Yesterday Google announced that it’s latest algorithm update, Panda, had been made live across all English Language Google users.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/04/high-quality-sites-algorithm-goes.html

When the Panda update was implemented in the USA there was a major shakeup in the search results with many, many site owners having their rankings crushed overnight and suffering from the obvious knock on this had on revenue for some of those sites.

The Panda update has been rolled out by Google in order to address the amount of low quality websites appearing in their search results. The update pushes down lower quality sites, in an effort to have better quality, more relevant sites rank in the search results for any given keyword term.

Google have suggested the update affects some 14% of search queries on this latest implementation of it’s update (which is an increase of 2% over the original implementation in the USA).

We are gathering data at the moment to try and understand the actual impact on UK websites in general and hope to report back on our initial findings in a few days.

If your site has been impacted by this Panda update, please leave a comment and let us know what the impact has been and why you think it has affected your site.

We should point out this is not all doom and gloom. Naturally, if some sites loose rankings, others will gain and all round Google is trying to do the correct thing for their user base – serve better quality, more relevant search results for their queries. Long term this is good. Short term there will be fall out.

We like to think we are in the online marketing business or maybe the SEO business, or PPC management business; but, we are not. We are in the human behaviour business.

It is too easy to get side tracked and pigeon holed as this or the other, when the real goal is to solve a problem.

As an SEO we can say yep we’ll get you to number one for the term ‘blue widgets’, but what use is that if there are no people ready to TAKE ACTION searching for that phrase?

Much better to study psychology of a searcher and understand that the people ready to take action are searching for ‘xt10-2 blue widget’ – this may get 10% of the search volume but searchers are 99% more likely to buy.

It’s all about human behaviour, search psychology, putting your self in the mind of the searcher – whatever you want to call it. We are in the human behaviour business.

Without the upfront research, understanding motivations, understanding psychology, solving the searchers problem and crafting a compelling online message – any online campaign is doomed to failure.

All too often a business gets so caught up in the running of their company, the internal terminology they use, and their own way of thinking – that they miss the crucial aspect of starting any online campaign or building any web preseence – they forget the very audience they are trying to serve. Spend time researching what your customers want, what they are searching for, how they are searching for it – get out of your world – you are more often than not too close. Be a customer.

Your online campaigns will sky rocket.

The web does not work without content. Period.

This is obvious right?

Then why do sooooo many companies expect their website to rank in the top 10 of google for [insert fairly competitive keyword here] without creating more content than ‘Who We Are, What We Do, & Contact Us’?

If you don’t have compelling content, offering real value, then you will not attract links (other than pure rubbish), and links are what matter for search engine ranking.

Think of content creation like, adding more stock to your shop or your sales team making calls, or a carpenter buying wood – it has to happen. No results happen on the web without content.

• If you are an ecommerce store that means creating product listings that are outstanding, different from the norm, have a story, really sell the benefits to your customers, give examples of experience.
• If you are a B2B operation it means giving away some of you knowledge for free to everyone on the web.
• etc.

Content on the web can now come in many forms: Written (read typed), Video, Audio, Graphical (infographics for example), Games, etc.

If you are serious about the web, developing top tier rankings within the search engines, and generating new business via online mechanisms you absolutely have to devote time and / or/money to content creation.

We recommend daily content creation in some form or another. But don’t churn out any old rubbish, make it compelling. If you can only do that once a week then do it just once a week – but do it.

Many businesses don’t have the time or resources to generate the content – that is fine companies like interactive3 can help with the process. But companies like us will have to spend time getting to know your business inside and out before even trying to create content. So clearly there is a financial element there. The best people to generate content for your business are the people that work in and on your business every day and really understand the workings of the industry, customer pain points etc.

When the content is created, then it is down to your SEO company/person to promote the content and hopefully garner links to it.

Make content creation for your web presence part of your daily schedule and watch the results follow.

I have been watching some tweets recently started by Brett Tabke of WebmasterWorld.

He made an interesting point that SEO is no longer ONLY about the S (i.e. Search) it is more about the O (i.e. optimisation).

The point being that the way webmasters develop audiences for their online presence is evolving. Google and other search engines are changing their search results to not only list the most relevant web pages, but also the most relevant social interactions from the likes of Twitter. Many of the social websites have mamouth volumes of traffic. This traffic is all potential audience development for savvy marketers.

So I agree with Brett that as an SEO (we have always hated that label) our duty to our clients is to ensure all online activity is optimised for targeted traffic generation – be that web pages, twitter updates, facebook profiles, linked in profiles, google local business presence, photo streams, video channels, map placements etc.

Like it or not the web is every day becoming more social and search engines realise that social ‘streams’ are these days just as relevant as web pages for certain topics. So to stay ahead you need to optimise all potential audience sources.

However as Mikkel also pointed out. Demographics across different social streams vary tremendously. So careful analysis is needed to define if the audience is targeted and relevant to your business and offering.

This all positive and I think most online marketers are aware of this shift, it was just interesting how Brett framed the discussion.