You can watch the entire video below, but here are my quick thoughts.

1. Penguin 2.0 is coming.

If your website has survived the first major Penguin update, yet you still have some spammy-related content, be ready to pay the piper when this hits.  I know of many websites that took huge hits when the first one hit, and I’m sure this one will be just as rough.

There are many things you can do to avoid getting hit – build a good site with good content and don’t try to manipulate or trick the search engines into thinking you’re better than you really are.  There are many write-ups on the web about Penguin, no sense in me rehashing it here.

2. Link building networks will continue to suffer.

Even since Matt’s video on Monday, they’ve already announced that another major link purchasing site has been targeted and probably de-indexed.  If you’re buying links through one of these websites, you’re probably going to see your own website penalized because of it.

This has been a pretty big debate for many years. I know of several SEOs that still buy links – they just don’t broadcast it.  Using a service is a pretty silly way to go about doing it anyway – it’s not like Google isn’t smart enough to watch those sites and penalize them.  If you really want to buy links, do it one-on-one with the website owner, and make it look as natural as possible.

By the way, I’ve never purchased links for a client, and probably never will.  I can’t see jeopardizing their entire business for a silly link.

3. Build a Badass Site With Great Content

Ok, those aren’t the exact words that Matt used, but you get the idea. I’ve been harping this for years. If you want to have the best site, the most traffic, and the biggest amount of sales, simply build your site so that your visitors can’t get enough. Give them all the information they need and more.

My friend Mason says – answer their frequently asked questions, and then answer their should ask questions. You know your industry better than your customer. If you answer a question they didn’t even know they should ask, just think about how much of an expert you become in their eyes.  Cha-ching!

4. Always Keep an Eye on Your Google Webmaster Tools Account

Google is pretty good about communicating any problems they find with your website – and this is done through their Google Webmaster Tools system. Any hacked errors, malware, bad links, 404s, unable to connect errors, etc are all listed there.  You should check this at a minimum of once a month, if not more.

5. If Your Doing Things Right, You Don’t Have to Worry

These guys that are out there that follow the latest tricks to beat Google might as well just quit.  They’re in it for the quick buck and don’t care about your business. I’ve cleaned up messes that guys like this have made for some pretty big sites.  Sure, it keeps me employed, but it hurts the small business owner.  And they don’t care about that, I do.

I have several clients that are doing very well online. When Penguin 1 hit, they weren’t affected at all. Why? They were doing things right and above the board.  There wasn’t anything I had to clean up afterwards because there was nothing to clean up. They built great sites, they blog often and they answer questions right there in the open for their customers (and competitors) to see.  Read point #3 again and hire someone that knows what the hell they’re doing. You’ll be glad you did.

While I admit I haven’t read the details, I can’t imagine how some of the small businesses I work with are going to accomplish this. It’s going to take a signifigant amount of manhours to get it done, and with all the different regulations out there, who’s to know if it’s done right or not?

What’s even worse – part of the bill apparently excuses businesses that make less than a certain amount (I think it’s $1,000,000?) online from having to comply. This sounds great at first, but think about it. My business is to bring more traffic/sales/leads/referrals to my clients. When I succeed, they make more money. Now they’re being told that if they make more money, they’ll be penalized for doing so.

Doesn’t this sound a bit counter-intuitive? Do you see a lot of businesses trying not to grow and stay under the cap so they won’t have to pay the huge fees? I do.

Retailers have been frustrated by consumers who use stores to try on clothes or test electronics then return to their home computers – or pull out their smartphones – to buy them tax-free online.

While this is a valid point, I also see a problem with the statement. Take Borders, for instance. That business refused to stay up with the times, balking at the internet (and Amazon) and look at them now – defunct.

I should mention that online retailers are supposed to voluntarily collect sales tax now in many states, however it’s estimated that only about 1.4% of them actually do it.

Do you think the Marketplace Fairness Act will pass? Do you think it may not now, but eventually will become law? If you’re a small business owner, what are your thoughts on the penalty for making too much money?

Sure, they all post to the various sites, some of them have a decent website (although most don’t – they’re very poorly done), and they all put their various houses on MLS, etc.  But I’m talking  about taking one area and dominating it.

In some areas of Missouri, there is a certain real estate agent that ‘rules the city’. For instance, if you want to buy or sell a home in Fenton, Sue Martin is the person to call. She has worked a long time to be the Fenton MO go-to person when it comes to real estate. I’ve never met Sue, but I’ll say this – if her website was stronger and better built for SEO, she’d have even more sales.

But most cities aren’t like that. There’s no go-to person. I’m betting that there are a lot of agents who want to be that go-to person for a certain area, but they just aren’t sure how to do it. So they’re doing what everyone else is doing – posting to Trulia, listing in MLS, running around town handing out business cards.

None of them are focusing on picking one niche and dominating online.

Let’s take my city for example – Arnold Missouri. Population 20,000 or so. If I do a search for ‘homes for sale arnold mo’, I get the usual – Zillow, Trulia, Remax, Homes.com, Coldwell Banker. What I don’t get are any individual agents that have great websites.

Page two of this Google search is even worse – I get Prudential, AOL Real Estate and loopnet. By the end of page two I’m getting apartments and manufactured homes. I still haven’t seen an agent’s personal page.

This is where I think a smart agent will really be able to dominate. Pick a city, an area, a ‘zone’ and rule it. Build a website (I recommend WordPress) that’s not full of fluff and crap. Customize the content for everything related to the area. Blog about community events, school happenings, and of course homes for sale. Rule the area with online content. Don’t buy into all these third-party schemes to get you more traffic.

Build, build, build and you’ll win.

As a home seller, wouldn’t you be more inclined to go with an agent that was ‘really out there’, always marketing your town, your community? Of course you would. Wouldn’t it b cool if you typed in ‘homes for sale jefferson county’ and your agent showed up near the topp (or first)? You bet.

So here’s a question (and I honestly don’t know the answer to this) – why isn’t someone ruling an area online?

Is it because the real estate companies lock them down? Does Remax and Prudential not allow their agents to get their own domain & website? Or do they give their agents a pre-determined ‘agent page’ on their own site that they can put their info? Do they force them into using a ‘corporate site’ only?

Or is it the opposite – are there so many real estate ‘predators’ out there, hawking their great website solutions that the agents just give up? Do they not know where to turn, who too believe, where to put their money? I can imagine they get hit every day with offers, ideas and marketing ploys that promise big results.

I’d love to hear your comments, especially real estate agents. What is stopping you from kicking ass in a certain area? What things set you apart from all the other agents that are doing the same things you do? What online tools do you know are out there but  you have no idea how to use? Why aren’t you ranking #1 for homes for sale in your area?

The book made it to number two on the Bestseller list, sitting right alongside names like Robert Cialdini and Malcolm Gladwell. It was quite exciting!

About a month after it was published, the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, made news when he publicly said that people with verified Authorship set up on their site will likely start to outrank those that didn’t take the few minutes required to set it up. That’s a pretty bold statement!

If you want to rank well, following the easy steps in my eBook will have you all set up in no time.

And for the next three days, I’m giving away my eBook for free. All weekend – no cost.

That’s right, de nada. No pesos. The big goose egg.

http://www.amazon.com/Google-Authorship-WordPress-Website-ebook/dp/B00B1H98VS/

And you don’t even have to have a Kindle to read it – you can download a free Kindle app for your smart phone, tablet and PC.

I’d love it if you’d follow the steps, set up your Authorship, and come back to Amazon and write a review about your success.

For those that do write a review, I’ve got another surprise freebie for you. Just email me (will@willhanke.com) that you left a review and I’ll hook you up!

If you’re running a WordPress website, you can’t pass up this offer. Here’s the link to download the eBook for FREE between now and Sunday at 11:59PM PST

http://www.amazon.com/Google-Authorship-WordPress-Website-ebook/dp/B00B1H98VS/

Speaking of search engines, over the years they have become more and more complex, measuring an ever-increasing amount of indicators to judge which website deserves top placement. While that placement used to be pretty static (if you ranked #2 in Boston, you ranked #2 in St Louis), it’s not the case anymore. You may rank #1 for blue widgets at your business, but next door you may be #3. And next door to that you may be on page 2.

There’s no way I could possibly go through a list of all the indicators, but I think it’s worth spending a little time explaining some of the top indicators that a small business should pay attention to.

Content

The saying has been around since Al Gore first flipped the Internet switch to on – “Content is King“.  And that is still true today. In fact, its more true than ever.  There is still nothing better that you can do for your website than build content. A new blog each week, a new page that answers a question, or a new article that explains how your product can benefit society – it doesn’t  matter.

One of the biggest push-backs I get is from business owners when I tell them I need them to write. In 95% of those conversations, they freak out. And I can’t necessarily say that I blame them – they’re busy running a business.  But if they were able to understand the positive effects of writing, they’d be all over it.

See, the search engines love websites that are answering questions and solving problems.  They measure how long someone comes to a blog – if people are staying or leaving quickly.  If they’re staying, they must be getting their answer. If they hit the BACK button and continue to search, they probably didn’t find their answer.  Get a lot of people hitting the BACK button and your page will not rank for long.

New content drives more traffic. Your website shouldn’t be stale, it should be alive. If there is new content every time Google comes back to index your site, you get the love. No new content, you lose their favor. It’s really that simple.

Links

I didn’t really finish the saying earlier – “Content is King, links are Queen“.  That’s the real saying.

It used to be so easy to get links. Write an article, submit it to a few thousand article directories, and get links. Run a ‘directory submitter’ and get even more links.  It wasn’t uncommon to get 100,000 links to a website in a month’s time.

Well, not so much the case any more. Most of those websites are now ignored by the search engines, so the links aren’t really worth anything.  And that’s the case for most links now – if they’re easy to get, they probably have little or no value for your site.

Kind of like dating a girl – if she’s easy to get, she’s probably not worth having.

So how do you get links nowadays? Well, you can start by writing great content that attracts links. Good stuff that answers questions or compels people to respond will naturally get linked to. Yeah, it goes back to content again. Great content garners great links.

There are other ways to get links – for instance a controversial piece on a recent news topic may get people talking (and linking). A page on your site that entertains would get links.  Simply asking a vendor or manufacturer  could get you a link.

Social Indicators

Remember how you used to type in a phrase and see where you ranked? It was, for the most part, the same in your office as it was at home. Well, that is definitely not the case anymore. Because of social indicators, everyone sees a different set of results when searching Google.

I used to provide weekly keyword ranking reports to my clients so they could see if they were moving up or down.  These reports were terrific – they gave us a quick indicator of what keywords and pages on the website needed attention, and what keywords were doing well.  Not any more.

Social indicators killed keyword ranking reports.

You see, if you’re friends with me on Facebook or Twitter, it’s likely that I’ve talked about (or checked in at) Chili’s  restaurant. Now sure, there are a few other similar restaurants near me, but that’s the one I like.  Well, one day you decide to look up local mexican restaurants on Google.  It’s very possible that Chili’s will come up on your results page because I’ve talked about it and we’re connected socially.  Sure, there are other close mexican restaurants, but if no one in your circles is talking about them, they may be excluded. Crazy, huh?

The same is true for any business, not just the food industry.  Look up a dentist and you may see your cousin’s recommendation in the results simply because he was recently there and he tweeted about it.  Look up an auto parts store and you may see one that’s a little further from you but has 7 mentions across your social network.

Social media is no longer an option. It’s an integral part of the search engine ranking algorithm, and it’s not something you can ignore any longer. In fact, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt recently mentioned that businesses that were on Google Plus and using the various Google tools were more likely to rank higher. What more reason do you need?!

Other Indicators

As I mentioned, there are hundreds of indicators that help your website rank at the top of searches.  There’s no way I could list them all, but suffice to say if you get these three – content, links and social media – under control, you’ll be eons ahead of your competitors.

Once the pitch is completed, I get some great responses.  Some are ready to sign, but most have some objections, which is fine too.  Below are some of the ‘barriers’ that a business owner may have before signing an SEO contract.

It Takes Too Long

Probably one of the biggest objections I get when pitching a new client is that SEO takes a long time.  And for the most part, they are correct.

The search engines are not about to rank your site at the top just because you think you’ve got the best thing since sliced bread.

A Year? Really?

For the first year of my publicly selling SEO services, I offered six month contracts.  It was a palatable number to small business owners, and they weren’t as freaked out about the fees, etc related to the service.  But what I found out is that after the initial six months was up, not a lot of my clients were renewing.  Why? Because they weren’t ranking well for their top phrases.  To them this meant they just wasted six months of marketing budget.

What they failed to realize is that before they hired me, they weren’t on the Google radar at all.  Not in the top 100 for their search terms.  Six months in, I may have optimized their site and built enough links to get them up to, say, the top 20 or 30.  And to business owners, a page 3 or 4 result is still useless, and they’re right.

But take your foot off the gas, and guess what happens?  You slow down.  You fall off the top 100 again.  Had they kept going, they’d have started to see significant traffic increases.

Is this easy to explain to a business owner who just spent six months paying you for little increase in traffic? Umm, no.  So I modified my pitch (and my contract length) to explain that I needed one year’s worth of foot-to-the-floor work and they’d be happy with the outcome.

In most cases, six months just won’t do it.  At least not with white hat techniques.

Budget Issues

Potential clients may also be objecting to your proposal because of the price.  Usually it’s not that they can’t affford it, it’s more that they need to be assured that spending this amount of money is a good idea.

Expense vs Investment

Probably the biggest objection for business owner is the justification of the expense.  I’m not a fan of them classifying my work as an expense.  While it does look like one on paper, if they would only understand that SEO is an investment, they’d be a lot further along with their marketing in general.

Sure, some marketing is an expense. Flyers are an expense. Business cards are an expense. But paying someone to work on, tweak and upgrade your website so that it’s running at optimal performance is an investment.

You Charge How Much?!

Hiring a good SEO person or agency isn’t a cheap endeavor. And getting to the top of the search engines is no easy task. It takes a lot of changing, building, tweaking (and sometimes coercing) to get a website to start ranking. There is a lot of time put in to a well-oiled machine, and there is a lot of knowledge that goes into doing it correctly.

I spend at least 5-10 hours a week researching my industry. I want to be the best.  I spend time specifically learning the latest changes that the search engines have made, understanding new technologies, markup languages and techniques that can help my clients succeed. That’s knowledge I enjoy getting, and my clients benefit well from that time spent.

No Guarantee – The Risk vs Reward Conundrum

Probably the biggest push-back I get when pitching a small business owner is that I give no guarantee for my work.

While that’s enough to freak out any business owner, I’m confident in the work that I do, and the reputation that I’ve built.

Because the search engines have never told anyone their algorithm, and the fact that it changes very often, it would be nearly impossible for me to offer a guarantee.  They could change every rule tomorrow and we’d all be in trouble.

In fact, I’d even go so far as saying any company that does offer a guarantee is probably scamming you.  They can’t. It’s impossible. Or their guarantee in bunk – it’s written in a way that they can’t really lose.

“Well rank you on page one for any five-word keyphrase that we pick within 30 days”.

Sure, if there is no one on the web currently ranking for ‘dentists that wear orange shoes’ then I’d say they have a pretty good chance of building a page and ranking for that phrase. But how much valuable traffic will that really bring you? None.

Be weary of guarantees in the SEO world.

Any investment in a business has some amount of risk. There are a lot of unforseen things that could happen – heck I could get hit by a bus tomorrow.  And so could the guy you hired to do any service. There are always risks.

The smart thing to do is put your money and time into a business that shows results, has references and that you trust.