Do you know all about Google Panda? I decided that I would do a little research on it because when it was introduced in March 2011 some sites benefited with a rise in rankings while other sites lost out and started sliding in rankings.

The person responsible for Panda is a Google engineer named Navneet Panda. What he did was change the machine learning scalability of Google.

This means that sites are now rated for quality. Google now looks to see if the site is trustworthy and is credible. The sites that people show they like are placed in one group and the sites that are not favored are put into another group. The sites that are liked less are downgraded using Google’s Panda system.

So Panda has really done something new and different regarding SEO. It is now not just a matter of including all you keywords and getting the search engines to visit, you also have to think about the people that want to come to your site knowing they can trust it. Links are not as valuable as they were with Panda.

Panda relies on the popularity of your site and you should know how they do that. They measure how many visitors are coming to your site and how many pages they are reading while they are there. They measure this through Chrome, Android and Google toolbar. The more pages read, the more popular your site is. The more people that tweet or forward your site address to others will help increase your popularity.

Unique content is not as important as it was. How popular your site is, will now allow Panda to increase or decrease your rankings.

Now that I have read up on Google about Panda, I believe they are ready to make changes within a few weeks, so we are in for interesting times.

To YOUR success

Sue McDonald

 Will This Increase My Traffic?

Most helpful- Royalty Free Photos. If you ever wanted to know how to get royalty free photographs, then visit this blog and find out now. A lot of people were unaware of this source for photographs.

Most beautiful. The Power of Words.This is a blog that includes a video and I really loved everything about it. It is really for those that understanding copy-writing.

Most popular- Do You Use SEO? I wrote this blog about one of my favourite subjects – SEO. I still think it is very important to know how to get your page ranked.

Most controversial- Some Ideas On Selecting Your Business. We have had a very controversial tax introduced into Australia – known as the Carbon Tax. Governments are trying to make the world accountable for their actions and go green. So if you can why not start a green business and be out in front.

Favourite –Some Wisdom Form the Buddha. I love Eastern philosophy and this is one of my favourites. Read it and understand why the Buddha’s wisdom has lasted for so long.

Post that surprised you – Interested or Committed.  I sent this to a lot of my friends and everyone who read it claimed to be committed but that was not the case. There were people making all kinds of excuses why they had not done things and they could not tell the difference between interested and committed.

Post you are most proud of –  What A Great Life! I was sent this video of a fellow Australian and when you see it , you should never again complain about anything.

The five people I nominate are:

Robert Grimm

Louise Mandar

Lesley WK

Maureen Amberg

Hilary Dickinson

What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization is a method to get your site higher in rankings with all of the search engines. There are two parts of SEO – there is “on page” which accounts for between 20-30% and then we have “off page” which is the other 70-80%.

What benefits do we derive by increasing the ranking of our site? The higher ranking you achieve allows you to get higher in Google and what we are aiming for is page one in our niche. This gives you organic traffic and the more traffic you receive the more product that you can sell.

Some of the “on page” factors for you to consider:

Do some Keyword research

Chose your Domain name and have your main keyword in the domain name

Page title- include your keywords in your page title

Use H1-H6 Header tags

Use Meta tags

Give a Meta description

Content – any content you put on your site has to be original. Google does allow duplicate content but you can only benefit once from that content. This means if the first time you used it on a site and that site has a higher ranking, Google will not take notice of it on the lower ranking site.

Use a Site Map

Use Anchor text.

As I said remember this is only 20-30%. Increasing your ranking with SEO can be very time consuming if you are doing it for yourself. However, it can also be rewarding. All pages on the internet are created equal, but if you know how to use SEO, you have an advantage of getting noticed and ranked by the search engines. Many people think that Google is the only search engine but there are hundreds of them.

The main objective of “off page “SEO” is to get links pointing to your site. The search engines are unaware that you are creating these links and each link acts as a popularity vote for your site in the eyes of the search engine.

Some elements of “off page” SEO are:

Blogging – there are several free platforms that you can use like Blogger, Hub Pages, Squidoo.

Blog commenting – go and check out other peoples blogs and leave a relevant comment.

Forums – find forums in your niche and sign up and ensure that if you are permitted you add a signature block including your site. Each time when you write a post or thread, people see your site and it is possible they will visit.

Free classified – US free ads and Craigs lists are two well know ones

Articles – write articles and post them to various directories like Ezine. Each article should be unique content

Pinging – each time you add to you site or blog, ping it using pingoat.com or something similar

Press Releases –One of the best ways to increase your traffic

Now you can see that this can be time consuming but all of these methods are free. You could pay for advertising but this can be expensive. If you know how to do SEO and put it into practice, every day just doing a little more, you will be able to get your site up in the rankings.

To YOUR success

Sue McDonald

One of the biggest challenges that all internet marketers face is getting targeted traffic to their site. There are several ways to drive traffic to your website.

One of the most popular ways is through Search Engine Optimization. There is two parts to SEO – on page SEO and off page SEO.

A few things you should know about “on page”. Always start with keyword research. Google provide an excellent free tool for this – Google Keyword Tool. When you are purchasing a domain name, ensure that your main keyword is in that domain. When you are posting on your blog, use the keyword in the title of your blog. Keyword density must also be considered. It should be between 3-5%. Anymore many make the blog or article appear to be spam.  Make sure you use header tags and meta tags. You can use internal links from one of your pages to another. Always only use unique content. If you use the same content that you have used before, Google will only rank this content once and that is where it is ranking the highest. These are some of the “on page” factors that Google loves and will increase your ranking and help get you traffic.

Some of the “off page” factors include writing articles and blogs and linking them to your site. You can also go and find blogs about similar topic as your own and add a comment. This too will give you another link and more traffic.

Another way to get people is to advertise your site. If you go to Google and type in ” free ads” you will see how many sites are available.

To get traffic to your site or blog, make sure that the content is relevant to your URL. In saying this, when people come to your site, they are looking for information that is related to their keyword search.  Your site or blog should help the person with their problem by answering any questions they may have. If someone leaves a question in your comment box, always give them an answer.

If you are using a blog, it is advisable to add regular posts to your site. Not only is this good in the eyes of Google but you will find that you will get a good following who are interested in what you have to say. Give people a free book or article when they visit your site. This then will help you foster a relationship with your visitors.

Encourage people to come and leave a comment on your blog and take the time to answer them and reply accordingly.

To YOUR success

Sue McDonald
P.S. Leave me a comment and as long as it is in good taste – I will approve it.