SEO basics after Google Caffeine: what to do and what to stop

Caffeine is a rebuild of how Google indexes the web. The old system updated in layers every couple of weeks; the new one crawls and indexes continuously, adding hundreds of thousands of gigabytes a day. Google's own announcement claims 50 percent fresher results. It is not a ranking change like the "Mayday" shift in May, which quietly reduced traffic to many large sites' long-tail pages.

For you, three consequences matter.

1. Freshness is rewarded sooner. A new page or blog post can appear in results the same day. Stale sites look staler by comparison.
2. More of your site gets indexed, including the thin pages you forgot about. Duplicate and near-empty pages are now visible to Google in a way they were not.
3. Fixes show up fast. A corrected title tag or a repaired redirect is reflected quickly, which makes testing and tidying far more rewarding than it used to be.

Run this checklist on your ten most important pages before spending a dollar on anything else.

Beyond the table:

• One topic per page. Each service, product line and location deserves its own page. If you serve five cities, build five pages with genuinely different content, not one page with five city names in the footer.
• Internal links with real anchor text. Link "commercial roof repair" to the commercial roof repair page, not "click here."
• Fix duplicate content. Make www and non-www resolve to one version with a 301 redirect. Use the rel="canonical" tag, which Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all support now, on pages that exist at several URLs.
• Set up Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Center. Submit an XML sitemap, look at crawl errors, and check which queries already send impressions.
• Speed matters now. Google confirmed in April that page speed is a ranking signal. It is a small one, but a site taking eight seconds to load on a Comcast connection is losing visitors anyway. Compress images and drop the Flash intro.

If you serve a metro area, Google Places (the renamed Local Business Center) is the highest-return hour you will spend this year. Claim and verify your listing, choose the right categories, add photos and hours, and make sure your name, address and phone number are written identically on your website, in Places, and in the data providers that feed it (Localeze, infoUSA, Acxiom). Ask happy customers to review you on Google, Yelp and Citysearch. The seven-pack of map results sits above the organic listings for most local queries, and the businesses in it get the calls.

Links remain the strongest signal, and the kind of link matters more than the count. Aim for links a Google engineer would look at and consider earned.

Start with the ones you already deserve. Suppliers, distributors, chambers of commerce, trade associations, the Better Business Bureau, local sponsorships, your alumni association. Most businesses have twenty of these available for the asking.

Get listed in real directories. Yahoo Directory ($299 a year), Business.com, Best of the Web and your industry's own directories. Avoid the free-for-all directories with 10,000 categories and no editor.

Publish something worth linking to. A pricing guide, a local market report, a calculator, a genuinely useful how-to. One good resource page earns more over two years than a hundred article-directory submissions.

Talk to local press and bloggers. A story in the city business journal with a link to your site is worth more than every reciprocal link exchange combined.

Guest write for industry publications. Offer a real article to a trade site; most will include a byline link.

Use social channels for discovery, not links. Twitter and Facebook links are no-followed, but they are how people find the content that later earns real links.

Expect this to take months. A new site that acquires ten to thirty good links in a year is doing well; a competitive category may need more, but quality per link is the lever.

Caffeine makes Google faster at seeing everything, including this list.

• Buying links or renting footer links on unrelated sites. JC Penney-style schemes are being caught, and smaller businesses do not get a press cycle, just a penalty.
• Reciprocal link pages titled "Resources" that link to a hundred strangers.
• Article spinning and mass directory submissions. The articles are not read and the links carry little weight.
• Keyword stuffing in body copy, hidden text, or dozens of meta keywords. The meta keywords tag has been ignored by Google since at least last year.
• Doorway pages for every city and keyword variation with the same boilerplate.
• Flash-only sites and all-image navigation. Google can read some Flash text now, but it still cannot rank what it cannot parse reliably.
• Chasing PageRank toolbar scores. The toolbar value updates a few times a year and tells you almost nothing about traffic.

1. Weeks 1 to 2: install Analytics and Webmaster Tools, fix redirects and duplicates, rewrite titles and descriptions on the top twenty pages.
2. Weeks 3 to 6: build out one page per service and per location, claim and complete Google Places, request the twenty links you already deserve.
3. Weeks 7 to 12: publish two or three substantial resources, pitch two local or trade publications, start a monthly log of rankings for twenty phrases, organic visits, and leads.

Judge success on organic visits and inquiries, not on where one phrase sits on a Tuesday. Rankings fluctuate daily under Caffeine; traffic over a month does not lie.

We begin with discovery: a technical crawl, a look at which queries already bring you impressions, and a frank review of your link profile and your competitors'. We plan the page structure and the content calendar around how your customers actually search. We build it properly, which often means fixing the website itself rather than bolting on tactics, since our web development and performance marketing teams work from the same plan. Then we improve on a monthly cycle from the data, because search, brand and site experience are one problem, not three.

In a representative transformation engagement, a multi-location service company arrived with a Flash-heavy site, one generic title tag and a link profile built from directory submissions. We rebuilt the site in clean HTML with a page per service and location, consolidated duplicate URLs, claimed every Places listing, and replaced the directory campaign with a resource library and trade-press outreach. Organic inquiries became the largest lead source within a year, and the monthly report the owner receives tracks leads first and rankings second.