Using books as an SEO tool
Search engine optimisation is all about online, the latest buzzwords, etc., right? Wrong. Natural search is very dependant upon natural use of language. Understanding how people use language will help you understand how they will search, which in turn should help you pinpoint the words and phrases most likely to get you some decent natural traffic. So, in fact looking at books can help you identify what words are most used in the English (or your chosen language) and unsurprisingly the boffins at Google have developed a tool that can do all the leg-work for you. Ngram Viewer is somewhat hidden within the Google Books back-end but is as relevant to SEO professionals as it is literary experts. Using the extensive database in the Google Books system it has identified how words have been used in books over time. You can see how words have become popular over periods of time and how their use and popularity has also declined. Just choose the words you want to examine and compare, choose the years or period you want to cover, the language and then the smoothing of your curves on the graph. Click search lots of books and await a perfectly formed line graph. The results are very interesting. For example here’s a look at the use of communication words in books published between 1984 and 2008. The domination of the word ‘letter’ could be a bit skewed with the other potential definition of the word but it is interesting to see it’s rise in usage of letter as the use of fax declines. So how can this help SEO? Well looking at what words are most popular is at the core of any SEO professionals work. If you can combine that with knowledge of historic use and also knowledge of how all words wax and wane in popularity over time, you can become better in your role. If you want to be really clever about it too, you can find what words are the most popular in general and keep those always in mind when looking for case studies, examples and newsworthy stories. Unlike other aspects of our daily lives the science of language is still a relatively un-tapped market, but as more and more clients search for metrics that work and you search for the smallest of tweaks for the biggest of marketing gains, expect more time and investment to be made into how we use words and how that can equate to increased revenue. What other language tools do you use to help your SEO?
Content is King and Images can be viral
Since Google Penguin at the end of April, the old adage of “Content is King” has taken a whole new giant step. The new ranking algorithm changes sees websites who publish lots of meaningless content just to get search traffic are now penalised, as are those found guilty of keyword stuffing on their pages. So effectively, the more natural your prose the less chance of it falling foul of the googlebot and with the increase in social searching the better your chances of ranking higher too. Good content, well researched, well written and well presented is ultimately more shareable and the more shares your pages get, the better for your page rank. Equally the more popular your content becomes on social networks, the less reliant on Google and its latest algorithm. The dust has begun to settle and the general consensus from those who have tested is that 800-900 words is the perfect length for the best rank. Yet while length it appears is now important, so originality and quality still rule. In terms of keywords, the cut-back in stuffing suggests keyword density shouldn’t hit above 4% nowadays so make sure you pick and choose those keywords and where they appear very carefully. Presentation is important too, and that includes images. Google has long been promoting the SEO of images in search and now, in the social sharing world, an image really can say 1,000 words and when you only have 140 characters anyway, that is like gold-dust. Images in the form of screen-grabs or better still fully-formed infographics attached to a tweet, Facebook post or pinned in Pinterest suddenly give you much more than limited text characters and a chance to explain and engage. Infographics are constantly being re-tweeted, shared and pinned in the modern social world and a video on YouTube is still by far the quickest route to securing big search traffic. Plus if your page contains something visual and has some dynamism to it, it is far more likely to attract customers back. Getting return visitors is the most effective way of improving visibility of your page. Like any aspect of your business, existing customers are always easier to convert to spend money with you than finding a whole new set. If you have a nice image on your page or social media channels, people will want to share it, so make sure that everything you do is branded too – you want people to know where it originated from and hopefully drive traffic back. Remember what you write on your pages will often be the first thing a potential customer sees about your company. Whether that is landing on your home page or as a search result on Google and the like, where those few brief sentences in your site description could make or break whether they click through.