Here are some quick online marketing tips:
- Use basic SEO techniques
- Don’t try to fight Google
- Write content for your visitors, not Google
- Google shouldn’t be your only online marketing strategy
To clarify that last tip, as an online marketer you can’t spend all your time chasing your Google search ranking – it will go up and down as Google’s algorithm changes.
You see, Google is in a war. It’s always been in a war. A war against shady marketers who try to “game” the system to come out on top.
In the Internet Marketing world there’s always been tons of ways to get to the top of Google’s search results “the easy way”. Google wants inbound links? Get your auto link generator or join “link farms”. Google wants content? Get your auto content generator and create hundreds of crappy “articles”.
What Google really wants is decent, informative content that answers the user’s question to be at the top of the list.
So, every once in a while Google changes the algorithm it uses to figure out who’s on top to counteract all the spammy sites that have been using so-called black hat SEO methods to get there.
They recently announced a new release that affects about 11.8% of the queries.
Here’s another part of the story. To help your personal browsing, at least using the Chrome browser, there’s an extension called Personal Blocklist. It’s kind of like a “Dislike” button I’ve outlined in red below.
Chrome Personal Blocklist extension
While Google didn’t use data it monitors to create the algorithm, it did compare the new results with the block list and found it matched up pretty well.
However, we did compare the Blocklist data we gathered with the sites identified by our algorithm, and we were very pleased that the preferences our users expressed by using the extension are well represented. If you take the top several dozen or so most-blocked domains from the Chrome extension, then this algorithmic change addresses 84% of them, which is strong independent confirmation of the user benefits.
A few of the white hat marketers have already come out saying their page rankings have improved since the algorithm change.
What we tell our clients is “you can’t game the system”. Other than basic SEO techniques that help Google bots – like accurate page titles, descriptions and headings – what you need is legitimate, informative content that helps the searcher.
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The results of their yearly Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Survey have just been released by MarketingSherpa with some interesting findings. This year, the SEM field was getting so big that they broke their survey down into two parts, SEO and PPC. This survey report deals with SEO.
In the results of over 2,000 responses from B2B and B2C marketers, the first thing that hit me was only a third of businesses use a formal SEO process. Almost half use what they call ‘informal processes’ and 20% have no SEO plan at all!
Also, two twists in modern search engine marketing are ‘personalized’ search (which means different people get different search results depending on their search history) which screws up the metrics of your SEO program, and the advent of social media results showing up on search engine results pages (SERPS). Continue reading .
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