Whether Panda is an algorithm change or a ranking filter is irrelevant if you have been hit by the beast; what really matters is how you prepare your site to help ensure that Panda recognizes your site’s content and services as relevant and timely.

Panda updates are pushed manually by Google (which precludes it from being an algorithm change and more akin to a SERP filter).  What this means is that irrespective of your current SERPs, determined by the algorithm, your website is being re-assessed as each Panda update is pushed. If you do get hit by Panda, you are effectively being tagged as sub-standard and won’t be scored again until the next Panda update is rolled out.

Following are the primary helpful tips to remain or return to favorability with Panda:

Use Good Quality Writers for Content

Panda is largely aimed at “thin content” sites – those which have poor quality content, typically created with a poor understanding of the subject matter.  You know it when you read it, because you get the immediate feeling your 5 year old could write it better.  Google’s introduction of tracking and rating authors is a further response to finding and giving good credit to well-constructed and written content. “Content is King” has never been a more important or relevant maxim to follow.

Write for Human Users

“This is an article on replacement windows San Diego CA, and you should always choose XYZ replacement windows San Diego CA company for your home improvements.”

That line may have been OK for SEO copy a year ago, but in terms of the delivery of relevant information to the user contemplating replacing glass at their house, it is poor quality and clearly not written for human consumption.  The focus is clearly upon people and their needs, so while there is a requirement for optimized copy which search engines can use, your main priority (by a large margin) is to write in a manner clearly aimed at real people.

“XYZ Home Improvements has been proudly serving customers in San Diego for over 20 years, and carries a wide choice of replacement windows styles suitable for your budget.”

Remove all Duplicate Content

Panda initially set out to eliminate poor quality content from getting ranked, but if you are using duplicate content you are not gaining any benefit from having it on your site, and Panda is looking for this type of behavior.  Copying other site’s content is simply inviting a Panda penalty – don’t go there.

Diversify Your Traffic

Think of your keyword portfolio as a stock portfolio – you need to diversify it so you are not relying on one stock too much and you can cover losses if one does not perform well.  The same risk principle should be applied to your keywords, and the underlining principle is to diversify your portfolio as much as possible. This means increasing the number of keywords you are ranking for.

You can take this diversification principle even further and diversify your traffic. This means looking at developing sources of traffic from all search engines including Yahoo! and Bing, and continuing to invest in your paid search and social strategies to maximize your portfolio strategy.

Summary – Do Not Feed the Bear

Panda is looking for poor quality content, therefore, stay far away from someone else’s content and if you do have duplicated content on your website, (for instance with repeated product descriptions), look up and use the canonical feature, so Google knows you are not stealing someone else’s thunder.

Craft quality content for human readers, update it frequently, and you’ll be well-positioned to maintain and increase your rankings on relevant keywords, if coupled with a consistent SEO program.  Panda loves fresh, good quality content.

At RankPay, our primary keyword analysis tool is Google Analytics… it has an incredibly robust feature set, provides great insight into site visitors including what search term was used to find our site, and hundreds of other reporting outputs that allows us to effectively measure every variable tied to site conversion — traffic sources, volume, avg time spent, bounce rates, time of day effectiveness, landing page UI positives/negatives, and literally every other component that impacts conversion.

Last month, Google announced the introduction of “Secure Search” within Google Analytics.  Essentially, this was a User Privacy initiative.  Google has reset reporting so that any consumer that is performing a search while signed into their personal Google Account will now have the search terms they use hidden from the sites that they visit.

This means that Google Analytics will continue to report the usage from the searcher however they now report the data and display the source as “Not Provided”.  Google estimates that this change only affects a minority of traffic, likely a single-digit percentage number of users.  Analytics still provides complete insights on this Traffic such as:  conversion rates, segmentations, bounce rates and so on.

We also continue to find value in utilizing Google’s Webmaster Tools offering for additional keyword search analysis.  Just sign in to your Google account, and click on “Webmaster Tools”, and you will be taken to the Dashboard. Here you can add your site and will be taken through a verification process (which is simple,  and as easy as adding Analytics).  Their Search Query tool showcases data over the past (30) days, so it is helpful (and free), but limited compared to Google Analytics.

Also, checkout www.RankPay.net  — we created this site to share a handful of Free SEO Tools that you will find helpful as you explore adding additional keywords to optimize through SEO, and measure effectiveness.

We’re continuing to watch the data from our “Not Provided” segment and compare it to our “Sourced Traffic” segment each month.  We recommend that all small businesses and webmasters follow this same practice to further understand your sites’ Visitor Experience Trends to better select and optimize keywords that ultimately impact your business, and help drive the most qualified visitors to your product or service.  If you’re not measuring effectiveness with Google Analytics, start today – http://www.google.com/analytics/

Larry Page, one of Google’s co-founders, who stepped into the CEO role at around the same time as +1 launched, made it clear that Google placed a lot of emphasis on the success and importance of social media. Page went so far as to tie 25% of employee’s bonuses to the success or failure of the +1 strategy.

Transformation

Despite widespread market penetration upon launch, activity on the network has recently slowed. Google is discovering is that there is disparity between numbers of accounts, and the numbers of active users.  We know that Facebook has over half-a-billion accounts, but just how many are active, and how does usage increase or decrease over time.  There is no hard data, but we do know that Facebook is not immune to this issue.

From an SEO perspective, we’re spending a lot time to better understand the +1 impact on SERPs.  Clearly social signals have the capacity to be a powerful factor, and the importance of a social signal online can be inferred by real world analogy: in a voting democracy, just how representative are the politicians put into office if only a small percentage of the electorate actually takes the time to cast a vote to begin with?  This appears to be the big issue confronting not only Google, but any search engine looking to use social signals when calculating SERPs.

The growth of +1 usage is about to take a significant jump upon the broad release to everyone.  Now the challenge becomes how to ensure that users are authentically using +1’s, and how will their influence help to provide Google with additional signals and insights to further refine the search experience.

Preparing for Change

It’s too early for any SEO Company to accurately know the weight that Google is actually placing on social signals within the algorithm, but we do know they are a factor. We have previously recommended that our customers include the +1 code (and the Facebook “Like” feature) to make it easy for visitors to share their endorsement.  At some point, Google along with Bing/Yahoo! will overcome issues associated with valuing the weight of a social signal, so the best advice for website owners is to make sure their sites offer the very best content and user experience they can provide.  Ultimately, that is the only way you will receive the appropriate recommendation.

We strongly believe that opening-up +1 will allow Google to accelerate momentum, therefore, we’re encouraging our customers to invest heavier in their own site offerings and engagement.  We also suggest utilizing Google Analytics to understand the differences between your ‘socially-engaged’ visitors –vs- traditional site visitors — it’s clear that these signals are important to Google now, and will become increasingly more valued as +1’s become more prominent and part of our everyday online experience in the very near future.

While Google enjoys more than 2/3rds of the US Search market share, their share internationally is a different story that ranges from complete market dominance to modest share contingent upon the country. Bing has recently concluded a deal with the Chinese search engine, Baidu for providing English language search results, while Google has withdrawn completely from China, the largest Internet market in the world.  Depending on the country, either Google or Bing-Yahoo! is the preferred search engine for mass reach, although there are certainly independent market leaders such as Yandex in Russia, which operate with 64% market share.

We consistently hear feedback from our customers, and have witnessed firsthand the power and value of Bing-Yahoo!.  This should not be taken as a broad generalization, however; a reminder to all of us that Google is definitively the priority engine to optimize for, although businesses must continue to review and understand visitor and conversion analytics by search engine source to ensure how each engine impacts your business.  Continuing to maintain and increase prominence on Bing-Yahoo! is a smart move, although just like a Google, the objective of measuring ROI on an engine-by-engine basis needs to remain the same.

A further search development which directly affects the US market is the fact that Mobile search is growing rapidly.  The battle lines over search have merged into the war for smart phone users and mobile devices, such as iPads and tablets. Google acquired Motorola for $12.5 billion in August in a deal which now gives Google handset manufacturing capability as well as a slew of technology patents.  Optimizing rankings on relevant keywords is becoming increasingly more important to be displayed on a mobile device, as it is on a traditional PC.

RankPay is constantly watching trends across our portfolio of keywords in order to optimize our platform and services, relative to search volume.  Fortunately, relevancy of results is continuing to improve, and the way in which consumer search and devices are used to search is evolving by the day.  Therefore, keep spending time with Google Analytics to see how search volume is changing, and how that relates to your site engagement and ultimately conversions.

The good news for all of us invested in SEO is that search volume continues to grow by the minute as consumers expect search results to deliver the right solution in real-time…   everytime.

On February 24^th, many high ranking companies in the US awoke to major hits on their SERPs as a result of Google’s efforts to improve search results quality.  Now the rest of the world is getting a taste; websites using the entire world’s languages (with the exception of Chinese, Korean and Japanese) are finding themselves subjected to Google’s “quality” test known as “Panda”.

What is Panda?

First of all, Panda is a filter rather than an algorithm change. As such, it is run discretely and there have been several updates since February (we are now on Panda 2.03 which was run in July). Instead of rankings being affected directly, the filter is run and if you are caught by it, then your ability to rank in SERPs is impaired. You can only get out of Panda’s grasp if you (a) improve your website content, and (b) Google runs Panda again. This is one reason why simply changing your website and removing duplicate content or improving content quality, does not produce an automatic return to high SERPs. You have to improve the site AND wait for the next iteration of Panda.

Are You a Target for Panda?

Panda is squarely aimed at “low quality” sites. The big question is what constitutes a low quality site?
Low quality means poor content which has little user value:

• poorly written content;
• lack of originality and credibility;
• outright duplication of content;
• an overabundance of on page ads (especially above the fold); and
• multiple website pages dealing with substantially the same topic, but optimized for different variations of keywords on it.

Content Considerations to keep in mind:

• If you’re maintaining a blog, be sure to post your own articles and acknowledge sources whenever possible.
• If you’re running an e-commerce platform, ensure that your product descriptions are unique and not copied from other sites.
• If you’re providing a service, diversify your value proposition with articles, images and videos.

Future Panda iterations are definitely on the horizon, which means you must exercise a high standard of quality control over your site content to help sustain and support your dedicated SEO Programs.  It’s clear that investing in your site’s user experience is continuing to be the MOST important signal that Google measures and values.

Blogging effectively creates a two-way conversation between you and your target market. In addition, there are distinct SEO benefits to be gained from operating your own blog, which means that SEO considerations apply to how you set the blog up and what you do with it.

Blogging Platforms

Blogger is a Google product and is available for free, however you cannot buy your own domain name and “own” the property (that belongs to Google and you are subject to their rules).  Blogger is simple to use, which is perfect for many first-time bloggers.  There are a range of alternatives including WordPress (which RankPay uses), that also operates as a free service and you can buy your own domain name and create a blog or website using the free WordPress CMS (Content Management System). This may sound more involved, however it provides your full ownership and control over all aspects of the blog itself.

SEO Tip #1 for Blogs – Utilize Blog Post Title within the URL of the Post

The default setting for most CMS’ is to use a number affixed to the blog domain name as the URL for the post itself, e.g. http://www.myblog.com/post12345. This is a missed opportunity for the search engines as they are also reading your post URLs for clues as to the content contained therein. A better URL for a post  you have titled, “Top 5 Tips for Coffee Growing” would be, http://www.myblog.com/top-5-tips-for-coffee-growing – this will further support your efforts with the search engines to highlight your fresh, relevant content.

SEO Tip #2 for Blogs – Organize Page Title Order

You should stipulate what the page title order will be so that keyword terms are closer to the front of the page title. For instance, having page titles which start with the date is less effective than having them start with the keyword terms you are aiming for. Both WordPress and Blogger offer plugins which allows you to customize the title and meta tags of your page for a better SEO practice.

SEO Tip #3 for Blogs – Use Heading Tags

WordPress, and other CMS’, will automatically put your post title into a “slug” or tag. If you are using keyword rich titles, this presents little issue, however wherever you have the opportunity to use tags, you should take advantage of them. Header tags and post tags are given extra credit by search engines and represent a significant SEO opportunity.

SEO Tip #4 for Blogs -Link Structure

Search engines and people find their way around your blog or website by using the links you provide. You should have a good link structure so both can easily navigate around the blog, and get back to where they were originally, without feeling like they are in a maze.

SEO Tip #5 for Blogs – No Duplicate Content

Copying content is a spam signal to the search engines – you should not put duplicate content on your main website and the same applies to your blog. In case you need to reference a text from a third-party site, provide a short summary and include a link to the original source. This makes your blog more credible and tells search engines that your site isn’t a duplicate.

Summary

Your company blog should be a de facto extension of your site, and as noted above, the same considerations that are standard for your primary website should be applied to your blog.

Further, your blog itself has the opportunity to rank prominently for relevant/targeted  keyword terms, therefore you should treat your Blog’s SEO Program with a similar approach and principles as your primary site to capitalize on the ranking opportunity within the engines.

Prominent Rankings = Increased Traffic = Higher Sales?

Unfortunately, increased traffic does not necessarily equate to more sales.  Worse, the cost of driving traffic may not be offset by current sales rates, so what is the solution? SEO is a fantastically powerful marketing tool, but it is one of several factors in web marketing success.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) assumes a dominant role and is responsible for the second half of our equation, and critical to ROI.  To optimize your conversion rates you must put yourself into the mind of the visitor to your site who has a need, a desire or a problem. You have the solution/product/service and the answer to what they are looking for.  All of your touchpoints and calls to action must reflect this, as the visitor is drawn through the sales conversion funnel and ultimately, to the sale.

(7) Basic Conversion Rate Optimization Tips

1.)    Establish Your Value Proposition by being simple and clear.

2.)    Reduce onsite advertising to mitigate customers leaving your site, if applicable.

3.)    Mitigate too many offers – remove as much distraction as possible through the sales funnel.

4.)    Share testimonials to highlight your customer’s experiences.

5.)    Utilize Call-to-Action messaging to effectively communicate your products/services offerings.

6.)    Simplify the checkout process as more than 50% of sales are abandoned at the purchase stage.

7.)    Test everything….. measure effectiveness of messaging, layouts, and so on.

While SEO and CRO share many optimization principles — they are not mutually exclusive.  The best strategy is to maximize your focus on each discipline in-parallel.  Investing in SEO, combined with CRO, will help every small business achieve ongoing efficiency.

That said, after you’ve set-up your site optimally for seo services – there is an ongoing responsibility to understand what is happening on your site, and the effectiveness of all your marketing related investments. This is where Google Analytics comes in and is incredibly valuable for insights literally across every aspect of your site optimization and marketing.

First, you will first need to sign-up for a Google account, once you have completed the process, click on “Account Settings” and select “Analytics” within “My products”.   Follow the instructions for adding a new URL to Analytics – you will be taken through a step-by-step series of instructions for generating HTML code to add to your website, (including instructions on how to do this).

Your first screen will be the Dashboard – this is the heart of Google Analytics and is where you access the numerous reports generated.  You are provided with a trending graph of visitor traffic over time, where the traffic comes from, a map overlay, and an analysis of the content that is attracting visitors. You can rearrange the dashboard using drag and drop functionality, so it is customized to your needs.   In addition, you can reset the date ranges to suit your own reporting requirements – the default setting is the last 30 days.

There are hundreds of reports that you can build and customize, however here’s (2) reports that we recommend:

Visitors Overview Report
Visitors Overview report is immediately underneath Site Usage – this is a very popular report which tells you how much traffic your site received over the desired time span, number of page views, average length of each visit and the bounce rate.  You can drill down into more refined detail, even determining the connection and browser used by the visitor — this is an ideal snapshot of activity on your site.

Traffic Sources Report
Immediately below Visitors Overview is Traffic Sources Overview – click on view report and see the search engines and other sites that are referring traffic to your site, which search terms are most popular, which visitors come to you directly, and so on.  This is an essential analysis particularly for optimizing your SEO and Sponsored Search investment.

Takeaway
From our perspective, Google Analytics should be mandatory for websites and small businesses that are dedicated to creating better engagement on their site.  It also helps to validate all of your investment decisions, and then provides the tools and insight necessary to optimize regularly.  The truth is – we don’t feel the need to cover any other analytics considerations for comparison purposes since Google Analytics is free, user-friendly and robustly built with every feature that you’ll ever need to optimize your site engagement, and effectively measure your online marketing investments.

Think about this – you want to buy a car. You search on “cars” and maybe you’ll look at particular brands, e.g. Ford, Toyota or Chevrolet. These are examples of initial, fact-finding searches; a subsequent search may be “Ford 2011 Mustang”, which indicates the searcher is starting to focus on a specific model and getting closer to the buying decision.

However, “Ford 2011 Mustang” could display websites with great information, but they are from dealers on the other side of the country.  What the buyer is looking for is a 2011 Ford Mustang which they can learn more about within their geographical shopping range.  As the consumer moves further into the purchase cycle – they begin to search with local modifiers such as: “Ford dealer Detroit”, or “Ford 2011 Mustang Detroit”.  The addition of Detroit signifies the searcher is now actively looking for where they can go and buy the product.  It is also the major driver behind the creation of local search, as multi-word queries, and searches with geo-modifiers continue to increase by the day.

Another development behind Local Search has been the appreciation that customers were using the Internet to find out what to do or where to eat “right here, right now”. The advent of the Mobile Internet with smartphones capable of delivering a good user experience has created the ability to input a search term for a restaurant combined with the geophysical location of the mobile device. Recommendations can now be produced based on the user’s “want” and targeted location.

Moving forward, Local Search will continue to evolve at a rapid pace as users expect relevant results at the local level.  This means that all businesses will need to optimize for local-based queries wherever applicable to ensure that they’re competing from an SEO standpoint when it makes sense.  Make sure to explore long-tail keywords and all geo-modifiers as you build-out your search marketing programs (inclusive of SEO).  We’re monitoring local SEO closely as the search engines continue to improve the local search experience… more to come on this topic in the coming months.  In the meantime, check-out RankPay’s Keyword Opportunity Tool, which can certainly help identify relevant considerations – please note: these phrases typically result in lower volume, although they often drive solid ROI due to the strong engagement of pre-qualified visitors.

SEO On-Page Optimization Fundamentals for Small Businesses

When a business decides it needs a website, the instinctive step is to go find a website developer to design and build a site. Let’s assume the resulting website is fantastic, complete with easily navigated pages, packed full of useful content. The consumers that you send to the website are ‘Wowed’, but as time passes, traffic to your site is not what you hoped.  All of the expectations of masses of traffic and hungry prospects looking for your product or services have disappeared.

You want to drive qualified traffic to the website, so you consult a Search Engine Marketer, who starts talking about “SEO” which will generate targeted traffic.  Next, you’re being told that you have to find a website developer who can also change the site coding.  Unless you like paying double for the same work, it makes sense to get the job done right the first time out.

The following are the primary SEO On-page Optimization Fundamentals to ensure that your site is well-positioned from the Search Engines’ perspective, once you’ve identified the select keywords that will help drive pre-qualified customers to your site:

Page Title Tag – the page title tag is what flashes up on the screen when a website page is displayed at the very top left of the page.  The Page Title is also displayed in the search engine results.  You need to use your primary targeted keyword at least once in your page title, twice if you can, but use it wisely.

Meta Description Tag – another key element for website SEO is the Meta description tag – this is used by the search engines to help determine how important your website is, but it also serves as the text which a search engine will return to users in the Search Results page.

Header Tags – these are the H1, H2 tags and so on – which are used to emphasize subtitles and text on your website and also used by search engines to help determine the relevancy of your page relative to the search term input by the user.

Website Content – if you are expecting search engines to rank you for a specific keyword term, it logically follows that your content should have the keyword included where applicable.

Alt Image Tag – with graphical elements, you should use your targeted keyword with a relevant alt-image tag as well. This helps search engines index your site’s media better and serves as a helpful caption to your images for your users.

Takeaway

Keyword research and implementing SEO On-page Optimization Fundamentals should be completed in-parallel with website development. Web developers are typically not SEO practitioners. Keeping these fundamentals at the top of your consideration list will help you rank prominently for the targeted keywords that are meaningful for your Small Business.