SEARCH NEWS – APRIL 2012

Sell SEO Make Money Search News is your monthly source to keep you up to date on the latest trends in search engine marketing. You’ll know about emerging trends in online marketing and we’ll explain how those trends can be put to use in your business.

Making Sense of Google’s Latest “Updates”

Recently, Google identified a number of blogger network sites that existed purely to build links to websites. Google targeted one of the larger blogger networks called “Build My Rank.” The Build My Rank site was de-indexed, along with an overwhelming majority of its posts. Businesses that were over-reliant on the links from Build My Rank (and other blog networks that may be facing de-indexing) saw a significant drop in rankings. Businesses that used Build My Rank but also acquired links from a variety of other sources fared much better. The more you diversify, the less impact a Google update will have on your rankings.

We have always stressed that SEO and marketing overall needs diversification. Links should come from as many different sources as possible and be relevant. Diversity coupled with relevant and useful content is what builds value. Our diversified approach to link-building in combination with your relevant and useful website content (we cannot overemphasize the importance of relevant and useful website content!), puts you on the path to improved search rankings. If you’d like to diversify even more, consider adding pay-per-click advertising, email marketing and/or social media to the mix. Let us know if you’re interested.

Meanwhile, Over At Yahoo

Thousands of Yahoo employees are out of a job due to layoffs earlier this month. Since August 2010, Bing has powered Yahoo’s search results and in October 2010, Microsoft adCenter began powering paid search for both Bing and Yahoo. Rumor has it that Yahoo is discussing a renegotiation of its search and advertising deals with Microsoft, and Yahoo is “in active discussions” with Google about Google taking over Yahoo’s search business.

Google powered Yahoo’s search results from 2000 until Yahoo went independent in 2004. Yahoo partnered with Google on advertising in 2008, which attracted the attention of the Department of Justice–Google pulled out of the deal later that year over broader antitrust concerns and fear of being labeled a “monopolist”. Seems unlikely that Google will go down that road again. Google is under antitrust scrutiny from the FTC because competitors charge that Google is using its search dominance to promote its own services at the expense of competitors and consumers.

Time to Get Serious About Social Media

According to data from Experian Marketing Services, Facebook had 7 billion visits (not unique visitors) in March; Twitter, 182 million; and LinkedIn, 86 million. Newcomer, Pinterest, kicked LinkedIn out of its third place spot in March with 104 million visits. You simply cannot ignore those numbers. Participating in social media is a must for every business if only because your customers and prospects are spending a lot of time there! In addition to massive numbers of visits, social media sites are taking steps to give businesses more opportunities to engage with their customers and prospects.

All Facebook brand pages have transitioned to the new timeline format. Facebook is also improving its self-service ad feature to make setting up ad campaigns easier and more tailored to achieving specific marketing objectives. Twitter has launched self-service ads for small businesses, but release is currently limited to cardmembers and merchants using American Express. LinkedIn has announced a new program that lets brands embed a “follow company” button from the social network on their homepages; followers will receive automatic updates from the brand in their LinkedIn feeds.

It’s no longer so simple to set up and manage a social media campaign. More advertising and marketing opportunities mean more time strategizing, implementing, updating and communicating. Once you have a social media page, you must monitor and respond to messages to be effective at community building. We’ll take care of all of those details–call us and we’ll get your social media campaign rolling. We can help you figure out where you should concentrate your efforts to best suit your budget.

The Fight for Internet Privacy Goes On

While search engines’ tracking of Internet activity is great for online marketers, allowing for more targeted advertising, the government and many Internet users disapprove. The Federal Trade Commission and The White House want more transparent privacy options for consumers, like an easy to use “do not track” option. Some browsers have tracking protection but the concern is that they’re not easy to use, not very effective, or both.

FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz is pushing for five key “do not track” principles: universal implementation, ease of use, no option to override, no technical loopholes and the ability to opt out of not just targeted ads but all behavioral data tracking.