Influence of Google Panda update in Small Businesses Ranking

 Google is working on a restore of Panda, a "kinder, softer Panda," Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts announced at SMX last week. The aim of the next generation of Panda is to help small businesses that may have been impacted by earlier versions of the algorithm that Google has unleashed periodically since the initial launch in February 2011.

Panda was firstly launched as Google's algorithmic answer to low quality and thin content sites that had gained famous rankings in the search results.

While Panda was initially used as battling content farms, the side effect was huge for less authoritative sites, a category that many small websites fall into, regardless of whether they had stellar or poor quality content.

The Panda algorithm was mainly hard on small businesses and greatly decreased their search visibility when compared to larger or "big brand" types of sites that Google seems to favor. This is particularly true for product related searches where sites like Amazon or large retailers dominate the results and smaller sites just can't compete, even if they offer better service or prices.

The same applies for websites offering local services, such as a local real estate agent or a local exterminator. While local search can solve some of these problems, there remains the issue that their content doesn't rank well for usual searches.

On a WebmasterWorld thread on the theme, user EditorialGuy gave an outstanding description of how Panda affects small businesses, using a fake example search:
Take a query like "armadillo grooming tools." In the current Google results, such a inquiry might yield product listings from Amazon, Target, Walmart, Petsmart, Petco, and so on. If I were a Google search engineer testing that query, I'd want to see a mixture of name-brand results and results for specialist sites like armadillofancy dot com that present unique content and show a real understanding of and passion for armadillos."

Last year, Cutts seemed to acknowledge that Panda was having a pretty important impact on smaller businesses. In August he began asking for examples of small quality sites that weren't ranking well in Google. At the time, many small sites that had been negatively impacted by Panda were hopeful that an upcoming Panda update would give them a bit of a improve in the rankings.

There's no word on when webmasters might see the Panda refresh, but since it Cutts mentioned it, we can maybe expect to see it live sometime within the next few months.

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Google Penalized Link Networks

 Google's fight against link networks around the globe continues. Google on Friday announced taking action on the following: German link network famous; another German agency network; and Spanish and Italian link networks.

The famous site says it "matches advertisers and publishers based on their targeting requirements. This let’s you easily reach a broad or niche audience," The site's various services include "content integrations" via guest posts, product information, press articles, video seeding, and social media (Facebook and Twitter).

Google also took action against German link networks in February, hopeful at the time there was "more to come."

The Spanish and Italian announcements were made via Twitter by Giacomo Gnecchi (in Italian) and Javier Perez (in Spanish); Google's Matt Cutts provided the English translations: "we've taken action on Spanish and Italian link networks that violate our quality guidelines."

Google's action comes fewer than a week after Cutts warned penalties were imminent. It isn't yet clear which link networks, or how many, were penalized.

Announcements of penalties to link networks have become a near weekly occurrence of late, impacting sites in many languages. Below are some of our other recent stories with those facts.

Guest Blogging 2014

 Google's Matt Cutts, the search engine's chief spam fighter, rallied a call that has many marketers shaking. The days of guest blogging, he said, are above for SEO. If you're just guest blogging to get links, he goes on to say, you're in bad company.

What he's referring to is awkward guest blogging that basically mimics the article marketing of old: bombarding mediocre content at every site on the web in hopes of scoring a link, without a thought to branding, audience, or relevancy.

Even with Google fast down on spammers, not all is lost. But it's dangerous to treat guest blogging deferentially.

Here's a closer look at how guest blogging can be one of your top tools for establishing credibility, authority, and thought leadership.

Recognize Why Thought Leadership Matters

There are many different kinds of writing obtainable to content marketers, from in-depth content like ebooks or white papers to quick blog posts meant to amuse and delight. Thought leadership elevates content formation to new heights by focusing in on quality insights, good writing, and taking a forward-looking position on key issues.

According to the Harvard Business Review, it begins with your brand which is "your personal assure to the market and to the world." They go on to explain that it's not sufficient to be the person that speaks Spanish, the most efficient sales leader, or some other similar skill-based position. These can be eliminated, or someone can come along who does what you do better, faster, or cheaper.

The best way to become exceptional is to build a brand centered on your unique strengths and contributions.

Instead, reframe the question to ask, "So how do you build a reputation as a singular expert – someone who doesn't just contribute in the conversation, but drives it?" You drive the conversation by identifying trends, formulating well thought-out points, and taking them to highly visible venues to begin to share.

Thought Leadership Starts With Defining a location

Thought leadership is about expertise. To move into the realm of writing or speaking for thought leadership purposes, you first have to determine your unique positioning.

What is it that you have to say and that you want to say that's diverse than everything else that's already being said? The answer can range from present a radically different position on the key trends and issues of your industry to simply putting a different twist on execution.

For example, if everyone talks about the value of video marketing from a theoretical viewpoint, but you're creating 3,000 word in-depth tutorials that really move people forward, that's your niche.

How you define your place can be based on several things:
 

•    What are your underlying goals for thought leadership activities? Are you promoting a specific business, or building your brand as the foundation for a career in a specific industry?
 

•    Where are your strengths? Are you able to write quickly? Are you comfortable on camera? Can you make people laugh with quirky top 10 lists, or do you have access to unique contacts that could be the foundation for a powerful interview series?
 

•    What series of smaller objectives are you going to tie to your content marketing, such as specific bylines or becoming known for talking about certain issues?
 

•    What unique experience or perspective do you have that's in demand in your industry, but hasn't been claimed by an expert yet?
 

•    From an industry perspective, what are some urgent questions that you and your peers and competitors are facing? What is the hot news or the biggest trend? If you think six months to two years into the future, can you answer the same questions and start talking about them now?
 

Develop Your Content Strategy

Thought leadership has many unusual components. shaping your strategy for "getting your message out" is a critical aspect of a practical thought leadership movement.
Choosing your channels is as weighty a decision as important your message. There are numerous opportunities available to you, for example:
•    Create a blog or website that becomes an authoritative brand in your space.
 

•    Contribute to other publications.

•    Talk at conferences, panels, and other industry events.
 

•    Write articles for trade magazines or convention publications.
 

•    Guest post in a range of online venues.
 

•    Host a podcast, video program, or interview show.
 

•    Invest in writing longer works, such as books, ebooks, and white papers.

If nothing else, remember this one key takeaway: the most efficient thought leadership efforts are systematic, and help you achieve a series of goals that build your brand along the way.
 

Make Some Key Decisions About Brand You

"Thought leadership" is a term that's used and injured to describe a lot of things. Mostly, it refers to having a platform to affect the discussion through your writing, speeches, work, and more.

At another level, thought leadership also means that you're valued for your skill and someone that others consult when they want to hire someone in your space. In extreme cases, "thought leader" becomes almost a job description, describing someone who writes books and travels to conferences for a living.

Expect Part of the Game to be Psychological

It's durable to move from thinking of yourself as an employee to a manager or leader. But stepping outside the idea that you're not just leading a company, but that you're taking a leading role in your industry also requires some major mind shifts.
 

Conclusion

Cutts' call to action is an important chance to look at guest blogging as just one part of building your personal thought leadership table. Thought leadership is about defining your brand, connecting with an audience, and moving the conversation forward. Many tools are at your disposal to make that happen successfully.

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Tips to Rule The Search Engine Results Page

 Getting your message across is often much more efficient on other websites than your own site.

Strong domains need less SEO effort to rank. This means you could potentially rank multiple times in the same top 10 search engine results page (SERP).

Additionally, being allowed to write for essential industry websites is a great demonstration of your expertise.
Here's how you can perform this strategy.

When Expertise Leads to Sales

In knowledge demanding industries, showing your expertise and creativity often leads to improved sales. This can be seen in several industries. SEO consultants, lawyers, financial advisors, and even architects advantage from being found with articles displaying their work and knowledge.

If you're in an industry that rewards expertise, you should start guest blogging and writing articles for the authority websites in your niche.

Selecting the Platforms to Write for

•    Start by selecting strong domains. You can find them by organization searches for many applicable keywords in your industry. The ones that rank across a wide range of keywords indicate strong domains with a lot of links bound for at them.

•    They should rather already work with a network of bloggers and allow guest blogging. Writing just a couple of guest blogs is often more capable than becoming a regular contributor, mainly because you want to spread your effort across multiple sites.

•    Do they already rank for your most significant keywords with another page? No problem! You will increase a head start in ranking, but your article will only be shown in search results once it outranks the older article.
•    select websites focused at other experts and also try to write for sites with entry-level audiences. Both can probably rank for attractive keyword combinations. Authoritative websites in your industry make you look more of an authority when you write for them.
Writing the Article

•    Make sure your articles provide clear examples of your knowledge and creativity. Make sure the title makes the article seem newsworthy enough and include an important keyword combination. The overall text should be well optimized for your main keyword, but other combinations can often be easily integrated as well.

•    Articles that are worth sharing also attract a lot of social media thought. At least some of your articles should have a viral element in them. Depending on timing, personalized search, and other factors, you should always have at least one article in the top 10.

•    You can effortlessly have multiple articles across different sites focused on the same keyword arrangement. The resulting Google top 10 for that keyword should show your broad knowledge on that niche subject. Using different angles you make your articles relevant for everybody searching for the keyword combination.

•    If allowed by the platform you write for, link to your own website and other related articles you've written. These could be on the same website or other ones you write for.

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Facebook Announced New Page Design

 Facebook announced yesterday they will be rolling out a novel “streamlined” look for company Pages on the desktop version of their site. The new look is designed to help users and Page admins alike by emphasizing important information and making the most commonly used tools more available. This announcement comes just a few days after Facebook unveiled a new design for their News Feed.

The Page timeline design has been updated to make posts look reliable to how they would appear in the News Feed. Anyone who’s ever managed a Facebook page before knows how frustrating it after spending time crafting a grand post only to have it appear differently in the News Feed to how it looks in the Page timeline. Now you can be certain your posts look just as good across the whole platform.

The new design also makes company pages look a lot more like individual pages. There’s a left column dedicated to your Page’s posts and a right column dedicated to your business’s information. Here’s an example of how it looks:

New Features for Page Admins

The new design brings with it several new features just for Page admins. If you look on the very top right hand corner of the above example you’ll see the existing week’s Facebook activity at a glance. This includes ads running, amount of new likes, Page reach, and notifications. You can click on any of these for more detail. You’ll see a few new navigation options across the top as well.

The most fascinating new feature is the Pages to watch section. A page to Watch allows you to make a list of other business pages and compare your performance against theirs. This is a enormous way to keep an eye on your competitors, clients, and other businesses you care about.

The “Overview” tab of Page Insights displays some key stats about the Pages they are watching. The “Posts” tab of Page Insights includes an aspect to view the past week’s most engaging posts from the Pages you’re watching.

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Important website analytics tools

While analytics are a must for any Internet marketer, it can be a bit frightening to know exactly which tool to use in order to track your results. After all, there are literally hundreds of analytics tools existing on the market, all with different features and benefits. Here is a quick review of 10 of the most popular website analytics tools to help you choose which one will work best for you and your company.

1. Google Analytic

By far the most accepted web analytics tool is Google Analytics. Google Analytics is geared toward Internet marketers and small business owners who want to study more about their website. Google Analytics helps marketers and website owners understand traffic patterns, traffic sources, conversions, bounce rates, paid search statistics, and more. The data accessible is robust and intuitive enough for anyone to learn. While it is intuitive, there is a bit of a learning curve, and you may need to take a few tutorials in order to actually get the full benefits of Google Analytics.

2. Moz Analytics
 

Moz.com is one of the Internet’s leading search engine marketing companies, and offers a complete web analytics package. Moz analytic help you track your search marketing, social media marketing, brand activity, links, and content marketing efforts all in one convenient location.
 

3. TrueSocial Metrics

If you’re looking for a tool to help particularly with your social media metrics, then TrueSocial Metrics is a vast investment. TruSocial Metrics helps you calculate your social media marketing return on investment.
 

4. Clicky

Clicky is one of the most complete tools on the market, next to Google Analytic. Also, all of Clicky’s data is real-time, so you don’t have to wait around to make reports you may need.
 

5. KISSmetrics

KISSmetrics tells you, in great detail, what your website visitors are responsibility on your website, before, during, and after they buy from you. Google may tell you what is experience on a website, but KISSmetrics tells you who is doing it and when.
 

6. Woopra

Woopra is another real-time analytics tool that helps you track page views, events, and learn about your customers. Woopra also provides in rank about conversion funnels, customer activity, and when customers lose interest. Woopra helps you learn about your customers’ actions in order to pick up conversions on your site.
 

7. GoSquared
GoSquared is also a tool that measures real-time visitor engagement, but the main difference is in the design. They pride themselves on being intuitive, functional, and beautiful.
 

8. Buzzstream

Buzzstream is an analytics tool that helps you explicitly with link building research and social media research. You can sign up for either option, or both options.
 

9. BrightEdge
 

BrightEdge is an analytics tool that is used particularly for search engine optimization. It includes information on keywords, backlinks, traffic, conversions, competitors, geographies, devices, and more. It also includes information on local search and daily rankings.
 

10. FoxMetrics
 

FoxMetrics is another tool that helps track customer engagement in real-time. Not only can you track what your customers are doing on your website in real-time, but you can also track the customer life-cycle with where they are clicking, what e-mails they are opening, what products they are purchasing, and more.
 

Summary
 

These are just some of the web analytics tools out there. As you can see, there are a lot of options to prefer from, and the tool you end up selecting will really depend on what you are trying to measure, how much knowledge you have in the industry, what your budget is, and how much time you are willing to put into learning an analytic program.

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International Link Building

 Anyone at least moderately familiar with SEO best practices has a good perceptive of both the importance of link building as well as the fundamentals of the approach, but for those who are just getting up to speed, here's a fast synopsis.

What is Link Building?

Link building is a tactic or series of tactics that boost the number of websites linking to a fussy page or domain. Some factors in this approach include:

•    How many links are pointing to a explicit page or a domain from other unique domains?

•    How are the links placed and what text is included in the hyperlink on the page they live on?

•    What are the sole characteristics of the site(s) linking to the page or domain?

A website with a large number of inbound links to pages can benefit from a boost in rankings when a search engine deems those links as precious. The value is resolute by authority, relevance, popularity, and other ranking mechanisms that make up the algorithms of Google and other search engines.

Think like an International Search Engine

To take this draw near to an international campaign means building upon the foundation of domestic link building practices and start to think how a non-domestic search engine might look at it.

Here are a few questions to ask, using India as an example:

•    Is the information on your page applicable to visitors from India?

•    Are people in India writing about the topic on this page, and do they consider this exacting site a good resource when they do?

•    Are other popular sites and authors in India linking to this website?

Country Code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs)

Whatever your aim countries are, you should make sure that you have websites that are based in that country linking to your pages and domain. Target specific regions for link building efforts by soliciting and acquiring links from intention ccTLDs that match the country or region you are targeting. For example, if you were targeting India, you would want to make sure that several websites with the domain .in are providing backlinks.

To help with your efforts, there are several SEO tools that allow you to study your backlinks by location and/or ccTLD, which should make this easier, especially if your SEO campaigns are targeting multiple countries.

The Media Relations Component

A good link building movement has a lot of similarities to a media relations or PR initiative. You want to get reputable sources to write about you, and eventually link to you. Not all news outlets will hyperlink to your site, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try.

Find accepted sites in the country you are targeting and make a plan to solicit links from them. This applies not only to larger news sites, but also to bloggers who are often more likely to provide a link to your pages.

Don't forget directory sites as well, many of which can be country-specific.

The methods to acquire these links are like to a domestic campaign, but the individual outlets are sure to vary from location to location.

Conclusion

One thing that you shouldn't do is to imagine that your link building strategies can be accurately the same as they are for your domestic efforts, even if some of the tactics do bear a signal similarity. Make sure you invest the time and effort to truly know the media culture of the countries and regions you're targeting.

To put this in viewpoint, consider the effort you have invested in local link building efforts and remember that the same type of research and education will be required in each region you target.

Finally, remember that, like any other SEO effort, link building needs to be real and real if it is to be truly successful. If you don't have anything valuable to offer audiences in your target country, you need to reorganize your objectives. With a solid value plan, however, it is really just a matter of getting up to speed on your new target country.

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