The most recent significant update to the Google ranking algorithm is the Penguin Update unleashed on April 24. It’s designed to reward high quality websites and penalize what Google calls webspam. Web sites that may have enjoyed high rankings due to things like keyword stuffing and excessive keyword placement in various places in the code may experience lowered rankings.

The main focus of this change is to remove content from websites with:

• Spammy link profiles and link manipulation like buying links, poor links, too many links with the same anchor text, etc.)
• Too many links from client websites (“web hosting by XXX”)
• Manipulative link schemes like link farms and 3-way link schemes
• Duplicate content
• Keyword stuffing
• Doorway pages
• Over-optimization

Have you suffered from Penguin?

If you think you’ve been unfairly penalized by this update, Google has a form to complain about it and possibly get your website re-evaluated. Google’s Pengiun complaint form is here.

Ned help recovering from a Penguin slap-down? Need help optimizing your site without running into a problem with the Penguin update? Rank Magic can help.

Boy, that sounds pretty dumb. Why would you want to hide your address at Google Places? Well, depending on the nature of your business you might have to.

Google has actually been calling businesses that are listed in Google Places and asking them if they serve clients at the listed address. If the answer is no, as is common for many home-based businesses and businesses that perform services at the customer’s location (think appliance repair companies as an example), then your listing in Google Places may suddenly vanish.

This happened to a potential client of ours, so we want all of our clients to know and be prepared for this. If you’re really not prepared to accept customer visits at your listed address you should hide your address in Google Places to prevent the penalty. Otherwise you may disappear from Google Places until you do hide your address.

For more background on this change, see the excellent article at SEOmoz. It describes the odd history of this policy change at Google and provides good advice to help you decide whether to display your address.

If you need advice on this, or anything else related to your visibility in Google, please contact us at Rank Magic.

Matt says it best, so take a look at the video.

Increasingly employing variations on a keyword phrase rather than strict repetitions of a verbatim phrase seem to work best.

At Rank Magic, we do only White Hat SEO. Contact us if you need help with your search visibility.

Search Engine Land’s recent Local Consumer Review Survey looked at the way consumer behavior has changed since 2010, and what they found is important for local businesses. Here are a few highlights:

• Only 15% of internet users don’t use the web to find local businesses, while 24% use the web every week or almost every day.

What that means for you is that having a web site that represents you well and that customers can find can obviously drive more business your way.

Question: How many times have you used the Internet to find a local business in the last 12 months?

Some other findings  —

• A clear majority say that positive customer reviews at places like Yelp and Google Places make them trust a business more.
• And 52% say they’re more likely to use a local business if they’ve seen positive reviews about them.
• In fact 72% say they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from people they know.

Those are all reasons we encourage all of our clients to ask their own delighted customers to write reviews in such places. Of course you need to claim your listings in those places and fill out as much as possible about your business there first. For more on that, see our blog posts in the Local Search category.

Does your experience agree with this study? Let us know by leaving a comment.

Jena Ellis recently compiled a list of what she terms 9 Totally Awesome 404 Pages. Take a look, and after you have a chuckle see if these examples prompt you for a way to make your own 404 page unique or even fun.

While you don’t have to become a full-on SEO expert, you should do your homework and try to understand the basics of what’s happening to your website. Never hire an SEO consultant and let them make changes to your website. You should maintain control of your site, in conjunction with your webmaster because too many SEOs have hurt their clients by using black hat SEO tactics. You need to be part of the process  — the  more involved you are the easier the process will be and the better results you’re likely to get.

Here are six ways small business owners can get more value from their SEO efforts.

1. You don’t need to become a full-fledged SEO expert, but you should develop an overall understanding of the process. Too many small business owners know just enough to be dangerous, and focus on the meta keywords tag or look for ways to “game” the search engines. Some of those things (the keywords meta tag) are useless and others (like trying to trick the search engines) will bite you in the tail sooner or later. You need to listen to your SEO consultant and, above all, ask questions.
2. You need to remain in control. Never hire an SEO company that’s going to go and make changes to your website. Not all of us in this business are competent, and not all of us follow the guidelines of the search engines in terms of ethical SEO. You and your webmaster need to retain control of your website. That way, any SEO recommendations have to pass two sets of critical eyes: yours and your webmaster’s. If anything looks suspicious or if there’s anything you don’t really understand, you can ask about it before it’s applied to your website.
3. You need to be involved. You can’t just hire an SEO consultant and think that paying them is all you have to do. For example, you need to be the one to decide what keywords you need to be optimized for.  Selecting the keywords that will give you the bets ROI requires more than number crunching  — it requires an understanding of your business and your customers. You also need to be involved in any changes to the copy on your website. SEO consultants and webmasters don’t understand your business well enough to rewrite your website copy. You need to be in charge of what it says on your site.  SEO consultants are not, by and large, effective marketing copywriters, and neither are webmasters. You may chose to hire a copywriter to hone the marketing message while ensuring the proper keyword placement on your pages, but you need to work with them so your site says what you need it to say in an engaging way that projects your personality. You can’t just turn copywriting over to anyone and expect not to be involved.
4. You have to participate in the boring stuff up front. Make sure all the contact information on your site is correct and up to date. Participate in keyword selection. Start or maintain your blog and listings in social media like Facebook and LinkedIn. Work on honing the copy on your site in accordance with SEO recommendations. Your level of participation in all this translates directly into the level of success you achieve with your SEO.
5. You need to understand SEO success comes from the sum of all the parts and there’s no single magic bullet. Google has more than 200 factors that govern where you rank when someone searches for what you do. Here are just a few:
1. You need to have a clean website that search engines can understand .
2. You need to have “authority” gained by having other good websites link to yours.
3. You need to have appropriate keyword placement on your site, both visibly an din the code.
4. You need keywords in the links that point to your site.
5. You need exposure from directories.
6. You need social media exposure to help establish your brand.
7. You need effective and engaging copy on your site to convert visitors into paying customers.
8. You should have an active blog with helpful information for your customer base.
9. If you’re a face-to-face business, you need local search optimization.
10. You need positive customer reviews and testimonials.
6. Don’t try to rush it. Don’t expect results overnight. Depending on where you start, expect it to take three or four months before you start seeing results. Trying to rush doesn’t help. SEO is not a sprint but a marathon. I’ve seen many people start a blog to improve their online visibility (a very good idea!) and write six or seven posts the first month, three the next, and then nothing ever after. A blog needs regular feedings. It would have been better to spread those same posts out, even only once a month, than be a flash in the pan blog. Ongoing link building at a steady rate is far more effective than getting a  blitz of new links all at once and the no new links for a long time.

Follow these simple principles and you’ll get much more out of your SEO.

Want professional help and a friendly hand along the way? We can help.

According to The Huffington Post:

At first glance, the site resembles a collage of images ranging from Hello Kitty cupcakes to nail polish and ornate wedding dresses. But take a closer look at the user demographics and you’d be sorely wrong to dismiss the concept.

Nearly a third of all Pinterest users have annual salaries of $100,000 or more, almost 70 percent are female and the largest age demographic represented on the site are people between 25 and 34. What more could an advertiser want?

Moreover, since the pinboard-style website’s inception in September 2009, the site has seen a nearly 900 percent increase in unique visitors, with 17.8 million unique monthly views in February, up from 11.7 million one month earlier.

In terms of time users spend on the site, Pinterest is only third to Facebook and Tumblr, with users spending an average of 98 minutes on the site per month, Mashable explains.

Its referral traffic — that is, the number of users it sends to other websites — is also through the roof, beating out Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn combined.

That referral traffic fact means that id your website has content that people are driven to Pin, those return links will bring motivated visitors to your website. And they will also drive up your link popularity and, in turn, your rankings in the search engines.

You can only join by invitation, so go to Pinterest and request an invitation. Then look for Rank Magic.

We help clients get listed at Google Places, Yahoo Local and Bing Local, to claim their listings, and to complete those listings in a manner that will help them to be more visible in the local (map-related) search results in those three search engines. Clients report that provides tremendous benefit to their visibility and traffic. May we help you with that?

A Service to Expand on Local Search Optimization

Local optimization can be more than Google, Yahoo and Bing, though.  With more than 70% of searchers looking for local information the media is changing.  Now iPads and Android tablets, cell phones, laptops and GPS devices are the tools consumers are using to search with.

There’s an App for That

All the new tools have come with all new applications.  Many of those apps are quasi-search engines themselves: MapQuest, Angie’s List, Google+ and dozens more. So how do you optimizer your site for these new local media sites?

Location, Location, Location

A few years ago your location was your actual physical address and the Yellow Pages was how people found you.  The Yellow Pages is going the way of your local pay phone, and what once was the best location for your business to be found is now almost obsolete. You need to register your business profile with as many of these new local media sites as possible.

A New NJ Company May Be Able to  Help

LL2 (Local Listings2) has come up with a way to help you optimize your visibility on these additional local sites.  For starters, they can register your business on up to 36 of the top local media sites.

Review Sites

Many of these sites are review sites like Google+ and Angie’s List and Yelp where customers can write reviews about your products or services. Of course companies are likely to receive both good and bad reviews on these sites. To defend against any negative reviews you need to have your profile and your message as the first thing potential customers see. LL2 can help with that.

Links

All of the local media sites have a place for you to link to your website.  So a side benefit is that if you register with 36 engines you have 36 reputable links coming back to your site, from usually high ranking sites.

Rank Magic Special Offer

Disclaimer: Although we know and trust the folks who started LL2, we don’t yet have any experience with their new services. We can vouch for the concept, though, and expect it will provide good value.

LL2 is offering a special for Rank Magic blog readers.  Just go to the site and pick a plan, fill out the form and hit submit. In the box titled “Ad Agency”, type in “Rank Magic”. Do not enter your credit card information.  Someone from LL2 will follow up with a phone call and offer you a 40% discount off prices listed on the site.  Unfortunately, the site is not setup to give special discounts but the good news is you get to talk to someone knowledgeable to answer any questions.

While they offer ongoing monthly service, if you’re adept at maintaining social media accounts you might ask about an option just to get you set up and optimized on all of them as a one-time project. You will need to keep them up to date thereafter of course, and provide updates periodically to all of them.

According to research conducted at Missouri University of Science and Technology, it takes under three seconds to form a first impression when someone lands on your website.

“We know first impressions are very important,” says Dr. Hong Sheng, assistant professor of business and information technology at Missouri S&T. “As more people use the Internet to search for information, a user’s first impressions of a website can determine whether that user forms a favorable or unfavorable view of that organization.”

A major factor

(Credit: Image courtesy of Missouri University of Science and Technology)

First impressions are a major factor in whether a person remains on a website long enough to find what they’re looking for or long enough to take an action like buying something or calling a phone  number. A poor first impression drives away potential customers.

Using eye-tracking software and an infrared camera, the researchers monitored college students’ eye movements as they scanned the web pages. They then analyzed the eye-tracking data to determine how long it took for the students to focus on specific sections of a page — such as the menu, logo, images and social media icons — before they moved on to another section.

It took 2.6 seconds for the students to scan and then focus on an item on the web page, where they formed initial impressions. The item they first focused on was fixated on for less than 2 tenths of a second before their eyes moved on to other items on the page.

After rating the sites, analysis showed that students stayed longer on the pages that they scored more highly for their first impression. That’s not surprising, but indicates that first impressions have a strong impact on how long a person is willing to view or read a web page.

The elements on the page that drew students’ focus and displayed the greatest interest were these, in order of attention time:

• The website’s logo.
• Equally important was the main navigation menu, whether horizontally along the top of vertically down the left side of the page.
• The search box, if there was one.
• Social networking links to sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
• The site’s main image, if there was one
• The site’s written content.
• The bottom border or footer of the page.

One thing that wasn’t focused on during this study was banner ads, but that’s a topic for another blog post.