Worried about your next move in SEO strategy?  One of Google’s most recent algorithm updates focused on giving credence and rewards to websites featuring local content.  Not only did the company create an algorithm that helped to drive more traffic to long-tail local keyword pages – it also helped locally created sites to increase their overall search rankings for broader search terms.

Now, with the recent trend of pushing local pages, suddenly Google Maps and Google Places are great web tools to utilize for your SEO strategy!  Google Places is actually made for local business and provides assistance in creating a quality link that shares local information about the business.

Google Places allows company owners to establish a physical address, owner verification, proper categorization, reviews and directory listings, searchable address matching, and other localized information.  Google Places acts as a “digital shop” for your company, and because of their exclusively local approach to SEO, many companies are now locally ranked as #1 in relatively broad keyword searches because of the relevance of the local search query.

Google Maps is a similar tool but focuses more on directions and listings rather than in-depth local information.  Still, Google Maps has the capacity to help establish a business and even direct users how to find the location, and what other businesses are nearby.  The potential here is massive, and we can clearly see that localized content is making a comeback in a big way.

The best strategy in a post-Panda Internet world is to focus on local content, not only as a means to SEO, but as simple marketing fundamentals.  Build your audience from the ground up, from the city up, and expand at a natural pace.  It clearly works offline, and this is the way it’s going to start working online throughout the next decade.

The relationship between Google and the average website owner is indeed a complicated one.  Google has made many enemies over the past couple of years because of its controversial algorithm changes…and yet who doesn’t want to impress Google and be on the receiving end of a traffic hike?

The Google dynamic is highly sensitive, but truthfully, it is a relationship based on honesty.  The basic point these algorithm updates have reiterated is that Google wants white hat SEO methods, and is turning its back on SPAM, and SPAM-like content that is written cheaply and with SEO manipulation in mind.

This means avoiding keyword stuffing, avoiding cheap and easy links, and avoiding “content mill” style writing which basically recycles material into something barely readable.  The entire idea of the content mill is based on “cheap and easy writing” which will create a link or two.  However, the latest algorithms are now penalizing sites that do just this – namely, create dozens and dozens of “too easy” links in a shallow effort to boost reputation.

So yes, Google is going overboard and may accidentally be penalizing quality sites that simply have a few too many cheap backlinks.  However, by taking a stricter approach to quality control – actually analyzing your links and your content and checking them for black hat or gray hat techniques (i.e. poorly worded content, over-optimized anchor text, excessive keywording) you can avoid the penalties that are befalling many companies right now.

The mistake so many websites are making today – and paying for dearly – is to assume that they are safe from Google’s Panda-Penguin updates simply because they have quality content.  It is a far better idea to scrutinize your content well in advance and focus on giving a “clean” and “pure” product to the almighty Google Bot.  Do this and avoid Panda, Penguin and whatever other scare comes your way.

Keep your SEM strategy clean and honest and you will prevail.

Are you interested in increasing your web presence online?  This is a very important issue and is actually at the heart of the SEO industry.  SEO, otherwise known as Search Engine Optimization, is the process of promoting yourself online and increasing your search engine visibility.

If you are a business owner new to the idea of SEO then it’s easy to become overwhelmed at all the various facets of online business promotion.  We generally recommend a dual-action strategy: Organic SEO with PPC.

Organic SEO

Organic Search Optimization can take some time to pay dividends – sometimes as long as six months to a year, depending on your industry. Organic SEO can cost more initially, but can be more cost effective once you’ve achieved a certain level of market penetration.

PPC Marketing

On the other hand, PPC Marketing can yield immediate results, if managed effectively. This is good because you can start bringing in buyers right away, but it will also require a relatively constant amount of budget on an ongoing basis.

Here are three specific avenues you want to think about, and that will help you communicate with the SEO consultant.

1.    You want a strong local presence.

Make sure that Google Places, Google Maps and Facebook Places are all part of the plan.  It is much easier to compete and win for local search results, since the Google Venice update actually helps to send local traffic to you, even for broader keywords with local phrases added

2.    You want long-tail keywords relevant to your industry.

Don’t go after broad keywords unless you have lots of patience and time. Instead, go after less popular (but still niche popular) keywords.  Rather than take blind guesses, the best course of action is to research the most popular “long-tail” keywords that have a reasonable degree of searches but with low competition for them.  Make sure these words are relevant to your company so as not to face a penalty from the search engine.

3.    Diversify Your Links

Much attention has been given in recent weeks to over-optimization, which is essentially second-rate content used only to artificially increase the number of links.  With the recent Google algorithm updates, and presumably with more updates on the way, it is essential to diversify your links (from a variety of directories and blogs) as well as diversify your SEO by looking into other search engines besides Google.

It’s not hard to break into web marketing and to get some “instant success.”  It won’t be colossal success right away, but if you strive to follow these three paths, you will establish a strong reputation in the business.

Google Penguin has already affected numerous online companies since its debut in spring 2012.  One of the first casualties mentioned was Ezine Articles, which continues to fall in rankings, suffering penalties over “over-optimized content”.  In fact, many SEO companies are now shifting their attention away from article directories (now seen as cheap links) and are instead intensifying their efforts on guest blogging.  Guest blogging is when you post a guest blog for another website.  When an SEO company handles this, this indicates not only creating the material, but also finding a quality blog at which to post such information.

Surprisingly, even Google’s own Blogger.com was caught in the crossfire, and actually suffered a slight traffic decrease after the Penguin algorithm update went into effect.  This is a strong indication of at least two things: (a) that Google is not necessarily giving preferential treatment to its own sister sites; and (b) that low quality individual pages are definitely negative factors affecting the overall site.  This explains why Blogger and Ezine Articles both took a hit – just think of the many individual pages on each website that are of very low quality.  While there may be some solid gold content on both sites respectively, not every page is a winner.

Companies are already reacting to Penguin, and perhaps even more so than Google Panda, since the world has had the chance to learn about Panda over the past year and a half.  Now, website owners are rewriting their pages and making sure that all content is fresh, and ready for new and improved Penguin crawling and indexing.  Lastly, some companies that are now thoroughly frustrated by the ever-changing algorithms – are now focusing attention on local advertising (through Google Places, Facebook Places and mobile marketing) as well as other search engines like Yahoo and Bing.

Don’t give up hope.  Diversify your web marketing plan and you will be rewarded!

Whether you need Organic Search Engine Optimization or PPC Marketing, Level9Solutions can help. Complete our SEO Research form for further information.

Some months ago, I wrote about ineffective data security practices in my blog titled “How much do you really know about your internal computer security?”. In that blog post, I discussed how senior management in many large corporations are simply not aware of many of these weaknesses.

Even when management is made aware of severe security threats, there are no processes in place to expedite a thorough review of all security processes and put fixes in place. Most companies have separate project ‘queues’ in place to deal with compliance and regulatory updates, but not for security issues. Considering that a serious breach could result in massive loss of customer confidence, huge fines, loss in market value, this is a no-brainer.

Now back to LinkedIn. By all accounts, LinkedIn is storing passwords in encrypted format, unfortunately a big lesson learned is that just because you have some encryption, does not mean you are protected. Having ‘effective’ encryption, and overall security mindset is what helps. In the case of LinkedIn, even though they used SHA-1 encryption, they neglected to use ‘Salting’. ‘Salting’ is when random bits are added to the password hash, so that the resulting output is unpredictable. PC World has some more details on this.

The bigger issue for LinkedIn and other breaches like this is that since people tend to use the same password of multiple websites, same users’ data is vulnerable on many other websites as well.

The lesson learned is that security issues have to be taken seriously and existing issues cannot be fixed using simple band-aids. More often than not, applying band-aids can cover up more serious underlying issues – issues that may never be discovered till personal user data starts showing up on sites like Pastebin. It is unbelievable that some companies still think hiding columns of unsecured data form website interfaces solves the problem. Unfortunately some companies learn the hard way, after they are faced with massive regulatory fines, loss of customer confidence and plunging market value after a major leak. Don’t let your company be one of them.

One of the most important statements from Google, and every SEO expert who claims to know Google so well, is that it’s time to stop writing content for search crawlers (or robots) and instead to focus on writing content for human beings.  Now, if you have ever written articles for “robots” (meaning a bunch of standard paragraphs, somewhat coherent, but mainly existing so as to accommodate a series of odd keyword texts) then you may find the idea of writing for human beings intimidating.

How does one write for people and stop thinking of search engine optimization in terms of keyword density?  (Indeed, keyword density is not as important as it once was)  There is still such a thing as keyword density in web marketing and SEO today.  The only difference is that the algorithm has been highly improved, and can now detect “natural” occurrences of the keyword rather than the somewhat obsessive 5% or even 1% repetition.

When you converse with or write to other human beings, there really is no reason for keyword density – a staple of the search engine design.  Rather, there is a need for repetition and emphasis; an artistic and persuasive use of a recurring word or sound.  Obviously, using too many instances of a word would distract your audience.  And yes, when they read content obviously written for SEO robot purposes and not for human readers, they will lose interest.

So your first order of business is to analyze all of your website’s pages and make sure they pass the “human test.”  Do all of the articles and the web copy pages make sense?  Or is there incoherency from one paragraph to the next?  It helps tremendously to stop “selling” your idea and instead to focus on more important issues like product details, the ins and outs of your industry, and the latest news that concerns your customers and your unique market.

Writing for human beings is actually a much more rewarding process so take steps now to make sure your entire website passes the human test and is spared from Google’s Penguin rampage!

Have you heard about Penguin?  Everywhere you turn in marketing, people are talking about it, and stating that it’s time for small to moderate to large business owners to take quick action and update their sites to be “Penguin ready” – if they haven’t done so already.

Google Penguin “one ups” Google Panda by actually penalizing websites that “over optimize.”  What does this mean?  Is there such a thing as over-optimizing?  In general, terms, no. Optimization is a rather broad term that simply means readying your website to be easily crawled and indexed by search engines.  Therefore, the more you optimization work you do; the better.  As we’ve learned before, the more content you produce; the better.
However, what Penguin is specifically penalizing is websites that over-optimize in terms of excessive keyword repetition.  This is indeed an Internet phenomenon, and one that you can’t really imagine seeing in the entertainment world, the news world or in print media.  After all, how many times does a newscaster begin his/her story with “Are you looking for information on tube socks?  Well, we have information on tube socks.  For more on tube socks, let’s turn it over to Jane…”

You would think the newscaster was insane!  Likewise, publishing keyword-excessive content seems to go hand-in-hand with a lower quality of writing.  Not surprisingly, article directories are suffering from the Penguin strike in a big way, as many of these sites are guilty of over-keywording articles and over-generalizing information, to the point that it’s not really helpful to a real human Internet viewer.

Penguin is actually doing a lot of good, as webmasters and site owners are now being forced to re-edit their content and make sure it is of interest to human beings, and not merely to robot crawlers mindlessly looking for keywords.  If you haven’t updated your site to be Penguin friendly yet, then by all means do so…one of the algorithms most controversial changes is the fact that entire sites can be penalized for a large number of individual pages with over-optimized content.  It’s time to start taking Internet writing seriously!

If you want to advertise your company to the online world, then what should your SEO campaign consist of?  Don’t make the mistake of leaving the SEO company to decide.  Not only are there some unscrupulous types out there who will take advantage of ignorance, but more to the point, you will never know how well you’re doing unless you actively take charge of the campaign.

That means that you must plan goals, and decide the most profitable avenues for your business.  So let’s review some major SEO arenas that are most likely to benefit your company.

1. Article Marketing

Article marketing has taken a “hit” lately as some of the top article directory sites (where articles are submitted and published) have taken a dive in Google search rankings.  However, article marketing still remains a legitimate way to build links – provided you’re writing quality stuff.

2. Blogging

Blogging and guest-blogging (on blogs of online acquaintances) helps you market your business by targeting keywords and writing detailed blogs that are informative or educational.  Blogging gives you more freedom creatively and more control over publishing rights.

3. Press Releases

Press releases are articles submitted to news outlets, meaning they can by syndicated and get you loads of traffic.  However, these releases must be written in a sophisticated way and have a newsworthy topic.  Press releases can be distributed for free on cheap directories or distributed globally for a fee.

4. Social Media Marketing

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and many other sites are earning highest search rankings for many keyword phrases.  They are also the most popular Internet sites because of mainstream and global popularity.  Use their big names to your advantage by creating content exclusively for social networking.

5. Local Pages

One of the newest trends in SEO is that of local page marketing, using big name sites like Google Maps/Places, Facebook Places, FourSquare, Yahoo Local and Yelp.  These sites concentrate search engine efforts on sites within a specific location, and actually crawl and index webpages with local keyword searches.  They integrate smoothly with mobile devices, which can direct users in “real time” to the nearest local business based on local cell phone keyword searches.

When you read about SEO, these are the most important arenas you’re discussing. Plan a campaign around these five areas, based on your budget and your schedule.

Two of the biggest avenues and thus the biggest “sells” in SEO and web content creation are article marketing and blogging.  Chances are, if you ask for an SEO firm to give you a price quote, they will be pushing one of these two options.  While they might sell you “linkbuilding” packages, blogs and article directories are two of the easiest – and most effective ways – to create quality links.

In the past, article marketing had a distinct advantage over blogging, since many blogs had low traffic, while popular article directories benefited from high “robot” traffic – they were being crawled and indexed rather quickly, thanks to the popularity of their site and their huge number of links.  The latest algorithm updates from Google, however, changed this dynamic.  Sites that “over-optimized” were penalized with the latest updates, while social network sites, news sites and even company or individual blogs were rewarded with higher rankings.

Now, blogs are actually being favored by search engines and are getting loads of traffic – at least more than they ever were in 2010, before Google’s Panda change.  Does this mean you should focus only on blogs?  Not necessarily.  Article marketing can still be an effective way to build links, provided you write a quality article with some well-placed longtail keywords.

However, you cannot afford to invest all of your web marketing solely in the “big five” article directories, when there is clearly a need to establish more quality links all over the web.  This is just a matter of common sense—when you put up signage for your company in a local area, do you want to put a thousand signs up in one mall, or do you want to put a few dozen signs all around the city?

Think of your new Search Engine Optimization strategy in a similar context.

Google’s three latest algorithm updates have set the Internet marketing industry ablaze. Since February of 2011, when Panda was first released, the world’s top search engine has declared war on websites that have “low quality content.” Just as everything was settling down in the SEO world, two new algorithm updates make headlines: Venice and Penguin. Just to review what we’ve learned from Google thus far:

Google Panda: Lowers the SERP rankings of low quality sites, including “content mills” and pages with little content but heavy advertising. Sites that benefit include social network pages and news sites.

Google Venice: An improvement for local content publishing. This update automatically matches locally produced content appropriate for user searches based on the user’s IP address.

Google Penguin: A further refining of Google’s algorithm, based on Panda’s changes, this time further targeting content mills, and higher-grade content mills like article directories. This update specifically targeted “over-optimized” sites, that is sites that excessively linked or keyword stuffed their content.

In light of these new updates, many in the SEO world are now backing away from keyword densities and content-mill style writing, and are instead focusing on blogs. Blogs are usually written with a bit more sophistication, since they are aimed at people and not directories. Directories have always been traffic magnets, but mostly because of web crawlers that seek out keyword requests. The latest filtering technology penalizes websites that go after search engine crawlers or “bots” but fail to converse with actual website surfers.

How does this affect you, the small business owner? Now is the time to take your message online and to refocus your strategy to be read, and not merely to be “found”. It doesn’t matter how much content you produce, if it fails to pass Google’s new “human” filter. That is will bring you traffic and sales in the long-run.