEOVI (Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicatiors) must be processed again.

Now one must realise that the search engine understands that this is an edit, and thus treats the added comment as an addition to the page, and runs through the algorithms again, but does not start at the very beginning, rather jumping into the information flow pattern at a pre-determined point and proceeding from there.   The trust factors are now an important issue, as the author attribution of the new comment is known, because only logged-in persons may place comments within the social media structures. Who is the author of this comment and what is this authors niche field of knowledge are now an important issue.  If these issues can be matched to the content of the page in question and shown to be semantically relevant to the authors niche then some extra SEOVI's (search Engine Optimisation Value Indicators) are added which will have an imp[act on the position of this social media post / article within the SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages)

Each additional comment causes the same re-action from the search engine, and the trust factors as associated with each new comment are evaluated and added into the mix.  If any of the commenters have a high authority rating within the semantically linked space, then this may improve the accumulative SEOVI's associated with this particular comment and pass along many other SEOVI to other areas such as links placed with the comment in question.  The value that this has should not be underestimated, as this is part of a feed back loop which can have many unforeseen implications,  especially if the link points to a page where any one of the other commentators is referenced as an author, or directly connected to these issues through a link to a publisher, where any one of the commenters or the original poster is associated as a publisher or contributor.  When Google or other search engines re-asses the page in question these issues will then cause an improvement in some of the trust factor SEOVI and thus improve other related SEOVI that pass along value further up the chain. This added SEOVI here has a further knock on impact as this filters through the system and opperates as part of a positive feed back loop, pushing up values all along the way.

Each iteration of the algorithms causes a slight improvement until the values stabilize again at some new value.  These changes can be small, but they can also be quite substantial depending on the topic, who is commenting, what they actually type in their comments, and the links within any comment and the feed back loops that are created.  this is the reason that one should expand the conversation by placing meaningful links that expand the conversation within both the original post / article as well as within the comments.  the impacts of these links is very significant, and if done in conjunction with more than one social media platform, they can be very significant when added together.  If the original content in the web or blog has listed a publisher, through the accredited HTML 5  methods (REL = PUBLISHER)  and that publisher has created a community and then this commenting  happens within a post in that community, which is created by the author of the original article,  then the SEO impact can be very substantial.

Where the post in question that is receiving the comments resides,  is also a very big issue here, and the domain rank as well as the page rank of the original location where these comments are considered will also have an impact on the growth in value of the SEOVI (Search Engine Optimisation value Indicators) associated with any individual comment.

It thus follows that the SEO value of a comment can be very significant, especially if persons who have some authority within the semantically linked niche comment and sustain an ongoing conversation with links to other resources to expand the conversation.  This once again boils down to issues of quality, and not quantity, though quantity does play a role, especially when there is plenty of good quality.

Many thanx for reading to the end...

Does paid advertising have any SEO Value?

The SEO  benefits of paid advertising are huge! 

 

Paid advertising is not usually associated with SEO, and this is a very big mistake, especially since the introduction of the Google Humming Bird Algorithm where SEMANTIC FOOTPRINTS and TRUST FACTORS now form the core of the primary SEOVI (Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicators) which need to be considered when doing any form of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

To understand these issues better, we need to come to grips with what is meant by SEO and there are so many different versions of this story, so to ensure the we stay on the same page and that  YOU clearly understand my point of view I will once again quote my definition of SEO.

In my opinion SEO or Search Engine Optimisation has three distinct objectives

1) to ensure that search engines index your online content.

2) to ensure that your online content appears within the SERP's  when people are searching for your products, services and related company / organization information.

3) to ensure that your intended target market audience select the link to your  on line content, then follow through by performing at least one CTA (Call To Action)  within the page that they selected from the SERP;s

If any one of these fails your SEO has failed.   Now that we understand the purpose, aims and objectives of any good SEO strategy lets see how PAID ADVERTISING IMPACTS ON THESE ISSUES

When a spider takes its data from the page in question the information about the advert in question is also included within the page as part of the #IPSEO or In Page Search Engine Optimisation.  So you as the owner of the page need to negotiate with the advertiser and ensure that the advert is suitable and relevant to your intended target market audience.  This is basically saying that you are in control of the quality of the advert and must thus ensure that the advert meets your qualifications,  other wise do not display the advert within your page.

When you place paid advertising within your page, from display networks like Google adsense and many others you specify your target audience, and have access to many filters and tools that would ensure that your adverting is in some way related to your target audience.  If you have done your #IPSEO or In Page Search Engine Optimisation right, and documented this clearly within the target market research phase then setting these related filters within your adsense campaigns will be relatively easy. If you make it easy for the search engines to identify your desired target audience, then the ad display network will also be able to calculate and predict your intended target audience, and thus have much better quality adds.

It is our considered opinion that this improved quality of the in-page advertising filters through to the quality of your page and impacts on many other #SEOVI (Search engine Optimisation Value Indicators) from page rank and domain rank through author, publisher and many other SEOVI specifically your semantic foot print and the associated trust factors.  These Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicators (SEOVI) are the variables that Google as well as other search engines use within their very complicated multi stage algorithms that match a search query to a SERP (Search Engine Results Page)

+Rand Fishkin  of +Moz posted this  #whiteboardfriday  where he talks about the issues associated with paid advertising and explains many of the related issues.

Is great content enough to get good SERP's?

   This Post has been written in response to a comment on this Google plus post

+Rand Fishkin  of +Moz  posed the question : Is It Possible to Have Good SEO Simply by Having Great Content and there were many comments on the post in question.  How ever many questions were left un-answered because of the individuals involved specific agendas.  see the post and follow the link there for a deeper understanding of the issues discussed here.

First we need to remind those who know, and inform those who have not heard, that #FUFISM is a new marketing term which is an acronym for Functional User Friendly Integrated Social Media  which every person who does any form of online marketing needs to understand and put into practice.

 Read more about +fufism  as discussed in this blog  or in our web pages here

Engagement within the social media, in most cases,  involves some form of passive link building, as you offer links to your web pages, blog or other online resource, and hope that your target audience and those who have an interest, share your social media posts further, and most of these have links that are useful or offer your target audience specific information relating to your online discussion, or where to find more information on an item that has been requested in the ongoing social media conversation.

Link building is a very delicate affair, and building your social audience is directly linked to your social media policy, especially where your social media policy discusses link building and related issues that need to be avoided such as  inadvertently spamming your influencers with requests to share your posts further.



 

An earlier post discussing link building can be found here

 Influencer marketing (new terminology for public relations management activity)   is also directly linked to your link building strategies and should be discussed in your social media policy statements which every employee needs to be aware of.   This awareness should be done through   your own in-house workshops where you ensure that your staff are knowledgeable of your company or organisational social media policies, and what impact their social media activities will have on your total online marketing effort.

If you have more than 5 people working on your online marketing then this is a very critical issue.  failure here can and will lead to many issues where your online marketing will have a negative impact on your SERP's through errors that are made by your staff  which could easily have been avoided through proper communication.  This is where #FUFISM based marketing strategies come into their own, and ensure better co-operation between the various different departments who each play a different role and have a different impact on your toatal marketing strategies.

Things like a junior member of the team, or a new employee making use of a link farm, because he / she thinks that this will help, but is not aware of the impact of this type of marketing.

Other issues are when people within your online marketing use different structures for their NAT issues (NAT= Name Address and Phone Number)   A set NAT format that should be used across all platforms, especially within the link building activities on social media, as this  is a very sneaky and devious issue, which  comes to play with Google Humming Bird and Google pigeon as well as a few other un-named algorithms.

SEO is an aful lot more than doing inpage coding, and involves many off page activities, some of which are even off line, such as adverts in the news paper, adverts on the radio or even television advertising, all of which influence how your target market searches for your info online and which words they type into the search engine. 

Are your pages optimized for these specific words used in your offline marketing?

Things like   industry specific words which you push out there into the public space (cyberspace) hoping to influence your target markets choice of words when searching online are also part of the SEO industries problems, and link building around these specific sets of terminology are of extreme importance, especially the passive type of link building where these words are used in the social media posts that are put out there with links to pages in your online resources that expand on the conversation around your hash tags and other industry specific terminology.

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is a vastly complex issue that has three criteria that need to be met

1) your pages must be found within the SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages)

2) Your intended target market must click on your link in the SERP's

3) Those who found your listing in the SERP's and then selected your link there must either click on a CTA (Call Ta Action) within the page  or stay on page long enough to satisfy the search engine that they benefited from the information on that page

If any one of these criteria are not met then your SEO has failed.  poor link building, especially that of the passive kind, leads to poor conversion rates and has a very big impact on increasing the bounce rate for your pages, as those who have been mislead by your social media posts that have been shared by your influencers, will not stay on page long enough to satisfy a search engine that they have gained any benifit from your content within that specific page.   This is where CO or Content Optimisation becomes one of the most critical elements of your SEO efforts.  

YES YOU READ RIGHT CONTENT OPTIMISATION (CO) IS A SUB SET OF SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION and any body that tells you different should in my opinion never be trusted with your SEO, or any other part of your online marketing in any way.

Your bounce rate is a very critical issue and all search engines are now looking at ways to use this as a tool to push pages with poor bounce rates lower down the SERP's over time, and lift those which have better bounce rates higher up the SERP's.  Google's Humming Bird algo is very active here, and those who do not take this seriously will soon discover that their rankings are slipping and they may not be able to fix this untill they fix their Content Optimisation.  Your link building, and especially your link building within the social media plays a very critical role in your Conversion Optimisation (CO) as this leads to an expectation of what the viewer will find when they land on your page, and if their expectations which have been developed within your social media marketing are not met when they land on your page, you will not get any clicks and the end user (your intended target market) will depart in a very short time.

Your bounce rate is a very important #SEOVI (Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicator) that you need to keep under control. This is not an easy task as there are so many factors involved, and your link building through the social media is one of the primary areas that need your attention, as the impact on your CO (Conversion Optimisation) coming from your social media link building activities, both active and passive are extreme in nature.

The CTA's (Call To Action) statements within your online content must match the expectations of your intended target market which you have created within your social media marketing, through your link building and influence marketing tactics, which should all be included within your company social media policies and directives issued to your staff.  

It thus follows that what +Rand Fishkin  discussed in this WHITE BOARD FRIDAY is very important and you need to watch closely, and listen clearly because he talks around this issue with great care not to offend those who have niche markets such as CO (Content Optimisation) , CM (Content Marketing) SEM (Search Engine Marketers) as well as many others, all of which in my humble opinion are sub sections of Search Engine Optimisation.

Many thanx for reading this post. please leave a comment as this is a very controversial matter and the more people that discuss this the better for all.

The value of Conversion Optimisation from a FUFISM perspective

Because we are looking at Conversion Optimisation from a #FUFISM perspective we firstly need to remind you what we mean by the term +fufism   

FUFISM is an acronym for Functional User Friendly Integrated Social Media and also a marketing philosophy where SEO and your target market research are two of the primary areas that need to be integrated into your total marketing strategy through effective and properly  managed use of the social media

Next we need to describe what we mean when we talk about Conversion optimisation, and how this works

 

In internet marketing, conversion optimization, or conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the method of creating an experience for a website or landing page visitor with the goal of increasing the percentage of visitors that convert into customers. It is also commonly referred to as CRO.

Conversion Rate Optimization is the process of increasing website leads and sales without spending money on attracting more visitors by reducing your visitor "bounce rate". A conversion rate is defined as the percentage of visitors who complete a goal, as set by the site owner. Some test methods, such as split testing or A/B testing, enable one to monitor which headlines, images and content help one convert more visitors into customers.

There are several approaches to conversion optimization with two main schools of thought prevailing in the last few years. One school is more focused on testing as an approach to discover the best way to increase a website, a campaign or a landing page conversion rates. The other school is focused more on the pretesting stage of the optimization process. In this second approach, the optimization company will invest a considerable amount of time understanding the audience and then creating a targeted message that appeals to that particular audience. Only then would it be willing to deploy testing mechanisms to increase conversion rates.

Next we need to understand the term BOUNCE RATE

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Bounce rate (sometimes confused with exit rate is an Internet marketing term used in web traffic analysis. It represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and "bounce" (leave the site) rather than continue viewing other pages within the same site. Bounce rate is a measure of the effectiveness of a website in encouraging visitors to continue with their visit. It is expressed as a percentage and represents the proportion of visits that end on the first page of the website that the visitor sees

Search engines also use this, but they have a timed version where a user is allocated a time to click on a call to action statement within the page, and if this time exceeds the predetermined time then a bounce is recorded. This time factor is set by the search engines, and us as site owners and marketing professionals have zero input to determine this time factor.  We also have no clue as to what this time factor is. 

From my research it appears that partial bounce rates do exist (at least for Google)  and that the time is not set in stone, and may vary according to the complexity of the search term as well as the polarity of the search term.

Next we  need to understand the term CTA or Call to action,

 In terms of online marketing a CALL TO ACTION is a reference to a link within the content which the marketing team has placed strategically to entice the end user (your target market) to click on so that they may proceed to the next stage of the conversion funnel.

Using the above definition, we must assume that every navigational link on the page is also a CTA. These navigational links may not necessarily be part of the sales  or conversion funnel, but they are never the less important CTA's which allow your end user (your target audience) to move between pages and gather the information that they are looking for.

Next issue to confront is what is a #SERP

A SERP is basically the result that a search engine returns when an end user types a query into the search box and either clicks on search or presses the return key.  This result is mostly pre-calculated by a search engine after your pages are indexed, using a host of different criteria, such as  but not limited to:

• page rank, 
• domain rank, 
• your key words in page,
•  your inbound marketing, 
• your social media marketing, 
• your content marketing,
•  your SEM (Search Engine Marketing)
• The semantics relating to your in-page content
• All your other SEO efforts, both #IPSEO (Inpage Search Engine Optimisation) and #OPSEO (Off Page Search Engine Optimisation)

Now that we have an understanding of the terminology used here, lets get to grips with  the value of Conversion Optimisation in terms of the bounce rate, and as such your SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages)  If an end user does not stay on a page long enough (in terms of the search engines perspective) to gain any value from their visit to the page then this will have a negative impact on the bounce rate from the Search engines perspective.  One way to eliminate this negative perspective from a search engine is to have the end user click on any CTA within the page.  The search engine does not care of your perceived value of this click in terms of your sales funnel  or conversion funnel, and NO CLICK = bad news for bounce rates

Bounce rates are currently (October 2014) one of the primary signals being used by many search engines including Google as SEOVI (Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicators) to determine their SERP's

It thus follows that CO or Conversion Optimisation is a key element in your SEO strategy,  and if not done properly, the damage to your online marketing can and will be considerable.  What most SEO practitioners forget to tell you is that any bad bonce rates have a culminate impact on your domain rank, your page rank, your site's trust factor issues and some other ares that are critical to getting top notch SERP's

My advice to you is thus that you should monitor all your bounce rate issues, and ensure that any pages with a high bounce rate be evaluated in terms of your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and CO (Conversion Optimisation) policies and that you rectify these as soon as you can




Sources of research for this article

THIS LIST IS NOT EXHAUSTIVE  AND EXCLUDES ALL INTERNAL SOURCE AT INFO4U

1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_Rate_Optimization
2_ http://www.meteorsite.com/search-engine-optimization-seo
3) http://www.meteorsite.com/conversion-optimization
4) http://www.meteorsite.com/blog`
5)  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounce_rate
6) http://www.web1marketing.com/glossary.php?term=bounce+rate
7) http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/B/bounce_rate.html
8) https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1009409?hl=en
9) http://www.epower.com/google-analytics-glossary.php


J also evaluated many Google plus posts and conversations  mainly with these profiles but also many others  +fufism +David Amerland +Eric Enge +Joshua Berg +Jaana Nyström +Plus Your Business! +John Dietrich  +SEO  +SEO on Google+ - Search Engine Optimization  +ReelSEO +Mark Robertson +Jeff Huber  +Ammon Johns +Rand Fishkin 

What link building tactics do you use?

Is link building  dead?

in short link building is not dead, and will not die any time soon!

That being said we do need to understand the many issues that surround link building, and the implications of your personal link building strategies.  In the past when things in search first started out links were the primary SEOVI (Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicator) and links were gamed to the extent that Google and other search engines started showing very distorted and poor SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages)

see previous post discussing the value of a link in 2014

The search engines thus introduced algorithms that started to look for patterns that these so called BLACK HAT search engine optimisation practitioners were using, and started penalizing those who they thought were cheating or gaming the system.  Google now has a number of NAMED ALGORITHMS , as well as many un-named algorithms,  that look into these matters and related matters where Search Engine Optimisation Technical staff and online marketing practitioners SPAM the search engines in a variety of different ways using many different techniques.

Some of these named algorithms include :

>>  PANDA

>>  PENGUIN

>>  HUMMING BIRD

>>  PIGEON

These algorithms help to improve the SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages) and some are punitive, while others add value to the work of those who apply recommended tactics that are rather technical and difficult to implement, such as Google's author and publisher programs that are connected to Google plus.

This short video below will help you understand why I say that link building will not die any time soon, but link building has changed and it is now necessary to selectively screen out bad links and focus exclusively on high quality links from reputable sources when ever possible.  The question asked was does Google have a version of search where back links are excluded.  listen to what  +Matt Cutts had to say then evaluate your own situation.

The question thus becomes  What is link building and why is it important?

In short links, some times called HYPERLINKS are the tools that you use to allow  the end user, or your audience to move from one place on the internet to another, and are the only tool that search engines have of locating your online content.  If there are no links pointing to your page, then a search engine has no means of locating your page, and it will thus never be found in search.  In the past the more inbound links a page had the better it did in search results.

Link building is the process that you follow to ensure that your web pages or blog posts acquire in bound links, be they internally from   pages within your own web site /  blog or externally from some other online resource.

Today, due to the amount of SPAM generated by so called BLACK HAT SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION this is no longer true, and Google as well as all other search engines now use the quality of links more than the quantity of links.  Then  within Google search there is the issue of PANDA and PENGUIN  which both have negative or punitive tools that tackle SPAM and bad quality web pages

It is thus important that you understand the  need to have a link building policy in place, and that this link building policy needs to be well documented and shared with every person who has anything to do with your total marketing plan.  Bad links can come from a number of sources, and those who do not know about these issues can very inadvertently make use of a link building farm or some other bad tactic, thinking that they are helping your marketing efforts.   New employees or  junior marketers who have not been exposed to the impacts of bad links may not understand what a link farm is, and believe they are being helpful in getting traffic to your pages.

DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF BAD LINKS TO SINK YOUR ONLINE MARKETING EFFORTS,  BE CAREFUL WHEN DEVELOPING YOUR LINK BUILDING POLICY

The social media is currently a very big source of links to your online content, and as such you do need to have a social media policy in place to deal with these issues. Once again Your social media policy needs to be well documented and shared with everybody who has anything to do with your marketing, be it online or not.  You need to remember that all your offline marketing has a very big impact on your online marketing in many ways, especially when it comes to issues around search. You will need to include your link building policy within your social media marketing policy,as they are very interconnected.

Off line marketing has strange impacts on your intended target audience, and this is where you should use terminology and language that is specific to your business interests.  Your target audience will be induced to use the words and language in your off line marketing to search online to discover more about your company, your products or your services, and you need to be aware of this in your online marketing, especially in your social media marketing, as this is where you will have direct one on one conversations with your target audience as well as many others who may or may not have a direct interest in your product, service or business proposition.

The people who you have conversations with online within the social media space, may or may not decide to place links within their posts to your web pages or blogs, and as such you need to influence these OUT SIDERS in a positive manner so that any links that they may place within their social media posts are positive and  relevant to pages within your web site or blog.

These issues are also confounded and confused when marketers say that you should not be doing any link building at all.  Link building as a term is also a very difficult term to come to grips with in the current scenario where past link building practices have destroyed web sites through their spam attacks and the use of link farms.  Link building has definitely changed a great deal over the last few years, and is now a very delicate art that is not properly understood.  On the one hand an online resource must have inbound links, these links need to be of high quality and carry some authority to have any success in the SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages) and on the other hand excessive links as well as links of low quality can cause a web site or blog some serious damage within the SERP's.

The guys at +Moz recently published an article called The beginners guide to link building   which I have found very helpful, and shared with my audience in other places.  The G+ post embedded below is actually what inspired this post, as I commented there  and had an interesting conversation with both  +Mike Gracia and +William Rock   Take some time and read the comments as I believe they will help you to understand the great difficulties that we as online marketers have in dealing with the changes in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) issues as well as how different people interpret the terminology within the  search engine optimisation world.  Please remember that these are sensitive issues, and need great care, so ask for second and third opinions, then apply your own mind and be aware of those who are willing to game the system.
  

THERE IS LOTS OF BAD ADVICE OUT THERE