What now?

[ciznerguy]

Hi all

What now for optimization projects.

this is what I gathered so far with all the changes in the SEO world.

No

• Stop guest blogging activity!
• no need to stress about directory submission.

Yes - create great internal content that engage clients. this jmy problem.

Great content OK and what can I do with it to get people engaged. Slogans are not action items.

What engagement are beneficial to sites? like and +1 from within the site?

sponsors posts on FB and how do they help website?

We as agencies and consultant need action items and measurable activities. I like the changes however so far I do not know why or what?

Many more Questions for later.

Guy

[matbennett]

I think that the changes over the last 18/2 years months make things more interesting for agencies.  There is just a bit more challenge in explaining the work to clients.

Technical SEO seems to have become more important again. It seems to now be pretty easy to hobble your own website through bad on-site practices and likewise to get an advantage through good ones (like schema). Now that we have  (mostly) more useful webmaster tools at our disposal the emphasis seems to be on the site to either get this stuff right or suffer the consequence. That is definitely an area where the skills than an agency can offer can really bring value.

Link "building" might be out of favour, but links are as important as ever.  That then means someone with the skills and knowledge to conceive the ways to do that, identify opportunities, conceive content, produce that content and then do the work needed to get that content noticed.

Wrap all that up with a strategic view that many companies don't have the digital skills to pull off and I think that there is more scope than ever for good agencies.

[ciznerguy]

thanks for the prompt reply.

I agree that the changes are great and creativity is part of our work now, which is cool.

Technical SEO is straight forward and we have some great tools at our hands however when it comes to actionable things to do to get those important links are very unclear.

I am checking many social options but there is a clutter of tools there.

again I am in a place where what to do is crystal clear and the how is still very blurry.

[ReferralCandy]

Hey Guy,

I'm not sure why you are thinking about stopping guest blogging activities. I believe guest blogging is still a great way to achieve greater brand exposure and obtain backlinks from authoritative sites within your niche.

Granted, Google has mentioned before that links in guest posts should be "nofollow"ed. If you are guest blogging in massive amounts for the sake of link building, then sure, you better nofollow your links. But if you write quality content of decent lengths, I don't see why Google will penalise you for linking back to your site.

[ciznerguy]

hello

guast blogging is now frowned upun.

please look

watch?feature=player_embedded&v=IMxC3wQZOyc

[matbennett]

Guest blogging as an activity isn't frowned on.  Guest building as a way to manipulate link authority (or in fact anything as a way to manipulate link authority) is.  In that video Cutts says this in the first sentance "Guest blogging for links"

Like most things in SEO it is how you do it.  If I write some quality pieces for well respected blogs and these include followed links to my sites (as do many other types of sites / pages of varying types) that is very unlikely to ever cause a problem.  That is very different to having a strategy that involves large amounts of guest posts on sites of questionable value with a high proportion of guest posts and I have little else of more weight to back up my link profile.

I really think the "black hat / white hat" metaphor doesn't help people with SEO.  In truth there is a LOT of grey - it's almost all just shades of grey.  Most methods lose their shiny whiteness if you try to scale them up - particularly if you dumb them down at the same time. Most "frowned on" methods can still be used very effectively if you are selective and intelligent in your link building and keep focused on quality over quantity.

Don't believe me?  Start another question here on moz.com and ask "If the Huffington post (#1 blog in the world according to Technorati) asked you to write an article about something you are passionate about and said you could have a follow link in it, would you use that link?" .    I don't know many professional SEOs that would say no.