The New Number One Spot: Planning for the Future of SEO

You run a successful business, or at least the IT for a successful business — that’s why you’re on SoftLayer. And, chances are, you’ve already spent lots of time and effort optimizing your site for search engines. You’ve built backlinks; you’ve ensured the structure of your site allows the search engine spiders to see every page of the site and prevents the creation of duplicate content; you’ve carefully written titles, friendly URLs and header tags; and you’ve continuously tweaked your on-page content to get to the number one spot in Google, Bing and other search engines.

Unfortunately, that apical spot is quickly becoming an apocryphal one; being number one isn’t what is used to be. The Search Engine Results Page (SERP) has undergone dramatic changes in the past few years, and even if you optimize perfectly and grab the top spot, you might be pushed down (even below the fold) by a variety of other Google products:

• Ads & Comparison Ads
• Local Results
• Image Results
• Video Results
• Shopping Results

In today’s SEO market, you need to optimize not only for regular web results, but for every other Google product too. Luckily, there are a few tips you can use to make sure you appear in those products, and get the new and improved global number one spot—and lots of traffic too.

Local
Does your business have any local presence? Or do you ever see yourself buried under lots of local results, even when you have great SEO? Optimizing your local presence can fix that, and it’s a pretty simple task. If Google already ranks you well, then it considers your site to be a high quality site. You just need to make sure it also considers your site to be a local one as well.

To let the search engines know you want to rank locally, follow these four steps:

1. Add your company address to the footer of your page. Use the address Google already has on file for you. (If you tell customers that you are located at “1156 6th Avenue” and Google has you listed at “1156 Avenue of the Americas,” use the latter.
2. Embed a Google map on your contact us page. Find your company on Google Maps, then click the link icon on the top right of the map. You’ll see an option to “Customize the Embedded Map.” Pick the size that works for you and add it to your site.
3. If you haven’t already, claim your Google Places account at http://www.google.com/placesforbusiness
4. Lastly, build more links. I know you’ve already built a lot of relevant, quality links, but now you need relevant, quality local links, so make sure you’re linked to from local portals, yellow pages and local directories.

Images
If your customers are often looking for images – of your products, of your content or anything on else on your site – or if your results are pushed down by image results, you need to take the extra step of optimizing your images. Ignore what you’ve heard before about alt tags and image titles; we’ll share some of the real steps to take to make sure your images rank too.

As we saw with local SEO, ranking for images isn’t about doing special SEO for images as much as it is about doing great traditional SEO, and letting Google know your images are there … and that you want to rank for them in Google Images and in Universal Search results. The first – and more important – step for ensuring that your images rank is making sure the page on which that image is found is perfectly optimized. Next, focus on these steps:

1. The most important image-specific optimization technique is ensuring that the name of the image contains the word or phrase you are optimizing for. Is it a picture of your West Coast data center? Call it “west-coast-data-center.jpg” instead “DC76182687.jpg.”
2. The next most important element is the content surrounding the image (or images) in question. That data center picture will rank well if it’s on a page all about your data center locations – and particularly well if it’s embedded right in the middle of a paragraph about your West Coast data center. It won’t do very well in a slideshow with a one-line caption beneath it.
3. You can highlight the images you particularly want Google to rank well in Universal/Image results by adding those images to your XML Sitemap. Inside the tag, add the following lines for each image you want to highlight:
   <image:image>
   <image:loc>http://example.com/image.jpg</image:loc>
</image:image>

Google recently improved its image duplicate filter. Buying lots of stock images? Then it might be harder to rank for those images. But if you have original images, then great! You have a leg up on your competitors.

Video
Got any videos on your site? Then you definitely want to implement the steps below to make sure Google recognizes those videos and ranks them highly. If you do, any page that has a video will get a thumbnail in the SERPs and you’ll show up in Google Video search. You’ll also be given an incredible, unfair advantage: if there are two videos on a page, Google likes to group them together; if you’re the lower video, you’ll automatically be pulled up the SERP to be next to the higher video.

As we saw with images, your first step is great optimization of the page on which the video resides. That means ensuring the video isn’t alone on the page; try to add other textual content – comments, transcripts, context – alongside the video. This is especially important for video, since Google just interprets the video on the already well-optimized page, instead of ranking video separately on the SERP. You just need to let Google know you have a video.

1. The first step to letting Google know about your video is actually having a video on your site, and fully owning and hosting that video. Embedding a YouTube video on your page – even if you filmed and produced it, and it’s on your channel – is not enough. You need to host both the video (the .swf file) and the video player (the .flv file). If you use a service like BrightCove to host and play your videos, make sure to set up a CNAME from your domain to BrightCove’s, to prove to the engines that the videos really are yours. This applies to images as well.
2. Once you are hosting the video, you need to tell Google that the video is there. You can either set up a video sitemap, an XML file similar to your XML Sitemap, that tells the engines where it can find videos on your site and some information about those videos—including where the thumbnail image is, the title of the video, a description and some more optional information. If you can’t put together a video sitemap, you can add some meta information to your page, called micro formats, that will let Google know there’s a video on that page. The two accepted formats are Facebook Share and RDFa.
3. Lastly, make sure the URL of the page that contains the video is less than 70 characters. Any more and Google might truncate the URL. If they do that, they won’t show the thumbnail, even if you’ve followed the above two steps.

You may have noticed a theme here: Good SEO combined with following a few special steps to make sure Google knows which special category you are trying to rank for translates into great Universal SEO. Follow these steps, and you’re sure to get the real #1 spot … And if you want a little help getting the “good SEO” piece done, you can always use Drive, the only SEO software designed to optimize for Universal, rich-media SEO to help. For more information about our business and what we do, check out the RankAbove page in the SoftLayer Marketplace.

If this information is helpful and you want to hear more, leave a comment, and I’ll start working on a follow up with tips for Google Shopping, Google News and more. To tide you over, you can click through a presentation about blended search from October:

- Eli Feldblum, RankAbove

For those of you familiar with the CloudLayer platform, you might already understand the value of a local disk storage option, but for the uninitiated, this news presents a perfect opportunity to talk about the dynamics of the cloud and how we approach the cloud around here.

As the resident “tech guy” in my social circle, I often find myself helping friends and family understand everything from why their printer isn’t working to what value they can get from the latest and greatest buzzed-about technology. As you’d probably guess, the majority of the questions I’ve been getting recently revolve around ‘the cloud’ (thanks especially to huge marketing campaigns out of Redmond and Cupertino). That abstract term effectively conveys the intentional sentiment that users shouldn’t have to worry about the mechanics of how the cloud works … just that it works. The problem is that as the world of technology has pursued that sentiment, the generalization of the cloud has abstracted it to the point where this is how large companies are depicting the cloud:

As it turns out, that image doesn’t exactly illicit the, “Aha! Now I get it!” epiphany of users actually understanding how clouds (in the technology sense) work. See how I pluralized “clouds” in that last sentence? ‘The Cloud’ at SoftLayer isn’t the same as ‘The Cloud’ in Redmond or ‘The Cloud’ in Cupertino. They may all be similar in the sense that each cloud technology incorporates hardware abstraction, on-demand scalability and utility billing, but they’re not created in the same way.

If only there were a cloud-specific Declaration of Independence …

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all clouds are not equal, that they are endowed by their creators with certain distinct characteristics, that among these are storage, processing power and the ability to serve content. That to secure these characteristics, information should be given to users, expressed clearly to meet the the cloud’s users;

The Ability to Serve Content
Let’s unpack that Jeffersonian statement a little by looking at the distinct characteristics of every cloud, starting with the third (“the ability to serve content”) and working backwards. Every cloud lives on hardware. The extent to which a given cloud relies on that hardware can vary, but at the end of the day, you &nash; as a user – are not simply connecting to water droplets in the ether. I’ll use SoftLayer’s CloudLayer platform as a specific example of that a cloud actually looks like: We have racks of uniform servers – designated as part of our cloud infrastructure – installed in rows in our data centers. All of those servers are networked together, and we worked with our friends at Citrix to use the XenServer platform to tie all of those servers together and virtualize the resources (or more simply: to make each piece of hardware accessible independently of the rest of the physical server it might be built into). With that infrastructure as a foundation, ordering a cloud server on the CloudLayer platform simply involves reserving a small piece of that cloud where you can install your own operating system and manage it like an independent server or instance to serve your content.

Processing Power
Understanding the hardware architecture upon which a cloud is built, the second distinct characteristic of every cloud (“processing power”) is fairly logical: The more powerful the hardware used for a given cloud, the better processing performance you’ll get in an instance using a piece of that hardware.

You can argue about what software uses the least resources in the process of virtualizing, but apples-to-apples, processing power is going to be determined by the power of the underlying hardware. Some providers try to obfuscate the types of servers/processors available to their cloud users (sometimes because they are using legacy hardware that they wouldn’t be able to sell/rent otherwise), but because we know how important consistent power is to users, we guarantee that CloudLayer instances are based on 2.0GHz (or faster) processors.

Storage
We walked backward through the distinct characteristics included in my cloud-specific Declaration of Independence because of today’s CloudLayer Computing storage announcement, but before I get into the details of that new option, let’s talk about storage in general.

If the primary goal of a cloud platform is to give users the ability to scale instantly from 1 CPU of power to 16 CPUs of power, the underlying architecture has to be as flexible as possible. Let’s say your cloud computing instance resides on a server with only 10 CPUs available, so when you upgrade to a 16-CPU instance, your instance will be moved to a server with enough available resources to meet your need. To make that kind of quick change possible, most cloud platforms are connected to a SAN (storage area network) or other storage device via a back-end network to the cloud servers. The biggest pro of having this setup is that upgrading and downgrading CPU and RAM for a given cloud instance is relatively easy, but it introduces a challenge: The data lives on another device that is connected via switches and cables and is being used by other customers as well. Because your data has to be moved to your server to be processed when you call it, it’s a little slower than if a hard disk was sitting in the same server as the instance’s processor and RAM. For that reason, many users don’t feel comfortable moving to the cloud.

In response to the call for better-performing storage, there has been a push toward incorporating local disk storage for cloud computing instances. Because local disk storage is physically available to the CPU and RAM, the transfer of data is almost immediate and I/O (input/output) rates are generally much higher. The obvious benefit of this setup is that the storage will perform much better for I/O-intensive applications, while the tradeoff is that the setup loses the inherent redundancy of having the data replicated across multiple drives in a SAN (which, is almost like its own cloud … but I won’t confuse you with that right now).

The CloudLayer Computing platform has always been built to take advantage of the immediate scalability enabled by storing files in a network storage device. We heard from users who want to use the cloud for other applications that they wanted us to incorporate another option, so today we’re happy to announce the availability of local disk storage for CloudLayer Computing! We’re looking forward to seeing how our customers are going to incorporate cloud computing instances with local disk storage into their existing environments with dedicated servers and cloud computing instances using SAN storage.

If you have questions about whether the SAN or local disk storage option would fit your application best, click the Live Chat icon on SoftLayer.com and consult with one of our sales reps about the benefits and trade-offs of each.

We want you to know exactly what you’re getting from SoftLayer, so we try to be as transparent as we can when rolling out new products. If you have any questions about CloudLayer or any of our other offerings, please let us know!

-@nday91

Given the ambitious scope of WorldHostingDays, we weren’t sure what to expect from the sessions, but we were excited to hear fresh perspectives on the European-centric hosting market. We walked away from the sessions with a few new ideas to implement into SoftLayer’s business, and it was interesting to hear the (regionally accented) conversations focus on the same problems and questions the US hosting industry is tackling: Public and private clouds, IPv6, scalability, stability and security.

Many European companies that are relatively new to the hosting scene are experiencing some phenomenal growth (similar to what we’ve seen at SoftLayer), and the opportunity is growing exponentially beyond their growth as new markets turn up with fresh needs for quality infrastructure. In these developing markets, local events in Europe like WHD will be invaluable to educate and relate how this relatively new industry might change the face of the local business environment … And when those efforts carry into Asia, the sky is the limit on the opportunity.

We have some pretty huge global plans on the horizon, and we’re excited to position ourselves for worldwide recognition. When WorldHostingDays 2012 rolls around, you’re going to see an even bigger, badder and better SoftLayer.

-@gkdog