By now, I guess you must have gotten tired of reading about Panda this, Penguin that. But just for good measure, here are a few articles you can read to know what I am talking about:

• To know more about Penguin and other recent Google changes this article at WordTracker.com offers some valuable insights.
• Thanks to Penguin, getting rid of “unwanted” and “unnatural” backlinks seems to be the hottest thing at the moment. This WebProNews article asks if Google be killing the web as we know it.
• With google’s renewed aggresive stance against “spam”, any thing you do to improve your Google organic search rankings (SEO, essentially) is potentially counter-productive. See this article at SEOBook.com.
• As it often happens with Google algorithm changes, some businesses have found the going too tough, and have had to close down. The story of Children’s Furniture Store is just one of many.
• All of which reminds of a sermon that I think we are not preaching loud enough: THOU SHALT NOT LIVE BY GOOGLE ALONE. Read this article for reference.

As you would expect, bazillions of the internet marketing “experts” and SEO “gurus” have written countless posts on what to do to penguin-proof your site and recover any lost traffic. The chorus goes something like: write great content; focus on link quality not quantity; remove any on-page spam you might have engaged in; remove all spammy links to your site; diversify your links’ anchor text to include brand anchors, naked URLs, and junk anchors (e.g “click here”, “read more here”, “see this article”); submit a reconsideration request to google; etc.

All of this is great advise, and it might get you some positive results. But remember, even the experts aren’t always right. Sometimes we only parrot what Matt Cutts and his webspam team are feeding us. And lately, Google’s message seems to be “just build it and let it be, if it is good enough, people will link to you naturally. Any form of active outreach is spam”.

The sad reality is that internet marketing is a jungle of some sort. You cannot afford to sit back and wait for things to fall in place, no matter how great your content or product is. Otherwise, smarter competitors with inferior products will easily outdo you. That is why it is called marketing, you have to get people to know about it. The problem is in the how to.

Before Panda and Penguin, SEO was an assured way to easily reach your audience. One of the surest ways for ranking (at least in Google) was to amass thousands of links with keyword rich anchor text. Many of the techniques most SEOs used to get such links were purely meant for [manipulating] the search engines. Yes, that includes several so-called “white hat” techniques. I am sure you know why; It’s because those techniques produced results. Then along came Panda and Penguin, and you know the rest of the story.

Certainly, there were a few lonely voices in the wilderness, e.g Eric Ward, who were preaching against building links for the engines, urging us to focus on human traffic instead. Some of them even warned us about an impending Googageddon.

What then should you do in the light of these changes?
Let me first make a few observations:

1. There is still some residual, non-SEO, real-traffic value in many of the link-building techniques that we consider obsolete. Take reciprocal links for example, sometimes it makes perfect sense to “exchange” links with a website whose content complements yours. The aim here is not to manipulate search rankings, but to give visitors of either websites an extra reference resource. Here’s an old article by Eric Ward as to why reciprocal links are viable. You can make a similar case for several other now-demonized techniques (article marketing, social bookmarking, directory submissions, and even footer links).
2. Any new and hot internet platform or fad can be, and will be overused, misused and abused  by internet marketers. (Pinterest, take note). Right now, increasing your “social signals” may be touted as the next ranking secret, but at some point in the not-so-distant  future, it will become a noise signal, considering how we are already spamming it. Another trending ranking “secret” at the moment is guest blogging  (even though  it isn’t entirely new). It is only a matter of time before a whole industry emerges for this purpose alone (remember directories when Google came along?). From then, their SEO value will be all downhill. But even then, some people will still be using them effectively for business. You can be one of those.
3. So far, most of the people complaining about the poor quality of search results post-penguin are the marketing type and/or website owners. We don’t hear much grumbling from the “ordinary” users (who form over 90% of the searchers, I guess). While this may be because they don’t own any blogs or web properties in which to vent their anger, it may also be an indication that the results aren’t as bad as we claim. This user group – the consumer – is what Google cares about most, because that’s where their profits lie.
4. Despite what Google is saying, some link spam still works in getting top rankings. I have observed it in a few niches that I actively monitor, and others have written about it too. Read this post, and this very long one for example. I believe there is a limit to how far Google can go in punishing link spam without diluting their search results quality to an extent that angers their most important user base.  Fact is, some of the guys producing the very best content also engage in some form of link spam, knowingly or otherwise. If Google penalizes every bad link out there, all this great content will be nuked too. The ultimate loser will be Google. It will be in Google’s best interest to only devalue (not penalize) some spammy links.

So, what to do?
I wish to reiterate the message of my previous post. It is time to re-examine your overall online strategy, and decide on what is important for you. If you are in it for the long term, the slow, steady and deliberate process is the best approach. Do what you have to do, without focusing too much on search engines. Focus on building meaningful and complementary relationships. The search engines may reward you or disregard you, but that won’t make or break your business.

If you prefer making a quick kill, then moving on to a new project, you should not fear to experiment. But while at it, use some brains. Don’t spam for its own sake. If you spam your way to top rankings for a very competitive keyword for example, you’d better make sure you milk the most value for those rankings when the visitor lands on your site. For your effort, you might even earn a few “natural” links/social shares/social bookmarks.

If you want the best of both worlds, learn from the experts on both sides. Borrow the aspects you are comfortable with. Use social media and paid advertising in the meanwhile.

Whatever your style, don’t just sit there and pray that Google will reward you because you have great content. Reach out.

What he proposed was unacceptable, and I told him so. His argument was that Google does not give a hoot about you and your business, and that at some point in your relationship with them, they’ll screw you over and over again. This, even if you’ve always played by their rules. It might take one month, or ten years, but it will happen eventually. So if you can game their system (using blackhat techniques) and reap some benefit, you’d better do it and make the most of it while it lasts.

I thought his views were a bit extreme and misguided. And personal too (he had told me how google had terminated his high-earning adsense account with thousands of dollars unpaid earnings, for violating some unspecified terms). I thus told him “thanks, but no thanks”, I’d rather stick to the straight and narrow “whitehat” path.

A few weeks later, Google started busting the so-called link networks like BuildMyRank, and I felt vindicated. The end was surely nigh for the “bad guys”.

A few more days down the line, and they (Google) launched the Penguin update, and I knew for sure this would be the last nail on their (bad guys’) coffin. After all, Google had assured us that this update was not the much-dreaded over-optimization penalty. Rather it was aimed at decreasing rankings for sites engaging in webspam (see their official announcement here).

Alas! I should have known better. After the Penguin dust had settled, my blackhat friend’s sites were still ranking extremely well, while my most important domain was hit rather badly. I lost about 75% of my search traffic. If google (and search in general) was my only source of traffic, I would be whining and lamenting like the many webmasters who are now petitioning google to kill this Penguin.

I manage my own sites, and I try my best not to engage in webspam. But then again, webspam, like promiscuity, is relative. So if Google’s spiders and algorithms think I have engaged in it, they are right. Incidentally, I am not the only one who thinks Penguin torched some wrong targets. See this FaceBook status by Michelle MacPhearson for example. Sour grapes? May be, may be not.

Fortunately, I practice what I preach. A fundamental lesson I have often repeated here (e.g here and here) is the need to diversify traffic sources. You cannot (or should not) put your online business at the mercy of one channel, more so one you don’t have complete control over. Otherwise, you’ll only have yourself to blame when that channel change their model.

So, what lessons have I picked from Penguin and Panda?

1. It’s all summarized in the title; At the end of the day, targeted and sustainable traffic is all that matters (of course, plus how well you’ve optimized your website for conversions – to make good use of that traffic). Get that traffic by all means, including search. “Sustainable” here implies that it has to be ethical as well. There are some universally accepted standards of what is ethical, and what is not. Spamming people – in social media, email, or any other place  - for example is unethical, and not a sustainable model for a reputable organization.
2. Search traffic is great, but if it makes up more than 50% of your traffic, you should be scared. It is too vulnerable to algorithmic changes. Google’s intentions may still be noble, they probably want to return the best results possible. But they can still get it wrong – and I think they’ve gotten a lot of things wrong lately. You don’t want to close shop because of an algorithm gone wrong. Or, if indeed negative SEO works, an opponent may just google bowl your online empire to oblivion.
3. When it comes to search, do not overly obsess about being 100% blackhat, or 100% whitehat, you’ll be limiting yourself. There’s a lot you can learn from both worlds. The true masters dabble in both colors to some extent, but they label it greyhat. Not all blackhat is unethical, and not all whitehat is stupid and ineffective. Google webmaster guidelines (and all other advise from the “experts”) are not God’s 10 commandments. They can be flouted without crossing the ethical line. The benefits of doing so sometimes outweigh the risk. Use your judgement.
4. If you are in it for the long run, the old and boring advice could also be the best – whatever you do, the center of focus should be your customers/visitors’ experience. Forget about the search engines, and do what you would do in their absence. When it makes perfect sense to buy links from popular websites for example, do so.

Here’s some little background and perspective
Panda was first deployed in February 2011. It was an algorithm update “designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites” – according to Google’s official statement. Since its initial launch, the Panda filter has been updated and run several other times, affecting the google SERPs in different ways each of these times.

The big deal with panda is that it not only affected “content farms” and other low quality sites, but also several high quality ones too. I have seen thousands of great blog posts and videos on what to do to panda-proof your website and recover your rankings, but none of these qualifies as “the” ultimate panda survival guide, despite offering great SEO advice.

There have been a few other important algorithm updates after Panda, the most notable being the freshness update and the page layout update. Both have some implications on SEO and internet business as a whole, but their effect was probably not as profound as Panda’s.

Then, just when we thought we had seen the worst from Google, two big things happened that tell us we should brace ourselves for more.

First, The Wall Street Journal published this story about an impending huge change by Google, one of “the biggest in the company’s history”. If the story is true, Google will very soon be providing the answers to most of its users’ search queries instead of just giving links to other websites that provide the answers. (Mashable too published a similar story).

Danny Sullivan, one of the most recognized search authorities, has downplayed the impact of this, arguing that semantic search and direct answers are not anything new in Google search – they have been there for some time.

I really want to believe Danny Sullivan’s argument that this news is just PR smoke by Google. But the source of the “smoke” is none other than Amit Singhal, the top engineer in charge of search at Google. He wouldn’t mention it if no such thing was in the pipeline.

The second big thing was the Matt Cutts’ announcement at SXSW of a soon-to-be-launched penalty for “over-optimized” websites. You can listen to the whole audio of that session here, but the idea is to “level the playing field” so that ordinary people who have great content but have no clue about SEO, can stand a chance to rank above others who over-do SEO.

Should you worry if you are an SEO? I think you should, even if you have always been 100% white hat. Why? Because, we all know that Google has always penalized most black-hat (and grey-hat) techniques that we could call over optimization – keyword stuffing, link schemes and other forms of link spam, hidden text, cloaking and doorway pages, etc. This implies that the announced “over-optimization” penalty will target some practices that we presently consider as “white-hat”.

Please also read what Vanessa Fox has to say about the whole thing. Great insights there, from an ex-googler.

What Does All This Portend For Kenyan (and other African) SEOs?
In a nutshell, we need to style up and diversify, or become irrelevant and fade away. Stay with me to understand what I am saying.

This may sound a bit rude, but many of us Kenyan SEOs and digital marketing “experts” do not measure up to expert standards. I have met “internet marketers” whose concept of SEO is only about submitting websites to search engines and having the correct meta keyword tags. I can point out countless examples of Kenyan websites overdoing it to near spammy levels.

Some outdated practices are still a norm here – stuffing hundreds of keywords in the title tag, meaninglessly repeating keywords in the page to attain the “correct” keyword density, etc. The slightly more knowledgeable among us also chase after links, but often in some not-so-effective link-building techniques – reciprocal link schemes, comment spam, directory submissions, etc.

Some of these techniques may work for us for a while, but as local online competition increases and Google implements the above-mentioned changes and penalties, our clients will soon realize that we’ve been selling them snake oil.

Even if Google is bluffing with all their big announcements, the fact remains that they have the capacity to carry out their threat. After all, they employ some of the best brains in the industry. You cannot stay under their spam radar forever. Sadly too, you can follow their prescribed best-practices and get punished for that – for over-optimizing.

I agree with Eric Ward’s assertion that it is folly to forever rely on search engines’ algorithms for your traffic. It’s too expensive a gamble. That’s why I am saying we need to diversify our traffic sources, and wean ourselves from the search engines. I know how hard this is, having grown up in the era of google goodies. It requires a mental weaning of some sort.

Definitely it is OK, maybe even advisable, to know what makes a website search engine friendly, but that alone should not dictate our entire online strategy. We should go back to getting links more for their targetted traffic potential, than for their SEO potential. The pay-off is higher. Of course the tricky bit is in the “how”, but with some creativity, we can get good at it.

One way to go about it is to understand how people used to get information in the ages when search engines were non-existent. I love the words of wisdom below from Dosh Dosh (unfortunately his website is no longer active, I had to dig this from my subscriptions archives).

“Without search engines, people will do what they’ve been doing for thousands of years. They rely on each other. They rely on the community, on the collection of publications known within their geographic location or industry. They rely on word of mouth. And they also rely on getting information from common resources like a public square, library, forum or marketplace.

Go where people gather. There you will be heard. It sounds like rudimentary marketing but quite honestly, until I’ve tried ignoring search engines and focusing exclusively on gathering points, I didn’t realize how much actual marketing I was NOT doing.”

My interpretation. Social media is one of these popular places where people gather and seek for information. But, and it’s a big but, most people there hate being marketted to. Just as spamming pisses people off in most places, it does so in Facebook, twitter, and other social networks. You have to be tactful if you adopt social media marketing.

Beyond this, we’ll also have to revisit and refine some good old, often abused, marketing practices. Build a list, engage them via email marketing or other means, etc. Hopefully, I will expound on these and other techniques in a future post.  A bit too tired for now.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is your future. SEO is not dead per se, but if SEO is all you do, you have a risky business model. You will have to adopt a more holistic marketing approach, or risk going the way of the diskette.

As you would expect, there has been a massive reaction online, both locally and globally.

Most people are condemning the “evil” Google and labelling this as a fraudulent scandal. But I think Mocality are just throwing a tantrum, and we are simply overreacting. And no, I am not playing devil’s advocate. My opinion is informed by the following facts:

1. The database Mocality accusses google of scraping was available for public use in the mocality website. Google did not hack or steal the database. Stefan himself acknowledges that Google did not use bots or any form of automated scraping. Instead, the data mining was done by “a team of humans”.

2. The purpose of listing business contacts in the directory is so that other people can contact those businesses. Google acted within that purpose. If you read through Mocality’s terms and conditions, it is debatable whether indeed Google violated those terms (sections 9.12 and 9.17 included) simply by contacting the business owners. The terms and conditions state that

You agree that you will not:…

9.12. modify, adapt, appropriate, reproduce, distribute, translate, create derivative works or adaptations of, publicly display, sell, trade, or in any way exploit the Site or Site Content (other than Your Content), except as expressly authorised by Mocality in these Terms of Service;

and

9.17. access, retrieve or index the Site to construct or populate a searchable database of business listings or reviews; (emphasis mine)

3. Google would have very little to gain just by using Mocality’s name. Don’t get me wrong, mocality is a considerably big name in the Kenyan online space. But it is not big enough to make Google desperate to appear to have a partnership with them, just to gain market share. In fact, it should be the other way round – mocality wanting to use Google’s name to get business mileage.

I don’t think the decision to use Mocality’s name was a matter of policy from senior levels at Google. At worst, it must have been instigated by an overzealous, and not entirely professional employee or lower level supervisor, one who is also not very conversant with the Kenyan online business market.

I often have the impression that the different teams at Google do not always pull in one direction, and that is why “scandals” like this one happen. Each team has an assigned goal(s). In an effort to attain the goal, the teams may sometimes do things contrary to the company’s overall policy guidelines. Remember the recent paid links scandal with chrome? Or the earlier one with Google Japan?

Recently I had a conversation with an online business owner whom I hold in high regard. He has built an online business empire that earns him over $5,000 every month, part of it from Google. He told me how his sites were badly affected by the recent Panda update. As an attempt to correct part of the problem, he removed all adsense ads that were above the fold. This is in line with the web spam team’s advice to show relevant content above the fold, content that is obscured by ads. (Reference).

Soon after that, a member of Google’s adsense team contacted him advising him to restore the ads since placing them there had better chances of attracting clicks, or something to that effect. Further evidence that at google, the left does not always know – or care about – what the right is doing.

4. The whole deal is not really fraudulent. Consider the amounts mentioned in the attached audio recordings as hosting charges, KSh 200 per month (approximately USD 2.4), do you think Google is so desperate for such small amounts to make it stoop this low? I don’t think so.

I, like many other observers in the Kenyan tech industry I believe, have been wondering what Google hopes to gain from its aggressive push of their free .kbo.co.ke websites. My initial hunch was that they ultimately want to get more small businesses to advertise in their Adwords platform. I still believe that that is part of the whole game plan. But today, I also understood a different aspect – a push to get more people creating google accounts, and by extension, join their social network Google plus, through which Google wants to dominate the world. But still, there’s no direct fraud involved.

In Conclusion
There is no doubt that Google’s actions were very unethical, by falsely claiming to have partnered with Mocality. But that was a dumb mistake. Mocality’s name was not going to add so much business value, Google being by far a more recognized brand than Mocality. Still this does not qualify to be called a fraud or scandal.

If you too are considering taking the PPC (pay per click) advertising route, doing the things I mention in this post can help you get good results from your efforts. Talking both from knowledge and experience, I know PPC is a great way to get [almost] instant traffic to your website, well-targeted traffic. However, if you do it incorrectly, you can easily waste your money without getting any real business benefit.

Here are the three things you should do:

1.  Fix all performance issues with your website
This may sound like a no-brainer, yet I have seen some Kenyan sites advertise in adwords, but when you click the ad, you encounter a “bandwidth limit exceeded”, “server cannot be reached”, or similar errors. This is not just a waste of advertising dollars, it also undermines your credibility and professional outlook.

Potential performance issues include, but are not limited to, code defects in your website or landing pages, too low bandwidth quotas, server outages, site speed issues (pages taking too long to load), etc. Some of these issues – e.g. code defects – are within your control, and you should fix them, or get a developer to fix them promptly. Others – e.g an unreachable server – may depend on your web hosting service provider. Get a reliable hosting provider, even if it costs you a little extra.

2.  Chose the correct landing pages
The beauty of PPC is that you choose the keywords to bid for, and the pages on which visitors coming through those keywords will land. The best practice is to drive your visitors directly to the inner pages that really match those keywords. Very often, you will see websites driving their PPC traffic to their home pages. While this is not bad in itself, it may lead to lower than ideal conversion rates. This is because most home pages are generally designed as entry points to lead visitors to the more product/service-specific inner pages. If a visitor from your PPC campaign has to make two clicks or more before they can enquire/subscribe/buy, you are increasing the chances of them dropping off before converting.

It is equally bad to lead visitors to pages whose content is totally unrelated to the phrase they searched for. Thus the twin side of this point is to choose the correct keywords.

3.  Optimize your chosen landing pages for conversions
This is probably the most important point. You are paying for this traffic, and definitely not just for its own sake. Your goal is to get more conversions from your website. This may mean getting the visitor to place an enquiry, actually buy something, subscribe to your list, etc. You should make it easy for the visitor to perform this goal.

There’s plenty of good advice in the web on how best to optimize your PPC landing pages for conversions. Some of the things to do include:

• Have a clear call-to-action that stands out from the rest of the page: In simple terms, a call-to-action is a word or phrase that instructs your visitors to take a particular desired action after landing on your web page. “Fill The Form Below To Enquire”, “Click Here”, “Add to Cart”, “Buy Now” are some commmon examples. One technique is to have the call-to-action as a graphic/large button that clearly stands out. The goal is to make sure your audience quickly understands what you want them to do.
• Keep the copy short and concise: If you have any text (sales copy) in your conversion pages, it should be straight to the point, and should add value to the overall intent of the page. If necessary, just highlight what makes your product/service great without being verbose. You can use bulleted points to achieve this.
• Keep your conversion form as minimalist as possible: Internet buyers do not have all the time to fill in a form that feels like a research questionnaire. In many cases, the client’s name and email address are all you need. Any additional details you ask for should be totally relevant for the conversion/lead.
• Remove distractions and clutter from the conversion page: Anything on the page that impedes or does not aid the conversion process is a distraction and can lower your conversion rate. This includes having multiple calls-to-action in one page, too many links leading away from the page, and even unnecessary images. The site navigation bar is also almost always not necessary to have in the conversion pages. The “daily egg” blog has a great discussion on potential distractions in a landing page.

More resources on landing page optimization

• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-essential-ppc-landing-page-optimizations
• http://www.marketmotive.com/training/tutorials/conversion-optimization/ppc-landing-page-optimization-the-road-to-recovery.html
• http://www.searchmarketingstandard.com/ppc-landing-page-optimization
• http://www.ppchero.com/your-roadmap-to-a-successful-landing-page-audit/

In a nutshell, for an online business to continue operating profitably, you will need a more solid business model, now more than ever.

Let me expound. Up to a few months ago, if search engines were the only traffic source for your website, it was still possible to remain profitable. All you would need to ensure is that you got your SEO (both onpage and offpage) right, and your site optimized for conversions. I’ve written before that that’s a rather shaky model, but you could still survive anyway.

Not anymore. It’s no longer that guaranteed today. You may think you have everything in order, having followed the whitehat “best practices”, and still get pandalized for reasons not so obvious to you. Online forums, e.g webmasterworld are full of stories of many high quality websites that have lost their search engine traffic since google rolled out panda. Some previously successful companies have laid off staff as a result, others have sold them off, like this guy

And even if you continue ranking well for all the relevant keywords, soon it may be impossible to measure the ROI of these rankings, thanks to encrypted search, which google announced the other day. What this means is that in your web analytics software, you will not be able to tell which keywords brought you traffic from google. I know, google have stated that this only affects searches from signed-in users, for now, but I have a feeling this will be rolled out to everyone in the near future.

It’s Futile Chasing Google’s Algorithm
Talking from my own experience, it’s a futile exercise chasing google’s algorithm and trying to fix everything to get your lost rankings back. Apart from my day job, I run a few websites of my own, and also help some old clients of mine in their SEO and internet marketing. One particular website was hit very hard by the initial Panda update. Naturally, we panicked and tried to correct all that could have triggered the “penalty”.

We rewrote the content for all pages that had potential duplicate content issues, implementing canonicalization where this was not fully possible, made sure all pages had unique titles and descriptions, added more good content in pages that we thought were “thin”, fixed all the bad internal links, etc. etc. Guess what, within two to three weeks, we were back on page one for the keywords we were previously ranking well for. Then they rolled out Panda 2.0 and the cycle started again.

At some point, I think Panda 2.3 (around July 22nd), there was nothing more we could possibly fix, but the roller coaster ride went on and on with every iteration of the panda: ranking in page one for a few weeks, then out of the radar for the next few weeks. As I write this, we are back in page 1 for most of the keywords, and hope to remain there forever. But the message is very clear: first page placement in google SERPs is no longer guaranteed, no matter how good your SEO. There’s now a real need to de-emphasize search engine traffic, and instead focus more on other traffic and leads sources.

How Is This Good For The Web?
And this is why I think all these google changes are good for the web. Businesses are being forced back to the drawing board. They will have to lay solid structures and strategies. Perhaps I am being overly optimistic, but I think more people will soon realize the importance of value-driven networking, or linkbuilding if you wish. The era of link-building for its own sake is dying. I mean, if “a link” is no longer “a link”, I wouldn’t want to waste my time chasing a link that has no real traffic potential.

People will still buy links (sorry google), but only from highly targetted sources. Google may continue dominating internet advertising through their adwords product for a while, but other advertising channels will gain some reasonable share since diversification will become a must. That means more revenue for other companies (the advertising networks).

Something else, people who want to continue doing real business online will re-focus on optimizing their websites for human beings. Traffic is gold, it does not come cheaply or easily, so you want to make the best out of it when you get it. A bounce rate of, say, 50%, will be intolerable, so you will want to give your visitor an offer they’ll find hard to resist (great content). You will also want to make it intuitively easy for them to buy from your site (sale), or contact you (lead).

Social media will become an increasingly important source of traffic (it already is, but this will go higher). Being so valuable a source, serious businesses will not want to misuse it, lest they face penalties there too.

This may have been google’s intention in the first place: to deemphasize SEO and force people to do no evil. But they may have inadvertently shot themselves in the foot.

Could This Be The Beginning of The End For Google?
Will search engines remain relevant? Of course they will. It’s the only way some people know for finding information on the web. But unless google really achieves what they set to achieve with Panda, this may mark the beginning of the end of google’s dominance in search. It will definitely not happen overnight, but it surely can, unless they fix their stuff.

I know, that last paragraph is a very bold statement and it needs qualification. Google introduced Panda to to “reduce rankings for low-quality sites” and ” provide better rankings for high-quality sites” (from their official statement). Unfortunately, not everyone believes they have achieved that. See the discussions in this webmasterworld thread for example. In some cases, the quality of their search results seems to have gotten worse.

I’m not a great fan of google bashing, but lately, I have started seeing the point. People made the switch from Altavista to google because of quality issues. Is it possible to switch from google to, say, duckduckgo or wiredoo (the upcoming one by MC Hammer) for the same reason? Why not?

In a previous post, I explained why every business organization must have a website. While everything I wrote there remains true, you need to go beyond merely having a website, to having lots of relevant targeted traffic that adds to the business’ bottom line. The “how” depends on your overall web strategy and the goal of your website, but if you follow my suggestions below, you’ll at least be on the right track.

1. Design your website for human beings first
Remember it is real people who will buy your online products, subscribe to your special offers mailing list, click your ads, etc. You do not want to make it hard for them to perform those activities. Anything in the design that makes it hard for users to find information or to take certain desired actions is bad design.

Most probably you are not a web designer yourself, so concepts like “usability”, a “good navigation structure”, and “great user experience” may sound foreign to you. But even as a layman, you should test your website before publishing it to the world. Your intuition can help you tell a bad design from a good one. Do not blindly use technology just because it is available. Flash and animation may be fancy for example, but when over-used they become more of an obstruction than enhancing the user experience.

2. From the word go, your design should cater for flexible SEO (search engine optimization)
In simple terms, SEO is the art, or science, of making your website discoverable through search engines like Google and Bing. If you are selling curios for example, you want people searching for such terms as “curios”, “handicrafts”, “antiques”, etc to find your website. The “how to” is what we call SEO.

Despite what some of us would want you to think, SEO is neither magic, nor rocket science. There are some key SEO principles that you can easily learn, among them is the importance of the title tag (it is one of the most important on-page SEO factors at the time I am writing this at least. It remains to be seen if this will change in the future due to the ever-changing search engine algorithms)

Ideally, your website should have a content management system (CMS) that allows for flexible on-page SEO. You should be able to easily change the title, other SEO tags, etc if and when needed. That way, you can correct any mistakes you make, as well as add more content whenever necessary.

3. Learn the basics of SEO
For a start, you should know how and where to conduct keyword research. Do not assume that just because you are using the term “African curios” in your website for example, your potential clients will use the same phrase to search for products like yours. They may be using other related but more popular phrases that your site should optimize for. Adwords keyword tool, Wordtracker keyword tool, and Trellian keyword discovery tool are just some of the tools you can use for keyword research.

Once you have done your keyword research, you should know how and where to use them optimally within your content and pages. To learn more about SEO and how to use the keywords in your pages, I recommend you read the beginner’s guide to SEO by SEOmoz. Chapter 4 of that guide is particularly useful for on-page optimization.

4. Optimize your site for business/conversions
You can build a great site, with lots of relevant traffic, and still sell nothing. Why? Because you have not optimized for conversions. Interested people get to your pages, like the content, but do not find an easy/intutive way of placing an order or making an enquiry. A waste.

There are several things you can do to improve website conversion, e.g have clear calls to action, declutter your conversion pages, and include trust enhancers, etc. To learn about more website conversion factors, read the article on the silent killers of conversion at the marketing experiments blog. This post at Dr. Ralph Wilson’s web marketing blog is equally useful.

5. Build links to your website
In short, get other websites to link to you. Inbound links benefit your website in two ways: referral traffic (i.e visitors coming to your website from the external websites that link to you) and search engine rankings boost. In fact, links are among the most important SEO factors today.

Admittedly, link building is not a very easy process. In the earlier days, it was quite easy to get good links through reciprocal linking (link to my website, and I will link back to you). Today however, links are like gold, not many people are willing to give them to you. However, if your website offers some real value, related websites will not mind linking to you when you approach them. Reciprocal links may still have a small place today, but remember not to overdo it. Search engines frown upon excessive reciprocal links. Google for example.

You should read Eric Ward’s link building primer to learn how to go about building links. Chapter 7 of the SEOmoz resource I mentioned above is also helpful.

6. Measure the results: use analytics for your website
When you have a website, you need to know how many people are visiting it, from what source, which pages they mostly visit, what actions do they take while there, how long they stick around, and several other important metrics. In web-speak, this is what we call analytics. Web analytics helps you gauge which of your marketing efforts is paying off, what pages to fix, etc.

I would recommend you use google analytics, it is easy to set up and use, and provides great reports. But it is not the only analytics solution. There is piwik, an open source alternative to google analytics, Awstats, Webalizer, and many others. If your web hosting company gives you access to cPanel, you might find Awstats and Webalizer already preinstalled for you.

7. Do not ignore social media
Some people think social media marketing is a fad. Trust me, it is not. If you read my post on the most popular websites in Kenya, you know that social media websites rank tops. A big part of your target audience are visiting sites like Facebook, twitter, and linkedin to interact and network. You cannot ignore these social sites in your marketing effort. If for no other reason, monitor social media discussions that may affect your company’s reputation (reputation management)

From my personal experience, social media, especially twitter and google plus, are also a great way to get the opinion of experts in your chosen field. There’s a lot you can learn from such authorities that can help you grow your business. I have for example learnt a great deal by following/adding to my circles such web authorities as Eric Ward, Danny Sullivan, Dr Ralph Wilson, Rand Fishkin, and many others, in twitter and google plus.

8. Leverage on your offline channels
Simple things like putting your website address (URL) in your business cards, company letter heads, and even on your car (if you have one) can get you more visitors.

9. If you do not have the expertise, outsource
I know, doing all the above may overwhelm you if you do not have the necessary skills. Often, you’d be better off focusing on your strengths to build your business, then outsource on areas you are weak in. That’s why there are experts like me ;-) to help you. Feel free to contact me, if you need assistance in your online marketing efforts.

10. Bonus Point: Ignorance is not bliss
Read the old but still very relevant article on common mistakes small business webmasters often make, at Danny Sullivan’s search engine land.

I wanted to find out which sites most of these Kenyans visit. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything much from the Kenyan internet service providers. The closest I came accross was the graph below showing data from safaricom, courtesy of Whiteafrican.com.

Considering that Safaricom has a 92.18% market share of all the Kenya internet subscriptions (see the above-mentioned CCK report), its data is a very good indicator.

You may argue that, since the majority internet subscribers for Safaricom come through mobile devices, the list is a bit biased towards sites with mobile content. But as Whiteafrican correctly points out, the mobile phone is the primary means of accessing the internet in East Africa. You simply can’t ignore that market segment, and as an organization, it may help to have a mobile content and mobile marketing strategy

But, just to be sure, I also had a look at the Alexa rankings for Kenya, and as you can see below, there is a big overlap. True, Alexa data may not be 100% accurate, but it is indicative enough. I look forward to the day Google will include Kenya and other African countries in its 100 most-visited sites by country tool.

The 10 most popular websites in Kenya (According to Alexa)

1. Facebook
2. google.co.ke
3. google.com
4. Yahoo!
5. Youtube
6. Blogger.com
7. Wikipedia
8. Twitter
9. Daily Nation
10. LinkedIn

The 10 most popular Kenyan websites in Kenya

1. Daily nation
2. Capital FM 98.4
3. The Standard
4. dealfish.co.ke
5. mocality.co.ke
6. careerpointkenya.com
7. businessdailyafrica.com
8. kenyanjobs.blogspot.com
9. orange.co.ke
10. safaricom.co.ke

What can we deduce from the above?

Several things:

• If you have never considered social media marketing, it is high time you did. From the above statistics, and from general observation, it is obvious that Facebook is the hottest online property in Kenya at the moment. Other social networks (Youtube, Twitter, and Linkedin) have sizable local traffic too. Of course it is debatable if indeed it is a good thing that most Kenyans spend considerable online time  “facebooking” and “tweeting”.But before joining that debate, with a good strategy, there is a way you can take advantage of this social media crowd.
• Search engine marketing, i.e. SEO and PPC, should obviously also be a key part of any organization’s online plan. What with what with Google (both .co.ke and .com) and Yahoo! having huge traffic from Kenya. Looks are however deceptive sometimes. Before you conclude that Kenyans are using the internet for research, take a look at some of the top searches from Kenya (I got these from Google insights for search). The key terms include: “facebook”, “yahoo mail”, “gmail”, “yahoomail”, “Kenya Jobs”, “jobs in Kenya”, “jobs in nairobi”, etc. Some of the rising searches (at the time of checking) were “masinde muliro”, “osama”, and “nairobi nights”.Obviously, many searchers know the websites they want to visit (e.g. facebook, yahoo mail, Nairobi nights), but don’t remember the URLs thus use Google to lead them there. This, to me, underscores the importance of brand building. The search for “jobs” to an extent also reveals one of the biggest needs in Kenya at the moment – employment opportunities. This is also attested by the fact that Kenyan job websites (brightermonday.com, careerpointkenya.com, kenyanjobs.blogspot.com) are some of the most visited Kenyan websites.If you incorporate search engine marketing in your overall strategy, be sure to use the correct tools to discover the so-called “long-tail keywords”. That’s where the profits lie.
• If you are looking for advertising opportunities, the websites of local media companies are still a good place to advertise. They are by far the most popular Kenyan websites locally.
• There is still a lot of room for you to create a high-traffic website today. Three years ago, neither mocality.co.ke nor dealfish.co.ke existed (their whois records show they were both registered in 2009). Today, they are among the most visited Kenyan websites. Of course both of them have been advertising quite aggressively, both online and offline. And that is the point. Consider nyerionline.com too (created in 2008). I haven’t seen any of their paid ads  in google, but they too are now a force to reckon with.
• Despite what some people claim, blogging ain’t dead, at least not in Kenya. In my informed opinion the reason many Kenyans are visiting Blogger.com and wordpress.com (position 6 and 11 respectively by alexa statistics) is to blog in the free platforms they provide. Lately, a number of blogger.com-powered Kenyan bloggers (Bankelele, Wanjohi wa Kigogoine, Tamaku, Sue Maisha) are grabbing the attention of wide audiences. There are countless other reputable Kenyan bloggers with their own registered domains. And they have a huge following.
• Bonus point: You can deduce a lot about the online habits of Kenyans if you go beyond the top 10 to, say the top 100. I took a look and I can safely say that some of the popular online activities among Kenyans include downloading free stuff like movies and software, reading local and international news, engaging in online political and social discussions, and watching pornography (surprise?!).

Since the rest of the website was working just fine, I would probably not have known of the hack quick enough to act, had I not received notifications from some internet security organisations. You can imagine how threatened I felt when RSA, The Google, and a few others contacted me with not-so-friendly messages about “my” phishing website.

I was a bit lucky that the hacker had not denied me access to the administrative parts of the website, so it took me a short time to resolve. Below are the steps to take when you find yourself in similar circumstances. To give due credit, this is an abridged version of a web page I came accross on how to prevent your site from getting hacked. You should read that page to get the full information. But here goes:

1. Take you website offline
This is crucial if you want to protect your site visitors and your website’s online reputation. It also prevents any further attacks from the hacker (unless they are on the same IP address as you). One good way of doing this is by add the following few lines to your .htaccess file:

ErrorDocument 503 “Our website is temporarily closed for maintenance. Please check back in 1 hour”
RewriteEngine On
# To give yourself access to the website, change 111 222 333 444 to your actual IP address.
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^111\.222\.333\.444$
RewriteRule .* – [R=503,L]

You can find more ways of taking your site offline, plus their merits and demerits at the website I mentioned above. Here’s the URL: http://25yearsofprogramming.com/blog/20070704.htm

2. Delete the offending files and scripts
If you can identify the files/folders that the hacker has created, delete them. Sometimes, as it was in my situation, you may not be able to delete them because of permission issues. In my case for example, the hacker set the folder’s permissions to 000, meaning I could not see its contents, write to the folder, change its permissions, etc. (To know more about permissions, see these google search results on understanding unix permissions). This leads to step 3.

3. Notify your hosting company
This is sometimes the only solution e.g when the hacker has denied you complete access to your website. There’s a lot that the hosting company can do, that you cannot do. In my case, they were the only ones who could delete the offending folder and scripts.

4. Change your passwords for everything related to the website: the cPanel, the administrative back-end (if any), databases, etc. You want to lock the hacker out, if they had somehow gotten your passwords.

5. Upgrade any third party scripts you are using in your website to the latest versions. You may also have to re-examine own code for any security holes.

6. Re-evaluate the permissions on your files and folders. The permissions should be at the strictest level possible without compromising website functionality.

Once you have done all the above, refer to my previous post on how to enhance your website’s security. This is to reduce the likelihood of a similar attack in the future.

Let me reiterate here that this post is quite brief. The page http://25yearsofprogramming.com/blog/20070705.htm offers you a very detailed and comprehensive way of going about it. You should read it.

Leaving the merits and demerits of that update aside, the change should remind us of a fundamental truth that has existed ever since search engines entered the internet scene: if you want to build a sustainable online business, it is foolish to rely only on one source of traffic (search engine traffic especially).

You’d expect that by now, we would have learnt from past major google updates like the BigDaddy, Florida, Allegra, Dewey, and MayDay updates. Relying solely on search engine traffic leaves your website too vulnerable to such algorithm updates. But alas! many of us still attempt to catch up with the latest algorithm. By the time we finally get there, there will have been thousands of other smaller updates, plus at least one major update that gets us back to the catch-up game again.

So What Should We do?

Most of what we should do is common sense. Unfortunately, it also requires some deliberate effort and hard work. In a nutshell, it all boils down to link building. At the risk of repeating what has been “overpreached”, I highlight some must-do’s:

1. Networking with like-minded website owners
In real life, who you know often counts more than what you know. The same is perhaps more applicable in the internet business. You gain a lot by partnering with others offering a similar or related products to your own. Instead of thinking “competition” you should think “win-win”. If there is some real value you can offer to visitor’s of the other guy’s website for example, you could do a guest blog post there. The visibility and credibility you gain is invaluable, while you also add value to that website.

Take the internet marketing business for example, Aaron Wall and Danny Sullivan are some of the best known authorities. They could be competitors of some sort, and they do not necessarily agree 100% with each others opinion. Yet you will find posts by Aaron Wall in Danny Sullivan’s Search engine land.

Remember, guest blogging is just one, and not the only, way of networking. Be creative.

2. Building Communities in the new social media
I am talking mostly about Facebook and Twitter. Despite what some “experts” may claim, social media marketing is not a fad. Facebook and twitter alone have a combined total user population of over 600 million. This is massive by many standards. Of course these people are not there to be marketed to. But with good etiquette, tact, and by providing real value, you can build a community of loyal visitors to your website from these social sites. I recommend that you read this blog post if you want to learn how to avoid the pitfalls of social media community building.

3. Community participation
Besides just creating your own community, you can gain a lot by tapping into already existing communities. Forum posting falls in here in my opinion. By now, I am sure you know how the mantra goes: offer real value, do not spam, be ethical, etc.

Forum participation may be a very slow way of gaining traffic, but if you are posting in a forum in your niche, the benefits are real. Other similar communities you may participate in include facebook groups.

4. Affiliate Marketing
If you are directly selling services or products in your website, you can build a network of affiliates who will market your products through their websites.It is quite easy and effective. To understand how affiliate marketing works, see this web page.

5. Good old link exchange requests
Most SEO experts today frown upon link exchanges. Even Google, in its webmaster guidelines, discourages excessive use of reciprocal links, i.e. the typical “link to me, and I will link back to you”. But I think link exchange still has a role in building traffic. Again, you should use common sense here. A link will add no value to your website (traffic-wise) if it is buried at the middle of a “links and resources” web page that has 200 links to other websites. But, if you have some really valuable resource, most people will have no problem linking to it from a high traffic page.

6. Be Proactive
There is nothing wrong with asking visitors to your website to share the site with friends if they like it. You can even provide the means thorugh which your visitors can share the content via email, social bookmarking sites, social media sites, etc. If it is a wordpress blog for example, the share this plugin or something similar does the job well.

7. Create good content
I should probably have started with this point. Good content still remains the king. If yours is an information site, provide unique content. If it is an e-commerce site, present your products/services in a well laid out professional format, and make sure you have adequate product/service description. People will find it easier to link to good content.

In short, your content and general design should be aimed at satisfying the human visitors to your website, forget about the search engines. Google herself agrees as much. Ironically, if you do this and most of the other things mentioned above, your rankings in search engines is likely to go up.