Websites around the are falling victim to Google’s new “Panda” update. It’s designed to weed out so-called “low quality” websites, but in reality it’s also taken a lot of others down with it.

Google is now claiming to favor high quality content that gives people what they want – or find unexpectedly worthwhile. And penalize sites that don’t. Hopefully this won’t require too much adjustment.

Give the people what they want. Target searcher needs instead of search engines.

Making people stay is good. Making people share something is great. Making people convert is excellent.

What Industry Leaders are Saying About Panda

In this video, SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin talks about SEOmoz’s findings on how Panda has changed SEO – and a quick overview of what the “new SEO” now looks like.

Here’s some of Rand’s key points, with some additions from us:

Quality is Key.

Build your pages for people, not for search engines.

Google has done lots of user testing and also has a massive amount of user metrics. They now feel they have everything they need to predict whether people will like your site, and to evaluate whether or not they actually do.

Content should be easy-to-read and well presented. Design needs to focus on the user.

“Good quality content” that is written needs to be replaced with purposeful content.

Conversion rates measure quality.

A conversion occurs when a visitor does something that you specifically want them to do. Though conversion rates are more often associated with purchases, downloads, subcriptions, or contact, they can also be simply assigned to key pages, or page views.

A high conversion rate is a great measure of the new standard of quality – whether or not you’re offering what people want.

When lots of people arrive at your site via a keyword and proceed to completing a converting, you probably had what they were looking for when they searched. That’s quality as defined by the user.

Social signals indicate quality.

This one is a bit tougher – how can “social signals” be an on-site quality signal? Apparently, content that people will want to share has certain characteristics to it as well. In addition, social signals are the new big ranking signal.

So, if you’re going to create content for a keyword – create sharable content and get it shared.

Try to make it content that people would share in your niche (check out what’s being shared for some ideas) and make it easy to share from your site.

Get it shared to get rank – get it into the hands of influencers, and find ways to encourage people to share.

Add the kind of content people like and the formats they like: Video, PDF’s, embedded presentations, and they’ll be more likely to share – and to stick around and read themselves.

How to avoid low-quality content

Get rid of duplicate content, whether on-site or from other sites. Avoid changing a couple words and re-using things. Avoid pages that merely define a keyword. Avoid more outsourcing to third-world content writers just to keyword stuff.

Stay tuned for more Panda-specific updates. If you have any questions or comments, please add them below.

Wed, June 10, 10 am PST, 1pm EST

Learn the fundamentals of setting up Google AdWords to generate B2B sales leads.

Google AdWordsFind customers who are actively looking for your products and services, engage them effectively and generate qualified leads.

Target Audience:

• marketing professionals
• business owners
• sales executives

“101 Level” this course give an overview for marketers or business professionals that are new to Google AdWords or even new to all forms of online marketing.

For more experienced marketers, there will be a wrap-up look at ways to boost campaign performance and increase ROI by decreasing cost-per-lead.

REGISTER NOW!

The question was the same from most of this group – we don’t have 100 hours a month to devote to this, nor do we have unlimited budget, but we need to know how to get online lead generation working for us.

The answer starts with Google AdWords:

1. It’s easy to control costs (maximum daily budgets)

AdWords gives you the unique opportunity to pay only for clicks, and to tell you exactly how many of those are turning into leads. On the simple side of things, you can estimate the value per lead and adwords will show you if you’re in the black or not.

If you are running an e-commerce system, realized revenue can easily be matched to a specific campaign and thus you can always see which campaigns generate the highest ROI.

If you are B2B, it will be important down the road to track ROI of specific campaigns by integrating AdWords with a CRM system like salesforce.com this way you can tell exactly how much forcast and realized revenue is coming in for every dollar going out the door.

TIP: I like to look closely at customer’s average deal size and profitability for a specific campaign that we’re targeting, so before I get going I can understand what our target “Cost Per Acquisition” should be.

2. No overhead to start seeing results

In competitive markets, a small business webiste may never crawl to the top of the search engines, even with 100 hours a month in Search Engine Optimization, link building and content generation. It is possible to lay out 100K just to get there!

3. You only pay for very targeted clicks

If you are looking for people in your local market that are looking today fora mortgage, AdWords will deliver those people in a lot less passive way direct to your website (ideally to a landing page) we will talk about that in a later post.

“elliptical trainer” “first time mortagage” “mortgage broker, Vancouver” (+ regional limitations)

4. Again, contrary to any myths out there, you only pay for clicks.

As our markets get more competitive and customers are constantly getting inundated with information, many SME’s are finding their costs are just too high on AdWords. The reason for this is largely due to lack of targeted ad text and realavent landing pages that drive conversions.

Most customers I look at that say AdWords isn’t working, (while there can be a variety of issues in their account), the biggest thing is lack of realavent, targeted landing pages, with clear calls to action.

Many customers have had conversion rates below 1% on cost per click of over $2.00 for a small business that’s selling a $2000 item, $200 just to get a sales lead is a little tough to swallow.

So now that you understand why AdWords can help you generate leads for your business, you’ll need to learn about landing pages..

Stay tuned for landing pages 101 and a free webinar on best practices for landing page optimization.