First we had the Panda update which Google described as an update to address freshness among other items. Many websites were impacted negatively but those who follow white hat SEO practices really didn’t see any changes. Now the Penguin update has been rolled out and in an attempt to address over optimization among other things, Google is looking at websites that follow the “perfect” formula to gain rankings. Those steps to “perfection” would include buying a keyword rich domain, over-stuffing your copy with keywords and gaining links for a limited number of keywords. Or over-saturating your link building efforts by concentrating on one or two keywords only as well as getting those links on known spam blog networks, unrelated blogs or just having keywords placed on sites with no relevance to yours.

So if you’ve participated in these schemes and have seen your site drop in traffic from Google organic results, than you need to re-think your strategy. We can help! Contact us for an SEO evaluation of your website today.

So Google+ has been available to everyone for awhile now and I thought I would take a look at our clients and the impact having a Google+ presence is having on their rankings.

As we know Google has been upfront that a +1 (like) is a signal in their ranking algorithm. In their Webmaster Help files they state the following: “This is just one of many signals Google may use to determine a page’s relevance and ranking, and we’re constantly tweaking and improving our algorithm to improve overall search quality.” The theory is very simple, if one of your friends has +1′d a piece of content and you are searching for something relating to that content your trust in your friends opinion on that piece is of more value to you than from someone you don’t know or an “regular” search result. In essence you will more than likely click on a friends result and another and the more +1’s a piece of content has the more trust it has earned and as such should rank higher than a piece than has less +1’s.

What I have found is it is true. Google does reward content with more +1’s with higher rankings than those without. Our clients that have developed a Google+ profile and integrated those profiles into their websites have seen a 85% increase in rankings versus those who have not yet developed a Google+ profile. Further more these increases started to occur on average within the first two weeks of creating a profile and integrating it into their websites. The clients that then continued to build their Google+ circles and were active in Google+ have seen quicker crawl times and faster indexing than those who just created the profile and integrated it.

So does this mean the way to achieve top exposure for your keywords is to develop a Google+ profile and go crazy with it? Absolutely not, what I have failed to mention before this is we continued normal SEO activity for those clients which touches all kinds of social media. However it is not a stretch to say the addition of Google+ did have a positive impact on their visibility.

While Google+ is still a step child in the social media world, it does continue to grow slow and steady and appears to have long legs.

2011 had a number of changes come down the road, not like every year I’ve seen since 1998. The search industry is evolving on a daily basis. With that in mind here are a few things we might expect to see in 2012.

1. Continued privacy/tracking issues - With the rollout of SSL in Google (allowing those users logged into their Google account to encrypt their search queries) it would be reasonable to expect more movement to protect the surfer at the expense of those trying to track queries to their website.
2. Social integration - With Google+ clearly being used as a signal in Google results and the partnership between Facebook and Bing, 2012 will surely show more integration between social and search.
3. Mobile, Mobile, Mobile - We saw exponential growth in 2011 and would be shocked if we didn’t see the same in 2012.

I may not have gone out on a limb here but it’s my two cents for 2012, Happy New Year everyone!

I know I’ve landed on more than a handful in my years of surfing, those “fake” sites that use a brand name in the domain to lure you in and once there it’s obvious the product is not licensed product. Well it appears the fight to remove those domains and others associated with counterfeit products might have some legs to it. A recent ruling by District Judge Kent J. Dawson in favor of Chanel orders search engines to de-index a number of sites selling counterfeit Chanel product. While this ruling includes websites whose domain do not include any Chanel brand terms, it does address those that do.

Over the years I’ve had plenty of clients ask what can be done about people buying domain names that include their brand and until now there has been little recourse, maybe that is all changing.

Google’s latest algorithm update is called Fresh and from what we’ve seen it appears to be yet another tweak to reward websites that offer fresh content on a regular basis. If you are writing content on a regular basis you want to make sure your articles are included in Google News and that you are properly time stamping each article. Simple changes like those appear to have an impact with this new update.

So for all of the craziness going on in SEO forums, Twitter and such once again the basics of SEO matter, in this case create relevant content on a regular basis.

Local search is the rapidly, emerging focus of Google (Google Places), Bing (Bing Local) & Yahoo (Yahoo Local) search engine advertising today. This is due to the fast growth of mobile devices (pads & smart phones) and their use in business and consumer research and buying decisions. Use of mobile optimized web pages lead to improved user acceptance and increased consumer engagement.

Consider that:

• 73% of activity online is in one way or another “related to local content”.
  Source: Google 5/07/2011
• 54% of search users have substituted Internet/search for the phone book.
  Source: comScore Networks
• 50% of connections to the internet are from mobile phones.
  Source: comScore Networks
• A mobile browser was the #1 method for searching local information (20.7 million users a month) in Dec. 2010.

Source: comScore Networks

• 58% of mobile users expect mobile sites to load faster than a desktop site.
  Source: Google

Your opportunity to grab a top Local Listing ranking is now! As of July 2011:

• 84% of businesses have not claimed their local Google, Bing and Yahoo listing.
• 79% of online advertisers do not have a mobile optimized web site.

How can The Info Group help you participate in local mobile search advertising? The Info Group is proud to announce their new Local Business & Mobile Optimization Project, designed for business to get a local & mobile presence in a relative short time frame for an affordable cost. The Local Business & Mobile Optimization Project includes:

1. Local Listing Optimization Phase:
• We claim (if needed) and optimize your Google Places Listing.
• We claim (if needed) and optimize your Bing Local Listing.
• We claim (if needed) and optimize your Yahoo Local Listing.
• We create and submit a KML sitemap to Google.
• We submit your optimized business listing to 250 premium publishers including the major Online
• Yellow Pages, various Search Engines, industry directories and 411 directory assistance.

1. Mobile Site Phase:
• We build and geo-optimize a mobile version of your website (up to 5 pages).
• We add “sniffer” script to your current website to redirect to mobile if a device supports.
• We submit a mobile sitemap to Google.

Contact Us Today to begin your Local Business & Mobile Optimization Project!

Interesting post on the Google AdWords blog regarding their new +1 button. Take note of the reference to organic rankings being impacted by the number of +1’s a page has. This is another indication of how social media is impacting old school search and maybe Google’s answer to Facebook’s “like” button?

Lot’s of chatter about the negative impact many websites saw after the Google Mayday update was initiated but IMO it’s just that chatter. I looked at all of our clients websites traffic and number of indexed pages in Google from the previous year compared to this year and have not seen one shred of evidence Mayday had a negative impact. In fact if I had to make a case it would be easier to make one saying the impact was positive. I wonder if those complaining didn’t have their websites properly optimized and by properly I mean for long-tail keywords as well as short-tail. That is part of what Mayday was about, giving better visibility to websites that have optimized for long-tail keywords.

I have always approached optimization with an eye to long-tail keywords so when the Mayday update hit, I was not worried and I have been justified in my lack of concern. I do wonder how those companies that sell themselves as SEO experts but were hit hard by the update feel about their expert ability now. I actually read a post from one of the so called experts who blamed everyone else for his clients drop in visibility (no I won’t link to the post, don’t want to embarrass him) but suffice it to say he’s proved what kind of expert he is to me.

So you’ve setup a YouTube account, you are posting pictures to Flickr and have a Facebook account as well, Great!!! The question is are you optimizing your social media to be found?

What I mean by that is it’s great you are participating in social media but you need to optimize your social media accounts and content to increase your find-ability. How do you do that?

Here are a couple of tips for the three social outlets I mentioned earlier.

• YouTube, after you upload your video’s make sure you are use your keywords in your title, description and tags.
• Flickr - In your profile description use keywords to describe yourself/company and link to your website. Use keywords in your photo file names.
• Facebook - Make sure your business page is set to public. Link to your company website. Create a custom tab with keyword rich content. (Search for FBML if you don’t know how)

Finally every bit of content you create has a option to input meta data, make sure you’re doing that before you upload anywhere on the internet.

I don’t know if social media is the be all end all but it’s here and if you’re going to play, play smart.

Google rolled out personalized search to every user of their search engine and with that signaled the final days of top organic rankings being the metric to measure your SEO efforts with are clearly in view.

Say what? In a nutshell Google places a cookie on your machine and gathers your search history over time and then uses that information to show you what they think you are interested in. For example if you search for diamonds and click on every diamond ring dealer’s website and you do this several times over a period of time you will begin to see less results like Wikipedia (which doesn’t sell diamond rings) and more results for diamond ring merchants at the top of your results page when you continue to search for diamonds.

So what reason is there for SEO? Well, this doesn’t mean Google is giving up ranking sites it just means they want to deliver more relevant results to each user. With that said you will need to optimize your site for your products and services but you should look at traffic, visitor behaviors like time spent on site, etc to gauge the effectiveness of your SEO campaign.

Why wouldn’t I just do nothing but PPC? You should engage in pay per click but keep in mind some studies show 70% of search engine users don’t click on PPC results, so if you only engage in pay per click you are limiting your audience reach.

I have no doubt personalization will impact rankings, it’s a foregone conclusion but it shouldn’t impact your SEO efforts. We moved away from trying to sell rankings a couple of years ago and moved toward selling the impact of SEO, like targeted traffic, etc. So if you are hung up on where your site ranks, GET OVER IT, because where it ranks on your machine probably isn’t where it ranks on mine.