Archive for Rank On Page #1
SEO is a “Bug”?
Posted by: | CommentsDes: It ‘a bug that you can get high rankings in Google without buying advertising, and Google is trying to fix this bug.
“The EES is not good for users” and “It ‘a bug that you can get high rankings in Google without buying advertising, and Google is trying to fix this bug” is 2 sentences spoken by a Google employee , and going against what Google has said up to now. What emerges from these sentences, is that this new employee seems to know very well how things work in Google. 
The person in question is that Jonathan Rockway. It ‘a new Googler – or Noogler – as they are called the new employees. He started work at Google in early January. We do not know what his duties, but does not seem to be related to web search.
The SEO is not a good thing?
This has not prevented Rockway from commenting on SEO and our ads in a discussion on Hacker News , here is an excerpt of what he said:
“If the social characteristics are relevant, then users will gain a better user experience. And this is a good thing, even if the individual pages receive less traffic from Google. Instead of doing SEO on the entire Internet, companies can now influence the search results for a small percentage of users. This is a good thing because SEO is not able to climb, and SEO is not good for users or the Internet generally. “
The SEO is not good for users? As might be expected, this phrase has quickly attracted the attention of the SEO community, by Aaron Wall at Barry Schwartz .
Google says that SEO is not spam
The official position of Google is that SEO is not a bad thing. The company said it several times over the years. And a few months ago, Matt Cutts did a whole video to explain that the SEO is not spam :
Danny Sullivan, Google has confirmed that this video “accurately portrays our position” about SEO.
The advertisements can position yourself well?
Perhaps even more disturbing is what it says about Rockway ads:
“If you look at the experience of using Google’s point of view of the customer, it’s pretty good. Users from their searches, obtain relevant results and advertisements. Advertisers put their content on top of everything else. It ‘a good compromise between usability and advertising, and it works really well. It’ a bug that you can get high rankings in Google without buying advertising, and Google is trying to fix this bug. Manipulate Google’s results should not be something that you feel entitled to do. If you want to position yourself well in Google, be relevant to users. Entertain them with a report on social or via email, provide them with useful information about your products / services and, in general, seeks to “reach out” to their wishes.“
The bolded phrase would suggest that Google is working to make sure that if you want to get high rankings on the engine, is to buy advertising.
There seems to be a reasonable thing, and probably does not know what it’s about Rockway (also seen in the guidelines that Google is clearly written that “participation in an advertising program does not affect either positively or negatively on the inclusion or ranking in the pages of Google’s search results “).
Advertisements do not matter
3 days after the first comment, Rockaway has made a 180 degree turn:
“I should not have to mention the commercials. The position on the results page should depend only on the quality of content, if your site has the best content on the Internet for the words searched by the user, should be among the results above. You should be able to change your position in the organic results in other ways, for example by exploiting bugs in the algorithm of Google ranking. The specifics of this algorithm may change, but if your site is the best, you have nothing to worry about. “
Once again, the EES is seen as a sort of “exploit”.
For the record, the official position of this mess by Google – communicated to Danny Sullivan – was as follows:
“As always, the placement in Google is completely independent from advertising and other partnership, there is no way to pay for a webmaster to get a better ranking.
When it comes to SEO, who owns a site of high quality can be found positioned well in Google without any outside help. Some still prefer to optimize their sites, and these people have published guidelines on how to evaluate a SEO company. “
Finally, I agree with Matt Cutts when he says that it is nice to see more Googlers who communicate. But I would prefer that the Googlers who communicate, at least know what they’re talking about.
Images By: Hugo A. Quintero G. – CC BY 2.0
SEO Methodologies Requiring Immediate Intervention
Posted by: | CommentsIf you would like your company or website to get and keep a higher Google page rank in search engines like Google, you have to become familiar with a couple of methods that will help you accomplish exactly that. Bear in mind that learning search engine optimization is vital if you wish to possess an edge against your competitors against other sites or companies that provide exactly the same kind of services or content while you. 
The greater your internet search engine Google page rank is, the greater chances you’ve of having greater volumes of traffic to visit your internet page or website. Greater volumes of traffic can result in a greater quantity of possible clients, converting to greater profit. Here are a handful of SEO methods that you could really learn and implement to have the ability to get and keep your high Google page rank.
The very first factor that you ought to most likely do is find the best and reliable website hosting company, one that will assign to each domain a completely independent and different Internet Protocol, to make sure that your host avoid any issues with the hosting service and steer clear of getting knocked from the internet search engine database once it has been evaluate and listed in spiders throughout time it was lower.
Keyword Nomenclature
This is among the more prevalent, but nevertheless important, Search engine optimization methods that you ought to learn to be able to make full use of the results of search engine optimization for the site. Make certain that you simply pick the key phrases that’ll be used throughout your site’s content, in the title towards the body of texts there. It is crucial that you set these key phrases that you would like found inside your title or tags.
It’s not blatantly necessary to place these in each and every page inside your site; only on individuals’ pages which are relevant compared to that keyword. So let us say the keyword that you simply made the decision to make use of may be the word mobile phone, make certain that you simply link it for your site’s content which has its concentrate on cell phones to ensure that whenever you direct visitors to your website by using their keyword, they will see your site’s content about cell phones.
Create Links
Creating links will even help direct visitors to your website, therefore enhancing your odds of getting good possible clients for the business. However, connecting with other sites isn’t always enough to encourage them to go to your site. You skill would be to really make certain that you’re making use of your selected key phrases within the backlinks that can help indicate this content situated in your site. In by doing this, if individuals are searching for a specific content, they’ll be forwarded to your website underneath the right content relating towards the keyword that they’re searching for.
More Pages, More Overall Chances
The greater pages you have produced inside your site, the greater chances you’ve of having your internet content discovered because of your possible clients. It is going to follow along with more pages provides you with more chance to improve your keyword density, combinations, etc.
One of the ways that you could keep the page volume up is as simple as simply creating new content each week, offering another perspective, otherwise new, on the particular subject or keyword you have in your other pages. This helps improve your odds of making content with a relevance as to the customers are searching for once they chose to talk to your site while using keyword link.
Quality Content Is Obvious
Getting lots of pages might help improve the likelihood of growing the quantity of traffic forwarded to your website, however, in case your site cannot offer quality and relevant content as to the type thirsty customers are searching for, then your customers only will click to the internet search engine after landing in your site, an action which could have negative effects in your Google page rank. If performing international SEO, your content should have translation to different languages, one service such as Technovate Translations could handle with ease, affordability and expediency.
If that was the situation, then your search engines like Google will be aware of the, and can see these starved customers didn’t find anything relevant inside your content for his or her search.
Some of the Majors Benefits of Link Building
Posted by: | CommentsIn this era when internet marketing to a great extent is dependent on SEO or Search Engine Optimization, mastering the tricks is a necessity for every professional related to it. There are quite a few crucial tools that work behind the effective functioning of SEO, one of them being link building. The benefits of link building is not just confined to SEO alone, instead paves the way for several benefits that give an edge to the online profits you are looking for. However, poor quality links will not serve your purpose and therefore quality must always be ensured.
Listed below are some of the chief advantages of link building:
- Quality links expand search engine rankings – Generating fine quality links is a key strategy for extracting the best results out of SEO. You should be familiar with the fact that the inbound links have an important role to play in determining the rank of the pages your website has. Also be careful to keep in mind that online research influences about almost ninety percent of the offline purchases made and since search engines form the center of online commerce, it is important for you to keep the quality of the links under constant check.
- Generate traffic to the website – Having made sure that you have managed to get links from good quality sites, generating traffic to your region will definitely be easier for you. This is how one can bring a good amount of visitors to his site. Link building helps in the formation of the channel between the visitor and the site, thereby bringing direct traffic to the website. The aim behind generating links from a quality site is to sustain the interest of the visitor.
- Draws in excessive quality links – It is true that getting links for a new site is quite a difficult task to establish and therefore needs you to toil hard. However, once you are through it, the results will reflect the effort you put in. Having achieved the goal, you will be able to gather a significant amount of quality links even without approaching for them. You will automatically be able to see that a lot of people are showing interest in writing or commenting about your products and trying to establish a link with your site. This is the wonder that this particular mechanism does to your website.
- Causes increasing return with time – Acquiring good links for your site is just like an investment that will go on reaping success with the passage of time. These links continue to exist in place thereby giving you profitable return over time. A major benefit of employing this tool is that the links gathered over the years will go on influencing the rankings, ensuring that traffic generation does not cease.
- Strengthens Your Networking – As you start exchanging links, it leads to a network through which you learn how to connect better with people who give you links. The moment someone is investing time in linking to you, it would mean that you have achieved a value for them.
Image: John Morgan – CC BY 2.0
4 Natural Link Building Techniques
Posted by: | CommentsLink building can be a difficult task in this day and age. There are many different techniques and strategies being utilized to acquire links however not all of them are safe and some can be harmful to your site. In this article we will discuss 4 tried and proven natural link building techniques.
Guest Blogging
An excellent strategy to generate natural links to your site is by guest blog posting or “guest blogging”. This natural method of acquiring links will almost immediately gain traction for your site in the search engine rankings. The process of guest blogging requires well-written, unique and engaging content or articles. Then posting these articles in an open forum where webmasters all over the World bid to acquire your content. Utilizing guest blogging not only saves you money but also generates high quality natural links which in return will help bolster your search engine rankings and drive focused traffic to your site as well.
Social Media
Social media is another free and very efficient technique to obtain natural links to a given website. Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are the most popular social media outlets today. It is vital for companies to use these sites to create an all around online presence. To correctly utilize social media for link building, simply create a page for your company’s website on all the outlets and start generating original, unique and useful content such as articles, videos, etc… Stay active and engage with your followers, your content will do the rest. Social media can be a great boost to your sites traffic an rankings if used properly.
Web Directories
Web directory submissions are one of the oldest link building techniques still used today. There are different types of directories out there, some are free and some charge a fee but either way they serve as a great tool for acquiring natural links. A web directory is basically a listing of websites organized by different categories. These directories are used by end users to find services, products, etc… Once a site is submitted to a directory it will not only receive a link but also it may generate focused traffic to your website.
Press Releases
Press releases are another great way to build natural links. A press release can be about anything you want to promote. For instance a certain product, a sale or an upcoming event. It needs to be unique and engaging content that catches the end user’s attention. If your PR is written well enough webmasters will naturally link to you and share your content. Just like the directories this will not only earn your site links but also drive traffic and ready to spend customers to your site.
SEO Guide: The Use And Structure Of Robots.txt Files
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Many people who are just getting starting in the SEO world have a difficult time wrapping their head around what a Robots.txt file is, and what it does for a website. So what does a Robots.txt file do?
Robots.txt
Search engines often visit websites in order to do a crawl so that they can index the site. These robots are essentially trying to categorize and archive web sites. This is generally a good thing. However, there are on occasion certain parts of your website, or it entirely, that you do not want to be crawled. There are various reasons for this.
Examples Of Why You Wouldn’t Want A Crawl Performed
– Two versions of the same page you don’t want to get hit for duplicate content for.
– Information on-site that may be sensitive or private.
– A website or specific pages are under construction or being worked on and are not ready to be indexed.
– You are doing a site transfer, where there will be two exact versions of your site on the web.
– Demo Sites
– Admin Areas
How Robots.txt Files Work
You use the Robots.txt file to tell search engine robots exactly which pages you would like them to visit, and which ones to avoid. The location of the Robots.txt file is crucial if it is to work correctly. They are always found in the main directory, and if they are not in there, the robots will not find the file as the main directory is the only place they will look for them. As an example it would look like, http://YourSite.com/robots.txt.
There are also many types of crawlers to be aware of for each search engine and other sites, and using their correct name is critical if your Robots.txt file is to work appropriately. Here is a short list of some of the more commonly used ones to consider for Google.
– * (The sign for all crawlers, meaning any and all.)
– Googlebot (Google.com)
– Googlebot-Image (Google Image crawler)
– Googlebot-News (Google News Crawler)
– Googlebot-Video (Google Video Crawler)
– Googlebot-Mobile (Google Mobile Site Crawler)
– Adsbot-Google (Google Ads Crawler)
Structuring A Robots.txt File
The structuring a Robots.txt file is fairly easy and straightforward, however it must be done in a precise manner. In essence, the file is a list of user agents, the targeted disallowed files and directories. The user agents are search engine crawlers. The targeted disallows are the files and directories that are to be kept from being indexed. Another addition to this are comment lines which give a little extra information for future use, denoted by the # sign.
Example Of Proper Robots.txt Structuring
# To disallow the crawl of the /image directory
User-agent: *
Disallow: /temp/
Mistakes To Be Aware Of When Dealing With A Robots.txt File
The example above is relatively easy to understand, however there are often times much more complicated issues to deal with, such as allowing certain users agents access while disallowing others. The most common mistake to be on the look out for are typos and wrong directory names.
Example Of Potential Mistakes
User agent: Googlebot (Problem: Missing the – between User-agent: Googlebot)
User-agent Googlebot (Problem: Missing the : after User-agent)
Disallow: /tem/ (Problem: Missing the p in temp)
Disallow/temp (Problem: Missing the / after /temp/)
Examples For Using Robots.txt Correctly
What follows here are some good examplesof how to use Robots.txt files correctly.
All Robots Visit All Files
User-agent: *
Disallow:
All Robots Disallowed From Entire Site
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
All Robots Disallowed To Three Directories
User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /tmp/
Specific Robot Disallowed To Enter Site
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
Two Specific Robots Disallowed To Enter Two Different Directories
User-agent: Googlebot-Images
User-agent: Googlebot-Video
Disallow: /Images/
Disallow: /Video/
All Robots Disallowed To Enter A Specific File
User-agent: *
Disallow: /Directory/file.html
Allow A Single File To Be Allowed Within An Otherwise Disallowed Directory
User-agent: *
Allow: /File/
Disallow: /File/Phile.html
Hopefully this article will help to demystify the whole confusing nature of Robots.txt files. Remember, it’s quite simple to use, but it’s also quite simple to mistype. Meanwhile, the only way you’ll know you’ve messed up is if you notice your disallowed files have been crawled and indexed. At which point it’s a little late, though you can disallow for the next run. But the version that was crawled would be cached and saved. So be sure you watch what you type, and have fun making the Internet work but more importantly… Stay frosty folks!
SEO To Benefit Humans, Not Just Robots
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Whenever SEO is mentioned, most of us will immediately think of how we can optimise our websites and offsite content so that search engine robots are able to index it easier and see it as being more powerful. However, although it is important to improve the way in which the spiders view your site, it is just as important to optimise it for human beings too.
With Google changing its algorithm in order to give more weight to content that is shared via social media, it is now more important than ever to make sure your writing is shared and viewed as much as possible. The only way to do that is to make it more accessible and enjoyable for people to read.
With our somewhat stylish SEO hats on, it is hard to think of SEO being of benefit for human beings but it is; and the good news is that it is nowhere near as technical as trying to please those pesky spiders.
Here are a few ways you can optimise what you’ve written and improve your chances of gaining social shares. So whether you are writing for an agency that carries out SEO in Bristol or you are a website owner wanting to improve your business’s online presence, these tips should be of help.
Picture Perfect – One great way of making your content more engaging is to include a picture or a video within it. Not only does a picture break up the page, it also makes the reader use a different part of their brain and will give them something different to look at other than just words. I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of opening a page and seeing that it’s just filled with words. And what do we do when this happens? Immediately press the back button in all likelihood.
Experiments have proved that a page containing a picture is 4.1 times more likely to be read and this is increased to 7 times when a video is included. Interestingly, you can also control where a reader focuses their attention by using pictures. A picture of someone facing the left hand side of the page has been shown to focus the reader’s attention on any writing written there and the same with the right hand side.
Pictures and videos can also be a great way to include another keyword in your content. By including a keyword in the image’s title or description you can optimise your article further without it being seen as keyword stuffing. I would advise only one use of a keyword per image though.
Think About The Layout – In the same way that pictures can break up the writing, having lots of shorter paragraphs as opposed to a few long ones can also do this.
Research has shown that we tend to read things too fast and understand them less if they are written in large chunks. Therefore, in order for your content to be understood and enjoyed, you should break it up into manageable sections and use subheadings to define these clearer.
These subheadings will help people find exactly what they are looking for within your piece and will mean that they don’t have to trawl through all of it if they don’t want to.
Be Unique – One of the best ways to get your articles seen by the masses is to make then as unique as you can and make sure the writing is really engaging. As a writer, you are taught that everything has already been done, but that doesn’t mean that your take on a piece can’t be unique.
Find something that hasn’t been done to death and put your own slant on it but most of all, make it entertaining. The serotonin that runs through our bodies is what drives us to seek out pleasurable experiences and so most people who are looking for things to read online will want to be entertained or informed.
Many of us will have had the experience of reading something online and following link after link until you find yourself reading a piece on a subject totally removed from where you started. This is the serotonin at work, so aim to make it so your article helps to fuel people stuck in this loop.
Put The Share Buttons In The End Zone – A vast amount of websites now come fully equipped with buttons that link to every social media site under the sun in the hope that you will share the piece with all your friends via these platforms. However, having these buttons at the top of the page is like the waiter asking for payment before you’ve eaten the meal.
It is much better to place these icons at the bottom of the page so that when a reader finishes the article, the links are naturally in the right place to take advantage of someone liking what they have just read.
SEO Zen: Focusing On Small Wins
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If you’re not a subscriber of the popular productivity blog ZenHabits.net I highly recommend it. Many of the productivity principles the author talks about relate perfectly to SEO. One of those principles is the principle of small wins.
Far too often we focus too much of our efforts on major objectives and major initiatives when it comes to search engine optimization. As a result we find ourselves “spinning our wheels” making very little progress in our SEO campaigns and causing more stress on ourselves at the same time.
Examples of Small Wins i.e What Is a Small Win in SEO?
By focusing on small wins instead, you can accomplish things each day that will help you move your SEO campaign’s progress forward. Before you know after a few weeks or so you’re “small wins” have added up to be huge successes for your campaign. Here are a few examples of an SEO Small Win to get your brain “stewing”:
– A Page Title change on one of your most important pages
– A Meta Description change on one of your most important changes
– Syncing Google Webmaster Tools data with Google Analytics
– 1 new guest post from a popular blog in your industry
– Adding a Video XML sitemap
– Adding Authorship Markup so that your avatar shows in search results
– Adding your site to the Yahoo! web directory
– Adding your site to the BOTW directory
– Cleaning up your 404 not found errors
– Adding a Caching plugin to your WordPress blog to increase page load speed
– Adding open graph data to your template or site theme
– Verify your site with Bing Webmaster Tools
– Add a Pinterest button to the images in your blog posts to increase your “pin” activity
And many many more. Notice that all of these are individual, small wins that can potentially have a huge impact on your traffic and rankings. But also notice that these are achievements that take a relatively small amount of time and effort… giving you more time to study and plan new SEO strategies.
Focus on 3 Small Wins Per Day
Now the question is… how many small wins should you be achieving each day. Limiting yourself to 3 small wins each day will help you in the following areas:
– By limiting yourself to just 3 you force yourself to prioritize your tasks in the most efficient way.
– You don’t over-burden yourself with tasks which helps you stay focused and achieve more over longer, consistent periods of time.
– By achieving a smaller amount of tasks you give yourself better ability to track the progress of your work through Web Analytics and other data sources.
– Because your day is not filled with dozens of meaningless tasks… you give yourself the chance to truly FOCUS on what it is you are working on which makes you more efficient and more creative.
Really just 3? Yes just 3!
I challenge you to try this method of SEO productivity. You will find more succces while working less. And who doesn’t want to work less right?
The Holy Grail: A Search Engine Optimized Website
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Coined the ‘holy grail’ of internet marketing, fully search engine optimised websites are every web owner’s dream. But in reality a fully search engine optimised site is extremely hard to achieve. You not only have to know what you are doing in the search engine optimisation (SEO) arena but you also have to keep abreast of search engine changes and developments. In this article we take a look at what SEO is, the importance of keywords and link building as well as the need for all websites to have a website audit done.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimisation and is the process of getting your website found for certain keywords which are used by people when looking for something online. SEO encompasses a number of different elements including determining the keywords which are searched for and most suited to your website, producing copy which includes the keywords in a balanced way, tagging your site with appropriate words and generating relevant inbound links. It is typically an on-going process which is never completed and the ‘rules’ in which you should right copy and optimise your site are constantly changing as the leading search engines such as Google and Yahoo change their algorithms.
Using the Right Keywords
One of the main factors in the constant struggle to get your website optimised and highly ranked by the search engines is to determine the right keywords to use. For example if you are an online shop selling jewellery, you might initially think that ‘jewellery’ would be a suitable keyword to use.
However in reality all jewellery websites will be using this keyword so the term is highly competitive, making it hard to get ranked highly. You therefore need to be very specific about which keywords you go after for search engine rankings and these might include ‘sterling silver jewellery’ or ‘9 carat gold necklaces’. Long tail keywords are less competitive and can lead to high rankings and high conversion rates such as ’18 inch sterling silver snake chain’ for example. There are a number of online tools which can be used to undertake keyword research, some of which are free to use.
The Need for a Website Audit
The next step in trying to achieve a fully optimised website is to have a full website audit undertaken. This looks at your website from both a search engine and a visitor point of view and makes recommendations for elements that might be lacking from the site, ultimately hindering your SEO performance. Website audits are best done by professionals who understand the complexities of SEO and how visitors actually use websites.
The Importance of Link Building
Another important element in the quest for a search engine optimised site is a range of relevant inbound links. These are typically links from other websites which share similar keywords to you and direct traffic to your site. Although this might seem like a simple process, obtaining relevant inbound links is extremely difficult to do. The links need to be free and not paid for in most cases and must be on a website with a high Google page rank themselves. Link building is an extremely time-consuming process but greatly benefits your website’s search engine performance if done right.
Although SEO can be done by web owners, due to the on-going nature of SEO and the changing ‘rules’ it is something which is best done by professionals who specialise in SEO.
Life after Google Penguin: Do we really need SEO now?
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When the internet was still new, ranking in the first search engines wasn’t difficult at all; cyberspace wasn’t very big. Now, the World Wide Web is bigger than most people can imagine. Net craft, an English company that tracks internet market share, found over 460 million websites at the end of 2011–and right now, while you’re reading this article, worldwidewebsize.com is showing 50 BILLION web pages listed on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Since there are over 7 billion people in the entire world, that is a lot of content– a little over seven pages of content for every person alive, right now.
Where is My Website?
Well, unless you have a lot of traffic, quality content and back links from other websites, it’s probably buried somewhere on the back pages of Google where no one will find it by searching. Most people never look at the search results past the first page or two on Google, or the other search engines; that’s why getting to page one is so important. The latest Penguin update caused massive ranking shifts for millions of websites, especially websites that didn’t offer quality content, used “keyword stuffing” or relied on low quality traffic to get visitors. This actually helped the website owners who build good websites, but it changed what a “good website” is, according to Google.
Ranking in the New Google
SEO is more important than ever, but it has to be the “right” kind! The search engines are looking for a lot more than a plug in affiliate page. The websites that get attention have a lot of quality content, consistent organic and exact keywords (but no more than 1.8% overall), quality back links and “real” traffic. Search engines don’t count all the 10-second visits from a traffic exchange the same way they count people who specifically click on your link somewhere–and the traffic they really want to see comes from ordinary searches.
They also track how much people move around on your site, and how long they stay. Having an optimized site allows Google to find you, but unless your content is also interesting, being found doesn’t mean you will get ranked Google finds your site by keywords, but those keywords have to be part of some well written content for them to do you any good. Optimization is more than your keywords; everything about your site needs to be optimized to get the ranking you want in the search engines.
Believe it or not, Penguin is a Good Thing!
Once you understand how Penguin works, it’s easy to see how you can make it work for you and your website. Just as a quick example, open up a Google search window, and begin typing in anything you like. Google will present a list of options if you have your browser set for “auto complete”, and those options let you know exactly what real people have searched for, in real time. If you typed in “where is my website”, for instance, it gave you a list of options to search–and all those searches are the best traffic, the “organic” kind. Just using the drop down box to choose keywords for SEO can really make a difference.
Now, more than ever, we need SEO, and Google provides the tools you need to get it right–because if they help you rank, they make money. Taking the time to get friendly with Penguin and Google and optimizing with the free tools they give you will pay off in time–and once you achieve top ranking the right way, you’ll probably stay on top.
If It Wasn’t For Those Meddling Robots
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Honestly, just when you think it’s safe to sit back and relax and leave your online marketing efforts on auto, those infernal robots over at Google go and move the goal posts once again. The fledgling online marketing world and the fledgling online world – it is only just out of short trousers after all – are now facing yet another set of updates, designed to keep them up all night; and not in a good way. Google’s latest set of updates (likely to be five hundred this year) are all about ‘quality’, or so they say. So, how do you survive this latest outbreak of “Panda-monium?”
Humans Take Over the World
There are plenty of online marketers and business people who still aren’t convinced that quality content matters; this isn’t really their fault, it’s kind of Google’s. Early on in the days of the Internet people discovered that you could dazzle those infant robots with words. The scatter-gun approach worked excellently for a while, with the robots thinking that these random words had some kind of relevance. They did, I guess, if you were a robot; just not if you were a human (which seven billion of us still are). So, in a gear shift (one of many) Google and the Gang got a bit more sophisticated; this spawned the linking industry, in which three billion writers set about creating rubbishy content on a massive scale that linked back to your site. For a while the robots were fooled, though human users remained sceptical.
Crazy Geeks
So, here we are bang up to date in 2012; now Google demand relevant, original content, that ‘adds value’ to its readers’ lives; not asking much there then. There’s something of a rumour that the Search Engine giant is even using real people (no way, those crazy geeks!) to check content, having worked out that robots are great, but they’re no literary critics. Plus, sadly, they’re just no match when it comes to making decisions on content! Many of us could have mentioned this fact twenty years ago but no, they’ve had to learn for themselves, as so many of us do.
Made by Humans, for Humans
So, is it back to the past for Internet marketing? Possibly; humans = creative; robots = functional. The two, as yet, don’t mix. While Google’s’ robots are incredibly sophisticated, the real problem is that they aren’t the ‘end users’ of the search ‘product’. There are industries in which robots fulfil a buying and selling role, the financial markets being a good (well, maybe not that good) example. However, the end user in the search market remains defiantly human; as the Internet develops into the “Internet of things” this may well change (although I fear that we’ll all have to get over the early days when our fridges sneakily order cheesy pornographic material) but for now creating content for marketing purposes contains one simple truth; quality sells. Whether you’re producing your own, or outsourcing your content production, it’s a truth that’s worth bearing in mind for the foreseeable.
Survival Tactics
According to Google’s own guidelines, there’s a simple answer to this; however you’re marketing and wherever you’re posting you’re content it needs to be quality, add value and offer useful information. It shouldn’t be difficult to achieve, but judging by some of the content still around on the Internet it must be an almost Herculean task for some businesses. The simplest solution is to hire a pro to produce your content, if you’re not able to do so (or don’t have the time to do so) yourself. Ultimately it’s no big news that climbing the ranks of the search engines is no use to your business, if the human users can’t understand a word of your content.
