Are you frightened of Pandas and Penguins? If your business and website was severely affected by Google's algorithm changes in 2012, you might be. I have talked to numerous clients who have lamented how much their traffic dwindled as a direct result of those changes. Many have told me how they're scared to do anything with their website for fear of future issues, and not a few have refused to ever speak to an "SEO Expert" again.

Fortunately, there are definitely steps that a business can take to not only improve their ranking within Google search, but also avoid potential issues with the next major algorithm change that Google will inevitably release.

For a long time, it was standard practice as part of any good SEO strategy to seek out links on other websites to your own. The ideal link was one where the text of the link included great keywords that related to your site and business. This use of keywords in link building is referred to as Anchor Text and was a very effective means for improving your site ranking in Google. That is, until the famous Penguin update of 2012.

As we continue to explore Google Analytics, one of the key areas of attention is Referring Sites. These are the sites that sent traffic to you. This is a critical statistic for understanding where your visitors are coming from so that you can gauge the effectiveness of your advertising and social media campaigns. Most of the time, you can tell by the address what the site is, like LinkedIn.com or even plus.url.google.com. But what about t.co? If you're like me, t.co represents a significant amount of traffic.

Bounce Rate is a term that you may have seen on your website's Google Analytics report, or heard about from your web designer when talking about search engine optimization. The importance of bounce rate as a measurement of how effective your website and marketing materials are cannot be understated. It's important enough that we will review what bounce rate is and what you can do to improve your site's "stickiness" for better SEO and more traffic conversion.

According to Google Analytics, Bounce Rate is the percentage of bounced visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce Rate is a measure of visit quality and a high Bounce Rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren't relevant to your visitors. Bounce Rate is different from Exit Rate, which refers to visitors who leave your site from a particular page when coming to that page from somewhere else within our site.

The focus of every Search Engine Optimization effort should be to target a specific set of keywords, but how does a small business owner go about deciding which words and phrases to include? We'll outline what it means to have targeted keywords, how to go about getting them, and where to use them, so that you can make sure that your website, and your web content, is optimal.

Link building is a process of improving website visibility and traffic. Usually, the more the links come to your site via different sources, the more traffic your site will receive. However, link building is a tedious process which requires proper allocation of resources and time. Also, awareness of effective link building techniques and their appropriate implementation can go a long way towards link popularity.

Every business website needs good backlinks, and we often tell our clients to work on getting backlinks. However, not everyone understands what a backlink is or what makes a good backlink. We'll provide an overview so that, by the end, you'll have a great understanding of the importance of backlinks for your website, and will even have some great sites to visit immediately to start building your backlinks.