Article Contributed by Anca Bradley
For small businesses, visibility is key. Customers can’t find you if they don’t know you’re there. While major multi-national companies can throw resources at advertising agencies and gain a higher profile, small organizations don’t have that luxury. SEO, or search engine optimization, is a great equalizer. A noticeable online presence makes you easier to find than competitors. As search engines have become more sophisticated, so has SEO.
Pandas and Penguins
In the early days of Google and other search engines, the software’s sorting and ranking algorithms were naive. Pages stuffed with keywords and light on content ranked well, clogging the first few pages of search engine results. Designers quickly found ways to sort valid sites from those with a low signal-to-noise ratio, and legitimate businesses had to evolve to meet changing optimization needs. Two of the largest and most influential changes were Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm updates.
The first Panda update came out in April 2011, according to the Moz.com (http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change) tracker, and it revolutionized search engine optimization. Small businesses that had previously relied on high keyword percentages and thin content found themselves penalized while those that used natural writing surged ahead in page rankings. Google, and eventually all other major search engines, had begun to think like its users and weed out the low-value sites.
If Panda was Google’s answer to thin content, then its later Penguin algorithm was a defense against over-optimization and bad back-linking strategies. Sites that had previously relied on intricate linking schemes or paid links suddenly found themselves devalued on search engine results pages. That drop in rank had significant implications for traffic; the top three spots on the first page account for almost 60 percent of clicks, say statistics from Optify as published on Search Engine Watch (http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2049695/Top-Google-Result-Gets-36.4-of-Clicks-Study).
SEO Help for Small Businesses
Understanding where SEO was in the past helps small businesses predict where it’s going in the future. Google regularly releases updates to Panda and Penguin as well as other smaller tweaks. Trends today have been toward rich content with natural contextual cues that lead organically to higher page ranks. Search engines want to serve useful content, and they do it by prioritizing pages customers might want to read over keyword-stuffed or heavily linked text.
To stay on top of search engine algorithm changes, many small businesses are turning to professional content creation teams who make it their business to keep current with state-of-the-art SEO. Giving your existing site an SEO makeover may boost your traffic and give you the higher visibility that’s so important to a smaller company’s bottom line. Professional bloggers can also contribute to better SEO while giving your readers a reason to make your site a destination. Social media signals factor into rankings too, and by supplying content worth sharing, businesses can garner more interest from word of mouth.
Penalty checkers are another valuable tool in creating a winning SEO strategy. These products analyze websites and blogs for elements that could draw penalties from Google such as low-value back-linking and keyword stuffing. Fruition’s Google penalty checker tool (http://fruition.net/google-penalty-checker-tool/), for example, looks through more than 30 Google updates and measures content against them for more reliable search engine optimization. Small businesses can’t afford to make mistakes that drive their page ranks lower; these tools can help prevent down-ranking oblivion.
For experts in SEO and small businesses that use them, staying in front of ongoing algorithm changes translates directly into greater visibility.
About the Author
Anca Bradley is a geek at heart and enjoys all-things SEO and Social Media. Her experience includes several years of making major contributions to a wide variety of projects, such as Pay-Per-Click ad management, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Management and Campaigns as well as other web strategies that are crucial in today’s online business sphere.
Anca Bradley’s interests are family, music, biking, technology, and of course the internet.