Seems like the ever growing web is going to experience some growing pains again over the next little while, with the inclusion of Penguin version 2.0. Googles head of the webspam team over at Google came out with a few points about what the successor to one of the largest updates for search has in store for site owners across the web.

From his video blog that was posted, Cutts had this to say as a short description of the coming upgrade: “This one is more comprehensive, we expect it to go a little bit deeper and have more of an impact than the original Penguin.” So in short, if you were affected by the first update and still haven’t been able to self determine what you may have done to wrong the algorithm, chances are this may further sink you in the search results. But, putting all of the doom and gloom aside, upgrades to the search algorithm are widely accepted as a good thing, but there will always be winners and losers when there are any changes, regardless of how big or small. We’ve always extolled the virtues of having quality content in order to sell yourself on the search engines, and if the video blog post was any indication, strong content will be even more important as the update approaches.

Contrary to what some in the search engine optimization space may think, Google doesn’t hate those of us in the space that optimize websites to help a quality site improve it’s positions. What they do hate, are the black hat users and the spam sites which seek to circumvent the algorithm and cheat their way to the top, very different methods than any quality SEO will leverage to help improve your site. It seems that there are new methods to maintaining control over your site and opening improved channels of communication so you can help discover what your issues may be so you can correct them. Cutts also spoke to reassure site owners who are following the guidelines: “If you’re already producing high quality content when you do SEO, you won’t have to worry. If you’ve been hanging out at black hat SEO forums, you may have a more eventful summer in store”.

There are a great deal of rules that determine how to conduct yourself and your business online, and make no mistake, the rules for SEO are some of the least flexible of the bunch. Due to the nature of the web being so flexible as a whole, it’s common to see new Search Experts crop up and whither away in a very short time. There are a lot of myths, misconceptions, and just plain bad advice out there online about search engine optimization, and with that in mind allow me to offer just a little bit of insight.

For all you internet beginners out there, you need to realize that just because you can find a template and put it online, it doesn’t mean you’ve optimized a site for search, let alone basic web use. You need to start with the basics of building and designing a website, clean coding with a navigation menu that is simple to use and crawl-able by bots. One of the more simple methods we use to get across to a new client when we tell them they need a new website, is when we show them the output of a basic spider and it returns a blank page regarding their website. If you don’t make it visible, don’t expect it to rank, regardless of how much time and effort you spend on optimizing it.

One of the necessary components to being able to rank online is by having quality content on your pages. Well written and keyword rich for both the search engines and for your visitors which come to your site, you need to be able to quickly and clearly deliver your message and call to action. This is where some of the time intensive processes come into play, because our goal as SEO’s is to deliver visitors to your site primarily, if you’re unable to convert those visitors however it’s irrelevant how much traffic you get. Your call to action needs to be obvious on your landing pages so that when someone arrives at your site, they know precisely what you want them to do. If you’re into selling merchandise, make your sales or features prominent for example, with contrasting text or images so it stands out to your viewer. You only have around 3-5 seconds to get your message across to the user, so you need to do it quick and clean.

The one last thing you need to remember as a new denizen of the web, is that just because there is the world at your fingertips and the code can do wild and incredible things, doesn’t mean you should use it. The more complicated you make your site, the more you invite something to go wrong, whether it’s with search or with conversions, and when things go wrong online it can be a game stopper for a business. Keep your site simple, and keep your message simple, and you will begin converting your new visitors almost as fast as they’re coming in.

Unfortunately from time to time, we are all fallible. You make a mistake at times, sometimes you burn your dinner, or stub your toe, there is always the chance for something to go wrong; even in the SEO world. Thankfully we are always monitoring your site to make sure to remedy anything if a shift happens in the search algorithms, but what happens if you’re not with us as a client? If you’ve taken your optimization work to someone else, who may not be as diligent as we are, who do you speak to when things go wrong?

Failure in an SEO campaign can come from only a couple of different places, either there was a mistake on the clients end, or the agents end. Contrary to popular belief, it’s somewhat rare that the mistakes come direct from the search engines themselves, but we’ll talk about that another time. So how can you fail your SEO as a client, especially when you’ve hired someone else to do the job for you? It’s not common, but there have been occasions where we’ve requested access either via FTP or CMS so that we may be able to make the changes required for on page SEO, and to be able to react to changes coming from the search algorithms, and we’ve had the occasional client who either can’t, or won’t give us the access we require. In this case we need to rely on you to make any and all changes we need to make, and if you fail to make the changes correctly, or even sometimes quickly enough, you can lose rankings and authority on your site. Making constant content tweaks or changes as well, without letting us know about it also hampers our SEO efforts, and as a net result can drive you down the list instead of up. Those are really the two major instances where you can cause your own demise.

It isn’t all roses and sunshine for the SEOs though, and just because we’re the best in town doesn’t mean that there aren’t snake oil salesmen out there. There are still emails which are sent out actually, which are promising #1 positions in Google in only a few days, and for as little as $200 to boot. First rule of life, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is greatly applies in this case. If someone has contacted you to work on your SEO promising those kinds of returns, then you need to realize that first off, they’re not playing by the rules of the search engines, and if they insist they are they’re probably trying to sell you an Adwords campaign and not an SEO campaign. It is absolutely true that you can rank immediately on page one for your search terms with an Adwords campaign, and you can likely do it for only $200 as well, but pay per click advertising is not organic advertising, and once your money runs out, your ad stops running until you refill the tank. In all honesty there are many more ways that a search engine optimization company or agent can ruin your search positions, but if they have any interest in remaining in business then they’ll do their best they possibly can for you at all times. A little knowledge however is a dangerous thing, and in the case of SEO there are little bits of knowledge scattered about the web, so be sure to ask the questions you need to before you engage a company, lest you have to deal with the consequences later.

When you’ve taken the time and put the cost out to have a website built for your business there are a ton of variables to consider and decisions to be made. I’ve covered a number of those multiple times through our blog, but as I looked back over some of the material I’d written I realized I hadn’t really made clear a certain point, the point of how important the time factor is.

I’ve discussed a number of times how important it is to trust in your online campaigns and realize that web traffic doesn’t just magically appear over night. It is a process to get your site listed legitimately in organic search without trying to find or exploit a viral niche, and it takes time for the bots to properly scour your content and make a decision at that point where you should list. Those few points are deliverables that are the responsibility of your in house SEO or your contracted SEO agency. A very major deliverable on your end as a client however, is a matter of time as well, as in the longer you take to deliver the harder our life gets as search engine optimization experts.

As an example, if you’re working your way into a competitive market and your SEO is asking for content, it’s extremely important that you do not sit on your hands for this. You need to get that content created and delivered as soon as absolutely possible so we can dig into it and make sure it fits in with the rest of the scope of your campaign. The longer you sit on a request for content, the longer and more difficult our job will become, especially in highly competitive niche markets, and what makes our job harder takes longer for your site to climb the ranks. The point of being on the ball when asked for new or updated content is only the tip of the iceberg, though it goes without saying that you should also make sure that your other contract obligations are upheld in a timely manner. The search engines throw out hundreds of optimization tweaks within a year, and it would be an utter loss to both of our businesses if a request goes unfulfilled. Here at Fresh we’re constantly watching your site, for any crawl errors from Webmaster tools for example, and we always make a point of monitoring the news just in case something slips into the algorithm late in the day. We do everything we can to make sure that you’re ranking as high as possible based on your current website and it’s content, just make sure that you deliver on what we need when we ask for it. Lost time can never be found again, and a day on the internet is a year on the street.

There are a good deal of different steps involved in properly optimizing a website. On site factors and changes, the time it takes to build a proper backlink profile, and making sure your website is properly built is a weighty deciding factor with the search engines.

On page, on site optimization is a time intensive project. Your content needs to be broken down, weighed and evaluated against your competitors as well as against the search engine guidelines. Your entire website needs to be taken down to its base components, the text, images and navigation all need to be optimized to ensure you have the best chance to rank your site. Some of the larger concerns you have with your on site work are avoiding being spammy with your content, avoiding using any tricky pieces of code to hide text or images – even if these are done by accident they have very real consequences for your website. Avoiding on site optimization issues are basic affairs however, and you can use your gut for the most part to avoid them.

All of the on page work that is done, and for all of the time that it takes to do properly, the off site optimization is just as intensive. There is no real handbook on how to properly perform off site optimization, but there are a couple of key points you can keep an eye on. While you have no real control over who, or what links to your website initially, you do have the ability to manage those back links pointing to your website via Google Webmaster tools. There is thankfully some reprieve where your back link profile is concerned, as the search engines are pretty good at picking out which websites aren’t on the up and up. One of the largest concerns that website owners seem to get worked up about are having links from websites that are obviously selling links to anyone that will pay. Well thankfully, the short story is that it’s highly likely that Google knows they’re not playing by the rules and any links that may be pointing at your site won’t be a problem for you. Matt Cutts, Google’s head of spam gave a brief answer to this concern, the main points to keep in mind:

Websites that sell links will see their toolbar PageRank downgraded by 30, 40 or 50%.

The site will no longer continue to be able to pass PageRank.

Sites they link to will no longer benefit from those links.

Before exploring the latest trends in local mobile engagement specifically, it’s valuable to recognize the rapid growth of mobile and other connected devices and their impact on how consumers are accessing the Internet. Within the U.S. smartphone market, Google and Apple solidified their market dominance, with Android owning 53% of the market, and Apple’s piece being 36%, totaling nearly nine out of 10 smartphones in use at the end of the year.

The most important piece of the puzzle of users who own mobile phones though, is they’re also likely to own other mobile devices, and at the end of 2012 that number was beginning to get up to around 40% share. Between all of the smart phones and other connected devices, it all adds up to multiple ways for people to access the web in varying formats. Rapid growth of mobile connected devices drastically changed how consumers accessed the Internet as PC use appears to have peaked. Growth in the number of PC users accessing the Internet flat-lined for the first time last year.

An important factor of mobile internet users to keep in mind, is their much higher than average engagement rate. If your website is mobile friendly, and locally optimized, you already have two steps forward in the right direction to increased business. Take this last Christmas shopping season, nearly 50% of all mobile owners used their devices to search locally, and that number is expected to grow over the next year again.

Local businesses should be introducing advertising strategies and mobile and tablet-friendly websites to attract consumers increasingly accessing the Web from their handheld devices. Over 60% of smartphone consumers are now accessing local content on their devices; and, while consumers prefer apps to search for local content, use of browsers is also strong. Local businesses should ensure their mobile efforts include both apps and browsers.

In the spirit of competition, Google has pretty much always said bring it on as competition almost always leads to improvements and innovation. There hasn’t been an innovative search engine developed since Google took their spot at the top of the heap, and while the task is daunting to take on the giant, it isn’t the company itself that is the issue, it’s their index of the web. As simple a problem as it may sound, creating an index of the internet is becoming an exponentially larger task every year, and as a result Google retains their spot as top dog.

Microsoft has similarly deep pockets with which to develop technology, whether it be in search, software, or what ever they may deem worthy at the moment. Disappointingly however, instead of sinking time and money into developing their own product, they spent who knows how much of both, on both their Scroogled campaign, Bing it on campaign, and their battle in the EU, trying to revive their antitrust reviews against Google. Their latest salvo in the fight, trying to convince those in power in the EU that positioning on the search results pages is directly relative to how much search traffic you get to your website. Anyone who works in any style of marketing company will tell you that if you occupy the choice spot, you’ll receive a better response, that’s a no brainer. But again, there was Microsoft time, and money spent to determine something that was already known by everyone who has ever done business. From Microsoft’s blog post:

Moving the best result down just two positions (from first to third) reduced traffic to that site by half.
The diversion effect becomes much more pronounced as a site is moved further down the page. A site that is moved from the first position to the tenth position typically will lose about 85 percent of its traffic.

A site that is moved from the second position to the ninth loses about 75 percent of its traffic.

Well no kidding.

Why they’re making such a big deal about search ranking is a tad confusing, because if you follow the language they use in their post, then Bing search does has exactly the same flaws as Google search, and their manipulated results. With those things being equal, shouldn’t the EU also look into potential anti-competitive practices against them as well? It didn’t go so well for them the last time that happened as I recall. There’s no arguing that Google has a leg up in the search world, they came onto the scene like gang busters with their algorithm and has had the largest web index on the globe, but instead of competing with them and developing their own product Microsoft has decided to go with another temper tantrum. Hopefully one of these days they’ll pull up their socks and improve their own products and stop kicking sand around the sand box.

There are a handful of advertising options when you’ve gotten your business up and rolling, and each one has their own pros and cons. Television, radio and print advertising is generally seen as being an older, dated method of advertising that still sees a fair amount of use, especially among some of the larger companies out there. Because at a certain point, you need to use it, because your competitors are.

And then 20 years or so ago, all of that got flipped onto it’s head with the rapid growth and use of the internet. It took a few years for an indexing service to come along, but Google worked out a way to wrangle the mess of the web, and give it some order, and allowed users to search the web for what they want. Fast forward to today, and it is again starting to become a tangled mess of advertising avenues. Having a website has become, for the most part, a no brainer, if you have a business, you need a website. Because just how old media advertising was perceived 60 years ago, if you’re not doing it and capitalizing on the advertising, your competitor will be. One of the biggest differences between the old advertising methods and their counterparts of today however, is that the online variants can be tracked and deliver you a definitive return on your investment. Search engine marketing, also known as pay per click advertising is great for immediate branding efforts and recognition, and helps you build your brand quicker than by just word of mouth. Think of PPC/SEM advertising as impulse adverts, like the gum and magazines you see in the check out isle at the grocery store.

The true benefits of online marketing really only become clear when you have the time and the budget to incorporate search engine optimization into your advertising portfolio. It is not to be taken lightly or done in a haphazard way. SEO is the chocolate chips in a chocolate chip cookie, you need to do it right, and it needs to be done in a proper balance otherwise you’ll end up with a poor product, and be met with the wrong side of the ranking algorithm on the search engines. There isn’t much to expand upon regarding search engine optimization, and in the spirit of following our own rule set of keeping it simple, if you don’t know how to properly perform SEO, don’t.

One of the fastest growing terms or trends in building a website the last few months has got to be the rise of the responsive web design. If you’ve shopped for a new site in the last bit you’ve undoubtedly heard the phrase, and it really does make sense. A responsive site isn’t a new idea, it’s just picked up a name for itself that designers can identify with, and it makes sense to boot.

When a web designer or developer is discussing a responsive site with you, it basically means the website can adapt to what ever technology the user is on at the moment. Whether it’s a desktop, tablet, or a mobile phone, your website will change to suit the visitor. There are some unique challenges that you need to be aware of though when looking at this type of design, as you may lose out on customer interaction or conversions if you’re not diligent about how the site performs. A top issue that you need to consider is the content that is displayed above the fold, or to put it another way, what content is immediately visible to a visitor without them having to scroll. Having visitors land on your website as the result of a search or a referral from a friend should be a near guaranteed conversion. But too many site owners and designers think of “flash before cash” and instead of working their magic and trying to make a conversion they show off and the main message gets lost. Don’t take that to mean you can’t show off the capabilities of your site or it’s design, just make sure your message isn’t being lost by doing so, both are possible you just need to be aware as you build it to make it happen properly.

Another key aspect of a responsive design is it is usually on the lower side of the content spectrum, so the content that is there needs to cover two major bases off the hop. It needs to be relevant, and it needs to be engaging for the user. Contrary to the belief of some who call themselves SEO experts, your content can be highly relevant without being spam filled, it doesn’t have to look liek a robot spit out a paragraph of keywords.And on that same note, your content can engage the user as well as be relevant, it just takes some wordsmithing to do it right to make sure the message is delivered while keeping the point in focus.

A responsive site design is a great move forward online, it’s a great means to use to provide your message to online searchers across multiple formats. Just remember to not get lost in the bells and whistles, and keep it simple. There’s nothing worse than driving a company to the top of search, just to have them completely revamp a website and lose their conversion rate.

In the last year the Google has released some pretty heavy duty algorithms to try and clean up their search results pages, affectionately referred to as Penguin and Panda updates. It is usually fairly easy to pick up on when an update is going on, as the results pages shift fairly consistently over a few days, and during that time you can go from a top 3 position, to not found, to page 2, and so on.

There are people in the blogging world who have some pretty close ties to the team at Google, and they were able to send off a quick email to find out if the gut feeling about an update was correct or not. Just last week however, it was announced that there would be no more direct confirmations from the search engine, about updates or shifts that are occurring. But don’t worry, it’s not that the communication is completely breaking down, it actually has more to do with the fact that the shifts shouldn’t be as abrupt or drastic anymore, perhaps it’s a sign that the results pages are getting closer to what the team at Google deems acceptable?

Of all of the things that we hate the most with the SEO business, there is always a short list of the few things that we try our hardest to stay away from. Some are unavoidable with client assistance, and some are completely unavoidable and regardless of how frustrating an experience it can be, we have to deal with it. As it goes with any endeavor, one of the biggest issues that can pull you apart is having too many cooks in the kitchen. There are all sorts of cliches you can use to this effect, but they all mean the same thing – too many people on the same project, and loss of information and procedure will occur. We try to minimize the impact of this by being able to directly work on a clients website, but there are sometimes cases where that isn’t a possibility, and so we deal with it. To a web developer two days to make a change may seem like an acceptable time frame, but to the internet and the search engines, it means all the difference in the world.

Another issue that sometimes crops up, and we sometimes receive phone calls for is for a quick solution, to a long running problem. Search engine optimization is not an apply duct tape here type of process, the minimum time frame we try to advise our clients of, both existing and prospective, is a 4 – 6 months window within which you might start to see consistent improvement. So the next time you’re considering using SEO to help bolster your site positions, just remember that if anyone tells you I can do it in two weeks for $300, you are potentially digging yourself a very deep hole at worst, at best you have spent money for no real lasting results.