Google Wants You to SEO

by Jim December 7, 2011

Yes I know, I used SEO as a verb. Google makes on average two changes to it’s algorithm a day! Keeping up with them? In order to help webmasters stay on top of these changes they have started publishing the most significant changes on a monthly basis. The reason for this (IMHO) is that the algorithm is as only as good as the pages it crawls. If your site is producing great content on a regular basis but the Googlebot has trouble crawling it or if it is signposted badly (internal links, keyword density), the bot will have trouble ranking it.

In this weeks show we’ll take a look at yet another change to the algorithm that seeks to reward original content and downgrade duplicates. As you’ll see, content thieves can rank higher than you if they’re doing a better job of SEO than you are despite Google’s best intentions. This is why Google is telling us about the significant changes they make. They want you to SEO your site. They need you to so they can improve search quality. The best library doesn’t just have the best books, it has them catalogued properly and provides a great experience for the reader. The same applies to your website.

YouTube SEO is next

As previously posted YouTube upgraded its interface and added some fantastic analytics tools. With video being such a huge part of Internet traffic now (YouTube is the second biggest search engine), it makes sense for Google to lift their game in this area. It doesn’t take long for the content thieves to rip off the latest viral video and try to rank above the original. The new changes we are seeing at YouTube with the integration of social signals and analytics will go some way to combatting that. If your business does not have a YouTube channel now would be a good time to get one and begin to integrate it with your social channels.

As I demonstrate in today’s show, the new YouTube analytics will show you how your audience interacts with your content and how you can improve your content. I wouldn’t be surprised if in the not too distant future, engaging videos will become as important as the keywords that surround them in their titles and description. If two videos are equally weighted for keywords and backlinks, the more engaging of the two will rank higher. The only parallel metric with a webpage would be bounce rates. The higher the bounce rate, the less users are finding the page useful. The new Youtube analytics shows you the equivalent of what PARTS of the content users find most interesting. That’s very cool.

Watch this week’s vid to see what I mean and check out Michael’s blog post on it later today!

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