by Cheryl Tieken

Panda hit. And it punished. And if you were one of those who felt it’s wrath, your website may have dove deep into the rankings. Many SEOs took to the blogosphere protesting the bold move by Google. Many small websites suddenly lost their only way to get noticed… or so they thought.

Even at Jacob Tyler, we were a a bit stumped. But as I had mentioned before, Google needed to do something because search results were beyond polluted with spammy results.

If you’re new to the ever-changing world of SEO and the word Panda only revokes images of cute, fuzzy, black and white bears chomping on bamboo, then make sure to check out this blog post on the Panda update and then click back because you will want to read the following few paragraphs. If you are already clued in, keep reading…

Ok, here we are. The online world post Panda. Yes, the Panda update was undoubtedly frustrating if article marketing was your gig. But don’t get mad, get innovative. Get social. Get helpful. Get user-friendly.

I think it’s safe to say that pretty much everyone is aware that social media marketing is used by nearly 3/4 of businesses nowadays. Your local pet shop is on Facebook. Farmer’s Markets. Heck, even your dentist probably has a Twitter account. Well yeah, that’s great and all but what does this mean for SEO?

What’s happened is that major search engines like Google and Bing have taken note. In fact, they started to take note awhile ago. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team released a statement that Google does in fact take social signals into account for ranking. But this doesn’t just mean having a bunch of Twitter followers is going to get you better rankings on Google. They do take into account who these followers are, how reputable they are and how they behave on social networks. If you have fans and followers that are reputable, trustworthy, actual human beings as opposed to robots, and are active online, it will do you some good. In fact, SEO-wise, it will do you a lot of good.

SEO efforts post Panda should be focused nearly 90% on being actively social both on and offline. Google hit the content farms because it now longer trusted the authors. Google does trust the kind of word-of-mouth leveraging that social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and YouTube provide. So get involved, if you haven’t already. And do not merely create a Facebook page and let it sit there. Engage with the community online. Ask questions, talk to your fans, give them content and links that they might enjoy. Do not just blatantly advertise your business. Make your social profiles as beneficial to the user as possible.

While it has not being openly discussed by Google, there is quite a bit to go by to believe that Google ranks sites on how user friendly they are. If your site load time is slow, search engines and users won’t like the website. But even more, make sure that your links are not just going to other pages on your site, but also out to other sites as well. If you read a great article from the New York Times about shopping habits, and you are writing a blog post about it, link out to that article. It won’t affect your page rank – in fact it may help to improve it because Google likes that you are enhancing the user’s experience.

Think outside the box when it comes to helping better the user’s experience. Create a YouTube channel and post relevant videos. Then, link to and from your website.

Don’t forget about good ol’ PR. Join networks like HARO (Help A Reporter Out), to receive daily emails where you can send a pitch to a reporter on a story that may be related to your type of business. If they decide to use you. you get incredible exposure very quickly.

Invest in doing blogger outreach as often as possible. Look out into the blogosphere and find people who are talking about the same things you are talking about. Comment on their blog entries. And when you comment, make sure you don’t sound like a robot advertising your site. Ask questions, give feedback on the entry, give additional helpful info. Your goal should be to establish a healthy relationship with bloggers in your industry. You not only will stay in the loop about certain trends and topics, but you may also be asked to guest post on occasion, thus resulting in increased exposure.

There’s no need to feel lost from the Panda update. In fact, you should feel relieved. You can focus your time now on things that are more enjoyable. Things like conversing with followers in your industry, helping people, reaching out and connecting with others, bettering the web and bettering the user’s experience overall.

Long story short. The SEO world post Panda is social – both on and offline. Get talking. Start making relationships. And get going already…

By Cheryl Tieken

In a world where technological change happens faster than a speeding bullet, and where Matt Cutts and Mark Zuckerberg have nearly become household names, is it  really any surprise then when Google makes another change?

Google has recently been rolling out some adjustments to your search experience, adding real-time results and personalizing your search based on who’s in your network of friends. It’s a well-known fact that Google is constantly changing their search algorithms, so much so that it has made the job of SEO a constant uphill battle. In fact, Google would love it if we would all just stop trying to optimize our sites in general. But let’s talk about that another time.

Yesterday, Google instituted another change in our search experiences. We will now have the ability to block sites from appearing in our search results and mark them as spam. Here’s how it works:

You search for a term. You then get your list of results. When you click on any one of those results and determine you don’t like the page or website, whether that be because it isn’t relevant or it’s offensive or anything really – it’s up to your discretion – you can then click the browser’s back button, return to the Google results and a new option will pop up beneath that result, “Block all example.com results.” After that, Google will never show you results from that site again.

There is one caveat however, this preference to block a site is connected to your Google account, so you need to be signed in to do this.

The next time you search and a blocked page would have appeared in the results, you’ll see a message telling you results have been blocked. This will give you the option to manage your personal list of blocked sites.

For now, Google has assured that this new change will not affect their algorithms, however they have admitted that they will look at the data and see whether it may be useful as they continue to evaluate and improve their search results in the future. So, while right now this change won’t affect rankings, we should still keep our eyes and ears open to more changes possibly looming on the horizon.

READ THE FULL ANNOUNCEMENT FROM GOOGLE HERE

Yes, I do believe I saw this coming… What am I talking about, you ask? Google, who changes its search ranking algorithms all the time, has recently announced a pretty large change that will show some significant improvement in results. Unfortunately, for white-hat SEOs who use article marketing as a way to improve sites’ rankings, this means methods will need to change in the months ahead.

Last Thursday evening, Google officially announced the change, responding to criticism of its inability to provide relevant search results. As I mentioned a week or two ago, the results have recently been crowded with article sites and content farms, like EzineArticles.com, Squidoo.com and eHow.com. These sites originally were supposed to provide useful and original content, like how-to’s and other forms of information. But throughout their existence, SEOs and online marketers have used them as ways to build links. And they have done this by publishing advertisements and articles basically copied from other places. I made the proclamation in my prior blog post, that as SEOs we need to only publish quality, useful content otherwise we are just polluting the web. Well, Google seems to agree and is supposedly starting to lower results for those overly used article sites and content farms.

For us at Jacob Tyler, we are not worried. We know that with online marketing, changes are constantly happening and we need to roll with the punches and stay on top of the trends. In the past few months we have begun to adapt our methods of helping clients. We have broadened our aim of SEO to encompass other forms of online marketing. We have noticed the extreme importance of social media and online interaction and are now helping our clients stay active and successful in digital communities. We are broadening our online marketing tactics even further by adding tactics like email marketing and social review sites to generate demand for our clients.

As online marketing experts we embrace the changes ahead and are looking forward to finding new and even more innovative ways to help our clients get noticed and succeed.

Check out the NY Times article about Google’s recent algorithm update here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/26/technology/internet/26google.html