Here at Little Big Voice, we’re always trying to keep our ears to the ground and whenever Google has a major update, we like to make sure we let people know what’s going on.

So it was with great interest this week when we got word of new initiatives by Google to reward websites with good quality content and penalise those who think littering a page full of second rate content and/or sites selling links is going to be good for their SEO.

In short – the word on the street is web spam and ‘trickery’ is well and truly out!

So what’s the big deal this time?

Google has always supported good SEO because it wants to offer the very best content in the search results for end-users when they search the Internet.

To this end, what you want to be achieving to meet this aim is good quality content, ensuring that your keywords are the right ones while having a system to review this regularly.  After all, it’s no good having a website sweep once in a blue moon.  SEO is a bit like Google’s constant updates – designed to keep abreast of what’s going on and to ensure that the content available is relevant to the users looking for it.  And that’s how you should think about your own website.

So what’s our advice?

Well, for a start don’t rely on bland text with no purpose. For years unethical black hat SEO’s have used software to spin articles, basically the software rewrites the same article many times using various synonyms, the article more often than not becomes unreadable producing low quality content. These changes at Google would similarly apply to any badly written content whether written by a person or a computer programme. Likewise, selling outgoing links on your website will also render your website as web spam.  Try thinking about the end-user and what they need to know when they search for your business and try to be a bit creative!

Now a key part of Google’s update is the need to eradicate the ‘webspam’ we’ve mentioned.  What this means is an eradication of websites that use certain techniques to try and trick the system.   These sites try and trick the system by looking for loopholes in algorithms for example, to achieve a high ranking.  It’s a bit like taking the credit for building a house, only to find that when you look inside it’s not actually finished.  It just looks that way.

So tell me more about web spam?

A big part of this is keyword stuffing, selling links and second rate content – keyword stuffing is when someone somewhere has written lots of words and ‘stuffed’ their keywords in to those words.  The downside of this approach is that you either get content which makes no sense, or content which is just bland and has no actual relevance to the end-user when they search.  Ever seen an article about something only to find it’s full of irrelevant links to something seemingly unrelated?  That’s a form of web spam.

So what does Google hope to achieve with the latest set of changes?

As Google have stated on their own blog, they want to assist end-users in finding websites that provide the right content, fulfil the requirements of that user and therefore, provide the best experience.

A second part of this is that the dodgy tactics that have been adopted by people are eradicated, so that decent websites get ranked better.  If their content is good why shouldn’t they be rewarded by Google by being higher up the chain?

So have these changes happened?

Some have and some haven’t.  However, Google’s blog states that in the coming days they are making a significant algorithm change that is targeted specifically at web spam.  Therefore, you can expect to see bad websites lose rankings for violation of Google’s quality guidelines. In fact, Google estimates that at least 3% of English websites will be affected by the update – thats a colossal amount of websites!

They obviously don’t tell us everything, but the fact that they’ve said this is a key indication of their intention to improve web results in general.

Google have said that they want to see more ‘white hat’ SEO (if you want to see what that is see our previous blogs) and develop search results so that they offer decent content to users everywhere.

What can you do if you’re unsure?

If you need feedback on the content of your website, then you can always contact us and we will try and give you some general guidance.

But remember, we’ve been writing blogs for quite a while now and we know for a fact that we have posted articles advising you on quality content, so do look around our blog and pick up some quick and easy tips!

Paul

In a previous blog called “Why bother with SEO?” the importance of SEO for businesses online was discussed in detail to help you understand its inherent value. In a nutshell; once your website is SEO’d, then it will rank higher on Google and other search engines for the desired search terms for your business.

But how do you know if you’re going about this in the right way? 

It’s a good question to ask. Just because a person understands what SEO and Search Engine Marketing is, doesn’t mean they know the right process of implementing it correctly to achieve the best results possible. It’s very much like someone understanding the principle behind shoe laces and what they are supposed to do — tie together — but understanding in principle is useless if you don’t actually know how to tie the shoelaces yourself. All you are left with is a pair of non-wearable shoes.

So let’s get lacing. Here are my TOP TEN tips on how to utilise SEO and Search Engine Marketing to the fullest potential:

Keywords

• Research and define your keywords.
• Never use keywords that are blatantly general or singular such as “travel” or “shop.”
• Use research tools to compile lists of the most relevant keywords for your business.
• Teach yourself  competitive keywording – relevant phrases without too much competition.
• Consider the affects of plurals and synonyms when selecting your keywords.

Content

• Keyworded copy is important but just remember that your visitors/readers come first, the SEO a distant second. Don’t heavily keyword/keyphrase every sentence and kill the copy’s flow or composition or people won’t even bother to read it.
• Update your content regularly. Daily or weekly blogs are a great help for this. Search engines love fresh content. But understand that by default, they hate duplicate content in return. So no copy and pasting! Press releases and new product pages make a big difference in SEO too. Create as much content about your products or subject as you can.
• Link your content. This is such a crucial factor that is worth the investment of time. Build up quality links. Make your content good enough that other people will link back to it.
• Create unique title tags for each page of your site and keyword the tags.
• Use the correct Meta tags to describe your content so search engines are more likely to describe your site/pages the way you want.

Remember to avoid – designing your entire site in Adobe Flash. While it can look the bee’s knees aesthetically, search engines cannot read it and therefore it is less likely to get ranked or seen. This pretty much stops those shoe laces from ever getting tied up!

Once you adjust yourself and your business/site by learning the do’s and don’ts of SEO you’ll find that it’s ultimately about creating quality; a quality website populated by quality content that has an active online presence on the web.

Paul

There’s a big question on a lot of minds in the world wide web. Businesses are often pondering how they can improve their search engine rankings on their specific keywords.

The answer is not straightforward but there’s something you can do to SEO your website and move it higher up the rankings: develop a strong content strategy and get smart about the way you develop and produce content for your online home.

What defines a strong content strategy? 

A strong content strategy is one that defines your business keywords and looks at plotting out relevant content that fits with those words over several months. Content strategy doesn’t just fit within the confines of strong copy. A strong content strategy encompasses all aspects of online content. As Knol defines it, this includes “design, development, analysis, presentation, measurement, evaluation, production, management and governance.”

Communication is key in content

Content strategy at its most fundamental level is about communication. It’s how we communicate our brand messages to web visitors and out to the search engines across the web. Defining some simple steps along the road to a fully optimised website is the key to removing a lot of headaches in your business’ life.

Consider your audience. Who visits your website and who shops from it? Identify whether you have a strong male audience or strong female audience. Do they come from certain economic backgrounds? Are they more serious? Educated to higher education levels? If you have branding guidelines, you’ve likely got a tone of voice guideline that defines the way that you speak to your audience online.

Once you have identified your audience and crafted your tone of voice, you can then look at the current content crop of your website to see if all of your content fits in with those guidelines and has the same flow to it.

You also need to consider the messages you need to convey within your language in order to influence the behaviour of those visiting your site, particularly for e-commerce businesses. This messaging definition needs to include your call to action for your customers. What are the titles going to be on each page? Have they been optimised? What are your sub-titles? Think about answers to each of these and then consider the messages that precede your call to action, which has to lead nicely into the CTA in order for the reader to have a clear flow to purchasing. Each of these needs to be considered from a content, quality and search perspective every time.

Little Big Voice has years of experience in guiding businesses and brands to success in the realms of SEO, search engine marketing and intelligent content for their online presence.

Paul

In our first blog, we announced the news that Google had made forty changes to the way in which it ranks websites and in this blog, we want to highlight one of the significant changes that could affect you and your website in the near future.

The core message here is for you to brace yourself over the coming weeks!

As we previously mentioned, the initial Panda update was a major challenge not only to us but many SEOs, but we thankfully managed to cope with it, finding the answer to what was a complicated puzzle, on behalf of our clients and all the websites that we provide Search Engine Optimisation for.  However, an SEO’s work is never done and we’re already looking at the content of the latest Google changes and what the impact will be across the web.

So what’s caught our eye?

About two months ago we noticed something going on with linking, based on our many years experience and let’s just say, we had a feeling that Google was up to something – and low and behold on their list of forty changes, links takes some prominence and has certainly caught our eye.

As Google have stated,

“We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page.”

What this is saying is that link evaluation is high on Google’s agenda and that they have changed the way in which links are going to be used when indexing pages.

They have also said that they are switching off the method of link analysis that they have used for a number of years, which means there will be some uncertainty for a while as SEOs will want to figure out exactly what it is Google is now looking at.

This change from Google will affect SEOs everywhere, mostly because links are an essential part of Search Engine Optimisation for a website and having the links in the right place and going to the right page is obviously part of this practice.

Some things of course don’t change.   There is still a need for good content for example, which should always be considered for your website, but the linking strategies that have been used with considerable success for a number of years will need to be amended to reflect Google’s new approach to them.

It’s important to note that had Google said that links were not going to be used anymore as part of their ranking process, then many, many websites would have sunk without a trace, so it’s perhaps good news that this isn’t the case but it remains to be seen whether the linking situation will be a temporary thing or a permanent fixture.

A recent poll did look at where links are on a web page and whether the same keywords are being used in anchor text in an effort to gain insight but it is inconclusive at this point and only time will really tell us what the outcome of the new linking evaluation will be.

From our perspective, we feel that with lots of evaluation we’ll combat the issue with links, along with a number of the other changes, so patience is absolutely the key at the moment.

In the previous update we didn’t have a single client drop in rankings so we’re confident that we’ll be able to deal with Panda 3.3, despite there being no quick fix as it were and it will most likely take several weeks to find the answer.

So, if you’re wondering where the Google change to links will affect you, best advice is to be patient and ensure that you are working with a reputable SEO specialist that knows what they’re doing and who will have the answer you need to keep you ranked well on the major search engines.

Paul

In this series of three blogs, we thought we would share with you some significant news in the world of SEO that could affect you and your site moving forward in 2012.

So what’s it all about?

Well last week Google announced that it has made forty changes to the way in which it intends to index sites, to enable more accurate results for end-users on the web.  They released this information on their own blog to confirm updates and what is Panda 3.3.

This new announcement is obviously very important but, interestingly the original Panda update has created a lot of issues for sub-standard Search Engine Companies with some still struggling to understand its full impact and thus find a way to deal with it properly.

Most of the new changes were actually made in February and therefore have taken place already but there are a few more to come this month, so if you have a website and are looking at improving your search engine optimisation you should take note.

We took a look around the web ourselves to determine what impact the first Panda update had and the results were food for real thought in one poll.

Of a selection of professional SEO providers a staggering 87% of the websites they were responsible for are still suffering from the original update and even more unbelievable is that 10% of SEOs have actually lost their jobs.  Yes, it was that serious!

While these stats are not totally scientific (the poll was put before 250 SEO professionals) when you consider that this small snippet of representation from the industry resulted in 25 people losing their jobs it is actually quite significant, and demonstrates perfectly why companies who make promises to get you to page one of Google in a week really shouldn’t be trusted.

Essentially, Google doesn’t want it to be easy because it wants the quality at the top for its end users.

Now, not to put too fine a point on it, figuring out the first Panda update wasn’t easy, in fact it posed a lot of challenges, but as we usually advise our own clients when things change online, it’s important to be patient and not panic.

This is what we advised our clients to do when the first Panda update came and we’re pleased to say that with a lot of effort and hard work, our client websites still have a prominent place on Google, with many still attaining page one listings for tough keywords.

So, our advice with these latest updates is simple.  Be patient, don’t panic and sit tight.  If you’re seriously suffering with your website rankings because of the first update or indeed Google’s forty changes, ensure you look for a capable and professional SEO service that will not make foolish promises to you, but who will work really hard on your behalf to get you back to where you should be on the major search engines!

Paul

In SEO and Keywords – Part 1 we introduced the elements of Search Engine Marketing that are useful if you’re trying to define your keywords and work out where to go with your campaigns.

In this blog, we’re going to be looking a little bit more at keyword research and why you should consider your Search Engine Marketing activities as a series of building blocks that you will need to continue to cement over the coming months.  It’s a big area after all and there’s a lot to take in.

I’m a national business and want EVERYONE to find me

While we all want to get as much business as possible online, so does everyone else and you have to be realistic about what can be achieved.

Even with websites, businesses constantly ruin them by trying to put too much on a landing page, thinking that by putting out a thousand messages that somehow that’s going to make people buy.  This is not the case.  You have to really think about the end user who has a much more specific plan on what they’re looking for than you could ever hope to second guess.

Search Engine Marketing is no different so while a business may want to go national, there’s a benefit in keeping things smaller and building upon each success, in a kind of ‘ground work’ approach to results.

Getting ranked on easier keywords will have some impact on the more demanding and difficult keywords, so it’s all valid.

If you want quicker results, then localised keywords will be easier to achieve in terms of rankings.  However, never assume that’s the end of your work.  In fact, we’ve written blogs that are all about companies who charge you a fortune for what is actually a much easier exercise.

If you’re looking at national coverage and want the big keywords, then you will need a budget for it and simply won’t achieve this with little work.  It can be done, we’ve done it many times, but you have to be absolutely dedicated to getting it and have the insight to understand that it will take months of SEO work to get there.

However, getting ranked locally will at least give you some presence to start off with and will help moving forward, so consider advice from your Search Engine Marketing provider on how best to approach it.

Of course you don’t need to be too tiny.  There’s probably not much point getting ranked for ‘gifts for her Barnet’, but it may be worth looking at ‘gifts for her London’ because it has a much bigger catchment area and will make a difference to your traffic and sales.

More keywords will surely help

Obviously the more keywords you are ranked for will help you attract more visitors to your website, but if you’re doing this from day one, then it’s just not realistic.

To reiterate the business that feels putting everything on the front page is the right thing to do, Search Engine Marketing success is about being specific and focusing on defined keywords.

If you start an SEO campaign with two or three keywords and then suddenly forget about them, opting for something else all together, you’ve got yourself on to a treadmill with no end point.

Therefore, instead of chopping and changing define your keywords and stick to them!  That way as you gain better rankings you’ll be able to see the progress you’ve made.

In our earlier blog we likened Search Engine Marketing to spinning plates.  Imagine the early keywords are your first four plates and they’re now spinning nicely with no risk of falling for now.  You can then begin adding more plates.  Whereas if you try and get fifty plates started at the same time you’ll end up with a lot of broken crockery.

Great Expectations

Try not to dream about page one rankings as you’ll inevitably get very disappointed.  Instead think of it like the hare and the snail race.  The snail is slow but consistent while the hare goes off at 100 miles per hour.  We all know the moral of the story so try to think of that with your own SEO.

Treat your Search Engine Marketing as a long-term strategy and begin spinning those plates one at a time and you will get the benefits of a healthy, high ranking site that gets lots of visitors.

Paul

Content is a curious beast in search engine marketing. Since I set up Little Big Voice, people have consistently asked me for my advice on content and how to approach a strong content strategy to boost the search engine ranking positions of their websites. Content does require a strategy behind it or you will invariably saturate your site with content that isn’t relevant or intelligent.

In the early days of Google – even up until recently – the quality of the content didn’t matter to them. These days, the plates have shifted and Google now wants quality content over excesses of content. With a proper strategy behind it and an intelligent implementation of a plan, you can drive good traffic to your website with strong search referrals. Without that, your site is going to have a real struggle on its hands.

Even today, websites are churning out content for the sake of having it on their site. They write, they upload and they wait for the traffic to come streaming in without a single thought to writing quality articles relevant to their desired keywords. It’s no longer enough to saturate the site with content; the content has to serve a purpose and speak to both an audience of readers and the Google bots. A hundred pages of mediocrity pales against a handful of quality content pages that were written for a purpose.

Unique 

The Google search engine algorithm actively ‘punishes’ sites that have plagiarised or duplicate content. It does this by dropping the duplicated pages down in the search rankings far below the original content. Duplicated content creates a hostile environment for your site because it creates a negative picture for the search bots. As a result, you will find that all of your search engine marketing efforts will be undone very quickly. Search engines will see you as a spam site or worse. Developing unique content will lead to increased search referrals and drive traffic to your site if you sustain the content strategy intelligently.

Search engine marketing is a case of building up trust on two fronts. You have to build ‘trust’ with the search engines by providing strong content that adheres to the laws of GoogleBot, but you also have to prove your worth to your audience. Quality content will bring an audience back to your site for more information on relevant or associated subjects.

The online community is very sharp. If you’ve plagiarised content, particularly if you’ve done so from another competitor’s site, you will get found out. The online community has a sharp eye for things like this and they can spot it instantly if they’ve been reading about the specified topics in more than one place. Write targeted content that’s focused on matters of interest relevant to your site and keywords. Establish yourself as an authority on your keywords and subject matter and your audience will trust you for information above others.

Paul

This is another popular question for search engine marketers and Google-snipers to ask, but it should be met with a fairly resolute, “no.” Google updates its search engine algorithm almost daily in order to keep up with the fluid world of search engine marketing.

Black hats start to lose their shirts

As Google adapts its algorithm and implements changes to it, it’s getting harder for black hats to use their shady techniques to boost themselves up the rankings. The latest updates favour newer content to give fresher results. Doing this shows that good quality, organic content. The black hats who swear by out of date algorithms are going to see their traffic disappear like a Las Vegas magician.

Like the Panda update, these changes to the algorithm are actually quite significant. Panda sent a lot of businesses into a fright because it changed the game in a big way. Panda would downgrade the beastly content farm websites that have copied content or saturated their pages with useless, black-hat content. Some legitimate sites have also suffered losses in their ranking positions since the algorithm change

What the new algorithm looks for in websites:

• Fresher results that will affect 35 per cent of results: that’s huge compared to other updates to the algorithm. The new content added to sites will be higher in the rankings. This isn’t new necessarily, but it has been radically improved from the 17.5 per cent freshness of previous updates. Does this mean that they are improved by 35 per cent; that’s an important distinction to make in order to look at the  algorithm update objectively. It simply means that 35% of results are going to be affected by the most recent algorithm update.
• Official pages will now rank highly in the search engine rankings: all official brand or company pages, official blogs and sites will all be boosted in the Google rankings. This increases the effectiveness of all ‘official’ pages and should – in theory – cut down on some of the more underhanded search engine marketing techniques employed by various competitors within certain industries. This modification should render fake or dodgy pages irrelevant or certainly impact on their effectiveness in the search engine rankings.

People always feel like they are having the proverbial rug pulled from under them whenever Google does something to change the way it ranks pages. The reality is that search is like that; it’s a fluid process and it is always evolving in order to compensate for changes in the industry or changes in technologies. It’s an organic medium and one that should always be evolving in order to give a balanced approach to marketing via search engines and the rankings. As Google grows to decide what’s ‘important’ and what is deemed to be unimportant.

Paul

The war between Google and Bing has long been fought on bloody cyber-battles between the two search giants. Back in 2009, a comparative study between the two showed one very large difference between the two results. When on search pages, sponsored links to the right attracted attention, but the difference between the two was significant:

• 42 per cent viewed these on Bing
• 25 per cent viewed on Google
• 90 per cent of those monitored preferred to view the paid links over organic search results in both engines

The test was redone again in 2011 to give a fairer comparison of the two. Back when the original study was done, Bing was relatively new in the market and people participating in the study were not used to its features or interface. The most surprising aspect of the new study is how close the new results’ margins are. The battle it seems has come to a near-deadlock.

Paid versus organic search: who comes out on top? 

• 90% the study’s participants viewed the organic results at the top. All of the participants viewed the organic results. 

When it came to paid ads or sponsored links on the right, the results are very surprising:

• 28% viewed them on Google;
• 21% viewed them on Bing.

Participants/searchers now overlook the paid links

The question of paid versus organic is a long and oft-debated question in search engine marketing. The research conclusions of this study seem to answer the question in a definitive way. Organic is the winner. Most people would advise a combination of concerted paid and organic search engine marketing in order to achieve broadly successful results for your business, but it seems as though this thinking isn’t necessarily correct; nor is it something we should live and die by when using search engines to market a business or brand.

The differences between the two search giants

Well, really, there aren’t many differences. Certainly no huge differences. There’s a differential of roughly 0.2 seconds between those looking at the organic results on Google (0.9 seconds) and those looking at the organic results on Bing (0.7s). That doesn’t necessarily equal a conclusive win for Google. Far from it.

Matt Cutts of Google has made his feelings on Bing quite clear. He’s gone at them for lots of different things, namely the fact that it appears as though Bing copies its search results from Google entirely. Harry Shum of Bing would deny these vehemently, of course, as he has in this forty minute video on the Bing search engine. And there’s no denying the remarkable similarities in Bing versus Google search results. Typing gobbledygook into one gives you the exact same results in another. But in the end, it seems that those squabbles and politics don’t matter to the users. Users are using both relatively equally and the arguments are rendered moot. The battle between Google and Bing is at a standstill and organic search is rising up in its significance.

Paul

Cloaking is a growing problem for search engines. ‘Cloaking’ essentially cloaks a page of secondary content and presents a crawler or search engine spider like Googlebot with an entirely different page of content. It started out in the early days of the internet when black hat SEO’s would create two unique pages in order to mask more suspect content on one of the pages. This would fool the crawlers into thinking that there was a standard page while web users see another altogether.

Back in the early days of the internet, when Babelfish was the translator du jour and people built .gif heavy websites with obscene backgrounds on Angelfire, this cloaking method was used to disguise porn and other assorted dodgy content from the search engine spiders. To paraphrase Matt Cutts, ‘Google-Bot would see Disney characters and the user would see porn.’ All very underhanded really and Google sees this as a violation of its quality guidelines. No matter what.

Google’s Matt Cutts’ video on cloaking and Google.

This is a great video straight from the proverbial horse’s mouth. Cutts gives a clear explanation of the devious nature of cloaking. His videos are becoming enormously popular for web developers and search engine marketers. He’s helping to dispel a lot of the myths and hearsay of search engine marketing and the great thing is that he heads the Google web spam team. Really, there aren’t many sources with that level of credibility or access to information on exactly what Google looks for.

What to look out for:

In Google’s Webmaster Tools the ‘Fetch as Google Bot’ function is a good way of looking at your web pages as Googlebot would. Doing this gives you a clear picture of what the Bot would see and gives you the chance to measure whether your pages are safe within Google’s quality guidelines. If they aren’t, the pages need to be re-addressed or Google will treat these as problem pages. The web spam teams will then intervene to tackle the pages as a priority. This could potentially be harmful for your website and its SEO.

Multi-language 

There are options if you need to display different content for different languages or countries. One way to do this is to use geo-location. Geo-location allows you to identify users from other countries and alter the content to match the language spoken in the country based on their needs.

Search engine marketing can be a difficult game to play at times because there are so many dodgy measures out there. The industry is dominated by people employing underhanded measures in order to achieve search goals and cloaking is a real issue. If your web developer – or you – are using cloaking to mask content from the search engine spiders, it could seriously jeopardise your current standing in the search engine rankings. Google is getting better at identifying these and they are working hard to put a resolute and final end to these practices.

Don’t be like the Klingons. Cloaking is cowardly.

Paul