Google Algorithm Updated

Everyone wants top rankings for their website and most people use search engines to find what they are looking for. We all know that if your website is not in the top of a search engine that you will miss out on prospective clients, however as you also know getting these top ranks are not easy. We almost all know in some form what SEO (search Engine Optimisation) is, even if we have not got a clue how to do it. But whether we have done it ourselves or got someone to do it for us you will know that a one of hit will not fit the bill especially when search engines make changes make changes to their algorithms (this is the special formula that SE’s used to rank your site in the search engine results pages [SERPs]). Sometimes these tweaks are minor while other times they are huge and the impact is far reaching for all online users.

Google has made an algorithmic change, which, looks for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. Apparently this is not a flyby night minor change either as Google have stated it is a rankings change, not a crawling or indexing change, which suggests that sites getting less traffic will still be indexed, but some of those pages are no longer ranking as highly this change impacts “long tail” traffic, which generally is from longer queries that few people search for individually, but in aggregate can provide a large percentage of traffic. Google have said they will not be rolling it back.

So where does this leave your average small to medium sized business owner? Well if you have an ecommerce site using a structure that has longtail keywords for pages less viewed, you need to check your stats and see if you were in fact impacted by the update (did you lose traffic from some long tail phrases), also check out your linking practices ensure all links have been obtained using whitehat techniques. Another very important thing to do to help yourself now is check your link strategy out and ensure you are passing link juice to your internal pages.

Make sure all pages have unique good quality information (if you do ecommerce, this is definitely for you do not just use the manufacturers materials) and if you do not use them currently or have not used your social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn for a while now is the time as this will help you to build links to internal pages and get traffic throughput to them. Most savvy Business owners realise they can not rely purely on Google or any search engine for that matter for traffic and that social media sites can help boost their business’ exposure. Finally do not go mad do not change everything in the hopes of fixing something that may not even affect you, use your stats and above all common sense.

This is not the end of Long Tail Keywords however good optimisation is really important to your continued online success now, forget how to change, manipulate or find a way around the algorithm changes instead work with it and fix your SEO efforts accordingly by making consistent updates to your content, posting high quality articles that have been optimised on to a well designed site that has also be optimised is the winning game plan here. This does not mean that your rank will be the same indefinitely it does mean that you do work a bit harder and a bit differently to consistently keep you business in front of potential customers.