Google makes small changes to its algorithm daily and also very few months, when they push their page rank, they push a bigger algorithm change. Last major one happed end of April which many SEOs called it Google Mayday Update. But that was not last major change by Google and will not be the last.

Sudden PR and keyword ranking changes, dropper and losses, are usually result of these big changes however growing Google filters, designed to prevent link spams, continue to devalue incoming links, and in many cases also penalize sites for artificial link spam trying to tweak Google rankings.

As an experienced SEO expert in Los Angeles, I have many clients in Los Angeles area, Orange county, San Diego, and Southern California that I visit face to face. They are mainly small businesses owners who think they can jump on top of Search engine SERP on their major keyword so they they hire some so called SEO specialist from overseas without checking his or her work or credentials, and when they don’t see any progress in their ranking, and in most cases drop in ranking and some even see a penalty, they look for local SEO consultants in the area to help them.

Of course local SEO experts aren’t cheap and we don’t promise overnight result. If you are a small business owner and you think your site has been penalized by Google or you have had a huge keyword ranking, before contract anyone make sure you do some research online and see what you can do yourself before hiring an SEO specialist. There are a couple of articles I recommend:

Here is one by Google
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=3ba4e344e391299e&hl=en

And here are a few more
http://www.ksl-consulting.co.uk/google_penalty.html
http://www.searchenginegenie.com/Faq/content/4/267/en/how-to-remove-google-penalty.html
http://seo2.0.onreact.com/google-filters-exact-match-anchor-text-links-are-the-new-meta-keywords

Many SEOs and webmasters, at pressure of their employer or their client, take the easy route and buy links. Although buying links is pretty common in the SEO and webmaster world but that is against Google guidelines.

Writing a great content and getting involved in your community to promote your site so they voluntarily link to you, is among best practices for SEO that works in long term. As Google’s webspam team and search quality team is getting smarter of detecting paid links, the links that follow their guidelines will help better in long term.

Below are two good articles to help you make better content and better links to increase good traffic and hopefully conversion to your website.

Google Explains How To Get Quality Links to Your Website

5 Ways to Power Up the Appeal of Your Web Content

Happy SEOing

Most beginner or intermediate SEOs don’t know exactly what Over-optimization means so I would like to attempt to explain it. There are two types of Over-optimizations; Onsite and offsite.

Onsite Over-optimization: This refers to keyword stuffing or using the targeted keywords too often in your content. Many SEO’s make mistake of writing content only to tweak the search engines not to write good quality for their users. And search engines in particular Google web spam filters can detect that and can cause negative effect on your ranking. The best content is the one that is written for your users. Of course you want to make sure your keywords are there in your content but in a way that makes sense. For example in this post, one of my targeted keywords is SEO over optimization but you don’t see me stuffing my post with that keyword. Just a few times in different forms, a couple times with hyphen and a couple times without embedded naturally in my content. That is good way of putting desired keywords in your content that is both user friendly and search engine friendly.

Offsite Over-optimization: This refer to building too unnatural inbound links growth. You want to make sure you make links in natural fashion. If too many links are made in short period of time, or if too many high quality links are made without having lower key links, or if there are too many links made under too few anchor texts, these are all some of few elements that can raise flags with Google.

Make sure you diversify on your inbound links with different anchor texts so it looks natural. For example if you are doing optimization for a client, let’s say a payday loan lender, then you want to make sure that is not your only keyword you are using. And do not send all links to your homepage. Send a few links with relevant anchor text to inside pages as well for example for the same site, I choose to send payday lender to an inside page with relevant content.

In summary, SEO over-optimization result of poor SEO strategy, and even experienced SEOs have tendency to make that mistake it probably because the get rushed to get faster results either by impatient client or employer. The key is not to give in to that and choose and define an effective SEO strategy that works. Explain things to your clients and your employers and educate them about possible consequence if SEO isn’t done properly. Trust me I know from practical experience!

Google allows you to do what they called personalized search which they will show you a different SERP based on your IP and your google login information. That is designed to show you a more relevant and user friendly search result however, if you would like to test where you are at based on a different keyword, you either have to use a ranking tool or you have to do an impersonalized Google search. The impersonalized searchers are done in two ways.
1. Clear your browser cash and then search Google – This could be a pain if you have saved URLs and saved passwords.
2. Pass the parameters to Google manual: http://www.google.com/search?q=MYKEYWORDS&pws=0
For example if want to know where you rank for Los Angeles SEO Consultant you can do this

http://www.google.com/search?q=Los Angeles+SEO+Consultant&pws=0

Since Google Caffeine has been official, I have noticed new content being indexed more specially if they are pinged after new content have been added. I personally like to stay away from word press plugins as much as possible because it can open backdoor to hackers hacking your website so I use a couple pinging services. One is pingomatic which is super fast and the other one I use is pingates that is a bit slower but pings more blog directories.

I have an SEO client in Los Angles that is a payday loan resource that writes about payday loans. He called me and said that he just put a post up and half hour later he was getting a comment. Then he searched Google for that specific topic’s title and it seemed it was indexed by Google.

This is big. No I take it back it is huge. Google is embarrassing fresh content even more and that could bring good traffic to websites. More content, and fresh content, the more authority and I believe in long picture, that could really help building an authority websites specially if an SEO doing an aggressive link building because good quality fresh content can justify a sudden surge in links.

Many bigger sites lost considerable amount of traffic after Google’s mayday update. While many SEOs and webmasters are still trying to figure out what how they can reclaim their ranking and traffic back, all Google is suggesting is to “write better contents for the users” which they have been saying that for a long time but the truth the matter is that it takes a lot more than a better content to rank good in Google and gain good organic traffic.

Truth is that Google updated their algorithm and although they do that everyday, but every now and then they make huge changes where it is fairly significant and observable. I came across this article, Was The Google Mayday Update A Complete Failure Then?, they pointed out something that I had also seen with one of my clients.

One of my big clients who is in short term loans were hit really hard post mayday. On the main keywords payday loan, which is the type of loan they offer online, they lost their ranking from being on the second page of Google all the way to below 100. It is interesting their ranking improved on long tail keywords in particulate trusted payday loans but whoever searches that?

At last, I would like to thank Google for keeps us, the SEO specialists and experts, in business. Their constant changing of their algorithm is reason I have a job and clients. So Kudos Google, and keep it up.

The SEO experts at SEOmoz have done it again and they have conducted a Whitebord interview with Matt Cutts most certainly a great interview about redirects, domain trust, and etc I recommend you all to check it out.

I was reading this great article SEO Site Audits: Getting Started which I found was a very useful for any SEO consultant. Organization and planning are two very important factors when it comes to consulting and those SEO specialists who lack it will have difficulty deal and retaining clients.

Every SEO expert has his or her own method of auditing websites to improve their search engine optimization but there is always room for improvement. I for example, have my full time job as an Internet Marketing Manager at a payday loan lender but I am allowed to do side work so as long as it is non competing. So I do SEO work at night and over the weekend so I can’t really follow this model given by the author since I spread out my hours throughout the week. The model here is a good one if you are dealing with a client full time, but it also gives you good guide to implement it if you have a model like mine.

Organization, planning, and communications are the main factors in success when you do your own business no matter which industry or sector you are in. And the more professional you are, the busier you will be, hence more important these factor become.

One of my clients that has a payday loan website lost a lot of traffic in may. On a certain keywords specially long tail ones they lost their keyword ranking position therefore quiet bit of natural search traffic.

SEOMoz was the first, that I know of, while most SEOs noticed a big algorithmic change by google, most were confused of what Google had done but the SEO experts at SEOmoz where the first one to blog about it and explain it. In one of their posts along with a video, they called it Mayday update.

While a month passed by and no one from google really admited any major changes. But around last week, google webmaster central released their new series of SEO videos by Matt Cutts, who admitted there was in fact a significant algorithmic change to google and it did effect the long tail keywords. Also he signaled that google may have finally gotten grasp of paid links better. You can check out that video here.

It has been known that Google makes and rolls out over 400 algorithmic changes a year. That makes it more than one change a day but most go unnoticed or have little effect on SERPs. But changes like this one where keywords ranking and organic traffic drop significantly, usually end up not going unnoticed because they cause significant traffic drop to websites.

Hence if you are an SEO expert, I do recommend you login to your analytic more frequently and try to understand the data. And I highly recommend reading SEOMoz blog. Many industry respected SEO Experts write for that blog and its a great place to both read on SEO and stay up to date with latest news and changes.