How Algorithm Updates influence SEO

It isn’t difficult to look back at current algorithm updates from Google and evaluate how each one has altered the role of an SEO. In the simplest sense, Panda forced us to become better writers and researchers. Penguin made us alter the way we build links. Most recently, although it was less of an algorithm update and more of an communications change to Google’s core algorithm, Hummingbird asked us to consider conversational search queries in the content we produce.

Regardless of how small an algorithm update may be, the development and growth of an SEO’s tasks can be traced back through the history of updates. The fact that SEO is so dependent on updates creates quite a bit of uncertainty in the industry. But hey, as SEOs we know that the only thing that stays the same is that everything changes!

The only confidence is that things will be dissimilar tomorrow.

Saying an SEOs role has changed in the last five to 10 years is an understatement. SEOs are tasked with more each year and the definition of SEO has broadened significantly. It’s become nearly impossible to be a one-man (or woman) show. It requires a team with a number of different skills to perform quality SEO today.

How SEO has Changed

There used to be a time when SEO was strictly about getting traffic to a website. It didn’t matter how it was done as long as it was accomplished.

That was a long time ago.

Today the role of an SEO is much more than attracting visitors. It’s about conversions. It’s about building a brand, having a social media presence, and producing unique, high quality content better than anyone else in your industry.

Why is this happening? It’s simple – Google wants it. Aside from making money, Google wants it’s users to find the best search results possible. How do you weed out the good sites from the bad sites? Make it tough for the bad sites to compete. Google is accomplishing this through their algorithm updates.

This is well beyond the scope of early SEO that built-in keyword research, generic, keyword-stuffed content production, site convenience, and link building.

Staying practical beside Algorithms

The difference between great SEOs and ordinary SEOs is that the great ones have a sense of what the upcoming holds. They’re able to look into their crystal ball and plan for potential algorithms that may lie in front. What’s their secret? It’s experience. There is a good possibility that at one time or another they were penalized for their SEO practices and have a full understanding of the power of Google.

Here are a few things you can do to stay proactive:

•    Don’t have a one-dimensional backlink profile. An example would be a site that has mainly built links through guest posting. While guest posting is a great way to link build, your backlink profile is supposed to look normal. Having a site with backlinks primarily coming from one source is an obvious sign to Google that you’re trying to influence rankings. Instead make an effort to switch up your link building strategy. For every guest post you write, try to get a couple of directory links and a few blog comments as well. Some consider directory links and blog commenting outdated link building tactics but they’re still helpful as long as they’re relevant links on quality sites. select carefully where you build these links and if you’re going to leave a comment make sure you are contributing to the discussion.

•    It’s always a good time to clean up your backlink profile. If you actually want to be proactive with link building, don’t wait for the next update to get rid of bad links. We all have a few links we’re not proud of and it’s best to remove them now before it’s too late. Do you best to have these links removed by contacting webmasters and if that doesn’t work then use Google’s disavow tool. Still Google stresses to use this tool after all other attempts have failed.

•    Diversify your attach texts. This shouldn’t be breaking news to anyone but if you haven’t already made an attempt to vary your anchor texts when link building then there is no better time to start than today. This goes back to building a natural backlink profile. A site that has the best part of its links coming from one or two anchor texts is another sign to Google that your links are unnatural.

•    Be significant in everything you do. The importance of relevancy for Google isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Whether you’re producing content or building links, staying applicable to your niche is vital to maintaining ranks and satisfying Google.

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Is There Importance In Your SEO Rankings?

If you are asking yourself this question they you are maybe thinking about selling your website. Or you want to know what your website is worth so you can make the choice to sell it or not.

Let’s be clear here. The parameters of this argument are a valuation based on what a buyer would be willing to recompense you for your website. And those parameters are defined by sites that are owned as businesses or investments, not client’s websites.

Now traditionally the value of your search engine rankings has been considered by the traffic amount x the adwords CPC. Market Samurai calls this their SEOV (SEO value) metric.

A simple method would look something like this:
Traffic x CPC = SEO Value

And example might be for Boston Injury Lawyer.

2000 x $40 = $8,000 per month.

Why Traditional SEO assessment is wrong

In the context of selling a website the traditional assessment of traffic x CPC is not relevant. Value is derived specially from profit generated by your website. All the assets combined generate profit and it is that profit that has value. In simple terms, your domain + traffic + content + your income do not equal your websites value.

Let’s state you had a website called howtomakemoneyonline.com and it was ranking number one for “how to make money online”

SEO assessment

Hypothetically. Let’s imagine there are 40,000 exact match searches for “how to make money online” at a CPC of $4.00 and that is the only keyword that you rank for. Assuming you are getting 40% of that traffic ranking number one in Google. Using traditional SEO value the website is worth $64,000 per month in SEO worth traffic value.

Website valuation method

Let’s say that the similar website generated $100,000 per year in profit from advertising and affiliate profits.

If you applied a multiple of say 2.5 times to that website the assessment would come back as $250,000.

One would argue that the website is worth $64,000 per month because of the traffic value. The details are that from a website buyers perspective the profit that site can make is what determines value. So they value the website at $250,000.

Tips When allowing for Selling Your Website

By definition, you should really be viewing your website as a business because that is what it is, an profits generating asset that generates income and profits.

So if you are thinking of selling your website then let’s canvas some website selling factors.

1. Make Your Traffic Defensible

Buyers want to reduce their risk when investing. Their main goal is to get a return on asset. The more risk an asset class the lower they are going to pay. Hence why government bonds are seen as the safest investment (lowest return). Generally buyers look for diverse income and traffic. That is why your traffic must be valid. This is summed up well by Matt McGee. As Matt points out having defensible traffic means having a range of sources including search, PPC, social media, direct traffic. This is a big challenge for search based sites that rely heavily on search engine traffic. Especially with the recent Google updates sites that had great value a few years ago have been completely wiped off the map and have no value today.

2. Establish a Selling Price

Do you really know what your website is worth? I’m sure you have some idea but there is usually a big difference between what you ‘want’ to get for your website and what you will ‘actually’ get for your website.

Your advertising price is usually based on the following:

    Your individual website and it’s unique assets

    What parallel websites have sold for before

    What the market is currently bearing for web businesses

3. Produce A Selling Document

Commonly referred to as an information memorandum or “the book”. This document is prepared to help sell your website. It includes such things as:

    An summary of the website

    The fiscal history

    Traffic history

    Synopsis on how it generates income

    Summary of operations (what is required to run it)

    Profit and Loss statements

    Client Interview (general FAQ’s buyers will have)

4. Locating Qualified Buyers

The number one confront webmasters have when trying to sell their website is locating qualified buyers.

There are a few options that you can consider:

•         Sell it yourself
•         confidential network
•         Business classified sites (e.g. businessforsale.com)
•         Forums
•         Flippa.com
•         Internet investment companies (like internetbrands.com)
•         Use a broker
•         Their list of buyers

5. Don’t Drop The Ball

Don’t underestimate the importance of this fact. Stop looking after your website for a month and you may lose 5-20% of your selling price. Let’s use this example:

6. Buyers Want the Lowest Price: Don’t Let Them Get It

Most business and financial buyers have bought many websites in their profession, while most webmasters have never sold a website.

Get yourself up on the terms used by a buyer. And be ready to keep strong on your asking price. There are a lot more buyers than sellers in the market in general; particularly with the market awareness from flippa.com the market is being educated on the prospect of investing in websites. Educate yourself on the process of valuation and look for multiple offers.

7. How to Keep Your Sale Confidential

If you try to sell your website by yourself you are maybe going to have to advertise it for sale. There is no stopping the fact that customers, employees, suppliers and competitors might find out. If you go around emailing people that your website is for sale, unless you are really sneaky, there is a small possibility that you will be able to keep your identity hidden.

To protect confidentiality, if that is important to you, the normal process is to develop a generic, non-revealing advertisement to send out asking for potentially interested parties to contact you for more in order. As the seller you have the right to screen all those enquiries, so if there is someone that you don’t want rummaging into your business financials and info you can refuse them receiving any further information from the broker.

Top 40 SEO Myths You are supposed to be familiar with About – Part 1

 Myth 1: Just the First Rank Matters

Many eBooks and other resources that business owners use will place an significant emphasis on the need to be at the top of search results, whether that be on Google Search, other engines, or even in places like social media. But surveys have shown that people rather often will look at other results and they will scroll down through the page. Being on top of a second page, for example, can be quite useful for traffic. Also, search ranking is only one part of the puzzle. Now Google places other results on the page like social recommendations and local results as well, which means there are a lot of more avenues open to you, and being in first place is no longer as critical as it once was.

Myth 2: You can do SEO with no outside Help

Doing SEO simply means that you go after a set of techniques and procedures to improve the possibility that web users will go to your site. It is true that anyone can learn these techniques, and, if you are a web site owner and you want to do your own SEO, then you can use up the time to learn and apply those techniques. But SEO can be complex and touches many areas such as marketing online, coding, technical aspects and PR skills. Most business owners just do not have everything required to do a great job at SEO, and that is why so many agencies exist that offer help. An IT worker or online marketer is often not enough if you want truly good results.

Myth 3: META Tags are Very significant

It used to be that each page on your site needed Meta tags in order to rank well. Those are small pieces of code that would offer Google a list of keywords and a description. The search engine would use those to find out what your web site was regarding. Now however, those do not have an effect on your ranking at all. Both Google and Bing stopped caring about META tags awhile back. However, Meta tags are not useless. For example, the description tag is the text that frequently appears next to the link that shows up in the search results, so it still serves a useful function.

Myth 4: Keyword-Rich Domain Names are ranked upper

Back in the dotcom days, it used to be that the URL you used was very significant. Google placed a lot of importance on the domain name, and if you might get a name that had your keyword in it, you would gain a big advantage over other sites. This is why a lot of companies in the late 90′s bought domain names for a lot of money. But now, the indexing process only looks at the actual content of your pages, and not the domain name. The domain name is still important, because people still get to see it, but it will not give you a higher rank.

Myth 5: You have to suggest Your Site to Google or Other Search Engines

All search engines used to have URL submission forms where you might send your site to Google and others. In fact, they still do, but that procedure is unnecessary. The crawlers that these engines use now are sophisticated sufficient that any new site will be found in a matter of days, if not hours. The only time you would have to worry about submitting your site is if for some reason it was not indexed repeatedly after a couple of days.

Myth 6: Submitting a Sitemap will Boost Your Rankings

Google offers a webmaster interface and from there, you can submit a sitemap, which is a XML file containing links to each page on your site. Some site owners take the time to submit such a file every time they make a change, but that is not needed. Submitting a sitemap does not modify your rankings. All it does is add pages which may not have been indexed previously. If your site is typical and has links to all your pages, then it is not needed.

Myth 7: SEO has nothing to perform with Social Media

Before the advent of Facebook and Twitter, SEO was the one and only technique to get traffic in an natural way. But now, social media is all over, and the line is quickly blurring between the two. While some marketers still consider SEO and social media to be dissimilar beasts, the truth is that they are very closely linked. For example, Google now places their own social network, Google Plus, into its search results. If you can get enough important people to talk about your product and link to your site, then their recommendations will show up in any Google search result that their friends do. This clearly affects SEO. On the flip side, Facebook has also entered search, by recently introducing their Open Graph engine, which searches based on friends and interests. So the two spheres are closely linked, and they are becoming closer all the time.

Myth 8: Google does not examine CSS Files

The Google bot used to be fairly primitive and only saw text, which is why many people concentrated on the text part of their web site. But now that engine is very sophisticated and reads JavaScript, CSS, and more. The crawler can certainly see whether your site’s presentation is appealing to users or not. For example, if someone searches on a mobile device and you have no mobile layout on your site, you may be missing out.

Myth 9: You need to modernize Your Home Page All the Time

Some people think that by updating their home page content all the time they will rank higher, or by not updating it their ranking will drop. In most cases that are not the case, since if you have a sales page that offers a product, then there would be no motive to update that page unless something about the product changes and Google expects that.

Myth 10: The H1 Header has Greater Value than the Rest of Your Text

The arrangement of your page is seen by Google and other engines, but you have to realize that many sites are structured in a different way. As such, no one specific tag has more worth than another. An H1 tag is simply a header that corresponds to a CSS entry in order for the user to see your page a positive way. It does not make Google rank your page any differently if you use H2 tags in its place, or if your keywords are frequently in the text and not in an exact CSS tag.

Myth 11: Linking to Other Highly Ranked Sites Helps Your Ranking

Some sites try to link to a lot of other high authority sites in order to help their rankings, but that does not help at all. Google uses PageRank to make a decision how your site will rank, and that algorithm is based on how useful your site is to others, and as such it will only look at how many other people link to you. Whether you link back to them is of no significance. Otherwise, any site could rise to the top simply by linking to millions of sites, which is simply not the case.

Myth 12: Using Automated SEO Methods is constantly Spam

Many people use automated SEO methods that do not fall into the spam area. Many companies have very big sites and they use automated scripts to do a lot of the grunt work of SEO. Whether or not a method is spammy is based on what the result is, not on how automated it is.

Myth 13: PageRank is the Only Factor that Matters

The algorithm that Google uses to rank sites is PageRank, which determines how valuable a site is to others. But according to Google, search result rankings are also affected by hundreds of other inputs. Some of these inputs are easy to see, like having your site being recommended by others on Google Plus. This proves that not just PageRank matters. The company is staying tight-lipped on how many inputs there are and how significant each is, but it is clear that there is more going on than just PageRank. With that said however, it is still generally believed that PageRank is the most vital factor, and a PR10 page is always better than a PR3 page.

Myth 14: The Title Tag is hidden from Search Engines

Most of what Google sees on your site is the text that is noticeable to users, such as what appears on the screen and is rendered in a web browser. As such, it would be simple to think that the title is not picked up. However, your title is very significant for SEO, because it is the text that appears on the link people will click on. Not only is Google using it to help your ranking, but people will also see it when they go to click on your site.