The world of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has changed radically in the last year. (SEO is marketing language for how easy it is for search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo to find your website.) You may have heard of Google’s “Penguin” or “Panda” updates.
The reality is that the search engines have made several big changes in the way that they calculate which websites best match a user’s search query. Everything that you may have been told by your SEO consultant in the past is likely to no longer be true. Gone are the days where your HTML code and tag structure were important; and repetition may hurt your ranking.
It’s not about keywords, it’s about subject matter expertise
The search engines aren’t dumb. They figured out pretty quickly that SPAM websites were working very hard to “game the system” by repeating several high-traffic keywords over and over. Unfortunately, many legitimate business owners had also been using those same strategies. If you saw your search strength go down dramatically in the last 12 months (meaning that the percentage of traffic you get from search dropped significantly, or that you used to be on the first page of Google but now you’re showing up on page 12), you are probably overusing keyword repetition. [Read more…]