Shortly after Google’s algorithm changes many websites have witnessed a fall in page ranking and traffic. Many content farms update their website with cheap content by reproducing or rewriting cheap quality content which were copied from other websites just for the purpose of search engine traffic and ad revenue and hence not providing any valuable information to the users. Google’s intervention and change of policy have drastically affected the websites like Mahalo, ezinearticles, Suite101 and more. However if you are updating your site with valuable original content you will not loose much. Google panda update has reduced the potential traffic of thousands of smaller websites and in particular blogs also. As always WRITE FOR USERS NOT FOR GOOGLE.

How exactly can you find out whether your website is affected?

Google has confirmed that change in its algorithm has tumbled tons of websites and as pointed out by statistics, approximately 12% of websites has been influenced by this move. So, how will you find out whether your website is included in that list or not? You need not call any tech savvy for discovering this stuff.

One easy way is, go to trends.google.com and log in using your mail id. You will know the fate of the website and the impact of panda update by typing the URL of the website in the box provided. While searching use the “last 12 months” parameter. Another way is to analyse your analytics data for the last 3 months.

Below is the Google trends for wisegeek.com which is one of the worst affected website. See how the graph is going down in the recent few days.

Check for the number of keywords for the last 3 or 4 months in your web analytics. See whether it’s dropped or not.

Popular websites like labnol.org has been worst hit by the panda update. It has lost almost half of its Google’s traffic by this new intervention. In this regard, Sistrix has released a comprehensive list of the worst hit websites due to the innovative benchmark of Google’s search engine. List of worst affected websites below:

Tips for lifting your lost poise

Having lost your potential visitors you are left distressed because of content farming update from Google. Now it is essential to boost the traffic and restore the page ranking. So let us find out what can be done for improving the traffic and build up the lost empire as before.

Now the hottest topic of the day is finding out the ways and means for fixing the problem of website traffic. A number of sites have already started musing over this issue by having discussions and more chats for finding out a solution.

The fact is it is not so easy to regain the lost traffic and as many others think it cannot be achieved overnight. You have to work hard to recover the rankings and it will take some reasonable time.

First step is to find out what exactly you have lost? Find out from the Google’s trend how badly is your website affected and drag in some statistical data regarding the percentage of lost traffic. Do some homework to find on what basis Google has downsized your website.

Find out whether the low ranking was due to the content of the article or it was due to the particular keyword. Improve the standard of your content by sticking on to the value. First accept that if you have lost more than 60-70% of the traffic then nothing more can be done for bringing it back. In case your loss is only 15-25% then something could be done for improvising the site.

Some tips are given below for fixing your problem:-

• Rationalize the most important pages which caused the problem
• Delete the unwanted pages which were created by using cheap content farming techniques
• Proper use of Nofollow tag and Canonical tag
• Hire genuine writers who could do wonders to rebuild your traffic
• Restructure the site with improved content by keeping users in mind

Above all, you should remember one thing. Google’s server will again list out your site in the first page, if your content and quality is genuine. So do not try to cook the content. Take time to analyze the issue. You can also write a feedback to the Google mentioning the changes you have made. Wait patiently for some time and follow the results.

Expand your sources

Another way of sorting out this issue is to broaden your horizons. Don’t just depend on Google alone. Share information to your friends and well wishers by newsletter which can bring you more traffic. Add yourself in community sites like Face book and twitter. You can also include advertisement about your product or add some latest developments of your site in social websites. Nowadays, many potential users seek information from these social sites and this could help in restoring your traffic. Social sites have become a powerful medium now and make best of use of them for your product.

To conclude, you have to deal with this issue in creative approach. Think from the perspective of the user and find out what he will expect from you. Avoid including low quality content on your site. Instead devise a new plan by adding fresh inputs which are genuine and unique.

Content farm is nothing but a company which handles and pays lot of freelancers to write and to produce greater number of texts or articles for increasing the rating of their website or blog using the Search Engine Optimization technique. These articles or texts for that matter are purposely written to satisfy the algorithms of the search engine thereby increasing their page ranking and number of potential customers to their site. To put it simple, they can generate revenue by attracting each and every visitor to their web page.

Now the issue before us is Google has silently introduced a major change in the algorithm of the search engine which decides the fate of the thousands of website owners across the world. Instead of displaying search content from content farms (which it was doing before) now Google has switchover to generate good quality search results for its user. Nevertheless, Google has not fully implemented this algorithm change worldwide. Now to begin with it has introduced this change from middle of February in U.S. alone. It has plans to progressively execute this change to other countries also.

This innovative idea of Google would for sure have large impact on low quality content farms who were once finding the top listed page ranking through search engines. Needless to say it would reduce the page ranking of many popular (!!) websites who were once boasting themselves as No.1 in the content world.

But what about the poor user who entirely depend on Google for searching anything from booking a move ticket to understand complex mathematical calculations. The user should thank the Google full heartedly because this update would fetch him better results ever before. And he would enjoy the original content generated from one of the good website which gives value for the stuff and not only for page ranking.

Infographic: Search Engine History by Infographiclabs

You’re targeting Google and definitely this is the first place you should go to select your keywords. Enter the keyword “CRM” and get the keyword suggestions by Google. Make sure you have selected your country of target in the field just above the search box. I usually keep the match type as “Exact” as this will give me more clarity on the keywords which I have to choose. After zeroing in the keyword which you’re planning to use, click on the “Google insights” button to view the search trend in Google over a period.

Export the selected keywords which you’re planning to target and keep this in one sheet and in the other sheet note the trends/position of all the available keywords. This will help you to prioritize your keywords based on the trend and the search volume.

Once you’re done with your keyword selection then next step is to verify your selection. There may also be some related keywords which you might have missed in your first step. So let’s make sure we haven’t missed any related keywords. Below are the few ways to verify your selection and ensure the quality of your selection.

1. Google Search Suggestion

Go to Google.com and type in your keyword CRM and Google will present you some related keywords as you typein. Note down all the keywords listed and click search with your search term “CRM” once again Google will present you with some related search suggestions. Take a note of this and compare all the keywords which you have selected during this process with your original list. If you found any new keyword using this method, go to Step one and check the search volume and trend of that keyword. Based on the search volume you can decide whether to add this to the original list.

Try different iteration with different related search terms and build your list.

2. Search in Wikipedia

This step will help a lot for the search engine service agencies who work on their client’s campaigns optimizing some difficult business terms or products.

Search in Wikipedia and read the relevant CRM article. This will help you to understand more about CRM and the related keywords. When you read the article note down the keywords (business terms, sub sections, images… etc) within in the article and check the global volume for those keywords as mentioned in the step 1.

3. Keyword Spy

Goto Keyword Spy and check the “Keywords” radio button and enter your keyword. In the results page the overview tab will give you some related CRM keywords and the “organic competitors” tab will show the top 20 competitors for that particular keyword. If you’re using a free version of the tool then you will get only limited results (upto 20).

This step will help you to compare and verify the keywords which you have chosen in using the Google keyword suggestion tool and analysis the competition for that particular keyword.

When you follow the above mentioned list you’ll get a very quality selection of keywords for your SEO campaign. These are the step I follow in my SEO campaigns for keyword selection. If you have a different view on these steps or if you follow a different strategy for your keyword selection please let me know and will be glad to add those to this list.

1. Use good title for your pages.
The title of the page should represent the content in the page. Identify the keywords in the page and shrewdly insert those keywords in the title. Use the important keywords in the beginning of the title.

Don’t
1. Never stuff too many keywords in the title
2. Never use too many comma separated words in the title
3. Never insert irrelevant keywords. (Irrelevant means, The keywords which don’t represent the content in your page)
4. Don’t exceed 70 characters

Instead of “Show me your friend and I will tell you who you are” i would say “Show me your title and I will tell you how good you are in SEO”

2. Using Header tags (H1, H2…) at the right places

When you write the content for each webpage make sure it has a content title and never forgot to mention that title inside a H1 tag and wrap the following sub headings inside the h2, h3… tags.

Though I know the use of the header tag, I haven’t included any header tags in one of my website (very very quality community based website), the reason is obvious, I don’t want to disturb the appealing design of the webpage by including a large text. Not surprisingly, for the keyword I targeted my website is in the 4^th page of Google (But it’s in the first page of Yahoo and MSN). Frustrated with the result, I included the keyword inside the H1 tag and placed it in the top of my homepage, just below the menu.

Result: Believe me, Just after three weeks my website is in the first page of Google. So what are you going to do, still worrying about your design or ready to get more visitors to your website?

Tips: Find the keywords inside that Webpage content and shrewdly include it inside the header tags.

3. Meta Tags: Still Alive?

The predominantly used meta tags by many SEO’s are Meta description and meta keywords. Well, That’s history now. The big “3’s” (Google, Yahoo, MSN) are now not considering the meta keywords. When your webpage has no text content, say a Flash page, Google consider the Meta description and list it in their web result. For example see the picture below:

So I would say, meta will not affect your search engine ranking.

4. Don’t keep a page size more than 100KB

Google loves the webpages with more text. Try to keep your webpage size under 100KB. Though Google lists all the webpages, which has the size under 150 KB, my advice is to keep the webpage size under 100KB.

Now the question is, Why Google is doing this? Is it because your webpage is cached in Google’s Server? Nope.

The straightforward answer to this is, “Google wants their visitors to be happy, They don’t want to lead their visitors to a webpage which takes more time to load”.

To be Continued >>

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Optimizing the website to bring in more traffic is the main motto for all the Search Engine Optimizers. How they do it? Are there any predetermined steps for that? SEO is not a rocket science, anyone who has very little knowledge in maintaining their website or blogs can follow it. In the coming blog posts I will blog more about SEO.

The search result for the term SEO yields 224,000,000 and the search result for the term “web design” yields only 141,000,000 results and that show how important SEO is!

Why is it important?

When you optimize your pages more shrewdly you can funnel your target customers to the correct page instead of them landing in the wrong page of your website.
Hope you got it how important SEO is! Meet you in the next post with more details on SEO.