Top 3 Tips to Handle Hummingbird of Google

Internet marketers all over the world are now coming to terms with the latest update from the house of Google, titled Hummingbird. After doing away with all the previous updates, Google has placed Hummingbird at the heart of the SEO community.

Google’s Hummingbird: What You Need to Know

The search engine giant Google has announced its new algorithm for searches. Code named Hummingbird, this algorithm replaces the older one! Read more here.

The search engine giant Google has announced its new algorithm for searches. Code named Hummingbird, this algorithm replaces the older one by integrating the best of the previous ones and adding some new features as well. Before you hit the panic button to check your website’s status with regards to this new algorithm, do note that Google has pointed out that it has been using Hummingbird for the last one month. So, you can well understand that nothing major has happened with Hummingbird kicking in. You need not do anything different with your website or blog to grab Google’s attention in the new scheme of things.

The Hummingbird has come up on the foundation laid by previous algorithms, including Penguin and Panda. You may not face the Penguin and Panda anymore, but you have to understand that they are very much around, albeit in the guise of Hummingbird. Google still values quality content on websites, along with well-placed backlinks on related and authentic websites. The other requisites of Google’s previous algorithms, like relevant content and convenience of the crawlers to index your web pages, will still determine your website’s fate in the SERP pecking order.

The only change or modification, if you please, in Hummingbird is that the searches will be more ‘conversational’ or focused upon meaning and intention rather than just some keywords or key phrases. For example, if you type in ‘Nearest i-pod sellers in my locality’ into the Google search box, Hummingbird will bring you search results that take into account what you mean to find rather than bring up results containing keywords like ‘i-pod sellers’ and ‘locality’. This kind of search results will make it easier for common online users to look for and find what they are looking for rather than face pages of results that don’t point in any specific direction.

You must still be worrying to check up how your website fares on the Hummingbird meter. Here’s a simple task you can do: find out if there has been any major changes to your website’s ranking in the last month, especially for your primary keywords. If the answer is no, your website is doing ok on the Hummingbird scale! Otherwise, you can study the drop in rankings and then find ways to fix it.

Experts believe that the Hummingbird update is a build-up on all the major updates that have come from the search engine giant in the recent past. And, Hummingbird is here to stay! So, sooner rather than later, you have to get your head over Hummingbird and do all you can to tame it to your advantage. Here are the top 3 tips to get more out of Hummingbird:

Research and Application

To acclimatize yourself with something that is new, you need research. You need information and the details to make the most of it. That applies to Google’s Hummingbird as well. There is a lot of information available on Google websites about this new updates, the norms it establishes and what to make out of them.

Read up on the available information and incorporate them into your SEO blueprint. For example, Hummingbird comes down heavily on web pages optimized on certain keywords that have no relation to the content available. If you have such web pages, tweak things around.

Respect Customer Interest

What you write and publish online is not independent of what your customers and online readers want to read about. You have to respect their wishes and demands in order to stay afloat in the world of Hummingbird.

Google is decidedly moving in the direction of putting more power in the hands of online users. They get to dictate terms of SEO and you have to follow suit. Make sure that you are stitching in customer’s interest in your content drafts.

Replace the Old

Websites cannot be left to vegetate and lie idle if you want to remain in the internet marketing industry with Hummingbird around. Google has little value for reputation and if your website is not being updated, is not alive to changes and is not injected with fresh content regularly, you will fall far behind.

Come up with fresh web pages and add them to the existing website. You can add new content to published live pages like the Testimonials section. This will keep Hummingbird aware of your website’s existence.

SEO Best Practices After Google Hummingbird & Penguin 2.1

Visibility of websites on popular search engines is very important, but selecting amongst the SEOs is tough. Many small scale businesses go for local SEO service firms, whereas the global and national businesses go for large scale web marketing companies.

The online advertising and web marketing is changing at a rapid speed. Therefore, there is a great need to update and shift towards modern SEO approaches and practices because if the inclusion of fresh approaches and practices to Internet marketing and SEO services is inadequate, then the website owners might suffer issues.

So, the traditional and outdated practices require amendments in order to meet the latest system changes that are introduced by the Google’s Hummingbird. The updates and changes brought by the Hummingbird and Penguin 2.1 software help the ward off companies that generate spams.

It’s not obvious that every time when the popular algorithm updates, the chances of high ranking of websites disappear. The web masters and best SEO companies must follow and implement the most efficient practices and fresh approaches.

SEO Best Practices for the Pre-Campaigning Analysis

1. Decide Your Goal – it is important to decide that at which market your company is targeting? One must have a deep knowledge of every corporation target clients by checking out the psychographics, demographic and industrial trends as well as buying habits of the market.
2. Identify the Personality of your clients – To decide your targeted audience you need to create identities which shall represent different types of clients. For creating personas, you need to study the authentic market data. This process helps in identifying and understanding your clients and their expectations and demands.
3. Go for different Texting Strategies – After you are done with deciding the targeted market and creating different identities of your clients; create a strategy for messaging which will aid in maximizing your incoming opportunities.
4. KPI’s – Recognize the major conversions which may bring success for the company such as monthly service orders, incoming calls, web leads or quoting request. You cannot track all info, but it is vital to have an exact target to calculate the course of the online campaign.

SEO Best Practices for Research of the Keywords

1. Recognize the correct keyword opportunity – the keywords are most important tool which aids in identifying the goal of the company. Wrongs keywords generate no visits, poor traffic opportunity and lack of CTR, as well.
2. Estimate the intent of the keywords – All keywords are not equal.  It is vital to think and consider analytically about every keyword to understand and decide that which keywords are more relevant for targeting customers and generating traffic.Scrutinize the results for different keywords and understand that where exactly your brand or company fits in.  If you find no similar search results then you might be focusing on an untouched opportunity or on any less relevant term.
3. Check the existing CTR info – Have a look at the webmaster and SEO tools to check the CTR or Click Through Rates of any term or “Keyword” that can generate impressions. The keywords with highest CTR are those which have given successful results by converting the web searchers into regular visitors or into successful client’s leads, too.
4. Consider about the keyword positioning competition – Searching for the keywords that display achievable ranking are very important.
5. Make use of relevant long tail keywords specific to your niche.

SEO Best Practices for On-Page & off-page

1. URL – The URL’s needs to be clean, simple and must have relevant keywords in it. Avoid lengthy strings that contains random numbers, letters and irrelevant characters like %, ?, &, 3, etc.
2. Content – The matter or content for every page needs to be natural and unique. The content has to be directly important for the keywords by making use of different synonyms, tenses and similar keywords. It is important that the website content meets the user’s requirement and expectations. It must be fresh (regularly updated)
3. On-page Structuring – It is advisable to break down the content of your website into different sections. It helps the users in quickly understanding and consuming the data. Even, the tags such as h3, h2, h1 can be used to rank the data. Avoid exclusive use of flash and images.
4. Links – It is a good strategy to connect the relevant sites wherever and whenever possible. One can link to the authorities on different subject matters, covered by the site. Stress only on relevancy & authority, not on quantity. Also interlink your own webpages well with variety of anchor text. Anchor text variation must be there for external backlinks as well.
5. Social – It is advisable to add a widget of social sharing to your site page. It will help the users in sharing your content on different social media networks. Use Google local, Authorship markup, Rich snippet (Structured data) for your website. Maintain good amount of social share, citations, hashtags & mentions in various popular social media sites.

Hence, these are some of the SEO best practices that help the webmasters. These practices are compulsory to be followed after Penguin 2.1 and Google Hummingbird processing in order to generate more traffic on your websites. With these modern and efficient practices, you can explore better online marketing opportunities and secure great SEO results!

Read more about how to stay safe from Google Penguin updates & tips to benefit from Google Panda & Penguin updates