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PubCon Part 3: Google Caffeine, Keywords and Blekko

Our final blog on PubCon held recently in Las Vegas, covers keen insights into Google caffeine, optimizing keywords, best SEO practices and a new search engine called Blekko.

After reviewing this blog you may wish to review PubCon Part 1: Google’s Matt Cutts shares his SEO vision and PubCon Part 2: Social Media & Landing Page Optimization.

May Day SEO for Google Caffeine

Bruce Clay (https://www.bruceclay.com/)

Caffeine is the new generation of Search Engine (SE) architecture for Google. Google Caffeine was created to support real-time and instant performance. A much deeper and broader content capacity is possible with Caffeine.

Other points mentioned in the session:

  • Google CaffeineCaffeine means different crawling requirements.
  • Stale content will be crawled less often.
  • More links detected means more crawling.
  • Caffeine may mean that more local targeting may be on the horizon.
  • On-page quality is increasing in importance as a ranking factor.
  • Trust scores for link networks will become more important.
  • More “spidered” pages leads to adding lower quality pages.
  • Caffeine may mean that additional ranking factors (as many as 128-200) have been turned on.
  • “Likes” may become the new links.
  • Video is now significant content.
  • User engagement is an increasingly important factor from a ranking perspective.
  • With recent changes to Google’s SERPs, in 30% of the queries the top organic listing is now below the fold. This will get worse.
  • Siloing (isolation) of content matters.

Stoyan Stefanov (stoyanstefanov) – Yahoo
Web performance optimization. Some key points and tools from this session:

  • Understand and know the “waterfall” of your page load times.
  • Have a front-end with optimization of things such as html, css, images etc.
  • Reduce the number of request on a page, combine all JS, all CSS and combine images into CSS sprites (one image that contains all the images). The best tool to use for this is https://www.csssprites.com/.
  • Reduce component size with things like compression, “minification” and lossless image optimization.
  • Suggested tools:

Brian Ussery (https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianussery)

Google MayDay update. He shared the following:

  • The Google MayDay update had an impact on sites that were “aggregated” site-wide.
  • Crawling time is 50% faster with Caffeine.
  • It is important to leverage unique content.
  • Use PUSH (Pubsubhuibbub) which is a tool that tells Google when you have content ready.
  • Use features like as RDFa, Microdata, Microformat.
  • MayDay raises the bar for long tail content.
  • Quality content is important when addressing issues that suffered from the Google MayDay update

In-House SEO – Melanie Mitchell (Moderator) – @melaniemitchell

Ash Nallawalla: Inside-Out SEO (@ashnallawalla)

  • Before you start writing content you need to think about SEO.
  • Select good topics and ideas. Content need to be unique and efficiently optimized.
  • Take care of the specific SEO language (acronyms, jargon). Non SEO people are usually not aware an “insider’s” specific vocabulary.
  • For client presentations, language used need to be clear and easy to understand.

Gerrett Rent: 8 Tips For In-House SEO Success (https://www.linkedin.com/in/garrettrent)

  • Webmasters and IT managers usually don’t know about SEO. SEO specialist need to understand IT in order to double check all IT related tasks. SEO specialists need to teach IT/webmaster teams essential skills related to SEO.
  • Build a testing web site, perhaps a personal one. This is a good place to try out concepts and experiment before you apply changes to your production or “real” website.
  • All company teams need to be in charge of their SEO related activities. This includes content creation from different areas of the company, testing, new ideas and promotions.

Josh Gampel: How To Hire an In-House SEO Team (https://www.linkedin.com/in/marketingrecruiter)

  • Social media managers and SEO Managerss are now practically combined positions.
  • Now there are specific SEO jobs (i.e. B2B versus B2C).
  • Analytical and creative people are excellent for SEO positions. SEO team members need to have the ability to interpret results, good communication skills and be able to think out of the box.
  • Social sites (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter) are great places to find SEO candidates.

Jessica Bowman: Why It’s Difficult to Implement SEO and How to Make it Easier – (@jessicabowman)

  • Good SEO is similar to a good organization; it should be able to embrace change.
  • Teach others and explain why it’s important think of SEO from the start. This helps to avoid missed deadlines when SEO is a built-in part of the plan.

Smart Organic Keyword Research and Selection, moderated by Joe Laratro

Carolyn Shelby: ABCs of Organic Keyword Research & Selection (@cshel)

  • Discover what words average people use to describe your products or services: ask different people about how they search the Internet for specific topics. Usually people without a search or Internet background reflect realistic keyword search terms used by the people or consumers you are targeting.
  • Use abbreviations and variations of your keywords.
  • Invite your entire company (IT, sales, PMs) to draft a keyword list about your products and services. Coworkers with lots of customer exposure will know what terms your customers use.

Will Reynolds: Keyword Research Tools (@wilreynolds)

  • Google Insights
  • Use filters and options in search tools, there are several options and you need to use the correct ones.
  • Check delicious and other bookmarking sites to see how people tag your site or content. It is a good idea to start this research now and keep it on-going.

Craig Paddock: Organic Keyword Research and Selection (@craigpaddock)

  • Use Blekko (new search engine), which has several SEO tools inside.
  • Ask people about a topic and how to search for it. (Note: this suggestion was mentioned several times).
  • Check on social sites and YouTube for key phrases.

Mark Jackson: Keyword Research – “The Process” (@markjackson)

  • Relevancy is very important. A keyword may be relevant to you, but is your website is relevant to the keyword?
  • Remember to review and refresh your data from time to time. Issues and vocabulary changes and you need to keep your searchable content up-to-date.

Rich Skrenta (CEO): Blekko – New Kid On The Block (@skrenta)

Blekko

  • Blekko shows a lot of ranking and crawling data. They are planning to make all of these metrics public.
  • Creating a successful search engine is hard. You need to have a lot of knowledge to get it right. That might be why others have failed in the past few years.
  • Blekko was launched on first day of November; less than 3 weeks later about three billion pages were indexed.
  • Blekko did a lot of focus group research.
  • Blekko uses “slash tags” to include and exclude information.
    • Filter your results by source (/health)
    • Select alternate data source (/maps)
    • Blekko is open to let the public be part of an editorial team for better results.
    • Filter your results by attribute (/date)
    • Click on the “SEO” button to learn more about your sites.
    • RSS subscription of search results.
    • Comparison between sites in SEO section. Information compares sites linking and other SEO related information.
    • Blekko is better for search. It allows people outside of Blekko to offer suggestions and corrections.
    • Facbook “Like” and “Tweet This” buttons are available on the Blekko SERP.
    • Blekko’s Twitter channel is staffed. They will respond. @blekko
    • “We’re not going to make search simpler for people. We’re going to give them more tools to help them search better.”