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by Roger Janik July 07, 2010

Roger Janik

Roger Janik is the President and Founder of ServerSideDesign.com – The Web Marketers. ServerSideDesign was founded in 2004 and over the years has grown to a staff of well-rounded professionals that handle tasks such as SEO copywriting, SEO programming, link building, social networking, pay per click management, web design, and reporting. ServerSideDesign is a proud member of the BBB, SEMPO and many other prestigious organizations. They were named as a top 10 company in 2007 for both Organic SEO and Link Popularity by Promotion World.

Roger Janik has written 46 articles for PromotionWorld.

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These last few months has been challenging for both search engine optimizers and search engine marketers.  With the recent release of Google Caffeine and now an update called MayDay, those trying to rank high and grab traffic from Google have found these two recent events more than enough excitement for one year.  However, this is the industry that we have chosen and for those looking to make inroads and continue to rank well with Google will need to understand what Google is requesting from us.

What are the Major Themes of the MayDay Update?

As always, there is a lot of buzz when a major update from Google shakes up the rankings.  This one is no different.  Google is continuing to become more sophisticated and as it becomes more sophisticated, it is better able to sift through the incredible amount of data on the web and sort it by what "it" thinks is the most relevant for its users and own purposes.  This being said, one of the major themes of the MayDay update is that Google now has the ability and it does seem to value an individual page of a website.  For those optimizing your site, this means that Site-Wide-Optimization is now more important than ever.  In addition, other items that seem to be targeted by Google include long tail keywords, which now it seems, need to have relevant content associated with each long tail keyword.  The duplicate content penalty seems to be stronger than ever, possibly due to the growing sophistication of Google's new algorithm & data processing abilities and content seems to be more important than ever, since many now believe that each page is ranked on its own (very little link juice coming from the homepage).

Site-Wide-Optimization: Optimize Each Page of Your Website

It seems now more than ever it is important for web developers to optimize each page of their website if they want to rank for a specific keyword.  For instance, if you have a website that has a very healthy and high ranking home page, don't rely on this page alone to help you rank with other keyword pages on your site.  Try to view each webpage on your site as a distinct entity.  Obviously interlinking and proper SEO techniques for building a site are still extremely important, but you want to make sure that each keyword page you build has its own unique content and that is strong enough to stand on its own.   It is extremely helpful when building a website or creating/revising a new keyword page that you create a page that focuses on the relevant keyword, that has a few external links and that offers unique content. 

Unique Content Makes a Difference

Unique content more than ever makes a difference to Google.  As Google continues to grow in complexity and sophistication, it will no doubt be able to determine if your content is unique.  While you don't need a lot of unique content on each page, make sure you at least have 200 -300 words that are keyword optimized at about 1% to 2%.  This is especially important for large ecommerce sites that have dozens or hundreds of products with little or no unique content.

Long Tail Keywords May Now Get Harder to Rank

MayDay seems to make it more difficult than ever to rank high for long tail keywords.  This is due to the fact that many ecommerce sites that may have strong homepages will find that their link juice no longer reaches their long tail keywords making it harder to be indexed and ranked.  Those that utilize site wide optimization techniques and create each web page to stand on its own with unique, keyword focused content should reap the benefits down the road.  In addition to site wide optimization, it should be noted that while long tail keywords may be harder to rank if you don't optimize properly, Google now has the ability to process long tail keywords efficiently.  Not only can Google easily extract long tail keywords from content, but it can also extract keywords within the long tail keyword phrase.  For instance a long tail keyword: Chicago-Ford-Mustang-Auto-Parts can now be easily processed and broken down to many keyword phrases such as Chicago-Ford-Mustang, Auto-parts, Chicago-Auto-Parts, Ford-Mustang-Auto-Parts and more.

Link Building for Each Page

Obviously, if you are optimizing a large ecommerce site, building links for each individual page will be out of the question.  However, for smaller sites, you should engage in building links pointed to a specific page.  Obviously, this requires lots of effort and lots of resources, but if you have certain webpages that bring in the majority of the traffic and revenue, this is a tactic that should be utilized as it may help you get a great return on your investment.

Put in the Effort

For those in the SEO and SEM industry, Google has definitely made a statement with the MayDay update that web developers and optimizers will fall by the wayside.  It looks like Google is ready to judge each individual page separately, helping those that work hard on making their sites relevant, up to date and engaging will rank the highest.

As always, we will continue to monitor the situation and report back once more information becomes available.