Google Algorithm Change Predictions in 2012 – Prepare your Website for the New Year

In order to predict 2012 Google Algorithm changes we need to first look at 2011. Starting from January 2011, Google started making algorithm updates to help weed out poor quality and duplicated content, scrapers and spammy websites.

Some big players such as overstock.com and JC Penney were hit with penalties in January and February respectively. The (content) Attribution Update at the end of January affected 2% of search queries. This gave us a very solid clue on what Google was going to be focusing on in 2011 – content.

Content

We’ve always known content is king, even before all the 2011 algorithm updates, Google has always favoured websites with vast amounts of content.

When you type a search query into Google, you are not looking for WebPages full of keywords or rehashed articles, you are looking for unique and useful information on your subject. Google knows this. They are always trying to provide you with better results – not an easy task by any measure. The best way to make these improvements is through search algorithm updates.

With all these recent changes, Google is trying to put more emphasis on good content; not just a lot of content – but a lot of well written, unique content. It’s not often I find myself doing this, but I actually agree with Google on this one. Content farming and scrapers represented the dark side of the internet, the sooner they are gone, the better. To combat this Google has named this set of algorithm changes Panda.

Panda

2011 for the Google algorithm was the year of the Panda. We saw no fewer than 11 Panda updates. During January a few algorithm updates were released to give clues as what 2011 will be about, it wasn’t until February we saw the first Panda update – affecting 12% of all search results. It cracked down on content farms, poor quality content, and high ad-to-content ratio websites. The effects weren’t instant either, only coming to Europe in April.

• Panda 1.0 – Feb 23, 2011 – Initial panda algorithm release, affecting 12% of search results.
• Panda 2.0 – Apr 11, 2011 – Rolled out to English search queries worldwide, integration of new signals.
• Panda 2.1 – May 9, 2011 – Minor changed not discussed by Google.
• Panda 2.2 – Jun 21, 2011 – Continued updates to Panda algorithm, updates were separate from main index and not in real-time
• Panda 2.3 – Jul 23, 2011 – Minor update to the Panda ranking factors.
• Panda 2.4 – Aug 12, 2011 – Rolled out to non-English search queries. 6-9% of sites affected in new countries.
• Panda 2.5 – Sep 28, 2011 – Changes unclear, huge ranking losses reported on some sites.

Minor panda updates affecting roughly 2% of search queries.

• Minor Panda updates – Oct 5, 2011
• Minor Panda updates – Oct 3, 2011
• Minor Panda updates – Oct 13, 2011
• Minor Panda updates – Nov 18, 2011

I don’t see panda as another update to the main algorithm, rather a branch on its own, I can certainly see more updates to Panda in 2012, content will always be important and this is what Panda is all about.

Whether we like it or not, as SEOs we will never know exactly what Google will do next, but we can prepare. So here are some things to watch out for and prepare your website in anticipation of 2012.

2012

2012, in my opinion, will see a decent proportion of Google’s updates refining the Panda update. Google is putting more and more emphasis on brands, with bigger brands getting more favourable results. Especially after the Panda updates – with similar content, we saw rankings drop for smaller brands (the review centre), while big brands remain untouched (trip advisor).

Here are a few things you can do to prepare your websites for 2012 algorithm updates.

1. Work on your brand, this is going to be big – in 2012, if it’s not going to be more content updates for Panda algorithm its going to be brand. Brand has been talked about for a while now, but the panda update really put an emphasis on this. Work on your own brand and Google will love you.




2. Review your website for duplicate and poor content – it’s not too late. Remove the large amounts of poor content you created to take advantage of Google before the Panda update. Replace them with quality pieces that are unique, helpful and engaging. More Panda will follow in 2012 to see how good you’ve been.




3. Engage socially – in 2010 everyone was talking about how social is going to affect SEO in 2011, who knew content was going to be the main focus? However, Social is not going anywhere, if not next year it will be the year after. Start early to avoid disappointment later.




4. Quality over quantity for links – An old one, but a good one. Google will eventually crack down the back link game, the first ones to go will be those with spammy back links and sites with enormous back links to referring domain ratios. Go after a few quality links and spend more time acquiring them.




5. Kept yourself up to date – Last but least, keep yourself up to date from the official source. Two websites you need to add to your RSS feeds or visit regularly are from Google themselves, the Inside Search Blog and Official Google Blog. The more you know, the better position you will be in to make changes.

Source: Google Algorithm Predictions in 2012 – Prepare your Website

SEO Checklist for Your Review Site

SEO Checklist for Your Review Site:

1. Make sure your blog post title begins with the keyword.
2. Repeat the keyword 2 times in the blog post title.
3. Blog post title should be long but not so long. Keep it at least above 3 words and less than 66 characters or 11 words.
4. There should be 2 sub heading in your blog post and each of them should have the keywords in them.
5. Description in the meta tag should contain less than 160 characters.
6. Description in the meta tag should begin with your keyword.SEO Checklist for Your New Website SEO Checklist for Your Review Site
7. Title in the meta tag should begin with your keyword.
8. Keywords in the meta tag should contain your keyword.
9. There should be 2 images in eachblog post which has title and alternate text defined (your keyword is preferable).
10. Make sure to have the keyword in the text links that you create.
11. Keyword should be in the first sentence of the blog post.
12. Keyword should be in the last sentence of the blog post.
13. Each blog post should have at least more than 500 words. Final post (the one with affiliate links) should have at least 700 words.
14. Each blog post should have a one bold, one underlined and one italicized keyword. I usually like to do this somewhere in my sub heading or the first sentence.
15. Each blog post should have at least a keyword density of more than 1.5%. Above 2%, keyword density is recommended.
16. Preferable, a video should be there in the final post of areview site or homepage. A testimonial of a product is the best choice.

Google’s Updates and the Effects on Blogging in 2012

One of the best ways to plan for online success in the coming year is too look back at many of thealgorithm changes that Google has made and the effects they will have on blogging in 2012. This year has seen well over 500 algorithm modifications, primarily coming from the Panda and Freshness updates. During this period of time, Matt Cutts and fellow Google folk did their best to help a lot of webmasters understand the implications of the various patches and updates that they have uploaded.

But quite frankly, many small internet marketers and niche websites got hit pretty badly. After Google’s Panda updates were first applied, many bloggers lost thousands of visitors per month and often dropped out of first page results that had netted them steady organic traffic. This is not something you want to be caught up in again, so make sure your blog is getting the time and effort it needs to boast user worthy content and see increased traffic from Google next year.

Main Reasons for Lost Google Rankings in 2011:

• Duplicate, scraped, or copied content – Panda hit this hard and does a great job of identifying “spun content” through N-grams and other techniques.
• High outbound links – link farms and sites associated with them got devalued a lot, if you had a lot of backlinks coming from these sources you may have been penalized.
• Stale content – the Freshness algorithm demands regular updates in 35% of keywords, depending on your market and online competition, you may want to add new content on a weekly or daily basis.
• Low content volumes – Matt Cutts has said that Panda also targets websites that have very low user worthy content, it is recommended that you update any pages/posts on your site that do not have competitive quality. (i.e. most posts should be 300+ words, a 50 word post could hurt your sites overall integrity)

Many people vilify the Panda update because it was such a problem for their own personal sites. The idea behind changes like Panda, are to improve the search results for Google users. Duplicate content and blogs that offer no value should never rank well in the SERP’s. Blogs that were affected by the update were usually low quality affairs that never deserved first page rankings to begin with. Many of these sites relied on backlinks from article databases to rank well. One of the side effects of removing scraped and duplicate content was the de-valuing of these link sources. Blogs that did not have strong link diversity suffered the most. Article marketing was a very popular method to get strong search results fast. Unfortunately, many bloggers relied on this technique for a majority of their backlinks. After the Panda update bloggers who used article marketing as the backbone of their backlink profiles dropped sharply in the rankings.

Panda Algorithm Overview:

• Major penalties for duplicate content.
• Content quantity and quality is more important than ever.
• Black hat techniques penalized – keyword stuffing, shady redirects, spammy meta data, and others will only hurt your rankings.
• Article databases lost link value due to low quality duplicate content.

Freshness Algorithm Overview:

• Caffeine indexing – will be placing more weight on newest results and information.
• Will affect 35% or more of keywords.
• Will affect less than 35% of search results. (some keywords receive the same search results)
• Helps authority and large publishing sites due to it being more difficult for small internet marketers and bloggers to keep up consistent updates and content releases.
• Daily online activity is more important than ever; ie. Posting, commenting, tweeting, etc.

The Freshness update can thank the Caffeine indexing system for allowing new content to be crawled indexed, and displayed. The new system allows Google to crawl and index fresh information at speeds that were not possible before its development. This innovation could not have come at a better time. Users demand the freshest and most relevant search results as possible. Google thankfully had the tools available to provide this exact service.

Search terms that are time sensitive are now identified by the algorithm even if the notion of time sensitivity is implied. For instance if a user searches for “war in Afghanistan”, in all likelihood they want the most up to date information. Not news results from the 80’s, when the USSR occupied the territory. Google wants to provide this seamless search functionality for their users. People don’t even realize that the search engine is interpreting their request in order to provide the best results possible. Even though the Freshness update affected only 35% of keywords, it has changed the way Google looks at blogs forever.

How does Google see blogging currently?

Blogging has become very popular and 100’s of millions of bloggers write posts on a weekly basis. This is a lot of information for Google to crawl and index on a regular basis, but with the advent of Caffeine, they are now able to do exactly that. Google can crawl and index blog posts only moments after they are written. Even the information in the comments section is crawled and indexed now. The more information that Google has regarding your blog, the better they can associate it with specific search terms.

Blogs must make regular updates if they are to remain relevant in the search results. Quality and consistency are two features Google is always looking for and a great way to display them is through the daily release of unique, well written content.

• Must make weekly blog posts to remain current for Google search results.
• Only write quality, unique content that is related to the blog subject matter.
• Relevancy matters, many paid for services post random articles on blogs for paid links, these are usually not related to the blog subject matter. This is a spam indicator. Avoid this at all costs.

Blogging in 2012 post Panda

Google has made around 500 algorithm changes and adjustments throughout 2011. The majority of them have been done to improve the search results that Google provides. Some of the changes have crippled bloggers that were able to make a living with their blogs. But they probably did not provide users with anything of value or participated in black hat link building techniques. In any case, most bloggers should be extremely happy with the changes that Google has completed. Blogs are ranking for thousands of high traffic keywords and are among some of the most visited websites in the world. The Freshness update has only solidified the relevancy of blogs in the search results and offers more opportunity for bloggers to be found in 2012.

20 Guru Tips To Increase Blog Traffic - New!

Increasing blog traffic is

one of the major concerns of bloggers. After all its one of the important measur

e of your blogging success. Increasing blog traffic was one of the first articles i read online and it feels really good to write something about that i have learned over time.

To summarize the entire post in few words, I believe the major contenders in increasing blog traffic are your blog posts frequency (quality post with proper SEO) and posting timings. These few factors play the vital role in driving traffic to your blog.

And yea, consistency is a backbone too! So lets start with our exciting list of the top 20 ways by which we can boost our blog traffic.

1-Starting Off- Choosing Your Blog Platform

This can play a huge role in your blog's future performance and in determining your blogging success. Many top bloggers often use their own custom content managing systems. This means that they wont be using the popular blogging platforms like WordPress or Blogger and instead, they would make out their own blogging system, with posting tools, their own set layout of blog, their own custom commenting system etc.

This can be tricky for the beginners. So for this purpose, most recommend to use the popular content managing systems like WordPress, Blogger, Typed etc.

Just to know, there is nothing like perfect blogging platform. Its basically about fulfilling your needs. Some might be satisfied with Blogger and some with Typed/WordPress. So it depends. The posts below would better help you out in using one for yourself.

• 6 Reasons Why Blogger Overshines WordPress
• Top Ten Things I Hate About Blogger

So find out which one suites you best and then move on.

2-Make Your Blog As a Sub domain Of Your Website

As blogs are getting popular due to the way they present information and their interactive nature, many websites (companies) opt in for making a blog for them self too. Notice how we have Facebook blog or Twitter blog.

The whole point of the story is that in case we own a website already and we wish to proceed with having a blog too, then its a wise idea to get register your blog as a sub domain of your website. Why to start all over all with your blog?

Having a blog as a sub domain in (blog.yourwebsite.com) would help out your website in gaining more visitors in future (as blogs attract a lot of traffic due to their interactive nature and the way they are updated regularly, unlike a website).

The page rank of your website (the Google ranking authority), that you have already gained over the years would flow toward your newly build blog and make flourish faster as it would if it had a separate domain name. (www.yourblog.com)

Say if you are just starting out with a blog and you don't have a website history, then you obviously would start out with an independent blog domain.

3-Proper SEO For Your Blog And Every Individual Post

Posting with consistency over a long period of time would give you success, in terms of traffic, loyal readership and revenue. But that's not it. 1000s of posts with wrong search engine optimization (SEO) would not help at all.

We want every post to go out in the competition and rock the world. For that, its a wise idea to choose proper title tags or your blog and post pages. The following two articles would help you out acheive this.

• How To Write Search Engine Friendly Blog Post Titles?
• Optimize Blog Post Titles Using H2 Tag - Increase Traffic
• 3 Reasons Why Your PageRank is not Increasing

To summarize the Title strategy, its a wise approach to make your blog post title appear in the following order: (post name | blog name) e.g ( How to make money online | Mybloggertricks ). Choose proper keywords, that are friendly to human eye and are not just for the search engines.

4-Show Yourself Authoritative Even If Your Are Newbie

This might feel odd but its just how many top bloggers started off. No one in the world is perfect when they first launched their blog. So say you blog about cricket. And as i mostly say, that one could never get blogging success if hes not passionate about the topic he writes on. So its the first test you have to put yourself in.

Consider that you are a huge fan of cricket and know quite a bit about it. So as you blog along, you read more articles online related to cricket and then you share your knowledge with your readers in a way that you already knew it. So present what you know in a way that you know it well. Thats the main point i wanted to make here.

It doesn't mean that you spread out wrong information (as you are a newbie). Its just that learn along and present it wisely.

5-Participate In The Community (Forums, Blogs)

This can be helpful to some extent. But i also believe that many beginners get distracted with this strategy and loose focus on the posting frequency part (that is the basics). Consider a news paper company. Take NewYork Times just for an example.

News paper is kind of a blog, that is updated regularly (on daily basis). If you would get a newspaper the next morning with old news, would you consider having it again? Even if we consider that the NewYork Times were busy in making relationships with other bloggers, newspapers and community to increase their scope.

The content is what people come to your blog. So do participate in blogs commenting systems (blogs of your choice, relevant to your niche) but schedule a time limit for it in your entire day plan. May be an hour or so. I personally don't do it on regular basis (to be honest. I try to focus on developing content for my blog).

To find blogs in your relevant niche, say you blog about dogs food, then search in Google like, Top dog foods. That would bring a lot of blogs up. Start following them and participate.

6-InBound And Out Bound Linking

Linking content is really important too. Though this might not directly increase your traffic, but this would indeed increase your page rank (as discussed before) and then would bring quality search engine traffic for sure.

In bound linking is basically when you link your post with some other post on your blog. Notice how i shared other old relevant post that were shared on Mybloggertricks in the past. This is inbound linking. You can directly mention old posts like (you might also like bla bla) or make the link within the sentence. Take an example of the next sentence.

It is always important to know How To Inter-link Pages Smartly To Flow The PR Juice To Ever Single Page!. See? You can make the link part of your sentence too. Its works the same. In this way, the page rank that your present post have gained would flow to these linked posts, resulting them to get higher ranked in search engines.

7-Increasing Post Frequency With Guest Bloggers

There is a limit to the number of posts that you can mange to write in a single day. May be 3-4 maximum. So why not to take help of other guest authors that would help you out in the process. This is the general idea. But to note, you wont be getting any guest bloggers in your early blogging days and no one would feel like posting and associating them selves with a newbie blog.

So you have to do the initial hard work of posting regularly (or you can hire paid bloggers too) and then seek on guest bloggers.

• How to Write and Submit a Guest Post?

8-Posting Timings

Hell important. Take on an example of this blog. There is nothing to hide guys. We feel like sharing our experience through these posts. :)

So now days i normally publish posts around 11-12am. (which makes up 8-10am in US, from where most of the internet traffic lands on). This is the time where most of the people check on blogs (as per stats). I may visit mybloggertricks in my office once a day, and if there is no new content (even if the authors would post later in the day, i wont get to read it).

So its wise to publish out the article when most of the people tend to read it. So coming back to timings, when ever i get late in post, we tend to see a decrease in the Alexa rank! So posting on right timings would increase it dramatically.

9-Consider Using Ads When You Get Setup

Imagine a blog with no or less traffic is full of ads. What impression would that give? A clean blog with clear cut content gives out a more positive feel. That doesnt mean you should not monetize your blog, but i believe that as due to the low traffic, the Ads wont make you any considerable money, so why not to give a clean look to blog until you get some loyal traffic.

That would be the time to introduce the Ads.

10-Always Talk Hot!

Many of the readers here at MBT shared their views that how we published a post on Christmas Gadgets. Christmas is near so why not to talk about it? Its hot. This is one of the strategies of flowing traffic towards your blog. There is nothing to hide. Thats how the world of blogging works.

In fact this is what blogging is. What if a SEO blogger doesn't tell the top blogging techniques to their visitors? So if there is a particular dog disease out in the world, and you blog about dogs, do write about it.

11-Content Layout- Addition of Pictures/Media

Pictures are better than thousand words. We know that. Notice how pictures in this post make it more interesting to read. Its just some kind of natural force that makes you continue reading out the rest of the post.

Its a must. Find any relevant video to your content to if you could find one.

12-Learn With Your Analytics

Monitor your blog's top articles in terms on visitors, bounce rate, time spent etc and then try to improve those articles. Feature them in your feature post widget for your blog so that they get even more attention. Try to update the content, if there is any thing new to the post theme.

Notice your top performing days which bring most of the traffic and try to utilize it. You may want to add an extra post on that top performing day.

13-URL SEO- Post link layout

Like in WordPress, you write the post url separately to the post title unlike in blogger. In blogger, you can add some additional code to your templates, to make the post titles as your post url. The best SEO url strategy is to make the url same as the post title, with keywords that you are targeting.

14-Be polite, Humble Blogger

Your relationships with your readers is crucial. No one likes rude attitude. When a reader leaves out a comment, greet him in a great way that he would be feel honored to share his thoughts again. This would increase the interactivity of your blog and if you continue to do so consistently, you would find a great people ready to praise you all the time.

15-Table of Contents Can Help

If you have a blog with tutorials, tips, then its a wise approach to have list of contents (sitemap) that would help navigation easy for the visitors. This can increase the number of page views dramatically. So like wise bounce rate would drop (that's what you want).

16-Say All What You Got

Be natural and say it all. When the readers would know that you are straight about what you know and anything that you don't know, they would respect you. When you mention any thing that is still new for yourself, be positive and mention that you are still experimenting on that one.

Every one is in the process of learning all the time.

17-Creating Curiosity And Fulfilling it

The ebook creation series that i have worked over the last couple of days has developed a curiosity among many of our friends here at MBT. Series of posts works pretty well for this purpose. Always mention what is coming next day so that readers would feel like waiting for it.

18- Drive Referal Traffic-YouTube

YouTube has been really in, in terms of driving traffic to my blog. In fact my top performing article is backed by a YouTube video that brings in much of a traffic. You would have seen many top bloggers using YouTube videos to give an extra edge to their content.

You can make a short video supporting your article and embed that into your post. Believe me that gives a great impression.

19- Build a Brand- Work On To Be Unique

Your blog looks and feel are very important in terms on developing a unique brand. Even if you use a template, work on to make it more personel so that it just belongs to you. Clean and clear design can impress the visitors and tend them to push the like buttons here and there. I often go for like buttons on blogs just by their first impression.

It means a lot.

20- Post Frequency Final Note:

Many beginners dont get the post frequency part. They can never decide the right post frequency for their blogs. As here, i would recommend posting out 2 or more articles daily (they can be short around 400 words) and then stick to this for 6-8 months. The results would be self explainatory.

So these are the top 20 tips that would lead you to drive traffic to your blogs may it be blogspot blogs or any other. The idea is universal. Again buddy, the power is in consistency. This is for the motivational purpose. If you don't stick to what you do, there is no use. So lets do it together and sketch our success with our own hands.

My Predictions – Business and Marketing Trends 2012

2012 is fast approaching, it’s December 2011 already! Here are my business and marketing predictions for 2012:

Sharing

27 Million units of content are shared online on a daily basis and according to The New York Times Customer Insight Group, 85% of people surveyed said that reading other users recommendations and feedback enabled them to make a more informed decision. With people now automatically turning to the internet to ask for feedback, research their choices and look for recommendations from other users it is a short hop to the idea that recommendation engines, social networks and other types of sharing will become a major focus for marketing.

Social Sales

With sharing reaching an all time high with no expected downturn in the future for now, collaborative consumption via group buying sites will increase, with group buying moving into the utilities section looking at group buying of electricity, phone, internet, petrol and other daily consumptables on the increase.

Collaboration

We will see the rise of collaborative business opportunities, as we will see businesses begin to collaborate more often in local directories, local mobile marketing, deals, and in ways that take their marketing outside the box with new cross promotional opportunities. Local Marketing will take on a whole new flavour as collaborative local businesses market their businesses using complementary cross promotional partnerships by branding online destinations using discounts, contents and events.

Gamification

“Gamification is the concept of applying game-design thinking to non-game applications to make them more fun and engaging,” explains Nathan Lands, creator of Gamification.org and co-founder of Gamify, which will soon launch a product that allows individuals and brands to gamify their own virtual spaces. Gaming is now a part of the mindset of the new purchasing generation and we will see more gamification of sites including social networks and business websites as we see new ways to reward customers for taking action. Imagine rewarding a customer with a gold star or a point each time they took the step in your call to action and then collating this information in order to reward the user with a gift when they reach a certain number of stars or points? A little like taking the reward card online via mobile phone or tablet.

Social Media Influence

I can see your social media influence (how widespread your listening public are online) becoming an influencial factor offline and on, as more companies not only reward the big players with lots of freebies, better airline seats etc… but adding in those with large reach and influence online for Facebooking, Tweeting, Plusing and YouTubing their recommendations and gratitude.

Digital Security

With too many sites getting away with too many false promises, people who are not who they say they are, hacked personal email and bank accounts etc.. we will see the subject of digital security come up more often and more regulatory bodies, perhaps in the future a we will even see a system governance and governing body – perhaps not in 2012, however certainly in the very near future.

Social Media Will Die Out

Shock! Horror! …what I really meant is, that the idea, belief that social media is a fad AND the words used to define social media marketing will change completely into just marketing as all marketing become social. As far as I am concerned the world has found it’s voice and will never again lose it, this for me means that this kind of marketing and the daily rituals associated with customer service and building relationships with our customers and clients and social marketing will become the way marketing is done in all business. There will be an increase in ways to do this as more agile minds come into play and we will see the rise of the branded online customer experience rise.

Video Marketing

Video marketing will become a major influence with new sites dedicated to digital advertising will rise up and challenge television ads, asking the question: “Whose video ad will get the most recommendations?” and rewarding users for voting on their favourite and sharing it.

Intelligence

Social and digital platforms user information will be aggregated for businesses to use as research for product development and marketing strategies, after all this is where your audience is and this is where they are sharing their questions, recommendations, likes, dislikes…

The Rise of the Social Business

The social business is one that realises that their business must transform and include their employees, their customers, clients, partners in fact everyone in their sphere of influence as a part of their social marketing circle. The social busines recognises that each of these groups of people have influence and a voice off and on social media and that each and every voice counts as a vote for or against their company, even a sacked worker has a voice. Organisations who take this seriously and make the adjustments needed to the way they do business will thrive, those that do not.. well you get the drift.