The Convergence of SEO and Social Media
Off-site SEO and social media are becoming more and more hand-in glove with each other. With over 800 million active users on Facebook and 100 million monthly active users on Twitter, there's an enormous opportunity to interact with potential customers. Websites such as Digg and Delicious can be a huge driving force to interesting content that one may write about. A viral video or website can get a jump in traffic that no amount of traditional SEO could ever produce. There's also data that seems to indicate that search engines give more credence to websites that get social media attention or "buzz".
It's clear why it would be important to not only focus on traditional SEO, but work the social media aspect as well. A lot of traffic could be missed out on if not. |
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Google's Most Recent Update
In early 2011 Google started a rollout of it's most recent update to it's search engine algorithm, called Panda. The whole focus of Panda has been to lower the rank of "low-quality" sites and increase,
or keep high, the rankings of website with good, usable content. Websites created with copied content with the purpose of showing ads (called "scraper" sites) are being heavily penalized.
This update has it's basis human quality testers that have rated thousands of websites according to design, trustworthiness, speed and overall quality. Those ratings have then been brought into an automated algorithm to mimic these humans raters, then applied to the millions of websites Google crawls through.
How do you know if your website will be affected by Panda? As long as your website does create original content, doesn't stuff keywords in an attempt to get higher rankings, and in general would be useful and used by an actual person, you should be fine. Usual technical SEO actions to make sure your site is visible and getting traffic are still valuable and should not be dropped.
There have been several parts to the Panda update that have rolled out throughout 2011, the most recent being at the end of September 2011.
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What Is A Bridge or Doorway Page?
Webmasters are sometimes told to submit "bridge" pages or "doorway" pages to search engines to improve their traffic. Doorway pages are created to do well for particular phrases. They are also known as portal pages, jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages and by other names.
Doorway pages are easy to identify in that they have been designed primarily for search engines, not for human beings. This page explains how these pages are delivered technically, and some of the problems they pose.
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Who Are the Major Search Engines?
Why are these considered to be the Major Search Engines? They are all either well known or well used. For search engine marketers, these are the most important places to be listed, because they can potentially generate so much traffic. For users/searchers, these well known, commercially backed search engines generally mean more dependable results. These search engines are more likely to be well maintained and upgraded when necessary, to keep pace with the growing web.
Not all are "true" search engines that crawl the web. For instance, Yahoo, and LookSmart are "directories" that depend on humans to compile their listings. In fact, most of them offer both search engine and directory information, though they will predominately feature one type of results over the other.
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How is Ranking in the Search Engines Determined?
Search for anything using a search engine. Almost instantly, the search engine will go through the millions of listings it has in its database and present you with ones that match your search topic. The matches will be ordered, the sites that are the most relevant are suppose to come up first.
Search engines frequently do not give you exactly what you ask for, often to find what your looking for you will need to rephrase your search in different ways. Unfortunately, search engines aren't human, so they can't ask you questions to narrow the search and compare it to what's in their database. How do search engines decide what is the most relevant web site? They follow a math equation called an algorithm, there are a number of factors involved but primarily frequency and location of the keywords on the web page is what determines relevancy.
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