Google Algorithm Change - My Perspective

Who cares?

Yes, you heard me right - who cares?

The people who care are the ones who are very reliant on search engine rankings to create awareness for their organization.

I would characterize this situation as an OVER-RELIANCE on search engine rankings.

Here's why.

I'll pick on my own site for a minute - www.TheWebForBusiness.com.

I personally don't really care how many people find the site in the search engines. Why? Because it is not my primary marketing tool. I have relied on the "old-fashioned" methods of getting the word out. I focus on word-of-mouth and personal networking. It has kept me busy enough over the years and when I need more work, it arrives.

I also have a moderately-sized e-mail database so direct, targeted e-mail works for me as well.

The site is currently #21 in Google for "website design niagara", #20 for "niagara website design" (or #11 if you count the businessniagara.ca directory) and #1 under "niagara internet marketing". It's also #8 under "niagara seo" and #4 under the longer version.

I'm putting these stats here so I can go back in a future blog post and see how these have changed based on Google's algorithm change.

Why don't I sweat the algorithm change? Because in the big picture, my brand - the story I tell and people tend to believe - is fairly strong. People know who I am and I get referred a lot.

Now, this devil-may-care approach may not work for everyone. I have clients who are deeply concerned about their search engine positions. I'm still not stressed about Google's change - because the sites that have been around for a while at the top of the heap are probably still going to be there when the dust settles. There's always a chance that some of our client's sites will even improve their rankings when it's all over. One never really knows, does one...

The point is - if you've done your homework over the past several years you probably won't have much of a problem. What do I mean by homework?

• creating quality content for VISITORS to your site instead of merely creating spider-bait
• working on getting inbound links from quality resources instead of link-farms
• keeping your site up to newer technical standards to make it as search-engine-friendly as possible

Let's see how this shakes out.

Okay - it's a rant. Get over it.

Avoid these things in websites:

• Frames - this is soooo 1990's. It's bad for search engines, screen readers and a whole bunch of other stuff. They're not necessary, so avoid them.
  
  
• 100% graphic-only websites - You know what - you can use these if you don't give a rat's @ss about search engine optimization or ease of updating or people with visual difficulties. You can't increase the font size. You have to call your graphic designer / web developer to make the simplest change and search engines can only read TEXT - not pictures.
  
  
• Webpages with no titles - What's the title? According to what search engines look at, it's the information contained between the <title> and </title> tag in the code. Where YOU, the human being experiencing the site see the title is RIGHT AT THE TOP OF YOUR SCREEN - above the "window" that displays the website - above the menu options in your browser software - right at the tippy-top of the page. Search engines love them. People often don't notice them on your site, but considering the title of the page is what's displayed in search engine results (along with your description meta tag contents), you'd better have one for the people too. Oh yeah, they're also a teeny-tiny bit important for search engine optimization as well. (Did the sarcasm come across there? It should have...)

In the past two days, I have encountered websites committing all these sins. Granted, some of them were DIY websites. That's acceptable. The other sites were done by people who get paid to design websites. I'm speechless when trying to think what I can say about those folks.

I will admit it is possible that the web developer did what the client WANTED them to do.

However, I also know that knowledge of the issues surrounding website development and internet marketing is low in the non-internet business world.

Therefore, doing what the client WANTS is not always in their best interest unless they have been informed about the pros and cons of doing it "their way".

If you're going to get a website, get informed - either by doing your own research and knowing what questions to ask or by meeting with more than one or two web designers so you can get an idea how much they know about the MARKETING side of the internet.

Having a beautiful website that is invisible in the search engines is an option if there are compensatory strategies in place to drive traffic to it, but when you could have both, why would you settle for less?

The enemy of "great" is "good". Ask yourself what could be done to make your online presence GREAT! More importantly, ask your web developer the right questions to see if THEY have a clue.

#1 in Google

"I want my website to be #1 in Google."

I hear this a lot.

Okay - I'll bite.

"For what?"

"Huh?"

"You know #1 in Google for WHAT?"

"Oh. Umm..."

And so the story goes.

I used to have the #1 website in Google for the term "Lake Ontario Squid Fishing". It was consistently #1. Of course, there are no squid in Lake Ontario, but that didn't stop us from having the top rank. Did anyone look for that term? NO! But that's not the point - we were #1 in Google.

Quite often, people want to be #1 in Google for very generic(and competitive) terms. Car sales, for example. That's admirable. For a mere $10K or $20K per month, you can probably be #1 for your generic term. However, you can be #1 for a whole bunch of less competitive terms that are perhaps more relevant to your target audience which will get you BETTER ROI than the more generic term you wanted to be found under.

Also, keep in mind there are more ways to get (and keep) the attention of your target audience than search engines.

Just my $0.02 worth today - with thanks to Larry Anderson for the inspiration.