Evolving SEO in 2011 - SEO Trends and Techniques

Google's description of low quality sites they were targeting stated, "sites that contain content copied from other sites" which is pretty much the backbone of all of these sites. Adding to the pain is that these sites are used by thousands of individuals, SEO companies and agencies as an outlet for website related content.

The immediate effect of the revision was that EzineArticles and other major article directories dropped significantly in Google's rankings; in addition to Squidoo and Hubpages, sites like eHow.com and About.com also saw material changes in their rankings and traffic numbers. Fitting the description of content farms, the sites were hammered hard by Google's penalties.

Does this mean that article marketing on these sites is no longer a viable strategy? If you've been putting out marginally spammy and minimalist content the changes are going to make it much tougher for it to rank at the search engines. With directories scrambling to abide by Google's new set of rules, they will be scrubbing lower quality and spammy articles. Where the algorithm presents an opportunity is for quality content that exists on blogs and websites. These pages now have a much better chance of ranking higher because Google will give more credence to original site and blog content than that on the directory sites. This is actually a complete reversal of Google's methodology prior to Panda/Farmer.

Expect the following changes to continue into the rest of 2011 and beyond.

* Pay per Click (PPC) will get more expensive - Competition in the bidding process for PPC placement is rising as more businesses shift away from traditional advertising methods to online efforts. Combined with the well established trend showing that searchers click on and give more credence to organic search results, it may be time to re-evaluate the return on investment for any existing PPC campaigns.

* Search engines are transferring their love from content farms to social media - While they probably resent the content farm title, EzineArticles, Hubspot, and the like were the primary target of Google's Panda/Farmer update and saw traffic drop off a cliff. Meanwhile, the major search engines are doing everything they can to show results that originate from social media sites. Even if you don't plan to fully engage on these sites, you should have a monitoring system in place to see what is being said about topics relating to your business.

* Local search via smart phones will accelerate - If you're not optimizing for local search, start now. The trend is entrenched in traditional search and is expected to ramp up faster as smart phones expand their slice of the mobile phone pie chart.
Consider these trends as you move forward with your SEO efforts. As always, vary your marketing strategy between multiple fronts because you never know where the next algorithm changes are going to be targeted.

If you're gearing your site toward mobile search, here are the two aspects of search that you should pay attention to if you're not doing so already:

1) Focus on local search. Traditional search is getting more local by the day and mobile search looks like it will go that way as well. Marketing your site to focus on local search for will deliver benefits from both search formats.
2) Smart phone users love apps. If you can build one that delivers a value to your audience, it can help to keep your business in front of them and make it easier for them to interact with your business.

It remains to be seen how the directories will fare in the long run but it appears that Google is ready to reward original content that adds value for searchers. The key now is to play aggressively while staying within the new rules.
For more information, visit SEO Marketing or call (866) 530 7703.