Panda & Your Website Design

Panda changed the game because of the high number of sites that were hit. A lot of sites felt the effect but weren’t directly hit. For example a website that got most it’s links and traffic from Hub Pages would have felt like they’d been hit, when Hub Pages got hit. A lot of the strategies that were used in the past aren’t working anymore. A lot of companies are panicking and starting to throw things at the wall to see what sticks, the biggest problem with this is Google only runs the algorithm every couple months.

Google’s algorithm is like a soup and every once in a while they threw in a special spice to add a little flavor. But it’s too expensive to use all the time.

People had gotten really good at ranking websites so Google had to change the game. Sites that were created to funnel traffic elsewhere have been devalued because they don’t deliver value to Google’s visitors. When looking at all the changes that are currently taking place you really need to look at every update since Caffeine. Caffeine allowed Google to become more effective at indexing websites. But there’ve been so many updates, for example you’ve got the Mayday update that focused on long tail keywords, I’m going to just stick with the Panda update.

So…What’s changed?

Panda is all about quality. Google NOW cares about the look and feel of your website and the content.

Most people who have ranked in the top 10 for a competitive keyword knows that in doing so you are giving the impression to the Google searcher that you have Google’s approval. It’s a real credibility booster. Now it appears that Google cares about your credibility, since they are in affect vouching for you.

Google’s forcing companies to improve the users experience and those companies are reaping the benefits and not just in more traffic from Google but in increased dollars as well. Understand that a 10% increase in traffic yields the exact same dollar amount as a 10% increase in conversion. The end result and money saved as well as the dollars spent to implement are all better on the conversion side. I am trying to say that it is less expensive to increase conversions than it is to increase traffic and increasing conversion allows you to spend less and get more out of your traffic, marketing and advertising.

Okay, I need to slow down a bit, let’s get back to Panda and what’s changed. Then I’m going to go through your website and tell you what needs to change on your website as well as what types of offsite optimization you need to do.

Remember that a website is never finished. The best sites are the ones that have lots of quality content and are updated daily.

There is no reason to monitor the indexing process because of how quickly Google appears to index. They also seem to index nearly everything. Your website ranking well depends on a lot of factors, none of which should be an indexing problem.

You should optimize your home page for your main keyword and several secondary keywords because it displays both article titles and content snippets.

Title. The keyword should appear in the title, preferably towards the front.

URL. Make sure the keyword appears in the URL for the page or post.

Make sure the keyword appears in the first paragraph and a couple times in the body. Your keyword has to match the topic of the article and should never overshadow the article. And always remember what makes you unique, you aren’t the first to cover this topic. A website filled with nothing but content is boring, you have to add a little bit of you and your staffs personality into the website. Injecting your personal stories into the website will set you apart from the crowd.

Share a few small details about your personal life. You want to share enough that you seem like a real person. This increases your readership, increases the time people spend on your site and increases your ranking. Relate the content, even the personalized content, to the overall theme of the site. You can share customer’s stories and experiences that relate to your business. At one time everyone wanted articles with round about 500 words. Now it would appear that websites with content that is uniformed in size can negatively impact your website.

Create articles that range in size from 200 words long up to 1500. Of course don’t stretch the article out if you have nothing to say.