Creative Minds rebrands as CMA Digital

London, UK – Thursday 3rd May 2012.

London based internet marketing agency Creative Minds has rebranded to reflect successful growth over the last 12 months. Moving forward as CMA Digital, the agency has successfully confirmed the acquisition of clients from various sectors, including corporate and finance. The team believe their ethos of providing consultative, conversion rate focused Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaigns has been key in their growth.

“Through the delivery of consistent results that trend upwards overtime, we have not only retained clients, but increased our reach based purely on reputation. Continuing into 2012, we aim to develop our service portfolio to match the growing needs of our clients, a portfolio for which we feel CMA Digital is a more appropriate banner.” – Robert Wilson, Managing Director

About CMA Digital

CMA Digital offer Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) services to businesses across the UK.

Media Enquiries

Pete Thornton
0203 405 1644
info@cmadigital.co.uk
CMA Digital

The response to the update has been massive – some sites saw rises and others saw massive declines. Anti-Penguin sentiment is high and so far over 600 people on change.org have signed a petition demanding that Penguin be overturned. The update impacted around 3.1% of all search enquiries in English speaking countries, Google confirmed.

What had been previously dubbed as Google Search Analyst Matt Cutts’ ‘Over-optimisation penalty’ instead focused largely on removing what is known as ‘webspam’.

Google’s guidelines on webspam refer to a number of commonly practised SEO techniques, including keyword stuffing and link schemes. Google describes the latter as:

- Links intended to manipulate PageRank
- Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging
- Buying or selling links that pass PageRank
- Links to webspammers or ‘bad neighbourhoods’ (porn, gambling sites etc.) on the web

If you’ve seen your rankings and traffic drop since 24th April then it’s likely you’ve been participating in one of these link building methods or you have been engaging in other practices that fall outside of Google’s Webmaster Quality Guidelines. Google has been talking for years about cracking down on linkbuilding methods it deems to be against its guidelines and the Penguin update to its search algorithm demonstrates that the search giant is dedicated to tackling what it perceives as webspam.

The message that Google Penguin has sent out to many sites is a strong one. Google has always been an advocate of websites that benefit user experience and frowned upon those that enact deceptive or manipulative behaviour so Penguin, along with the Panda update last year, is continuing the clamp down on these types of sites.

If your site is one of the ones adversely affected by Penguin, what can you do to ensure that it returns to its former glory?

Here’s a short rundown of points you should consider when performing SEO on your site:

- Create unique, worthwhile content – Google loves new, original content which people want to share across social media platforms. If you’re duplicating or spinning the same old tired content again and again then you’re doing something wrong.
- Ensure the links you build are ‘natural’ – A common theme of companies that have been affected by the Penguin update is their severe lack of natural links. If you are buying links, engaging in comment spam practices or linking to dangerous sites then you’re going to get smacked down by Penguin, hard.
- Don’t have too many ads above the page fold – This one’s been around since Panda launched last year, but Google hates sites that have more Adsense than actual sense. If your site has ads, either keep it minimal or below the fold.
- Improve the user experience - Does your site load slowly, are your pages full of irrelevant keywords or do you have a lot of doorway pages that are only placed on your site to draw traffic? If so, Google will punish you for it. Make every aspect of your site user friendly – focus on education rather than solely marketing.

These updates to Google’s search algorithm are becoming more commonplace as time goes on. Google will only continue to get smarter at punishing the sites that break its rules, so rather than getting trapped in a constant cycle of fearing for your company’s rankings when the next update rolls around it’s important to take these measures to ensure that you pre-empt any change the search engine will make. If not then, like the Penguin, your business will be left out in the cold.

The conversion we’re looking for here is someone to actually click on our link in the Google search rankings. Although search engines use a variety of factors in determining your page ranking they don’t actually use the description tags, but they do include a snippet in their search engine results. This means that there is the space to write interesting, engaging copy to  encourage people to convert from search engine results.

Getting the meta desctription tags right is important because well written meta descriptions can help to increase not only your click through rate (CTR) but also your bounce rate. People are less likely to leave the page if the contents of your page have been described accurately, hopefully meaning that whoever is searching has found what they were looking for.

Even though the search engines don’t factor in content in meta description tags towards page ranking, there are certain things that you should put into every set of meta tags to help increase the chance of conversion.

Keywords – it’s important to include keywords in your meta description because the search engines will bold any relevant terms within the copy for it, which will no doubt help to draw customers in.

Congruency – your SEO description tags should summarise exactly what is on the page. Misleading people will only increase your bounce rates and devalue the page in question that you’re trying to rank.

Sentence – listing keywords isn’t necessarily the way to go. It’s very possible to have a readable sentence which flows naturally and includes keywords, so if you haven’t managed that then you’re likely doing something wrong.

In conclusion, the type of copy you want to have in your meta tags is readable, coherent, truthful and with a couple of keyword phrases thrown in for good measure. This should hopefully culminate in engaging copy that flows properly, even with your targeted keywords. As a result, the chances of converting on your page should rise exponentially.

Creative Minds is a Kent SEO agency, offering professional SEO services and specialises in search marketing for clients through the use of ethical SEO.

Matt announced this revelation during a panel named Dear Google & Bing: Help Me Rank Better! with industry bigwigs such as Search Engine Land’s Editor-In-Chief, Danny Sullivan also present.

Cutts has said that the new over optimization penalty will be introduced into the search results in the upcoming month or next few weeks. The purpose of the update is to “level the playing field” and therefore give sites that have great content a better shot at ranking above sites that perform better SEO, but lower quality content.

During the panel, Cutts went on to say:

“We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.”

How big an impact do you think this update will have on the SEO industry? Share your thoughts below.

Creative Minds is a Kent SEO agency, offering professional SEO services and specialises in search marketing for clients through the use of ethical SEO.