Tasha Harrison

2011 saw one of the most important changes in the way Google ranks websites. Google’s Panda Update was designed to increase the quality of search results and start to punish ‘link-farms’ (sites with hundreds of links which are designed for purely SEO purposes). This basically means that Google stopped putting so much emphasis on the quality of links and put more emphasis on the quality of the website as a whole. The idea is to stop people from simply creating hundreds of meaningless links and reward sites with great content which is worth linking to.

The two most important criteria for judging the quality of your site are:

1. The quality of your website – how often content is changed and updated, loading speed, repeated pages.
2. Social bookmarking – ie how many people have linked to and shared link to your website on social media sites.

Of course this is a great victory for blogs and news sites, since they have constantly updating content which lends itself naturally to being successful on social media. However, it does make it increasingly difficult for ecommerce sites and smaller businesses who maybe don’t have the time to create new and exciting content all of the time.

Sadly, there is no easy way around this. Gone are the days when an SEO person would simply spend time building links through directories and meaningless article sites. Now SEO needs to be fully integrated into your overall marketing strategy.

Top Tips for SEO in 2012

1. Ensure your website is properly optimised for search engines from the start
   A good website designer should structure your site properly – it is much more difficult to go in after your website is built to make the necessary structural changes.
2. Create a section of the site which you update on a regular basis
   This could be a latest news section or a blog, but this is becoming increasingly important. A regularly updated blog will give you a huge advantage over your competitors and enable your site to rank for a greater number of search terms.
3. Create a Facebook Fanpage and get a Twitter account
   These two social networks are still extremely important in terms of sharing your content and making connections with people. The success of these should not just be measured in terms of sales, but in terms of how many links and connections you have. Remember that links from social media will help your ranking on Google.
4. Use your offline marketing channels to drive traffic to your social media as well as your website
   Gathering as many fans and followers online is the same principle as building a list of email addresses. It enables you to communicate with your customers and potential customers, reminding them you are there for when they are ready to buy.

On February 22nd a massive earthquake struck Christchurch causing massive damage and killing many people. As the international media covered the event, Google did what they do best – created an easy and effective way for people to find the information they needed. Complete with resources including emergency numbers, missing person finder, map, updated news and video, as well as real time responses from Twitter.

Despite the fact that I love the Internet, read newspapers and magazines online and on my iPhone, never buy an actual printed newspaper and believe that in ten years time print will all but die out, I still love books. I love going to a bookshop, especially antique bookshops, I have a collection of three or four first editions of my favourite authors and one day will inherit an early 20th century edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Which is why I’m really excited about Google Books.

Bringing books back to life

Essentially, Google Books will one day be a database of almost every book ever written. According to Google, the project will bring books back to life, books that are no longer in print and have been forgotten. They will give users access to these books by digitising them, so we will be able to read them online. Authors, who never thought their work would be read again, will now be forever published in the giant database. Published books will be sold via the site, linking to Amazon, Waterstones, Blackwells etc. In the future some authors will be able to charge a fee if their books are still in copyright, but out of print.

The trouble is that this runs contrary to the established copyright laws that protect the intellectual property of authors, which pretty much undermines how the publishing industry is set up and how authors make money. So, unsurprisingly, they’re quite upset about this. Musicians and journalists are already suffering as a result of the perception that all media should now be available for free. The publishing industry probably thought they were immune, protected by their ancient laws.

Google are now the bad guys

Google, however, have little respect for the old ways of sharing information. They plough on regardless and only worry about the consequences afterwards. Google Books was first launched in 2005, but they’ve been arguing with the Author’s Guild and the Association of American Publishers about how to deal with the problem of copyright. Finally, they have reached a settlement, which isn’t perfect, but is the first step to realising Google’s great plan.

Google have been made to be the bad guys here. Ten years ago they were this cool little search engine company, the darling of the internet, but they have become too powerful. People now fear them, worry that they will one day lay claim to all the information in the world. But it is the brilliance of their products, most of which are free to use, that has made them such a giant. Instead of trying to fight them, it is important to work with them, since they are almost undoubtedly the future of media across the world.

There’s big changes on Google today. The search engine is going to include results from sites such as Twitter and from blogs. This is important, because it means that the search results we receive will be up to date news, as it happens. The explosion of  Twitter, in particular, has been the main catalyst for this change. It gives people the ability to publish news as it is happening. It is important that Google reflects this new real-time news source (Rupert Murdoch should take notice).

The other big change is the increased personalisation of your search. Google records your web history and bases its search results on the sites that you visit. So if you regularly visit a particular news site, it will place that site higher up the search rankings if it is relevant to your search. This is a big game changer for SEO, since it favours more established sites. It also means that when you view your own site on Google you will generally see it ranking differently than most of your potential customers, meaning that you have no idea how well your site is actually ranking.

Most good SEOs will have seen this trend already and will have been aware that personalisation has been increasing over the last couple of years. It provides us with a new challenge and increases the need for different forms of online marketing, like social media and online PR. It also creates a problem for SEO companies who still guarantee positions on Google, as they will find it hard to prove.

From a users point of view I actually think these changes are rather limiting. Surely the point of search engines is that we can find something new. Before the days of social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Digg, we relied on search engines to bring us new sites and information. Now we will increasingly receive the same sites, having to look further through the results to find something new.