First, understand what Google has to say about Freshness:

Different searches have different freshness needs. This algorithmic improvement is designed to better understand how to differentiate between these kinds of searches and the level of freshness you need, and make sure you get the most up to the minute answers.

According to Amit Singhal, the blog post’s author, the following types of searches will be impacted:

• Recent events or hot topics (occupy oakland protests, nba lockout)
• Regularly recurring events (presidential election, exxon earnings, etc)
• Frequent updates (best sir cameras, subaru impreza reviews)

As consultants and managers of 35 lead-generating and ecommerce websites, we’re guessing nearly all of our clients will be impacted only by the third group, frequent updates.

Of course, all we can do is speculate the impact until after the update, when we’re able to test what Freshness rewards and punishes, but in the mean time here’s what we’re recommending to our clients.

Content Is Still King

Focus blog posts and site updates to terms you think will be affected by Freshess (see above). Ensure that each page of new content is optimized for one primary target term and 2 or 3 long tail variations.

Push your fresh content to your social media channels (Try SocialToaster.com to recruit “ambassadors” to do it for you).

Figure out a way to stimulate or better use User Generated Content. One of our clients is posting Amazon product reviews on their site, for example.

Reviews!

We know that Google pays attention to consumer reviews. Just check your Google Places page and note how Google pulls in reviews from InsderPages, Yelp, and others.

We can read into Amit Singhal’s post that search phrases like “best sir cameras” and “subaru impreza reviews” will be impacted by Freshness. Where do you rank for similar terms in your industry? If you’re getting a lot of your traffic from these phrases, prepare to promote these terms with more SEO content and links.

Update your HTML and make reviews and testimonials more identifiable to Google. Google likes reviews to be in Microformat coding. Read more in Google Help.

If your products are in Google Product Search (a.k.a. Google Shopping), beef up your positive reviews.

Respond quickly and positively to all negative reviews, no matter on what site they appear.

Google+

We’ve been watching client Google+ stats in webmaster tools, and haven’t seen much to work with — no hard evidence of this impacting search results, other than Google telling you which sites in search results your friends have +1’d. Nonetheless, we believe that Google considers social media content fresh, especially their own.

Just by the fact that Google is giving us data showing “search impact” of Google+, we’re playing it safe and encouraging our clients to use the Google+ button and collect more +1’s.

If you haven’t yet, set up a Google+ Business Page page and work it like your other channels. (HootSuite.com can help you push one update to multiple channels).

The more you tell Google about yourself, the more information they have to work with.

Video

Optimize your YouTube.com channel and video for your Freshness terms. Promote your videos to page one of Google search results. Don’t know how? Hire an SEO. (like us!)

News
We wonder if the Freshness Update is the beginning of the end for Google News. Will news results be more integrated or relocated on the search result page? To be sure, Google is constantly optimizing the layout and design of their search results page.

If Google wants to know what’s hot, what’s current, and what’s news, then by all means give it them. Our hunch is that press releases will remain a difficult way to get more than a temporary lift (note: they’re still good for link building).

Google will most likely instead continue to favor news stories from major and local news outlets. The example search results Mr. Singhall mentioned in his post are from MSN, Aljazeera, The Guardian, and the LA Times. In addition, we’ve found that with our SRM clients, content from major news outlets is much harder to displace off page one of Google searches.

Do what you can to include your target Freshness keywords in titles and content of all online press coverage.

Help I Can’t Do All This Myself!!

Hope this helps you to stay minty fresh. Call Eric to see if we can help: (866) 446-1972.

Further Reading

• Search Metrics predicts that winners will be news, broadcasting and brand sites
• Internet Retailer discusses potential impact on eCommerce sites
• Search Engine Watch recommends 4 Types of Timely Content for Google’s “Fresh” Update
• Inc explains Forget Facebook: 4 Reasons Your Company Needs a Google+ Page

A client recently asked us what we recommend when launching a website. From an SEO standpoint, we at periscopeUP do a LOT to ensure the search engines are properly indexing a site, including quality control on the site using our SEO checklist, and webdesign checklist, submitting the site, XML sitemaps, webmaster accounts, and redirecting the old pages to the new in case people have linked to them or bookmarked them, Google Places, and of course, links, links, links.

But this isn’t what the client was asking!

She was interested in knowing what she could do herself, from a PR perspective, to get the word out.  The website launch plan below will help you increase visibility and get some SEO lift.

Website Launch Checklist

1. Plan your tasks for one month prior and one month after launch

• Define your target audience and strategy
• Setup monitoring tools to listen to mentions of your company (google alerts, for example)
• List all your contacts, blog followers & blogger friends, email list, media contacts, social media fiends, etc
• Schedule tasks
• Write up all the features and benefits of your new site, to help users understand what improved and why they should visit. Remember that a feature is what a product or service does, a benefit is how it improves your life
• Provide easy ways of contacting you in every communication
• If applicable, document the roadmap of what’s to come (new site features, etc)
• Know how to optimize your links! Our video on internal links holds true for external links too

2. Drop some hints to your audience a month prior to launch, to let them know it’s coming.

3. Syndicate an optimized press release that includes a good description of why you’re the best and what’s new about your site / services.

• Pitchengine.com
• PRrweb.com
• One of the hundreds of free PR sites
• Notify local & industry press outlets / contacts individually

4. Email the world (don’t forget mom!)

• Send an email announcement to your loyal followers / clients / mom / social media followers
• Be sure to list new features of the site and give a reason to visit

5. Attack social media channels

• The key is asking everyone you know to post on their accounts and give them good (short) content to do it
• Notify Facebook & Twitter followers & followers of your clients / friends / mom
• Update LinkedIn followers and groups you & friends belong to
• Check out Social Toaster

6. Blog, comment & participate in forums

• Write about your new site on your site, prior to, during, and after launch
• Comment on industry blogs, forums, etc, showing off your great new site and asking for feedback

7. Ask for feedback

• Collect and disseminate feedback a month after launch to share the good & stay top of mind

8. Track the impact of your efforts

We hope this checklist was helpful. Please comment below and let us know if we forgot anything!

Oh yes, they do.

We’ve learned the hard way that if your site gets hit by a virus, the search engines will penalize you. On a few occasions recently, we’ve seen our clients websites hosted by major providers get hit and go down. We notice it when our SERP tracking tools alert us to drastic drops in search engine ranking positions.

If you’re a search marketer or webmaster concerned with organic search rankings, you need to take security seriously. This blog post explains the impact we’ve seen on a client’s SERP rankings and what we did to harden their website.

For privacy reasons, we won’t mention the name of the client or give their URL, but we can share the SERP positions. This graph is provided by AuthorityLabs, one of the SERP tracking tools we use.

As you can see, the blank space indicates the outage of the site. The chart also shows how after the site was restored, the SERP positions in all three of the major engines remained below their previous rankings.

Google’s SERPs still are not back to the top 30 postions.

The restored site was identical, and there was no significant difference in our link building immediately before or after the outage.

How To Protect Yourself From A Drop In SERP Rankings After A Website Outage

As they say, an ounce of prevention…

Since influencing the search engines is so laborious, the best protection from sagging SERPs is prophylactic. Keep your website up and running, and you’ll be safe.

Since this client was running WordPress, we will provide the steps we took to harden their site. Let it be known, though, that if a hacker wants to get into your site, there’s nothing you can do to fully prevent it. As our security advisor says, “There’s way more of the bad guys out there than us security guys. And in some cases, they’re much smarter.”

These steps are intended to “harden” WordPress, to make it less susceptible, but not impenetrable.

Security Checklist for WordPress

If you’re installing WordPress for the first time, use the Secure WordPress plugin, which helps with installation by removing extra information, otherwise, perform these tasks:

There are also several plugins that can help with closing these security loopholes. It’s best to install these one at a time, to see how they behave and to see if there’s any impact on your site.

If you’re installing a new instance of WordPress, start with WP Security Scan. If you’re working on an existing site, start with Secure WordPress, which will close many of the vulnerabilities listed above.

WordPress Security Plugins

Note: We are not security experts and suggest you hire one to provide professional advice about your particular setup.

How Do I Get My Ranking Back If My Site Goes Down?

Many hosting providers keep thier own backups, but you need to check to see what their policies are for restoring your site. Some hosting providers don’t backup your site, or may only keep a week or so of backups, which won’t always help.

It’s important that you keep your own backups as well, just in case. Here’s the tools we use:

• WordPress EZ Backup – Backs up the entire site
• WordPress Database Backup – Backs up the database

Check your Google Webmaster Tools. We’ve seen the webmaster tools reporting weeks after a site was restored that it still had malware or that the keywords of the site was incorrect.

You can then submit a reconsideration request to Google to re-index your site. Google does read all requests, but provides no timeframe for responding.

After your site is restored, speak with your SEO specialist about their strategy for restoring your rankings.

Other Resources

• Eyal Estrin’s Hardening WordPress Guide
• Secure Your WordPress By Learning From My Mistakes

I got a call today from a web developer we partner with, who asked if I had a best practices guide for designing a website with SEO in mind. It got me to thinking that while most of our SEO work is on technical or content issues, many of these best practices will impact a designer’s work.

The most important thing for a designer to understand is that SEO is not push marketing, it’s pull marketing, where you’re responding to a stated need by your consumer. This means that effective SEO design should give users what they’ve already told you they’re looking for.

In other words, a user is having a conversation inside their head about what they need when they type words into a search engine. Your job as a web designer is to step into that conversation and say, “I’ve got what you’re looking for.” This most often means creatively using your target keyword phrases in mind as you design your UI. Why? Users are thinking in their terms, not your terms, and not the client’s industry terms.

We always coach our clients: this is not about you. It’s about your customers & making them feel like you can solve their problems.

In addition, we of course always advise clients to involve SEO at the inception of the web design project. Knowing what terms people are searching on and having a keyword sitemap will help designers make informed decisions. Plus, it could reduce the need to rework designs.

Checklist For SEO Webdesign:

• Make sure the text, headers AND navigation are machine readable, either with web-safe fonts or technologies like Cufon or Type Kit. This is most important for headers and tag lines, less so for flashy imbedded presentations. Go ahead, select the text on this example.
  • Don’t use images or flash for navigation, only html text.
• Use your target keywords in the navigation elements, when possible. Look at the Floating Docks pulldown menu in this example.
• Use your target keywords in the header text, when possible. Example.
• Include a machine-readable footer. For local businesses, be sure to include the address. Example.
• Put a strong call to action and the phone number in a big font in the top right of the masthead. Example.
• Have at least a page of content on the home page, even if it has to go below the fold. Example. Consider show/hide features of DHTML5 if you want to minimize the negative impacts of too much copy.
• Find a way to utilize internal links in the copy. Example.
• Include an HTML site map for larger sites. This will help search engines and people.
• Design a custom 404 page.
• Never, ever build a site entirely in flash. Only use flash to embed movies into HTML wrappers. Use a technology like Frontal Code to make flash machine readable.

Coding Your Webdesign For SEO

• Make your code W3C compliant and fast loading. Google is trying to make the web a “better place” and has been known to penalize sites for bad code and long load times.
  • Use .js includes rather than putting javascript on pages. The search engines will therefore only read one line when loading this http request. Even though there might be 100 lines of code for the script, this would be handled as a separate request.
  • Use compressed, fast loading images.
• If you’re on a CMS, make sure the title, nav, headers, and other page elements are independent. Many older CMS systems tried to make administration easier by making these page elements controlled by a single field.
• All images should have optimized alt tags.
• Avoid frames.
• Ensure the site displays with javascript disabled.
• Check for broken links and images.
• Code address and contact information with Microformats
• Consider that the pages at the top level of a site are “more important” to search engines than sub section pages. In other words, apply SEO strategy to your directory structure. Keep URLs short and include keywords in the URLs. Generally, the closer to the root, the more chance a page has of ranking. As usual, I agree with Stoney deGeyter’s description of how to use directory structure to an SEO advantage.
• If possible, use table-less coding techniques and put the most important content for the search engines at the top of the code. In this example, you’ll see that at the top of the web page is content for branding, not content for SEO, but have a look at the code, and you’ll see the first words we’re presenting to the search engines is actually “Maryland Lasik.” Look at the screenshots below for an illustration.

Note how the SEO content appears below the brand / sales copy.

Yet in the code, the SEO Optimized Content comes above the sales copy.

If you have any additional thoughts on SEO for webdesign, feel free to post a comment below.

Finally, you should also check Google’s Website Design Guidelines.