Google Penguin 2013 Coming?

Google Penguin Coming Again in 2013?

Google Penguin is a the Google based name for a specific Google algorithm update that was first announced in April of 2012. The update is aimed at decreasing search engine rankings of websites that violate Google’s Google Webmaster Guidelines by using now declared black-hat SEO techniques, such as keyword stuffing, cloaking, participating in link schemes,deliberate creation of duplicate content, and others. Google was specifically introduced penguin for the "Over-optimized Websites" in order to rank lower or penalize a website from their search engine.

Fasturtle always on top of the latest #SEO related guidelines and best practices is in the process of evolving its SEO programs with introducing a Back link Audit report and if clients are interested, can have Fasturtle SEO Experts go in an remove certain back links that may be negatively impacting their overall SEO. 

 How This Affects Your Website

You should understand that the sole purpose and task of the Google Penguin is to identify back link quality and acts like a filter that sits on top of the core algorithm, runs sporadically (the last official update was in October 2012), and is designed to take out sites that use manipulative techniques to improve search visibility such as link farms, purchased links etc.  So if you are unable to see specifically how many links you have, where they are coming from and the knowledge on how to remove those links, your website could come under fire.

Local Business Listings are Vital to Small Business Success

Businesses today are using online marketing services in Phoenix to increase their online exposure, traffic and leads. In addition to maintaining campaigns for search engine marketing in Phoenix, an increasing number of small businesses are beginning to look at the marketing potential of local business listings, which are included on a number of different search engines. It is a great tool for small businesses because like search engine marketing in Phoenix, it is geographically targeted to directly reach customers in the immediate area.

Most local business listings on search engines include the following:

• Business Information. This section tells the customer basic information, such as the name, address, phone number, email address and website. When customers visit your website, it’s important for it to be user friendly and that the design represent your brand well. Working with a company that specializes in web design in Phoenix would be highly beneficial.

• Details. This section adds to the basics, informing customers of the products or services the business offers.

• Photos/Videos. Business owners can add photos and videos to their listing page, so customers can get a better feel for the business environment and what they can expect when they visit. A company offering online marketing services in Phoenix can help you to develop professional photos and videos.

• Comments/Reviews. This section is a great outlet for customers to share their positive experiences with others, so they will want to become a customer as well.

Locals use these business listings on an everyday basis to find a variety of services to meet their needs, so it’s important for businesses to take advantage of this opportunity to connect. The following is a list of benefits you can receive by employing online marketing services in Phoenix to maintain local business listings:

• Accurate. When a user is searching for a specific service in their area, the business results provided are incredibly accurate. Searches can be performed by business category, location or by using selected keywords.

• Cost Effective. Claiming your business listing is very affordable and should be included as part of your budget for online marketing services in Phoenix. You can potentially gain a lot of targeted exposure at lower costs than other forms of advertising.

• Added Features. Local business listings allow for customers to view all the necessary information about your business. Phone number, website and business hours are basics that should be included. Some added features that business listings allow for include, photos and videos as well as a map with a list of directions on how to get to the business from a customer’s location.

Business listings are a major tool used by customers to find great local businesses to meet their immediate needs. In order to reach these customers, business owners should take advantage of this marketing tool by claiming their pages and adding features that show how great their business is.

In addition to local business listings, it is important that you use a large mix of other marketing tools in order to increase your chances of reaching your customers. For example, search engine marketing in Phoenix is one of the most important elements to include in a campaign as it will help your business to be found in organic search where most customers are searching.

Online marketing services in Phoenix can help you to develop an integrated marketing campaign for your business. At Fasturtle, offering expert online marketing services in Phoenix, we have successfully developed integrated marketing campaigns for hundreds of satisfied clients. With professionals in copywriting, email marketing, search engine optimization and web design in Phoenix, we are able to deliver each client with a personalized campaign that works best for them. For more information on online marketing services in Phoenix, please call Fasturtle at (888) 468-8785 or contact us online.

Top 5 Changes to SEO in 2013

1. Blogging Author Ranking

2. On Page SEO

3. Geo-Centric Optimization

4. Mobile Sites & Mobile Apps

5. Social Media Influence

1)      Blogging Transformation from Publisher Rank to Author Ranking:

Google AuthorRank will play a great influence on the overall PageRank of websites and their blogs. Author Ranking seeks to eliminate sites that pay for services that link or have articles often containing duplicate content coming from “high authority bloggers.”  The 3 primary areas this Author Rank will evaluate are the Interactions (includes relevant links to pages that become popular, amount of shares/comments, posts or contributing writers post/engagements from social media. Topics – if a “high authority author” is writing multiple blogs about various topics and has links – the old way of rating them as “a high authority” will likely decrease as new standards are put in place.  There is a lot of industry talk about how Google will be scaling a bloggers authentication to their website and analyzing the topics they are writing about.  This will without a doubt impact “high authority bloggers” as the algorithms and standards being put in place.  A true blogger should be seen as an expert on their subject matter which should revolve around an industry or specific topic/theme.  The aforementioned two then create the third dynamic being Popularity.  Are the topics generating audience and engagement, views etc?  How popular over time links on those blogs become popular trends, topics or as stated webpages/resources.

2)      On Page SEO:

On Page SEO seems to be increasing in how bots are crawling and indexing webpages and algorithms are determining the overall ranking pages, whereas it before a lot of it was determined on back links, site traffic, anchor texts and variables that were easy to manipulate.  Some companies out there did just that, which evolved the Blackhat industry.  Major search engines are seemingly shifting the scalability of On-Page or On-Site Optimization, META Data, Unique Content (does it read normal to a viewer), Site Map (easy to navigate), Rich Snippet Tags, webpage load times (does it take forever to load), analyzing now the links to your website (are they relevant), HTML coding, duplicate content, structured data and many more to determine the sites success in SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) visibility.

3)      Geo-Centric Focus:

As search engines continued to build their own infrastructure, the technology during this time was minimal and limited in allowing engines to quickly and efficiently identify the particular region, or  location from which people were searching for things.  Thus many people catered 1 Keyword with maybe 35 cities attached to it, so 1 keyword would become 36 separate keywords.  Take that times 10-15 keywords, you now have hundreds of keywords.  From there evolved the infamous "keyword stuffing" evolution. Today is a different story, for companies who do or do not use Geo-Targeted PPC (Pay-Per-Click), the expansion of Mobile devices, tablets, and synchronization with major Search Engines like Google, are continuing to play a major influence on SERP.  With that have come the evolving micro-formats that experts like Fasturtle should be able to incorporate into your website code to further allow those searching from mobile or portable devices to see results that are within their Geo-centric sphere.  It is not known what the radius of that sphere is (or if it’s even standardized) but many experts speculate the Geo-target (sphere) varies based on factors such as Address & Physical Location, Category of Business (how many businesses in a given area are registered under that category), Customer Reviews and Verified Business Listings in Directories.  Geo-Targeted AdWords and PPC are also going more and more Geo-Targeted, with a focus allowing marketers to better specify location based Ads.  Social media is increasing their base for ads that are specific to locations as well.

4)      Mobile Sites & Mobile Apps:

Increased traffic to the internet is increasing with the help of mobile based technology.  Having a website that is mobile friendly and allows users to engage your product, service or site is an absolute necessity in 2013.  Google Mobile Development recommends the industry best practice of using responsive web design, namely serving the same HTML for all devices and using only CSS media queries to decide the rendering on each device.  Google does state they support having your content being served using a different HTML or URL such as an m.site if it is properly coded with proper codes that again your website hosts or providers should be able to adhere to.  Mobile apps are another popular tool many business are using to drive revenue and make it easier for their customers to quickly get information and purchase right from their device.

“If you haven’t thought about what your site looks like on mobile you better start. Also, site speed – making your site fast is good for users, and it gives an SEO edge.” – Matt Cutts SMX Conference March 2013.

5)      Social Media:

Social media will not only play a tremendous role in marketing aspect of businesses but also the business reputation.  Many of the bigger search engines are now building and deploying Social Rankings that will essentially identify users that are engaging in business pages or even their own profiles and scale that to the frequency of others taking about, reviewing or sharing posts from businesses, products or advertisements.  Part of this effort will in essence minimize RSS feeds – if your audience is following your twitter, Facebook and Blog but EVERY time you make a post it’s the same post or RSS fed why would that audience continue to follow all three?  Stastistically, RSS based posts give less returns than unique posts depending on your industry and business size.  It will be vital to ensure you are utilizing your social media in creative, unique and engaging like formats.  While the signals or equations that determine this are not yet in full effect, rest assured its coming. 

Is Human Engagement Google's New Ranking Factor?

Is Human Engagement Google's New Ranking Factor?

Over the past year, Google has spent a lot of time making changes to their search algorithms through the introduction of Panda and Penguin. For online marketing professionals, this required a complete overhaul of old practices. In order to build search engine optimization programs that continued to work well for clients, these professionals had to quickly analyze and learn the new ways to market in an algorithm geared more towards human engagement.

Google’s intention with the algorithm updates wasn’t to cause headache for marketers and small businesses using search engine optimization, but rather to offer users more relevant, higher quality results in search. As a marketer, it is now more important than ever to make sure that your content is interesting and valuable to your target market. Google’s new algorithm has made human engagement a much larger factor in rankings than with previous versions of the algorithm, so page metrics and other components are now even more important than in the past.

The following is a list of factors that may affect your SEO in Phoenix and other cities across the nation:

·         Bounce rates. If you have high bounce rates, this will negatively affect your SEO programs in Phoenix. When a user clicks your link from the search engine results page and then immediately clicks the back button, this means that your content fails to capture their attention. Not only will you lose potential customers that bounce off your page, but Google will also push your page down in the rankings. To avoid this, refresh your content to make sure that it is interesting and relevant to your target market.

·         Social signals. Once again, it is essential that you have high quality content, so that people will want to share your pages with their friends on social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. Google’s algorithm is now looking for these social signals to identify what pages are most relevant to the SEO keyword in Phoenix or the area that your business operates in. The higher your social signals, the stronger your SEO programs in Phoenix.

·         Referral traffic. The quality of the source that includes a backlink to your page is important to search engine optimization programs. The best links come from pages that are valued by Google and send traffic back to your page from a highly targeted audience. In order to be linked on these pages, you must have a well-designed, user friendly website with interesting content that is relevant to this target audience.

For successful SEO programs in Phoenix, it is essential that people actually read the content on your pages. When you have valuable content, you will likely achieve higher metrics, such as click-through rates, shares on social media pages and referrals as well as lower bounce rates.

Government Looking To Tax Your Email?

Taxing Your Email?

Be careful before you hit "SEND" soon enough if one official in California has it his way, every email you send could come at a cost!  While many in Legislation have identified that the internet is an untapped revenue source that could "be used to help local economies" the idea of having emails as taxable seems absurd to most Americans.

Taxing Emails? Not A Good Idea

Berkeley City Councilman Gordon Wozniak recently pitched the idea in a council meeting, suggesting that money be collected as a wider reaching Internet Tax.  His argument was based on the idea of using such monies as an effort to save the local Post Office. 

So just how much money would be taxed per email?  For Wozniak, it would be 1 cent per gigabit which in his calculations, "...would net billions of dollars a year."

Aside from the 1998 Congressional Law that was passed, the Internet Tax Freedom Act, which bans Internet taxation, many in the hi-tech industry speculate the Government could one day turn to the Internet for an additional funding stream.

The argument that it will eliminate Spammers and Scammers is almost an empty argument.  For those of us in the "tech" world we know that Spammers often acquire email lists or plant phishing code in ads they place maliciously, once attained, they send emails from distant Countries or devices registered in Countries.  So that bears the question: how would they be held to this "tax?"  In essence, Spam will continue.  For those of us legitimate emailers, say in the workplace, will all internal email communications be taxed?  Will Senators and Congressmen exempt themselves from this Tax?  How will the tax work with sending emails to loved ones in the Military (especially large data video files of our children wishing Mommy or Daddy Merry Christmas etc).

What do you think about paying taxes on emails?  Please share with us your comments and have your friends and family also share theirs!
 

Long-Tail Keywords Help SEO in 2013

Long-Tail Keywords Help SEO in 2013

Long-tail keywords are a combination of three or more search terms that are more specific to the product or service than one or two search terms alone. Traditionally, long-tail keywords have not been as popular a choice in search engine programs in Phoenix as they have less search volume than more basic keywords. While this is true, those businesses that include long-tail keywords in their search engine optimization programs enjoy some huge benefits.

Long-tail keywords are a powerful tool and are becoming significantly more important to SEO rankings in Scottsdale and other cities around the world due to today’s media landscape. For example, Google, the number one most used search engine in the nation, is increasingly becoming known as a source to ask a question and immediately receive an answer. Search has changed from just providing a list of resources that may or not be helpful in providing a solution to actually giving users a straight forward answer. As such, more people are typing actual questions into the search bar and are expecting an answer, which is making long-tail keywords even more important to search engine optimization programs.

The following are a couple benefits that you can receive by including long-tail keywords in your search engine programs in Phoenix:

Less Competition. More basic keywords that are heavily searched by users tend to be extremely competitive. Every business in your industry, including large corporations, is using them in their search engine optimization programs to try and reach customers, which actually makes it more difficult to do so. When you use only basic keywords in your search engine optimization programs, there is a higher chance of your website not gaining in SEO rankings in Scottsdale and other cities around the country. This means that your website may not even be seen. While SEO rankings in Scottsdale and the greater Phoenix area are important, in many cases it is a better strategy to try and rank for more specific long-tail keywords than to go after the more competitive, basic keywords.

 Increase conversions. Long-tail keywords offer search engine optimization programs the ability to better target an audience that is looking for their specific products or services. Businesses that use more basic keywords in their search engine programs in Phoenix face a huge amount of competition, as reviewed above, and often don’t receive a return on investment because their business isn’t relevant to what the user may be searching for. Long-tail keywords are very relevant because those users that type in these keywords are often looking for a specific product or service, which your business offers. When a user is able to quickly find a solution to their problem, they are more likely to be converted from a visitor to a customer. For this reason, long-tail keywords are a great opportunity for businesses to reach their markets.

Long-tail keywords are very beneficial for businesses because they are less competitive and bring in more targeted visitors, which increases on-page metrics and conversion rates. At Fasturtle, a Phoenix area online marketing company, our experts have over a decade of experience developing search engine programs in Phoenix and other cities throughout the nation. We have worked with businesses in a wide variety of industries to develop specific keywords, which increase exposure and targeted traffic. If you are interested in developing a search engine optimization program and increasing SEO rankings in Scottsdale or another city, our online marketing professionals would be more than happy to help. For more information on search engine programs in Phoenix, please call Fasturtle today at (888) 468-8785 or contact us online.

Top 5 Quick Tips for Effective PPC Campaigns

Top 5 Tips for Effective PPC Campaigns

Looking to implement a PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ad campaign can be a challenging endeavor, especially if you lack the knowledge on how search engines read and index pages, and the necessary campaign components to set up and run a cost-effective PPC ad campaign.  As one of the top rated SEO companies serving Phoenix, AZ, Fasturtle can help you with your PPC management and Marketing needs.  Pay per click marketing has an estimated return on investment of $20 per $1 invested. The industry accounts for $1.1 billion per year, and is growing at a rate of 13.8% per quarter. Pay per click marketing campaigns have helped online marketing evolve into a whole new echelon of business branding, marketing and conversion.  The largest PPC providers currently are Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft Ad Center.  The cost per click (CPC) is depended upon completion of the PPC metrics (keywords, targets, etc) and mirrored against the search engine’s standards.

Here is Fasturtle’s list of ‘Top 5 Tips for Effective PPC Campaigns’

1. Separate / Create Keyword Buckets for Each AdGroup: For Example “Scottsdale Appliance” and “Scottsdale Appliance Repair” should be two different AdGroups. When you separate keywords this way, you can then cater your AdCopy appropriately.

2. Make Sure AdCopy is Keyword Rich: If you are using “Scottsdale Appliances” as a keyword, mention “Scottsdale” + “Appliances” as much as possible in a way that makes sense to a viewer.

3. Pay Attention to Quality Score: If you have a keyword that is “Poor” quality, consider deleting this keyword so that it does not drag the overall Quality Score of your AdGroup down. Remember that Quality Score has a direct correlation to your AdGroup’s minimal cost per click (CPC).

4. Geo-Targeting: If you know that 98% of your feeder market comes from Gilbert, Chandler, Mesa then be sure to use Geo-Targeting to capture this business. By using Geo-Targeting you can also save money and achieve higher conversion. This would be set up during your PPC advertisement in the settings field.

5. Select the Right Landing Page: Send “Scottsdale Appliance Repair” traffic to the Home Page of your website. This is particularly important since landing on the right page will improve your overall quality score as Google does look at relevancy. People will also be much happier when they get exactly what they expected upon clicking on your PPC link.

If you are considering launching a PPC campaign in Phoenix or another city throughout the United States, Fasturtle can help. Our team of online marketing professionals has over a decade of experience working with businesses to develop digital marketing strategies. Our effective PPC Campaigns stretch from San Diego to New York.  Call Fasturtle at (888) 468-8785 or contact us online to learn more about social media and SEO programs in Phoenix or another location.