Posted on September 28, 2011 by Darryl Delong
In previous blog posts we’ve discussed the importance of website design and content on search. However, there are certain publishing platforms you can use to build and maintain your website, that come with SEO benefits. WordPress is one of those platforms. In addition to the fact that it is free open-source code, there are numerous themes, plugins and widgets to help you give your site the look and feel you want. Just as important, building a site in WordPress, including the plugins, has many SEO benefits. Below we have listed just a few of these benefits, including any necessary changes:
Posting and Updating Content is easy to do with WordPress.
By now you’ve probably heard the phrase “content is king”, but having to depend on a webmaster each time you want to post content pages to your website can be expensive. With WordPress you don’t have to outsource the task of adding a new blog post or page to your website. You can handle this task by logging into your WordPress control panel and using the WordPress built-in WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor. If you can update a Word document then, chances are, you can update a WordPress blog post or page. Adding content to your WordPress site is as easy as typing it, or copying it from an external source, adding a page title and hitting the publish button.
With the WYSIWYG editor you can easily SEO your content by adding keyword-rich page titles, headlines, hyperlinks to other internal pages, H1 or H2 tags, bolding text and more.
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Posted on August 4, 2011 by Hans Riemer
Who wants the worst website award?
In our previous post about the Google Panda update, we mentioned that inbound links, while still very important, are not weighted as heavily as a ranking signal as they were previously. What has gained in importance is website quality and user experience. As far as inbound links are concerned, they are still extremely important as a ranking signal but Panda now enables Google to analyze links more carefully. Unnatural linking patterns are now more likely to harm your rankings than before Panda.
Let’s talk about website quality and user experience. Imagine that you’re Google and you want to present only the best sites at the top of the search results. But how do you rate website quality via software? Quality is really something best left to a human being, or many human beings, to gauge.
For several years, Google has provided the public with a dizzying array of “free” tools and applications. These include Google Search (a tool so ubiquitous that it has become a verb), Google Analytics, the Google Toolbar and lately a number of social apps including the Google +1 button.
Google doesn’t charge for these applications. However, we all know that the popularity of Google Search is what drives Google’s core revenue business, namely, keyword sponsorships via AdWords. If everyone switched to a different search engine overnight, Google would lose 2/3 of its AdWords revenue. (The other 1/3 is derived from AdWords clicks on non-search related websites, which Google calls the Display Network.)
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Posted on June 28, 2011 by Hans Riemer
Where did my website go?
Over the past couple of years, there’s been a sharp increase in complaints about poor quality websites showing up at the top of Google’s search results. In response, Google issued a software update, known as Panda, on February 23, 2011. The fundamental goal of the Panda Update was to downgrade the rank of websites that didn’t offer users unique, valuable information. One website that was mentioned in this regard was eHow.com, which offers many thousands of how-to guides, and has sometimes been referred to as an example of a “content farm.”
Panda had a powerful effect, banishing many formerly top-ranking sites to second-class status and elevating other, previously lesser known sites, to the top of the rankings. It didn’t have as significant an impact on eHow as Google wanted, so a subsequent release of Panda was made in April.
Panda is the latest escalation in the war between Google, which wants to rank websites by quality and usefulness, and people who want their website to appear at the top of Google’s search results for certain keywords whether they deserve to or not.
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