The world of search engine optimization (SEO) has radically changed in the last year. (SEO is marketing lingo for how easy it is for search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo to find your website.) The search engines have made several big changes—you may have heard of Google’s “Penguin” or “Panda” updates—in the way they calculate which websites best match a user’s search query. Everything you thought you knew about SEO is likely to no longer be true. Gone are the days when your HTML code and tag structure were important, and today repetition may hurt your ranking.
Subject Matter Expertise (Not Keywords)
Search engines aren’t dumb. They quickly figured out that spammers were working very hard to “game the system” by repeating high-traffic keywords over and over. Unfortunately, many legitimate business owners were also using those same strategies. If you’ve noticed in the last year that instead of being on the first page of Google you’re now showing up on page 12, you are probably overusing keyword repetition.
In the new world of content marketing, what you choose to talk about on your website is more important than how you talk about it. Ideally, focus on no more than three featured topic areas. For example, you might choose bathroom remodeling, kitchen remodeling, and basement finishing as the top three things your business does. Everything you post on your website (blogs, project photos, events, news, etc.) should focus on one of those topics. Remember, the search engines are now looking for subject matter experts, not generalists.
Content Structure (Not Page Titles)
“Old” SEO had some very basic rules to follow: Make sure you have keywords in your page title; use keywords at least four or five times in the text on those pages; and make sure all of your meta-tags and meta-keywords are coded in your HTML. None of these are very helpful anymore, and overuse of keywords in your writing can actually result in a lower ranking in today’s search engine algorithms. Remember, search engines are wary of people gaming the system.
Because search engines rank subject matter experts higher than sites that seem like they’re trying too hard to do well on certain topics, consider redesigning your navigation to classify all of your content into one of your specialty topics. Using the example introduced above, we might change that website’s navigation to read: Home, Bathroom Remodeling, Kitchen Remodeling, Basement Finishing, About, Contact Us. Any new content posted should fit into one of those categories, and the URL for anything would include those keywords (for example: http://www.awesomeremodelers.com/bathroom-remodeling/main-street-project-photos).
Experts (Not Amount of Content)
Finally, start paying attention to who writes for your website. Author rank is becoming extremely important for SEO in the new landscape, because Google now assigns a higher search ranking to people who write about the same topics on multiple websites. Their logic is that because these people write for many sites on the same topics, people must believe them to be an expert. Your SEO strategy must include incorporating author rank into every new piece of content created to make sure that the author’s influence is part of a search engine’s process.
In short, the new SEO technologies operate less like computer algorithms and more like reporters sniffing out a good story and chasing down qualified sources. In coming issues, we will focus on how to change your strategy accordingly for each of these three areas.
April Wilson is the CEO and president of Digital Analytics 101, an online marketing company.
