You are here: Home / Archives for google

Friday Trivia: Saying Goodbye to Google Reader

March 29, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Welcome to SEO Advantage’s Friday Trivia feature, where we discuss, dissect and comment on the internet and marketing, and how the two intertwine.

We recently learned that Google Reader will be going dark on July 1st, but do you know what year it was created?

  1. 2001
  2. 2003
  3. 2005

Answer: C

Although Google Reader has gained prominence in the RSS world, it’s actually among the newer feed readers. The service was first launched in 2005, and will have been in operation for not quite eight years when it goes away this July. In those years it became one of the top RSS readers in existence, offering a clean, easy-to-organize method for viewing news and blogs.

Google Reader and the Online Marketing Connection

Arguably, even as a relative late-comer, Google Reader can be given at least some of the credit for the popularity of RSS, and hence the popularity of blogs, which have become a mainstay of online marketing. Gmail is one of the top free e-mail services on the web, and many Gmail users became Google Reader users by default because of the connected service. For a fair portion of users, Google Reader offered their first experience with an RSS aggregator.

As more people began to use RSS as part of their daily lives, blogs became even more popular. They shifted from a method primarily used for personal expression to a near-requirement for businesses looking to grow customer engagement. Some blogs themselves became businesses, garnering deals for books and television shows.

While personal blogging still exists, the blog has now become a powerful business platform. With the loss of Google Reader, however, some users are moving away from RSS altogether, and instead continuing a trend that had already begun to gain traction. As online marketers, we need to be aware of this shift and account for it. That means realizing that consumers who are leaving traditional RSS readers behind aren’t leaving blogs behind. They still want the kind of engaging content and conversation that springs from blogging platforms, and businesses need to provide an easy way to track that content.

Social Media: the New RSS?

The reason so many are finding it easy to move away from RSS is that forward-thinking businesses are already providing an alternative method of tracking updates to favorite blogs: social media.

At SEOA, for example, every blog post we publish is immediately shared on our Facebook page. Chances are that’s how you ended up here reading this. This practice gives you a way to track us without an RSS reader, not to mention an easy method for sharing posts you might find interesting, and multiple options for joining the conversation.

This type of change is part and parcel for the online marketing experience. The dynamic landscape of the internet is what attracted so many of us to the field in the first place. From the perspective of an internet user the loss of Google Reader may be a disappointment, but from the perspective of an online marketer, it’s an opportunity to move forward, adapt, and develop new approaches.

Filed Under: Friday Trivia, Online Marketing, Social Media Tagged With: , , , ,

Google Will Now Include Panda in its Real-Time Algorithm

March 15, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Up until now, Google’s “Panda” was just a periodic update by the search giant to ferret out sites engaging in spam and other nefarious activities. Over the last couple of years, many websites have lost rankings due to the update.

In a Q&A session at the SMX conference earlier this week, Google spam chief Matt Cutts was asked when the next Panda update would occur.

He answered that it would occur either today (March 15), or Monday March 18th at the latest.

A brief recap of Panda

Following an update in late 2009 aimed at improving its indexing process, Google obtained lots of content to display in their search results. Some of this content was really good, some not so good. In commenting about the events of 2010 and 2011 leading up to Panda, Cutts explained that many sites were taking a minimalist approach to content, meaning they were making only token efforts to avoid being labeled “spam.”

To address this issue and provide better search results for their users, Google unveiled the Panda update in February 2011. One thing became clear during all of this – Google was using more human reviewers to determine if a site is “trustworthy.”

Sites who simply rehashed content found elsewhere, or who otherwise had “low-quality” content, were suddenly being knocked lower in the rankings. Google would run this update every month or so – with the last one occurring on January 22nd that affected 1.2% of English-based searches.

Going forward, Google will be including the Panda “parameters” in its real-time algorithm.

“Rather than having some huge change that happens on a given day, you’re more likely in the future to see Panda deployed gradually as we’re rebuilding the index, so you’re less likely to see these large scale sorts of changes,” explained Cutts last week at SMX West.

Google also working to revise its “Penguin” update

Besides the content based Panda update, Cutts also indicated Google would be going after spammers more aggressively through a revised “Penguin” update. You might remember Penguin from last year – it targeted sites considered to be “over-optimized.” Examples include:

  • Questionable linking practices
  • Overuse of exact-match domains
  • Aggressive use of exact-match anchor text
  • Keyword stuffing in internal/outbound links
  • And more…

Explaining the new Penguin update at SMX West, Cutts says the update will be the most significant one for 2013. He says the anti-spam team at Google also plans to target more link networks this year. While Cutts was fairly forthright about their plans, he didn’t provide a timeline of when the new Penguin update would hit.

With that said, it’s clear that we’ll likely see some pretty significant activity on the Google front in the next few months. Many sites and merchants on Google will undoubtedly be negatively affected.

How do I avoid being caught in the Google penalty box?

From what we can tell, Google’s primary goal is to provide useful results to their users. These search results must provide valuable information to readers.

Therefore, you should ensure that content you’re developing is unique, and provides value to your site visitors. You should also follow good linking practices to ensure you’re not snared by the new Penguin update when it comes out.

Following tips on linking and content found here at SEO-e is perhaps the best thing you can do to avoid being penalized. Check out some of the links below of prior posts exploring these best practices.

And please browse around our blog for more insights into what Google looks for, and how they penalize sites that do not meet their strict standards.

Related Posts

Penguin Update Targets Link Schemes and Low-Quality Content

Link Building in the Post-Penguin World – Guest Posting

Answer these 23 Questions to Understand What Google Looks For

3 Steps You Should Take Before Linking to another Site

 

Filed Under: Forum Watch, SEO Technology Tagged With: , , , ,

Infographics – A New Frontier or Too Much at Once?

February 8, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Unless you’re completely new to developing SEO optimized content, or have been living under a rock for the last couple of years, you’ve certainly heard of the infographic – many outlets and marketers have extolled the virtue of including infographics in your content marketing mix.

Some have placed them on a high pedestal, going so far as to say you’re really behind the curve if you’re not including them in your content mix.

Others, while enthusiastic about infographics, are a bit more restrained.

Commenting in an interview with CMI, co-founder of JESS3 Leslie Bradshaw says that infographics should be viewed as a “…high-level tactic that are good for educated audiences.” For consumer audiences, infographics may be a bit much. “Consumer audiences are much more likely to share something on Facebook that’s really ‘snackable,’ Leslie explains.

So in order to develop “graphic” types of content that will get shared through Facebook, Google+, Pinterest and others, Leslie and her team develop what they call “data graphics”, which are basically shorter visual representations of one or two data points.

We of course like to take a more restrained approach…

Understanding what infographics are, and more importantly how you should approach them is way more important than putting one together for the sake of doing it.

However, we certainly appreciate the old saying “a picture is worth a thousand words”

Visualization is very powerful, and the ability to convey complex information graphically is what lies at the heart of an infographic.

Infographics is a short hand term for “information graphics” – they can be defined as graphic visual representations of information, or as explained in this CMI piece by Ahava Leibtag, a true infographic takes “…a complex data set and translate(s) it into an easily understood picture.”

Ahava goes on to explain that many pieces marketed as infographics, while good, are really “posters” since they lack complex data. While her example from Copyblogger is a really great, informative piece of content, it really lacks the sophisticated data that takes it to the infographic level – I would suspect Ahava would have the same opinion of an infographic, or “poster,” we did for an e-cigarette client some time ago…

If you’re looking to include infographics in your content mix, there are a few rules you need to follow says Paul Gustafson at CMI. These rules include:

  1. Tell a story
  2. Communicate complex data simply
  3. Make sharing through social media easy

Some of the most successful infographics in fact take very complex information and concepts and boils them down into their simplest, most easily digestible form.

Avaya provides us with some questions you must consider before embarking on the infographic voyage. Answering the following questions is critical to developing a successful infographic she explains.

  1. Do you have something relevant?
  2. Do you have a clear call-to-action?
  3. Can you post the infographic in more than one place?
  4. Do you have a good designer?
  5. Does the infographic approach fit into your branding?

In the end, it all really boils down to determining the purpose of building an infographic in the first place, its relevancy to your brand and message, and its ROI potential

Once you’ve addressed these important questions and you determine if and how an infographic will work for your site, you’re ready to get started.

There’s a plethora of templates out there for you to check out, or you can design a custom one…this handy infographic from Infographic Labs (below) provides a great overview of the “how.”

So in the end, are infographics the new content nirvana, or do they overload audiences and not deliver on the promises so many claim them to hold?

The answer of course – it really depends on a host of factors. If your audience in more “consumer” driven, perhaps you should consider the smaller, or more “snackable” pieces JESS3 develops.

If your audience is more sophisticated (some B2B), perhaps a two-level infographic makes sense…

We should caution though, you have to address the fundamental questions of purpose, goals, relevancy, sharing, ROI and more before you develop an infographic.

Have you developed any infographics for your website? If so, how did they work out?

Let us know in the comments field below or on our Facebook or Twitter profile today.

Related Posts

Content Marketing – 5 Predictions for 2013

Filming an Interview Online – A Primer

Content Marketing over Traditional Advertising – Making the Case

Making your Content Work for You in Better, More Valuable Ways

 

What Is An Infographic? by Infographiclabs

 

Filed Under: Copywriting/SEO Content Development, Online Marketing, Social Media, Tip of the Day Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Friday Trivia: Which Came First?

January 25, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Welcome to SEO Advantage’s Friday Trivia feature, where we’ll discuss, dissect and comment on the history of the internet and marketing, and how the two intertwine.

Each of the events listed here was the beginning of something that would become integral to the online marketing world. Which happened first?

A.      Facebook launched

B.      The first commercial mobile internet device debuted

C.      Google launched

Answer:  B

The Facebook launch occurred in 2004, so it hasn’t been that long relatively, and Google began their journey to the top of internet search in 1998. It was before that, in 1996, that the first mobile handheld device accessed an internet without “like” buttons, or even Google search.

The phone was the Nokia 9000 Communicator, and it was released in Finland. In the years since, the technology has become commonplace. These days many people wouldn’t dream of buying a phone without internet access. You can hardly leave your house in the U.S. without seeing someone busily surfing the web on a mobile device.

It has actually taken many corners of the web a long time to catch up, though, and while mobile website technology is improving and becoming more common, you can still find yourself surprised by big name websites that don’t play will with mobile, even today.

That’s changing, though. Improvement and growth in mobile web technology made our list of online marketing predictions for this year, and it seems apparent that the web will continue to adapt to its users, as it always has.

So, were you surprised to know that mobile access preceded even a web fixture like Google?

Filed Under: Friday Trivia, Online Marketing Tagged With: , , ,

Getting to Know Your SEO: An Interview with SEOA’s Stone Reuning

January 24, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Stone Reuning has been doing SEO since the pre-Google era, back when Yahoo was the king of search. That alone would be impressive, but it’s really just part of the story.

When it comes to decision support cred, it doesn’t get much better than Ernst & Young, and that was only one stop along Stone’s 25-year career in consulting and business services. He and his brother Wes – an SEO Advantage partner and Executive VP – both worked with Fortune 500 companies before teaming up to form Tampa Bay Associates, where they developed and implemented business solutions. Then, in 1999, the Reuning brothers created the venture that would become one of the internet’s most innovative and successful SEO companies: SEO Advantage.

Stone and I “sat down together” in the virtual office this week, and he told me the story of how SEO Advantage was formed, and how Stone and Wes saw an opportunity and seized it at a time when SEO and mainstream internet use were still in their infancy.

The Reuning brothers were specializing in medical systems in the late 90’s, back before Google took over the search world. “We were going to move our healthcare company into the internet arena,” Stone explained, “but within weeks it became obvious that if we wanted to make this work we needed to get this website to the top of Yahoo and Alta Vista, and in front of the CEOs of hospitals. We were looking at providing software for healthcare businesses, but once we started to develop the website we saw an opportunity to do something new that every business would need. Making that progression was natural for me, because succeeding on the internet was just another math problem.”

Thus SEO Advantage was born, and in the years since it has stayed on the forefront of every SEO development, adapting to algorithm updates when necessary, but usually surviving those updates relatively unscathed. This is a credit to Stone’s forward-thinking leadership and ability to see the future of search before it happens. It’s also the direct result of the fact that, unlike many SEO executives who become completely disconnected from the day-to-day operations of their companies, Stone works in the trenches. He remains directly involved with every single client SEO Advantage serves.

I asked him how he maintains that passion, and it became immediately obvious why managing from on high is not and never will be his style. “My main interest has always been in product development,” he told me.  “I enjoy developing new approaches, looking at math, and making things work in a profitable way. How do we make systems work, and how do we make them work better?”

“I’ve always viewed clients as business partners,” he continued, “I ask them, ‘what are your problems? What are the things you’re trying to solve? What keeps you up at night?’ I like to form long-term relationships with clients. Some have been with us for over a decade. Building these relationships, to me, is the right way to do business.” Considering SEO Advantage’s success, that’s not just an opinion. The company’s record has been proven time and time again, to the benefit of clients in fields from law to medicine to precious metals.

Another contributing factor to that success is the company culture that has evolved over the years. SEO Advantage employs a virtual office approach, and although Stone is hands-on with every client, he doesn’t micromanage, preferring to give his employees a sense of ownership over their work.

“I think it says a lot about who we are as an internet-based company that we fully utilize online resources as part of our day-to-day operations. We aren’t constrained by geography. We find and hire talent from all over the U.S., giving our clients the advantage of the most skilled, experienced staff available. Our approach breeds creativity and attracts people who are driven and self-motivated outside of a traditional office environment. It also keeps down our overhead, which is great from the client perspective.”

When asked to name the number one aspect of SEO Advantage that gives it a decided edge over other SEO companies, Stone didn’t hesitate. “Our team,” He said immediately. “Early in my career, one of my supervisors said to me, ‘I want you to basically do my job so that I can go do another job.’ That stuck with me, and that’s why I’ve focused on building a company of managers. SEO technicians who are used to following someone else’s instructions to the letter wouldn’t fit in here. I want managers who are invested in their work, and I find that giving passionate people autonomy makes it fun for everyone, which in turn promotes even more creativity and innovation.”

Next I asked Stone to name the best and worst developments in SEO over his career. His answer: “Google and Google.”

“SEO was easier when we started. Companies could get people to rank with spam, but the long-term value of that approach was short lived even back then. It would make people rank, but it didn’t actually produce revenue. It’s more complex for us, but it’s also better for the people using the internet.”

“I’ve always gravitated toward what Google reinforces,” he continued, “and we’ve always been much more on the messaging side of things. It’s nice these days to not have to compete with the spammers, so while Google makes it more complex, it’s actually easier for us, because we never became dependent on those sorts of tactics.”

To wind things down on a casual note, I asked Stone what was the one thing he couldn’t work without during the day. I expected him to say something like coffee or music, but instead I got one more indicator of how passionate he is about his work.

“The newness of the SEO problem,” he answered. “I’m a math geek. I like trying to figure out new approaches with the math. The internet’s even better than a math problem, though. It’s the biggest math problem. You have to infer, figure things out. For me, growing businesses is fun.”

That approach and attitude pretty much sum up how SEO Advantage operates, and why the company has been so successful in developing new approaches to search marketing for our clients over the years. “Growing businesses is fun.”

Filed Under: Copywriting/SEO Content Development, Online Marketing, SEO Advantage, SEO Technology Tagged With: , , , ,
Next Page»