How Does Auto Complete Help SEO

If you have ever used a mobile phone with word recognition, you will probably remember it didn’t always get it right, well Google’s auto complete pretty much does the same thing, but has a much better way of deciding what the next words and letters will be.

Start writing a word into the Google search box and almost immediately you will get a selection of search terms, to save you from having to complete the complete phrase or word. This of course saves you time, which is what Google is trying to achieve, get the results to you as quickly and as accurately as they can.

This also helps for people like me, who are terrible at spelling. When I see the word, I know it is right, but when it is not there, I regularly spell my search term wrong. But this little tool also can help people with their SEO strategy.

This is because the order that the search terms are presented are based on the quantity of searches for those words. For a business wondering what search terms to optimise their website for, can now easily figure out in  the favourite terms and phrases, as they are presented first.

Any SEO company worth its sale, will at least experiment with the auto complete, look for popular search terms that directly relate to the business in question. In their blog, Google has written more information about the predictions in auto complete, to understand the latest updates.

So What Is This Panda Update?

For some time now, many webmasters and those just using search have complained about content farms and websites that just exist to publish low quality content. So a few months ago, we saw part 1 of what is now known as the Panda update. This algorithm change was designed to identify poor content sites (all automated at Google), leaving only the better stuff, or at lease specialised sites in place.

The first round of results had a mixed response (don’t they always, normally depending on whether their sites lost rankings or gained), however our results pretty much stayed constant throughout.  It was sites such as ezine-articles and other article based sites, where the members were not screen well enough, or where content was rewritten just for the benefit of link building.

Just last week, saw part two of the Panda update, this time with some more serious results and some real losers. The Guardian reported on winners and losers of this update with some real shocking information that really could decide the financial future of some of these websites. Our experience on this update, saw a few sites drops quiet badly, but there was a common link. The sites that dropped had not been updated, or changed for a very long time, or had been put together very quickly.

Our excuse had been, “if its not broke don’t fix it”, in better words these sites had been working well, and we did not want to update or change content in case it lost the rankings it had gained. The good news is, we know what to do , but as I write this in Easter week, I am still finding very slow indexing, so it is possible there are still changes afoot.

There are many other opinions out there to what needs to be done to get sites back up there, with one or two people suggesting it is not a content thing at all, because they can still see low quality sites out there. There is also a debate to what constitutes low quality, after all we are not all experts at grammar, but that does not mean that the information, maybe badly written does not have real value to the reader.

It is times like this where the good SEO companies stand out from the rest, who merely buy, rent to steal links and think, this all there is to search.  No, the quality SEO company will be doing experiments,. to find what survived, what went up and what went down. We have done this, as we said before, it was the sites we put the lest effort into, or was out of date that suffered. The results also only seemed to affect larges sites, certainly our normal sized creations all survived well.