Matt Cutts, Google’s main man for dealing with web spam, has announced on his blog today that a big algorithm change is now underway.  Google tweak their algorithm lots of times throughout the year, but it’s the big algorithm changes that get people nervous. And rightly so.

Look at the May Day algorithm change that took place last year. Google’s change hit a lot of sites that were ranking well for longtail keyword phrases. In a lot of cases these were sites that were doing nothing wrong, and were ranking well for a broad range of phrases, including many longtail ones.  Many sites saw a massive drop in traffic almost overnight, often by 50% or more.

Of course with all changes there are going to be winners as well as losers.

Here is what Matt Cutts had to say about this latest change…

My post mentioned that “we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.” That change was approved at our weekly quality launch meeting last Thursday and launched earlier this week.

This was a pretty targeted launch: slightly over 2% of queries change in some way, but less than half a percent of search results change enough that someone might really notice. The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.

And here is the link to his blog post

I think this is going to be interesting! Just look at the number of aggregator web sites that are out there where they just collect news and posts from around the web and bring it together. There are high profile and high ranking sites doing this. What is this change going to mean for them?

I can also think of a few sites from celebrities, that have good Pagerank, and pretty much all they do is pick up on topical stories, write a sentence or two of commentary, and publish it. The ‘original content’ is negligible and the bulk of it is ‘copied content’.

What is going to happen to sites like those? And more importantly, what is going to happen to YOUR web site?

This is likely to be a big shake up and it’s going to be interesting seeing who wins and who gets slapped by Google.  I guess all will become apparent over the next few weeks!

And most of all, I wonder what this update is going to end up getting called?

Not many business owners would consider opening up a new retail location that is miles out of the way, with no main roads leading to it, no signs that the business is there, and nothing to tell customers that it exists.

Yet everyday that is exactly what is happening in the online world. People with a perfectly good business head are getting websites developed for their business that stand absolutely no chance of ever returning the cost that they have invested in getting the website built, let alone delivering a profit.

So what is going wrong, and is YOURS one of those web sites?

The search engines are extremely secretive about how they rank sites and determine who will rank highest for any given search term. To make matters worse they are constantly changing the ranking algorithms to provide the searcher with the most relevant results, and also to prevent the people who try and ‘cheat’ their way to the top.

Unless you are lucky enough to be, or to know someone, who has years of experience of search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), and also pays to keep up to date with the latest developments and changes with the major search engines, then you are highly simply NOT going to be able to achieve and maintain top rankings in the search engines.

And if nobody can find your website in the search engines then it simply is NOT going to bring you in any business

We can deliver new leads and fresh customers to your business, month after month.  If you need long term, low cost, traffic to your web site then we will work with you to optimise your web site for keywords that will deliver traffic that is specifically looking to buy your product or service.

Don’t be fooled by search engine optimisation companies that tell you that they have got you to page 1 of Google for your business name. You may not want to believe it, but it’s almost certain that people aren’t searching for your business name. They will be looking to ‘buy shoes’, or for a ‘Ford dealer’. Being aware of, choosing, and targeting the correct keywords will make a massive difference to the number of visitors to your website and to the number of those visitors that end up buying.

And helping you choose the right keywords for your business is just one of the ways that our service will help you.  With the right keywords selected your website can be optimised using on-page and off-page techniques that ensure that you rank highly for the keywords you are targeting in the organic search results.

There may be hundreds, or maybe even thousands, of keyword phrases that are applicable to your business, and of course using search engine optimisation techniques to target ALL of those keyword phrases is simply not practical. That’s where pay-per-click can help you. By optimising your web pages for the keyword phrases that will bring you the most traffic in the organic results, you can mop up on the many other keyword phrases that, combined, can bring you in far more traffic than the organic traffic.

However, if you have ever used Google’s pay-per-click solution then you probably know how complex it can be and you may have experienced just how easy it is to blow your budget with this – unless you really know what you ar doing!  And we do!

Managing a handul of keywords on pay-per-click can be a real time consuming task for a lot of people. We are able to manage and monitor thousands of keywords and campaigns and ensure that each is checked DAILY to ensure that only the best and most cost effective ad is running for any of the campaigns running. This means that you get the maximum return for your budget in terms of ad performance and cost effectiveness.

Before setting up any pay-per-click (PPC) campaign we will sit down and work with you using a mathematical model to calculate what the most is that that you should be paying on pay-per-click to ensure that the your profit on your customer or lead acquistion is realised.

Whether you created your website yourself, or paid someone several thousand dollars to build it for you, the question is – is it making money for you? Have you recovered the cost that you initially invested in it? Do you know how many new customers your website will bring you this month and how much net profit will result from those customers?

For the vast majority of businesses with websites the answer to most or all of those questions is either ‘No’, or more  likely, they have no idea.

Unless you are tracking, measuring, and testing every element of your website, and your visitors interaction with your site, then you really will have no way to determine how effective it is and what works and what doesn’t.

There are lots of companies that offer search engine optimization (SEO) services. But most of them seem to think it’s still 1996 rather than 2009!  They are charging people, like yourself, for submitting websites to the search engines and to a handful of (usually worthless) directories. Oh, and maybe they will help and advise on your meta-tags.  That sort of stuff ceased to be effective years ago and demonstrates a lack of understanding of how modern search engines work.

And what about visitor analysis and conversion tracking?

How often do you hear search engine optimization (SEO) companies talk about that?

The reason other SEO companies don’t talk about it is that they either don’t have a clue about what it is or how to do it, or they simply don’t care, because it is far easier to charge a naive customer for SEO services that are easy to do, but simply have little or no impact anymore.

When you come to me to help you with your website I make sure that you can see the return on your investment on every dollar you spend. Everything is tracked, measured and tested. Split testing is carried out repeatedly to fine tune your site to squeeze every last bit of performance out of it.

Visitor interaction is monitored so that you know how your visitor got to your website, what they were looking for, and what they did when they were on your site. This helps identify and fine tune the entry and exit points on your web site and take appropriate action to ensure that the customer is guided into your marketing funnel so that you can guide them towards your ‘call to action’.

And if you aren’t currently getting many (or any) visitors then thats OK. I will provide you with on-page and off-page search engine optimization and marketing that is is highly effective. All of the techniques used are current and based on tried and tested methods that will deliver long-lasting results. Beware anybody that is offering to do SEO and is unwilling to tell you how they are doing it. There are a lot of spammy, flavour-of-the-month methods that can get your site ranked highly one month, then banned the next! The people doing this sort of SEO are as bad as the ones using the out-of-date methods that are no longer effective!