SEO has changed dramatically over the past 18 months. If you are still working under assumptions that are a year old, you are probably doing more harm than good.

1. Everything you know about
SEO is wrong
September 2012
Phil Buckley
SEO – What You Need To Know Raleigh SEO Meetup Group
Twitter: @1918

2. The Old SEO Home

3. What’s changed?
February 23, 2011 – Panda 1.0
A major algorithm update hit
sites hard, affecting up to 12% of
search. Panda seemed to crack
down on thin content, content
farms, sites with high ad-to-
content ratios, and a number of
other quality issues.

4. The +1 Button — March 30, 2011
Panda 2.0 — April 11, 2011
Schema.org — June 2, 2011
Google+ — June 28, 2011
Expanded Sitelinks — August 16, 2011
516 Algo Updates — September 21, 2011
This wasn't an update, but it was an amazing revelation.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt told Congress that Google made
516 updates in 2010.
Query Encryption — October 18, 2011
Freshness Update — November 3, 2011

5. What do we know?
8 events tracked = 1.6% of 516 changes, 0.28% of 2,800 tests
This slide was lifted directly from Dr. Pete’s MozCon presentation

6. Search + Your World — January 10, 2012
Ads Above The Fold — January 19, 2012
Venice — February 27, 2012
Penguin — April 24, 2012
After weeks of speculation about an "Over-optimization penalty", Google finally rolled out the
"Webspam Update", which was soon after dubbed "Penguin." Penguin adjusted a number of
spam factors, including keyword stuffing, and impacted an estimated 3.1% of English queries.
Knowledge Graph — May 16, 2012
Panda 3.7 — June 8, 2012
Link Warning Confusion — July 19, 2012
DMCA Penalty — August 10, 2012
7-Result SERPs — August 14, 2012

7. Wait…
7-Result SERPs ?
from http://searchengineland.com/7-new-10-google-showing-fewer-results-131006

9. Long-term domain diversity
Gradual decline with 2 large drops: (1) Penguin & (2) “Bigfoot”
This slide was lifted directly from Dr. Pete’s MozCon presentation

10. What’s a normal day for Google?
79.7%
of SERPs change
every 24 hours
1,000 SERPs over 2 months (May + June 2012)
This slide was lifted directly from Dr. Pete’s MozCon presentation

11. But an awesome site is still
enough right?

12. John Mueller
Senior Google Webmaster Trend Analyst
Google Webmaster Central
“It's one thing to have a fantastic
website, but search engines generally
need a bit more to be able to confirm
that, and to rank your site - your content -
appropriately.”

15. Can scrapers still compete?

16. Are you ready to do SEO
without knowing what
keywords are driving traffic?

17. Not provided
45% of my search traffic comes in as “not provided”

18. Shit just got real.

20. YOU HAVE TO BE

21. STRATEGY
TACTICS
CONCEPTS
KEYWORDS

22. NFL.com
New York New Cleveland
Giants England Browns
Patriots
10,000 8,000 1,000
Eli Manning Tom Brady Colt McCoy
5,000 5,000 300

23. The Drop off

24. Get your content ready

26. F.A.Q.
Should I do SEO myself
while running my business?
No.
What should I focus on?
Content.
When is the next SEO
Meetup?
October 30th. Live site audit(s).

27. Thank you for coming
Special thanks to our sponsors: