Progressive SEO

The more things change, the more things stay the same. This widely embraced saying rings never more true than in the SEO marketplace, where technical standards, algorithmic changes, and consumer patterns all impact and disrupt the search optimization landscape.

These changes leave marketers inundated with options to focus their SEO attention and resources. With so many aspects to optimize and improve, which ones should forward-thinking SEO managers embrace to get ahead of the competition?

That’s what this brief is all about – providing you with details into the areas of SEO that you must improve if you want to stay ahead of the pack.

Within this brief, we outline two new but fundamental SEO tactics: micro-formatting and social seeding. These can help improve your primary and “tail” terms within search engine results pages and help provide the competitive advantage of being an authority within your market in search results.

SEO Focus Area #1 – Micro-Formatting and Schema.org

When thinking about search engine optimization and maximizing your results, the number one question in your mind should be “How can I make my site more relevant?”

Search engines want nothing more than to provide quality results to their visitors. In doing so, they know that they will provide a positive experience, and users will be back to leverage the engine again and again, probably even clicking on ads.

Because relevance is the most vital directive for search engines, it is paramount that your website embrace every technology that will assist you in providing the cues and details that will help your web pages rank higher.

In the past, it was a fairly level playing field as keyword density and metadata optimization allowed businesses to target varied phrases within their content. Businesses that embraced these practices were rewarded with higher ranking pages and increased levels of non-branded traffic.

Now, however, a new technology has emerged that is changing the way you need to conduct SEO. The technology is called micro-formatting, and it allows you, as a business, to add context to your search engine results while providing further cues to search engines about the context of your pages.

Let’s say, for example, you are a bookseller. Within your website code, in a programmatic fashion, your webpage will render micro-formats that say the following:

Name = Mastering SEO
Author = Craig Smith
BookFormat = Hardcover
NumPages = 129
PublishDate = 2011
Image = https://outerbox.com/images/mastering-seo

Now search engines will have this additional context that allows them to serve more effective search listings to users. Check out this search listing of a URL/webpage that has been improved through micro-formatting.

This standard search listing adds review data, stock data, and pricing details to non-shopping listings, clearly making it stand out on the page and providing additional context to Google that helps users.

Make it a priority to introduce the concept of rich snippets and micro-formatting to your technology team, and you will see your website reap the benefits of increased click-through rates and page relevancy.

Learn more about the consortium and micro-formatting standards at the group page that has been embraced by Google, Bing, and Yahoo at Schema.org.

Focus Area #2 – Social “Signals” in Search Algorithms

Recently, major developments have taken place within search algorithms to weigh social media actions as ranking factors.

Social signals present additional cues that can be leveraged by search engines, and these elements have been incorporated as secondary variables to be utilized when engines decide which pages to rank at the top of the results.

Likes and brand mentions that take place within the “social web” have been proven to drive SEO performance in recent industry research.

As spammers and the secondary link-buying markets exploded in recent years, search engines realized that if link manipulation was utilized, search results would not be trustworthy. It is vital to their existence that they maintain quality and continuous improvement in their search listings.

When algorithms are primarily based on links and on-page factors, search results can be too easily “gamed”.

All too often, top-ranking sites for competitive searches are “thin” sites that are obviously engineered for nothing but affiliate revenue. The Panda update helped filter much of this practice, but it still exists.

Google and other search engines have realized that leveraging data from X, formerly known as Twitter, and Facebook provides details into human-connected content sharing, which helps their algorithms weed through webpages looking for quality signals.

It is widely known that Google and Bing actually pay X for this data. The real-time nature of X provides the ability for a search engine to become even more effective as a source of real-time news and information – instead of just a gateway to that information.