From McCord Web Services – Google Partner and Web Visibility Experts
Nancy McCord, of McCord Web Services, (a Google AdWords Certified Partner) explains when you would want to use Google AdWords Express. This streamlined automated version of Google AdWords is a great platform for local selling business owners who have a low click budget and do not want to hire an AdWords account manager.
Google’s Panda and Penguin updates have turned the web upside down leaving SEO experts struggling to understand the what it takes to now earn top organic placement. In this recent article from Website Magazine (a publication that I really like), some tips are revealed that may help you to update your SEO strategy.
First, it appears that big brands are breaking all the rules and getting or retaining organic placement. There are some important take-aways we can glean from the research done for this article.
1. Size and authority of your website are key for organic placement. A 5 page website will never be able to garner organic placement when competing with larger well placed website. Blogging remains the very best way to quickly build authoritative content for small to medium sized businesses who want to compete with big brands.
2. Facebook shares will impact your organic placement. Twitter activity is down the list to number six for impact, but Facebook social signals remain a key indicator of success in placement on Google. That means not just posting on Facebook but having people share your posts that contain links.
3. The content in the <h1> tag and the volume of content on a page for big brands do not appear to impact organic placement.
“Surprisingly, the data show a negative correlation between these factors and rankings – contradicting traditional SEO theory,” explains Marcus Tober, Searchmetrics’ CTO. “So, not having keywords in headlines or having less text on a page seems to be associated with sites that rank higher.”
That’s interesting news pointing out that authority of a site actually counteracts the keyword density and using keywords in the <h1> tags for big brand sites. However, that does not mean that smaller brands cannot and should not optimize their page code, but do it smarter and in a natural readable format.
4. Too much advertising on a page even for big brands appears to impact organic placement. This is a direct impact from Google’s Panda and Penguin updates. It doesn’t mean you cannot have ads on your page, but need to not have your page all about ads.
In a nutshell, here are the factors Website Magazine says are important. Make sure to read the full article as it is really pretty helpful.
In the last few weeks Bing has upgraded its webmaster control panel from insignificant to significant. In fact, in many ways Bing Webmaster Tools make Google Webmaster Tools appear superfluous.
In the new Bing interface here are some new things you can now do:
Personally I find many of the tools very user friendly and helpful. I think Bing has done a wonderful job at integrating these new tools into their webmaster control panel and making them highly understandable and helpful for website owners and site webmasters.
I have had a rash of phone calls from prospects telling me that their organic placement has dropped so much after they paid a ton of money for a new website that they want to repost the website they had five years ago to get their old traffic and Google.com placement back. Sorry, but there is no time machine that will take us back to the time you placed highly on Google.com.
A website is not a brochure; you create it once and then hand it out for years. It is a work of art, a puzzle, a tool, a selling machine. It needs care and it needs content updates. What worked three years ago and five years ago certainly does not work now. Even if we could reload a website that performed well five years ago on Google, it would certainly not perform in the same place today.
The Web has changed dramatically in the time that I have been providing professional services and it has significantly changed in the past three years and significantly changed this past year. What is important for website owners to understand is that now the content is crucial for organic placement, but more than that, it cannot just stop at great content.
A well placed website (in the organic search results) needs:
That in a nutshell is a web authority site! A website that is beyond a brochure but provides real help and information for readers not only on services and products that are sold but on topics and ideas. This is no five page website, that’s for sure.
It takes time and money to build and maintain a web authority site, but the rewards can be big. With a site that is well placed organically, you may not need to spend quite so much in advertising to get traffic to your site. The older your authority site is, the more links you will naturally earn which will continue to improve your placement as well. Additionally, the depth of information you have on your website will let prospects know you know your business and are the go-to person for their needs.
What used to work three years ago for organic placement certainly will not work now, but quality content and information-rich web pages will never go out of style. I invite you to visit our “web authority website” and see if we can help you too.