How To React To Google's Over-Optimization Filter

In the News: Google announces another Panda update, paid blog networks don't work anymore, you might have to hide your location on Google Places, how Bing removes junk from the result pages and more.

Last week, Matt Cutts, head of Google's anti-spam team, announced that Google is working on a penalty for over-optimized websites. What does this announcement mean to your website and how should you react to this announcement?

Here's what Matt Cutts said in detail:

"We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over-optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site. We are trying to make Google Bot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now."

Does this mean that you shouldn't optimize your web pages anymore?

This announcement is aimed at people who are trying to push the limits too far. Of course, it is perfectly okay to add your keywords on your web page and it is also perfectly okay to exchange links with other websites.

Actually, all of these methods can have a very positive influence on the Google rankings of your website. The problem starts when these elements are overused. This usually happens when you use fully automated tools and services to promote your website.

For example, it is likely that the following SEO methods will get your website in trouble:

• automated link exchange networks that add your link to hundreds on other websites
• tools that automatically create fake forum accounts and comments with a link to your site
• tools that automatically create keyword rich web pages for you on your website
• participating in paid link schemes

Fully automated solutions always mean spam when it comes to SEO

Google wants to show high quality web pages in the search results. Web pages that have been created automatically cannot have the same quality as a web page that has been created by a human editor. Fully automated solutions lead to low quality links and content that is not helpful to the average web surfers. Businesses that "optimized" their websites with these methods are the ones who will be hit by the new ranking filter. If you see the words "fully automated" and "hundreds" or "thousands" in one sentence that you can be sure that the advertised product or service is spamming and your website will get in trouble if you promote it with these methods.

Don't panic and create a symbiotic relationship with search engines

If you haven't used the spam methods described above to promote your website, then your Google rankings won't be in trouble. Optimizing your web pages remains very important because you have to show Google and other search engines that your website is relevant to a particular keyword and that your website has a high quality.

Secure your Google rankings by using white-hat SEO tools

Optimizing your web pages is important but you have to make sure that you play by the rules. If you do it correctly, search engine optimization leads to lasting high rankings, more customers and more sales. If you're pushing the limits too far, your website will get in trouble sooner or later. If you want to get lasting results, only use white-hat SEO methods.

Why Keywords Are Important To Building Your Blog

Keywords are essential for any blogger wanting to get more readers, fans, subscribers, and ad revenue for their blogs. Why is this? This is because keywords are search terms that people search on search engines like Google or Bing to find your blog. If you can get ranked highly for a keyword that is searched a lot on Google or Bing, you will get organic traffic to your site. Organic traffic is great because it is traffic through the search engines and it doesn’t cost you anything. The goal to build your blog is to find many keywords relating to your blog that people search a lot, and then rank in the top ten in the search engines for those keywords.

Now that we know why keywords are important we need to figure out how to find good keywords to try to rank for. The keywords you should be targeting depend on what theme your blog or website has. The more specific your blog is the easier it will be to rank for keywords. For example it will be harder to rank for the keyword blog then something more specific like cooking mom blog or parenting blog.

Since the term blog is very general there is going to be much more competition. Another thing that will help in ranking high for keywords is if your website is a .com instead of a .blogspot.com or wordpress.com. When you own your own domain anytime you have someone link to your website your site will get a boost in the search engine rankings, instead of blogspot or wordpress getting that boost. If you are blogging for money or wish to brand yourself, invest in the .com domain.

Let’s start finding some good keywords. I’ll use the example parenting blog. To find what keywords we should target if our blog is a parenting blog we should click on the google keyword tool We type the keyword parenting blog into the box where it says word or phrase, and fill out the annoying captcha. Then we hit the search button. 100 keyword ideas will come up. If you click on the local monthly searches you can have all the keywords organized in order of which search term gets the highest monthly searches for parenting blog all the way down to the lowest.

Notice on the left side of the screen you see match types and underneath the box, broad is checked. If you remove the check from broad and check the box exact instead you will see which exact phrases get the most local searches on Google, and the competition for each.

For example the keyword parenting styles gets 8,100 local monthly searches and appears to have low competition. To be in the top ten for keywords it is easier to find keywords that still get a decent amount of searches and have low competition, then go after a keyword that has a lot of searches and very high competition. If you eventually target many smaller keywords with low competition this can add up to some big organic search engine traffic from Google and Bing!