We did have some forewarning this update was coming. As we discussed a little over a month ago, Google’s spam chief Matt Cutts was asked at the SXSW Conference what Google was doing about “overly-optimized” sites. Although it isn’t customary for Cutts and Google to announce an update ahead of time, he went on to explain how the search giant was planning an algorithmic update to deal with this issue.

So what is overly-optimized content?

In the context of the Penguin update, this can include content stuffed with keywords, shady link building and other practices. According to a report in Search Engine News and SEO Moz, sites negatively affected by the update likely have one or more of the following:

• Low-quality or “spun” content
• Questionable linking practices
• Overuse of exact-match domains
• Aggressive use of exact-match anchor text
• Keyword stuffing in internal/outbound links

Below is an example from Google’s Webmaster Central Blog of a site with unusual linking patterns and excessive use of keywords. Notice how the links have no relation to the content.

Courtesy of Google Webmaster Central blog

Best we and others can tell the update was rolled out to all languages simultaneously on April 24^th. For searches in English, it’s estimated around 3.1% of queries were affected. To compare, the initial phase of Google’s Panda update affected 12% of searches done in English but in the beginning, Google said it would only affect 3% of searches.

But someone else’s loss could be someone else’s gain. Many sites who are not affected indeed improve their position following updates like Penguin.

From updates like Penguin and Panda, we can discern that Google prefers branded sites – early reports too indicate that sites with a good link profile survived the latest algorithmic update. We all know how Google has been targeting spam, unnatural links and low-quality sites for a long time. This latest “update” is simply a continuation down that road.

Penguin is a lot like Panda in that it is an “algorithmic” update – meaning that if you were affected, submitting a reconsideration request with Google won’t get you very far. Basically what you have to do is remove the spam, clean up your site and wait for a data refresh and re-crawl.

That of course can take weeks.

If you feel your site was caught in the filter by mistake, there is a form you can complete to petition Google. You can also visit your Webmaster Tools account or use Google’s Webmaster Forum to inquire about your site.

It’s suggested however that you be real careful in pursuing these options. Be absolutely sure your site doesn’t have an issue with it to cause it to be legitimately filtered during an update.

Check back with us again in the next couple of weeks as we explore things that can trigger a loss in rankings through algorithmic updates.

Was your site affected by the Penguin update?

If so, what was the issue and what are you doing to address it?

Other Posts You May Be Interested In

Answer these 23 Questions to Understand What Google Looks For

Upcoming Google Update to Penalize “Over-Optimized” Sites

3 Steps You Should Take Before Linking to another Site

8 Ways you can safely sell Links on your Website

Google Panda Update Causes Some Sites to Lose Traffic, Revenues

If you just put a site online and don’t touch its design for many years, it will appear that your company is behind the times. Since online marketing channels and SEO is constantly evolving, you have to stay current or risk losing your position to a competitor who’s on top of their game and has an updated site.

Other reasons like migrating to a new content management system or rebranding your company can also serve as motivation for re-designing your website.

When planning and implementing your redesign though, there are several things you need to consider. Continue reading for 10 important items you should be thinking about when doing this all-important task. These tips came to us by way of a recent white paper from our friends at Hubspot. For more detailed information into the following 10 points, download the white paper today.

10 Important Points to Consider when Redesigning your Website

1.    Analyze your existing site’s metrics

Before you even begin, evaluate your current site’s performance to see where you stand. Metrics to consider include – number of visitors, click-thru-rate, bounce rate, time on site, current SEO rankings and more.

2.    Develop goals for your new site

Have a concrete reason for re-designing your site beyond “it’s been awhile.”  Redesigning your site should be more about how your site works rather than how it looks. Tie your reasoning into metrics mentioned in #1 and be sure you clearly communicate this to your in-house team or agency.

3.     Account for your current site’s assets

Many designers fail to consider how a re-design can hurt more than it helps. For example, you may have a page on your existing site that does very well and has lots of inbound links. Losing this page could do great damage to your position in the search engines. Important assets you need to be sure you preserve may include – most shared/viewed content, most visited pages, best performing keywords and number of inbound links to individual pages.

4.    Look at the competition

While it isn’t wise to obsess about what your competitors are doing, it can be very helpful to understand where they may be outfoxing you. Run you and your competitor’s site through a tool like Marketing Grader so you can learn the strengths and weaknesses of each. Don’t copy your competition but instead use it as an opportunity to learn where you can improve your site.

5.     Develop your Unique Value Proposition (UVP)

Before you begin developing content for your new site, be sure you identify what makes you unique for your competitors and be sure that messaging is consistent across your entire website. It’s important you immediately answer why someone should contact you or otherwise stay on your site rather than flee to your competitors.

6.     Design your site around personas

Don’t make your site about you – make it about your customers. Use language they can understand and relate to. Segment your personas by demographics and identify their needs. Use this as a basis for developing your site’s messaging.

For example, let’s say you’re a hotel marketing manager trying to bring in new customers. In this case, you can target five buyer personas – an independent business traveler, a corporate travel manager, an event planner, a vacationing family, and a couple planning their wedding reception.

7.     Optimize your new site for search

Hopefully you’ve got all the bones there for building search engine rankings but it’s amazing the sites we run into who don’t. Anyway, be sure you inventory your existing site pages to find the ones with the most link juice and search engine value. Be sure you develop a comprehensive 301 re-direct strategy to ensure you don’t lose any of that traffic or value.

8.     Identify Calls-to-action

These are the elements in your site’s content and design that motivate a visitor to take action – be it to click ‘buy’ or simply provide their email address or download a whitepaper. Your website shouldn’t be static but rather should motivate someone to take action. Examples of good opportunities for conversions include: free whitepaper, contests/promotions, product purchases, free trial, etc.

9.     Have an ongoing content development strategy

As you know from reading our blog, we place high value on a consistent stream of valuable, informative content. Develop a strategy for building this content. Start a blog, develop press releases on important company news and think about landing pages you can develop that target important keyword phrases.

10.     Include extras

Any website built today should include basic elements like a homepage, product page(s), about us/FAQ and a contact us page. But go beyond this to really make your site shine. A blog for example is a great way to provide important information on an ongoing basis. You can also include landing pages for lead generation, add RSS capability and include social sharing buttons on all your pages.

This list of 10 things to consider when redesigning your website isn’t meant to be exhaustive. Each business and industry is unique. Much of what determines the success of a redesign occurs before you actually do the work. Many website owners get caught up in how the site looks rather than how it works.

Following these 10 recommendations though will ensure you’re well prepared to successfully re-design your website.

Many customers have come to us wondering why their site isn’t performing that well and we usually find something mentioned above that they’re lacking. Most of all, many businesses view their website as a singular resource when in fact it should “…integrate with other functions like social media, e-mail marketing and lead generation.”

Have you re-designed your website recently?

How did it work out? Are you satisfied with how your new site is performing?

Is there something mentioned here that you missed?

Remember, you can always go back and make changes – that’s the beauty of online marketing. You can always go back and make tweaks to boost your site’s performance.

Other Posts You May Be Interested In

Answer These 23 Questions to Understand What Google Looks For

3 Types of ‘Breadcrumbs’ – And Why You Should Include Them on your Site

10 Most Common Web Design Mistakes

34 Things You Must Do When Redesigning your Website

“Don’t Make Me Think” – A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (Part I, Part II, Part III)

How does Google write the algorithms that crawl a site, index its content, and rank it according to keywords?

While that’s certainly a question we could write many books trying to explain, Google does provide some guidance into its thinking. They do not discuss specific ranking factors but do provide some insights into what they consider a high-quality site.

The search giant’s stated goal is to deliver the best search experience for their users. In their Webmaster Central Blog post following their big Panda update a year ago, Google claimed it would be making nearly 500 tweaks to the algorithm over the course of 2011.

Rather than trying to keep track of all that, Google recommends and we agree that you should develop site content – articles, blogs, landing pages, e-books – with your readers in mind first and the search engines second.

The following questions originally posted on Google’s blog can serve as a good way for you to evaluate the quality of your pages and those of your competition. Continue reading for the 23 questions Google asks in assessing the quality of a webpage or article:

1. Would you trust the information presented in this article?
2. Is this article written by an expert of enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
3. Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
4. Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
5. Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
6. Are the topics driven by genuine interests of the readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
7. Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
8. Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
9. How much quality control is done on content?
10. Does the article describe both sides of a story
11. Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?
12. Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
13. Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
14. For a health related query, would you trust information from this site?
15. Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?
16. Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
17. Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
18. Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
19. Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
20. Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
21. Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?
22. Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?
23. Would users complain when they see pages from this site?

Considering these questions and more when developing content for your site will go a long way toward ensuring your hard work doesn’t go to waste by way of a penalty.

WARNING: Low-quality content on one part of your site can impact the entire site’s rankings

Be sure you’re focusing on your entire site.

If you have lower quality content, it may be dragging your rankings down. Google suggests you can deal with this issue one of three ways:

• Removing the low-quality pages altogether
• Merging and improving existing content into more useful pages
• Move low-quality content to another domain

Of course, there are many other things to consider when making sure your website is crawlable by the search engines.

But from a content perspective, considering these questions above will go a long way toward excelling in the rankings and avoiding troubles during any algorithmic updates.

Other Posts you May Be Interested In

Upcoming Google Update to Penalize “Over-Optimized” Sites

Outlook for Search – Building High Rankings in 2012

7 Strategies for Maintaining “Fresh Content”

Content Marketing over Traditional Advertising – Making the Case

Dubbed the “Venice” update, Cutts said Google would punish sites that are too optimized for SEO, or what he called “over optimized” or “overly SEO’d” (…according to reports from HubSpot and Search Engine Land).

Although Cutts initially had planned not to announce the update ahead of time, he decided to go ahead and spill the beans following a question the panel received from an attendee at the SXSW event.

Basically, the question asked what Google was doing to prevent overly optimized content. For example, if you search for “three-winged widgets” on Google and the first result is just a keyword stuffed document, it won’t have much value to you, the reader.

In his response to the attendee’s question, Cutts explained the changes as “trying to make the algorithm more adaptive.” Sites that will be penalized will be those who are clearly engaging in keyword stuffing, exchanging too many links and any other practices that go beyond “…what a normal person would expect.”

I’ve done things SEO-e and other sources have suggested I do. Will I have to worry about being penalized for following standard recommendations?

A similar question was asked of Cutts by our friend Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land and the short answer is no, it won’t.

Those who will be penalized are sites whose content is driven by keywords rather than topics. If you’re selecting topics based on what you’re audience wants you shouldn’t have anything to worry about provided you’re not stuffing your content with keywords. As we’ve said before, if you spam your content with keywords to the point that it doesn’t read naturally, your site will be either ignored or penalized.

In a follow-up to Cutts’ response, Bing’s Duane Forrester added that social sharing is an important signal as to how others value your content. If others think you have great content, they will “…amplify it” Forrester explains.

“If you’re not engaged socially, you’re missing the boat because the conversation is happening socially about you and about your content. Those are really important signals for us,” explains Forrester.

In light of these revelations by Cutts, we want to take a moment to reiterate the old rule of thumb.

• 2-3 separate, unique keywords on a page
• Vary your use of keywords (i.e. singular, plural, stemming, synonyms)
• Above all, make sure your copy reads naturally. If it feels spammy to you, then it likely contains too many keywords

In the end, if you’re writing with your readers in mind first and the search engines second, you should be okay. Make your readers the first priority and the rankings will follow provided your site is easily crawlable so the bots can actually read and index your content.

Read some of our prior posts on keywords and how you can maximize keyword instances without your content being too spammy.

Are you concerned about Google’s Venice update? What are your thoughts on penalizing sites for over-optimization?

Other Posts You May Be Interested In

3 Steps You Should Take Before Linking to another Site

Latent Semantic Indexing – A New Way to Look at Keywords

Standard Keyword Research Won’t Always Tell you what your Prospects are Looking For

11 Steps to Increasing Keyword Saturation while Maintaining Valuable Content

In just under a year since it was rolled out, Google+ has grown to over 100 million users.

And while it hasn’t reached the stature of Facebook, Kawasaki thinks now is the time to start focusing on the new social network. As of now, it’s still the “wild west” – meaning, you can stake your claim now before the competition. With Facebook and Twitter, you have to cut through a lot of noise to reach your audience.

Another reason is search traffic. According to Guy, Google “…owns the river called search traffic” and it can “…point that river any way it wants.”

What makes Google+ desirable over Facebook and Twitter?

According to Guy, it’s the ease at which he can edit posts, the more elegant user interface as well as the quality of comments.

What kind of content does Guy put on Google+?

We’ll get into a couple of his suggestions in a minute. But one thing from the interview that really caught my attention is the content he uses. My thinking has always been to only include content we produce.

After reading this interview though, I’ve changed my mind.

Including any kind of content your readers may find interesting will keep them coming back. Guy uses a site called AllTop to find leading topics his readers may find interesting.

In fact when it comes to content, Guy suggests adopting the NPR model.

National Public Radio – both on the radio and online – provides great content 365 days a year. This content is so good that we tolerate their periodic fundraising appeals.

Content you share should provide value – information, analysis and/or assistance.

It should be valuable to the point that you earn the right to also promote your product(s) and service(s) – usually about 5% of the time. NPR for example spends the vast majority of its time providing content but there is that 5% of the time they’re promoting their services and asking for donations from listeners.

Another tip from Guy – make sure people think they’re interacting with a real person on your Google+ profile. Respond to comments quickly and be a real person behind the profile, not a “…hoity-toity brand.”

Should I focus on a business profile or a personal page?

According to Guy, it really depends on your situation. If you plan for your business to outlast you, then go for a business profile. If you’re a sole proprietorship or individual brand, then a personal page is just fine.

Regardless of which route you choose, be sure you interact directly and reassure followers that there’s a real person on the other end. Doing so will ensure they come back for more.

Guy Kawasaki was best known as being one of the original Macintosh “evangelists” back in the 1980s. Much of what drove him back then re: Macintosh is what’s driving his passion about Google+ today.

His new book is very inexpensive (…$2.99 for Kindle edition). I plan to pick up a copy and review it.

Tune back again for a quick review…

In the meantime, read Guy’s interview on Social Media Examiner for more.

Other Posts You May Be Interested In

Google and the Merging of Search and Social Media

Google + – What is it and how will it integrate into your marketing strategy?

Google+ Now Open for Businesses and Brands

We’d know – we’ve spent a few years working to get sites to the top of the search engines. Building links is a big part of that. But sometimes though, it can literally be considered a “needle in a haystack” trying to find the right, do-follow link that will really move a website.

As the years have gone on, this task has gotten even more complex as search engines like Google continually make changes to their algorithms.

Fortunately though, there are tools available that can expedite these steps and make the daily task of finding good quality links slightly easier. Below are 6 recommended tools for really cranking up your link building efforts. Each tool has its own unique strengths and focus.

1.    Screaming Frog SEO Spider (http://www.screamingfrom.co.uk/seo-spider/)

Utilizes an often overlooked way of getting links and audits your site and your competitors’ site(s). The desktop tool sees which incoming links to your site are going to 404 error pages and crawls competitor sites to see where they’re linking.

2.    Majestic SEO (paid) (http://ww.majesticseo.com/)

Majestic SEO is now considered the premier tool for comprehensive backlink data since Yahoo Site Explorer went offline last year. Many SEO companies use this tool as a ‘behind-the-scenes’ data provider for their own stats.

3.    Blekko (http://blekko.com)

Blekko is unique in that it uses backslash functionality to provide SEO-rich data. Basically, you register for free then enter any site’s URL with modifiers like “/SEO,” “/inbound,” or “/outbound” for detailed link information.

4.    SubmitEaze (http://www.submiteaze.com/)

Since Google’s Panda update last year, the value of directors and article links for link building is something to be real careful with. SubmitEaze helps you find the qualified directories related to your industry that will benefit your firm.

5.    Quix (http://www.quixapp.com/)

Quix is a “bookmarklet” tool that brings many everyday SEO, social, WordPress and webmaster tasks under one umbrella. Literally dozens of commands allow you to research competitor sites, Google and even social sites like Facebook and Twitter.

6.    ToutApp (http://www.toutapp.com/)

Although link building through blind e-mails requesting a link to page A in exchange for a link to page B are in the past, there is still a need for link builders to stay in touch and cultivate media and PR contacts. ToutApp helps do this by automating the process and providing detailed tracking.

We’ve used a few of these tools to help us dramatically improve link building efforts for us and our clients.

Have you used any of these tools?

Any other link building tools you’d recommend?

Let us know in the comments field below!!

Some other posts you may be interested in

Outlook for Search – Building High Rankings in 2012

3 Steps You Should Take Before Linking to another Site

8 Ways you can safely sell Links on your Website

For example, if someone uses a very specific term on Google, they may land on an article in your knowledge center discussing the topic they’re looking for.

For our purposes here though, a landing page is also a web page that “…allows you to capture a visitor’s information through a lead form.” This is a definition provided by a recent e-book from HubSpot on landing page optimization and conversion.

Good landing pages will target a particular audience – traffic from an email campaign or pay-per-click ad for example. It’s important you create a landing page for each offer you have. For example, you can either build a landing page designed to promote downloads of a new e-book or you can build one designed for the visitor to make contact, provide information or signup for an offer.

Landing pages are important because they allow you to convert more visitors into leads since these pages make the process of receiving an offer much easier. One main reason is because site visitors don’t have to spend time navigating your site to find your offer.

Landing pages also eliminate visitor confusion on what they must do to receive your offer. They eliminate frustration for visitors, guaranteeing you will see more conversions.

Continue reading for 6 basic landing page optimization tips everyone should consider.

1.    Use clear title, description and layout to convey the value of your offer. Create a strong incentive for your visitors to download, contact or sign-up.

2.    Minimize disruptions on your landing page, including navigation links you may have on other pages. Keep visitors focused on completing your form or reading through to the call-to-action.

3.    Include social sharing links like Google’s +1, Facebook’s ‘Like,’ Twitter, LinkedIn and so forth. This allows visitors to easily share your page/offer with their friends.

4.    If you’re using a form, design and structure it with the user in mind. Only ask for what you need to follow-up and qualify the lead. Don’t make it too long or invasive.

5.    Have a Thank-you page that appears once the visitor finishes downloading your e-book or completing the contact form. Maintain engagement by suggesting other pages/offers they may be interested in or next steps they can take.

6.    Track conversion rates and keep testing to find areas of improvement. Use metrics and A/B test results to refine your pages so they continue to grow.

Point 6 is especially important in that testing and metrics lets you see what works and what doesn’t. Having this information in hand gives you a tremendous advantage in building landing pages that work.

Check back with us again soon for more information on A/B split testing, conversion metrics and other important items you can consider to help maximize your landing pages’ potential.

Other Posts you May Be Interested In

Hooking your Readers – 7 Approaches to Great Headlines

How Minor Tweaks to your Headlines Can Boost Conversions

Maximize Conversions by these 9 Tips for Writing the Ultimate Landing Page

But search engine optimization and building search rankings go well beyond just keywords, an arbitrary amount of content and so on. It also has to be informative and interesting enough to be shared either through linking or the increasingly important social media mentions.

Simply writing generic content that doesn’t grab the reader’s attention won’t exactly yield a whole lot of benefit for your firm.

Headlines are how you grab this attention, which should intrigue the reader into continuing on for more.

Time is valuable….

Since we’re bombarded with so much information all the time, we’re only going to look at what really intrigues us and think will benefit us. Seeing a boring headline limits your content’s potential in this regard. And if it doesn’t see much in the way of traffic, links and mentions in social media, it won’t have the impact it can.

That’s why taking a few minutes to craft a headline that grabs your reader’s attention is so valuable. Headlines are an invaluable part of print media (…think about when you’re in the checkout line looking at the magazines). In the online world, headlines are doubly important due to the sheer magnitude of content that’s out there.

Nick Usborne has outlined 7 approaches to headlines that can grab readers’ attention and ignite their curiosity to keep reading. Using one of these will help you maximize the impact your content has on your bottom line.

Approach #1: Ubiquitous List

People love seeing lists, which are easy to scan and read. They are a lot of times a hit on social media. Lists can be especially valuable if you include some sort of benefit like “5 Ways to save on your Vacation,” or whatever is applicable to your business.

Approach #2: “How To”

Always a winner too…explaining how to do something will always draw a lot of attention. Be sure you say that in your headline (ex: “How to save 15% on your heating bill) so people will clearly see the benefit of reading further. Millions of people go online each day to find out how to do something – buy a car, pick a stereo, fix a flat, whatever.

Approach #3: Challenge

Another thing that compels people to read is a challenge. Do I know the answers or not? What don’t I know or what am I missing? Good example from Nick – “5 Things you don’t know about your teenagers.”

Approach #4: Intrigue

This approach is kind of like a brain-twister where the reader has to keep going to find the answer. “Body Found, Man Still Missing” is an actual headline from a newspaper. While searching for a missing person, someone else’s body was found.

Approach #5: Conspiracy

We all love a good conspiracy involving anyone in a position of authority (doctors, lawyers, politicians, etc.). Giving any indication they’ve hidden the truth will certainly entice readers for more. (Ex:  The truth about raw food diets)

Approach #6: Secrets of the Opposite Sex

People love delving into the mystery of what makes the opposite sex tick. If you’re targeting a specific gender, you will grab a lot of attention this way. (Ex: Why women love to shop or Why men love to watch sports)

Approach #7: Scarcity

Indicating scarcity of an offer or a closing window of time to do something will indeed motivate people to read further. People don’t like to miss out on something so their attention will be drawn by the prospect of a last chance. (Ex: “Last chance to get tickets” or “Deadline for applications soon”)

Examples of headlines are mainly from Nick with a few more thrown in there by me.

These 7 approaches to headlines will garner much more attention than regular, descriptive headlines. The result will be a much higher number of social media mentions, likes and shares.

Nick Usborne has an e-book on crafting killer headlines that I hope to obtain and read here soon. When I do, I’ll come back and share what I learned.

Have you taken one of these approaches in crafting a headline?

If so, did you see more conversions, shares and so forth?

Other Posts You May be Interested In

How Minor Tweaks to your Headlines Can Boost Conversions

Test Headlines with the ‘Breath’ Test

Beware of your Page’s Primary Purpose When Writing Content

10 Steps for Optimizing Web Content and Landing Page Copy

This latest update is known as the ‘freshness update’ because of its stated goal – rank newer content higher in search results.

The search giant says these changes should affect around 35% of searches, mainly in areas where the most recent content matters – current events, hot topics, celebrity gossip, product/movie reviews and breaking news are examples of where this principal would apply. See further explanation and a list of the winners & losers in this great post from TechCrunch.

Here are a few searches you can look at for an example – “Black Friday 2011,” “Penn State scandal” or “NBA lock-out”

One thing you will notice is how top results are time-stamped and annotated more visually than before. Some of these annotations are in days while others are notated in minutes or even seconds. From these ‘time-stamps,’ we can tell that date-specific content is being served now more than ever.

Considering this emphasis on placing newer content higher in search results, consider the following 7 strategies to ‘evergreen’ your content and increase your chances of a ‘freshness’ boost in search results.

1) Start and maintain a blog

It’s clear from this update that more timely content is better. Therefore, one of the best ways to accomplish this ‘timely’ requirement is to publish content on a variety of topics on a regular, even daily basis. A blog is one of the best ways to easily get this content online.

2) Generate ‘Link Bait’ pieces

Content pieces that are informative and entertaining sometimes bring in thousands of visitors, hundreds of social media impressions and dozens of links each day. When these types of pieces are published on your blog, you will certainly see higher rankings. Seeing the popularity and relevancy for so many people will be a strong signal to Google.

3) Use Time Stamps to your advantage

Take a look at the top results in our sample searches and you’ll notice that each one has a time stamp. Each ‘freshness’ result has a clear publication date pulled by Google from the piece. Time stamping is easy to do and automatic on many blog platforms like WordPress. Google recommends the YYYY-MM-DD format (…2011-12-12).

4) Maximize Your Use of Social Media

Make sure you’re using social media tools to ‘push out’ new content as well as ‘pull in’ traffic     and social signals to that same content. Nothing says ‘fresh’ like a Tweet, Facebook comment or a +1 on Google’s new social network. Also, you can tap into your social networks to help write more content for you. If that isn’t possible, getting your friends to simply promote your content or leave comments will dramatically boost your ‘freshness quotient’ with Google.

5) Dynamically Update XML Sitemaps

By default, XML sitemaps include time stamps for each crawled URL within the sitemap.      Making sure these time stamps are updated regularly when new content is posted is now a pretty big deal. Blogging platforms like WordPress do this automatically but for your regular site content, it’s recommended you install a standalone XML sitemap generator that will automatically update your pages when you do.

6) Publish more Press Releases

Press releases scream ‘fresh’ and timely. In this new era of freshness though, press releases just may be the best and fastest way to feed the search engine a steady stream of the type of content they’re displaying high in search results. However, a press release will only remain fresh for a couple days up to a week so think about ways you can ‘update’ a prior press release with new, more detailed information when possible.

7) Get into Google News

Although it’s extremely difficult for a lone blogger to get into Google News, doing so can have a tremendous influence in how/if your content will find its way to the top of these ‘freshness’ results.

After reading about Google’s new fascination with freshness, you may be thinking that you can simply make changes to a previously published piece of content. According to Google’s statements though, one of the more important factors affecting which content they serve is when they first crawled a page. Making changes to your content in the hope of getting a ‘freshness boost’ will not work.

Therefore, be sure your content is correct the first time!!

One observation about these changes that we and others like our friends at Search Engine News have noticed – freshness doesn’t always equate to ‘most relevant’ in terms of returned search results. Down the road, this distinction may cause problems for Google…we’ll see of course.

Related Posts

Google “Caffeine” Goes Completely Live

Press Release Optimization – Why Your Press Release May Not Be Ranking

5 Common Mistakes that Stop Press Releases Cold

Getting Wisdom from the True Masters of Social Media

In our last post discussing mobile smartphones, we listed some astounding statistics on how rapid this technology is being adopted and how many users are projected to access the Internet through a smartphone in the coming years.

Many of the facts and figures we found (…some of which listed in Part I) certainly provided compelling reasons to begin thinking about smartphone technology and its role in your online marketing strategy.

In Part II, we’re going to delve in and examine the ‘how’ of building a website compatible for smartphone’ display…as far as marketing goes, it’s hard to say what works and what doesn’t. For now, let’s focus on making sure your site(s) can display on a mobile device and are properly optimized.

To start, one point from a HubSpot article on mastering mobile marketing pointed this out – “…the answer to how lies in not thinking about mobile as another PC but another limb for busy, active customers.”

That’s right – don’t look at mobile smartphones as yet another item on your long to-do list. Rather, think of it as another way customers can interact with your brand. Being accessible both through a computer and smartphone will most assuredly put you at the apex of businesses marketing online.

So getting started – the first step is for you to evaluate your users. Find out how many people visit your current site through a mobile device and which devices (I-Phone, Android, Blackberry) they use. Set realistic goals by optimizing popular content from your website for smartphones.

Next step is to understand mobile’s limitations and leverage its capabilities to your best advantage.

One of the most important things to remember is screen size and making sure your page(s) are viewable on the smaller smartphone screens. Images need to be sized properly to ensure they display and load quickly (…if images are so large they take up huge amounts of bandwidth, visitors are less likely to come back). Include ‘alt image’ descriptive copy that can display in lieu of an actual picture.

Also, if you have forms, keep them short. Studies have shown that users will not spend lots of time filling out a request form, especially on a smartphone. This goes for clicks too – don’t make your users click too many times to get to your content. The more clicks visitors have to make, the fewer of them who will stick around.

If you have a storefront for instance, including click-to-call functionality on your mobile site is an important component to have. Functionality for directions (…Google Maps) are invaluable in these cases as well.

And although mobile browsing should be more streamlined than desktop browsing, you shouldn’t neglect your calls-to-action.

One more important point – be sure you test your mobile site and content on different devices, just like you test regular web content on different browsers. Some will display certain things differently. It’s best to find this out in the beginning so you can make any necessary adjustments.

These items are just a few basic things to get you started. As we said earlier, mobile ‘marketing’ is still pretty new so there’s not much to report on what truly works. You can always consider developing an ‘app’ for I-Phones and I-Pads but it’s generally recommended you get the site down first. Apps are more for mid-level prospects anyway.

One of the best ways to learn what may work is to think about your experience using mobile smartphones. Let us know about some good mobile sites you’ve seen in the comments below.