SEO Strategies You Should Do and Not Do To Your Site

Google has revealed some SEO DOs And DON’TS. According to Google, via WebProNews.com, here are som

Google: Good Content Matters More Than SEO

Google’s Matt Cutts put the smackdown on SEO at a recent SXSW session. This is what WebProNew

 

SEO Strategies You Should Do and Not Do To Your Site

March 24, 2012 in content, content development, SEO, Tenisha Mercer

Google announces SEO do's and don'ts

Source

Google has revealed some SEO DOs And DON’TS.

According to Google, via WebProNews.com, here are some things you SHOULD NOT do in your SEO efforts:

  1. Have no value proposition: Don’t assume a site should rank #1 and not know why it’s helpful to searchers  — and potential customers.
  2. Use a segmented approach: Make sure your SEO goals match your company’s objectives and goals. Your SEO goals should be aligned with company and department goals, and vice versa.
  3. Implement time-consuming workarounds: Work harder, not smarter. Avoid short-term strategies as opposed to spending time on research and development. The more time you spend on the front end, the more time you save, not to mention money and effort.
  4. Get caught up in the latest SEO trends: Ignore those “tricks” and “secrets” that promise to boost rankings; they often don’t work and could get you punished by Google. They are trendy, fly-by-night shortcuts, which can sometimes have lasting, dire consequences. Instead, focus on proven techniques that are time-tested and that work. They may be more time-consuming, but there’s a reason why they work.

Now, here are some things that Google says you SHOULD do:

  1. Make your site stand out from the pack. Be original.
  2. Make sure your site content includes relevant keywords.  This will require some research, as you are putting yourself in the mind of a prospective customer and what they are searching for when looking at your site. Also, use Google keyword tools to analyze keyword searches and trends. Bottom line: Know your customers, and what they might search for, and back it up with keyword analysis tools..
  3. Master the fundamentals. Create unique title tags and meta descriptions, and have good internal links.
  4. Sign up for email forwarding in Webmaster Tools: Help Google help you.
  5. Build buzz: Use content to build natural links, +1s on Google Plus, likes, follows, etc. Offer value to your audience, that’s designed to be shared and reshared online.
  6. Stay relevant: Nothing’s worse than a stale, out-of-date site. Keep your content fresh and try new and cutting edge tools, such as social media.

Are you doing any of the “dos” or any of the “do nots”?

Google: Good Content Matters More Than SEO

March 20, 2012 in content, content development, Content Marketing, Google, Google Panda Update

Source

Google’s Matt Cutts put the smackdown on SEO at a recent SXSW session.

This is what WebProNews reported Cutts said during a SXSW session, “Dear Google & Bing: Help Me Rank Better!”

And the idea,” Cutts said, “Is basically to try and level the playing ground a little bit, so all those people who have sort of been doing, for lack of a better word, ‘over-optimization’ or overly doing their SEO, compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we want to sort of make that playing field a little more level.

So that’s the sort of thing where we try to make the website…the Googlebot smarter, we try to make our relevance more adaptive, so the people who don’t do SEO, we handle that, and then we also start to look at the people who sort of abuse it, whether they throw too many keywords on the page or whether they exchange way too many links, or whatever they’re doing to sort of go beyond what a normal person would expect in a particular area. So that is something where we continue to pay attention, and continue to work on it…we have several engineers on my team working on that right now.”

Is This New?

Cutts’ comments only confirm what we had already suspected: Good quality content matters even more — ahead of a site that is SEO’d to death.  Bottom line: A site with good, quality content can receive more ranking than a site that’s been SEO’d to death i.e. content farms.

Confusing, much?

Not really, as this is what we’ve suspected all along. But Google is known to send out mixed signals, change up the algorithm and then we figure out MONTHS later that what worked at one point doesn’t work now.

Why These Steps Are Good For Content Marketing

For content marketers, this is a welcome change. Before Panda, we saw way too many sites with crap for content, but ranked on page #1 because they had good SEO. Hopefully, the playing field is leveled, so that websites will now demand, pay for more good SEO content AND recognize its worth.

Does that mean your site’s SEO can be crappy but you’d still rank well with good, quality content?

I wouldn’t go quite that far, but what Google appears to be saying is that good content is just as important — if not more — than SEO. You need both to have a site with good rankings.

What do you think about Cutts’ comments?

 

 

Content Marketing Is Here to Stay

March 13, 2012 in content, content development, Content Marketing, Uncategorized

For those of you who haven’t gotten the memo: Content marketing has arrived.

That’s the consensus of SXSW, who see what used to be the stuff of PR departments, is now an instrumental tool in marketing brands worldwide. No longer is the focus on ads, but telling a story and using that as a soft pitch.

A recent study from Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs found that content marketing represents 26% of all marketing budgets.

With thousands attending one of the most influential social media show, SXSW, I’m glad that folks have realized: Content marketing is here to stay.

 

 

Who Owns That Tweet on Twitter?

February 29, 2012 in content, Content Marketing, social media

 

Noah Kravitz is sued by his former employer, PhoneDog.com, for allegedly renaming and taking ownership of their Twitter account.

Noak Kravitz - New York Times

What’s the value of Twitter followers?

To PhoneDog.com, it’s a cool $340,000 –or $2.50 per follower, per month for eight months — that it says it seeks from former employee Noah Kravitz. The mobile phone website claims Kravitz kept and renamed a company-owned employee Twitter account he maintained for them after his employment ended.

Here’s how it went down, according to a story in the New York Times.

Allegedly, Phonedog claims Kravitz amassed a huge amount of followers — 17K — under his Twitter handle Phonedog_Noah. Kravitz left PhoneDog in 2010, but said the company asked him to keep tweeting for them.

This is what Kravitz told the NYT:

PhoneDog asked if he “would tweet on their behalf from time to time and I said sure, as we were parting on good terms,” adding Phonedog told him he could keep his Twitter account.

That all changed, Kravitz claims, when he switched his handle to @NoahKravitz — and kept all of the company’s followers that he had amassed uner his old emploieye Twitter handle. Phonedog sued in July, citing their Twitter followers as their customer list and that Kravitz twitterjacked their account.

And this is where the whole case gets interesting — and murky.

The costs and resources invested by PhoneDog Media into growing its followers, fans and general brand awareness through social media are substantial and are considered property of PhoneDog Media L.L.C. We intend to aggressively protect our customer lists and confidential information, intellectual property, trademark and brands.”

Kravitz claims PhoneDog has overestimated the value of its followers — and that the real issue is back pay and his 15% stake in PhoneDog’s ad revenue. Further, Kravitz claims that Twitter is the legal owner of the tweets he is being sued for –  not PhoneDog.

Setting Twitter Precedent?
With so many companies outsourcing their social media accounts — whether to a freelancer, Twitter ghostwriter, spokesperson or even delegating the responsibility to an employee — what is the legal law about taking a company’s followers or even maintaining a page? Who owns content?  And, what, if any, paperwork, must be signed off on in order for someone to maintain social media accounts? Are Twitter followers customer lists? When you leave, do you take your tweets — and followers– with you?

All thorny issues that only a judge and jury can decide.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Google Panda Minor Update In February

February 29, 2012 in Google, Google Panda Update

google panda announces minor update in February

The Google Panda wheels are churning once again, with recent news about a Google Panda update listed among 40 changes for the month of February, alone.

This most recent update comes on the heels of Google Panda’s one-year anniversary. Google Panda signaled a seismic shift to many websites’ search engine marketing results last year. Google placed greater emphasis an authoritative, quality content — a shift that some websites have just started to recover from after a series of Panda updates last year.

This is what WebProNews recently reported from Google:

We improved how Panda interacts with our indexing and ranking systems, making it more integrated into our pipelines. We also released a minor update to refresh the data for Panda … This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web.”

So, there you have it folks. Panda is more apart of how Google indexes, and quality is paramount.

Want to see the entire list of changes? A lot of them have to do with search result, but here’s the list verbatim from Google:

  • More coverage for related searches. [launch codename “Fuzhou”] This launch brings in a new data source to help generate the “Searches related to” section, increasing coverage significantly so the feature will appear for more queries. This section contains search queries that can help you refine what you’re searching for.
  • Tweak to categorizer for expanded sitelinks. [launch codename “Snippy”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] This improvement adjusts a signal we use to try and identify duplicate snippets. We were applying a categorizer that wasn’t performing well for our expanded sitelinks, so we’ve stopped applying the categorizer in those cases. The result is more relevant sitelinks.
  • Less duplication in expanded sitelinks. [launch codename “thanksgiving”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] We’ve adjusted signals to reduce duplication in the snippets forexpanded sitelinks. Now we generate relevant snippets based more on the page content and less on the query.
  • More consistent thumbnail sizes on results page. We’ve adjusted the thumbnail size for most image content appearing on the results page, providing a more consistent experience across result types, and also across mobile and tablet. The new sizes apply to rich snippet results for recipes and applications, movie posters, shopping results, book results, news results and more.
  • More locally relevant predictions in YouTube. [project codename “Suggest”] We’ve improved the ranking for predictions in YouTube to provide more locally relevant queries. For example, for the query [lady gaga in ] performed on the US version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in times square], but for the same search performed on the Indian version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in India].
  • More accurate detection of official pages. [launch codename “WRE”] We’ve made an adjustment to how we detect official pages to make more accurate identifications. The result is that many pages that were previously misidentified as official will no longer be.
  • Refreshed per-URL country information. [Launch codename “longdew”, project codename “country-id data refresh”] We updated the country associations for URLs to use more recent data.
  • Expand the size of our images index in Universal Search. [launch codename “terra”, project codename “Images Universal”] We launched a change to expand the corpus of results for which we show images in Universal Search. This is especially helpful to give more relevant images on a larger set of searches.
  • Minor tuning of autocomplete policy algorithms. [project codename “Suggest”] We have a narrow set of policies for autocomplete for offensive and inappropriate terms. This improvement continues to refine the algorithms we use to implement these policies.
  • “Site:” query update [launch codename “Semicolon”, project codename “Dice”] This change improves the ranking for queries using the “site:” operator by increasing the diversity of results.
  • Improved detection for SafeSearch in Image Search. [launch codename "Michandro", project codename “SafeSearch”] This change improves our signals for detecting adult content in Image Search, aligning the signals more closely with the signals we use for our other search results.
  • Interval based history tracking for indexing. [project codename “Intervals”] This improvement changes the signals we use in document tracking algorithms.
  • Improvements to foreign language synonyms. [launch codename “floating context synonyms”, project codename “Synonyms”] This change applies an improvement we previously launched for English to all other languages. The net impact is that you’ll more often find relevant pages that include synonyms for your query terms.
  • Disabling two old fresh query classifiers. [launch codename “Mango”, project codename “Freshness”] As search evolves and new signals and classifiers are applied to rank search results, sometimes old algorithms get outdated. This improvement disables two old classifiers related to query freshness.
  • More organized search results for Google Korea. [launch codename “smoothieking”, project codename “Sokoban4”] This significant improvement to search in Korea better organizes the search results into sections for news, blogs and homepages.
  • Fresher images. [launch codename “tumeric”] We’ve adjusted our signals for surfacing fresh images. Now we can more often surface fresh images when they appear on the web.
  • Update to the Google bar. [project codename “Kennedy”] We continue to iterate in our efforts to deliver a beautifully simple experience across Google products, and as part of that this month we made further adjustments to the Google bar. The biggest change is that we’ve replaced the drop-down Google menu in the November redesign with a consistent and expanded set of links running across the top of the page.
  • Adding three new languages to classifier related to error pages. [launch codename "PNI", project codename "Soft404"] We have signals designed to detect crypto 404 pages (also known as “soft 404s”), pages that return valid text to a browser but the text only contain error messages, such as “Page not found.” It’s rare that a user will be looking for such a page, so it’s important we be able to detect them. This change extends a particular classifier to Portuguese, Dutch and Italian.
  • Improvements to travel-related searches. [launch codename “nesehorn”] We’ve made improvements to triggering for a variety of flight-related search queries. These changes improve the user experience for our Flight Search feature with users getting more accurate flight results.
  • Data refresh for related searches signal. [launch codename “Chicago”, project codename “Related Search”] One of the many signals we look at to generate the “Searches related to” section is the queries users type in succession. If users very often search for [apple] right after [banana], that’s a sign the two might be related. This update refreshes the model we use to generate these refinements, leading to more relevant queries to try.
  • International launch of shopping rich snippets. [project codename “rich snippets”]Shopping rich snippets help you more quickly identify which sites are likely to have the most relevant product for your needs, highlighting product prices, availability, ratings and review counts. This month we expanded shopping rich snippets globally (they were previously only available in the US, Japan and Germany).
  • Improvements to Korean spelling. This launch improves spelling corrections when the user performs a Korean query in the wrong keyboard mode (also known as an “IME”, or input method editor). Specifically, this change helps users who mistakenly enter Hangul queries in Latin mode or vice-versa.
  • Improvements to freshness. [launch codename “iotfreshweb”, project codename “Freshness”] We’ve applied new signals which help us surface fresh content in our results even more quickly than before.
  • Web History in 20 new countries. With Web History, you can browse and search over your search history and webpages you’ve visited. You will also get personalized search results that are more relevant to you, based on what you’ve searched for and which sites you’ve visited in the past. In order to deliver more relevant and personalized search results, we’ve launched Web History in Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Morocco, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Estonia, Kuwait, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Nigeria, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Bosnia and Herzegowina, Azerbaijan, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Republic of Moldova, and Ghana. Web History is turned on only for people who have a Google Account and previously enabled Web History.
  • Improved snippets for video channels. Some search results are links to channels with many different videos, whether on mtv.com, Hulu or YouTube. We’ve had a feature for a while now that displays snippets for these results including direct links to the videos in the channel, and this improvement increases quality and expands coverage of these rich “decorated” snippets. We’ve also made some improvements to our backends used to generate the snippets.
  • Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.
  • Improvements to English spell correction. [launch codename “Kamehameha”] This change improves spelling correction quality in English, especially for rare queries, by making one of our scoring functions more accurate.
  • Improvements to coverage of News Universal. [launch codename “final destination”] We’ve fixed a bug that caused News Universal results not to appear in cases when our testing indicates they’d be very useful.
  • Consolidation of signals for spiking topics. [launch codename “news deserving score”, project codename “Freshness”] We use a number of signals to detect when a new topic is spiking in popularity. This change consolidates some of the signals so we can rely on signals we can compute in realtime, rather than signals that need to be processed offline. This eliminates redundancy in our systems and helps to ensure we can continue to detect spiking topics as quickly as possible.
  • Better triggering for Turkish weather search feature. [launch codename “hava”] We’ve tuned the signals we use to decide when to present Turkish users with the weather search feature. The result is that we’re able to provide our users with the weather forecast right on the results page with more frequency and accuracy.
  • Visual refresh to account settings page. We completed a visual refresh of the account settings page, making the page more consistent with the rest of our constantly evolving design.
  • Panda update. This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web.
  • Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.
  • SafeSearch update. We have updated how we deal with adult content, making it more accurate and robust. Now, irrelevant adult content is less likely to show up for many queries.
  • Spam update. In the process of investigating some potential spam, we found and fixed some weaknesses in our spam protections.
  • Improved local results. We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.

What do you think about the most recent Google Panda update?

 

Memes Become an Important Part of Visual Content Marketing

February 27, 2012 in content, content development, Content Marketing, social media, Tenisha Mercer, visual content marketing

Memes are an increasinly important part of visual content marketing

Source: Shutterstock

Unless you’re living under a rock — and don’t troll YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr or Twitter– you’ve probably noticed that memes are red hot.

Memes are wide ranging,  and take the form of hyperlinks, videos, pictures, websites, hashtags, or just a word or phrase online that go viral at lightning speed. Often, they evolve into commetary memes and parodies.

One such controversial meme, Shit White Girls Say to … Black Girls, was so popular that it garnered 8.3 million hits recently on YouTube. It also earned its creator, Chescaleigh, an interview by CNN’s Andersen Cooper — and spawned countless competitors.

No matter what form they take, memes are all forms of visual content marketing, as this post by Christine Dunn explained on Content Marketing Institute. Mostly,  memes going viral has largely been the work of college students on social media networks.

Now, corporate America is getting in on the trend. Eager for new and upstart ways to get their audience connected to products — without a hard sales pitch — this platform is increasing the spotlight on memes. The ante is now upped, because the visual content marketing methods in memes are now an ever important part of content marketing.

Companies are scrambling to reproduce them, as a result. But, as with things that go “viral,” sometimes there is no rhyme or reason. Try too hard and the secret sauce gets lost. But that isn’t stopping many companies from trying their hands at memes.

“If you think about it, these things are easy to make and yet elicit a personal, emotional reaction from people,” Gerry Praysman, “Buzz Marketer” at Brainshark, told Dunn. “It doesn’t take long to see what the picture means, but they get people to ask what’s interesting about it. If they’re witty and make sense, people will laugh at it for 15 minutes. People will sit and go from meme to meme.”

Mediums like Pinterest — an uber popular online visual pin-up board – and YouTube only increase their popularity — on any given day, you can find memes on both of these mediums.  They can take sometimes complicated information and break it down into digestable visual bites.

What do you think about memes’ popularity? Will you use them in your content marketing?

 

 

Do You Have Mobile On Your Radar?

February 23, 2012 in content, content development, Content Marketing, mobile

Mobile is hot — super hot. No, it’s smokin’ hot!

Now we can quantify it: Mobile Internet use has doubled, to 8.5 percent this year, up from 4.3% last year, when compared to desktop use, according to StatCounter.com.

 

Mobile use statistics by StatCounter.com

That increase may seem like a small amount — and it is, relatively speaking.

But if you are a content marketer, you need to pay attention, as more and more consumers turn to mobile to find things. Your next client may request a mobile site, as more Internet users turn to the smart phones, instead of traditional PCS or even laptops,  to find the nearest hair salon, the best takeout joint , or for everyday Internet use.

That means you’ll have to have mobile on your mind as you develop content — and brush up on mobile content strategies (they can be very differnet than those of static websites, because more emphasis is placed on how content is layed out).

Mobile is big  and, as indicated by the latest numbers, has nowhere to go but up.

Do you  have a mobile content strategy?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Will Your Content Marketing Be Replaced By Computer Generated Content?

February 17, 2012 in content development, Content Marketing

 

 

 

 

 

 

Never say I didn’t warn you: Narrative Science, a company that produces bot-generated stories from computers, is now producing stories from tweets. Stories from tweet streams? Apparently so.

This is Narrative Science’s description of its beta project:

“We tell the story behind the data,” its description said, in a story on WebProNews.com. “Our technology identifies trends and angles within large data sources and automatically creates compelling copy. We can build upon stories, providing deeper context around particular subjects over time. Every story is generated entirely from scratch and is always unique. Our technology can be applied to a broad range of content categories and we’re branching into new areas every day.”

The company is analyzing tweets about Republican primary candidates and using an engine to generate a daily report.

Here’s a computer-generated story about New Gingrich.

NEWT GINGRICH GAINS ATTENTION WITH HOT-BUTTON TOPICS TAXES, CHARACTER ISSUES

Newt Gingrich received the largest increase in Tweets about him today. Twitter activity associated with the candidate has shot up since yesterday, with most users tweeting about taxes and character issues. Newt Gingrich has been consistently popular on Twitter, as he has been the top riser on the site for the last four days. Conversely, the number of tweets about Ron Paul has dropped in the past 24 hours. Another traffic loser was Rick Santorum, who has also seen tweets about him fall off a bit.

From a writing perspective it’s  not bad. But it’s not brilliant, either. Just OK. I’ve read a lot worse — from humans. Usually, computer-generated articles from articles, or article spinning, usually makes no sense– and will plummet your SEO ranking as a result, especially with Google’s increased emphasis on quality content.

But wait … will this computer-generated content replace content marketing? I’m going to say no, not for those who want and are willing to pay for good, quality content. But for bottom-of-the barrel companies willing to pay low, low rates for content? Maybe so. After all, at least it will read better than the gobbledygook writing that makes zero sense, that they get for low, low prices.

What do you think about computer generated content? Is it a good or bad move for content marketing?

 

Are You Sharing Your Content Marketing?

February 9, 2012 in content, content development, Content Marketing, social media, Tenisha Mercer

Content marketing is all about sharing.

Companies that try to keep content to themselves are shooting themselves in the foot. Companies that share their knowledge — like Coca-Cola, Mint.com and American Express —  are reaping the benefits and becoming content marketing thought leaders in the process.

A 2011 study by Content Marketing Institute found that content marketing will remain a priority in 2012. Specifically, content sharing is the name of the game. Last year, marketers distributed more business-to-business content on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn than ever before.

Look at this Bluegrass Interactive infographic about content marketing at content marketing leaders like Coca-Cola, Mint.com and American Express. Coca-Cola has a massive online presence on Facebook, and others create and share content across multiple platforms that others share.

What is your content marketing strategy? Do you plan to share more content in 2012?

 

Content Marketing Explosion
 

Is Pinterest The Next Facebook?

February 9, 2012 in content, social media

Pinterest logo

 

As quickly as Facebook and Twitter zoomed to the top of social media sphere, social media analysts have been eager to annoint the newest, hottest, newest site in social media.

There have been lots of contenders — deal-oriented sites like Groupon are super hot– but it now appears there is a clear winner — Pinterest.com. In just 9 months, the site has gotten 10 million users, according to TechCrunch.com.

It’s official: Pinterest is the new social media phenomenon.

The Numbers
It’s clear that Pinterest.com is the social media network to watch. Ragan.com reports that it grew 4,000% in the last six months. The time users spend on the site is also expensive, according to Ragan.com:

At an average of 88.3 minutes per visitor, it ranks third on engagement behind Facebook and Tumblr and well ahead of LinkedIn (16 minutes) and Google Plus (5.1 minutes),” Ragan.com reports.

TechCrunch reported Pinterest had 11.7 million unique monthly visitors in Janaury 2011 — up from 7.5 million in December and a paltry 418,000 in May 2011, according to figures from ComStat. Drumroll, please: That’s the fastest growth of a single site — besting social media juggernauts like Twitter and even Facebook.

Its growth is nothing short of astounding.

What is Pinterest?
Pinterest is a social image sharing site.

It’s really not a social networking site. It’s nothing like Twitter or Facebook — and I think that’s one reason why it’s doing so well. Social media “trailblazers,” in their rush to create the next newest and greatest, often only can see beyond creating a duplicate of what’s worked before — the next Twitter, the next Facebook — instead of innovating.

This is why Pinterest has grown so rapidly; nothing like it is on the social media landscape today, at least from what I can tell. Much of Pinterest’s growth is coming from a seemingly unlikely sector: moms.

All kinds of images are on the site — hair, dogs, houses, home decor, recipes, pictures of food, you name it.

How does Pinterest Work?
Pinterest allows you to “pin” items on virtual bulletin boards on the site, via a quick click button on your tool bar. You know how you browse sites like food.com and you want to bookmark several recipes?

Pinterest does it for you, pinning tem on your bulletin boards. You can browse others’ bulletin boards by topic, or view others friends’ bulletin boards. This is what has made Pinterest so popular among moms: They’re “pinning” — posting pinups of recipes, home decor and other topics — at a furious pace.

Keep These Things in Mind:

I. It’s a public network and others can see what you pin.

2. You can’t sell things on Pinterest, but retailers have gotten a record number of referrals.

3. You can collaborate on boards with multiple contributors.

Do you use Pinterest?