Google announced the rollout of its Knowledge Graph, which will cause a big change to how results are delivered in the SERPs. Basically, the intent behind the Knowledge Graph is for search engines to think more like a human — and deliver results that reflect that. It’s gradually rolling out in the U.S. as we speak, but you might not see it for yourself quite yet. After the initial rollout is complete, Google will expand the Knowledge Graph to searches on mobile and tablet devices, then to languages other than English.
As Google puts it, Knowledge Graph, “taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do.” Wait. What exactly does that mean? Let’s take a deeper look at this rollout, and try to make things a little clearer!
What is Google’s Knowledge Graph?
To explain the Knowledge Graph, let’s all pretend we’re conducting a search in Google for the term ‘Taj Mahal.’ Before the Knowledge Graph, Google simply saw that query as a string of characters; but it means much more than that to you, a human, right? If only search engines could understand ‘Taj Mahal’ like you understand it, the results would be much more relevant to you! That’s exactly what the Knowledge Graph will help Google do, and as a result, users will see improved search results.
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.
Google recently announced “new matching behavior for phrase and exact match keywords.” Starting in mid-May, exact and phrase match keywords will “match close variants, including misspellings, singular/plural forms, stemmings, accents and abbreviations.”
Google has also made a change to the ad rotation settings. After 30 days, Google will run only your ad with the highest clicks. The ad with the most clicks may not necessarily be the ad that brings the highest quality traffic to your site. An ad that Google takes out of rotation may be your most profitable ad. Google will make more money from the higher clicks, but you may not.
If you’re running an Adwords campaign, be aware of these changes and take the extra steps to be in control of your campaign. Better yet, leave PPC to the professionals—US! Our PPC analysts are Google Adwords Certified and it’s their job to keep on top of the latest changes and configure the settings to make the most of your budget.
On April 24, Google released an update that’s designed to target those who have been spamming Google through activities such as keyword stuffing, cloaking and link schemes that violate Google’s 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.
Every business should know the SEO tactics that are being used to build its search rankings. Many SEO firms don’t reveal their tactics and their clients have no idea whether or not they’re at high risk for Google penalties. We are transparent; we believe in honesty. Everything we do for your SEO campaign is displayed on your dashboard.
We continue to stress the importance of diversification for both SEO and online marketing to help you maintain well-rounded strategies that keep you on a steady course through updates and other changes. We encourage all our clients to use a variety of online marketing channels, such as social media, email, PPC, guest blog posts and press releases. Call us for more details on 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, “We’re 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.”
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.
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.
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.
The main question our customers ask when looking to promote their websites with Search Engine Optimization is “how can we calculate the Return On investment of our SEO Campaign?”. There are many tools to measure that variable, but it’s not as easy as it might seen.
Why is that? – ROI implies a growth on business transactions to make more income. Improved Search Engine Optimization results doesn’t correlate immediately to bigger income. If your website ranks on position #1, with your “mainkeywords” and brings a high volume of of new visitors to your website but no conversions, no new income will be generated. That doesn’t mean the campaign didn’t work or that you’re not obtaining your money’s worth, this actually means the other elements of your web site and/or your sales system is not seixing that traffic.
From our point of view, Search Engine optimization must be seen as a very important piece of an overall Marketing strategy, and in that context everything is being done to bring more visitors, make conversions, and obtain more clients.
Considering the above, there are methods to track the way your SEO campaign is paying off.
SERPs – Where is your website ranked with the main keywords? What has been the improvement on those positions? Consider that a huge proportion of clicks is lost after the first Google Page and any ranking improvement towards the top 10 position is highly valuable.
Traffic – The Main Goal of any Search Engine Optimization campaign is to bring more visitors and continuously increase their volume. Monthly analytics of the traffic will tell us what keywords is performing better, which one should be changed or even discarded. Monitoring visitor volume, behavior and source is a verry important component of the off-page optimization activities.
Links from other websites – The number of reputable inbound links is one the the best indicators of the success of your SEO campaign. Google considers highly ranked links as “votes” for the content on your website and this affects the position your site will finally have on search results.
PR or PageRank: part of Google’s ranking system that gives a number or PageRank to every site on the internet. The main reason of this rank is to differentiate the important sites from the least important. It’s not a heavy component of Google’s algorithm anymore but it still affects Search Results. When SEO is properly done the PageRank for any site is improved helping it become more important and credible next time it will be indexed by search Engines.
On February 1st, Facebook filed for an IPO and expects to begin selling shares by the end of April.
In 2011 Facebook reached profits of $1 billion on sales of $3.7 billion. 85% of that income came from advertising and the rest from games and other fees. The Social Media Giant plans to raise at least 5 billion and hopes to raise over 10 billion when it begins selling stock in April or May. This is probably going to be the biggest Internet or technology IPO ever.
For online marketers, the message is: social media must be embraced! Its impact is growing and growing every day. Facebook and other social media websites will continue to be aggressive in looking for ways to compete with search engines. Besides having a presence on social media networks, many marketers are including Facebook PPC to their advertising strategies. From 2010 to 2011, the number of pay-per-click ads displayed on Facebook grew 42% and the average price per ad grew 18%. Consider that it’s easy to make expensive mistakes when you first venture
into social media marketing. Contact us if you want help with social media.
Last year , 487 million smartphones were shipped, a 62.7% increase over the previous year. This marks the first time smartphones shipments topped that of PCs (only 414 million PCs delivered). Most users don’t replace Computers as often as they do with phones, of course. But there’s no denying consumers are becoming more and more attached to smartphones.
There are many ways to tailor your marketing and advertising strategy to mobile devices. Google Adwords offers many mobile PPC advertising options, even click-to-call. A mass email campaign reaches people with smartphones and tablets who check their email while they’re on the go. Give us a call if you’d like more information about Mobile marketing.
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.
Thousands of Yahoo employees are out of a job due to layoffs earlier this month.
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.”
