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2011 in Review AND a Plan for 2012

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Oh what a year it’s been! Many webmasters will be happy to see the year end and hope that 2012 is a bit quieter but what EVERY online business owner needs to do right now is …

Use the Changes from 2011 to Prosper in 2012!

Part I — Download the Presentation Audio (mp3) here.
Part I — Download the Presentation Transcript (pdf) here
Just Released: Part II — Download the Q&A audio (mp3) here

  • Action #1: Fix Your Listings – fast and easy changes to get the most from the rankings you do have.
  • Action #2: Get Panda-Proofed NOW – Google’s big algorithm update was a mystery for a while, but now it’s crystal-clear *exactly* what to do to recover and thrive in the age of Panda.
  • The Outlook for 2012 – What we see coming in 2012 and what you need to do right now!

Coaching Sign Up Link: http://seobt.co/2011

Our coaching program (and the special holiday offer) are explained at the very end of the webinar – but we would encourage you to watch the entire webinar before signing up.

Ask us your questions today!

We are collecting, summarizing and answering the dozens of questions we got during the webinar and will be posting the whole lot in just a couple days. Leave your question here and we’ll answer it too!

Related posts:

Two Ways to Defeat Existing Competitors Webinar Replay: WordPress SEO With Joost de Valk Setting Up Quick Featured Images Pro Plugin For WordPress New Rules of SEO: Mobile Users Run the Internet

Comments

  1. If you’ve spent a good deal of time and effort getting a keyword phrase up to Number One on Google (and it didn’t bring you the traffic you originally thought it would) and then you go to work on another phrase, is there any way you’d lose any of your traction on the initial phrase? I realize we should be working on quite a few keywords and keyword phrases and we are, but we were really concentrating on one particular phrase which was key to our niche and now I want to make sure we keep those gains.

    (keyword phrase = “employee testing” | our site: http://EmployeeTestingCenter.com)

    • Hi Stan,

      I took the liberty of checking your keyword “employee testing” in Google Adwords and it only show 320 searches per month in the US (exact match).

      Another phrase might be better to target is “pre employment testing” which bring in 1,600 searches per month (exact) with a bit more competition (over 500K vs 180K for employee testing).

  2. Hi

    At the end of the presentation there was a page to sign up or ask additional questions.

    However can i ask a question here. Do we need a fully built site to get the most value from this membership? or can coaching include strategy for a new venture? Ive build sites before and “done” seo 🙂

    regards

  4. Guys, great stuff as always!
    You are the only gurus out there whose letters i don’t delete without reading.

    • The Q&A session will be up in a couple days and we’ll make sure everybody gets notified. We’re also collecting questions here and from the webinar chat transcript that did not get answered – dozens I’m told! – and will post answers for ALL of them.

  6. Hi,
    The PDF transcription download has a problem — comes up with an error screen when download attempted.

  12. Any advice for this issue I’m having with rel=author…?

    I have a Google+ badge, which links to our Google+ business page that is global on the blog. That came as a suggestion from Google, and I believe it is where the rel=publisher markup is located.

    When I use the rich snippets testing tool, it finds both rel=author and rel=publisher and tells me there should only be one or the other. (rel=publisher on homepage, rel=author on content). How do I avoid that when I’d like to have the Google+ badge located in a group of social media links on the sidebar?

    It seems the rich snippets tool just defaults to pick the Publisher icon/company logo instead of an author pic. I’m actually fine with that – but is having both markups on a page still a potential problem?

  13. I find it very interesting, and I also think that by the time everyone gets Panda proofed, they will come out with some other Animal analogy, that will be equally difficult to unravel and even more likely to cause your ranking to change dramatically.

    • Thomas,
      I don’t necessarily disagree, although there really is “method to this madness” – or at least explanation. Panda – which is actually the last name of the engineer that created the core technology (no lie, it’s true) – was required as a direct result of the massive influx of less-than-perfect pages that resulted from Caffeine. The two things interesting there are that [1] they failed to understand in advance what faster/deeper/more-frequent indexing was going to do to index quality and [2] they were pressed to fix the problem “expeditiously” … which usually results in less than perfect testing! That sure turned out well. 🙂

  14. Hey Leslie & Dan,

    I got your email about answering our questions before Christmas and I really need a Christmas miracle for my site and my business. I have a site that lost a lot of traffic and revenue (-75%) since the beginning of the year. It was a approximately 250 page static site and I am currently converting it to WordPress. I have a couple of questions that I hope you could answer after listening to your webinar.

    Question 1) In the webinar, I believe you stated that lower/lost rankings from Panda was the direct result of duplicate content that causes your site to lose the snippet wars. I am not sure what you mean by “lose the snippet wars.” Could you give an example of this? Is this as simple as taking some content from your site and searching Google for a portion of it (in quotes) and seeing how many number one results you get? If this is the case, is losing the war not being the top ranked listing more often than not?

    Question 2) You stated in your webinar that the first action item to Panda proof your site is to establish authorship for your original content. After this is done, this will fix the problem? We don’t have to do anything else like file DCMA takedown requests to have the duplicate versions removed from the other sites? Are you saying that Google is respecting this fix as a means to establish the owner of this content? Could not the ones using my original content do the same thing?

    Question 3) You stated in your webinar for those using WordPress that they should use excerpts in their RSS feeds to prevent portions of their original content from being duplicated all over the web via RSS syndication. Now if we do this, should the excerpts ever be used anywhere else on our our websites (i.e. like in the related posts listings or recent posts listings)? In other words, if using excerpts in RSS feeds, should this be the only place they are used by our sites to prevent snippet comparisons by Google?

    I hope you can address my questions so I can implement this in my WordPress port.

    Thanks,
    Will

  15. Hi Dan & Leslie

    You say the first action to take is to Panda proof your site to establish authorship for your original content. I have 4 travel sites so do you mean write an About Me page and establish authorship for all 4?

    I checked sites above me in Google for my Valencia site which got hit by Panda and none of them have established authorship and none have an About Me page – what they do have are loads of backlinks and most are from other sites they own.

    Love the webinars and thanks for all the great info.

    Merry Xmas & Happy New Year
    Carole

    • Good question! Turns out to be a straight forward answer and I just added it to the list. Look for it soon. Plowing through (nearly) a hundred.

    • While that’s true, Robert, I’m struggling to imagine a case where the additional data that Google provides via integration with their other tools (Adwords, Webmaster Tools, etc.) doesn’t provide a whole lot of actionable information that you won’t get from other solutions.

      I’m also struggling to understand the context of your comment. Did someone claim that you needed Google Analytics to get keyword data?

  19. Interested in signing up for the coaching.

    A little expensive for me but within my budget.

    How much more $$ per month can I expect to spend on my SEO following the tips that you give in the membership?

    • There is no single answer to that question but our focus in coaching you is two fold.
      First, we try to guide you into authority and link building methods that pay for themselves rather than being a cost. You do have some “float” between doing the work and getting the benefits but it can be very short – weeks – when done correctly. Where everyone else in our industry teaches link building as a cost, we teach it as a marketing activity that ultimately drives sales both directly and as a side effect of better ranking.
      Second, we’ve all heard that “content is king” and that is more true today than it was even before so much of our advice will center on what content you should develop, how it should be incorporated into your web presence and how to create the volume of content you need at a price that makes sense to your business.
      These two skills, links and content, are really all that is required to rank for pretty much anything you could imagine!

  20. Thanks Leslie & Dan for the great video! I hope there will be more insightful video from you guys this year. By the way, are you planning another link liberation or other SEO course this year?

    Regards,

    Christian

    • As mentioned in the video, the next release will be our “White Hat Black Belt” SEO course in January – this is a deep and comprehensive “all the way up to speed” SEO training. Link Liberation 3.0 will be released soon after that – most likely early March.

  21. Thanks for the great tips, especially regarding the use of excerpts. It seems that good practices never go out of style. Fresh original content will always be king. Especially with the development of artifical intelligent search engines like Siri coming on board, it will be more important than ever to have socail viral links to great content.

  22. I commonly refer to you guys as the “Supermen” of SEO. However, I was just wondering if you “tested” the conversion rate from your latest MP3 and MP4 downloads with the dog barking in the background (I’m guessing this was Dan’s? I don’t think Leslie would ever stand for this…?)
    Anyway, as much as I love and respect you both, I think the dog barking probably caused you as much as a 50 to 75% or greater loss in credibility.
    And conversion.
    At some points in the MP3 and MP4 (that had audio issues, so I had to ‘match up’ the audio with the visual) I could “visualize” Dan (or Leslie) trying to run after his dog to “quiet him down.” At one point, it seemed Dan was away from his mike “tending” to the dog.
    I know you don’t want to hear this, but I thought you’d at least want to hear it. Believe me, it cost you a lot of conversion money.

    By the way, I spoke with Leslie in “way back” in 2005 right after I bought “Optilink.” Optilink no longer works and I was wondering if I need to buy an upgrade? I usually use SEO Elite, but used to rely on Optilink. I would love to be able to use Optilink again as a trusted link source tool.
    thanks!

    Bow Wow. (No dogs in the back-ground,)
    Chris

    • Chris, when the choice is between doing the event in an environment with dogs, or not doing the event at all, I am certain that our conversion rate is infinitely higher with the event actually taking place.

      I for one don’t get particularly excited about working with people who listen to an hour and a half of great information, and can’t give it appropriate value because they heard a dog at one point during that time. I’d rather work with people who appreciate me taking the time late into the evening to share the information with them.So in that sense, maybe we need more dogs.

      I assume we can include you in the latter group, and that you were just making a helpful suggestion, without realizing the devious cunning that goes into making sure that the dogs would bark at exactly the right time.

      Woof woof. 🙂