Channel Topics - SEO Automation Evolved

Search Engine Automation has always been a key feature of Affino. It allows small teams to have big results when they aim to get their pages high on the Google Search rankings. Affino has been evolved massively over the past twelve months to meet Google’s criteria for search engine friendly pages.

Affino has also been updated to make things considerably more automated, including automated meta tagging, automated search engine friendly URLs, greatly streamlined code, improved use of automated headings, improved incoming feeds, new user-friendly tagging interface, personal URLs, HTML / Ajax versions of components which were previously Flash only, and the list goes on.

Channel Topics

The 5.5.13 release of Affino introduces a whole new level of SEO Automation with the introduction of Channel Topics. It is a concept we started working on eight years ago, and which has finally been realised. Topics are key terms which you define for your site, on Comrz these include ecommerce, ecommunity, Affino and ’social commerce’. When users register they can select topics they’re interested in, and equally anyone can tag content on the site with the same topics.

Affino then goes beyond basic manual tagging by providing automated tagging where users do not tag their content. Additionally we’ve introduced hash tags into status messages / microblogs, which uses the Twitter hash tags to automatically meta tag updates.

The key element we’ve introduced in this release is the ability to tag channels with say eCommerce, and then pull in content and member highlights on to the page automatically. These highlights elements are fully dynamic and extract from the various content sources only content which has been tagged with the topics selected on the Channel.

It means Affino builds automated topic-based landing pages on-the-fly with no manual intervention. This is great for targeting your users and achieving and maintaining high Google rankings.

Getting the Top Rankings with SEO

Google Page Rank is affected by a number of criteria:

• Content
• Content Currency (how fresh the content is)
• Update Frequency
• Meta Tags
• Longevity
• Incoming and Outgoing Links
• On-topic Media
• Surrounding Site and Domain
• On-topic Links
• Code Structure and Quality
• URL name
• Page Integrity, i.e. no broken links or missing elements
• How Human Readable it is
• Page Size
• Quality of Grammar
• And more

Google also use other weightings (they claim to use thousands), but these are the key ones, with the majority being based on the content, integrity, surrounding site and presence.

The biggest practical issues for generating top ranking pages using SEO are:

• Originating Great Original Content
• Maintaining Currency

Originating great content demands that you have a knowledgeable person on board who can create or source great content. It helps greatly if your site can handle incoming feeds to automate incoming content, and if it provides social publishing capabilities which means it’s easy to bring in guest and community contributors.

Maintaining currency requires constant daily updates to ensure that Google and the other search engines see that the content is continuously updated and remains relevant. It is also essential to allow social engagement and promotion by providing outgoing feeds, comments and ratings, and easy means for sharing the content including social bookmarkers for the leading social sites such as Facebook and Twitter. It is also important to promote the content on appropriate sites. Everything else will come organically.

How Affino Drives SEO

Affino automatically handles the code, page size, structure, URL naming, Meta Data (where possible) and page integrity by itself. The latest Affino updates include enhanced feeds, which when combined with all the updated user generated content elements, much of the content and media is now also covered; so are the incoming and outgoing links, high frequency updates and content currency. 

What does this all mean? In simple terms it means you will be able to achieve top ranking pages with the minimum of effort. The bottom-line for a business is that the individual or team responsible for the SEO campaigns will be far more effective than if they had to do everything manually with traditional blog and content management solutions, and there will be far fewer dips in rankings.

The problem with SEO is that it can be very time consuming. It requires constant vigilance and continuous investment, and ideally means having full-time staff on hand to drive your online positioning. In the real world, the number of companies with dedicated SEO resources is a tiny proportion of the whole, so smarter, more automated methods are required. With Affino, if you get the essentials right when setting up your landing pages, they will largely run themselves, as long as the site content and incoming feeds remain relevant and on-topic.

By automatically aggregating all the on-topic content on to the key landing pages (Topic Channels), and providing prominent positioning on your site linking to them, Affino will continue to drive their currency without requiring continuous manual input. The biggest impact this will have is to reduce the time it takes for your pages to rise up the Google rankings, and once there it will help to maintain the position without the dips which which usually occur as soon as the focus goes off the key words / topics.

Social Commerce Topic Example

It’s very early days, but we’re just launching our first landing page for Social Commerce. Initially our focus is purely going to be on getting up the page rankings. Once we see some traction we’ll improve the positioning and commercial elements. We will also be integrating it into our store once that is launched later this month.

Since we have minimal content creation resources in-house we’ve started by importing a number of key feeds: Social Commerce Today, and Google, Twitter and YouTube feeds for Social Commerce. We’re started to ’curate’ some of the content by pulling out highlights, and once we’ve got a larger pool of articles and media we’ll invest some time in picking out the top articles from the general web and showcasing them.

Once we get traction, and as we build up the content on Comrz we’ll change the page configuration and start showcase much more of our own content, however it won’t happen overnight, rather over the next two to three months. We’ll also start to pull in more of the community-based content as the Comrz community starts to get traction.

Assembling the Landing Page

There are many resources available for you when creating the landing page. You can start off by simply having an article with key links and related content, however this is very much the manual approach. The Topic-lead approach requires using the appropriate content highlights elements. Affino will initially offer nine, which can be used to highlight the key site content (and we’ll extend this as the need arises).

Below are the key elements and the key uses for each one. All can present relevant highlights.

Detailed Standard Section

• Articles - News and Features
• Products
• Groups
• Online Directory Entries
• Feeds

Detailed Media Section

• Videos
• Images
• Podcasts
• Media Feeds

Blog Highlights

• Community Content
• Professional Bloggers

Carousel

• Products
• Feeds
• Articles - Features

Feature Scroller

• Media

Simple Events Listing

• Events
• Shows

Who’s Online

• Followers
• Interested Users

Related Items

• Any content directly related to the topic including: community spaces, leaders, questionnaires, polls, newsletters, feeds

Text Item

• Channel specific information including the title and teaser

Aim for the Top

There are no limitations with Affino when it comes to achieving top ranking pages on Google, so go for it.

If you have any questions of comments then post them below.