Search Engine Optimization

In April of 2010, Google announced that it had added site speed to its search engine ranking algorithm. Site speed carries less weight than other ranking factors, so less than 1% of search queries were affected as a result of Google’s update. That being said, site speed isn’t just important for your search engine ranking; faster sites also improve user experience. Studies have shown that visitors spend less time on slow sites. That’s why it’s imperative to increase your site’s speed.

If your website takes less than two seconds to load, you’re good. Studies show, however, that users will leave a site if it hasn’t loaded in four seconds. So, if your website takes longer than four seconds to load, you’ll annoy your site visitors and your search engine rankings will probably be affected.

Check How Fast Your Site Loads

The first thing you need to do is determine how fast your site loads. You can check your site’s speed with the following tools:

WebPagetest allows you to test your site’s performance in different web browsers and geographic locations.

Pingdom Tools will test the load times of all elements on a web page and find bottlenecks.

GTmetrix will grade your site’s performance using information from Yahoo! YSlow and Google Page Speed and then provide you with actionable recommendations.

If you have a Google Webmaster Tools account, you can go to Labs > Site Performance to see how fast your site loads for users around the world.

How to Increase Your Site’s Speed

Here are several quick fixes that will help to increase your site’s speed:

Website Compression

Compressing your website’s content will decrease the time it takes for your web server to send content to your website visitors. Tools like Gzip compress the size of the page that’s sent to the browser, which will decompress the information before displaying it to users. A tool like Gzip is capable of reducing file size by upwards of 70%.

Minimize 301 Redirects

If possible, avoid using 301 redirects because they force the browser to a new URL and require it to wait for the HTTP request to come back.

Remove Unnecessary Code

Code for external services, such as a widget that shows your company’s most recent Twitter updates or social media “share” buttons, can slow your site down. If an external service isn’t absolutely necessary and is providing you with little benefit consider removing it.

Upgrade Your Hosting Package

Switch to a hosting company with a better reputation, or upgrade to a better package with your hosting company to increase your site’s speed.

Reduce HTTP Requests

Your website will load faster if there are fewer HTTP requests. To reduce HTTP requests, minimize the number of scripts, style sheets, images, and other items that need to be loaded.

Optimize Images for the Web

Don’t use images that are larger than necessary. In addition, when you save images in a program like Photoshop, click “save for web” instead of “save” so that the file size is smaller.

Google’s Matt Cutts confirmed last December that Google factors social media activity into their ranking decisions, so there’s no better time than now to jump on the social media bandwagon to promote your content. Using Twitter, a micro-blogging service, is one of the most popular methods of networking and promoting content on the internet. Although “retweeted” links to your site won’t hold as much weight as web-based links, they will play an increasingly important role in your website’s SEO campaign. Here are some ways you can use Twitter to boost your search engine rankings.

Build an Active Presence

There’s a lot more to Twitter than just opening an account and posting links to your content. In order for Twitter usage to actually improve your rankings, you need to connect with other people in your industry and get them to retweet your updates. Start by following relevant people, jumping into conversations, joining Twitter chats, and offering to answer people’s questions. If you’re having a hard time finding people to follow, consider using Twitter search to see who is tweeting about your industry and then follow those people. You can also check out the following/follower lists of a major player in your industry and then follow the same people. Another easy way to find people to interact with via Twitter is by copying contact lists from other social media sites, such as LinkedIn or Foursquare.

Use Target Keywords in Your Tweets and Profile

Use target keywords in your tweets and Twitter profile, just as you would in your website content. If you use target keywords in your profile, you’re more likely to accumulate relevant followers, and if you use target keywords in your tweets and they get retweeted, it’ll help you rank for the terms that are most relevant to your site.

Make Your Updates Easy to Retweet

Use a short Twitter handle and keep your tweets concise so that they’re easier for people to retweet. You’re only allowed 140 characters (including spaces) in your tweets, so you need to keep things as short and sweet as possible, especially since people like to add their comments to tweets when they retweet them.

Host Contests to Encourage People to Retweet Your Updates

Need more people to retweet your updates? A great way to drive tons of traffic to your site, increase your follower count, and get your updates retweeted is to host a Twitter contest. In order to enter the contest, people must follow you on Twitter and retweet your link using a specific hash tag, which is essentially a sharp symbol with a keyword (i.e., #micmarketing). You would then pick a winner randomly out of all the people who retweeted your link with the particular hash tag you invented. The winner will get a prize, which could be anything from a free consultation to a free iPad. It’s up to you! Of course, the more enticing the prize, the more participants and links you’ll get.

Create Quality Content

Lastly, the most important thing you can do to improve your rankings with Twitter is create quality content. Twitter users crave informative, valuable content, so if you deliver great content and interact with people who are interested in what you have to offer, the retweets will follow.

You’re probably thinking: yeah, yeah, yeah, everybody says that you should publish quality content, but what exactly does that mean? Well, for one, your content needs to be in-depth and contain original findings and research. Don’t just rewrite everything else you see online; create content based on your own experiences and studies. Conduct surveys on a regular basis to find out what your readers want so you can deliver content that they’ll rave about!

Whether you’re a small mom and pop business or a large corporation, one of the most effective strategies in your online marketing arsenal is spying on your competitors. From identifying important keywords in your industry to determining where your competitors get their links, spying on your competition is a great way to improve your SEO campaign and ultimately outrank your competitors. Here are 5 simple spying techniques that will help you figure out exactly what your competitors are doing that gives them such great search engine visibility, so you can beat them at their own game.

1. Sign up for Google Alerts

Not only is using Google Alerts a great way to keep track of what’s going on your industry and what people are saying about your brand online, it’s also a great way to stay on top of what’s being said about your competitors. You can sign up to receive alerts anytime your competitors’ names or websites are mentioned online. Anytime a competitor is mentioned, it could also be a chance for you to request a link or market your business. Just be sure to keep a log of each competitor’s mentions so you can actually follow through.

2. Find out Every Time They Make Changes to Their Sites

Monitor changes to your competitors’ websites by entering their URLs and your email address at Changedetection.com. Every time your competitors make changes to their websites, you will receive an email. By keeping track of your competitors’ website changes, you’ll get a head’s up when your competitors add new services, content, etc.

3. Check Their Backlinks

Using the Yahoo! Site Explorer is a great way to find out how many links your competitors have and who is providing those links. If you find out where your top ranking competitors get their links, you can then determine if it’s possible to get links from the same sites. Furthermore, researching your competitors’ backlinks will help you determine approximately how many links and what types of links you’ll need to outrank your main competitors.

4. Determine What Keywords They’re Targeting

To get an idea of what keywords your competitors are targeting, inspect their meta tags and use the Google AdWords tool to generate keyword suggestions based on the website’s URL. You can also type your competitors’ URLs in Backlinkwatch.com to find out what keyword anchor text their backlinks have. This information will provide you with clues about which keywords they’re targeting in their SEO campaigns.

5. Monitor Their Social Media Accounts

The search engines have made it clear that social media mentions matter in SEO. Monitoring your competitors’ social media accounts is important because if you determine who is talking about your competition and what they’re saying, you can use that information to supercharge your own social media marketing efforts.

To start with, subscribe to your competitors’ RSS feeds, monitor the comments sections of their blogs, and follow their activity on social networking sites. To take your social media monitoring efforts up a notch, you can use a service like Social Mention, which notifies you anytime a competitor is mentioned on the social web.

Approximately 12% of all search queries were affected by Google’s “Farmer” update. Was your website a victim? If you’ve noticed that traffic has gone down significantly since February 24th and you’re absolutely sure that Google’s update is the cause, it’s essential to be proactive about it rather than cry about the injustice or ask yourself, “Why me?”

It’s possible that your site is completely innocent and was unfortunately just lumped into the same category as content farms, and if that’s the case, your best bet would be to contact Google and provide them with feedback about how your site was affected. The best way to do this would be to post on the thread that Google created in their webmaster discussion forum. You can’t expect Google to immediately make changes to your site’s rankings based on the facts you provide them, but you may feel reassured knowing that the algorithm is a work-in-progress. Your site’s lost rankings may only be temporary.

If you are indeed guilty of creating mediocre content that doesn’t provide value and engage users, however, then there’s a lot of work ahead of you. Here are some things you can do to improve the quality of your site and regain some of the traffic you lost after the Google “Farmer” update was implemented:

Check Your Analytics Data

Prior to making any changes to your site, have a look at your analytics data to make sure that February 24^th is when your site’s traffic levels went down. Also, check traffic sources to be sure that the drop in traffic occurred in organic search. Traffic fluctuates on a regular basis and for a variety of reasons, so it’s worthwhile to check your analytics to ensure that the “Farmer” update was indeed to blame for the dip in traffic.

Determine Which Queries and Pages Have Lost Traffic

Check your analytics data and Google Webmaster Tools to determine which queries and pages have lost traffic or if overall traffic is down. The Google “Farmer” update gauges quality signals on a page-level basis, so it’s possible that only certain categories of your site content were affected.

Get Rid of Significantly Impacted Pages or Improve the Content

Were certain pages of your site significantly impacted by the Google “Farmer” update? If you find that those pages have low quality content, you should either delete them altogether or improve the content substantially.

Nowadays, writing original content isn’t enough to appease Google. Your content needs to be useful, in-depth, credible, and authoritative. To create content that satisfies Google, answer your prospects’ questions within your content; include statistical data; write longer, more detailed articles; and keep all of the content on your site up-to-date.

Add More Unique Content to Ad-Heavy Pages

Make sure your pages contain more content than ads. Many users will not engage with your content if there are too many ads plastered on the page. On pages of your site that have lost traffic, minimize ads and add more unique content, when applicable.

Evaluate Visitor Behavior on Your Site

Look at your analytics data to determine how visitors to your site behave. Do people spend a lot of time on your site or do they click away immediately? Are a good portion of visitors to your site return visitors? If the bounce rate of search visitors is high, it could mean that your content isn’t engaging enough. If you’re fully convinced that your content is of top-notch quality, perhaps your website’s design is confusing, there are too many ads, or your site’s navigation isn’t clear.

Promote Your Content

If user engagement on your site is lacking (e.g., your articles don’t get Tweets, Facebook “Likes,” or comments), but your content is good, perhaps you just need to build awareness of its existence. You can do this by writing press releases, submitting guest posts to relevant blogs, interacting with people in your industry in niche forums, and using social media.

Get Feedback from a Third Party

To get an idea of how your website looks in your visitors’ eyes, try to get feedback from a third party. Ask them questions like:

• Would you be comfortable submitting your credit card information through this site?
• Are the articles on this site good enough to be in a magazine?
• Do you think this site has too many advertisements?

Evaluate the answers to these questions to determine which areas of your site need improvement and how you can ultimately boost search traffic, conversions, and trust.

Last week, Google implemented what is now being referred to as the Google “Farmer” update. Here’s the scoop, according to Google’s blog:

“…In the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.”

This recent change to Google’s algorithm is significant considering that around half a billion searches are performed per day in the US alone. Currently, the Google “Farmer” update only affects US search results, but the change will take effect around the world in the near future.

It is widely believed that Google updated their algorithm to weed out content farms from the search results. Content farms are sites that focus on quantity rather than quality because they make a profit off advertising based on the volume of content they produce. Content farms typically publish rehashed content that is focused on popular search terms and requires little thought, research, or resources to write.

The owners of the content farms that were affected by this update are probably pulling their hair out right about now, but all in all, Google’s “Farmer” update is a sign of progress and good news for both web users and publishers. It means that producing high quality content will become more important than ever before. To ensure that your website continues to rank well in the search engines and receive satisfactory levels of targeted traffic, here are a few things you can do:

• Get active in social media. Social media is becoming increasingly relevant, especially since Google’s algorithm takes social media popularity into account when ranking websites. Plus, if you generate plenty of traffic and leads via your social media marketing efforts, your business won’t take a hard hit if search traffic to your site decreases. Basically, you shouldn’t put all of your eggs in one basket; diversifying your marketing strategy is essential.
• Build high quality inbound links. Article directories, such as Ezine Articles and Articles Base, were significantly affected by the Google “Farmer” update. That likely means that links from those article sites will have less value from now on. Therefore, move your focus away from article marketing as a link-building strategy and instead focus on networking with other content producers in your industry to solicit high quality links.
• Hire a professional writer. Consider hiring a skilled, SEO and social media-savvy copywriter to produce content for your site. Your content is more likely to rank well in the search engines and be shared in online communities if it’s engaging, informative, and well-written.
• Publish more in-depth content. To please the search engines, your best bet would be to publish more in-depth content, such as “how to” articles, case studies, reviews, and analytical pieces. Avoid publishing rehashed content. In other words, if you don’t have anything new to say, don’t bother saying it at all.

Lastly, keep an eye on your analytics reports. If you notice that traffic to your site has gone down for certain keywords, analyze your content to determine why that could be. Work tirelessly to create highly valuable content that is useful to your target audience and the search engines will reward you. Furthermore, make an effort to build a loyal customer base via social media, in-person networking, list building, and other means, so Google’s constant algorithm changes don’t pose such huge risks for your business.