Have you noticed your site’s rankings drop considerably in the last few weeks? It might have been a result of Google’s latest search engine update, Penguin.
Launched on April 24th, Google Penguin is entirely about promoting white-hat practices and upholding the standards of Google’s quality guidelines, and has little to do with directly improving search results. The Penguin update has been specifically designed to penalize and de-rank sites that have boosted ranking through grey-hat means. What is grey-hat, you ask?
Simply speaking, grey-hat techniques are any SEO techniques that are intended to boost ranking for a site without regard for user experience. These techniques include keyword stuffing and link schemes, which have been all too common in the past. If you’ve had your site’s ranking fall drastically as a result of Penguin, chances are high that you or your SEO person used one of these techniques.
According to Matt Cutts, the Penguin update is intended to reward those sites that have made use of white-hat SEO techniques. White-hat SEO is complicit with Google’s quality guidelines and includes doing things such as making sites load faster, writing informative and unique content, and improving usability. These are judged to be white-hat because they benefit the user as well as the search engines; they focus on building the quality of the site rather than on boosting its rankings.
The bottom line is, grey-hat techniques will not get you results as they once did – they will, in fact, be harmful to your rankings if implemented. Thankfully, there are SEO specialists like Longevity Graphics who hold fast to Google’s quality guidelines and pay close attention to what works and what doesn’t. The Penguin update is about promoting quality on the web, and that’s something we have always believed in.
What is Google PageRank?
PageRank is the algorithm used by the Google search engine. It is based on the premise, prevalent in the world of academia, that the importance of a research paper can be judged by the number of citations the paper has from other research papers. Google has simply transferred this premise to its web equivalent: the importance of a web page can be judged by the number of hyperlinks pointing to it from other web pages.
What affects Page Rank?
Simply put, the PageRank of a web page is therefore calculated as a sum of the PageRanks of all pages linking to it (its incoming links), divided by the number of links on each of those pages (its outgoing links).
Is Page Rank important?
It is a common belief that page rank isn’t important anymore. I, however, find it hard to believe that Google would assign a page rank system that isn’t used for something. It is true that websites with low page rank can rank high with in the search results pages for targeted keywords. There are many different algorithms at play to determine this.
So what is page rank for and how can we leverage it?
Generally, page rank of a website can be used as a starting point to determine where it is at in regards to domain authority. Where page rank plays a big role in SEO is determining better external link backs to your website. Having higher page rank domains pointing to your website, help to establish more authority within the eyes of the SERPs.
To learn more about leveraging page rank and how developing an extensive link building strategy can improve your website’s results and increase your traffic to your website, contact one of our internet marketing specialists today.
Lindsay Viscount
Owner/Creative Director
www.LongevityGraphics.com
In the last post “Pinterest…Pin Your Interests” emphasized on the importance of being visually stimulated. Once again we are going to continue to emphasize how important images are to every business, because we all know we like being visually stimulated.
This time, I am calling out all Iphone and Android owners to download Instagram if you have not already. Instagram has over 27 million users and have been purchased for 1 billion from Facebook. Instagram is a downloadable app and a social network that allows the users to take pictures, edit photos with different filters, and share it through Instagram. You can also share your pictures through Facebook or Twitter. Instagram works similar to Twitter, where you can use hash tags (#) so people can find your photos. In order to create conversations with people you can always use the ‘@username’ to directly create a conversation with someone.
So what makes photos such an important tool for marketing? Photos can be utilized within story telling. Story telling is the foundational strategy to developing and strengthening your brand. If you can tell a great story about your business through text, you can also create a story through images. Since taking photos are easy and instant, it is easier to share it with many people. HubSpot simply states it as “a great way for people to experience brands in a different way, and it elicits emotions that may not have been experienced through text alone.” Some big companies that are using Instagram to build their brand are: Starbucks, RedBull, Marc Jacobs, Tiffany & Co etc. When the big companies are using it, you know there is value to Instagram.
Instagram may or may not be your desired way to market your business, but depending on your business it can be very handy.
Ways to Instagram your Business:
1.) Day in the life of your company: Fans and customers are always curious what you do at work. They want to know what it’s like to work where you work.
2.) Company News: You can promote and advertise new blog posts, services and events on Instagram by taking a pictures of your new blog, or already made campaigns.
3.) Contests: There are fun ways to create contests on Instagram. You can always ask your fans to take a picture with your product and use a hash tag (#) on Instagram to get fans to participate in your contest.
4.) Events: If you create a hash tag (#) with your event. This can encourage people to take pictures and use that hash tag to spread the event pictures around.
So do some social media touch ups and use Instagram to strengthen your brand! Have fun Instagraming!
Longevity Graphics has been building websites and implementing internet marketing strategies since 2002. Our competitive advantage is the experience that we bring to the table, the extensive knowledge of Google Webmaster standards, ranking factors, conversion optimization, and the personalized customer service that we provide to all of our clients; big and small.
When working with our clients on an internet marketing campaign, we utilize many different platforms to get the best results for the unique needs of the client. 3 platforms that we almost always recommend include:
Google Adwords is a pay-per-click option that allows our clients to drive immediate targeted traffic to their websites. We can control the placement of the ads (whether you come up first, second, third or on the side), the cost of the clicks and the daily/monthly budget and target the ads geographically. This is a great platform to start receiving great results when implemented correctly. If you have tried implementing a Google Adwords campaign and failed to see results that were bringing you a return on your investment, it is worth speaking to an expert who knows how to optimize your campaign.
Google Places is a great way to target geographical search queries interested in working with a business with a specific geographical region. The benefit to Google Places is it’s FREE, the listings out rank organic results and your customers can add reviews to your listing which can help to promote the benefits of dealing with your company.
In the example below, you can see that The Last Door is coming up for the search querie “Recovery Centre For Men New Westminster” within the Google Places section of the search results page which is out ranking the organic search results.
Google+ is an interesting new platform that we are urging our clients to take advantage of. Google is starting to display Google + profiles within the search results pages (seen below). Not a lot of companies have started using this platform for marketing and you can really get a jump up on your competitors by utilizing this platform.
In conclusion, when developing an internet marketing strategy don’t forget to utilize these great Google platforms to help boost your exposure. Gaining targeted traffic in all areas of the internet will help to develop your brand, increase your leads and at the end of the day you will see an increase in your return on investment
If you’ve done any SEO, you know it’s all about keywords. Once you establish what your site is about, you do keyword research, keeping an eye out for low competition, high traffic keywords you can take advantage of. Then, you implement your keywords throughout your site, trying to fit them organically into the content of the page as well as in the meta tags.
Writing or editing content to include keywords can be tricky. Overloading a page with keywords is dangerous, however, as it might be considered spamming. This is dangerous because it can result in a penalty to your ranking.
Then there’s the ‘keywords’ meta tag. If you don’t know its history, then it probably seems like an essential meta tag. The truth about the keywords meta tag is that it’s not only deprecated, but using it can actually benefit your competition. All you really need to know to be justified in rejecting this tag is that Google doesn’t support it. When the keywords meta tag was used by search engines, it was abused by crafty marketers who stuffed it with unrelated (but popular) search terms to boost the rank of the site. It’s clear why a meta tag that allowed the manipulation of search engines had to go.
You aren’t penalized by Google for using the keywords meta tag. However, you are essentially giving away your keyword research to other people who are doing SEO for a competing site. Right-click and view source – that’s all they have to do. Of course, if someone really wants to figure out what keywords have been used on a site, they can go through each page and read through all of the copy and meta tags. The difference is that using the keywords meta tag makes it so easy to copy that they won’t be able to resist.
Pay-Per-Click/Google Adwords Landing Page Recommendations
When designing the landing pages for the pay-per-campaigns like Google Adwords or a Yahoo/Bing campaign it is good idea to start by designing 2 completely different designs (1 short page, 1 long page). You provide all of the most important information above the fold. (The fold is everything that is on screen without having to scroll.)
Important elements include:
Above the Fold:
Below the Fold:
Landing Page Testing
Once you have launched a pay-per-click campaign, it is a good idea to test certain aspects of the page to identify what your audience will respond best to in order to achieve the best conversion results. You can easily test different aspects of your landing page by implementing Google Website Optimizer. Here is what I recommend testing:
Building websites and landing pages for conversion optimization is something that I love to do and have developed skills in for many years. If you are creating a landing page and would like a second opinion on what you have developed, I am always happy to give you my opinion, so send me an email. [email protected]
Google Adwords audits are something that we do quite frequently. I run into tons of small businesses that setup their Google Adwords accounts on their own hoping to gain new business leads. The thing that I find most often, is that businesses that setup their own accounts usually make some common mistakes that can cost them big. Their budgets get eaten up and the leads that they receive are not very relevant. Something that I often hear is “Google Adwords doesn’t work!”
Well if you setup your account to target relevant traffic, Google Adwords can be a very cost effect way to increase your business leads and your ROAS (return on as spend). Here are some tips that will help you to improve your campaign.
Tip #1 – Campaign Setup
When setting up your campaigns, it is a good idea to break the campaigns up by geographical region and by the network that you choose to market your ads on. This will help you in the future to allocate more budget to the campaigns that are performing at a higher level, converting, and bringing you more of a return on your ad spend.
Tip #2 – Ad Group Setup
When setting up your ad groups, it is a good practice to setup many ad groups that will incorporate unique targeted keywords. This will allow you to develop targeted keyword rich ad content to display to your audience that is relevant to the search query. Implementing this strategy will increase your chances of a higher click-through-rate which will in turn increase your quality score giving you a better cost-per-click and higher placement than your competitors based on a usability experience.
Tip #3 – Keywords – Broad or Match
When selecting keyword match types for a PPC campaign, it is important to take into consideration many factors; fist and for most, conversion rate, cost-per-click, conversion rate and quality score. Adding broad matches will get you more volume but will cost you more per click. The quality score on the broad match keyword should be lower than an exact match on and hence cost-per-clicks should be higher. You can run a low cost-per-click, high click-through-rate campaign on exacts but your ads will only reach a small audience.
Recommendations for setting up the pay-per-click campaign are to use broad match for longtail keywords and test broad and match types for higher traffic keywords. Since longtail keywords are already very targeted they will receive less traffic and convert at a higher level. However, the higher traffic keywords need to be tested to determine which convert better and have a higher return on ad spend. Once return-on-ad-spend has been determined, we will select the best method for specific keywords.
Tip #4 – Longtail Keyword Strategy
Within the pay-per-click channel, best practice strategies indicate that using more descriptive longer search phrases (longtail) convert at a much higher rate and cost a lot less than broader terms. Using geographical terms matched with broader terms is a great way to create longtail keywords. This is a strategy that we will implement.
Tip #5 – Hire A Professional
If all of this sounds foreign to you, hire a professional to setup your account for you. We setup accounts for clients all the time, and once your account is setup right from the beginning, it’s takes very little time to manage it. If you have already setup your Google Adwords account, we can audit it for you as well.