Harry Clark is the Client Marketing Manager at London based Award Winning Digital Agency Cyber-Duck Ltd. Harry recently attended the 2012 SXSW Interactive festival and wanted to share some of the information learnt from a Panel discussion featuring Danny Sullivan, Duane Forrester and Matt Cutts.

After a week filled with inspirational talks, great networking opportunities and some of the greatest parties I have ever had the privilege of attending, I sit here on a plane from Houston to London and start to reflect on my experience from SXSW 2012. Now, believe me, there are a few stories I could tell you about the trip, but instead I wanted to share what I learnt when I attended the ‘Dear Google & Bing: Help Me Rank Better!’ panel discussion.

The panel featured three veritable authorities when it comes to search engines. It included Danny Sullivan, chief editor from Search Engine Land, Duane Forrester, product marketing manager from Bing and headline panelist, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team. Unfortunately Mr Cutts could not make the event in person as his wife had surgery just two days before the panel, but through the powers of technology, he was able to join us and participate via Skype (and interestingly not via Google Hangouts).

After a few minutes of preparing the Skype call as well as Danny having some fun with putting Matt’s head on Gwyneth Paltrow’s body, we were off and questions from the floor started to flow. So here’s what we learnt:

Sitelinks

The first question posed was regarding Google’s sitelinks feature and whether webmasters have the ability to control the sitelinks they want to see appear for their search results. Matt and Duane clarified that both search engines will not allow you to suggest the links you want to appear here as it’s up to the algorithm to determine the most popular/trusted content for their users. However, webmasters do have the power to remove or change the weighting of the sitelinks via webmaster tools, meaning you can start directing them towards the content you really want them to see.

The image above demonstrates where Google's main search results (1) and sitelinks results (2) will appear.

Bing’s search engine also offers sitelinks in their top search results similar to Google. Webmasters can block/unblock any sitelinks which they wish not to appear in their Bing search results. However, Bing now displays 8 sitelinks (compared to Google’s 6) with rumours circulating that Bing will increase this to 10 available sitelinks for top search results.

Bounce Rates

I’m sure all webmasters reading this will have analytics of some sort set up on their website, and if you don’t then I suggest it’s the first thing you do after reading this. Not only because it is important for you to understand how users are using your website but also because search engines can track if users immediately bounce back to result pages from your website for a given search query.

This phenomenon is known as ‘pogosticking’. Generally speaking, if the user returns to the search engine to find another result or search a similar query, then this indicates that user did not find the content they were looking for originally.

The above shows users how they can find their website bounce rate via Google Analytics

Of course, some websites will have high bounce rates because they deliver the exact content the user was looking for immediately. In this scenario however, users are unlikely to bounce back to the search engine to look for another site based on the same search query.

Finally, if your website does have a high bounce rate, then do look to reduce it by creating compelling content and a good user experience. Features like suggested articles or pages at the bottom of your website are great ways to continually engage users, helping to reduce your bounce rate and increase dwell time.

The Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors

Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan also made the audience aware of a very helpful periodic table of SEO ranking factors he had produced. The table visually explains the different types of on-page and off-page SEO practices you should be considering if you want your website to have any chance of ranking well. On top of that it also includes a list of violations which will prevent your website from ranking at all.

The Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors (courtesy of Search Engine Journal).

The periodic table of SEO is a useful beginner’s guide to SEO and best practices; for a more in-depth insight, take a look at the full SEO periodic table.

Over Optimised Websites

In my eyes, one of the best questions posed to the panel was related to over-optimisation and whether you can be penalised for going too far.

Interestingly Matt Cutts exclusively revealed that in the coming months, over optimised content will not rank as highly and instead these websites will be replaced by those with great content which is written with the user in mind. So even if you consider yourself an SEO expert, take a close look to see if your website includes an abundance of keywords or outbound links and if they do, then make some changes to your content as these practices will be penalised.

Matt Cutts was quoted as saying “We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great sites. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect.”

An oft-preached but sometimes forgotten mantra of many SEO professionals is write for people first and search engines will follow and after the proposed update, it looks like this will be more true than ever.

Social Awareness

Social is something we continually talk about when it comes to SEO and whether social awareness or social engagement affects your search engine rankings.

As many of you will already know, Google + is already impacting on Google search rankings and it is imperative you add a Google + button on your website to encourage users to ‘+1’ your website or content. On Google, Facebook ‘Likes’ are not a contributing factor to Google rankings, nor are they likely to be for the foreseeable future (unless Google organises a similar deal to the one they previously had with Twitter).

Bing is a whole different story altogether, as they’ve had a deal in place for 18 months now and Facebook ‘Likes’ are already having an impact on Bing search results.

Regardless of this, good social engagement tends to go hand-in-hand with high rankings as the better the content the more people will actually want to link to it (or Like/+1/Tweet it) and good rankings will follow.

UX (User Experience)

At Cyber-Duck we are passionate about UX, meaning we continually strive to create websites which are engaging, easy to use and useful for the end user. Not only is this great for website users, but it’s also great for your rankings as search engines will reward what they believe to be a user friendly website. So make use of semantic HTML5 mark-up, such as header, nav and section tags which will clearly portray your website’s layout and features to the search engines. Using microdata you can also help search engines understand more about the type of content you are posting, such as videos and articles.

Credible Sources

It’s not about the quantity of back-links; it’s about the quality. So look to obtain back-links from relevant and credible sources (such as we have done here). Blogs and newspapers are credible online sources so focus on guest blogging opportunities or look to generate some kind of PR stunt which newspapers will want to write about. If your back-links are from credible sources in the long-term your website will perform better than competitors with low-level ‘spammy’ back-links. A good example of this recently has been the hugely viral and successful campaign for ‘The Dollar Shave Club’ where by having a funny and engaging video they have achieved national newspaper coverage and a social buzz.

One point worth making is don’t ever be scared to ask for a back-link from a blog or newspaper which is featuring your content or website. What’s the worst that can happen?

Paid Links

This really goes without saying, but DO NOT PAY FOR LINKS!

Although you may notice some initial benefits from paid links in terms of rankings, the search engines will pick up on this, and they will be sure to penalise your website. You need to be acquiring long term, genuine sustainable links which will not hurt your website’s rankings in future algorithmic updates.

If you are in any doubt over how serious search engines take this, just take a look at what Google did to Google Chrome in 2011 for sponsoring blog posts containing links back to the browser’s download page.

Personalisation of your Search Results

Search engines are now looking to tailor search results enabling them to deliver the content users are looking for. So bear in mind that everybody’s search results will differ and this can be based on a variety of reasons.

Since the ‘Search Plus Your World’ algorithmic update from Google, users will now have their search results customised towards content they have ‘+1ed’ as well as content which has been ‘+1ed’ from that of their Google contacts. On top of this Google can pick up on your previous search queries helping you to find the content you want as quickly as possible.

A good example of this was presented during the panel discussion, when Danny Sullivan did several searches such as Hotels, Hotels in Paris before finally searching Hotels in Austin. The final search for Hotels in Austin still showed some Hotels in Paris results as Google looked to tailor the results based on previous searches made. Below you can see that after searching "hotels" my results are still showing hotels in Paris based on my previous search queries.

My personalsied search results when looking for hotels.

Web users will also be alerted if their search results have been personalised via at least one of the two following ways. The first notification comes in the form of a message (see picture below) which will tell users how many of their search results have been personalised, with some of these results appearing on the first page of Google. The second notification featured at the top of the results page is the more popular toggle which allows users to switch between personalised and impersonalised search results.

The message (left) and the Google toggle (right) which allows you to see and manage whether you are recieving personalised search results.

Brand Rehabilitation

So what if your website has been penalised and your rankings have suffered? Will you ever rank again? Have you been black listed? Or do you just need to wait 60 days and serve your punishment? Well if you’ve been punished it’s for a reason, so there are definitely some changes which need to be made.

Start by re-evaluating your website and look into ways in which you can make it look better, work better and finally rank better. Review the user experience of your website, look to re-evaluate low value content and push out new and exciting data/content. Using A/B testing or multivariate testing you can also explore ways of improving your website’s overall experience. Removing a couple of keywords or bad links is not a sufficient revamp so really look to overhaul all your old content.

Remember search engines are not your enemy; they just want their users to find the best the web has to offer. So if your website has been punished by search engines, don’t assume your rankings are gone for good, but also ensure you look into the issues you have been penalised for and demonstrate that you have changed your ways.

New Website Launch

There was one point raised where 301 redirects for old pages had not been implemented by a company for their new website launch (rather inexplicably because their IT manager did not want to create them) which understandably shocked the panel.

Implementing 301 redirects from old pages to ensure search engines know which corresponding new (and relevant) pages you want them to crawl and index is a fundamental part of SEO. If your webmaster, or IT manager does not feel it is worth the effort, then ensure you explain to them that the ranking drops the website will suffer will be potentially unrepairable; or in the words of Danny Sullivan, “make sure you kick, scream and shout at them until you get your way as 301 redirects are imperative for maintaining rankings when revamping a website”.

Rewarding Original Content

The final point from this intriguing panel discussion centred on why big news websites get rewarded in rankings for regurgitating content originally posted elsewhere.

With Google they look at freshness and look to reward original authors so ensure you link your Google profile with any content you are publishing online, as it is then likely you will appear first for that content, and the search result will also supply a pretty little picture of yourself.

You may also want to use schema.org to ensure you are rewarded as the original source of the content. This will prevent your page from being pushed down in search engines.

Schema.org provides content creators with a collection microdata/metadata tags which can be added to HTML mark-up to identify the original author, location and date of the content. These tags are recognised by most major search engines. The use of these tags enable search engines to easily find the location of the original content which will be rewarded with high rankings should the content become popular and subsequently reformatted and reposted across the web.

Those are the main points I took from my favourite talk at SXSW 2012 and I hope everyone has learnt at least one thing they didn’t know before. All feedback is openly welcomed so please feel free to tweet me @hjclark3 or alternatively tweet London’s Award Winning Digital Agency (and my employer @cyberduck_uk) and let us know what you think.