How effective is your website?

If you’ve been involved in ecommerce or online marketing for more than a couple of years, and have been paying close attention to how the internet has changed, then you won’t need to read this. However, if you’re like the majority of people with a working knowledge of what to do and what not to do then this could be a bit of a revelation.

What are algorithms?

The way Google (other search engines are available of course) determines search results is reliant upon many algorithms. Simply put, these are formulas that score websites according to different characteristics to make sure that someone using Google gets quality results relating to their search.

Before 2011, there had been a few loopholes or shortcuts to get websites to place at the top of search results very quickly and it became big business. There were two main ways to do this. One was to grab content from everywhere else and put it on your website so it was overloaded with keywords (sometimes known as scraping) but in the process you weren’t actually creating anything new so the quality was often poor; the other was to create 1,000s of backlinks in a very short time using software, which as a result would trick Google into believing that if everyone was ‘talking’ about this website then it must be relevant and it would score highly.

Google’s Panda and Penguin

In April 2011 Google went live with Panda and then in April 2012 Penguin went live too. The significance of these two new algorithms and why people are still talking about it, was that the fundamental way websites are graded by Google, literally changed overnight. Its still a popular topic because there are so many businesses that haven’t changed a thing about their online marketing and are losing customers to their competitors that are aware of it, and have updated their strategy.

Websites that used scrapers to get content from other sources; those with over optimised content, and those with artificially created backlinks were the targets of the changes made by Google and but it signified a fundamental shift in the characteristics needed to score well and naturally other websites were and still are affected.

What was the Effect?

What did this all mean in reality? Well, if you were running paid advertising with Google, then you wouldn’t have noticed much of a difference if most of your visitors were coming to your site through paid clicks and your website ranked badly in the organic results. After all, the way your website scored was irrelevant, it was how much money you were willing to spend. You spend money every month in order to jump the queue, people come to your website and you get business. But if this is your marketing method of choice then I’ve got some news for you too.

You would have seen an effect just like everyone else if a significant proportion of your website’s visitors came from organic clicks.

Websites that were getting good numbers of visitors as a result of organic search results saw a drop off in visitor numbers by 50% or more.This is a snapshot of that exact drop off for a website, BUT, look at the date. I said April 2011 right? This is end of February 2011. This was BEFORE the full roll out of Google Panda, this was only when they were testing it and had only partially implemented it!

Everywhere you looked, there was evidence of massive drop offs in visitor numbers, but you’d have only noticed if you were monitoring this information in the first place. What were the effects if you had heavily relied upon those shortcuts I was talking about earlier? Just take a look at the picture below. How would you feel if that was your business? What if it still is, and you’ve been wondering why your business hasn’t really grown.

What can I do to improve my search results?

Just like you take your car to get serviced and maintained once a year (at least you should be if you want it to work well), it is important to monitor the performance and health of your online marketing and that of course, includes your website.

Google has released details of the main ways that they measure a website (no doubt they’re keeping some things under their hat). So, what can you do to improve the performance of your website?

• Add regular original content with the right keyword concentration
• No or little duplicated content
• Naturally occurring, quality backlinks
• Use google analytics to see how each part of your website performs
• Use long tail keywords which often have less competition
• Make sure you have a site index submitted to Google
• Make sure there are social media share buttons on your website
• Create social media accounts and link to your website
• Quality content not quantity

If you are going to use somebody to update your website and your online marketing, make sure they know what they’re doing. Hopefully with the information above you’ll feel a little more confident asking someone about enhancing your website’s SEO and you’ll know what questions to ask to check that they know what they’re doing too.

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Was your business affected by Google Panda or Penguin? Add a comment or contact me. I’d love to hear your experience.