Is Google SEO Dead? Depends On Your Hat Color

The announcement of the latest Google algorithm change has created widespread panic in the SEO community.

Matt Cutts has publicly stated that the Google Search Quality Team makes > 500 changes every year. Keeping up is impossible. However, the latest change has SEO ears standing up.

The recent deindexing of buildmyrank.com, the popular blog network and Matt Cutts’ talk on the ‘over optimization algorithm change’ SHOULD be of concern, to some SEOers.

Google has described the change as a step to ‘level the SEO playing field’ opening opportunities for white hat SEO to be just as effective as black hat SEO, as it should be!

It has raised a lot of questions about the value / future of SEO efforts. Basically, what is going to hurt your rankings and what is taking your SEO efforts too far?

Mr Cutts explains what Google’s intentions are regarding the latest update -

“Absolutely there are some people who take it too far. What we’re mindful of is when someone says, “We’re White Hat. We continue to do the right thing, and we see the Black Hats who are over optimizing or going too far, and they seem to be doing too well.” So we’ve been working on changes to try to make sure that if you are a White Hat or if you’ve been doing very little SEO that you are going to not be affected by this change. But if you’ve been going way far beyond the pale, then that’s the sort of thing where your site might not rank as highly as it did before.”

Should you be concerned? Maybe. How closely alligned with Google’s SEO Guidelines are your SEO efforts?

CJM

Google Takes Down Build My Rank

Google is continuing to ring the changes. Recently Google took down a major blog network, setting SEO Marketers into a panic.

Read more here: http://site-reference.com/articles/hot-off-the-presses-google-takes-down-a-popular-blog-network/

CJM

Google’s Seach Quality Team Releases 40 Changes

40 changes have been released by the Google Search Quality Team from February.

In an effort to be more ‘transparent’, Google have made changes to Links, Google Panda, Freshness & Images.

Read more about it here: http://site-reference.com/articles/googles-search-quality-team-releases-40-changes/

CJM

Find Out Who’s Linking To Your Website – Google Search Engine

In Google.com search engine type in this text

link: (then website URL). For example: link:www.fastmetrics.com

This will show what other sites are linking to yours. Handy tip for Webmasters & SEOers out there.

CJM

Fastmetrics ranks highly for another keyword. High organic SEO results!

Recent Google results show Fastmetrics has added another popular keyword to it’s list of high organic rankers.

As of today, ranked #5 out of 79,000,000 search results. A targeted keyword too, double bonus!

Image courtesy of infxsolutions.com

Ask me how; cody@fastmetrics.com

Or read more on how to achieve high organic SEO results here, with a keyword strategy.

Cody James Miller

Google Webmaster Tools – monitor your SEO progress & more.

I have been a user of Google Webmaster Tools since starting in SEO. It has gradually had features added to it and now has a new dynamic interface.

Image courtesy of quality-web-solutions.com

Not just a place for webmasters, but a great way to keep track of what keywords are being used to find your site, what keywords are bringing up your site and monitoring sitelinks and external links.

Google Webmaster Tools also provides an XML sitemap inclusion option, which it will crawl directly. (XML sitemaps allow search engines to crawl a list of URLs that are available on your website, from a single “page” or file).

In addition, find crawl errors and pages that might need a 404 redirect placed on them.

Overall, a very useful, free tool for monitoring SEO progress and your website performance, when it comes to Google. Described as; “your one-stop shop for webmaster resources that will help you with your crawling and indexing questions, introduce you to offerings that can enhance and increase traffic to your site, and connect you with your visitors”.

You will find all the major search engines, including Microsoft’s latest and greatest, Bing, have similar facilities. It will help your site if you submit an XML sitemap to these too!

Highly recommended. Check it out – Google Webmaster Tools.

Cody James Miller

Optimize your website with SEO – tricks & tips.

So you have a website. It’s neat and you’re pretty chuffed about it.

But will people find it? Will Google even list your site when someone searches for info or a product that you have on your site?

SEO can be the answer. With the right SEO planning and research, bring your site traffic. Targeted traffic.

Keyword research can make or break your website. Too broad, too difficult to rank. Too specific, no one will search using these terms. It’s a fine line, but it can be done. (Top 10 Google rankings and how Fastmetrics did it, here).

Image courtesy of superseoman.com

This week from entireweb newsletter, some tips and SEO knowledge that every website should implement.

If you take only one thing from the article, let it be this; take action! Do some SEO work on your website today. There is always room for improvement when it comes to SEO.

Cody James Miller

Top 10 Google rankings & how we did it.

Fastmetrics is very proud of our recent organic search results for keywords that we implemented in an SEO plan about 6 months ago.

We have decided to share the secrets of our success. Why?
Because SEO is about finding your own market and targeting it.
Maybe our competitors take advantage of this information. But SEO is always changing. To stay in front, you have to change with it.

How has implementing a keyword strategy helped?

Increases in;
-site links
-pagerank for individual site pages
-organic traffic

Emphasis on organic traffic here, because it’s free and YOU can determine what keywords you want to rank for, with a keyword strategy.

Image courtesy of Stylish Design.

What was our keyword strategy?

An SEO plan was definitely the building block of our success. This provided a guide on what we wanted to do and how we were going to do it. Secondly, an SEO site review picked up a lot of areas that were not optimized for the search engines at all.
(This is a work in progress. While we are now ranked well for selected keywords, there are always new ones popping up).

A time consuming part of the process was keyword analysis, where we asked ourselves a lot of questions.
1. What keywords did we want to rank for?
2. What keywords were our competitors using?
3. What was the search volume of our selected keywords?
4. Were they too broad to rank well, but specific enough to target our market?

Then it was a matter of implementing SEO keyword changes to our site; tags, alt text, placement, links, URLs, etc.
It did take time to get the results we were after, but the outcome has been very pleasing.

Not to give everything away, Fastmetrics is now ranking in the top 10 of Google results for some of these keywords;
-ethernet san francisco
-business network solutions
-network solutions provider
-broadband san francisco (business & organic ranking).
-managed voip san francisco
-hosted pbx san francisco
-bonded t1s
-port phone number
-port telephone number

Of course, our SEO efforts are ongoing. SEO is always evolving. Google Webmaster Tools shows what terms people are using to find our site and there is always new keywords to look into.

Also, Google Analytics reveals new areas where we need improvement, in particular, reducing bounce rates with site inter-linking and more dynamic content. That is a whole new project in itself, but we’re working on it.

We are also working on better keywords, to get that targeted organic search traffic coming in.

Cody James Miller

Pay per click advertising tips & techniques. Improve your PPC ads.

Struggling against a tide of low click through rates, (CTR), or even lower conversion rates?

Want to increase the amount of clicks on your PPC ads, but unsure where to start?

Aashish Malve discusses some ways to improve your PPC marketing, here.

Image courtesy of Geekcamp.

Change your PPC approach and start getting those clicks, which can lead to higher conversions.

Cody James Miller

How to increase your PageRank in Google

Found another useful article here, which details some excellent methods for a major online goal; increasing your Google Page Rank.

Note: having your URL on this shirt would increase your website traffic.

(Cartoon courtesy of blaugh.com)

Cody James Miller