Over SEO ‘ing is going haunt you

According to Google’s main SEO spam man Matt Cutts, a new Google algorithm  will soon hit the streets that may kill your SEO rankings. If you’ve over SEO’ed your website, your going to get negative points.

I hate to say I told you so, but I did if you’re one of our clients. We’ve always just done ‘just enough’ to get the results we wanted. Not throw the whole kitch sink at the SEO project. Although having said that, I may have one or two sites out there to double check 😉

Matt’s additional suggestions were the same old story, but I think you really want to head them this time if you know what’s good for you”

  • Make a compelling website.
  • Make a website that’s useful.
  • Make a website that’s interesting
  • Make a site that’s relevant to people’s interests…We’re always trying to best approximate if a user lands on a page if they are going to be annoyed…All of the changes we make are designed to approximate, if a user lands on your page, just how happy they are going to be with what they’re going to get.”
To me, the last bullet above means more focus on bounce rates, which is kind of a bummer, because we know that people will zip over to a website just to get the phone number real quick. I do it myself all the time. My guess is that their looking for “white space” (eye rest) and multiple widgets, videos and feeds to make a good website their eyes. Flash is probably a no-no, which I’m going to miss. Lets face it, that’s what most of us like any way.

Duane Forrester, Senior Product Manager with Bing’s Webmaster Program added that a comment about the the importance of social sharing as a signal others actually like your content.  “Does the rest of the world think you have a great product?” Forrester asked. “If they do, they will amplify this. If you’re not engaged socially, you’re missing the boat because the conversation is happening socially about you and about your content. Those are really important signals for us. Whether you’re involved or not is your choice, but those signals still exist whether you’re in the conversation or not.”

As social picks up more steam, it’s still SEO. It’s just different methods to get the job done. Personally I think it’s the right way for them to go. Yes, we’ll loose some control we think we have now with SEO, but we can focus on building good websites the way we always wanted to before and for the right reasons. It’s kind of cool to see SEO come around full circle.  Bottom line– We don’t have to build ugly, SEO friendly websites anymore. We can build beautiful websites that people like to look at.

We just launch a new redesigned National targeted website two weeks ago for a client and we followed this new mantra completely. We’ll let you know how that worked out over the next few weeks. I’ve seen Google say one thing and do nothing before (or it seemed like they did nothing). Sometimes it just seems like a shot across the bow, a warning to the aggressive SEO crowd to cool it.

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