Fresh, unique website content is vital if you want to attract attention from both search engines and individual visitors. Google’s Panda update reinforced the need for websites to publish new content on a regular basis if they want to appear near the top of search engine results. At the same time, website visitors are becoming more discerning about what they read and share.

Writing to a looming deadline can be a creativity killer. If you feel that the constant need for new ideas is putting you under pressure, take time out to plan ahead. Getting a schedule in place for your 2012 website content will relieve your stress while keeping your online presence up-to-date and interesting.

Scheduling website content for the year ahead is not as daunting as it may sound. With the aid of a calendar and access to Constant Content’s team of content writers, you can pull together your 2012 website content schedule in under an hour.

The Importance of Seasonality:

The changing seasons have an impact on many online businesses. Jewelry businesses will typically see sales peaks around Valentine’s Day and Christmas, while travel agencies are likely to experience a spike in January. A quick look at website activity over previous years will reveal the seasons that matter most to your business. Use the changing seasons to plan website content that will appeal to your customers.

Find a Unique Approach:

As your competitors will also target these seasonal peaks, your next challenge is to find a unique angle that will appeal to website visitors. You can secure innovative ideas by working with a team of content writers. Constant Content allows customers to receive submissions to public requests from a number of talented content writers, increasing the chance of a quirky, distinctive approach to your chosen topic.

Encourage Visitors to Return:

Once you have a schedule for the coming months, you can entice visitors back by trailing future website content. Publishing a teaser, such as “Next week we will reveal the secret to five-star travel on a two-star budget”, will prompt visitors to return to your website to read the new article.

Handle the Unexpected with Ease:

Planning ahead and having website content ready ahead of time will give you some breathing space if life throws some challenges your way. Illness or a staff shortage may throw you off track. However, it will have less impact if your schedule has been planned and developed in advance.

Allow for Flexibility:

Bear in mind that your website content schedule is a tool to help you plan. It should not be set in stone. If one of your content writers produces an intriguing idea, you are free to adjust your schedule and run with it. Don’t let a unique or creative piece of website content escape just because it was not on your original plan.

By planning ahead, you can satisfy the demand from regular visitors for valuable new website content, while securing a high ranking in the search engine results.

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Over the next few days we're going to comment on a subject that's very important to us.  We'll be looking at Unique Articles and how they can benefit your business - exploring what makes articles unique, what value they can offer and how you should use them.

The phrase "unique articles" means different things to different people. Someone who uses software to spin articles so that the text is "unique" to search engines has a different definition of uniqueness than we do. Here at Constant Content, it's not all about passing Copyscape.

What Unique Means To Us

While we do run all submitted articles through iThenticate, a leading anti-plagiarism tool, we expect our writers to present new, interesting information. While a given topic may be common across the Web, truly unique articles present the topic from a different perspective.

Unique articles are:

* Fresh

* Relevant

* Engaging

* Shareable

* Highly informative

The Benefits of Unique Articles

Google has always prioritized unique content in its search results and has recently emphasized the importance of both freshness and social cues such as the number of +1s and likes. With a fresh perspective, new information, and an engaging writing style, a unique article becomes a shareable article – and that's good for business.

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Google just announced "Google Search plus Your World" with a splashy video that shouts "awesome!" While Google Search plus Your World may be awesome for social users, it's likely to concern you if you're involved in SEO on any level.

What is Google Search plus Your World?

Google.com can now display "personal results" when you enter a search term. These results include:

-Personal results based on your own Google identity and related Google accounts such as Picassa. Within the Google search results, you'll see personalized results including Google+ posts and photos from you and your contacts.

-Google+ people and pages related to your search phrase.

-Profiles of people. Google now offers autocomplete entries for people you might be interested in and lists them in the results.

Currently, Google gives you a choice to show or hide personal results. As a user, you might enjoy seeing what your contacts have to say on a given topic. If so, you can show results by clicking the "show personal results" icon. If you find social results distracting, simply click the "hide personal results" icon.

Google plus Your World – Implications for SEO

In either case, Google plus Your World does have its implications in terms of SEO. As a content publisher, you have no control over the choices Google users make. Some will embrace Google plus Your World while others will shun it. For those that opt for personal results, and you can expect many to do so based on the popularity of social networks, the first page of Google search results will be loaded with information from their own social circles - primarily those on Google+. Your ultra-optimized article or Web page which may have previously held the top position may be nowhere in sight! Personal results could crowd out traditionally optimized content.

Performing in a Social Search Environment

Constant Content has long stressed the importance of quality unique articles and web content. Google Panda validated this position, and now Google plus Your World is doing it again. In order to perform in this social search environment, content must be excellent, compelling, and sharable.

To take advantage of social search, follow these tips:

-Post well-written, engaging content

-Choose thought-provoking topics or tackle your topic from an unusual perspective

-Use a friendly, knowledgeable voice

-Choose content that is authoritative, yet easy to read

-Tell your visitors something that they don't already know

-Encourage comments from readers with direct calls to action to leave a comment

-Encourage comments from readers by asking questions at the end of your content

-Encourage sharing and "liking" by including social bookmarking buttons, particularly Google+ and Facebook buttons

Google plus Your World, like Panda and previous updates, will affect your world. How will you make sure your content comes out on top? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

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2011 was a big year for changes in SEO with the Panda and Freshness updates, but the changes were still relatively contained to the main Google search algorithm. In 2012, mobile phones, web browsers and social sites will all collide head on to create one of the biggest shake-ups in SEO that we’ve ever seen. The three biggest changes will be

1. Google Chrome will feed the Panda

2. Google Plus makes a power play against Facebook

3. Apple and the iPhone become players in mobile search.

Panda Gobbles Up Spam Sites with the Help of Google Chrome

Google Chrome moved into 2nd place in the browser wars, passing Internet Explorer 9 in April of 2011 and beating it by a full 12 percentage points by the end of the year, with nearly a third of all internet users choosing Chrome as their browser of preference. What does this mean for search?

Because Google can now gather data about site navigation, bounce rates and referring websites from 1 out of every 3 internet users, it means that the Panda of 2011 is about to get a whole lot tougher. The Panda is a piece of artificial intelligence that can learn from users which content is high quality and which content is garbage. The Panda of 2011 employed quality-testing users to figure out how to rank websites. The Panda of 2012 will use data from the millions of Google Chrome users to make its decisions, putting an even bigger squeeze on low quality spam sites.  Ensuring your site is using high quality unique articles will be more important than ever in light of this.

Facebook and Twitter Lose Social Weight to Google +

Earlier in 2011 and late 2010, Google Local Search (aka Google Map Search) removed third party review sites from their display. While third party reviews still play a factor in local rankings, they have definitely lost a little bit of weight in the ranking algorithm compared to Google Reviews.

It is expected that Google will make a similar switch with social ranking factors in 2012 when Google Plus becomes more prevalent. Google will strategically leverage all data available to them to provide the best and most relevant results for users, so incorporating data from Google Plus is a logical step. Google made a bit of a power play by removing the relevance of Yelp and Urbanspoon reviews, and they will likely attempt to decrease their dependence on (and likely decrease the SEO relevance of) Facebook and Twitter in 2012.

Apple’s Personal Assistant SIRI Takes Mobile Search Market Share

While there has been a lot of speculation about Google losing market share to Bing and Yahoo, there is a sleeping monster that is quietly gaining traction that has the potential to beat Google at mobile search - SIRI, the intelligent personal assistant on the Apple iPhone.

The iPhone is still the most popular mobile phone available, and security concerns about the Android are enough to make industry experts wary of Google ever taking market share. SIRI, the voice activated assistant, can answer simple questions and queries. And while the 2011 SIRI is still very 'beta', the 2012 SIRI will get smarter and smarter, eventually being able to offer up suggestions that previous users laboriously screen-typed into a Google search bar. Look for Apple to make a move and cut into the profits of the very profitable and growing market for local mobile search.

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While there were many changes in SEO during 2011, two in particular had the biggest changing effects and both affected the type of SEO content companies should use:

1. The Panda/Farmer update

2. The Freshness/Caffeine update

The Panda/Farmer Update

By far, the biggest game changer in SEO in 2011 was the rolling Panda updates ranging from early February all the way to November. The first implementation of the Panda update was reported to affect 12% of all search queries. Due to the very public penalization of JC Penney and Overstock.com for bad linking practices, first thoughts were that the Panda update was about off-site factors such as backlinks. However, further analysis and news has indicated that Panda is all about on-site SEO factors.

Panda is named after its creator, Google search engineer Navneet Panda, an expert in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Google had multiple quality testers look at thousands and thousands of websites and rate them. Navneet was able to create an algorithm that was able to learn from the input of these quality testers and then be able to 'rate' websites.

The presumed qualities that the Panda algorithm looks at are

o Bounce Rate - how many people leave the site after only a short period of time after arriving.

o Search impressions vs. Click Through Rate - how many people decide to visit the site compared to the amount of times the site is shown in Google results

o Number of Repeat Visitors vs. Total visitors

o Latent Semantic Index content - the percentage of content on the page that is within the LSI for the query.

o Ad Ratios - the amount of informational content on the page compare to the amount of promotional content (advertisements) on the page.

One of the unintended consequences of the Panda update is that the algorithm updated in 'waves', meaning rankings changed a lot less with each update, even though updates happened fairly often. Because of this (and also because of the release of Google +), speculation has occurred that social factors now carry more weight. This makes sense, since social factors happen in real time and can compensate for the slow updates of Panda.

The Freshness update

The freshness, or Caffeine, update was suggested to have an impact on 35% of search queries. While the queries that were most effected were typically time sensitive searches such as news items, schedules, scores and updates, there is evidence that the freshness update actually has a significant impact on most searches.

Sites that have frequent updates such as new blog posts, links or supplementary information have received a boost in rankings, while other articles that are considered “evergreen” that were written years before have received a passive ‘penalty’ by losing rankings to newer content. There is also a suggestion that newer, fresher links are also receiving an increase in value.

Conclusion – 2011: The year of On-site SEO

The Freshness and Panda updates have been focused almost exclusively on on-page factors that webmasters have control over. In order to summarize the effect of these updates, one should remember one old cliché and forget another one. For the Freshness update, remember the phrase, “what have you done for me lately,” and for the Panda update,remember the old adage that “content is king”… Google is trying to make the user king, and users want engaging and informative unique content. The secret of 2011 SEO is to engage in practices that keep your visitors engaged and your website fresh.

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