Professional Web Design, Breathing Life and Beauty back into your Website

*Another good read - results of which were not good for me.*

November 10, Issue #93 seo-news.com

Google’s Jagger Update - The Dust Begins to Settle?
By Ken Webster

What Happened?
Webmaster’s, Site Owners, Online Businesses and SEO Companies everywhere have been desperately trying to decipher the fallout from the longest and most grueling algorithm update in the history of the Internet. Webmaster and SEO Forums have been busier than ever before.

Relevancy and revenue generation are the two top goals of any SE (Search Engine). As the Internet and associated technologies mature, SE algorithms have become much more complex. This was demonstrated in Google’s 3-4 week long 3 phase “Jagger” update.

The initial response was very negative and Google received more bad press from every conceivable corner than what could have been imagined, going in. Many sites fell completely out of SERP (Search Engine Result Placement) over night, seemingly unexplainably. Some have recovered, but many haven’t, while others have improved traffic.

Compounding prognostication, Yahoo initiated a much milder index update during the latter phase of the Jagger update.
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With more companies adopting blogs, we’re starting to see what works and what doesn’t work from a design perspective. As a cue from Jakob Nielsen’s article on the topic, here are problems I often find.

Bad headlines. They’re frustrating. Some bloggers like to get creative… but creativity can affect search engine keyword opportunities. The important thing is that readers have a hint of what the post is about.

Links. Readers like to know where links take them and most of us rely on the status bar, but sometimes that doesn’t help. Some experts say to use “click here” to help those who are newer to the Web and others say that’s wrong, wrong, wrong. It just depends on the content. When linking, try to pick the best words that give readers an idea of what to expect. (more…)