According to Google’s Matt Cutts “… the idea is basically to try and level the playing ground a little bit. So all those people who have sort of been doing, for lack of a better word, “over optimization” or “overly” doing their SEO, compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we want to sort of make that playing field a little bit more level.”

What’s “Over-Optimization”?

At this point we can only read into of what Matt stated so far, “whether they throw too many keywords on the page, or whether they exchange way too many links, or whatever they are doing to sort of go beyond what a normal person would expect in a particular area.”

When Can We Expect This “Over-Optimization” Penalty?

It may already be starting to roll out as there have been recent reports of big changes in rankings by some. However, it’s unclear and likely will remain unclear until a large number of sites have had large changes in rankings.

What Can You Do?

We recommend not making any changes. As with all the big, newsworthy Google algorithm changes over the years there will lots of speculation on what’s being penalized as it becomes clear that this penalty is indeed rolling out. Most of the speculators will be wrong. Unless Google comes out and publicly states what is being penalized in this update it will likely be some months before there’s enough evidence across many web sites to “reverse engineer” the penalty.

In any case keep an eye on your rankings in Google’s Web Master Tools, perhaps downloading them weekly.

If you are an eVision client and have followed our advise you should have nothing to worry about as we’ve never suggested anything that should come even close to “over optimization” (in our opinion of course).

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In this article, I’ve included some user generated content ideas as well as some ideas most useful for ecommerce sites including:

1. User Generated Content: Forums
2. User Generated Content: Videos & Images
3. User Generated Content: Ask For Feedback & Questions
4. User Generated Content: Article Submissions From Readers & Customers
5. User Generated Content: Reviews
6. Rewrite Manufacturer Descriptions
7. Add More Extensive Product Information, Images, Video
8. Buyer’s Guides
9. Training Courses

Read 9 More Content Development Ideas For Increased Visibility

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• The continuing evolution of personalization.
• Progression towards Entity matching and away from the older model of matching keyword queries to text on a page.
• Content must be high quality and be shared socially.
• The importance of building a brand and generating a following.

Read SEO & Personalization: An Evolving Relationship

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In the latest article I cover 10 more content ideas that should help improve organic visibility and often help increase conversions on a web site. As with the previous 10 ideas much of this content can be promoted via your various social networks.

Read 10 More Content Ideas To Improve Organic Visibility

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Consumers often look for “trusted” methods to narrow down a list of potential businesses such as online reviews, referrals from associations, etc. “Trust builders” on a web site (such as a “Badge” from a respected verification system like VeriSign) can also help.

Most Americans are familiar with the Better Business Bureau (BBB) and most tend to trust the BBB.

The BBB offers an Accreditation process and I’ve seen that it can deliver benefits including SEO benefits (improvements in organic search results)

About BBB Accreditation

You can apply to be BBB accredited. They evaluate your business against their Standards for Trust, including Honest Advertising, Transparency, Safe Guarding Privacy, etc

To apply you must be in business at least one year and have no unanswered complaints. The cost is based on the number of employees starting with at $440 first year (which includes a processing fee) followed by $390 next year.

What You Get…

A BBB Accredited Seal for your web site that allows web visitors to access your Business Review on the BBB site. The benefits of this seal (badge) include the perception of Trust that many consumers associate with BBB accreditation. I believe you can also use this badge on some social sites and search engine listings like your Google Places listing which could help entice those visitors to contact you. You also get Badges for your building, print advertising, etc.

You’ll be listed on the BBB web site and your accreditation status is highlighted. Site visitors can also choose to browse through a list of only Accredited businesses. The BBB web is a very popular web site used by some consumers to find companies to do business with and even more often to check out companies being considered for complaints etc.

Click for an example of a list of Accredited carpenters

Accreditation Could Help Increase Organic Search Positions. There’s an active link to your web site from the BBB site. I’ve checked and these listings are search friendly so these active links from the BBB site, which is usually considered a very strong, trusted link by Google, may not only bring prospective clients to your site, the link may help your web site’s search positions (rankings).

People who search for businesses on the BBB site have the option to choose to only look at businesses that are Accredited. Plus the BBB now offers mobile apps to make researching businesses easier from these devices.

Accreditation Could Help Local Search Positions Too. The listing on the BBB site shows at least some of your business name, address and phone number. Again these listings are search engine friendly and may help your local search engine listings (such as a Google Places listing) rank better too.

Dispute Resolution Help. The BBB may receive complaints about your business. They will display valid, documented complaints in your listing. If someone sees your business listing with no complaints that could help. On the other hand, if you ever do get a complaint, resolve it quickly. Complaint resolution is displayed on your listing which could help convey that you are responsive to customer complaints. As an accredited BBB business they are available to act as an intermediary for you and your customer.

Your Category(S) May Appear In Search Results
In doing some searches for one of our client’s important keywords I noticed the search listings below in the screen shot for searches on “Warehousing Services in CT”.

Notice the 3 listings from the BBB for Accredited Warehouses near cities in CT in top organic positions just below the sponsored ads.

I’ll bet plenty of people click through to those BBB listings because most people know who the BBB is and the listings mention “Accredited” warehouses and “trusted warehouses”. If someone clicks on one of these listings they are presented with a list of accredited BBB businesses in the category. I’ve seen similar results in other markets.

If you see some similar BBB listings in the search results for some of your important keywords then this is all the more reason to consider accreditation, especially if the BBB listings are appearing higher in the search results than your own listing.

Free BBB Listing Option

There’s also a free listing option that doesn’t include most of the features of an accredited listing, but it does include name and address. Your business may already be listed, so check on the BBB site in your area.

To find your local BBB web site Search on “bbb, State”

The post How a BBB (Better Business Bureau) Accreditation Can Help Organic Search Listings and Increase Business appeared first on eVision Online Marketing.

However there are significant differences reported by position in this study compared to other similar studies. One of the other studies was conducted within the past year and one was reported in 2007.

But what’s clear by looking at the three of the studies is the advantage of reaching the top 2 or 3 organic rankings on Google. The top 3 spots get between 35% and 58% of the clicks across the three studies.

Rob looks closely at what could account for the differences in the numbers reported in the studies and finds a number of possibilities. It’s an interesting read if you want to hear about how widely these types of studies can vary and some of the reasons behind the differences.

But the bottom line is affirmation of SEO 101: Get to the first page, and get as close to the top as possible!

Read Rob Young on Search Engine Watch

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Here’s a video of Matt Cutts from Google answering a question about what SEO tactics to focus on for 2011. It was meant for large corporations but applies to most web sites.

In the video Matt covers a few tactics including…

Check your site speed.

First and foremost site speed is an important usability factor that affects your conversion rates, but as Matt says it’s also a “slight” factor in rankings

Get Started – See Google’s Webmaster Tools / Labs / Site performance for a Performance overview of your site and a Page Speed tool you can add on to Firefox

Get Control of Your CMS

Matt talks about the importance of having control of your Content Management System.

See for “How To Improve Organic Search Results With A Simple Site Audit” for more on CMS issues that affect SEO.

Internal Links Consistency

Matt discuses the importance of checking your internal links for 404’s for example,  but more importantly chekcing the site’s linking structure;  a strong ranking signal.

See 9 Step SEO Checkup Using Google Webmaster Tools , the “Gain Insight Into Link Strategy” section to help get started on internal linikng.

Participate In Social Media To Help Increase Incoming Links

Matt talks about participating in social media because if can help increase the number of high quality incoming links which helps improve your site’s rankings.

Start learning about Link Building here Link Building Basics: What is Link Popularity?

Read between the lines. Would Matt Cutts suggest social media marketing as one of the most important of three or four SEO tactics because of the affect it can have on incoming links? Or would Google like to prod us along on social media marketing for other reasons such as the realization in light of the Panda update that they need social signals to help evaluate what are high quality sites as well as the soon to be released Google +1 social bookmaking/recommendation button?

View Matt’s Video

Learn How eVision Can Help You
Get More Business From The Internet

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In this example, we will use a client’s Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to choose the best keywords to focus on first, those bringing searchers to the website who are converting into leads.

In my latest article on Search Engine Land you’ll learn:

Why Improving Rankings May Not Lead To Increased Click-Throughs

What Keywords Should You Focus On?

See how we used Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to choose the best keywords to focus on for this client, those bringing searchers to the website who are converting into leads.

Read How To Build Business By Focusing On
Click-Throughs & Conversions, Not Just Rankings

Learn How eVision Can Help You
Get More Business From The Internet

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The Top 5 SEO Tactics

Here are the top 5 SEO tactics that have been achieving higher rankings according to the survey

• Keyword Research- To learn what keywords to target or test

• On-Page Content Optimization

• Title Tag Optimization

• Link Building

• Meta Tag and Meta Description

Two Additional Tactics

The above are five of the top tactics we work on for our clients because they deliver results. However, we would add the following two tactics to improve organic search engine results. Notice I said “results” not “rankings”, focusing on rankings as the primarily goal of SEO will probably not deliver the results you want; searchers who click through to the web site and further, for many webs sites, the business goal is to increase the number of site visitors who convert by taking some action such as signing up, inquiring, purchasing etc.

• A Periodic SEO Site Audit, Having a search engine friendly website, a site with no barriers to the search engines is critical to success within “organic” search engine results. This article written for Search Engine Land includes some relatively simple SEO Site Audit steps that should help you flush out the most important site wide issues within a small to mid size website.

• Local Search Optimization. If local search results are important to your business then you should focus on improving your local search results as they are a very different animal than the traditional organic results that most of the above tactics focus on. See this article for more about local search results.

What Doesn’t Work

Last June we looked at what four senior SEO’s have said are SEO myths and boondoggles (Wasteful Pursuits) over the last year or so (Read the article to see all the claims and much more detail).

Below is a list of the myths were for which there is more or less agreement between two or more of these senior SEO’s.

• Having an XML Sitemap will boost your Google rankings. (Not for regular HTML pages, possibly for other Digital Assets).
• There’s no need to link to all your pages for the spiders to see them. Just list all URLs in the XML Sitemap. (Getting a regular HTML page indexed by listing it in an XML site map does not help rankings much).
• Meta tags will boost your rankings. (Keyword tags do not help in Google at all. They can help with misspellings in other engines. However there is value in well crafted Meta Description Tags which may be included, at least in part, in search engine listings).
• H1 tags are a crucial element for SEO. (False. They don’t make much difference).
• Submitting URLs to search engines is useless! True. Search engines will find web pages by crawling the web and following links. If they don’t find a web page that way, such as one submitted by a submission tool, it has very little change of reaching top results in the search listings.
• Click-Through Rate Improves rankings? False. If it were true we’d all be hiring overseas drones to click on our client’s sites.
• Keyword Density is Not Used. There is no magic formula.
• Our SEO firm is endorsed/approved by Google. Google does not approve SEO’s.
• First you get your site launched and then you add all the SEO goodness. Bad Mistake. Think SEO when you start thinking redesign! See 8 SEO Steps During A Website Redesign
• SEO is a standalone activity / one-time activity / SEO is Free.  False /False /False
• SEO is about rankings, not conversions. Again, focusing on rankings as the primarily goal of SEO will not likely deliver the results you want; searchers who click through at the very least and for many web sites the goal is searchers who convert i.e. site visitors who take some action such as signing up, inquiring, purchasing etc).

Related Reading

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This an 8 minute segment from our “Get More Business from Your Web Site” seminar

To Enlarge the Videos:  Hover your mouse over the YouTube logo in bottom right corner of the video and you should see a “Watch on YouTube” link (the videos plays wider there) or click on the full screen button in the bottom right corner.

Related Info

Link Building Basics: What is Link Popularity?

Is Link Building Important? Google & Bing Talk About Link Building

Learn How eVision Can Help You
Get More Business From The Internet

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