Unique Content

This has been a good rule of thumb since the advent of Google and other major search engines. It is even more so now. The days of looking at what your competitors are doing and emulating it are gone. Your content now has to stand out from the rest in order to be ranked.

Keep The User In Mind

The experience of the user on your website is being monitored. If users are bounced, pages load slowly, or ads are constantly assaulting them, your website will be ranked lower and lower until it is beyond irrelevant.

Socialize

Google has incorporated social media into its results. No ignoring now. Tweet, Link, create a Facebook buzz, whatever you want, just get going. The more often your business is tweeted or the Like button is clicked, the better your site will rank.

Market Yourself

You are your best advocate. You must market your company and services in order to create a brand and a buzz. Panda will recognize your business and place you higher in the rankings if you are mentioned more often across the internet.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to promote your business online without the help of an outside company. Marketing, social media, and branding are not within the scope of a single persons expertise. It may be time to shop around for the right search engine optimization group to improve your sales and web relevance.

The post 4 Ways To Take Advantage of Google Panda appeared first on LocalGiant.

Now enters Google. 2011 introduces their most recent evolution called the “Panda” or “Farmer” that promises to weed out low quality and shallow sites that simply wastes the viewer’s time. The new algorithm retains in their high ranks sites that sets the more modern SEO principle of mainly having original and valuable content that the audience can use, refer to or share and “buzz”. This is now applied to all English language queries worldwide and already had a measured 12% impact or effect on the searches made. This is of course continuously subject to updates for a more fine-tuned delivery of quality sites for every query.

Google has released a set of guidelines for three main areas of design and content, technical and with a special emphasis on quality guidelines that are to be followed so that a site wouldn’t be penalized or eventually blocked from being searched on Google. These guidelines boil down to an ideal site that contains good and original, if not outstanding content that is aimed for the user.

A company’s goal should therefore shift from attracting search traffic to that of providing a site whose composition should be well orchestrated and contains enough quality content that is valuable and relevant for it to be “morally” acceptable to Google standards and their new “high quality sites algorithm” as they call it.

The post Site Visibility and the Wisdom Behind What Google Says appeared first on LocalGiant.

Just this week, though, Google has clearly changed their mind about how they treat local businesses. The following changes were noticed:

1) The same business can now show more than one result.
2) Organic webpage placement no longer directly influence rankings.

A quick study of these new hybrid results seems to show that they are the same results that can be seen on the first page of Google Maps, but with the ranks on the first page of results altered. The strong bias of the near organic ranking algorithm had is no longer overpowering and the traditional Maps search results are shining through, again. This essentially re-opens the for local businesses and helps them achieve prime organic search results.

Aside from these change, Google is also displaying a lot more 7-Pack results at the expense of hybrid ones.

Observers have begun to call these changes collectively as the “Google Local Panda Update”, since they came so recently after Google rolled out their Google Panda search algorithm. However, it’s not likely that the new update has anything to do with these changes.

The post Google Hybrid Search Results Retaken by Local Businesses appeared first on LocalGiant.