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.

You’ve been reviewed online. It’s bad. You know people will read it because you have. To make it worse, who knows who wrote the review? A genuine disgruntled customer? An unscrupulous competitor? An internet troll? Who is this person trashing your reputation and putting your livelihood at risk?

It's never a good feeling.

Deal with it.

This doesn’t mean “find the serenity to accept it.” It means you should deal with so it’s not harming your business anymore. Make the bad thing go away.

If you have suspicions of foul play – that the review is a planted hit piece – then by all means follow up with a little detective work. But put a fire out before you move on to investigating what caused it. How you should respond to bad reviews, especially intially, should follow a specific formula that first minimizes damage, and ultimately gets rid of the review entirely – or the nearest thing to it.

Rid yourself of a bad review and you might look good in the process.

The right approach will help your business recover as quickly as possible and prevent any further damage. You might even come out looking better ever. A bad review offers the chance to show how well you deal with customer dissatisfaction.

To fix a bad review as quickly as possible follow these 4 R’s:

1. Relax

Don’t be a hothead. Don’t flail. You will probably make things worse. Take a deep breath and respond like the professional and dedicated person you are.

Take a moment.

Remember: people post negative content online for all kinds of reasons, including just to get a rise out of you. It’s what they call “trolling.”

Don’t get hooked! Never forget that your response will probably be just as visible as the review. Stay clear headed and follow the the next three R’s to rid yourself of the blemish on your online reputation.

2. Respond

Most review sites let businesses to respond to bad reviews. This is your chance to show how you respond to complaints and criticism. This is also your chance to get your word in. A bad review with a great response can actually be an asset – it’s proof that if things ever go amiss, you’ll still respond with excellence. You might even get a link and some web traffic out of it.

Offer to make things right and encourage the customer to contact you. Whether or not they do, anyone who sees the review also sees your response. And you’ll have had the last word.

Respond professionally and you'll look good.

Get someone to stick up for you.

A very potent response could come from a satisfied customer – someone who’ll defend you as a customer who found themselves in a similar situation and was looked after or a customer whose experience was absolutely nothing like the bad experience described in the review.

Whether or not you’re able to respond to the review, you should always make efforts to make things right with the customer. If handled properly they might even turn into an equally vocal supporter.

3. Remove

Some review sites also let businesses request removal of reviews if they feel they’ve been treated unfairly. Most don’t, but some do. It’s worth your while to find out about the review site’s policy.

See if they'll take it down. It's worth a shot.

4. Replace

This is the last step for a reason. It’s by far the most labor intensive and is best used in situations where you either weren’t able to respond to the review, or you really don’t want it read by or influencing other people. To prevent this from happening, you’ll replace the review with other content: You’ll drown it out on the review site itself and drive it down in the search engines.

Replace the bad review on the site

Get satisfied customers to write positive reviews on the same sites. Call in some favors. Make it easy for them and make it work their time. It’s considered poor form to solicit good reviews or to offer incentives, so don’t get caught doing it. Target your best customers and reward their kindness. Hire a firm to find review sources. Drown out the bad review with good ones.

Target the site with positive reviews.

Keep this in mind, though: many review sites flag reviews based on a variety of ‘suspicious’ criteria – one of which can be too many of the same kind all at once. So  don’t go too crazy with it. And do not make the mistake of hiring obvious shills. That’s much worse.

A bad review carries less far weight if it’s surrounded by good ones, so find a way to add them – carefully.

Replace the bad review site in the rankings

Drive it down in the rankings by taking up space above it. This is called “SEO for reputation mangement.” If you push it off the front page for the relevant keywords, you’ve pretty much taken care of things.

Boost the content you want people to see.

How?

• Get good reviews on other review sites, and help them rank.
  Help positive reviews appear on other review sites. Bolster those reviews, and the sites they appear, on in the rankings: Blog about them, bookmark them, and build links to them. Move positive reviews up to push the negative reviews down.
• Add your own content on your site and others, and help them rank.
  If they rank on the first page for your business name, start creating more presence online. For example:
  -Upload different forms of content: PDF’s, PowerPoint Presentations, Videos, to sharing sites such as YouTube and SlideShare. Videos are prime candidate for re-use across many sites.
  -Google Maps/Local/Places/Whatever. Many search terms now return maps listings first. Build a great places page and get it into the first page Maps results.
  -Social Media: Facebook & Twitter.  One advantage to social media pages are that they tend to rank well for brand names. Create yours and build some presence on them. They also integrate very wel with other sites, such as…
  -Free websites & outreach blogs about your business and its relevant keywords. Create free site accounts and write quality posts that link to other accounts.
  -Integrate and embed these accounts into each other to get more benefit

Tread lightly – don’t be foolish and get caught planting reviews or pretending to be other people. But it’s fine – beneficial, even – for a business to have lots of presence online. Build quality content and links to it to replace the bad review in the search engines.

This can all be Taken Care of

Bad revies are a headache to any business owner – and when they happen online they happen in front of everyone. But they are manageable.

The 4 R’s are an effective solution to bad reviews. A good response can turn a negative review into a positive. And strategically targeted content and SEO can make bad reviews disappear from view.

Consider hiring internet marketing professionals to ensure it’s done right.

A good internet marketing firm can provide immediate solutions to bad reviews and a strong positive start to help nullify them – then provide the tools and knowhow for a business to completely own and maintain its brand online.

Questions?

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them below. We’d love to hear from you.

Here is a quick keyword development strategy you can do yourself:

1. Know What Your Keywords Are! Brainstorm Your List:

Keywords are the words that internet users are using in order to find you on a search engine. It is important to get together with your team and brainstorm as large a list as possible for these.

Then vote on the top 20 or so. If there are 5 obvious ones, like your specific product category “industrial coatings” etc. You will want to identify these.

2. Use Tools to Expand Your List:

It sounds like an obvious place to start, but over half of the time we see an SEO strategy that is based on assumptions and after doing some research, we can find that the entire strategy is flawed. There are plenty of tools to help you do your keyword research and identify what keywords are actually the most commonly requested. Use your list as a starter and start using free keyword tools tools like Google AdWords Keyword Generator, Keyword Spy, WordTracker.

3. Predict Traffic Volume for Each Keyword:

Use Google AdWords Traffic Estimator to estimate search volume for each of your keywords:

Step 1: Input keywords:

Step 2: Currencies & Budget:

*(you can leave it blank for now and Google will choose maximum)

Step 3: Choose Languages & Geographic Regions:

After pressing “Continue,” Google will provide this graph showing cost per click, and forecast traffic volumes:

4. Local Versus Global

If you’re local, climbing the rankings for terms like “Business Card Printing, Milwakee” is a lot easier than trying to compete globally. Also, if you’re a small to mid-sized company that has a global strategy, but still gets the lions share of your business from one key market, consider running a  a micr0-site or sub-directory for that region and focus significant efforts in that market.

Lesson: if there’s enough in your backyard, dominate that market first, your dollars will go much further!

5. Learn From Your Stats & Get to Know your Long Tail

Chris Anderson coined the term “Long Tail” in his book about the phenomenon of the internet providing ever increasing level of targeted result for online info seekers, consumer and B2B buyers. It is important if you want to win the search engine game to really understand what niche market you’re targeting.

6. Use Google AdWords First!

Many people are poorly informed that Google AdWords is a) expensive and b) somehow cheating. The reality is that you really don’t know what keywords are the best ones to develop as your core strategy until you see some results. The best way to generate some results without over-investing in the wrong SEO strategy is to simply buy keyword placements with Google AdWords:

1. Start with broad terms that you know reflect your target market
2. Watch AdWords every day and adjust campaign budgets to ensure you don’t blow your budget in a day
3. Narrow your terms down to phrase matched specific terms that are generating the highest click-through rates
4. Track specific keywords all the way through your sales cycle to see which ones generate the most revenue

Aaron’s site, seobook.com is a great resource.

In Summary:

1. Start by Looking at Analytics

Look at your site analytics and Google Analytics. It’s easier to rank for keywords that you are already getting some traction on than entirely new keywords.

2. Scout Your Major Competitors for Long Tail Terms

Scout out long-tail terms that matter. Look at how your competitor’s menus are structured. What are the key product or service sub-categories?

If this is a very competitive market, product menus can give a lot of ideas about long-tail keywords.

3. Get Serious About Long Tail Terms

It’s been proven that long tail terms are easier to rank for and rankings can be achieved much more quickly by younger sites.

4. Use Keyword Tools

There are lots of them, here are the three free keyword tools we like the most

Thanks Aaron!

A 404 page is that useless page that turns up when you..

• click on a page link that has been moved
• click on a link in an old email where the page is no longer there
• or any other number of possible reasons!

Most of the default 404 pages are unintelligible for the non-geek. First of all, the page has the word “Error” preceded by a meaningless number. For most people over the age of 40 this, immediately gets them a little nervous, reminding them of blue screens of death and DOS commands gone wrong..

Aside from the internet explorer / IIS error, you will likely see this generated by default from an Apache web server:

When non-sophisticated browsers hit it, they often report thinking:

• this site is broken completely
• my computer is no longer connected to the net
• this site might be a bad site, might give me a virus
• it must be an old site
• etc.. etc..

Even sophisticated browsers will tell you they do not bother hitting the back button and re-starting their search:

• these guys don’t know how to maintain a site
• obviously they don’t have what I want
• I’ll just go to Google and start my search over

5 Things Your Custom 404 Page Should Have:

1. A clear, friendly un-alarming description

“Sorry, the page your looking for was moved.”

Also, because a 404 error can harm your brand, you may want to inject some creativity into it. Some fun & creative examples can be found at smashmagazine.com’s 404 revisited article.

2. A Clear Call to Action

“Please search here or use the sitemap to find what you’re looking for”

3. A Prominent Search Bar with a clear purpose:

4. Prominent Sitemap

Zappos.com is the world’s largest online retailer of shoes. When someone hits their 404 page, the first call to action is a summarized product catagory list that gets the buyer right back into searching products:

* What we can learn from Zappos is that displaying your entire sitemap probably isnt as effective as displaying the top  3-5 places that people go on your site / or the top 3-5 places you want them to go!

5. Prominent Homepage Link

The word “HOME PAGE” will suffice

2 Things to Drop: the words “404″ and “Error” both are fairly irrelevant to your average visitor.

My Top 5 404 Pages:

Additional 404 Resources:

Some Creative 404 Pages

1. Regular & Plentiful Content

Not that volume alone will make you a star, but it’s a good start. Chances are, as long as you’re sure what business you are in, you will be climbing the right rankings wall.

Most marketers simply don’t post enough content with enough frequency!

2. Relevant & Useful Content:

Even if google can’t figure out with its spiders that your content stinks, you won’t generate many inbound links from others if it is not useful to them and their readers.

As a marketer, and a consumer I love little tidbits that I can consume in some meaningful way.. like the old standby – “10 Tips..” “5 Rules of..” etc..

3. Link to people that are ranking well, often they will reciprocate

Link to other recognized authorities in your industry, wikipedia articles, etc.. and don’t forget to use trackback urls!! These tell others that you have linked to them so they can (and most will) reciprocate.

4. Narrow your focus on your keywords

Make sure your headers, titles and copy have your keywords. Remember, google is smart, so don’t “spam the search engines” it will backfire and get you de-listed for up to 6 months.

5. Get Guerrilla!! Pick a Narrow enough term that you can own it..

Narrow even more!! It’s a jungle out there, get picky .. that’s why I’ve chosen to work only with software marketers.. not because we haven’t done more.

Once you’re on a roll, make sure that you’re not biting off more than you can chew; for example, unless you’re Seth Godin, don’t try to dominate “New Marketing, or Web 2.0″ it won’t work!!

Link / Reference

PART 2 – Coming Next Week! Register / RSS

1. Seth Godin

Where to start with Seth.. while there doesn’t seem to be any debate amongst the internet marketing community, he’s one of the best. He’s not an analytics whiz or a an SEO champ per se, he simply covers the basics.. principles that we can’t fight in marketing – knowing our audience, picking our niches, looking for long tails.

His site with key publications, all worth reading – www.sethgodin.com/

Seth’s Blog – sethgodin.typepad.com

2. SEO Book

SEO book is written by a guy named Aaron Wall. Admittedly, when I joined the board of the International Internet Marketing Association, I’d never heard of the guy.. man that got some funny looks! He’s since become one of my top resources for the nitty gritty of search marketing.

www.seobook.com

3. John Hossak, VKI Studios

A friend and colleague, every time I talk with this guy, I respect him more; he’s the almanac of internet marketing and analytics. They are an Omniture certified shop and have been in the game for a while now. John Hossack has filled rooms at a few conferences accross North America, and he never dissapoints.

John’s Blog

4. Web Analytics Association

www.webanalyticsassociation.org

5. Google Analytics Blog

analytics.blogspot.co

6. Marketing Sherpa

Definitely some of the best money I’ve ever spent!! Great articles and case studies.

www.marketingsherpa.com