The days of black hat SEO are gone. And while SEO strategy certainly isn’t dead, the release of Google Panda, the Google algorithm that crowned quality as king, ensures that meta stuffing isn’t the best way to climb to the top of the SERPs. It appears that Google is moving steadily in this direction of rewarding high-quality sites with real content, rather than sites with keyword-heavy articles and tags. As SEO experts try to think of more and more ways to get any old site in the #1 spot, Google is creating more and more ways to make its crawler more intuitive so as not to be ‘tricked’ by those tactics.

How does Google define the quality of a webpage? 

 Who better to advise us on this subject than Google itself? The search engine’s staff has been making noise for some time now about websites that create a poor “user experience.” Those sites are usually advertisement-laden and provide little useful information to the visitor based on the key words they were searching for. And Google has tweaked its algorithm to penalize them. Characteristics of a strong webpage in Google’s eyes include: non-recycled content with relevant information, recently posted content and fewer advertisements located on the top half of a page.

Where does Content Marketing Fit in With SEO?

If you only update your site once a month, people don’t have any reason to visit it more often than that… Innovative content has the power to tell relatable stories and the fluidity to travel easily throughout the internet. It will naturally earn you link juice, keep visitors on your site for longer periods of time and help you brand your site, which will earn you higher rankings in the SERPs. Creating content with these characteristics will require a good deal of creativity.  

Here are some strategy tips for creating your content marketing plan:

• Figure out where you will promote your content – website, Facebook, Twitter, guest post on another blog?
• Research your competitors. Where are they posting, what keywords are they targeting, what type of content are they producing?
• Decide what type of content you will be creating. Try to use a mix of content that appeals to different types of viewers. An article can be enhanced with an informational video or chart/graphic explaining some concept in the content. Perhaps an editorial cartoon?

Strategies for Developing Content Ideas

The key here is creating something that people will want to share. That means posting lots of new content that your visitors will find intriguing. Here are some ideas to help you get your creative juices flowing:

• Create a how-to video for your product or service
• Film videos of your expert staff answering questions submitted by site visitors
• Analyze several recent pieces by well-known bloggers or experts and give your own commentary
• Create a poll on your site and then use the results as a hook for an article or blog
• Get an interview with an expert or popular blogger and post the it on your site Q & A style
• Attend a conference or webinar, summarize what you’ve learned and give your own opinions about the programming
• Download Feedreader (a search feed aggregator) and set up Google Alerts for pertinent keywords in your field to try to spark ideas

For small businesses, it is important to first do research to learn about the people you are marketing to in your community. Ask your customers about their interests and try to keep them satisfied by frequently posting new content to answer questions you think they might have or give analysis on topics they care about.     

Once you’ve created original content, consider it a prime SEO real estate and do your best to optimize it without interfering with the quality of the user’s experience.  Then you’ll have a powerful package of great content and SEO.

The Klik Blog is written by Klik Marketing founder and president Eric Fransen. Eric has been involved with the Internet Marketing industry since the late 1990’s.

The Page Layout Algorithm and Other 2012 Google Updates  

It’s only February, but Google is already hard at work making changes to its algorithm. By the end of 2012, Google is expected to make over 500 changes to the way its Googlebot crawls sites.

 The Page Layout Algorithm Update, announced in January, penalizes sites that place excessive amounts of advertisements on the top half of the web page. Google had received user complaints about content being buried under advertisement blocks. When users click a hyperlink they want to see relevant content, not a collage of ads that make it hard for them to find any content at all.

• If you have been affected by this Google algorithm change, you should minimize the percentage of your “above-the-fold” real estate roped off for advertisements. If you are using a WordPress template for your page layout, try switching to a layout that allows you to format advertisements in a side bar rather than a top bar. Note: After making changes, it could take several weeks or longer for you to see your site rise back up in the rankings. Your site’s size and architecture will affect how long it takes for Google to re-crawl the updated site.   

• If your site wasn’t top heavy in the first place, you probably saw no to little change in your rankings. In fact, Google said that only 1 in 100 searches would be affected.

With the introduction of a November 2011 algorithm, Google vowed to knock low-quality sites down the rankings ladder, while pushing high quality sites straight to the top. Dubbed Google Panda after Google engineer Naveneet Panda, the algorithm sent a strong message to web developers that sites must be first and foremost user-friendly.

So it should come as no surprise that Google would update its algorithm in a way that forces web site owners to scrub the top half of their viewers’ screens of unsightly and distracting advertisements. The algorithm rewards sites with most of the space above the fold dedicated to relevant content that includes the keywords for which the user is looking.

Several other 2012 tweaks to Google’s algorithm confirm the search engine’s focus on assuring its users are able to quickly locate the most recent, quality information.     

• The Freshness Algorithm released in November 2011 has also been updated since the start of the New Year. Google called the updates “minor” and said they are intended to turn the “freshest, most relevant results.” Google also said that it has improved the way it detects and determines the date of a document in hopes of producing, “more timely results, particularly for pages discussing recurring events.”
• Blending News and Search Results Google changed its algorithm to identify specific queries which should show news results and how to blend those news results with other search results so that they appear only when relevant.
• Rolling Panda Updates In January, Google said that it “improved how Panda interacts with our indexing and ranking systems, making it more integrated into our pipelines.”

Google’s New Year Resolution for 2012 is to “…focus on creating a beautifully simple, intuitive user experience across Google…” My advice to any small business owner is to create a website in which every single component is designed with the user in mind. Instead of trying to predict Google’s every algorithm shift, a more holistic approach is to make sure that your SEO doesn’t create a poor user experience.

The Klik Blog is written by Klik Marketing founder and president Eric Fransen. Eric has been involved with the Internet Marketing industry since the late 1990’s.

Advanced SEO and Social Integration by Roy Morejon and Brandon Uttley, Command Partners

Roy and Brandon are two of Charlotte’s top social media gurus. There presentation is on: There are a few ways to think about SEO and how it connects to other pieces of your marketing strategy. Increasingly, social media and SEO are becoming more closely aligned. A lot of the work we do in social get rewarded with more exposure for our businesses in the search engines. Even Google is making big efforts lately to focus on higher quality content and content that people react to in positive ways. How we rank in search engines can be an integral part of our inbound marketing system.

• Content Marketing is the backbone of all social media and search engine optimization today. 
• Social Sharing is Driving Growth
• We are in the midst of a massive shift online from search and intent to social sharing.

How do you compete with strong sites? A fresh burst of links may provide exceptional value. It will allow a page to overtake a high authority website for a short or even a long period of time. SEO is an amplifier and catalysts to social media and content marketing.

Where to Start?

• You need to make sure your website is suitable so that google can see your website properly.
• Google now has social analytics. Need to use the Beta Version of Google Analytics. You can see Social Engagement, Social Actions, Social Pages. For more information go to http://bit.ly/gasocial
• Google Profile Integration – Google allows you to see what “they see” in regards to content you are sharing. See google.com/s2/search/social.

What’s Working? Most Important Social Media Factors

• Trust Factors – Everything you do online should be done to increase the trust others have in you. 
• Google – Social Authority – An author’s authority on social networking sites is influencing traditional SEO. Social shows authority, not relevance.
• What are the Social Signals? How Google and others are quantifying social networking authority as a ranking factor within traditional search engine results pages. 
• Facebook Optimization - Fill out all page profile information completely. Because of Facebooks Social Graph all information on Facebook has the potential to be indexed. 
• Twitter - Tweeted links get discovered and indexed quickly.  Tweets from high-authority accounts get lots of RTs act as links (Google & Bing)
• Slideshare - Slideshare is great to use. Very good for long-tail keywords. Multiple opportunities for keyword placement. 

I’m going to start out this blog post with a bomb that will make a few of my clients shudder and start googling “True SEO Specialist”.  Now that I think about it, let me take care of that for you. Click http://tinyurl.com/3g9yw2e and then we can get started.

“Ranking in the search engines for your desired keyword phrases is NOT the end all, and shouldn’t be the focus of your search engine optimization strategy.”

Monitoring and knowing where you are ranked for certain keywords is nice, but shouldn’t be the focus. Here are a few reasons why and what we should be looking for:

Excellent Page Content - It doesn’t matter if you have top ranking for a keyword phrase and your content on the page doesn’t have good scent for the search. The content on the page needs to be not only relevant, but also engaging for the user. Your search rankings are “now” somewhat shaped by your website / page’s bounce rate. A few things that factor into your rankings in regards to website pages.

• Length and quality of content. The 200 word outsourced article is now dead. Is the content on the page authoritative? If not, you better start making some improvements or you will be penalized. Google wants to rank top-notch authoritative content towards the top of their search engine.
• Misspelled words are bad for multiple reasons. Google now will discount your site for poor spelling and grammar.
• If your website page special? Does it stand out? It should. Every webpage gets ranked on it’s own merit. So instead of focusing on only the home page start putting more time in to your internal pages as well.