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…

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

By Cheryl Tieken

Ok, so I don’t know about you but lately,  Google’s search results kind of piss me off. They’re hit or miss half the time and I can’t stand how daily search honestly reminds me of walking into a Nordstrom Rack. Sure, sometimes I’ll get lucky and find an awesome pair of shoes for next to nothing. Other times, its a ton of over-priced junk. And I know I’m not the only one facing this Google dilemma as there’s been quite a bit of chatter circling the web lately about Google’s deteriorating quality of results.

And Google, it’s not totally your fault. But it does seem that you are being tricked a lot more often as of late.

You see folks, the point of search engines has always been to provide the best and most relevant content to you. They do this by, one – determining relevancy based on the content of various websites – and two – by counting the number of links pointing back to that website. Linking is supposed to demonstrate a website’s authority and knowledge. Why would someone link to a site that they didn’t like? It’s like a vote for a site and Google usually trusts it. But through the years, many people have caught on to Google’s algorithms and have successfullly scammed the system. For awhile, Google saw through this and disregarded those particular sites, and I’m sure they will again. But right now, something funky is going on.

What’s happening now, and has been happening for years, is that SEOs use keyword-specific anchor text to help build links to websites. One way they do this is through blogging and publishing online articles. Submitting an article is a great way to build a back link to a website, however many people have abused this by submitting a ton of less-than-mediocre articles that really add no value to the web. The result is a bunch of unoriginal, lame content that’s floating around out there and Google still picks it up. So now, when you search for something that you need to find quality information about, the first three pages of results are all these terrible, unhelpful articles. Hopefully Google sees through this and fixes the problem soon. I’m sure they will.

So what does this teach us? As SEOs it is our job to get websites ranked. But as users of the World Wide Web, it is our duty to only put quality content out there. Call it a moral obligation, but if you want the Internet to get better, add to it with only the best content. It may be tempting to build links by writing a bunch of mediocre, overdone articles, but think about who you are hurting in the process – the users and your client’s online reputation. If you are going to write anything for the web, make sure it is original, fresh and something people would want to read. Give people something they want to link to and share. After all, isn’t that the point of writing to build links in the first place?

Let’s face it, the internet is the future for everything, including business.  Search engine optimization offers a way to get your businesse’s marketing needs online in an effective manner.  SEO helps expose your business to countless people and improve sales.

If you have an online website and you are struggling with not getting enough traffic to your web pages, it might be time to consider hiring an SEO Company. They can help you bring in more traffic by providing articles, link building, and keyword optimization.

You might have heard the online buzzword ‘optimization’, and wonder what it is all about or if it even pertains to you. Optimization is a phrase used by an SEO company that refers to helping online businesses fully optimize their websites to work well with the search engines. Optimizing a website helps generate as much traffic as possible to a website. Keyword optimization is practiced by analyzing your business and researching which keywords will work the best for your business to improve traffic flow to your site. These keywords will then be strategically used within your site, which will result in better rankings for the company site.

One very popular technique is known as article writing. Writing articles about your business can help you spread the word to shoppers throughout the web that you can provide the products and services they are looking for. An SEO company can write the articles for you and ensure they are relevant and interesting to read. They will be posted throughout the net on sites where there are large amounts of readers, which will give your business maximum exposure. Article writing helps provide credibility with a business too.

Link building works primarily with the search engines to give site popularity and improve your rank with the search results. It also gives online shoppers an easy way to get to your online business. Inbound links are important for any website and they can be placed throughout the web within articles, on other company sites, and even used on bookmarking sites. There are many ways an SEO company can provide link building techniques that will provide a benefit to your business of increasing traffic.

When a company doesn’t have a lot of traffic coming in and out of their website, hiring an SEO company is often a smart idea. There are many tools and techniques used on the web today which can help you be as successful as possible and compete in your industry.