ORLANDO, FLORIDA-Google has made a lot of changes to its search engine algorithm over the last couple of months, which had many SEO companies scrambling to keep up while their clients’ rankings felt the pain.

“If you made it through March without an email from Google or a penalty from Google or a drop in Google organic search traffic due to Panda updates or paid link-related issues, you should give yourself a high five,” says Kerry Dean, an SEO expert and columnist for Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of bloggingshiksha.com

According to our CEO Ali Husayni, none of our clients’ rankings in Google search results were negatively impacted by the latest Panda updates or the newest update from Google that has been coined Penguin.

“Our commitment is to stick 100 percent to Google’s webmaster guidelines. We aren’t involved in any of the black-hat or gray-hat SEO practices that Google is trying to avoid being a victim of,” he says.

Black-hat techniques are essentially webspam: deceptive, malicious or manipulative behaviors used to trick the search engine into placing a website higher in rankings even if the content isn’t relevant to the search. It’s really only a matter of time before Google finds out and penalizes the site for using them, which is why they are a waste of time.

“Although many people are doing damage control after the updates, trying to get back to pre-update rankings, we have had several clients set new high records for rankings and traffic,” says Husayni.

The SEO campaign for Gabriel Carini, who owns Carini Heating And Air Conditioning, has racked up some big results, both with the number of qualified leads and with his company’s Google rankings.

Other clients’ SEO campaigns are setting new traffic and ranking records like Tim Booth and Shawn Sandifer, who own a referral site for local contractors across the nation, and Don Gerig Jr. and Matt Gerig, who run a website for Santa Cruz real estate and homes for sale.

In all three instances, the clients expect to see even better numbers in the coming months. Husayni reiterates that businesses just need to stay away from SEO companies that resort to black-hat or gray-hat SEO practices for the long-term success of their SEO campaign.

“It’s not like Google is changing their approach to search engine ranking with these updates,” he says. “They’re just constantly trying to weed out spam.”

Google will continue to take aim at one spam technique after another. Businesses that haven’t done so yet need to clean up their act or suffer the consequences in their websites’ ranking and traffic.

Instead of using black-hat SEO and duplicate content to get to the top of Google, focus on beefing up the site with original content, information and resources the business’s target audience is actually interested in. An easy and effective way to add that information to the site is on a WordPress blog. Regularly posting the latest news about the business, promoting specials and upcoming events or articles keeps the site fresh, customers informed and rankings high.

It is also imperative that businesses be aware of new tools Google uses to rank sites. Google+ is one of the latest ways that the search engine is determining the popularity and relevancy of a page, which is why Husayni urges businesses to jump into social media.

“But you must do more than simply ‘be present’ to win the social media game,” reminds our Editor-in-Chief Lorrie Walker in a recent blog post about using social media to improve search rankings. “You have to actually be social.”

That means doing more than just setting up the business’s Google+ page or Facebook page and posting links back to the website’s content. Social media should be a way to start a conversation with potential clients by sharing the high-quality information being generated about the company, which naturally improves rankings without spamming Google. But by all means, make it easy for website visitors to share the information they find by having the +1 sign for Google+, the Tweet button for Twitter and the Like button for Facebook.

The rest of 2012 will no doubt hold another slew of updates to Google’s search engine algorithm, but businesses that want to maintain their rankings instead of seeing numbers drop after major updates would do well to heed Husayni’s advice: stay away from spam techniques and stay updated on the latest tools Google’s using to decide relevancy.

We want to hear what your experiences with social media and the latest updates have been. Did you see rankings drop after a recent update? How have you implemented Google+ and other social networks into your search engine optimization marketing efforts?

TAMPA, FLORIDA — It was this statement from Matt Cutts that instantly made me perk up and take note: “Normally we don’t…pre-announce changes, but there is something that we’ve been working on…to try to level the playing ground a little bit.”

I heard this during a podcast from SXSW in March, and Cutts, the head of Google’s Web spam team, was talking about SEO techniques that Google views as “over-optimization.” You can listen to the podcast at Search Engine Roundtable.

Earlier in the session, it was explained that all SEO experts weren’t bad; that a good SEO expert was like a coach who helps you figure out how to present yourself better via your website. That’s when Cutts, whose job is to hunt cheaters, showed his hand.

In the coming weeks, Google plans to start identifying sites that are overdoing it when it comes to SEO, compared to the people who are just creating great content and trying to make a fantastic site. This is a particular area to which Cutts’ team continues to pay attention.

“It’s an active area where we’ve got several engineers on my team working right now,” he said. “We want to sort of make that playing field a little bit more level. And so that’s the sort of thing where we try to make the Googlebot smarter, we try to make our relevance more adaptive.”

That way, people who don’t use SEO techniques won’t suffer from having their sites buried in search results by people who abuse SEO- whether they throw too many keywords on the page, they exchange too many links, or whatever else they may do to “go beyond what a normal person would expect,” Cutts said.

There are lots of people who seem to think that Google hates SEO, but that’s not the case, he said. It can be helpful by making a site more easily crawled, which increases the site’s user-friendliness.

Still, there are people who take it too far; black hat SEO techniques that do too well.

“We’ve been working on changes where if you’re a white hat or you’ve been doing very little SEO, that you’re going to not be affected by this change,” Cutts says. “But if you’ve been going beyond the pale, your site may not rank as highly as it did before.”

Matt Cutts warns over optimizers: changes are coming.

Google isn’t the only search engine that recognizes the need to address the SEO-on-steroids techniques that some people use. Duane Forrester, senior product manager with Bing’s Webmaster Program, also took part in the SXSW session and reiterated “over-SEO is always a problem.”

Ali Husayni, Master Google’s CEO, welcomes the change to Google.

“When Matt described an ethical SEO professional who makes sites user-friendly and more crawlable, he could have been describing us,” Husayni said. “We use only white-hat techniques because we understand that SEO is a marathon, not a sprint.”

“What’s interesting in Matt’s approach is that he mentioned two of the most common black-hat SEO techniques: keyword stuffing and link-exchange,” Husayni said. “So by over optimization, he means black-hat SEO. Unfortunately, Google has recently lost its handle of such practices as I explained in our recent post. So, Matt is on the right track here.”

Husayni predicted that this next Google change will further weed out bad SEO providers and enhance our clients’ rankings on Google.

“When you’re doing everything above-board, you don’t have anything to worry about,” he said. “But when you’re trying to cheat the system, Matt’s team at Google has shown time and again that they will catch onto you eventually.”

TAMPA, FLORIDA — Perhaps Charles Dickens said it best in A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”

That is how many business owners feel about Google Places and other sources on the Internet that enable people to write reviews or leave comments about businesses. Favorable comments about your product or service can be one of the best ways to build your reputation. Negative comments can have some of the worst repercussions.

Let’s get this out of the way first: your chances of removing a negative review from Google Places are slim. Check out Google’s information on that popular question here. One way to combat the bad press is to use the “flag as inappropriate” option, in which case Google will look into the review to determine whether it violates Google’s guidelines.

So what else can you do when someone slams your business in a review? Growmap.com has a great example of how one business handled it. In short, a company that sells woodworking tools and educational materials got a negative review from a disgruntled customer. The CEO sent out an email blast to its customers that outlined the circumstances surrounding the disgruntled customer and provided a link to the negative complaint, which he answered, the Grow Map article states.

Additionally, he included a link to his company’s Google Places page so satisfied customers could leave their own reviews “so others would have a more balanced view” of the company, the article states. It wasn’t long before the negative review was buried by dozens of favorable reviews.

“No company is perfect, and an occasional negative review should be anticipated,” says Ali Husayni, CEO of Master Google, which specializes in marketing medical practices. “This CEO took a proactive approach to this discouraging situation and I would say he turned a negative into a positive.”

Looking at the situation strategically, you want to drown your negative reviews with positive ones. Essentially, having 50 favorable reviews to one negative one will work in your favor, according to Matthew Loop, a social media and Internet marketing expert.

Multiple experts say it is wise to respond directly to a negative review, which you can do if you’ve claimed your Google Places listing. Be careful how you reply, though. Pop off a response in anger and you’re likely to do more harm than good. A professional, courteous response is what you want to shoot for.

In addition to knowing how to respond to a negative review, it’s important to understand just how important good reviews are to your business and more specifically, your website. Favorable reviews paint a favorable opinion of your business when potential customers find your Google Places page, according to Alex Eaton at Energypro.com. In terms of businesses’ overall SEO plans, the more reviews there are, the better businesses do in organic search results.

It’s also important to note that your Google Places page will list reviews from sources other than just Google places. It pulls reviews from sites including Yelp, Urban Spoon and Insider Pages, to name a few.

“I view this as yet another example of how Google constantly works to make user experiences better,” says Husayni, who works to achieve top SEO results for clients by offering guidance on how to manage their Google Places listings. “Pulling in reviews and comments from multiple sources gives those in search of information a broad picture of the company they are researching.”

I think Chris Robinson over at Giantseed Creative says it best when talking about negative reviews: “We can’t control the conversations taking place on social media platforms, but we can monitor and respond to what is being said.”

In closing, remember these key tips:

• Monitor your reviews
• Truly take note of what is being said
• Respond professionally and compassionately
• Take action if you believe a review is spammy or malicious in nature
• By all means, reach out to your happy clients and customers and ask them to give their honest feedback.

I’m convinced if you take this approach, you can’t go wrong.

LAKELAND, FLORIDA – As we continue to grow and take on more clients here at Master Google, we’re finding a great deal of commonality in questions asked of us by our clients and those who inquire about our SEO services.

Because of that, we decided to address several of the most frequently asked questions, in hope that if you’re a client already using us for your SEO campaign management, this information will enlighten you on the importance of various SEO campaign elements. If you’re a business in need of an organic SEO consultant, this may give you some insight into how our process works.

Hands-down, the most frequently asked question is this:

How long will it take me to get my website onto Page 1 of Google search for my main keyword?
Through the years, we have become quite good at predicting such an uncertainty. We’ve written a couple of times recently about the quick success we’ve had in getting clients ranked on Page 1 of Google. The time frame varies greatly from client to client. Normally, clients who want to get ranked for local keywords see results within two to six months.

Why does my Google rank change sometimes?
One day you’re on top; the next you’re near the bottom of Page 1. We constantly check SEO ranking for our clients’ websites, and we see a variation in results occasionally, due to changes frequently made to Google’s algorithms. Google’s primary goal is to provide the most helpful information to people using its search engine. That requires almost constant tweaks and changes. We are diligent in keeping up with these changes so that when a change adversely affects a clients’ website, we can get on track to restoring the previous ranking.

How many keywords are you going to rank me for?
There is no limit to the number of keywords we will rank you for, but we’ll focus on 20-30 main keywords

Who is responsible for my site’s rankings?
Our team has many members and each one is responsible for a part of your overall SEO work. Our writers- perhaps the team members you will be in closest contact with- are charged with developing well-written, relevant content for you on an ongoing basis. These articles and press releases play a huge role in your overall SEO efforts. Other members of our team are responsible for strategically posting these articles and releases on websites to generate quality inbound links back to your page. We also have team members who are tasked with making tweaks to your site to make it more search-engine friendly.

Are you going to change my site or what I have on it?
Once we have access to your site, we will make any necessary changes that will enable it to be found and indexed easily by search engines. Sometimes it is necessary to make changes to the content on your site, such as removing duplicate content and replacing it with custom content created specifically for you by our writers.

When will my article and press release appear on my website?
Our writers work nearly one month in advance so we can be sure to get your articles and press releases posted on time each and every month. That means that although our writers may contact you early in the month to interview you for your article and/or press release, the item may not appear on your website until closer to the end of the month.

Where are my articles and press releases published?
Articles and press releases are posted to a variety of sites throughout the Internet. We have some posts on our blog that list the top sites we use for posting articles and press releases. Each month in addition to a SEO ranking report, we also provide to our clients a list of the sites to which their articles and releases are submitted.

Who reads the articles and press releases that are written for me?
This is a difficult one to answer. It could be anyone. People who conduct Google searches for your keywords may stumble upon these articles and releases. News wires may pick them up. Someone might read the article, find it interesting and forward it to a friend. The sky is the limit. And the most important reader of these articles is Google. Its spiders will read and index these writings and will give your site credit as the source – thus increasing your overall rankings on Google search results.

How much time do you expect me to spend on helping you rank my site?
You get out of your SEO effort what you put into it. Our writers rely on your input to guide their writing. They need you to approve topics, and then approve completed articles and press releases so they can be forwarded to other team members for publication.

What happens if I leave your company?
Nothing. In most cases, your site will remain at the rankings we get you by the time you leave. And slowly, over time, you will lose your rankings – not because we reverse what we have done for you, but because Google changes and your competition does more work to get ahead of you.

Are your costs going to increase over time?
As we have to do more to keep our clients at the top of Google search results, we may increase the monthly budgets. However, you have to give us your consent. But when we quote you a needed budget, that’s usually good for at least one year.

© 2011 Master Google. Authorization to post is granted, with the stipulation that Master Google is credited as sole source. Linking to other sites from this press release is strictly prohibited, with the exception of herein imbedded links.
-end-