Google’s SEO warning and what we can do about it

SmartCompany recently published a great article on Google’s recent warning to SEO overuse.

While there were some good general thoughts about how best to not be penalised, here are some of my practical recommendations:

1) The title tag and meta descriptions will still be very important

While rankings used to be the primary reason for good title tags, click through rates and readability should be the focus today.

While this is not official, word has it that Google is using click-through rates and bounce rates to determine what ranks well.

2) Social media buzz is key to content marketing

If “fresh, relevant content” is the key to SEO success, then social media is key to content success. We can attempt to deduce this by asking:= “How would Google determine if your content was fresh or relevant?”

It used to only be links from other sites, but today, social shares and traffic (most of the web has Google Analytics installed) are two large chunks of readily available data that Google will definitely use. Carve a solid social strategy to get buzz around any content that you create.

100 articles read by 10 people each is not as valuable as a single article read by 1,000 people. Buzz is the key.

3) Build a community

Leveraging a community that loves your business/products/both will help you draw traffic and create content easily.

Use Facebook to build up fans that you engage with to generate content that you can then put up on your blog or website. Twitter helps you find industry specific news that you can then share easily with the community (adding value is key).

Communities add trust and authority to a site in so many ways and are of great value to any business that knows how to look after them.