Category: Search Engine Optimization

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Inbound Marketing – Where to Invest Your Time?

With link building right now being a big no-no while the Penguin 2.0 shakedown continues this week, the big question is where should you invest your time to improve your organic placement?

Where should you invest your time for the biggest payoff with search engines?
Where should you invest your time for the biggest payoff with search engines?

Here are my top tips and suggestions and where I invest my own time in regards to inbound marketing.

  1. I blog. I cannot underestimate the value of blogging. It has been a marked key to my own personal success online and one we highly recommend to clients. Not just drivel for your blog, but insightful information-rich content and a perspective that differentiates you from others.

  2. I write periodically for two large authority sites – SiteProNews and the Bing Ads global forum. I don’t waste time writting other places and will typically give these sites a 2 week exclusive on my content and then reuse the content for my newsletter. I don’t spin my articles or widely distribute them. Additionally I require that my Google+ author link be included in my bio so I personally get AuthorRank juice.
  3. I tweet. I have moved down in frequency from 5 per day to at least 3 and occasionally more.
  4. I Facebook but only once a day typically.
  5. I work my Google+ Community daily. I own AdWords Strategies and find the interaction of my peers interesting. I have used my ownership and moderation of this community to really boost my Google+ Circles.

These are the top areas that I invest my own personal time for my own business to get a pay off. You may have other areas you use, why don’t you leave a comment and let me and my readers know where you invest your time.

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Penguin 2.0 is Coming – Brace Yourself

Matt Cutts, one of Google’s lead spam engineers, is telling my industry that another large algorithm update is coming in the upcoming weeks. He has stated that it will be an important update and may impact many sites. Google is calling this pending update Penguin 2.0.

Many sites got hit severely by Google last year with the double whammy called Penguin and Panda and most have still not recovered. In fact according to a recent article only 5% of the sites affected have been able to re-mediate their placement. Hit hard were e-commerce website that do not have unique product content and sites with duplicate content. But additionally hit were legitimate websites that had tried to boost their organic placement by using link farms, link exchanges, and link spam creation.

Matt Cutts again states for the record that websites that have unique, well-written, shareable content will benefit from these upcoming algorithm updates but others who do not have this focus will see their placement drop. Here’s an article online that provides a nice short synopsis about what Penguin 2.0 will be doing. This Penguin update will focus on inbound links again as in the previous Penguin update of 2012.

On our end, we’ve already started to see site owners look to mix up their anchor text and move away from repetitive keyword dense anchor text in content and blog posts. Cutts states that this algorithm will be a big one and we recommend that you not ignore his warnings.

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Advertorials and Google

Matt Cutts, Google’s voice to my industry, has recently stated in a video that Google considers advertorials and sites that use them without a no follow tag to be in violation of Google’s quality guidelines. You can watch the full video here.

So what exactly is an advertorial and why should I steer clear of them for now?

Wikipedia says this about advertorials:

“Advertorials differ from traditional advertisements in that they are designed to look like the articles that appear in the publication. …The differences may be subtle, and disclaimers—such as the word “advertisement”—may or may not appear. Sometimes terms describing the advertorial such as a “special promotional feature” or “special advertising section” are used. The tone of the advertorials is usually closer to that of a press release than of an objective news story.”

In other words many advertorials are created to appear as if they were native articles belonging to a website or news site. They may not even be marked as a paid advertisement; but that is exactly what they are. A huge cottage industry has grown up around the creation and marketing as well as the placement of advertorials. Just recently sites which use advertorials and sell space have started to (in some cases) mark these well written articles as advertising. Some sites still flow PageRank to the promoted site providing SEO benefits.

Matt Cutts states plainly that these SEO based activities are clear violations of Google’s policies and in near future updates sites that use, promote, and place advertorials will be penalized in organic placement. For now, I highly recommend that using advertorials not be a part of your promotion programs.

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Is AuthorRank or BrandRank Coming for Businesses on Google?

Is AuthorRank or BrandRank coming for businesses on Google?  That’s an interesting question and one that I feel Google is leaning toward based on the chatter online, but one I doubt we will see this year. What exactly is BrandRank? First, let’s start with a little bit of detail.

AuthorRank passes SEO juice.
AuthorRank passes SEO juice.

This past year Google really pushed AuthorRank as a way to verify authors and help to build credibility of content. It all starts with a personal Google+ page, a tie-in to your website, and then tagging of your content you may write around the web. When properly done, you will see a face next to an article and SEO juice flows from links to the owner’s website, to the Google+ page, and pushes results higher in personalize and organic placement. It is a real boon for writers such as myself.

Google understood that there are many businesses where this benefit of authority of content would be valuable, especially for big companies/brands. So it quietly rolled out rel=”publisher” in addition to rel=”author”. For brands and companies the ability to tie together a website, blog, Google+ Business page using the publisher tag makes terrific sense.

However, Google has already stated that it won’t be putting a face or brand icon next to any of these results, at least not for right now. With Google really pushing AuthorRank, I would expect them to do the same with BrandRank, but more judiciously and most likely not this year. I just don’t think that they want to dilute what is happening with AuthorRank yet, but I feel that BrandRank  will come in the relatively near future.

In the meantime, I would strongly recommend that you position yourself early and start working to develop BrandRank if it is meaningful for your business. Preferentially use AuthorRank if it makes sense to your business or BrandRank if you are a medium to large business.