Trust - Reputation - Authority
Search engine optimization (SEO) is
changing. It has now become an integral part of your business
practices and is closely integrated in your business structure.
You can no longer simply ‘buy links’ and think of that as your
SEO strategy. The world is now much more Social.
Here is a quick list of ways to show if you are at risk of being
left behind:
Is your view of your success just
based on search results for those terms?
Is link building still your main
SEO tactic?
Are you still thinking just in
terms of keywords?
Is the number one spot on Google
how you get most of your online business?
Do you consider ‘anchor text’
to be crucial?
Is SEO seen as a ‘silo’ of
marketing?
Do you assume your SEO approach
can be ‘left to it’ whilst you put new marketing energies
elsewhere?
If so, you need change your mindset.
SEO Is Changing Your Business
In the earlier day`s many people used to buy links to increase
their ranking on Google. You would employ a company, or staff member,
to lead the SEO push and they would target keywords. Then you would
squeeze a load of those keywords into your content’s text and hope
you would get some visibility. You would use social like you would
send spammy emails to people, and you would sit back and hope
customers would simply arrive.
But this is no longer good enough, instead you need to look at:
Have a website that people find
easy to get around with content relevant to the user
Reaching beyond your site so
people begin to talk about you and your business - creating a buzz
Creating quality content
Have advocates who ‘love your
content’ and want to spread the word
Stay ahead of the rest - be the
one people want to include in the latest conversations
Have ways to engage the customer
in conversation.
Trust
Trust is important, but isone of those qualities that you cannot
easily define. When it comes to trust what you used to go can only go
so far in this new world of the semantic web. You can`t no buy trust
with an expensive website. Instead, every time you reach a potential
customers you have a touchpoint that will determine whether you build
trust, especially through your social activities.
Trust online will stem from two experiences:
1. Direct experience: f.eks having already been a
customer of your company, and
2. No direct experience: this is where a third party
comes in.
(The most popular third-party {suggestion engine}
is search.
Creating an Identity in a Connected World
The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike
existence in the world. We clump into families, associations, and
companies. We develop trust across the miles and distrust around the
corner.
It is Google+ that leads the way in making people want to use
their real name, photograph and information. Before Google+ there was
not really an incentive to do so; you could create a twitter handle
and ‘burn it’ if you wanted to come back ‘as another person.’
But Google+ is different.
The information attributed to links themselves is:
Relevance of the website linking
The ‘importance’ of the
linking website
The location of the link on the
webpage itself
Anchor text used to link
The age of the website, the page
and the link
Ranking and Reputation Scores
This
leads us to ‘Author Rank’ which considers the following in
relation to a piece of content:
Who created it
What else they've created
Their online activity
The content creator’s
connections on social media platforms
The content’s quality
The nature of the content
relevance
The use of multimedia .
Trust can now be determined by an algorithm and businesses need to
take note.
All of this has been made possible by Google being
about to attribute content to its right owners.
Getting your image displayed in Search
To get this ‘Google authorship’ markup you will need:
To add a pictoure to Google+
Profile
Tag that you are the person in
that image
Link in the ‘contributor to’
section on your Google+ Profile to sites on which you have authored
content
Have a link back from those sites
to your Google+ Profile i.e. a two way link, including using a
Google+ badge.