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First off, let's look at design and user experience. We know, good S.E.O. experts have been preaching the user design experience for what seems like forever. Good user design experience tends to generate more backlinks, people contribute more to the onsite content, and it gets more social signal shares and tweets. Now, this has a primary impact. If you can make your design a piece of art, versus something where content is buffeted by advertising and you have to click next, next, next a lot and the content the reader is really after isn't all in one page, then "boy oh boy", you have  a problem. If a sites design feels like it was way back in the 1990's, then all this stuff will impact on the ability of your page to perform. Don't forget, Google has said publicly, even if you have an awesome looking site, if you have a bunch of pages that are low quality, they will in all likelihood drag down the rankings of the rest of your site. So time to do some page renovations and rethink your strategies. Wow. Might sound crazy, right? That's what the Panda learning algorithm will do. It will predicatively say, "Hey, you know what? We're seeing these features here, this low quality, little appeal, push this page down."

Content quality matters a heck of a lot, and plenty of it.  When it comes to the S.E.O. world, people may say, "Well, you have to have good, unique, useful content." Sorry folks, it's not enough. It's just not enough. There are too many people like you, putting amazing stuff on the Internet. All good, unique, grammatically correct, spelt properly and describes the topic adequately when it comes to content.

If you say, "Oh, I have 50,000 pages about 50,000 different widgets and I am just going to go to Widget expert or I am going to go outsource, and I want a 100 word, two paragraphs about each one of them, just describe what this widget is you probably think to yourself, "Hey, I have got great unique content." No in fact the opposite, you have content that is going to be penalized by Panda. That is what Panda is designed to do. It has the ability to say this is content that someone wrote for S.E.O. purposes just to have good unique content on the page. It's not content that makes everyone who sees it, pay attention, want to share it and say wow. Are you getting the picture?

If I get to a page about a widget and I am like, "Wow, not only is this well written, it's kind of funny. It's funny and humorous. It includes some anecdotes and engages me. It's got some history about this widget. It has great widget pictures. Man, I don't care at all about the other widgets, this is just a damm good page. What a great page, I need to tweet this; I need to share this on Facebook and LinkedIn. I'll send it to my friend who collects widgets. I would love this page...it rocks." That's what you have to optimize for, nothing less. It is a totally different thing than optimizing for, as we have done, using the same keyword at least three times, putting it in the title tag? Is it included in there? Is the rest of the content relevant to the keywords? It's not just about the keywords, Panda changed all this, changed it quite a bit.

Finally, you need to understand that you are going to be optimizing around user and usage metrics. That's when people come to your website in comparison to other sites in your niche or ranking for your keywords. Do they spend a good amount of time on your site, or do they go away immediately? Do they bounce around or are they browsing? If you have a good browse rate, people are browsing 2, 3, 4 pages on average on your content site, that's not too bad. In fact, that's pretty good. If they're browsing 1.5 pages on your site, that might actually be pretty good. That might be better than average. On the flip side, if they are browsing like 1.001 pages, like virtually no one is clicking onto a second page, "ouch", that might be weird. That might hurt you.

When prospects see your title, your descriptor and your domain name, and they shudder thinking, "Yuck, I don't know if I want to get myself involved in that. They've got like four hyphens in their domain name, and it looks totally spammy. I'm not going near that." Then that click-through rate is probably going to suffer and so are your rankings.

Have a look at things like the diversity and quantity of traffic that comes to your site. Do lots of people visit your site from all around the world or around your local region, your country, and do they visit your website directly? You can measure this with Google Analytics, Chrome, Android and your Google toolbar. These usage metrics tell us where people are going on the Internet, where they spend time, how much time they spend, and what they do on certain sites and pages. They also show us what happens from the search results as well. Are people clicking from their result and then going right back to the search results and performing another search? They can take all these metrics about your site and put them into the learning algorithm and then have Panda essentially recalculate your page...Wallah. This why Google doesn't issue updates every day or every week about pages and sites. It is about every 30 or 40 days that a new Panda update will come out because they are rejigging all this stuff.

One of the common things that people who get hit by Panda wonder is, "Wow, how are we ever going to survive Panda? We've made all these changes and we are struggling." Well, firstly, you're not going to get out of it until they rejig the results, and there is no way you are going to get out of it unless you change the metrics about your site. So if you have a look at your  site analytics and you see that people are not spending more time on your pages, they are not enjoying them and sharing them, they are not naturally linking to them, your organic  traffic is not up, you see that none of these metrics are going up and you thought you had somehow fixed the problem, well you probably haven't.

This can be frustrating and it can be a tough issue. There are probably sites that have been really unfairly hit and that's not fair. Still, from the S.E.O. perspective, Panda is probably not going anywhere. Google are in all likelihood  very happy with the way that Panda has gone from a search quality perspective and from a happy user perspective. Searchers are happier, and they are not seeing as much spammy junkie websites in the results. From this perspective, you have got to like the way this is going. We are probably going to see more and more of this over time. It could even get more proactive. The secret is to work on this stuff, to optimize around these things, and gear your online S.E.O strategies for this brave new world of Panda.