Is SEO really dead?

Since the latest updates of 20011 and 2012 with all the Google changes such as Panda and Penguin there has been a lot of talk by SEOs that perhaps traditional SEO is dead. I mean, who wants to sit on page 5 of the search results? Let’s face it: nobody looks there. But some tips are still relevant today and there are some new factors to take into account when promoting your business with SEO:

Keywords Still Matter : Latent Semantic Intelligence

The things that haven’t changed with Google are keywords and backlinks from authority websites. Both of these are still important though Google is becoming more intuitive, so if you’re searching for keywords you may also want to search on a variety of terms for one keyword as Google is now much more intuitive in its semantic algorithm: search for “botox” and get returned results for “anti wrinkle treatments”. Another example, the term “mobile phone” is also cell phone, iPhone, Droid, etc.

Content has always been king but now even more so

However, generating content it’s often not an easy process. The payoff however, is huge. Consider this: you wouldn’t want to share anything that wasn’t helpful, right? Why would you expect your readers to be any different? So incentivize your readers by offering them content they can’t wait to share. There are a few places you can go to get inspiration for your writing:

Ubersuggest.org/
Google alerts
Google suggest
Twitter trends and other social media

Interaction is the new citation

Make sure that you create a buzz by putting your content out onto social media and update regularly. Good places to start to build an audience are:

Google + (Plus)
Twitter
Facebook

Follow the HuffingtonPost SEO Tips to Penguin Proof your business

Find out more on SEO for local business listings

Local SEO and the power of blogging

• Seduce Google’s freshness algorithm .
• Generate interaction to activate Google’s social signals
• Develop a great link profile!
• Enables Google Blog rankings in search.
• Enables you to develop an interaction with a blogging community.
• Enables you to secure discussion through your comments forum.
• Provides you an online reputation model as you develop your voice.
• Provides a solid feed for developing your social media presence as you tweet your blogs, link with Facebook and all the other social media channels. More from SearchEngineLand.com

You can watch your rankings increase and take your local sales through the roof.

How Local Search Engine Optimization Can Work For Your Local Sydney Business

If you have your own website, then you’ve probably noticed how your search engine rankings effect the success of your site. In this article, you can learn how to use search engine optimization methods to bump you to the top.

You need to have good grasp of the concept of search engine optimization first. Rather than actual people deciding where a page ranks, a computer uses algorithms to determine rankings. Search engine optimization techniques attempt to improve your website ranking by identifying how these algorithms work.

A search engine uses several things when determining the ranking of your site. Engines look for keywords on your site. Furthermore, a search engine looks at your site’s inbound and outbound links, as well as traffic activity.

Deciding on the most effective search engine optimization techniques requires research and effort. Your site should be appealing to consumers and easy to locate. Populating your site with keywords in the text, title and headings will help you to achieve a higher ranking in the search engines.

Buying a high ranking is impossible. There are sponsored slots on the results page, but they are separate from the actual search results. If by chance you are able to afford a featured listing at the top of a search results page, that is great, but customers will still know that you paid for the ad placement.

SEO is much more than just inserting keywords. You also need to create internal and external links in order to be noticed by the search engines. It’s important to trade links and content with other suitable sites to build up your linking opportunities.

A target demographic is a way of describing a group of people that share a common quality or trait that would make them more likely to purchase your products or services over others. It is very likely that visitors will randomly stumble across your site. However, the majority of these visitors will not turn into customers due to the fact that they are not specifically searching for the products and services that you offer. The best way to get buyers instead of browsers to your site is to use targeted marketing techniques.

There are endless possibilities if you have a website for your business. A brick and mortar store is great, but having an internet presence means that you give customers opportunities to purchase from you when they are not able to come to your physical storefront. Be sure that you look at your website as a necessity and be sure to give it plenty of attention. Sending you that message was the purpose of this article, and we hope the information will serve your business well.

Google Over Optimization Penalty, What Is It?
The penalty for over optimization is a new patch on the algorithm from Google to stop their search results being outsmarted by SEO masterminds. Firstly, we had Google Panda update, and prior to that there was the paid links penalty last year and this year it is the over optimization penalty. This has now become the default of Google. Whenever there are too many new rankings issues are throwing Google’s algorithm by smart SEO companies they come up with some patch or other to silence their disclaimers.
Google, by no means, seems interested in totally changing their algorithm architecture. Instead, they have been patching their algorithm to fight those who trick their systems. Soon Google’s search algorithm will be a patch of patches with confusions all around.
Over Optimization is one such algorithm patch which Google will hit websites with that concentrate less on quality of content and more on SEO instead. Google’s anti-spam engineer, Matt Cutts, indicated the same at the SXSW which was held recently. With this new penalty, once it becomes effective, Google will be able to penalize sites for abusing Google’s algorithm with SEO tricks to manipulate rankings.

The basic idea is for Google to try and level the field a little bit. The desired Google outcome is for all those websites who have been “over optimizating” or “overly” doing their SEO, compared to website owners who are just making authoritative quality content for their websites, to be downgraded in terms of their rankings so that good quality content outranks content that has simply been heavily optimised to rank in Google (and which may not be good quality).
Matt Cutts has been quoted as saying “And so that’s the sort of thing where we try to make the web site, uh Google Bot smarter, we try to make our relevance more adaptive so that people don’t do SEO, we handle that, and then we also start to look at the people who sort of abuse it, whether they throw too many keywords on the page, or whether they exchange way too many links, or whatever they are doing to sort of go beyond what a normal person would expect in a particular area. So that is something where we continue to pay attention and we continue to work on it, and it is an active area where we’ve got several engineers on my team working on that right now.”

Why is it Important for Google to Implement The Over Optimization Penalty?
For a long time, in order to rank in the search engines, website owners have been writing for search engine algorithms rather than publishing quality that their audience wants to read. Innovative thoughts and original content has been somewhat stifled due to this and the internet is becoming full of mediocre content simply created to rank highly in the search engines. This is sometimes referred to as search engine spam.

So as a website owner you need to think about:
• Don’t you write what people want to read?
• Don’t you write for the audience?
• Don’t you write for traffic?
• Don’t you write for better search engine rankings?
If you answer in the affirmative to all the above, then perhaps you are guilty of simply producing a website that is trying to rank highly in the search engines, offers nothing new or innovative and could be seen to be gaming the results.
Perhaps it is time to start thinking how you can really add value to the user experience of your website by creating content which is really useful and unique.
• STOP keyword stuffing – Gone are the days when a keyword density of 3-4% will take your page or website safely to page one. Don’t stuff keywords in your title tags, meta description and everywhere else. Create content that makes semantic sense and reads as if written for a human and not Google’s search engine. Google’s latent semantic algorithm is complex enough to detect what your page or website is about.

• STOP using backlinks from useless places – This what is called link spam. As an SEO practice, it is best to can do your best to garner links from comments, directories and various networks by using link bait: good quality content on your website. The moment you seek out spammy links from paid directories etc to trick the system, you will be caught and killed.

• START creating content – Provide readers what they want to read but also make it useful, unique, informative and worth reading: not just sales copy. Write your content in a way that even if readers leave your site they have gone away with value. Google will reward you for it.

• START interlinking to old pages within the site from new content Once Google starts to crawl your website to index the new content you will be able to create an effective navigation throughout your website. And that you will do with the help of internal links that will link to older pages of your website. By using the idea of internal linking you are actually telling Google that my other content is also useful. You can crawl that too.