SEO Ain’t What it Used to Be

I was going to name this post ‘The Dying Art of SEO’ but that sounded so dramatic. But the world of SEO has changed so dramatically that firms offering SEO services must radically change their business model if they plan to survive. And you, as site owners, should understand what impacts site rankings in search today. Whether you hire a SEO company or manage this in-house, either way the changes are radical enough that we’d like to help get you up to date.

The Panda update by Google this year is by far one of the most dramatic changes. There is a real shiver-me-timbers impact for sites that have been built around attempting to play the system with back links, keyword weighting in content, and acquiring content from content aggregators.

Personally, I couldn’t be more thrilled as these recent changes are more in alignment with my way of thinking and how we build websites rather than the ‘beat the system mathematical gaming’ other agencies employ. Building websites for people is a much better approach then building them for robots and spiders.

The current trend is that your website’s success in rankings will be driven by the quality of your content and your ability to entice and engage readers and participation with your brand or what is referred to as ‘social signals’:

• Value for visitors. Dig into your analytics and track your bounce rate and time on site. If your bounce rate is high and your time on site is low you have either attracted the wrong visitors or your content is crappy. Refer back to my blog on what to monitor on Google analytics for a quick how-to.
• Social signals at page level are now weighing in on rankings. The more you can get visitors to Like, +1, comment, share, or Tweet the page, the better your chances to move up in the rankings. BIG TIP: If you haven’t started to engage social media as part of your marketing strategy, you have some catching up to do – and quickly. You can out-perform the most optimized, most back linked site that’s using the best keywords in the universe with great social signals.
• Content, design and usability are now playing an even greater role in rankings. So if your cousin’s kid designed your site or it was designed several years ago, go back and plan on a professional website developed by a team that understands SEO best practices, usability best practices and has the ability to create an attractive, professional looking, interactive site with great content that your audience will find worthy of hanging around to read or view, and of course share with their community.
• Up-to-date software – if you are using software on your site, especially something like WordPress, Google is actually checking to see if it is a current version. Needless to say neglecting to update might be reason for Google to bring your ratings down.

So now that you know what positively impacts your search engine ratings, let’s visit what SEO companies can do for you and what questions you should be asking.

I confess that as soon as someone introduces himself or herself as an SEO expert or from an SEO company I get visions of dancing snakes popping their heads out of a basket. But to be fair, there are some legitimate SEO companies out there and certainly there are many experts, but just be sure you are considering one of them. Here are some tips and tricks: