Website Design for Search Engine Optimization

Google makes me laugh.

Apparently they name their updates silly things like:

a) The Farmer Update
b) The Caffeine Update
c) The Panda Update

Weird.

Anyways…every time the Big G makes an update to their search algorithm (i.e. how they rank webpages in their search results), there are always “loopholes” that allow us to benefit and get our websites to the top of the page.

Last week, Rick Porter showed me how to kill the panda update in order to get more traffic to your site.

In fact, he showed me two really cool ways, but then he said I could only share one of them with you.

Otherwise I’d end up like the Panda.

Soooooo….

Here’s the tip from Rick:

“The secret that you can tell people is not really a secret, BUT it’s just that people still won’t believe it or implement it even though Google itself has said this is where it is going with search results.

The secret has to do with pushing more content above the fold (above the fold means what you see when you land on a webpage without doing any scrolling).

You want your site to have more content ABOVE the fold and looking less like a giant billboard. So keep your banners NARROW and that way your site will look more like a great source of information.

The best example is wikipedia. Check out any article on that site, and you’ll notice it goes almost immediately into text content.

That’s one of the reasons it gets such high rankings and why there is plenty of inferior content on Wikipedia that is outranking good content from other sites in Google searches.

Case in point:  Look at the post on bodyweight exercises by Wikipedia

=> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodyweight_exercise

It’s nothing special, just information that links to more relevant information, BUT it ranks number ONE for the search term, “bodyweight exercise”.

So you might want to change your site so that it has more information above the fold. Don’t go overboard with artwork at the top of your site.

If you can create a site that Google recognizes as providing a ton of content, and one that still allows you to monetize you’re traffic, you’ll be able to make some nice passive money with a site that ranks high for the right search terms.

Hope that helps,

Craig Ballantyne

No pandas were harmed in the writing of this blog post.

That I know of.

And if there was, I blame Google.