Google’s Love For Content

At times, companies will come to FirstPage looking for Search Engine Optimization Evaluations.  Generally speaking, people will ask three questions:

• How are we ranking?
• Where are the growth opportunities?
• Why aren’t we ranking as well as we used to?

What does Google’s Hummingbird mean for your SEO strategy?

These are all great questions, but perhaps the most interesting one is the third.  To answer it, we need to go into a bit of detail about how Google has changed over the years.
Google’s core mission is to provide the best, well-matched results to search queries.  To do this, they employ an algorithm that contains over 200 variables that determine the rank of each website in a Google search.  These algorithms are constantly evolving and are kept secret, so to protect the site owners from gaming the system.

Find out how to write for search engines and humans.

Google Penguin is the latest update to Google’s algorithm.  The primary purpose of this update is to discourage websites that are using tactics to cheat the system (keyword dumping, hiding text, etc).  One of the best ways to adapt to this change is to increase the amount of legitimate offsite content. Some other simple tasks to focus on include setting up Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube pages for your business, getting bloggers to talk about your website and claiming your business on some of the top online directories such as Yelp, Google Places, Yahoo! Directory, etc. This will give your business more personality while increasing the number of inbound links to your website.

Read our detailed guide on Google’s SERP.

Google Panda is an algorithm change that is focused on evaluating the quality of in-site content.  In Google’s eyes, a site is considered to have poor quality if a searcher quickly bounces off of their destination.  As a result, they will lower the ranking of that site relating to that particular search phrase.  Some of the factors we have seen that affect this include poor site design (people leave because the page doesn’t look like what they expected), duplicated content (identical text with different keywords smattered throughout), or inactivity (no recent updates).  The key takeaway: provide new, valuable, targeted content that your users will enjoy, and Google will likely favour you, too.

Learn more about writing content for your website.

At FirstPage Marketing, we have always helped our clients provide valuable content to their users.  This is now more important than ever. If you need help adapting to these changing times, get in touch and we’d be more than happy to guide you through the land of Pandas, Penguins and whatever other changes Google has planned for the future.

What is the best way to respond to Google reviews?

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