SEO Eclectic – Web, Google, Etc.

The “Monthly Moz-Letter” almost got deleted today on my crusade to clean out my Gmail inbox. Glad I decided to open it – I almost missed this gold nugget from the Rand(om) Question section:

One last thing I’ll say about Panda in particular – you need to be willing to take dramatic action to respond. The sites I’ve seen recover are those who’ve done a complete redesign and a refresh of their content, making things so wonderfully amazing that they stand out as the best result for the query. Those who’ve made iterative attempts to reduce ads a little or throw some extra paragraphs on a page so as to hopefully get over the Panda algo generally haven’t.

Best of luck!
Rand

My take away? The huge light bulb moment SEO insight? If you want to rank first in Google in a post-Panda world, you’ve got to be a resource the best resource on the topic you’re targeting. Lead-aggregation sites (one of our biggest local rankings enemies in the moving industry) can’t just add tons of bogus content with a few keyword mentions, and increase their link buying budget and hope to outrank legit, helpful sites. But this also means that the websites of legit, authoritative businesses might not rank well if those biz owners don’t share their knowledge , and instead get caught up in the “Everyone needs to be on every social network to talk about themselves as much as possible” scamvice. Self promotion across social networks is not the same as being a helpful resource contributing to the betterment of your industry. I’m worried for the thousands of mom & pop businesses across the country that might miss that.

Mom & pop, if you’re reading this, here’s the best SEO advice I’ve got – be the best, most authoritative, most comprehensive, most helpful resource in the world on the topic you’re selling. Give all that helpful information away for free so that it spreads easily (Seth Godin shout-out). Then people will want to visit your site, want to find it in Google, Bing, Yahoo, Blekko, etc and, in turn, those search engines will want to deliver your site to the people using their search engines.

The recent Google algorithm updates (yes plural, if you’ve been reading the right sources), have many in a SEO panic, scrambling to add unique content to their sites, trying to write and re-write catchy phrases & titles, spamming the web with their infographics about not spamming the web with infographics.

But there is a small handful of people not freaking out… (inspiring video after the break). Read the rest of this entry »

I was catching up on some reading, including Matt Cutts’ blog, and found something he wrote that made me laugh.

Google typically returns search results in milliseconds, but it takes several seconds for you to type a query. In other words, the limiting factor on a typical search is you. :-)

I think my favorite part was the apologetic smiley face at the end. Wow.

Way to point the finger Matt. Don’t worry I’m not offended. It is funny, though, that advances in search technology have brought us farther than users can even appreciate. Are we (meaning the web and technology – obviously not people) going too fast? Isn’t it sometimes beneficial to take a second to think about your search as you type it in? Or maybe just to breath in between keystrokes, haha. I’m starting to really like Bing’s slogan – “What has search overload done to us?”

So if every time I type a letter into the Google search box it brings up a search. And each additional letter brings up a new search… what’s telling Google the difference between my normal search behavior and automated search result requests coming from a program or computer?

Apparently nothing…

Read the rest of this entry »