James Schramko here with an SEO news update and on January the 22nd Google rolled out
Panda 24. So, we’re going to talk about what you can do about that.
We’ve seen a couple of reports coming in that indicated there was a change and what
we think is important to do right now is to focus on lifting the overall authority level
of your site and that is to make sure that when someone comes to your site, and I’m
talking about an actual human being, that it is useful information and it’s good.
If you’ve got big blocks of links chunked along the bottom of your homepage, it’s
probably time to have a look at getting rid of those. Have a simpler navigation, have
less ads on your site, this is the ONE about quality so you really want to take it up a
notch. You want more pages on your site having page rank because they’re linked to from
more places and they have social power as well.
Things you can do to improve your authority are to use the Google rel= author, you can
put out videos and rich media onto your site, some images. And also, if you’ve got one
of those sites that has a lot of words in pictures, consider getting your web designer
to actually make those words search-readable. You want to be able to use text with CSS formatting
instead of just taking pictures. Things like sales letter, because they actually can reduce
the overall feel of quality of your site from a search engine’s point of view.
Even though Yahoo and Bing have increased their market share, they still only represent
a pretty thin slice – 16.3 percent for Bing and 12.2 percent for Yahoo, leaving Google
still in the 60’s at 66.7 percent market share. So the game is still Google, but there’s
a little bit of a sideways movement there from the competitors. I would still say it’s
worth spending most of your efforts building the best authority you can regardless of whether
you’re trying to get Google, Bing or Yahoo. If you can still syndicate out to Facebook
and YouTube and iTunes like we do with our TrafficSure product, I think that is good.
And when it comes to things like press releases, even if Google are trying to discount the
validity of them for SEO, and there’s certainly been results showing that they still work
for SEO, they can actually bring you real buyers and they do get syndicated into other
search engines and to other media formats. Particularly, you might fall in the hands
of the end buyer or a press person and editor or whatever that might want to run it in an
offline magazine for example. So they do lead to business. They’re still very effective.
We use them but we’re keeping a close eye on them and we’re testing. They still work
for SEO but they certainly work for more than that.
Anyway, so right now, you’re action step is to go and have a look at your site through
the eyes of a customer or a stranger and see if it would pass a human test. Is it useful?
Does it have really good content? Is it easy to find? Would you complain about it or report
it if you were the competitor for being junky site? This is how you defeat the Panda and
I’m pleased to report that the majority of our customers are still getting fantastic
results. So, I’m James Schramko and I’ll catch
up with you next week.
