Last Thursday Google announced a change in their search algorithm. According to the Google press release:
This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.
Read the entire press release here. This change only affects 11.8 percent of the U. S. queries. The change will be rolled out to other countries soon.
So, what does this mean for your internet marketing efforts? This is a good change for businesses that focus on providing useful, informative content. It is not good for businesses that try to take SEO shortcuts. This action taken by Google will reduce the rank of lower quality content farms.
In light of the change, it is a good time to stress our SEO advice of creating relevant, useful, original content on a regular basis and then when people find you, treat them well and deliver what they are looking for.
Key Take-Aways:
When you are using Google to search, you will find more useful content returned for your searches.
As a business, you will not have to compete with low quality content farms for results.
It is still important to be relevant and useful to people who visit your site.
In case you were thinking that, since you now have a Facebook page, a Twitter account, a Foursquare account, etc., SEO (search engine optimization) is just taking care of itself, you could be wrong.
SEO is still something that businesses need to give some serious attention.
As an effective online marketing tactic, SEO ranked #1 in this survey from Forbes.
Of course, you do need to include social media in your SEO plan. Using your keywords to get found on Facebook is a great tactic considering that Facebook has overtaken Google search as the most visited site. However, keep in mind that you do not own Facebook or Twitter or any other social media platform. Sometimes, they make decisions that can impact your business that you cannot control. For example, Facebook recently removed the ability for business pages that had less than 10,000 fans to set an FBML page as a landing page for new visitors. Of course, after the screams and outrage of many small businesses on Facebook, they reversed that decision very quickly.
The point is, you should definitely include social media in your SEO plan, but don’t forget about your own website. The one that you own and control. So what are some of the things you can do to enhance the SEO on your website?
Research your keywords. See what people are searching for that relates to your business. There are lots of free tools available. Just search for “free keyword tools” to see what is available and do the research.
Remember to go back and do that research on a regular basis as your keywords could change over time as people are using different words to search.
Select one or two keywords or key phrases for each page on your website.
Now that you have your keywords selected, let’s look at some “on page” SEO tactics:
Use your keywords in your root domain name if possible. If you already have a domain name that you have been using that does not include your keywords, don’t change your domain just to include them. However, if you are just starting out, go ahead and get a domain that includes your main keyword or keyword phrase.
Use your keywords in your page title. Each page should have a unique title and that title should contain the keywords or keyword phrase pertinent to that page.
Use your keywords in your content. Make sure that they occur naturally. Stuffing keywords in will not make sense to your visitors, and it will make you look amateurish.
Make targeted landing pages with unique keywords/key phrases for each page.
Create fresh, unique, relevant content on a regular basis.
Use your keywords in your alt tags.
Now, let’s look at some “off page” SEO tactics:
Get other relevant sites to link to you. How do you do that? Create great content. This is sometimes called, “link bait” and is a great SEO tactic.
Use social media to spread the word about your great content. Add useful information to social communities to build a reputation as an expert.
Enhancing your SEO will help your target customers find you. Once they find you, treat them well. Give them the information they are looking for and provide them with easy ways to contact you or to take the next step to becoming your customer. SEO is an important part of your overall business strategy puzzle. Make sure you give it some attention.
We have suspected it for some time. We see sites with lower Google page ranks outperforming higher ranked pages all the time. We knew that the public page rank that we see is months old. Sometimes you see an article that articulates the point so well that you just need to link to it. The great people at the Hubspot Blog did a great job of explaining:
Google has been testing a new version of it’s search engine. The project, known as Google Caffeine, is intended to be an overhaul of the architecture of Google’s web search that would improve its indexing speed, accuracy, and comprehensiveness. Google Caffeine is set to launch “after the holidays” according to Google’s Matt Cutts.
So, what does that mean for SEO? Well, a preview version of Google Caffeine was made available for testing to web developers and power searchers back in August. After reading many reports of the the testing results it seems that search results are faster and the results are more relevant.
While this test was nowhere near scientific, we do have some solid takeaways:
New Google is FAST: It often doubled the speed of Google classic.
New Google relies more on keywords: SEO professionals, your job just got a lot harder. The algorithm’s definitely different. It has more reliance on keyword strings to produce better results.
Search is moving into real-time: Being able to get info on breaking events is clearly a priority for Google and Bing. With both Twitter and Facebook launching real-time search engines, they needed to respond.
The results are what makes Google so popular and will be the true test of how good this new engine is. In my tests, the new Google pulls significantly different results than the old Google. For what I was searching for (my name, people I knew, events, computer hardware) the results were significantly better. In fact, it looks like the search keywords have become much bigger a factor than before. I’m seeing smaller sites rise to the top more overall.
What is notably different from the new set of search results is that the images, news and video results are presented differently. They appear to blend into the search results, instead of appearing on top (or at the bottom) of the search results. This could mean that the new algorithm takes into account the freshness of the content. The new algorithm also appear to reward sites that are updated on a regular basis with unique content.
So, the consensus seems to be that fresh, updated content that is keyword rich will be the winning formula. It also appears that static, brochure style websites will be the losers in the Google Caffeine world.
Is anyone voting for your website? That is how search engines see inbound links to your site. An inbound link to your site is a vote for your site.
You may be asking yourself, “How do I get inbound links?” That is a good question. This is where the hard work comes in. There are many link building methods ranging from just making a list of web masters and asking them to link to you, to really making the effort to create content that is worth linking to.
Creating content worth linking to is absolutely the goal to shoot for. It does take time and work, but the results are well worth the effort. While you are doing the work, it doesn’t hurt if you have relationships with web owners who you visit and enjoy that you can ask to link to you.
One of the best ways to create content that is worth linking to is to start a blog. Create new content on your blog that offers valuable information to your readers and see what happens. Again, these things take time but you will never get there if you never start.
Link building is an important part of SEO and it is worth spending some time on. When we work with clients on SEO, link building is certainly included in the package because we understand that those valuable links are a vote for you!
What if you planned a party – beautiful decorations, great band, delicious food and nobody came? That is what a lot of people do with their website. They have a wonderful design and a great product or service, they put it up and nobody comes. How do you get people to come to your website?
SEO (search engine optimization) is the method of optimizing your site so you can be found by search engines. It is like the invitation to the party. It is not, however, something you do once and you’re done! SEO is a continual process. We talk a lot about SEO on this blog. Why? Because it is important to the success of your website. You can even read a whole weeks worth of posts on SEO starting with this first post beginning what we called SEO week earlier this year.
It’s official. Google added new information to it’s webmaster site yesterday that they do not use the keyword meta tag in web ranking.
Does that mean that keywords are not important? Not necessarily. Keywords are what can help you stay focused. What is your site or blog about? Centering pages on your site around a few keywords or phrases can help you stay on course. Doing keyword research to see what words people are searching is also helpful.
Should you skip using the keyword meta tag? Not necessarily. Just because Google doesn’t the keyword meta tag, doesn’t mean other search engines don’t.
It is unfortunate that the keyword meta tag has been so misused as to make it less relevant. The best advice is still to have meaningful content about your business.
We use the Firefox browser a lot in our business. One of the reasons is that it is open source and thus allows for add-on extensions. There are add-ons for just about anything you can imagine. Some of the categories of add-ons are: Alerts & Updates, Dictionary & Language Packs, Download Management, Photos, Music & Videos, Plugins, Privacy & Security, Social & Communication, Toolbars, Web Development and several others.
Some of the add-ons we use in our business are:
SeoQuake SEO Extension: Seoquake is a Mozilla Firefox SEO extension aimed primarily at helping web masters who deal with search engine optimization (SEO) and internet promotion of web sites. Seoquake allows to obtain and investigate many important SEO parameters of the internet project under study on the fly, save them for future work, compare them with the results, obtained for other, competitive, projects.
SEO Workers Analysis Tool: SEO Workers Analysis Tool extension allows you to perform a basic analysis of the page in your browser with a single click. The results from the SEO Workers Analysis Tool are structured into the following useful groups: General status, meta tags listing, meta tags analysis, the pages displayed within search engine results, keywords found in the anchor tags, keywords found in the image “alt” attribute text, keywords found on the page, URLs found in the page, headers returned from the server.
SearchStatus: SearchStatus displays the Google PageRank, Alexa rank, Compete ranking and SEOmoz Linkscape mozRank anywhere in your browser, along with fast keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info and more.
TinyUrl Creator: With TinyUrl Creator you can easily shrink any long URL or link in the page to something you can email or Twitter using the TinyUrl service with a single click in your browser.
Let us hear your comments on what your favorite add-ons are for business and for fun.
You can use favicons to help with your company’s branding. Favicons are the 16 x 16 (or 32 x 32) pixel square icons associated with a particular website (or web page). Browsers that provide favicon support usually display a page’s favicon in the browser’s Address Bar and next to the page’s name in bookmarks.
There are several Favicon Generators out there. Just search for ‘favicon generator’ on google and make a choice. Once people get used to your favicon, they will quickly recognize when they are on your site.
Blogging can be a great SEO technique. Why? Because every blog article adds a new page to your website. Search engines love fresh content. And every blog article gives you the opportunity to focus your message on one subject or keyword phrase. Search engines like focused pages.
One thing to remember when setting up your blog is to have it as part of your company website. It should be either a sub-domain of your company website (e.g. www.myblog.mycompany.com) or a folder on your company website (e.g. www.mycompany.com/myblog). Don’t use one of the free blogging sites such as typepad or wordpress. You can use their free software, just not their site to host your blog. Your blog must be part of your company’s domain in order for your company’s website to benefit from any so called “google juice”.
