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Google’s Panda update significantly changed the internet landscape, putting scrapped sites and content farms on the brink of extinction. Sites like Suite101 have lost 94% of their traffic, according to an article in Wired Magazine that interviewed Google search engineers Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal. However, other websites were dramatically impacted as well, including retailer JC Penny, for questionable linking practices.
Given the magnitude of the Panda update across the web and all industries, there are three main takeaway lessons to ensure your website stays in Google’s good graces.
Lesson #1: Publish unique, valuable content that attracts links
While building your SEO through content alone takes longer than gaming the algorithm and buying links, it avoids any risk of penalization, now and in the future. In the SEO game, the content-driven turtle definitely will win over the gaming rabbit. If you are building your website’s long-term success, content is the core strategy.
Consider having your freelance SEO writer add more than just articles to your website or blog. Invest in white papers, case studies, and reports that add significant content value to your internet property. Not only will the content help improve your SEO, but will also be excellent material to turn visitors into customers.
Some SEO experts, such as Bruce Clay, are advising clients to vary the word count on each page to ensure that the content looks natural, as mentioned in Search Engine Land. 750 words may become the new 500, as the longer word count allows your freelance SEO writer to expound more extensively on the subject matter – thus mitigating any potential algorithm programming that may penalize for short, topical content.
Lesson #2: Leverage social media exposure
At the start of this year, we wrote about how 2011 was to be the Year of Facebook, and the Panda update turned the industry prediction into reality. Google is weighing the Facebook conversations, Tweets, and trends in determining a website’s authority, and the links that you get back from the social networks can be worth their weight in gold. Social conversations are being indexed and used heavily to determine the authority of a website.
Lesson #3: Avoid low quality links
Many websites that have been gaming the Google algorithm by purchasing links have been severely penalized, and a Search Engine Watch article outlines the characteristics to avoid in a site from which you are hoping to gain a link, including: low traffic, high ad-to-content ratio, poor quality content, and minimal comment moderation.
Google’s Panda update is one of the largest, most influential algorithm changes we have seen in years, and the effects were felt all across the board. The three lessons to gleam from the Panda update, however, will keep your website in the good favor of Google, both now and in the future.
Read moreCoca-Cola has used the same one since 1885, Sony is suing Clearwire over it, Gap’s North American President was fired for it, and JC Penny is paying for advertisements during the Oscars to show their new one. What’s all the drama about? Logos, but of course!
While we all know the critical role logos play in branding, logos can also significantly impact consumer behavior, according to new research from Boston College. In fact, a simple logo can prompt humans to become more aggressive, crave speed, and take risks.
Logos Can Prime Subconscious Behavior
In the study conducted by professors S. Adam Brasel and James Gips of the Boston College Carroll School of Management, which was published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology as “Red Bull ‘Gives You Wings’ for better or worse: A double-edged impact of brand exposure on consumer performance,” test subjects played a racing video game, wherein their cars were identical, except for the beverage brand plastered to the side of the automobile. Red Bull was put to the test against other popular beverage brands including Coca Cola, Tropicana, and Guinness, but only those who were controlling Red Bull cars displayed the dangerous, high adrenaline, and extreme behaviors associated with the brand.
The results of this study confirm “non-conscious brand priming,” which demonstrate that the branding of a company can encourage a consumer to act in line with the brand’s personality. From the study, it can be extrapolated that branding extends far beyond mental associations, and it has a direct impact on behavior.
Encouraging Your Customers to Emulate Your Brand
What does this research mean for your business? Your logo and branding endeavors should inspire consumers to act in a way that is beneficial for your company. If you sell stationery, your brand should encourage customers to be gracious, thoughtful, and (hopefully) wordy. Those in the athletic shoe business should rouse the inner marathon runner inside every customer. Furniture companies should motivate consumers to live a beautiful, inspired home.
It is too easy for branding strategies and logos to become convoluted, especially when you bring market segmentation and targeting into the picture. In simple terms, how can your customers emulate your brand?
As you develop your marketing endeavors around your branding strategy, keep in mind how your perfect customer would act, and one day, perhaps just your logo alone will prompt them to emulate your company’s personality – and increase your bottom line!
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Original content continues to be king, especially in light of Google’s new algorithm update. Just last week, Google tightened its algorithm to further differentiate between unique and duplicate content.
Content farms, syndicators, and spam sites were dealt a justified blow, as Google’s new algorithm will now push the original content producer’s website to the top of the search results. Sites that scrape or copy content will now find it difficult to rank well in Google. This algorithm update is just part of Google’s renewed effort to filter out low quality content.
According to Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, more than 2% of searches are impacted by this algorithm update, which means that the change may be quite noticeable. Cutts expounded, “The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.”
The impact of this algorithm update was significantly felt across the net, as webmasters of low-quality or scraped content sites found their traffic vanished overnight. Perusing through a Google SEO News and Discussion Forum, webmasters were sent reeling by the changes – which means that quality, unique, and original content is more important now than ever before.
Take advantage of the new anti-webspam algorithm update to power your website with fresh, unique, quality, and original content from your freelance writer. Your SERPs will thank you for it!
Read more2010 saw the successful launch of the .CO domain extension, which has garnered more than 600,000 registrations to date. With Google ranking .CO websites globally in their search results, many speculate that the .CO extension could indeed be the runner up to .com.
While 2010 was a key year for early adopters of 2010, could 2011 be the shining year for the new extension? A Super Bowl commercial, SEO benefits, and auctions of single-letter .CO domains may very well put the extension in the spotlight in the New Year.
.CO Shines in the Super Bowl 2011 Spotlight
GoDaddy launched into the limelight with their 2005 Super Bowl commercial debut, and within the last five years, the domain registration company has catapulted from a market share of 15% to 50%, dominating as the market leader. In 2011, GoDaddy will expose over 100 million Super Bowl viewers to .CO domains, potentially making the extension a household name. In fact, their 30 second commercial will be exclusively focused on promoting the .CO extension.
GoDaddy also made headlines recently when it made .CO the default extension for new domain registrations for a 24 hour period.
SEO Benefits of .CO
True to their word, Google has been ranking .CO globally, and relevant, content-rich .CO websites are performing just as well as their .com counterparts.
From a SEO perspective, the .CO extension opens a rare opportunity to snag keyword rich domains that have long been unavailable in the .com world. If you have been lusting after keyword rich domains for your industry, 2011 is the time to act. Even if the ideal keyword domain has already been registered, chances are you can buy it on the aftermarket now for 1/10th or less of their long-term value. Think of the .CO landscape today as the .com market in 1995.
Growing Fervor around .CO
Currently, i.CO is on the auction block, and some are speculating that the coveted single-letter domain could garner hundreds of thousands – or even millions – when the hammer closes the sale to the highest bidder. The result of this auction will make newsworthy headlines indeed, furthering the mainstream exposure of the domain extension.
.CO has been embraced by many early adopters, and after Super Bowl 2011, it may be the new household name amongst the masses as well.
Read moreLeveraging social media for SEO benefits is no longer for early adopters. Taking advantage of social media to naturally and organically build backlinks will be a mainstream strategy in 2011, at least according to Covario’s study, 2011 The Year of Facebook.
Search Marketers Target SEO via Social Media
Amongst more than 300 search marketers surveyed, 36% of respondents’ primary SEO focus will be on organic link building via social media in 2011. Another 30% of the survey partakers responded that their main SEO strategy will be focusing on link building in general.
When asked about advertising budgets, 46% of the respondents placed their top priority on social media advertising on Facebook and LinkedIn. In second place was local search advertising programs at an underwhelming 18%.
Taking Advantage of Viral Link Building
Given social media’s viral nature, is it any surprise that more search marketers are focusing on integrating SEO with social media? Unlike other link building strategies, social media SEO can take link building to an exponential potential.
Thankfully, you don’t need a social media guru on your staff to take advantage of link building. Simply start by commissioning your freelance SEO writer to compose compelling, interesting, useful, or provocative pieces, which can then be published on your website’s resource section or blog. Thereafter, give your social media campaign a kickstart with our social bookmarking service, which not only instantly builds backlinks, but can ignite a viral reaction to your content. Our social bookmarking service is a natural way to sow the seed of your content in the social networks with the potential to grow a forest of backlinks.
With 2011 just on the horizon, take a page from many search marketers’ planning books and capitalize on the ripe link building potential waiting in the social networks.
Read moreFrom Dell to Starbucks and President Obama to Martha Stewart, they have all taken advantage of today’s smartest business strategy. Even the Washington Post is on board. The social media trend of crowdsourcing is now becoming a core part of business repertoire.
Take, for example, fashion designer Derek Lam, who is not using ruffles or soft silhouettes as inspiration for his next collection. Instead, he is taking advantage of crowdsourcing to launch a collection to be sold exclusively on eBay.
While Derek Lam will be creating the first crowdsourced collection in history, he’s not the only business capitalizing on crowdsourcing. ModCloth’s Be the Buyer Program encourages customers to vote on sample pieces, and the ones with the most votes are put into production for next season. After launching this crowdsourcing initiative, the number of visitors to the ModCloth website surged by 25% within the first month, a testament to the fact that customers love the opportunity to voice their opinions.
From a business perspective, crowdsourcing is ingenious and takes all of the guesswork out of selling. Ask the masses specifically what they want, sell it to them, and enjoy incredibly profitable inventory turnover. When your customers voice their opinions about what products they want, this increases their stake in your inventory – which results in greater sales and deeper customer loyalty.
Today’s consumers want to be involved and connected to the businesses they support, and crowdsourcing is a smart way to demonstrate that your company sincerely cares about their input. In fact, the Gap is hoping to recover from its new logo fiasco by crowdsourcing a new design to mend their brand image amongst the masses.
Of course, the term crowdsourcing entails much more than selecting inventory for your business. Crowdsourcing is being used for an entire gamut of purposes, ranging from raising venture capital to designing affordable logos. However, for retailers, crowdsourcing is the ultimate gem in selling products that consumers passionately demand.
Read moreBacklinks have long been a staple of Google’s Page Rank, but in the near future, the recipe for link juice may just call for more shortening.
On the cusp of October, Google debuted goo.gl, its URL shortener, which will compete against the likes of bit.ly, Twitter’s shortener T.co, and GoDaddy’s foray into shortening with X.co. While the impact of goo.gl on SEO endeavors is still speculative, it could significantly influence how backlinks are counted.
Unlike other URL shorteners, goo.gl’s data could be easily mined by the search engine, which would in turn count the number of shared, shortened links towards PageRank. In theory, this would allow all internet users – and not just bloggers and freelance SEO writers – to influence which links are popular, relevant, and compelling.
Instead of hoping the snappy Top 10 article your freelance SEO writer composed will receive a hefty dose of backlinks from industry blogs with high PageRanks, you could theoretically rely on Facebook fans, Twitter followers, and other social networking users to squeeze you link juice – even if none of them publish their own websites.
In determining relevancy, anchor text would essentially be replaced by the trending ebbs of shortened URLs shared amongst social networkers.
While these theories are speculative at this point, if goo.gl gains traction and becomes a popular URL shortener, the backlink dynamic could be significantly changed. Both for the present and future, it remains wise to have your freelance SEO writer craft content with the social networks in mind.
Should Google mine the data from goo.gl for its algorithm, the Backlink 2.0 era may be just around the corner. Until then, we’ll have our cup of shortening ready.
Read moreWhile every texting, blogging, and Twittering Generation X and Generation Y member loves social networks, a new study finds that your grandma and grandpa may just be on Facebook and Twitter too!
Fastest Growing Group of Social Media Users
In a new research study conducted by Pew Research, older internet users are rapidly embracing social networks, quickly outpacing the growth rate amongst younger generations. In fact, between May 2009 and May 2010, internet users older than 50 doubled their social networking activities, soaring from 22% to 42% of the age segment. To contrast, in the same time period, the growth of social networking use for those between the ages of 18 and 29 rose by just 13%, from 75% to 86% of internet users.
Who Tweets and Posts on Facebook?
These older users are not only utilizing social networks to get back in touch with old friends and classmates, but to share updates on their daily lives as well. In fact, one out of 10 internet users who are 50 years or older Tweet about their day, update their Facebook pages, or utilize other social networks. On an average day, 20% of 50 – 64 year olds online will log onto their social networks.
What Does the Study Mean for Your Business?
If your target audience includes older adults, then social media is your ticket to reaching them. Tweet for their attention and add Facebook posts to become a resource they visit often. In the Pew Research study, many older adults utilize social media and blogs to stay abreast of chronic health issues, and if your business is in the health industry, social media is a double prescription for reaching your audience!
If you don’t have time to tweet or blog, let Communicate Better, your loyal literary sidekick, do all the work for you. We offer Twitter management and blog publication packages that allow you to garner the benefits of social media – without lifting a finger.
Read moreDid you register the .co domain for your website yet? If you missed the launch on July 20th, your next order of business may be to visit your registrar to protect your internet properties – and to see if the short, snappy, or keyword-rich domain name you’ve always wanted is available.
.co Makes Logical Sense
In the 25 years since .com launched, more than 90 million .com websites have been registered. While other top level domains (TLDs) have come and gone, .co is speculated to be the next .com due to its association with “company,” “commerce,” and “corporation,” as well as the familiarity of .co in country-specific domains, such as .co.uk and .co.jp. In the two weeks since the launch, nearly 400,000 .co domains have already been registered.
Fortune 500 Companies Buying .co Domains
It’s not just cybersquatters who snapped up .co domain names at $30 per year. In fact, 70% of companies who are in the Brand Finance Top 500 have purchased .co extensions, including Apple, American Express, Amazon, BMW, Canon, Cartier, CNN, Disney, Ebay, Coca-Cola, Ford, Hilton, Google, Honda, IKEA, Kodak, IBM, McDonalds, MTV, Microsoft, Nokia, Nike, Sony, Samsung, Toyota, Toshiba, Visa, Yahoo, and numerous others.
Opportunity to Shorten Your Domain
Other companies are viewing the .cos as a smart opportunity to rebrand themselves with the domain names they’ve always coveted. Twitter purchased t.co, while Overstock bought o.co for $350,000, and e.co’s auction ended at $81,000. Other interesting purchases of .co domains include:
Categorized as a “Global” Extension by Google
Before the launch, some critics of .co were wary about the possibility that the Columbia-based extension would be considered by Google to remain a country code top-level domain (ccTLD), as it did with the .cm extension, making SEO difficult on a global level. However, two days after the launch, an official Google spokesperson remarked, ”We will rank .co domains appropriately if the content is globally targeted. Webmasters will soon have the functionality to be able to specify this by using the geotargeting options in Google Webmaster Tools.” Google will treat .co domains in the same fashion as .com, .org, .net, and other internationally used extensions – making .co indeed a viable, mainstream alternative to .com.
At 90 million domain names, .com is indeed beyond saturated, and .co may just be the extension to open another 90 million opportunities in the years to come.
Read moreThanks to our new Twitter management service, you can take full advantage of Tweets without lifting a feather!
Communicate Better is proud to announce its customized, manual Twitter management services that build your followers, promote your website, and engage your audience with custom tweets – which translate into hands-free Tweeting for you.
Through our services, we help you harness the power of Twitter in building your traffic and potential customers, solidifying your brand, and deepening loyalty amongst your customers.
In addition to building your followers, our Twitter management service monitors those who may be tweeting @ you and engages in the conversation, thus building an active and viral community.
Enhance your online presence and utilize our keyword infused tweets to target the search engines while simultaneously building your credibility via timely customized content aimed at your industry.
By utilizing the power of social sites, via our social bookmarking services, or our new Twitter management service, your business can tap in to an expansive and vast audience while enjoying enhanced search engine rankings. You can now reach a large and growing audience, as well as targeted traffic, at a fraction of the cost of PPC campaigns.
Communicate Better is dedicated to your success, and we will continue to offer innovative content development and SEO enhancing services to help you reach or exceed your goals!
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