Search Engine Over Optimizing?

by Ixodoi Dae Programer, Writer, Designer, SEO

With Google's latest updates many people that earn their living online start to worry. It seems no site is secured and many loss their high and profitable rank after being hit by a Google's update. Those updates might hit a website so strong that from couple of thousands of hits a day the website get to a point it rarely get any traffic what so ever.

It seems that instead of calling its updates Penguin and Panda, Google should have named them using predators' names like sharks or snacks.

Yet, not all sites were hurt. To be honest it seems only one type of website was affected. It is the type of sites I like to call the "Over optimized sites". Over optimized sites are sites that focused too much on understanding how Google's algorithm is working and trying to fit the site to this algorithm. Unfortunately, many business website fall under this category.

This is actually the biggest mistake a website owner can do, and many SEO experts fall for it. Fitting your website to Google's algorithm is adjusting to the past instead of planning for the future! Instead, of adjusting to the old algorithm, you should understand what Google will want your websites to look like in the future and aim there!

So what will Google want? The answer is actually very easy! Google want to find good results for its users. Today its algorithm is not complete so it keeps changing it in hope to find a better solution.

Of course, it is not easy to know what the users will want, but we already have a good indication – social media shares are a good sign to know what people (= Google's users) are really interested in, and Google is well aware of it.

Therefore, it seems that Google's next move it to assign a "social score" to each website and use this factor while calculating the website rank and SERP. This means that the more shares and positive feedback your site has on social networks – the higher the chances it will get a good attitude from Google (and other search engines) both today and in the future!

So what are you waiting for? It is time to become part of the scheme of social media and drive some positive attitude to your website. For a complete review on social media that can be used efficiently for this purpose, and guides how to use them - feel free to browse my post about "How to freely advertise my business online".

Of course the fact that we should aim for the future does not mean we should forget everything that we learned in the past. There are some rules in the old way for SEO that are still logical and correct. It just means you should not follow the rules with close eyes as if they were the holy bible. Keep your eyes on the final target and keep on investigating if this rule will really make your website better for users? – If yes you should probably follow it, if no – it might be neglect-able.

In addition, the old SEO tools can still makes your life much easier (since you still need keyword analyzing, etc.). Yet, I see no reason why to through away so much money on tools that give only questionable value. Especially since there are so many good and free SEO tools out there.

For conclusions:

Instead of over fitting your website to Google's old algorithm you should aim to fit your website to the people you want as visitors, get positive social signs and spend as little as possible on questionable old methods to "increase" your rank.

Prepare yourself to the future and you will discover that "the Google force is with you!"