Future Searches

How To Avoid Google’s ‘Over Optimisation’ Penalty

The world of SEO has been up in arms since the announcement from Google that they are working on a penalty for over-optimization. Apparently there is such thing as too much SEO.

Google’s Matt Cutts has indicated that the changes will take place in the next few weeks. The changes are being introduced to give website with genuine high quality content a chance to rank higher. This is opposed to websites with lower quality content but more advanced SEO tactics. The penalty aims to even this problem out so that websites are given a higher chance to rank on their content.

This all seems to make perfect sense so far but what exactly does this mean for the future of SEO? Well it appears the fine line between spam and over-optimization is shrinking by the minute. However, those working hard on their SEO tactics should not be discouraged by this recent news. It’s more a case of making sure that the SEO on your website is at a happy healthy medium.

Here are a few tips on how to avoid over-optimizing your website.

The Risk of Over-Advertising

The idea of monetizing a website appeals to most web builders, bloggers, and business owners. From conception to launch plans are made on how to profit from the hard work and valuable content placed upon the pages. However many make the fatal mistake of over-advertising on their site. This is one of the common causes for websites to go under. The risk of over-advertising is much greater than the benefits of multiple affiliate links and banners. Here are a few reasons why you should consider moderate advertising.

It’s all about the fans
There is a reason you are prepared to monetize your site. You have noticed the increase in traffic and an ever growing fan base. Littering your page with flashing ads from various and irrelevant affiliates will only drive away traffic rather than keeping them on your site. Choosing your advertising carefully will allow you to hand tailor your affiliates for the traffic and niche that made your site popular. Sometimes less is more and this goes for advertising as well. Keeping moderate and well placed ads can help keep your visitors interested in your sites content while still offering the products or services you want.

Analytics packages and SEO

Five Basics to Monitor Using Website Analytics

If you’re new to using an analytics package on your website you may find the sheer number of measurements and statistics at your fingertips a little daunting. Below I’ve explained 5 basic areas that any good analytics package will cover and how the information gleaned from them can be used to further improve your site.

1) Keyword Analysis

An analytics package will allow you to assess, without much effort, the keywords sending traffic to your site, a crucial piece of information for any SEO plan.
This keyword report will break down where this keyword came from – e.g. Google – and how people performed who used this keyword. With aspects such as bounce rate (people that immediately left your website) and transaction information (how many keyword visits lead to a sale), you can quickly paint a picture of what is driving your business.
This allows you to determine which keywords are not pulling their weight, or if there’s a term you hadn’t targeted that’s performing really well. With a little bit of additional targeting, that missed keyword might turn into a goldmine of potential.

Optimizing For Trending Topics

What are Trending Topics?

 A key aspect of marketing is taking ‘the next big thing’ and harnessing its appeal. Trending Topics are the popular subjects, recent news stories and current events that everybody is talking and writing about. Finding and harnessing these topics is an excellent search engine optimization tactic. Trending Topics are a fantastic way to optimize website traffic towards those who are searching for those current topics.

There are typically two different categories of Trending Topics: Short-term and long-term. Short-term trending topics are news stories that will not remain popular for a long amount of time. A prime example of a short-term trending topic would be celebrity news and gossip. A subject such as a celebrity marriage may be a Trending Topic one week but irrelevant and forgotten the next. Long-term trending topics are sustainable issues that have both staying power and growing potential. An example of a long-term Trending Topic is the current ‘green’ trend. A few years ago it was a specialist subject of minimal popularity now it is a huge trend that will continue to grow.

How to find Trending Topics

The Importance of SEO in the Legal Industry

The legal competitive landscape has changed. Small law firms with a great web presence are now in direct competition with the bigger, legacy firms. Web sites and social media have overtaken “word-of-mouth” or yellow page ads as the best ways to generate leads for attorneys and law firms.

Law firms do understand the importance of having a web site. What some lawyers and law firms don’t understand is the importance of doing an online marketing campaign. Using such essential strategies as search engine optimization, search engine marketing, social media marketing, pay per click ads, blogging and geo-targeting, attorneys are discovering the value a solid online marketing campaign can have on their bottom line.

SEO Impact on Attorneys

Lawyers working in the same practice areas need to differentiate themselves from the pack.  For example, personal injury lawyers cover a wide spectrum of cases.  When a prospective client is online searching for an attorney, they will probably not search for a “Personal Injury Lawyer” but for a “San Diego Personal Injury Law Firm” or a “Dog Bite Attorney in San Diego. “ At that time when a prospective client finds you, the value of having great searchable content and relevant Meta data becomes evident.

The Future of Search – SEO or Social?

The web is currently alive with talk of the evolution of social marketing. With new social plugins expected in the form of the “Send” button from Facebook and the “+1” button from Google, it feels like there is a change in the air regarding the way that people find the websites and information they are looking for online.

With social seemingly gaining momentum and arguments over whether you need to hire social media experts circling the web (for http://www.seomoz.org/blog/everyone-should-hire-social-media-experts and against http://shankman.com/i-will-never-hire-a-social-media-expert-and-neither-should-you/), is the future going to see a move away from more traditional forms of SEO in favour of a more socially driven internet experience? If your career is based in SEO, do you need to get more social to survive? Let’s take a look at the state of the industry and see where the future of web marketing lies.

Social

Social networks are enjoying the very peak of success at the moment, with Facebook users increasing all of the time and Twitter gaining more followers as it becomes the ultimate resource for keeping up to date with the latest news stories.

SEO Is Meant To Be A Long-Term Strategy

If you’ve hired an SEO company, or done your own in-house SEO, in order to optimize your website for search engines, you’re probably seeing results that prove the worth of that investment. Your business’s website is ranked higher in popular search engines, like Google, and as a result you are receiving more visitors and more targeted traffic, ultimately leading to more leads and more paying customers. However, just because you have seen some success doesn’t mean you should immediately cease your relationship with the SEO company or stop your own SEO efforts.

Search engine optimization must be an ongoing effort for as long as you hope to maintain a strong web presence. SEO is not a ‘quick fix’ to help improve a business, but rather an integral part of any business strategy. Here are the main reasons why you should continue optimizing for search engines:

More visitors means more business, and SEO can continue to increase the number of unique visitors you obtain per month. The sky is the limit when it comes to web traffic, and you shouldn’t settle for a modest increase, no matter how exciting or beneficial that increase may be. Your ranking in search engines can always improve. Even if you are dominating your main keywords, you can use SEO to rank for other keywords vertically and horizontally related to your business. Plus, continued SEO can help you rank for the near infinite long-tail keywords that users will enter into search engines.

5 Free Ways to Promote Your Blog

Finding free ways to promote your blog can seem intimidating to new bloggers. Many blog owners do not have the resources to invest in a large online advertising campaign. Even if you do have the means to invest in PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising, there are still significant SEO benefits you can gain from other methods of blog promotion. Free blog promotion is blogger’s best friend.

Facebook and Twitter

Both Google and Bing announced in December 2010 that they factor “social media signals” in their search engine algorithms. Every link you generate on a social media website helps your blog’s SEO and builds traffic.

Links on Facebook and Twitter have the potential to go viral. If you post a link to useful information on your blog, your friends/followers will be inclined to share it with their connections.

Twitter is especially good for posting links because many other sites search Twitter for quality blog posts that they can link to on their website. If your post appears on one of these sites, you get double link placement.

Great Keyword Research Tools from Google

Choosing or selecting the right keywords for your website is one of the main tasks for any business owner, because the keywords which they choose are those keywords which bring them traffic to their site, conversion or at least a quick glance from a visitor. Selecting right keywords for your business is one of the daunting tasks. There are many tools available online which provides keywords data based on their assumptions.  Although, they may be not accurate at all times, we need to highly rely on them as there is no other option.

There are different ways to find keywords. As there are lots of tools are available online from the giant search engine Google, we don’t have to look at other softwares or tools. Below are some tools available from Google to find the keywords which are beneficial for your business.

1. Keyword tool from Google

This keyword research tool by Google is the best, simple and user friendly. Almost half of the people who are in to SEO use this tool to get effective data. With new interface, categories, ideas for mobiles etc. makes this tool more ravishing. I’d recommend each and everyone to use this tool to extract keywords which are meant for your business.

Different Ways to Get Backlinks for Your Site

As you already know that the higher the backlinks your site generates from quality & relevant sites, the higher your position will increase in the SERPs. But getting backlinks is not an easy task wherein after the incorporation of “no follow” attributes, people are fuming over to get backlinks from those sites which have “follow” attributes to get the link juice from that site.

I’ll explain you in my next post about “nofollow” attributes but first here I’ll explain you the method of generating backlinks for your site which are easiest & simplest by all means.

Let’s take a look on how to generate links from reputed sites.

1. Link Exchange

It is one of the best but toughest way to generate backlinks as it depends more on the second person you are exchanging links with. There are many ways of exchanging links like reciprocal linking, one way linking, three way linking, link baiting etc.  Mostly people are doing reciprocal which deals in sending mails to other relevant sites asking them to exchange links with you whom half of the people ignore because most of the mails are spam or are not relevant sites.

2. Directory Submission