I came across an excellent new way of describing the new SEO: “search experience optimisation”, and this hits the nail on the head!
If you want to fully optimise your website now to capture the attention of Pandas and Penguins (algorithm updates), you need to change your attitude towards the use of keywords and how links work on your website.
In fact, you could almost say that the new SEO really is improved content marketing. It is based on unique, compelling, readable and sharable content. It should be created so that your readers love your posts, want to bookmark them, tell all their friends about what you have written and regularly come back for more. And this can only happen if you product good quality content specifically produced to please, educate and entertain your readership.
So how does new SEO differ from old SEO? The keyword is no longer king. This means you don’t stuff your content up to the hilt to attract the attention of the search engines. Certainly don’t stop using keywords, but just be mindful of their relevance to your post’s content, and restrain their frequency by placing them in the title, URL, meta description and first paragraph. Here the keyword saturation is enough to stimulate the SEO response you want without impacting on the readability and enjoyment of your post’s content.
The other thing to take stock on is the use of links. Old SEO banged on about creating as many links as possible to and from your site. In new SEO links should take into consideration the relevance of their destination to the content’s subject, used sparingly and certainly not over-saturated both internally as well as externally. Contextual links used to be focused on keywords, but now the URL of the destination may have a better impact upon the search engines, especially if it is well optimised for relevancy.
Duplication is now a source of consideration. In the old days SEO was stimulated by plastering your content all over the web, linking back to your site to increase traffic and ultimately your site’s rankings. Now all this activity may be penalising this content and your site, and this also extends to duplication within your site, such as repeated titles, over-optimised tags and categories and the lack of no-follow links to your archives. If you want to increase your content throughout the web through article submissions and guest posting, just make sure that the distributed content is totally original each time, through edited titles, paragraphs, length and style. This isn’t affected by RSS feeds, as that only creates links back to your site without fully duplicating the content elsewhere.
So coming back to the ‘search experience optimisation’ as the new way to view the new SEO, if you can continue to create fabulously readable, conversational and fact-filled posts that everybody will enjoy, they are much more likely to be indexed than boring old posts like this one!
Sharing your blog is really sociable
Fairy Blog Mother
Blogs are meant to be shared. Interactive websites, as that what blogs are, should be seen as the hub of your business on the internet, as they are able to encourage your readers and visitors to interact with you on your own blog.
Blogs are perfectly designed to enable comments and feedback on what you have written, a chance to allow your audience to express themselves and share what they want to say. And the more interaction you get (and this means responding to your comments, perhaps even starting a conversation), the more likely the internet spiders will index this new content and raise both your visitor and search engine ratings.
But as well as comments, you need to encourage your readers to share your blog on social networking sites. This sharing encourages links, and links are like portals on the web, allowing access to visitors and spiders alike to enter your blog and read its contents. You shouldn’t be shy of encouraging links, because if they come from quality sources, they can boost your blog no end!
But first you need a method of sharing your posts, and that is done through RSS (really simple syndication, an American term that means putting it about in many different places at one time). Usually a blog’s theme will already have a RSS URL incorporated into the theme (template), located through the little orange square that signifies RSS. This provides a simple RSS URL like http://successnetwork.wordpress.com/feed.
This RSS URL will enable you to feed your newly written blog posts into your social networking profiles and your Twitter stream automatically as soon as they are published (all at once at the same time!). All you need to do is to set up the applications in each profile and add in the RSS URL and everything will just happen for you!
This self-sharing of your blog shouldn’t stop there, you need to encourage others to share for you too. You can add in applications that allow your readers to share your post into their social networking profiles and Twitter streams, all at a click of a button, and if they’re really technically minded they might share them in the social sharing networks like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Tumblr, Delicious and many more!
These sharing networks are primarily sites that thrive on their members sharing worthwhile posts with each other, recommending them to others, and voting on which ones they like the best. The most popular posts will result in more visitor traffic, and this activity and interaction will gain the attention of the search engine spiders to index these blogs, resulting in large peaks in your visitor stats and a lot of ‘retweeting’ and sharing on social networking sites.
As sharing is a nice, altruistic and caring thing to do, why not go out and share a blog post today, starting with this one?