GOOGLE

P AN

DA

S,

PE

NG

UI N

S &

OT

HE

R A

NI M

AL S

…

Website owner:To provide information

To educate peopleTo entertain peopleTo attract customers

Searcher: Information Education Entertainment Products and/or

services

WHAT DO YOU WANT?

To find the “right” website

To get your website in front of the “right” people.

WHAT GOOGLE WANTS

To display the “right” website to the “right” people.

GOOGLE

Founded in 1998

• Has crawled 30 Trillion URL’s

• Does 20 Billion crawls every day

• Completes 100 Billion searches each month

• There are over 1 Billion published web pages

Panda

Page Layout

Penguin

…and 20+ “tweaks”

3 MAJOR ALGORITHM CHANGES IN 18 MONTHS

PANDA – FEBRUARY 2011

• Impacts entire site’s rank, not just pages

• Uses AI to find high quality sites• Content reader• Spell checker• Grammar checker

• Looks at design, trustworthiness, speed

• Rewards good content; punishes duplicate content

PAGE LAYOUT – JANUARY 2012

• Ranks content “above the fold” higher

• Downgrades sites with ads that take up space above the fold

• Downgrades sites with “thin” content

PENGUIN – APRIL 2012

Targets violation of Google Webmaster Guidelines and Black Hat SEO

• Keyword stuffing• Slow pages• Duplicate content• Broken links• Link “farms” and link schemes

Emphasis now on fresh, well-written content

Social media likes, shares, tweets and +1’s are considered good backlinks

WHAT GOOGLE SAYS…

“Base your optimization decisions on what’s best for visitors to your site.”

“Think about what makes your website unique, valuable or engaging.”

“Make your website stand out from others in your field.”

WEBMASTE

R GUID

ELIN

ES

• On-page optimization

• Technical optimization

• Relevant linking strategies

• Good content

How G

oogle

ranks

web

site

s

WHAT IS A KEYWORD?

If you were looking for someone like you, what would you put in the search box?

That’s a keyword!

ON-PAGE OPTIMIZATION

• URL

• Page Titles

• Description (Meta tag)

• Image “alt” tags

• Image names

• Heading tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.)

• Internal links/Anchor text

• Content

Search bot looks for keywords

CONTENT

IS K

ING!

• New content

• No keyword “stuffing”

• No duplicate or “canned” content

• No bad grammar, spelling errors or clumsy sentence structure

What

Goo

gle w

ants

to s

ee…

TECHNICAL SEO

• Intuitive Navigation – Text links, no broken links

• Fast loading pages

• XML site map

• Clean code – HTML5, CSS3, NO TABLES

• Helpful 404, 301 and 302 pages

Test site on various browsers (Firefox, Safari, Chrome, IE, smart phones, tablets)

Reconsider Flash

PAGE LINKS

• Beware of “link farms”

• Organic links are best:

• Comment on blogs and articles (include your URL)• Apply to relevant directories (eg DMOZ) • Ask for links!• Good content gets shared• Get “social”

GOOGLE CONSIDERS SOCIAL SIGNALS

• Facebook Posts, likes, shares and comments

• Twitter

• LinkedIn

• YouTube Videos

• Articles and Press releases published online

• Blog posts

• Blog comments

PER GOOGLE GUIDELINES:

“Focusing too hard on specific tweaks to gain ranking on search engines may not deliver the

desired results.”

“Design your website for human visitors. They are the main consumers of your content.”

WHY BOTHER WITH SEO?

Search engines decide how to answer questions

SEO gives you a better chance to be one of the answers

THE

WORD P

RO

Website Design

SEO

Content Marketing

Social Media

Digita

l Med

ia M

arke

ting

www.thewordpro.com