Spam then in Google’s eyes can still be the pages people actually wanted to visit just because they have used border line black hat techniques. What Google now serve up for a lot of queries seems to be the same few authority sites: with how relevant they are being less important than authority. Even those sites that haven’t used Black Hat SEO, or haven’t used SEO at all even, have been penalised by the Google Penguin update, or perhaps the Panda 3.5 update the week before, as authority sites now rank higher.

As far as Google are concerned though this change benefits high quality sites and is anti black hat. What you need to understand is what to do if your site has been affected and what to avoid in future; first things first though make sure you are signed up for Google Webmaster tools to get messages from Google when they identify problems and for when you come to submit a reconsideration request.

The Google Penguin update penalizes keyword stuffing more than before and with this point you probably have had long enough warning and don’t need to keyword stuff anymore. Using a keyword twice now should be sufficient and then make sure you have some related terms in as well all at a low density but to confirm the subject: if you just write naturally of course you should in theory be safe.

When you write naturally you should hopefully create what Google see as good quality content, this means well-written content that makes sense, flows well and has mistakes removed. Your content certainly shouldn’t be duplicate content and spun content is now being picked up much more successfully since the Google Penguin update.

The points above clearly can help Google identify spam sites but as for using link schemes this is where Google could have trodden more lightly but didn’t. It seems wrong to assume that only spam sites will invest in SEO, those websites who invest time and money, for example employing the best writers to create good content, are in fact the most likely to invest in SEO and this may include them using black hat techniques, some of which not that long ago weren’t even seen as black hat.

In either case unfortunately if you want to avoid being penalized after the Penguin update then you need to avoid link schemes and link exchange schemes, what is more though you may need to get links from schemes such as private link forums taken down so they no longer link to you and only then submit a reconsideration request to Google if you have been penalized.

Google seem to have missed the point with this update, one flaw in their search is that building organic links for better rankings takes time and often the most relevant information is the freshest information from niche websites. Panda updates may have been painful for some but at least it made sense to use indicators of how real users were reacting to websites; the Google Penguin updates that favour established Authority sites can only be bad for searchers.

Firstly make sure you are signed up to Google Webmaster tools for the site in question, Google will tell you if something is wrong and if you get the message and act fast you can sometimes stop any action being taken.

If though the messages coming through from Google are saying that they have identified you using SEO techniques they don’t approve of, such as link schemes, you may have a steep hill to climb.

If this has happened you will probably have seen most or even all of your organic traffic disappear that could be worth thousands to you. You can have your site reconsidered though once you have changed your SEO techniques. Firstly of course remove the offending links, this includes ones from your site to others that may be in a link scheme and also those coming to your site that may be more difficult.

If you have used any other SEO techniques that Google may see as Black Hat such as in your on page optimisation change these back as well. Now resubmit your website to Google, if you couldn’t remove some links or have links that you feel they wrongly identified then tell them about it and explain.

If you are objecting and claiming that you did nothing wrong though be careful and be ready to back it up with some evidence: if you can’t though it may seem unfair you may have to remove links that you think are genuine. Also don’t try and argue that the techniques you used should be allowable if Google have plainly stated in the past and SEO best practice is that these SEO techniques are not acceptable.

Google will work with you if you show willing but can get fed up with you if you try to argue with them and leave you out to rot if they wish.

Of course if most of your links are from link schemes that Google disapprove of you may find you have to start your link building again and this is just the way of it; you could in such a case though be tempted to start again with a fresh new site and no history that Google may remain aware of even after your penalty has expired.

Even after reconsideration it could take 30, 60 or 90 days for your rankings to be restored as Google sees fit. To minimize the penalty that Google decide to give you after reconsideration you could use some SEO techniques that they wholly do approve of such as good quality fresh content that may show them your site’s value for searchers.

Picture credit: Google

Google’s recent post on their webmaster central blog gave five things to avoid in SEO and six fundamental SEO tips, when Google give you six fundamental SEO tips you of course pay some attention.

These SEO Tips started with one that on the face of it has little to do with SEO: ‘Do Something cool’, to make your site stand out from the competition: does this really help SEO though? Well as the Panda update takes in a lot more factors than before it probably does make some differences mainly from making your site more sticky, your site does need to stand out and be good to use too, and not stand out for the wrong reasons, for this to work. Does ‘do something cool’ mean break from the SEO rules we tend to follow though? Probably not.

Include relevant words in your copy was Google’s second SEO tip, yes they are telling you to add keywords; using keywords has never been black hat and Google want to understand what your site is about. What is black hat is stuffing irrelevant keywords or too many keywords with too high density. Google say though to try and put yourselves into the shoes of the searchers, we of course should all know this and know the best way to do this is to check exactly how many people are searching for each term so we can best serve them.

Be smart about your tags and site architecture, another SEO tip we all know about but perhaps sometimes forget about. In terms of internal linking especially this is often an after thought but should be done before other off page SEO work is started. Google also go on to tell you to ‘create unique title tags and meta descriptions’: you really should be doing this already for every page anyway.

Google’s fourth SEO Tip is a good one and that is to sign up for email forwarding in Google Webmaster tools. If you do this Google will actually help you with your on-page SEO by reporting any problems to you: with algorithms always changing and new factors being used all the time this information direct from Google shouldn’t be missed.

Attract Buzz, is Google’s fifth SEO tip, not completely clear but we think they mean to create good link-bait content that will attract natural links as well as likes, follows and of course +1s, as Google were seemingly keen to mention. Whether any of these, other than natural links, have SEO value though is unclear.

Google’s last SEO tip is to stay ‘Fresh and Relevant’, another good tip but one we should all know. Regular content updates are important and this includes tweaks to your existing pages as well as adding new blog posts, articles and other content. Google do also mention building a social media presence and creating an ideal mobile experience: these have a less direct impact on SEO, though Google may be starting to check mobile compatibility of sites when delivering results to a mobile device.

The first two in fact tell you a lot about Google and the way they see websites, they realize they are marketing tools for business and that they must be a part of companies wider marketing, this in turn makes websites more relevant and useful presumably.

1. Google’s first point is to avoid the mistake of having no value proposition, a mistake often listed in marketing mistakes lists but less often associated with SEO mistakes. Google’s argument is though that by knowing why your site should be number one for a keyword you should be able to come up with better pages and more relevant content, good for you, good for searchers and good for Google then.

2. Secondly Google champion an SEO and marketing department that are integrated, and know what each other are doing. This is also then a piece of advice often given in marketing mistakes lists, it is true though and SEO departments often don’t know what they are really trying to achieve. It is worse with a out of house SEO agency who your marketing department or agency don’t communicate with, give an SEO agency a loose brief and they will probably just bring you any vaguely relevant traffic. By making sure whoever is doing your SEO know that you want to attract customers in certain areas for example, with a clear buying intention, SEO and website people can make sure that landing pages are optimized and keywords carefully chosen.

3. Google extol the virtues of doing things properly, i.e don’t use a hack to try and save time rather than following best practice. For a start a lot of black hat type hacks will get picked up by Google if they become too common and you will then have to either come up with another hack or follow the best practice you should have done to begin with. The example Google gave interestingly was changing the timestamp on a URL to get it crawled more quickly rather than submitting the URL through Fetch as Googlebot.

4. Google’s fourth thing to avoid was getting caught in an SEO trend, another very good piece of advice. Often those new to SEO suffer from these most of all or those looking for a quick fix to their website’s poor rankings: they rarely live up to expectations. The white hat techniques that have always worked will continue to work, content will always improve rankings. Don’t then invest time in changing some small detail in every one of your site’s meta descriptions but focus on creating good quality, relevant content.

5. Google with their last point though seem to almost go back on their fourth point, as well as not following the latest fads and trends you should it seems have a website that is agile and allows you to quickly test improvements. Best practice does change over time and you will want to change your site from time to time, getting caught in a trend can be time consuming and wasteful but if you are going to follow a trend that may or may not work it is good to have a website that you can implement the change on quickly and easily: for this WordPress and other platforms with plenty of regularly updated plug-ins are by far the best.

Google’s February changes’ affect on affordable SEO

With Google announcing there were 40 changes to their algorithms in February it can be hard to keep up if you are looking to either provide SEO to clients or do affordable SEO work internally. The main thing though is to focus on the main points for those actually performing SEO, many of the changes improve search quality but make little difference to most webmasters, other changes though have less obvious effects and to keep things affordable SEO needs to be move with the times or better still be ahead of the game with the next trends that will come out of these changes.

First up is ‘more coverage for related searches’ this change means that more options for other search terms will be delivered to people searching, these options are often longer than those used to begin with and help people define what they need more exactly, they may also come up more now though for searches with few results. If the keyword phrases you use are short or have few other results then people could end up clicking to search again before looking at your result. More importantly though you can get new high performing keywords quickly by seeing what Google are offering as alternatives: these are bound to suddenly get a lot more traffic and can help with basic affordable SEO plans where you don’t want to spend days finding keywords.

Another important change for SEO is that they have improved how accurately they detect official pages; this in itself has little consequence unless you were lucky enough to have a site misidentified as official, it may though mean that competing for keywords containing your own brand will be easier though and you should consider whether you have made sure your company name, brand names and variations of them are included on your pages to make the most of this change for your SEO.

If you have a site completely or partly in languages other than English an important change is that Google will now be serving up more results for broad searches that include synonyms of a search term. Generally an exact match will still come up first and this will work only work for highly synonymous terms, it may mean though that you get a boost when using two or three synonymous keywords on one page, this has been the case with English for a little while.

They made this change in January but now perhaps they have taken it further again: fresh results are coming up higher than before and so for Affordable SEO don’t forget regular updates to your site, including updates to existing pages as well as fresh pages.

Leaving the most important change for small businesses to last, Google have updated how their algorithm identifies local content and local queries. The result is that local themed keywords are likely to start bringing you a lot more traffic, assuming the change is effective, local traffic is of course usually more valuable and your click throughs are likely to be higher: just remember to include your location in the title and description to maximize clicks to really benefit from affordable SEO that brings results.

Google’s Amit Singhal one of their top search executives has been explaining how Google will change search over the next year improving how Google understands language and the links between different terms.

Google of course already does this to some extent and a broad match search may bring up results with words that are similar and mean the same thing as the search you entered, understanding this is of course key to search optimization for Google though the traffic you can actually get from a broad match search that brings up your website is limited and varies depending on the total number of results.

These new changes though are likely to effect searches with low volumes most significantly but will affect search optimization for other terms as well. What many who specialize in SEO optimization are expecting is that Google will increasingly pick up on the contents of a page and look for keywords and plenty of related terms to confirm that a page is really related to a keyword used. This is already done to some extent and search optimization has changed significantly since the time when irrelevant keywords could be entered to drive traffic to a site. This update though could mean that Google are about to get a lot of better at catching poor quality sites out and SEO optimization specialists do need to be aware.

While the Panda updates have focused on collecting primarily user data to understand what makes a good site it is thought that Google’s semantic search will purely use robots to collect data and build understanding of how language works and how terms relate. It will even be possible for Google to understand context so that it can tell whether in your search you are using someone’s name such as Mr T Ball rather than looking for a ball. It does seem unlikely that whatever their initial plans Google wouldn’t use this in search results though thereby affecting how SEO optimization is done.

It isn’t clear yet how much the focus will be on improving the main results and how much it will be focused on delivering verified information to searches to answer queries straight away. This is likely to have a big effect on the use of quality content in search optimization though and informational content aimed at attracting traffic from people seeking information: often keywords that are less competitive than those that signal a clear buying intention.

Google’s semantic search looks set to be what Ask Jeeves originally tried to be: a search engine that bought back an answer rather than purely links, if someone searches with a question such as ‘What is the length of the coastline of Florida?’ they may get an answer straight away, this could be taken from your site but you won’t get any credit or any traffic and people won’t see your ads.

If Google use semantics for their search results and look at context etc then this may have a massive effect on your search optimization for where you rank for searches including a keyword but also mean that you are more relevant to the people who do see your site as a result. This in a way could actually make SEO optimization less of an art as considering the context of a keyword is less important as Google will do it for you: of course it could turn out that no-one is using a keyword in the way you hoped.

Keyword research for SEO optimization may need to be done from scratch if this change does go ahead and traffic for keywords at least closely monitored but there are bound to be opportunities as well.

Picture credit: Wikipedia

There is a lot of reaction to a recent interview with Matt Cutts of Google, as well as Duane Forrester of Bing, where Matt Cutts announced that Google would be moving to ‘level the playing field’ by penalizing those that ‘over optimize’. This SEO penalty has of course got a lot of people talking and a lot of people worried but if you look in more detail at what Matt Cutts said about what this SEO Penalty means it turns out that those following recent SEO best practice and white hat techniques have little to fear.

The first thing that Matt Cutts mentioned would be penalized was too many keywords on a page: a good SEO specialist though should already be limiting keywords and limiting their density; 1 or 2 prime keywords at 1% and then two or three long tail keywords with 1 or 2 mentions is usually about right. Whether Google will be even more strict though or will simply use a bigger SEO penalty for those who flout this practice is unclear but Matt Cutts did say that the Googlebot would be getting smarter suggesting that it may find new ways to identify keywords, such as looking out for those stuffed into descriptions, titles and even meta keywords.

The second thing Matt Cutts mentioned would lead to an SEO penalty was too many exchanged links; now exchanged links already have less value than non reciprocal links but could it be that they will soon have no value or could actually lead to an SEO penalty? How Google will decide how many are too many is unclear but it is likely to be as a percentage rather than an outright number; presumably Googlebot will be getting better at identifying three way link exchanges and other link exchange systems as well. If you do employ an SEO specialist that is building your links this way though they are already out of date and you may have to wonder what other out of date techniques are being used.

Google want to reward people who create great content and therefore this has to be the way forward for anyone wanting to avoid an SEO penalty, Matt Cutts specifically said that he wanted to level the playing field for “those people doing over optimization or overly SEO versus those making great content and great sites. ”

Key is that Matt Cutts hasn’t condemned SEO completely, the key in recent years has always been to think of your SEO as a way to work with Google to help them understand what you have and to make sure you appear in relevant searches, not to try and trick Google: for those who do try this their time is up.

Google Panda has gone a long way to improve search results by understanding better which sites are good and bad; what Matt Cutts’ comments may suggest is that they feel their understanding bought about by data collected for Panda is now better and the time has come to increase the importance of several ranking factors.

Picture credit: Google

The official Google Search Blog publishes a lot of information and includes monthly updates on how they are improving search quality. This is great if you are working in or on Search engine optimization but a lot of the details don’t give away instantly what you should do to your search engine optimization to benefit: plus there is a lot in there that has little importance to most people: such as it being easier for users in Saudi Arabia to now use an English interface to search.

We break down the important information from January’s changes, the most recent to be published, and what it means for your Search engine optimization:

Fresher results is an important change, as a searcher this is great as too often we want information on something and the results being served up are very out of date, Google then are striving to get a better balance between relevance and freshness. This will of course affect your search engine optimization and mean that pages that have been pulling in traffic for years may suddenly drop traffic. The solution is to not only add more fresh content but to update pages. By updating existing pages Google will still see items as fresh content but you don’t lose any of your inbound links: as you would if you republished, in which case you would also potentially have duplicate content problems.

Google have also announced that they will particularly focus on fresher results from pages for recurring events; if you run an event or festival this is useful so that people come through to information on your next date rather than pages for previous years, which are of course worth keeping to maintain inward links to your domain.

Google have also sped up Autocomplete, many in Search Engine Optimization haven’t given auto-complete as much thought as they should. Google now not only give you suggestions but load up results for those questions: this makes it much more likely that someone won’t complete the search they originally planned and will go for another one. The effect of this is that long tail keywords will be searched for less and prime keywords will see searches increase even more.

Apparently Panda has been updated again to improve the number of high-quality sites appearing in results, they don’t say what changes have been made but as with most of the major Panda updates high quality, sticky content and navigation that keeps people on site is what the SEO doctor ordered; this is essential if you have found that your site has been slipping down Google’s rankings. Remember that videos, including a text transcription, are especially good at keeping people on site for longer: which Google records and takes as a sign of a high quality site.

Another minor factor for your search engine optimization is that Google have improved Autocomplete spelling corrections and this includes for rarer searches and spellings: this means that some terms that Google thought were misspellings it will realise are not, this includes a lot of proper nouns of course. Also though less people will get search results based on misspellings so putting effort into using misspellings as keywords really is a thing of the past.

Well this thesis is wrong and for businesses in Tampa SEO can give great value with relatively low investment if done correctly.

For a start the way people go about finding businesses and doing an information search has changed drastically, Yellow Pages companies will now give you an online listing as well as a listing in the actual pages, why? Because they know that the paper version is dying as more and more people look for businesses online. Unfortunately for the Yellow Pages companies few people go online and start a search at their websites, generally people go to a search engine.

Once people get to a search engine they may do a search for a business they already know of in order to find out more; as a business in Tampa SEO can make sure that you at the very least come up top on search engines such as Google for your own business’ name.

Other people search for a business type but if they need a business that is local they will put in the location into a search as well, for example ‘Tampa SEO’. This is good news for small businesses serving a local area, the amount of competition locally should be relatively small and while big national and multinational businesses go after the obvious general keywords to make sure they dominate results businesses in Tampa can use basic SEO campaigns to make sure they are coming up on Google for people looking for businesses locally.

If you are serving a wider area or selling nationally or internationally with your small business though this still doesn’t mean as a business in Tampa, SEO is no use to you. There are thousands of potential search terms for most businesses, in some cases more if you sell a wide range of different products and services. Most people use perhaps 5% of the keywords and those are the keywords for which there is a huge amount of competition. There are still though many keywords that get a few searches every day, if you have a site with dozens or even hundreds of different keywords on this adds up to as much traffic as a couple of highly competitive keywords but you can get to the top of Google much quicker and start getting traffic straight away.

For many businesses in Tampa SEO has been a let down because they didn’t research the right keywords or keywords that they could get traffic for fast. Also though other elements are important including building links and creating plenty of fresh unique content to go on to a website; some of this work is best done by a SEO company but by creating some content and building some links in your downtime the cost of SEO can be kept right down for your business.

1. Choosing the keywords you assume are right for you
Be it SEO or PPC the keywords you need to get in traffic aren’t always that obvious, they aren’t always even going to be the most searched for. A lot of the time though you will find that people choose the keywords that seem obvious for their site and this has two problems. Firstly the obvious keywords are the same ones that your competitors will use meaning a lot of competition, secondly people don’t always use obvious keywords: sometimes they only vaguely know what they are looking for they may search based on the problem they have rather than the solution you offer for example.

2. Assuming that the design of your website is unimportant

For many people SEO is an afterthought and therefore they already have a website in place so just try to apply SEO techniques around it. One problem is often that their existing websites aren’t easy to update and add content to, see point 3. The biggest problem though is that without on page optimization search engine robots will be unable to read the website properly and therefore won’t list it in results, or they may find problems with the site suggesting the site is poor quality or hasn’t considered accessibility, for example alt image tags for the blind. All of these and other on page optimization techniques improve rankings and mean that other SEO work is wasted.

3. Not using Content marketing techniques

Content is more and more important to SEO, it has always been important but now good quality content is more important than it has ever been. Google like to see sites that are live and therefore they keep an eye on how often your site is updated, once a week should be your minimum. Google of course also look for keywords in articles but are getting better and better at judging the quality of articles; Google are very good at spotting duplicate articles too and ignoring them. This has all been the case for some time but only recently have Google been looking at how long people actually spend on pages and using this information to rank sites in their results. Video is a great type of content as it keeps people on the page for longer but well written interesting articles that are relevant to the keywords that are being used can also, by keeping people on the page, and hopefully on your site, improve search engine rankings.

4. Building only low quality, irrelevant links

Search Engines don’t judge all links coming to your site in the same way. For a start there are bad neighborhoods, links from which can actually harm your rankings but will usually just be ignored. Then of course there is the Google Pagerank of a webpage, the higher the better of course but the number of links going from a page is also important so a link from aPpagerank 4 directory page that links to 40 sites is not as valuable as a Pagerank 2 link from a blog with no other external links in the page.
Google and other search engines consider relevancy as well so where possible build links from pages on related sites and if possible put some of your keywords into the description and anchor text of the link to your site, if you have control.