10 Elements of a Perfectly Optimized Page

One area that search engines have made a number of significant advancements in recent years is in how they evaluate content on a website. So what does a perfectly optimized page look like in 2012? Let’s look at 10 elements.

1. Title tags are still important, but it’s not a good idea to over-optimize them.

2. Descriptions still don’t appear to add much ranking value, but can help encourage clicks.

3. Header tags still need to be relevant.

4. URL still ideally mentions the keywords.

5. Content is now about semantically relevant supporting keywords, not multiple mentions of the keywords. The example chosen is a recipe, because in order to make béarnaise sauce there are specific ingredients that are 100 percent relevant to the eventual outcome. One way of checking what keywords Google might consider as relevant is to do a ‘~keyword’ (or tilde) search. Other ways, let’s be honest, involve nothing more than common sense and knowing your subject.

6. Video and other ‘rich’ content can be useful on a page to increase engagement levels, reduce bounce rates and also to appear alongside results as illustrated.

7. Internal links need to follow the "reasonable surfer" patent. It makes sense in the "perfectly optimized page" example above to link to peppercorn sauce as an alternative to béarnaise.

8. Facebook/Twitter/other login comments are a way of sharing the content on other platforms. The direct SEO benefit may be debatable, but it never hurts to get your content in front of a large amount of people. With Google Search Plus Your World, it could be that adding a Google+ login is more important than anything else.

9. User reviews add regular content to the page, which can also be coded to include microformatting instructions and add extra elements to your listings in search engine result pages (SERPs).

10. Newsfeeds only share content that already exists elsewhere, but they contribute to an overall impression of the page changing on a regular basis.

It’s worth noting that the “perfectly optimized page” above won’t be perfect for all verticals, or for all brands – not everyone has the ability to add customer reviews to their product pages (e.g., insurance comparison sites).

Although there's no one-size-fits-all solution, hopefully the above list will give you some guidance on how to perfect your on-page SEO.

5 Things Bloggers Should Not Do In The First Month Of Blogging

As a new blogger we are excited about making money online or setting up business that we forget a lot of important things that is required. Here are 5 Things Bloggers Should Not Do during the first month of blogging at least.

Bloggers Should Not Expect Overnight Results

After just weeks into blogging, you find many bloggers quitting their blogs. One of the main reason being the determination and the lack of understanding of how the system works. Its important for you as a new blogger not to expect over night results. Bloggers are frustrated and vexed that their blog is not making any money at all and there are hardly 10 to 20 visitors daily. This is normal, the thing you need to understand is that it takes time for people to know of your blog and your blog to have some authority in the blogosphere. Google knowing bloggers quit often, only send traffic to blogs or websites that are over 3 months older.

Bloggers Should Not Not Ignore Your Readers

Another important aspect that you as a blogger should not ignore is your reader. Often bloggers are found ignoring comments and arguments in the comments section, neglecting to respond to emails and more. This results in very bad brand reputation and those readers would never visit your blog again. Remember to answer your readers comments and respond to emails on time or at least acknowledge them on time.

Bloggers Should Not Scrape Content Off Another Blog

This is been increasing off late, that blogger who are new and not finding ideas to write decide to copy and paste entire posts from other blogs. This is a very bad idea, and you can get banned from Google, or if the content is copyright, then you might even receive a notice from the copyright owner. Research for ideas and write your own content. With tools like copyscape its becoming much easier to find duplicate content on the web.

Bloggers Should Not Feel Lazy To Write Regularly

This is one of the most important aspect to why a blogger or a blog never sees the light of success. Bloggers become lazy to write regularly and lack in consistency. This results in blog being randomly updated with no specific focus. What if your blog was a newspaper delivering content to people all over the world, do you think it would be good to stop writing and stop providing information?

Bloggers Should Not Ignore SEO

SEO one of the most important aspect of any blog or website after content creation. Its not only important to write for your reader, but its also important that you do everything that you can so that search engines can read your content and rank them well. By taking the required SEO efforts you improve the chance of driving visitor from search engines like Google and sure to see the light of success.

All About Anchor Text - Whiteboard Friday

Welcome to our first Whiteboard Friday of the new year. It's 2012 and we're going to kick it off by examining the intricacies that revolve around anchor text. Although, this may seem like a very basic topic, we are going to cover some lesser known aspects of anchor text that is sure to satisfy even our more advanced SEOs. Enjoy and don't forget to leave your comments below!

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Happy New Year. This is the first Whiteboard Friday of 2012, and today we're talking about anchor text, which could seem like a basic topic. But, in fact, there are a lot of intricacies that we should cover. Let's get right to them.

What I have drawn here is a web page, and it says, "I just found this great website on Portuguese cooks. You should check it out." Now, this, this text in blue with the underline, that links somewhere, and that link points to another page. Let's say it's a page over here, a very nice page on Portuguese cooks. It has some pictures on it. I don't know what it's got.

What it's saying to the engines is not only eye this page and this website, I'm voting for this other page over here, and I want to pass over some PageRank and link juice. I want to pass over trust. I want to pass over the domain diversity, whatever the signals, the keyword agnostics signals are, but I also want to say that I particularly like this web page about Portuguese cooks. That's what I think you, search engine, should interpret and take away from it.

Of course, this anchor text with the keyword embedded in it becomes a very strong signal to search engines, and as we all know, this is one of the strongest signals that Google and Bing interpret, Bing maybe even stronger than Google. Because of this, lots of people go down a path of trying to acquire links that say the precise keyword that they want.

Of course, this is a challenge because most natural links on the Web don't generally do this. They will say things like your brand name. They might say something about your site. They might use your personal name, if they're linking to a blog or something. But it's rare, it's uncommon that they might say "Audi 87 engine parts for sale" or "best deals on holiday gifts." These types of anchor texts, the things that people search for, longer phrases, in particular, are very hard to get as natural links, and this is one of the biggest reasons that gray and black hat SEO exist because manipulating the search engines by acquiring lots of links that have these keyword matches pointing to your page can, in fact, do a great job of ranking you up, at least temporarily until the engines catch up and do something bad to you or to the people linking to you.

What I want to cover is some intricacies around this, some details that you may or may not know about anchor text, and those include: Number one, multiple anchors from the same page "do not" provide more value. What I mean by this is if this page said I just found this great website on Portuguese cooks, you should check it out and a bunch of other text, and then it said Portuguese cooks again and linked over to this page, not helpful. It does not add additional value. There is no reason that you should be going, "Oh man, I wish I could get four anchor text match links from this web page." No, that's not going to help you.

Multiple web pages will help you, but if they're from the same domain, that's not nearly as valuable as if they're from different domains. That leads us to the next thing, diversity of anchor text, diversity of the source. The root domain source of the anchor text links provides the strongest benefit, meaning if you can get lots and lots of websites, not just individual web pages but different unique web domains, linking to you saying "Portuguese cooks," chances are good this web page will do very well.

Number three, the fluctuating anchor text. This is something that people talk about all the time. They don't just talk about diversity of the link location across different domains, but they talk about diversity of anchor text itself, meaning, "Oh, I should have one that says Portuguese cooks and one that says Portuguese cooking and one that says cooks from Portugal. I'm going to vary up the anchor text a lot."

I'm a little skeptical about this, not because it's not potentially useful, and it should be a natural thing if you're going out and doing white hat types of link building and inbound marketing. But because the primary reason I think most SEOs do this is so as to not trigger pattern matching problems in the engines, meaning if every website that's linking to me says Portuguese cooks, that's suspicious, highly suspicious. That suspiciousness is the feature that people are trying to prevent.

So, I'm not so sure whether this fluctuation is all that important unless you're doing manipulative types of link building, in which case SEOmoz is not all that helpful for you. So, you're probably not watching this video.

Number four, the first anchor text in the HTML of a page is what Google counts, Bing as well. This was discovered on SEOmoz a couple of years ago. We ran some tests about it. We published the results. There was a lot of skepticism. I think Debra Mastaler from Alliance-Link wrote about it and said, "Hey, Matt Cutts, would you please confirm this?" And he did. He came out and said, "Yeah, that's how we interpret it".

So, basically, here's what's going on. If you see a web page and it says this website is awesome, it features highlights of great Portuguese cooks, now look, these two links are both pointing to the same page. I don't know why my handwriting is so terrible in 2012. I hope that repairs itself soon. That means not that the website is going to get credit for the anchor text website and the anchor text Portuguese cooks, but rather they are going to consider the anchor text website and ignore Portuguese cooks.

It's very frustrating, and something that you should think about when you're doing internal linking and you say, "Oh, yeah, we should optimize this link." If it's already in your menu, if it's already at the top of the page somewhere in a side bar and that's higher up in the HTML code, then that is what the engine is going to count. So, do be aware of that and same goes for anything that you're earning externally. If you've got the optimized anchor text for your website in the footer of the blog post where it talks about the author, Rand Fishkin is the CEO of SEOmoz, an SEO tools company, but I've already link to SEOmoz's home page somewhere in the blog post above, that "SEO tools company," that's not going to help anything. That's going to be discounted by the engines.

Number five, internal anchor text, meaning anchor text that comes from your own site, your own pages, it does help. It helps a tiny bit. You can see a little bit of benefit from that. I wouldn't focus on it too much because tiny is a small amount. That's probably the most obvious statement I've ever made on Whiteboard Friday. But nevertheless, tiny, small amount, therefore don't focus too much energy on this. Link naturally, internally. Link in such a way that people think your site is good, and, yeah, if you can work in your anchor text, great.

External anchor text is where it really helps, meaning websites that are not your own linking to you. That's where you really get value from anchor text, and you do need to worry about this a little bit. There should be some manual efforts, some efforts, whether that's guest posting and blogging, whether that's sponsoring an event, whether that's getting your biography featured or something like that, getting a badge embedded somewhere or a graphic embedded somewhere that links back to you in a certain way, you do need that anchor text link match. So, working on at least a little of that external anchor text is definitely worthwhile.

Number six, if a link uses an image, like this, so check out this awesome site on Portuguese cooks, and then here's a little screen shot of the Portuguese cooks website, and this is linking over. I tried to illustrate that in blue. This does not have any anchor text. It's an image. So what could the anchor text possibly be?

The answer is they use the Alt attribute. The engines use the Alt attribute that becomes the anchor text usually, not always. If there is no Alt attribute, sometimes they'll use something like the surrounding text, and you can sort of see and feel that association. Sometimes, they'll use page titles. Sometimes, they won't use anything, but they'll have weaker signals from those other areas of the page, that kind of thing.

If you are embedding images and you're linking back to yourself or you're getting links from somewhere or you're linking out to someone, you want to help them out, use good Alt attributes that describe the page that you're linking to. This is a great best practice just in general for screen readers and usability reasons. It's also good for search engines.

Then finally, number seven, no surprise, surrounding text can matter as well. Just as in this example where we said, "Hey, Portuguese cooks is mentioned right before the image," the engines may be using surrounding text of an anchor, particularly where the anchor itself doesn't have much value or context.

If something says, "Click here, you'll find some great information about Portuguese cooks," the engines might sort of glance around the page and look at the sentence, parse the paragraph, try and understand, "Hey, what do you think they're talking about here? What seems relevant?" This is one of the reasons why you can see that people who have earned not necessarily great anchor text can rank very well for keywords because it's often talked about. That topic is talked about when their website is talked about, and it becomes a brand association thing. It becomes a contextual association thing. This is a helpful thing to think about if you are earning links and you can't control the anchor text. Maybe, at least, you can get them to mention what you do somewhere near the link.

All right, everyone. I hope this edition of Whiteboard Friday has been helpful. I look forward to discussing more details about anchor text in the comments and hope to see you again all next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

How Google+ Uses SEO to Steal Search from Facebook and Twitter

  Google's Superior SEO Strategy

Notice anything odd about your Google+ profile? Does it rank incredibly well in Google’s search results for your own name?
Colleagues note that their G+ profile now outranks other online identities that they’ve worked for years on. My own Google+ profile, just 5 months old, ranks #2 for my name. It now ranks higher than both my Twitter and Facebook profiles, even though I use those services far more often.
Profiles aren’t the only thing ranking. Individual Google+ posts frequently appear in search results as well.

Ranking for people’s names is one of the Holy Grails of search, like Amazon ranking for every book in print. With 7 billion people in the world, ranking on the first page for even a small portion of these is lucrative territory.
As search and social focus more on the individual, the war over names has begun.
How has Google won so much real estate on their own search pages in such a short period of time? Do they cheat? No, not really - more on this later. Google wins by employing really smart Search Engine Optimization techniques – the same SEO practices available to any online business.
For Facebook especially, this is a sensitive issue. Facebook actively prevents Google from crawling most of its content, allowing big G to access “Fan” pages, but limiting information from regular profiles. Now that Google+ has entered the social game, this policy puts Facebook results at risk of dropping in rankings and losing search real estate.
I often work with websites and startups wanting to build SEO features into their platform. If I were to build a social media service for SEO domination from scratch, I would build it exactly like Google+.
Here's the takeaway: Use SEO to your competitive advantage, no matter your niche.

1. Incentivize Inbound Links

Not long ago, Google started displaying author photos in its search results. In order to display a photo, Google asks authors to add links from their webpages to their Google+ profile. This creates potentially millions of high quality links from the world’s most influential online publishers, all pointing to multiple Google+ profiles.

Twitter and Facebook both benefit from similar links, but never before has a social media service offered such an incentive.
Google's SEO Tactic: Require Authors to Link to their Google+ Profile

2. Internal Linking

One thing noted about Google+ when it was released was just how easy it was to be in lots of circles, or add lots of people to your own. People who struggled on Twitter for years to build up 1000 followers, suddenly found themselves in 2000 or 3000 Google+ circles, seemingly overnight.

Google’s strategy to connect everyone on the planet also makes for good internal linking. Following more than 1000 people may not create a practical social experience, but it creates a great SEO opportunity. The more your content is shared in other people’s streams and profiles, then the more your content is crawled, indexed, and deemed important by search engines.
Google's SEO Tactic: Encourage Large Circles Counts

3. Lots of Indexable Content

My public Google+ profile contains a wealth of information, all visible to search engines, including:

• Biographical Information
• Full Text of Public Posts
• Photos
• Links to people who have added me to their circles
• Everything I have ever +1’d

Compare that to my Twitter account – limited to 160 characters of biographical information, or my Facebook profile, which reads like an auto-generated pamphlet.
Consider how a search engine sees these pages. Take a look at the source code of any Google+ profile or use a tool SEO-browser (a search robot simulator) to see how many words appear on each profile.

• Facebook – 275 Words

• Twitter – 491 Words

• Google+ – 2621 Words

Google structures content to provide a wealth of information for search engines, to index and serve in search results.
Google's SEO Tactic: Search Engine Friendly Profiles

4. On-Page Optimization

Google+ makes it easy to share posts from others – a feature much like retweeting on Twitter or reblogging on Tumblr. These Google+ posts frequently show up in search results as their own entries.
As the title tag is one of the most important aspects of on-page optimization, Google wisely choose longer, more descriptive title tags. Compare these to the shorter title tags offered by Facebook and Twitter, which often run no longer than three unique words.
Here’s the title tag to 3 different posts, all by Rand Fishkin. Each of these posts is indexed by Google.

• Facebook – Yesterday, I…
• Twitter – Twitter / @randfish: Running test of Google+’s …
• Google+ – Rand Fishkin – Google+ – Shocking how many of the folks featured in this post form…

Which do you think ranks better for a query with “Rand Fishkin” in the search?

Google's SEO Tactic: Descriptive Title Tags

5. User Generated Content

Every post I’ve ever written on Google+ has been public. As a result, every post has been crawled and indexed by Google search. The privacy settings on the profiles are simple, intuitive and encourage openness.
The big green button screams, “Pick me! Pick me!”

Most Twitter posts are public by default, although unless a tweet becomes famous the 140 character limit prevents most tweets from reaching the definition of “rich” content. Facebook, in contrast, only shares posts from fan pages with Google, and not posts from regular profiles.
Google's SEO Tactic: Encourage Public Sharing

6. Show Google+ Author Profiles in Search Results

The first 5 items on this list represent SEO tactics that anyone can use, but in a way #6 belongs to Google alone. By linking to Google+ profiles in search results, they create an advantage that no other social media service can duplicate.
Is Google “cheating” by favoring it’s own property? Some say yes, but on the other hand, is there a more relevant result? To me, it makes more sense to connect my author profile with the website that actually hosts the content, such as my profile on SEOmoz.

This demonstrates the power of rich snippets. Since Google introduced author photos in search results, webmasters have scrambled to get their mug included – the idea being that rich snippets of all kinds increase click-through rates. The question is, are we increasing the CTR of our own website, or Google+?
Google's SEO Tactic: Creative Rich Snippets

What Can You Do?

Except for #6 above, most of these techniques are available to any online business. Google has found a way to create large amounts of search engine friendly content, and do it at scale.
The lack of diversity this creates in Google's search results is troubling to some. Google risks turning into McGoogle, where every result and every page looks the same. With any luck, more companies will adopt strong SEO strategies to raise themselves in search.
Now that the adoption of Google+ has hit 62 million users and growing, expect to see far more Google+ in your search results soon.

Google Panda Update: Say Goodbye to Low-Quality Link Building

A while back, I wrote about how to get the best high volume links. Fast forward eight months and Google has made two major changes to its algorithm -- first to target spammy/scraper sites, followed by the larger Panda update that targeted "low quality" sites. Plus, Google penalized JCPenney, Forbes, and Overstock.com for "shady" linking practices.

What's it all mean for link builders? Well, it's time we say goodbye to low quality link building altogether.

'But The Competitors Are Doing It' Isn't an Excuse

This may be tough for some link builders to digest, especially if you're coming from a research standpoint and you see that competitors for a particular keyword are dominating because of their thousands upon thousands of pure spam links.

But here are two things you must consider about finding low quality, high volume links in your analysis:

1. Maybe it isn't the links that got the competitor where they are today. Maybe they are a big enough brand with a good enough reputation to be where they are for that particular keyword.
2. If the above doesn't apply, then maybe it's just a matter of time before Google cracks down even further, giving no weight to those spammy backlinks.

Because, let's face it. You don't want to be the SEO company behind the next Overstock or JCPenney link building gone wrong story!

How to Determine a Valuable Backlink Opportunity

How can you determine whether a site you're trying to gain a link from is valuable? Here are some "warning" signs as to what Google may have or eventually deem as a low-quality site.

• Lots of ads. If the site is covered with five blocks of AdSense, Kontera text links, or other advertising chunks, you might want to steer away from them.
• Lack of quality content. If you can get your article approved immediately, chances are this isn't the right article network for your needs. If the article network is approving spun or poorly written content, it will be hard for the algorithm to see your "diamond in the rough." Of course, when a site like Suite101.com, which has one hell of an editorial process, gets dinged, then extreme moderation may not necessarily be a sign of a safe site either (in their case, ads were the more likely issue).
• Lots of content, low traffic. A blog with a Google PageRank of 6 probably looks like a great place to spam a comment. But if that blog doesn't have good authority in terms of traffic and social sharing, then it may be put on the list of sites to be de-valued in the future. PageRank didn't save some of the sites in the Panda update, considering there are several sites with PageRank 7 and above (including a PR 9).
• Lack of moderation. Kind of goes with the above, except in this case I mean blog comments and directories. If you see a ton of spammy links on a page, you don't want yours to go next to it. Unless you consider it a spammy link, and then more power to you to join the rest of them.

What Should You Be Doing

Where should you focus your energy? Content, of course!

Nine in 10 organizations use blogs, whitepapers, webinars, infographics, and other high quality content to leverage for link building and to attract natural, organic links. Not only can use your content to build links, but you can use it to build leads as well by proving the business knows their stuff when it comes to their industry.

Have You Changed Your Link Building Strategy?

With the recent news, penalties, and algorithm changes, have you begun to change your link building strategies? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

Biggest Search Events of 2011 & Predictions for 2012

Everybody's been talking about search in 2011, but what were the events that helped to shape the search landscape of the year?

We ran a poll on SEOptimise in order to find out. While the biggest search impact of 2011 might not come as much of a surprise, some other events were notable by their absence.

Out of eight possibilities, one ranked as the clear leader, with twice the votes of its nearest rival at the last count. So, without further ado, let’s look back at the most notable search events of 2011.

The Google Panda Update

Google's Panda algorithm change was all about improving the quality of search results.

This has caused lots of problems for SEOs and webmasters, with many sites suffering from huge drops in rankings and subsequent traffic as a result. There’s also been no real quick fix to this and for some sites it’s been such a long way back that they’ve had to change their whole business model in order to react!

SSL Search

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) search allows Google users to encrypt their search queries. Google made this the "default experience" for signed-in users on Google.com in October and, as a consequence, stopped passing query data to analytics software including Google Analytics.

Users began to see "(not provided)" appearing in their Google Analytics data, indicating that the search had been encrypted and the keyword data was therefore not available.

Google have stated that overall this will be a single-digit percentage of keywords that is classed as “(not provided)” – however, from an SEO agency perspective, if you’ve set client targets for increases in non-branded search and are no longer accurately able to measure a full picture of where visits are coming from, they will be some difficulties here. As witnesses by the reaction to this change from the search industry!

Social Signals & Integration

With Twitter and Facebook now well established, LinkedIn covering the business angle, and Google+ still emerging on to the social stage, social signals and integration are impacting our search experience.

Both Facebook and Twitter are now widely integrated into websites, giving companies a 'face' and an easy way to deal with customer feedback, both positive and negative.

LinkedIn perhaps has less of an impact on websites' search rankings, although its highly search-visible profiles offer an easy way for professionals to appear in queries relating to their own name or work experience.

But it's Google+ that holds the potential to change search drastically, providing it can gain enough traction to build a dedicated and regular user base.

The +1 button is already appearing on blogs and websites across the web, and on browser toolbars too, putting search rankings directly in the hands of Google's users for the first time.

Siri

Siri is unarguably impressive. Responding to natural, conversational questions with relevant search results, the voice-activated search function on Apple's iPhone 4S ignited a media furore when it launched.

Yahoo Site Explorer

Yahoo retired its Site Explorer service in November as part of its partnership with Bing, advising its users to head over to Bing Webmaster Tools instead. Site Explorer actually predated Google Webmaster Tools by about a year, and had become a point of reference for many web marketers.

Yahoo Site Explorer had allowed a glimpse into the performance of competitors' sites, and left a genuine gulf among free online services in those terms.

Google Freshness Algorithm Update

Google's Freshness update affected over a third of search results - roughly 35 percent - and is part of the real-time search trend.

It ensures that search queries relating to time-sensitive events, such as the Olympics, are more likely to yield results about recent or upcoming events than about those held a long time ago.

Between 6 and 10 percent of Google search users were expected to notice a change, with other types of content like news and reviews similarly impacted.

Microsoft-Yahoo Search Alliance

The Microsoft-Yahoo Search Alliance gave Microsoft direct access to some of Yahoo's search technologies as part of a 10-year licensing deal. Ostensibly, the alliance was part of an aim to deliver faster, more relevant results to users of both Yahoo search and Bing, with collaboration in other areas like paid search, too.

However, Google remains dominant, and the combo a distant second. And it seems, unlike with Google, web marketers were able to handle the transition smoothly enough that it had no negative effect on their search performance.

Predictions for 2012

So what might we see in the year ahead? Briefly, here’s what I expect:

Plenty More Privacy/Analytics Headaches

The rollout of SSL search from Google has only just started, with an increase in the number of queries affected widely anticipated. However, if the ICO don’t back down on the cookie directive law, this could only just be the start!

If you can only track users who opt in to allowing cookies this will have an extremely significant impact on how we measure website performance via analytics. So this is definitely the big one to look out for in 2012.

Shifting Facebook Demographics

I expect that this will be the year that teenagers leave Facebook in droves. The kind of growth this platform has seen can’t continue – and young people will be the first out of the door. Not only do they currently have to see their parents’ status updates, their parents can see theirs. No teen wants that.

Marketers are going to have to make a real effort to remain on top of this changing market and make sure they know where the teenagers go.

Unification of SEO and PR… With HR

SEO and PR have gradually become more integrated. Expect this trend to continue in 2012. What could be even more interesting will be larger companies using their employees to aid their marketing.

From Twitter, to Facebook, to YouTube – businesses will increasingly ask their employees to get involved in their online promotion. This could blur the boundaries between professional and social profiles, so firms will need to set out ground rules before using their workforce this way.

Tablets Taking Over

For so long the focus has been on mobile, but companies can’t risk missing the latest boat. Tablets are rapidly becoming the norm; eMarketer is predicting there will be 90 million tablet users by 2014.

This could help unify TV and online marketing. Research agency Sparkler found that 51 percent of all tablet use occurs while the owner is watching TV. It’s a downtime device and so in 2012 businesses need to ensure their marketing strategies take advantage of this.

Google Announces Panda Updates Will Resume “Next Year”

Google announced via Twitter that Panda Updates have ceased for 2011 and will resume after the New Year.  Perhaps this is an early Holiday gift to webmasters that need to cultivate content and links on their existing webpages.  The last update came in November and all have been considered “minor” updates, each time affecting less than 1 percent of all searches.  It’s important to understand, however, that with over 12 billion searches each month that is still 100,000 effects.
Google first released Panda in February and has released six updates since.  These have all been considered minor updates, although the search engine also noted that there are updates to their search algorithms “almost daily”.  Now, with the writing on the wall, webmasters have a 1 month warningthat the next update should be effective sometime in January, 2012.

These are my top 3 areas to pay attention to:

Keyword Density:  Google has a strict policy when it comes to keyword density ratios thanks to websites that lack quality content and simply publish a bunch of words trying to inflate their rankings.  Make sure the keyword density ratio is between 5–8 percent or Google may catch the page in their next update.  Read over the content and make changes (if necessary) to lower the density ratio if it falls above 8 percent.
Relevancy of Keywords:  In addition to density, pay close attention to the relevancy of the keywords and keyword phrases.  Reputable sites including PW Newswire and Forbes have been affected because they rank for keywords that are often abused by unscrupulous websites.  Some simple ways of determining this is to keep an eye on the domain authority score and try searching for those specific keywords, carefully observing the type of sites that also rank for them.  This will shed light on to the authority of the chosen keywords and keyword phrases.
Fix broken links:  Sites known as “link farms” have abused the right to post relevant links on their webpages in abuse of the search algorithm.  If there is content on the page and are broken links (pointing to URLs that no longer exist), seek to fix or remove them.  While not intending on falsely satisfying the search algorithm, Google may think that is what is happening.
Operating a website and performing regular maintenance are necessary to ensure the page ranks well on Google.  This is a clear advantage of hiring an SEO company.  With Google’s “1-month warning”, webmasters have some time to perform some maintenance to ensure they are providing authoritative content that returns value to the end-user.