Recent changes in Google’s algorithm that has led to a surge in bigger brands appearing among the top results of Google’s SERPs. Though the changes did not result from Google’s bias towards known brands but due to their commitment to give users the best possible results, which as Google sees it are sites that score well in terms of “trust, reputation, authority, [and] PageRank.” Of course since big brands usually have all these elements going for them then it shouldn’t be surprising that they will do better as Google refines their algorithm.

Sites that cannot lay claim to an established reputation need not be alarmed about the efficacy of their current SEO efforts because according to Matt Cutts “what you should be doing doesn’t change: try to make a great site. Try to make it a site that is so fantastic that you become known as an authority in your niche, and it doesn’t have to be a big niche. It doesn’t have to be a huge, well known keyword. It can be a smaller niche, and if you’re still the expert, that’s the sort of thing that people are going to want to link to, that they’ll talk about, the sort of thing people really enjoy. Those are the sorts of sites, the experts, that we want to bring back.”

In short we can still count on Google to continue in their efforts to provide the best results for search users and so weed out sites that do not give much value to users. So continue with building your site quality (reputation, links, content, etc.) because the next algo change is coming again soon. That we can count on since Google makes hundreds of changes to their ranking algorithm each year!

What makes an annoying website? I ask this question because I think very few people intentionally design or developed annoying websites. We end up having an annoying website sometimes when we just think about our preferences instead of thinking about making life easier for our visitors. We forget that the most important aspect of the website is the easy access to the information we are intending to provide to our visitors. A website that we think is a masterpiece may look like a nuisance to your visitors. Let us quickly go through a few pointers that sometimes end up making your website annoying without you realizing it.

Difficult to read text

They can be many factors that make it difficult to read your text; you may have a color contrast that is highly straining to the eye — for instance red text on yellow background (I know it is an extreme case). Some websites have microscopic text and it is so weird why on earth they have such a small font size on every page of the website. Make sure your text is easily readable; if possible get a second opinion, for instance you may find dark-gray text on a black background cool but there are many people who cannot read such text.

Lots of needless animation and sound

Lots of animation in the form of advertisements or misplaced extra effects also make your website annoying. If the textual information present on your website is important then don’t distract or irritate your visitors with lots of animations and noises. There is no need to play loud music when people come to your website because many people may be accessing your website at places that are quiet and where loud noise is not appreciated.

Lots of intrusive advertisements

Even if you maintain a website or a blog to earn advertising revenue don’t throw the advertisements at your readers’ faces. Let the advertisements be a part of your overall design rather than popping up here and there restricting access to the content your visitors are looking for.

A difficult-to-figure-out navigation

Your navigation should be prominently visible on your website and it should be extremely easy to access all the links in your navigation whether you use text or images. In case you use a JavaScript or a Flash animation to generate your navigation menu than make sure that a text-menu alternative is available too. A navigation menu that is difficult to click on is a very big turn-off for most of your visitors.

Lots of boastful copy

In case you are selling a service or a product from your website then using a hyperbolic pitch in your sales copy is a sure shot way of sending your visitors away to your competitor’s website because the Internet is full of such spurious, boastful noises. Always use informative copy on all the pages giving the right and relevant information to your visitors to help them make the correct decision as easily and quickly as possible.

The pop-ups

A pop-up is a widely-detested way of throwing information in your visitor’s face. Most people dislike pop-ups and if you have them on your website and if you wonder why you don’t get much business than it might be, or it must surely be the pop-ups that are sending your visitors away even before they can read something. A pop-up should only appear if it is absolutely unavoidable and if it is an integral part of your online application. Never ever use pop-ups to display advertisements and ask people to subscribe to your newsletter or buy your product.

Basically everything that makes it difficult to access important information or functions on your website is annoying. Everything on your website should be there to enhance the experience of your visitors. In order to decide whether they want to do business with you or not you need a professional, clean, and easily accessible website; they don’t need the dancing monkeys are the squealing whales to get enlightened.

However much we might emphasize the importance of SEO the truth is that people are right when they say that content is still king.

Nowadays, with the advent of blogs, website content has become easier and easier to generate resulting in more and more pages out there about every conceivable topic on earth. It is true that though emphasis is still placed in content this makes it even harder to come up with content that will stand out above (or at list distinctly) from the others. This is a problem because as we all know for a website to be truly successful in its niche it has to have content that will make visitors keep on coming back and even refer the page, whether via links or spoken word, to others. Without great content no amount of SEO will seal you and your website’s reputation.

The funny thing is that right now the general tack people take in order to get their websites to have the content they want is usually by adding a blog to their site. Now there is nothing wrong with blogs. If there were I wouldn’t be writing this blog entry. ^_^ In fact blogs are great especially if you simply want to share your hobby or passion. Blogs are also very good for generating fresh content on a more regular basis. It would be sheer folly to change your homepage’s content daily (unless your website is a news aggregator or is based on some dynamic concept) because it is important for your visitors (especially if you have an online business) to become familiarised with your website in order to help them locate the information they need fast each time they visit the site. Blogs are a good solution for giving your visitors fresher and more updated content. However, you shouldn’t rely on the blog to set your site apart from others in your field. Ok so there are some people out there who are so good that their blogs have become meccas for people in their own field. In search we have Matt Cutts, randfish, William Slawski, etc. But the point is that not everyone churn out as many excellent posts as frequently as they could.

So what’s my point?

My point is simply this if you wish for your website to be known for offering great content do not rely on your blog at once to do that. Instead it is better to consolidate your knowledge into one great resource and then put that up as your main content. It will take a whole lot more effort to come out with such content but in the end if you are able to come out with something that can be considered as one of the classic contents in your field then that will seal the fate of both you and your site. Do continue blogging but take time to publish the really useful resource. In the end your site will rise because of that one single page (or it can be pages if it’s really long…and it will be long if you take on an exhaustive approach to whatever it is you plan to write about) but your blog will not become irrelevant since it will be where people will check for updates. If you lack the time to do this you can just keep on blogging but do not be surprised if even if your blog does well enough, you don’t end up among the ranks of gurus in your field.

It is very much clear that the climatic conditions and the ecological threat are increasing day by day. The environmental problems are increasing and the concepts of Global Warming and Pollution are already increased with a pace never experienced before. Being a SEO this are some of the suggestions which I can give so that we SEOs can contribute our inputs in stopping this hazards.

• Lessen the use of paper: Instead of printing everything out opt to digitize as much as you can. This is true for any business, whether SEO or not. As a good example apple has lessened the use of paper products by making the packaging as small as possible. The insert that came with my new iPod Nano (Thanks hubby!) is really small and asks customers to simply go online to get more information. Since we do not have products to ship out you can lessen the use of paper by corresponding through email, editing drafts before printing them out, lessening handouts during presentations, etc.

• Blog about the environment: It may be the most easy thing which we as Search Engine Optimizers can make blogs which can guide people to avoid doing things which leads to environmental degradation.
• Conserve energy: Since we all spend a huge amount of time in front of the computer I wouldn’t be surprised if many have the same bad habit that I do of leaving the PC on when going on a break. At the very least turn off your monitor or set it to hibernate when going on a long break. Turn off the lights whenever you leave the room and turn off the radio/tv if you are not really watching it and is simply used to having it on all the time.

• Link to conservation efforts: Once in a while link, even if off topic, link to noteworthy conservation efforts you find on the net. Not only will it help raise awareness but also give these worthy sites added link juice.
I’m sure there are lots of other things everyone can think off to help the environment. What are you going to do to help the environment today? Share it with us or you can share it on Google Maps.

Recently Google Acquired Feedburner – the RSS feed management tool preferred by many bloggers and other online content publishers. With Google being a search engine company and Feedburner having RSS subscriptions analytical data of almost a million of feed, what’s going to be the SEO implication of this acquisition?

There might be two reasons why Google acquired Feedburner.

• To sell ads through its AdSense program
• To use the feed data to rank websites

The second point is relevant from the SEO perspective. Currently Google heavily use the incoming links (other websites linking to your website) to rank websites. The more quality inbound links you have, the better ranking you get. But more and more webmasters are purchasing links to improve their rankings, and these defeats the entire purpose of Google’s ranking algorithm. According to Google, the incoming links should be voluntary, and should be only acquired by creating valuable content, and this makes sense. If you have money you can purchase incoming links despite having lousy content. This may give boost to your search engine ranking, but it diminishes the quality of the search results.

Some believe Google may use the Feedburner data to evaluate websites. A higher feed subscription indicates that your content is popular and this further proves that it is highly valuable. Now, Google has its own RSS feeds reader called Google Reader but compared to Feedburner, very few people use Google Reader so the data over there cannot be used for large scale analytical purposes.

Right now Google official blog says:

…we constantly aim to give AdWords advertisers broader distribution to an even wider audience of users. For these reasons, we’re very pleased to tell you that we’ve just acquired FeedBurner.

which means Google primarily purchased FeedBurner to get an additional platform for AdWords. But, given the immense quantity of demographic data FeedBurner has, Google won’t be able to resist using it in the ranking algorithms. So if you are not burning your RSS feeds yet, start doing it now.