Study Shows Penguin Algorithm Getting Stricter

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Screen-Shot-2013-03-19-at-2.26.52-PMWhile everyone in SEO collectively yells every time a Google Panda update rolls around, announced or unannounced, Google’s spam fighting algorithm Penguin may be of more concern for many website owners.

Though Google’s estimates say less than four percent of websites have been affected by Penguin, a new study by Portent suggests that Penguin will eventually be a concern for SEOs everywhere, if it continues to follow its trend.

Since the reveal of Penguin, Google appears to have become less tolerant of spammy links. The study looked at 500,000 links which show that Google has been steadily reducing its webspam tolerance, and increasing the likelihood of site penalties over time.

This isn’t an issue for most legitimate site owners, as it takes roughly 50-percent spammy backlinks in your profile to trigger a Penguin site penalty, but when Penguin came out, a site needed to have 80-percent of it’s backlinks classified as spam to attract the attention of Google.

Still, a site with 50-percent spammy links isn’t watching their profile all that carefully, and is probably engaging in some pretty questionable strategies. The concern is where Google will draw the line. Will they keep tightening their grip until only 5-percent of backlinks are allowed to be “spammy”? We won’t have any idea until another Penguin update appears.

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How To Fix Common PPC Mistakes

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Human error is an unavoidable part of PPC campaigns. Unfortunately, when dealing with large lists of keywords or the minute details of URL tracking and geotargeting, there’s bound to be a couple of screw ups.

Melissa Mackey, of Search Engine Watch, compiled a list of some of the most common mistakes being made by PPC vets and how you can fix them when they inevitably happen to you. Not only is it a nice way to see what may be coming for you in the future, but it is also a reminder to always take that few extra minutes to check the details and then check again after your campaign gets up and running.

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What Questions Do You Ask For An Effective Design Brief?

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MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERAFew new designers appreciate how important design briefs are. It usually takes a few years and a couple frustrating and seemingly directionless projects to realize how effective briefs are in giving a designer good direction, and saving designers from numerous redrafts.

Even once you realize how importance a design brief is, many designers have trouble integrating them into their practice. How do you get that type of information out of a client? What do I ask?

That last question is probably the most notable. Asking the right questions can give you all the information you need to make a great finished product, but you have to know what to ask. In Claire Roper’s opinion, it only takes ten questions to make a great design brief.

Of course, even if you followed Claire’s rule, you’ll find yourself asking way more than that. For example, if you ask your client, “what do you want to achieve with the design,” there is no way for a client to respond that won’t solicit at least five follow up questions from a good designer.

The goal of a good design brief is to collect as much information as possible from your client to know what they want out of a project, and that involves asking questions you might not otherwise consider. You want to learn everything about the company you are representing, their history, and how they do work, but you also want to learn exactly what they like.

Asking a client to show you designs they like may seem like the first step to plagiarism  but its far from it. As a designer, your tastes are likely different from your client, and you need to know what each client likes. Asking them to show you what they like and dislike will give you a better idea of what you are trying to create and what to stay away from.

While you can start out with ten questions to ask clients, don’t stop there. Ask questions until you feel confident you understand the desires of your client and their business as a whole. These ten questions will get you going, but if your client isn’t bothered by answering twenty-one question, you should ask as many as you need.

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Why Responsive Design Is Winning The Mobile SEO Debate

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Source: WikiCommons

Source: WikiCommons

It is no secret how important a mobile SEO strategy is in today’s market, especially with predictions coming out stating mobile internet usage will overtake desktop internet usage in the next year.

Eventually, mobile search could catch up to desktop search, and users aren’t just staying on any website they find. Two-thirds of consumers say they are more likely to purchase from a website that has a mobile-friendly website, and more than a few survey has shown how low-quality sites or long load times repel searchers like a disease.

You probably knew all this. The debate over the importance of a mobile SEO strategy is over. The real question for most web designer’s is how do I achieve a mobile-friendly website? You have two options: a responsive web design, or an entirely separate mobile website.

There are pros and cons to both methods of course, but gradually it appears responsive designs are winning, especially when SEO is a factor. Jay Taylor, writer for Search Engine Watch, breaks down three reasons why responsive design seems to be taking the lead.

The biggest reason stems from a big endorsement from Google. It is an SEO professional’s job to please the almighty Google, since they command more searches than all of the other engines combined, and Google loves responsive design so much they called it the best practice for the industry.

Google’s preference for responsive design is likely because responsive sites have one URL and the same source code, regardless of how it is viewed, which makes the site easier for Google to crawl and contextualize. Separate mobile sites, on the other hand, have separate URLs and HTML, which complicates everything for the search engine.

Further more, content on responsive sites is easier for users to interact with and share than content that is separated between different websites. If that seems weird, imagine what happens when you get a link over Facebook from a friend who was on their phone. If you open that link on your desktop, you might get sent to a stripped-down mobile website if they use the separate website method.

When Google recommends a method for achieving your mobile SEO strategy, it is always best to do as they say, but there are other reasons responsive design is slowly taking over the search market. It allows a more uniform experience across devices, and makes managing your entire strategy easier. Everyone likes their work to be easy right?

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New AdWords ‘Similar Audience’ Tool

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AdWords recently introduced a new feature capable of showing your ads to more users, while also delivering a highly targeted audience. It sounds too good to be true, but, as Jeremy Decker reports for Search Engine Journal, the ‘similar audience’ feature makes it a reality.

The new feature picks up where remarketing leaves off. Now, not only will prevous visitors of your site be shown your ads, but also other users who have a similar search history as those users. This means that those who may be interested in your product but have not yet found your site will be shown your message and, hopefully, driven to your site.

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Implementing Usability Testing For Better Design

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While it is always important to design a website that looks pretty and makes search engines happy, it is always better to make sure users like your site. User experience is equivalent to customer satisfaction, but unfortunately some designers only test their usability at the end of the process, if at all.

Testing usability throughout every stage of the design process possible means the end design will be completely tailored to what your visitors want. Testing in different stages can tell you what you should focus on next and what can be improved overall.

Some people confuse usability testing with A/B testing, which is comparing two different versions of a web site on a wide audience and has quantitative results. Usability testing is all about subjective experience and qualitative insights.

As Jenny Shen puts it in her article at Onextrapixel, “Through A/B testing you can find out which version performs better, but usability testing helps you know the reason behind the results or why one version was preferred over the other.”

Shen also explains every step of usability testing in her article. I suggest reading it and taking notes so that you can start implementing testing on your next design. It won’t matter if you make a nice looking site if users don’t enjoy using it.

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The Pet Peeves of SEOs

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One of the problems with working in an industry few actually understand is that clients tend to come to us with requests or ideas that are wildly impractical  entirely not possible, or in most cases just show a complete misunderstanding of how SEO works.

After a while of working with a good number of clients, you start to run into some of the same requests and patterns that can start to drive a person a little crazy, or at least annoy them enough to write a list like “10 Things Most SEO Consultants Hate“, which is exactly what Trond Lyngbø did.

Of course, everyone has their pet peeves and some will be more frustrated by issues like these. But you can help make your first meetings with an SEO firm a little smoother by familiarizing yourself what they don’t want to hear. You’ll understand how SEO works a little better while you’re at it.

The most common annoyance is the constant requests for a quick fix. Many website owners and small companies don’t worry about hiring an SEO until something goes wrong, in favor of saving money and streamlining their company’s efforts. For a small business, it’s a fairly savvy move, but SEO is simply not a process with immediate returns.

Lyngbø evaluates clients on a quarterly or annual basis, and though many SEO’s pay closer attention and spend their efforts fine-tuning aspects of their strategy, the fact is organic traffic is one of the cornerstones of SEO, and there is no way to rush it. Marketing and SEO campaigns take time to see results, but the patient reap the benefits.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg of patterns that can frustrate you SEO. Being the person to do any of the things on Lyngbø’s list isn’t anything to be ashamed of because SEO isn’t exactly common knowledge, but if you are working with one, it is always best to learn a little about what SEO is able to do, and how it functions.

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Keys To Adwords Enhanced Campaigns

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KeysChances are you are already trying out AdWords Enhanced Campaigns. If not, you’ll likely be testing the new waters soon. So now seems like a good time to go through some basics to ensure you’re getting the most of your campaigns and enlisting the new features to work for you.

Lisa Raehsler has a checklist at Clickz for you to go over as you launch your new campaigns. Some of the advice is the same you would get with standard AdWords campaigns, but bears repeating. The rest is valuable insight into how to use Enhanced Campaigns new features to your full advantage, which can gain you more conversions and cost you less money.

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How To Make A Resizing Navigation Bar

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Everyone wants their landing page to make a splash, but how do you make an impressive header, include navigation, and not end up covering up too much of your page?

This used to be an issue solved by sidebar navigation, or other secondary navigation systems, but it seems there may be a way to show your readers a big visually stimulating header/menu bar combo that gets out of the way when viewers begin looking at your content.

Websites like This is the Brigade and All You have implemented this dynamic, animated menu that resizes as you scroll down, shrinking the navigation to let your content breathe.

It gives you the opportunity to show your brand or logo, and make a huge first impression, but then you can move the focus to what really matters to readers. Antonio Pratas has a tutorial at Web Designer Depot for anyone who wants to try this new style of header out.

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Where Is SEO Right Now?

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Everyone involved in SEO will tell you how drastically everything has changed this past year. They’ll emphasize how Penguin and Panda “changed everything” and they will be more than happy to talk about how dramatically linkbuilding strategies have been affected, but it seems like very few are talking about what these changes mean for SEO as a whole.

John Mihalik wrote about four strategic SEO trends that he sees as important for the rest of the year, but his predictions also work as a summary of where SEO is at right now. He misses a couple things that can’t be ignored like local SEO, but remembering these four trends Mihalik points out should be enough to give you a good idea of what SEO means for website owners today.

Quality is the New Standard – To be blunt, SEOs used to be able to take any site of almost any quality, and improve performance significantly with keyword stuffing, link buying, and all sorts of other borderline spammy tactics, but Google’s algorithm’s have advanced to unbelievable levels. With their complex set of metrics to evaluate sites by, Google can pretty confidently tell if a site is low quality, and there will be no way to bring a site out of the ether until the quality problem is solved.

Social is Important – Social signals are just now beginning to affect search results, but Google has made it more than clear they are implementing social signals into their algorithms and Facebook is working on improving their own search engine relying almost entirely on social data. Aside from questionable privacy practices, implementing social data into search makes sense. Interests, friend circles, location, and even internet habits can help search engines deliver results more tailored for individual people.

You Aren’t Mobile Friendly Yet? – At this point, any website without a responsive or mobile friendly version is beyond behind the times. More and more people are doing their searches on their phones and tablets. You can’t just throw together a low quality mobile portal either. Search engines look for the same quality signatures they do on desktop sites, and you won’t be getting any more traffic with a shoddy mobile page.

Knowledge Graph

The Knowledge Graph – Google’s knowledge graph, or that box of information in the top-right corner of your screen when you search for a celebrity or prominent brand, has been slowly becoming more common on SERPs over the past year. Mihalik also believes it offers an opportunity for brands to optimize their web presence and gain a little added performance for direct searches.

I question to efficiency or importance of the last one. The knowledge graph information does allow searchers to easily find concise information, but for a brand to appear on a SERP, the user has to search directly for that brand. If there is another company somewhere with the same name as yours, you could use the knowledge graph to gain a foot up on them, but otherwise I don’t see the knowledge graph becoming a cornerstone of SEO. Every other trend mentioned is pretty much a certainty at this point, however.

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