Google Over Optimisation Penalty – Evolution or a Shambles?

By on May 3, 2012 in SEO

So the Google Over Optimisation Penalty has been released and has definitely taken the Internet Marketing world by storm! It’s no secret that Google has been banging on about eliminating web spam from their SERPs and now they have raised the bar once again. However, is this an evolution or a shambles?

The 24th April 2012 marks the that this penalty (also known as Google Penguin Update) was released and was believed to effect only 3% of SERPs but the reality is that it has done a lot more than that. I personally know of at least 25 Internet Marketers that have had at least one, if not more of their sites hit by this penalty. Great news right? My opinion, no.

It’s also a true fact that a lot of genuine SEO‘s actually spend a lot of quality time on their websites and put forward some useful quality sites. So if that’s the case, why are these quality sites getting hit? Why after Google’s promises to eliminate low quality sites are top-notch SEO’s getting punished? I will show you an example on US Google SERPs:

Term: New Shoes

Google Over Optimisation Penalty for New Shoes

http://www.interpretive.com/rd5/index.php?pg=ns

Now if we take a took at this website it really has nothing to do with new shoes, and the fact that anyone searching for new shoes would most likely be looking to buy them. Is this useful and relevant to the user? No! Another thing to think about here is that this website ranks above sites that are relevant and do provide relevance and usefulness. What is going on here? Another Example:

Term: Bicycle Wheels

http://sheldonbrown.com/wheels/index.html

Again, another extremely unuseful website that in my opinion provides no real use to the user and from what I can see isn’t particularly optimised very well for search engines. So what is Google’s excuse and what is happening to the SERPs? It seems to me like the less optimised websites that are actually built out of hobby or for business reasons rather than a way to monetize Google are the ones that are surviving.

So what can be done?

Well a lot of SEO’s are still scratching their heads as to what can be done to ensure that their sites stay up providing that haven’t been hit, or what to do to recover their sites that have been hit. I’ve even heard talk of SEO being dead but in my opinion this is far from the truth. Google have raised the bar and are now running a tighter ship, so therefore we need to play by their rules.

From what I can see and from what I’ve read, link over optimisation seems to be the major factor for ranking decreases. Undiversified anchor texts appear to be doing more harm than good now and although previously worked well, admittedly is having a negative effect. Below are two images which back up my suggestions. Both images take a look at the percentage in inbound link with anchor text matching keywords. One of sites that were not penalised and one of sites that were.

These images demonstrate that every single website which got negatively hit by the Penguin Update had a “money keyword” as its anchor text for over 60% of its incoming links. Whereas the sites that didn’t have over 60% of its links a “money keyword” in its anchor text didn’t take a plunge. So to me, link diversity will play a major role here and would say 50% or less is a safe way to go. I would also advise throwing in your URL as an anchor text too, maybe even taking a “read more” or “click here” approach for anchor texts.

Another major factor for ranking decreases appears to be, what I like to call “niche under optimisation”. A post by Matt Cutts confirms that faking relevancy will have a negative effect on your website. Although this example is a little extreme it definitely gives insight as to what Google is going after; links that are not relevant and therefore not likely to be created naturally. It makes sense really because how can a “recommendation” (concept of “link valuation”) be valid if the link or recommendation has absolutely nothing to do with the page or website it is on?

Again this data identifies that sites that had no or very little links coming from websites and domain in the same niche were penalised. Although it shows that it’s okay to have incoming links from non relevant sites (as this may occur naturally), however it’s definitely important to justify those links with links coming from domains or websites that are relevant to your site or within the same niche. This suggests that Google is now devaluing or replacing anchor text use with “niche/content relevancy of linking sites” as a primary link relevancy, (or “quality”) signal.

So what do we do in terms of SEO now? Well my belief is to continue posting quality content and concentrate on getting high quality relevant back links and remembering to diversify your anchor texts. One tactic you could possibly implement is creating multiple high quality microsites that are relevant to your website/niche and using those as tiers. Another method (although this may be most “blackhat” solution) would be to create blog networks, however Google has already made it perfectly clear that blog networks will be deindexed and links devalued.

Google Penguin an evolution or a shambles? I will let you decide. Please feel free to leave your comments and feedback below. Good luck with your Marketing/SEO efforts and if you require any insight on your website(s) do not hesitate to contact me.

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What SEO’s Should Be Thinking About in 2012

By on January 16, 2012 in SEO

If you haven’t already noticed, Google has began rolling out there social network Google+ into their organic search results. The launch of Search + Your World this month has kicked up quite a fuss in the online marketing world with a lot of marketers panicking about what has to be Googles biggest and drastic changes in a very long time. This change will basically make Google search much more personal to users signed into the Google+ network. Instead of returning the usual 10 organic listings Google will return much more personal information such as posts, shares images/videos etc from your friends, circles etc. Below is a quote from Google:

“Search has always brought you information from across the web. Now, search gets better by including photos, posts, and more from you and your friends. When signed in with Google+, you’ll find personal results and profiles of people you know or follow. You can even expand your world by discovering people related to your search.” -Google

One thing I would advise is do not make the mistake of thinking that this will be just a small percentage of Google searchers even though it only affects users signed into Google+. It’s a true fact that at the moment the amount of users searching on Google that are signed in is much less than those that are not signed in. However Google’s efforts to expand into the social arena will bring a dramatic increase into these numbers and we will be seeing this increase very soon. Although its been happening very slowly, its pretty obvious that Google is moving towards being more of a social network than just a standard search engine.

If you didn’t already know it, social is the next big thing! Google+ in my opinion is going to be huge. Google have invested a lot of money into Google+ and I believe it’s going to become much more important from here on out so pay attention. If you don’t have an account, get one and start learning how to use if effectively.

So what does this mean for 2012? Well it means that us, as SEO’s are going to have to change our SEO game plan if we want to stay on top and the best way to do this is educate yourselves now! I think one major and important ranking factor for Google’s new change is becoming an authority figure within your niche. Now I’m not saying that SEO has run its course, as I still think back linking will have some value. I just think this change opens a few doors for us as professional SEO’s.

One reason is those that do their homework and learn how to adapt to these changes will surely be setting themselves up for massive success. More users will be signing up for Google+ everyday as Google’s social efforts expand. Google are marketing Google+ very aggressively and the numbers are increasing rapidly. As these numbers increase, so will the number of searches with users signed in. Secondly, competition within the SEO market will decrease as with every other major update in Google. Lazy marketers or marketers that can’t or won’t adapt will just give up. This means that us marketers can take advantage of this while the day is young. Becoming an authority figure within your niche will be much easier now than in 2 or 3 years time.

Don’t forget about Facebook, Twitter  etc accounts too. Just because Google+ is pushing their competitors down, doesn’t mean to say these site are not important. The more socially active you are, the more people will share your content and network with you. Below are two links to Google’s own pages. I urge anyone who is serious about SEO to spend some time reading these yourself. You can find out everything you need to know about this latest change.

http://www.google.com/insidesearch/plus.html

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/search-plus-your-world.html

Happy new year and good luck in 2012 with your SEO efforts.

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How to Increase Customer Conversions

By on September 19, 2011 in Marketing

The conversion rate of your website is critical, as this is what determines how profitable your site is. Whether you’re selling a product or service from your website or are just using it to build a list, you have to make enough of an impact on visitors that they take the action you want them to take. We briefly explain a few simple to apply points that will help you take the conversion ratio of your website to the next level, without doing any major changes.

Testing is Important: Getting the right kind of conversions for your website is a journey that’s filled with trial and error. You will not be able to tell exactly what is going to help you raise the conversions on your website until you do extensive tests with a variety of different things and methods. It’s important to try a variety of fonts and colors and designs to see if any of them have a good impact on your conversion ratio. Until you do all of your tests you are basically shooting blind, extensive testing is what teaches you what you need to know to figure out what gets people to respond to your offers. Every single person who visits your website is a potential buyer and impressing as many of your visitors as possible so that you can convert them into buyers revolves around your ability to test things on a regular basis.

A website that won’t let you down when it comes to helping you navigate it or makes a focused effort on getting the navigation right is something that can impress you. Regardless of your website size, you can expect to have bad conversions if you don’t help your prospects navigate through your site easily. Whether its the contact page or something buried deep in your archives, you need to do what you can to help those visitors/prospects find what they need.

Don’t Hide Your Contact Info: When visitors find your site, they should have a convenient way to contact you if they want. This is a good way to build trust, as people like to see a site’s contact info even if they never have a reason to use it. Trust is obviously one of the most important factors of all when you have a website. Having your contact details in an easy to see place on your page is a simple way to make your site more credible. There is a lot more that you can do to boost the conversions of your site, but what we discussed above can help you make a start and then push things from there, so that you can achieve long term success.

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Why SEO Has a High ROI – SEO ROI

By on June 28, 2011 in SEO

SEO ROI. If you are not convinced as to the importance of SEO, then all you have to do is consider the costs of SEO vs. ROI. The cost of SEO services vary from company to company, but realistically the costs can start from as little as £250 per month and can go up to £1000 per month and beyond. This depends on the amount of work involved, the amount of competition in your market that you’re going up against and the amount of time required to achieve the results.

While these figures may seem daunting, one must consider the results that will flourish once rankings have been achieved. For example, let’s say you have a high quality cosmetic product that sells, and you can sell this product for £40 per unit. Each unit you make 50% profit (£20). You want to rank your website for a search term that brings in 20 visitors a day. Hypothetically the cost to achieve this ranking is £500 per month and it will take 6 months to achieve. That’s £3000 in total. Would you say this was expensive? I would disagree. Let’s say that out of those 20 visitors, at least 40% buy. That’s at least 8 sales per day earning you at least £160. Not bad for a days’ work.

Let’s say the month is February and we sell average of 8 products per day over the course of the month. That works out to £4480 in total. The total profit from your £3000 investment is £1480. A great return on your investment would you agree? Not to mention the increase in revenue over the months ahead.

SEO ROISEO software can be very easily found for free or for a small fee on the Internet. However, the majority of the software you will find will fall into the black hat category which is frowned upon by all the major search engines. On the contrary, there is also SEO software on the market which are considered white hat, although they can come at a high expense and are usually rather complex and daunting to inexperienced marketers.

You may also, from time to time run into so-called “SEO Experts” that will dramatically undercut a lot of SEO companies out there. While these offers sound too good to be true, you’ll find that they usually are. A lot of these “experts” resort to shady black hat techniques which could potentially do more harm than good, and in extreme cases get your site banned and de-indexed from the major search engines. While their intentions are good, their methods are not.

All in all, just measure the cost of SEO against the possible gain or return on investment. Make a calculation on the profit you get even if just two people decide to do business with you based on your website per day, and then compare it with the costs. Chances are you will be convinced that SEO ROI is great. Search Engine Optimisation is not only a great marketing tool on its own, but can be used alongside other marketing campaigns to dominate your online market!

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How SEO Can Help your Business

By on June 28, 2011 in SEO

So how can Search Engine Optimisation and its process help your business? Lets say an online furniture store wants to increase their online visibility. Increasing their visibility is vital for their business. The higher the website ranks the more visitors it will receive and ultimately increase company revenue. For any online business that sells a product or service, Search Engine Optimisation is an important investment to be made to run alongside their current marketing strategies. If you are running an online store that sells a product or service, SEO is an indispensable marketing tool that has proven to be one of the best ways to dominate your online market and stamp out competition.

If you are selling a service or selling from an actual physical store or any other type of business, then a website is definitely a way to promote it. Rather than have an online selling platform you could potentially set up a promotional website or a small community where buyers can discuss your products. The possibilities are endless. You may be tempted to dismiss the importance of SEO and yet you shouldn’t.

Websites are becoming more and more important to promote just about anything these days. Websites also have many advantages. One fact being that they can present your business in detail, while the much more expensive television commercials only have 30 seconds at their disposal to attract your clients. Plus websites are easier to change, are much less expensive to maintain and can be updated regularly to inform customers or clients of new products or services.

The amount of people that are running Internet searches before deciding on anything is increasing dramatically. They want a car, they search for car offers online, they want a credit card, and they search for credit card offers online and so on. As the internet grows, the number of online stores is considerably higher than the number of physical stores. Online stores are much cheaper and easier to maintain, you can reach a much wider audience and it’s much easier for the client to study your offer within a short period of time, not to mention the convenience of your customer being able to place an order in the comfort of their own home.

Even if you haven’t moved your business online, chances are you will do at some point. Your website will more than likely be the most cost-effective way to promote your business in detail. Having a large number of website visitors is becoming more important to any part of business. Although not essential to have an online store selling services or products, it’s very important to have an online presence which is at least promoting your brand.

Still not convinced? See why SEO has a high ROI.

 

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What is SEO? Your Guide to SEO

By on June 26, 2011 in SEO Basics

What is SEO?

So what is SEO I hear you ask? SEO is one of the trendiest terms in the world of Internet marketing. Short for Search Engine Optimisation, it is a process that basically targets improving a website’s visibility on the Internet, making it appear higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Here is your guide to SEO.

How does SEO work?

When someone is interested in a certain subject, nowadays the quickest way to find out anything about it is to run a quick Internet search. For example, if you would like to buy some furniture, in most cases before going to the store, you check out the prices online in order to get an idea of what you can get and so you run an online search.

Suppose company X has an online furniture store which they would like to show up in your searches when you’re interested in buying furniture. In order for you to get to it (unless you have found it somewhere else), it would have to at least appear in the top five, or at the very least the first page of your search results. For that simple reason, it is very likely that after the first two pages you will either lose patience or will consider that the websites you have already seen are sufficient to give you an idea on what is going on.

In order to make sure that company X end up in your search results, Internet marketers studied the way search engines work. These basically use some very complex algorithms to calculate different ranking factors. One of these is Page Rank. The Page Rank is meant to calculate the likelihood of someone randomly surfing the web (without using the search engines) to reach a certain website. For the Page Rank to be higher, a website would have to be linked to on many other websites who in turn, are also very likely to be reached through links.

A good way to improve company X’s visibility is to place their website’s link on websites that have high traffic and are properly linked themselves. That will help company X in two ways:
1) The online furniture website will start to be visited by visitors of the websites where the store’s link was placed.
2) The website’s Page Rank will improve, which in turn will improve its chance of being among the first search results in your search for online furniture information.

Now, of course Search Engine Optimisation is not as simple as straightforwardly going to a website and placing your link on it. First of all, because most websites will not really offer you that option and second of all because if it were that easy, everyone would be doing it. Which ultimately means that everyone’s Page Rank would improve in the exact same manner thus leaving the online furniture website in pretty much the exact same spot as it was before.

Search engines also take into consideration the relevance of which your link resides when ranking your website online. Search engines are trying to calculate not just the number of websites the online furniture link is on, but also the likelihood of someone actually clicking on it. For example, if you are looking for an online furniture website and you end up on a website that has a link saying “click here for a cheap haircut”, the Page Rank will assume that you will not click on it simply because it is not on the topic that you are interested in. That is why, when taking into consideration Page Rank for a specific keyword (let’s say “online furniture”) your link would carry more weight (or link juice) if its anchor text or relevance is at least related to that keyword or topic of the website which your link resides.

In time, these “calculations” in the algorithm have led to more and more programmers developing software that is meant to trick the search engine rankings into basically increasing a website’s links through link spamming. Link spamming is the process of aggressively placing a link on a large number of highly ranked websites in order to outrank other websites. From the search engine’s point of view, this can lead to Page Rank increase for many websites that are actually irrelevant to the Internet user. That is why regular check-ups are done and websites that are found to use these methods are banned. More and more complex algorithms are added to this process, to weed out sites and users that take this approach. One term that is commonly used for these sorts of tactics is “black hat methods”.

Search Engine Optimisation is therefore a method that keeps developing as search engines are evolving and changing their ways of calculating the ranking factors of a website. Of course, many other factors come into play such as on page optimisation, domain age, inbound link quality, authority of your website, authority of websites linking to your websites to name a few.

How SEO can help your business.

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