The world of search engine optimization gets more complicated every day. With the latest Google algorithm change, “Panda,” some businesses are scrambling to figure out why their rankings dropped and how to fix it, while others are basking in their new found first page rankings. The goal of this article is to shed some light on why your rankings may have dropped and what you can do to be a first page contender once again.
What is the Panda Update and How Does it Affect SEO?
Google’s last major update, called “Panda,” was launched on February 24, 2011 for U.S. sites and became worldwide in early April. The update was an algorithm change designed to bring high-quality sites to the top of the search engine rankings and bury low quality sites with questionable content. The goal for Google is and always has been to provide its users with the the most relevant content possible, and to improve the overall user search experience. Panda is another major step forward in achieving this goal for Google. As a result, many popular search engine optimization techniques have been rendered ineffective. After Panda, business owners must now place more emphasis than ever on making sure their website consists of high-quality content, a professional web design, and an effective SEO strategy that does not violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
What Can You Do to Improve Your Rankings After Panda?
The challenge now is to understand what Google wants from a website and use that knowledge to rise in the rankings. This most recent update makes it imperative that business owners pay attention to the quality of their websites.
If you wish to achieve first page rankings on Google, you must provide useful information on a well-optimized and attractive website that loads quickly. Inferior design, duplicate or poorly written content, and keyword stuffing won’t cut it. Likewise, a poor link building strategy may do more harm than good.
The most effective way to proceed is to carefully perform an SEO analysis of your site. Determine if your rankings have been negatively affected by Panda. If they have, review your website and analytics to try and determine what aspect of your site Google is penalizing. Have you borrowed content from other sites? Does your site have a high bounce rate because it’s poorly designed? Are backlinks from questionable sites or link farms linking to your site?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, then proceed to correct them. Remove duplicate content and replace it with high-quality, unique content, replace your current web design with a professional design that is user-friendly and loads quickly, and have backlinks from questionable sites removed.
A Professional Web Design is Essential to Your SEO Strategy
One of the most overlooked aspects of a successful SEO strategy, a professional website design is more essential than ever to achieving first page rankings. Google takes into account a website’s bounce rate, or the percentage of visitors who leave a site without visiting any other pages after initially entering it. A high bounce rate indicates to Google that users do not find a site relevant to their search queries, and Google will lower its rankings as a result.
Research shows that users judge a website’s visual appeal immediately upon entering it. Users want an aesthetically pleasing site that allows them to easily find what they’re looking for. This is why poorly designed and difficult to use sites tend to have high bounce rates, which cost them in the rankings. In addition to design, the load time of a site is very important. Sites that load slowly are frowned upon because they create a poor user experience. Slow loading sites will have higher bounce rates than sites that load quickly, which can result in lower rankings. Even more importantly, Google is now taking into account user-experience by allowing users to block sites from their search results. While blocking a site only affects the users’ search results, Google now utilizes this user feedback to tweak their overall rankings. In other words, if enough users block your website from their search results, there’s a good chance Google will drop your rankings in order to provide a better search experience for its users. This only reinforces the need for a professionally designed custom website that is aesthetically pleasing, designed with an intuitive user-interface, coded properly, fast-loading, and creates an overall pleasing experience for the user.
Next Steps to Creating a Winning Post-Panda SEO Strategy
While we may never know exactly how Google decides the fate of each site, it is clear that there is much that can be done to rise to the top of Google.
The foundation of a successful SEO campaign after Panda is to create and follow a long-term SEO strategy that includes publishing unique and useful content, having a professionally designed, user-friendly website, and utilizing best-practice SEO techniques to optimize and promote each page.
To accomplish this will take a lot of time, effort, and expertise. As a business owner, your time is better spent running your business, not your SEO campaign. For this reason, consider hiring an experienced web designer and SEO professional, or a credible SEO company with web design expertise (or vice versa) to manage your SEO campaign. Either way, your SEO services team should include a web designer who knows how to create an attractive, properly coded, user-friendly website, and an SEO professional who utilizes best-practice techniques and has a proven track record of success.
In this article, we’ve only scratched the surface on how to create a winning post-Panda SEO strategy. Next month, we’ll go into even greater detail on what you can do to get your website back on the first page of Google!