SEO

With the rise of search engine popularity, and its ultimate incorporation into people’s daily lives, getting visible on the first page of Google has become one of the most important aspects of online marketing. Competition however is fierce. As evidenced by the recent Google Algorithm Updates; Panda and Penguin, changes in this industry happen quickly and often without warning.

While not every Internet marketing strategy is implemented in every industry at the same levels of intensity, there are a few universal truths for anyone who wades into the floodwaters of search engine optimization. So while this article is meant in good fun, these are the most basic and essential rules that every SEO should live by.

On Thursday, September 27^th, Google confirmed its 20^th Panda update. This update is fairly major for two reasons:

• It is not simply a data update, but an actual algorithm update. This means that both old and new sites are likely to be impacted even without making any changes.
• It impacts approximately 2.4% of English searches and 0.5% of foreign searches.

About 2 weeks ago, Google introduced a new, much needed tool, particularly since the release of Google Penguin earlier this year. Penguin targeted “over optimization,” which involves many things. However, a central target of the Penguin was the penalizing of sites that have many spammy inbound links. The problem for many webmasters is that they have had no absolute or direct control as to the quality of their inbound links. So, it is possible to have negative influences to your Google rankings simply due to the presence of link spam that could not be directly and effectively dealt with.

As I had hoped and predicted, Google has now made available the Disavow Link Tool, which effectively allows webmasters and SEOs to exercise full responsibility to eliminate bad links that could be negatively affecting both site and business performance. This is a welcome addition.

Potential customers need to find your company.  That means you need to be visible on the web. And in order to maintain a web presence that ranks high on search engines, you need some serious search engine optimization services (SEO).

Seems pretty simple.

The problem, of course, is the price.

In today’s web-savvy world, the term “search engine optimization” is often uttered, and in most cases, people simply don’t have the knowledge to use it correctly.

At the heart of this process is the continual process of optimizing a site to make it rank higher with the major search engines, and that optimization process doesn’t just happen on the site, but off of it as well. Both practices work as a way for search engines like Google to get a balanced view of your site.

Optimizing a website to make sure the search engine finds it easier is definitely very important in today’s business world. Unfortunately far too many people believe that once they have optimized their website by doing things like adding META tags, keywords, titles and description, they don't have to do anything else.

One thing you need to understand if you are going to be optimizing your site is that SEO is not something that you can set and forget. In order to truly make SEO work for your business, you need to make sure that you keep up with your SEO in order to make the most of it. If SEO was truly a one-time deal, companies would be able to achieve immediate success in a very short amount of time. 

When it comes to page rank, the most important factor is the quality of the website. Everything else is secondary. Consider the following tips when building and a maintaining your site.

Stay away from Flash-Flash can be tempting. The effects are dazzling and the transitions are smooth. It looks nice, that’s for sure. However, it isn’t SEO friendly. When the search engine robots crawl your site looking for keywords to see if you’re a good match, it completely ignores the flash components.

A key factor in today's websites is the ability to manage your META Tags. Whenever Farin Innovations builds a website, they include this ability to help separate you from your competition. It's very important you take the time to go through your new (or existing website) and optimize your META tags on each page.

For those of you who don't know which tags should be what, let me break it down and make it real simple: