Google unleashed its Panda update upon the digital world early in 2011 and it changed the landscape for the SEO community and certainly focused the minds of many webmasters on paying far more attention to particular areas of their website when going about optimisation.
If you thought 2011 would spell the end of the matter you would be mistaken. Panda 2.2 is looming on the horizon and may well create as many surprises as the original.
So in order to ensure that your website has a good SEO strategy moving forward into 2012 what sort of things should you be considering?
Good Quality Content
It makes sense starting with this as good quality content should be at the forefront of any webmasters mind and its importance cannot be emphasised enough. Without this a website doesn't stand a chance. Remember that content should be original.
Diversification
Look closely at where your website traffic originates from and explore new avenues and opportunities for visitor generation. Being well optimised on Google organic searches is great however you should not allow your business to become solely reliant on this as its source of income. Even the best SEO's can make mistakes and sometimes things can occur that are out of your control that could affect rankings such as server issues or mistakes by colleagues.
Paid search is sometimes a good route of income that is not properly explored by many people. A common misconception is that organic searches convert better than paid ones however this is not the case and is usually the result of a paid search campaign gone wrong that has left a bad taste in the mouth of the advertiser. There are some things that can be done to help a PPC campaign yield better results;
· Keywords - use words that actually describe the bargain on offer and alternate your approach for different products or services.
· Cost - calculate the actual cost in obtaining and keeping organic rankings as sometimes this can be a lot higher than you first imagine. Compare this to your PPC costs.
· Reliability - organic rankings are never certain whereas as long as you cough up, paid search will appear on page 1.
· Control - one negative thing about SEO is the inability of the advertiser to fully understand or target users behaviour when making searches.
Understanding Success
This argument has been covered many a time but its well worth repeating here. Use KPI's (key performance indicators) to measure the success of SEO and monitor if changes to your site have affected both rankings and visitor statistics.
Use caution when using Google's own webmaster tools for stats as it will give personalised results when a user is logged in.
Make Friends
Otherwise known as community building and a bit of an unknown at present and with the ongoing discussion as to whether Google will at some point use social signals from +1 to determine rank. Of course a big part of this is whether +1 reaches a size where it will be worth incorporating it in the search algorithm.
Putting the time and effort in building a community will help lessen the impact that a Panda update may have in the future.
Make it Easy to Use
Remember to write for people to read, not a machine. Google's own guidelines tell us this and its well worth addressing this early rather than leaving it until further down the line when the damage may already have been done.
SEO UK, an SEO Company UK who specialize in search engine optimisation, social media and reputation management services.
