SEARCH NEWS – JULY 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. Youll know about emerging trends in online marketing and well explain how those trends can be put to use in your business.
Content Marketing Builds Extra Value
Though Google is known for being incredibly vague with its SEO guidelines, one thing is very clear: Google wants high quality content so users get relevant search results 100% of the time and advertisers keep coming back.
Content marketing is all about educating and informing consumers about topics that are related to a particular industry. It’s not a hard sell. The company that is the “sponsor” of the helpful article gets its brand in front of consumers who are likely to need its services. That article sends traffic from Google and other search engines and fortifies the campaign with traffic from referrals, social media, customer reviews, word of mouth and more.
When we market content for your campaign, we place it where it will bring value to you, the audience and the search engines. Content marketing has the added benefit of attracting high-quality natural links that are less vulnerable to Google updates, like Penguin.
It’s Not Just You. Google+ Local Is Really Confusing!
Google+ Local has replaced Google Places. However, your Google+ Local information is still managed through your Google Places for Business dashboard.
If you have a Google+ page for your business, currently, there is no way to combine your Google+ Local page with your Google+ page. For now, you have to manage them separately.
What’s the payoff for setting up a Google+ Local page? A few things: Google+ Local pages will be indexed (Google Places pages were not). It’s very likely that in the future, social signals tracked on Google+ Local pages will be displayed as local annotations in the search results and as featured recommendation positions within Google+ Local internal searches.
Got all that?! Wouldn’t it just be easier to hand off the management of your Google+ profile to us? Call us and we’ll take care of it.
Social Media Twists and Turns
There’s ALWAYS something new in social media!
Due to Twitter’s new restrictions on how third-party developers are permitted to use its API, the LinkedIn/Twitter partnership that began in 2009 is over. In a blog post, Ryan Roslansky, LinkedIn head of content wrote, “If you had previously synced your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts, and selected the option to share Tweets on LinkedIn, those Tweets generated from Twitter will no longer appear on LinkedIn.”
The ongoing patent dispute between Facebook and Yahoo has been resolved and the former enemies are now working toward an advertising and content partnership.
Facebook is reportedly planning to sell mobile ads that will target users based on the apps they’ve downloaded through its Facebook Connect feature. Read more about the controversial advertising strategy here.
Google Panda Rolls Through Again
Google’s Panda update, released over a year ago, was designed to target low quality content. In June, Google pushed out two Panda refreshes. For those of you keeping score, were now up to Panda 3.8.
Note that a refresh is different from an update:
- An update is a change to Google’s algorithm
- A refresh reruns the existing algorithm to catch any sites that are in violation. Unlike an update, it does not change the algorithm.
The original Panda update impacted about 12% of search worldwide and the refreshes in June impacted only about 1%. This is yet another reminder of the importance of online marketing diversification and producing quality content with the end user in mind.
Its finally happened — Google has integrated local business listings and maps into its social platform, Google+. Google Places is on the way out but the complete transition hasnt happened quite yet. Googles latest blog post says this:
No surprises here! The winner is Google. Last year at this time, Google had 65% of the market share and now, 66%. Bing has 15% (up from 14%) and Yahoo 13% (down from 16%). Yahoo has been on a serious decline and at 13%, this is Yahoos lowest share ever.
Based on the sales of smartphones and tablets, mobile marketing has a bright future and is definitely something to consider when devising your marketing strategy. Mobile marketing is still relatively new, so theres plenty of room for growth and innovation in the mobile space.
The Google updates will keep coming, the rules will keep changing and we will continue to stress the importance of diversification. The best protection against Google updates is diversification of online marketing, to include things like PPC, email marketing and social media marketing. Call if you want more information on any of our online marketing services.
Google frequently tweaks its algorithm to target sites with low-quality content, particularly those that scrape content. Google calls these updates Panda. The first one came out in February 2011 and the latest kicked into gear on April 19, 2012. Google says, Were continuing to iterate on our Panda algorithm as part of our commitment to returning high-quality sites to Google users. This most recent update is one of the over 500 changes we make to our ranking algorithms each year. 
On April 24, Google released an update thats designed to target those who have been spamming Google through activities such as keyword stuffing, cloaking and link schemes that violate Googles guidelines. The update is called Penguin and is also known as the webspam algorithm update. Google specifically points out that the goal of this update is to punish outright spam. 
Google frequently makes changes to its PPC platform and you want to stay on top of them so you can make the right choices for your campaigns. 
SEO is just the first step to boosting your online visibility. We recommend that you use social media to amplify your online footprint. 
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