A terrible search engine bloodbath is on its way. Thousands of websites are going to be affected and your business’ website could be one of them. Over dramatic? Well not if you were listening to Matt Cutts, Google’s Head of Webspam at the South By Southwest SEO conference in Texas this year.

The next phase in Cutts’ crusade against spam is a major change to Google’s software. This change will automate the detection and penalisation of offending websites and is expected to be rolled out towards the middle of 2012. Cutts announced the search engine’s plans to, “level the playing ground,” by targeting websites with poor content that rely on “over-optimization” rather than delivering good content.

Google is essentially getting tough on websites that use manipulative practices and these are not just commonplace, they are endemic – particularly among the current crop of aspiring self-styled “SEO agencies”.

Many businesses won’t realise their website is at risk – until their Google traffic dries up. In some cases the damage will be so severe that unravelling it will be practically impossible and a new website domain will be needed in order to escape the Google penalty.

If you don’t understand exactly what your SEO agency has been doing to promote your site then you might need to prepare yourself for a very nasty surprise later this year. If you need customers to find you in Google then the impact could destroy your business.

I see a lot of websites ranking well in search engines because of low-quality, manipulative tactics on the part of unscrupulous SEO agencies that are focussed on the short term opportunity to make some money. These tactics often work but they’re what we call ‘dirty’ and they’re against Google’s terms of service.

Unfortunately, if your agency has achieved good rankings for your website, it’s quite possible that they’ve done so using spam and over-optimisation – especially if those rankings were achieved within just a few weeks or months. If you’re not sure exactly what your SEO agency has been doing, there are ways to spot a bad seo agency and diagnose a spammy SEO campaign.

Examples of bad SEO tactics ripe for penalisation by Google include:

• Having an unnatural or unbalanced link profile
• Excessive highly targeted links
• Keyword stuffing
• Large-scale link exchanges and blog networks
• Blog and forum spam

The key to a safe, long-term SEO strategy lies in the hierarchy of fundamental SEO principles. At the heart of genuine SEO is the creation and ethical promotion of high quality content. You need to:

• Understand your audience
• Tailor your content to them
• Make sure they know about it.

If you are concerned about your website’s exposure to bad SEO and would like some free advice, call me on 0207 845 9951. I’ll be able to take a look at your SEO profile and tell you if you’re at risk within two minutes.

There are, however, several cardinal sins that will almost certainly be detrimental to an SEO strategy. Even worse, they could get you blacklisted by Google. Over at searchenginewatch.com, Jennifer Horowitz of EcomBuffet condensed bad practice down to the most prevalent and fatal SEO mistakes – have you sinned?:

1. Failing to do proper keyword research

Don’t assume you know how people think and therefore how they will use search. Everybody searches differently, often based on which phase of the buying process they find themselves in. Dedicate proper resources at this stage – use keyword tools, research web stats and check out the competition to gain an edge.

2. Deciding to do SEO in-house, but never actually doing it

Do you actually have the time to handle your SEO strategy? You don’t have to outsource, but if SEO is sitting on a to-do list for months don’t expect increased web traffic from search.

3. Ignoring social media because you “don’t get it”

Whether you like it or not, social media is an integral part of SEO. At the very minimum, get yourself set up with profiles on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. But don’t expect sparks to fly if you don’t continue to nurture conversations and manage your accounts.

4. Lacking a strategy and plan

Handling SEO, blogging and social media requires a focused strategy with clear objectives. For instance, your Facebook posts, blog posts and Twitter marketing will prove far more fruitful if they’re coordinated to develop momentum.

5. Concentrating too much on engines and not enough on your site visitors

Never priotise web optimisation over user experience. It’s no good getting your site ranked highly if visitors won’t convert once there. Ensure your site is user-friendly, well-written and compelling and never compromise to please the engines.

6. Not growing your site content

Stale content will date your site, meaning lower rankings and unengaged site visitors (if they can even find you). Business blogs are an ideal way to keep your site fresh and supply the sort of regular, informative content that guarantees return visits.

7. Keyword stuffing and spamming

There are so many reasons not to: the engines will notice, you risk getting penalised or even banned, and your visitors will feel cheated. There’s no excuse not to be fully up to scratch on SEO best practice.

You Google the product and the search results are crowned with tempting money-off promotions. Next thing you know, you’re in the queue at Maccy D’s satisfying your craving.

The fast food giant has attributed its 3.1% May sales surge to, amongst other factors, new unique promotional tie-ins. Here follow three SEO tips drawn from McDonald’s latest social media strategy that will drive SEO rankings for any social page:

1. Link from your homepage

It might seem a no-brainer, but a surprising six of the top 20 most searched for retail brands failed to include any social media integration on their homepage. McDonald’s links to its promotions, YouTube,Twitter and Facebook marketing activity via its homepage. Search engines value these links highly, so miss this opportunity at your peril, and use your brand name in the link for maximum effect.

2. Use brand names in posts

It’s common knowledge that URLs that match search terms result in high SEO rankings on that search. With this in mind, McDonald’s made sure to launch Frozen Strawberry Lemonade with appropriately titled Facebook posts and tweets optimised with hashtags. The same applies for words used in any social media posts, so pepper your business blog liberally with both company and product names.

3. Get ‘likes’

Crowd science plays a major role in the search algorithms that affect your ranking. Link building is one way to get noticed. Likes and follows on social sites are another. To become truly popular in the social space requires buckets of creativity and originality. People like humour, but they really love offers and promotions. McDonald’s used a $1-off coupon to introduce its Frozen Strawberry Lemonade to its 9million+ Facebook fans, and more than 3,000 of them ‘liked’ it.

Tips adapted from searchenginewatch.com in conjunction with BrightEdge Technologies

Thackston argues that continuity between the initial trigger (be it an ad, banner or tweet) through to the landing page is vital. This means using consistent keyphrases and seamlessly flowing copy.

Anything less will confuse potentially interested prospects, who may well drop off before even visiting your site.

The basis of writing organic SEO copy is to develop and follow the same topic from a prospect’s first exposure to your site to the call-to-action on the webpage. Thackston advises thinking of your tag sets as links in a chain, ushering the prospect from one step to the next.

“It should – in essence – work exactly like the process when writing a paid ad/landing page combo,” she says.

The next step is, ironically, to stop. Before writing, walk the exact path your prospects will walk.

“If the title tag captures their attention, where will they look for more information?” she asks. “When they click through to your web page, how will they know they are in the right place?”

By considering these and other questions of continuity, SEO copywriters can send potential customers along a clearer path towards conversion.

We see this as a natural extension to our core blog management and social media services which are focussed on creating inbound website traffic for clients in the technology & corporate sectors.

There’s such a close relationship between online pr, social media and SEO and each discipline ultimately has the same goal – raising brand profiles online. And while SEO companies are not experts in PR, neither are PR agents experts in SEO. We need each other.

We’re initially offering two products – an SEO audit which grades websites and blogs for SEO effectiveness and a reputation management service which measures brand sentiment and recommends ways to influence negative comments posted online.

Online pr helps unlock the IP lying dormant within corporations and SEO makes it discoverable to those you want to see it –  add in social media marketing and the combination has a powerful effect on website traffic.

On your wish list?

The question that caught our attention was to do with how she sees the role of social media within website marketing activity, particularly in relation to SEO.

Here’s what she said:

“I think having a solid site: great content, good experience for users (intuitive navigation, responsive), descriptive page titles, standardized URL structure, etc., is of primary importance. A strong site is the foundation where you’ll likely make your online conversions. Once this foundation is established, the social media approach helps drive traffic, builds excitement (and inbound links), that you’ll be able to capitalize on with your solid site.”

The findings suggest that a company blog is more important as a new business tool than was previously thought.

First time visitors come from two major sources, referring sites and search engines, confirming that good quality content that is keyword optimised, will pull traffic to company sales funnels.

Research amongst Furlong PR customers suggests that 75% of blog traffic comes from social networking sites and 25% from SEO.

Compendium’s survey also looked at use of Twitter. Approximately 43 percent of companies surveyed had established a Twitter account.

Twitter usage was highest among B-to-B companies with 87 percent maintaining an account.

While Guido plots content for his blog, the overarching battle for online visibility races on. On one flank you have the keyword and link focussed techy SEO practitioners wearing various shades of hat, white, grey & black, creating text bristling with optimisation. On the other side, PR and digital  agencies advance steadily into SEO territory with content crafted to build brand reputation online with social media levers attached.

The arrival of Twitter has changed the game again and lately, in favour of the content providers. Link building has long been the covert weapon of choice for SEO experts but with Google publishing Twitter posts, content providers suddenly have a powerful new link building tool all of their own. Now, every tweet posted with a link is another step forward for that company’s organic search ranking.

SEO and online PR people though are really conspirators with the same aim, just with different skills. To really light an online PR bonfire, search and content needs to come together in the same container, a barrel perhaps? Make a bonfire night wish.

Google’s introduction of You Tube into video search results a year after it acquired the online phenomenon, could turn out to be the event that triggered a similar decline in text led SEO.

Video SEO will suit some businesses better than others.  If you put ’motivational speaking’  into a Google web search today, two videos of Peter Bland and Ruben Gonzalez appear, naturally enough, what better format to promote motiovational speaking. The textual results around them look bland in comparison.

Video content does pose some challenges though. It needs to be professionally filmed and edited and the content should be interesting, well scripted with ideally some greenscreen graphics. It’s an investment, but one that will pay off for organisations willing to try something new.