Google Penguin Update - Tips on Improving Website Rankings

The Google Penguin update has shocked many webmasters. Introduced by Google in April 2012, the Penguin update has been created to target websites that carry out excessive keyword stuffing and link building. But many websites are reported to having been affected by this update. The impact appears to be so large that the basic principles of search engine optimization seem to be shaken apart.

White Hat SEO Techniques Should Keep You Safe

Ultimately, if you carry out accepted or white hat SEO techniques you should technically not be affected. Selecting a reliable and efficient SEO company to handle your website optimization needs would be the best way to ensure this. The Penguin update should make sure that quality websites no longer will have to compete with lesser quality ones for favorable spots on the search engine ranking pages (SERPs). So have you got what it takes?

The SEO Company Is the Right Organization to Partner with

The best way to be prepared for these changes is to ensure your website is tuned for user-friendliness and quality, and not rankings alone. Good quality content can still help you attain high rankings. Efficient content writing is the key here. If your content is not stuffed with too many keywords, has information relevant to the reason people access your site, and is updated regularly, your website can move up the rankings through good old quality content writing which is part of professional SEO services.

Tips for Quality and Winning Content

First of all, you've got to stop choking your article with keywords but use them only when necessary. Gone are those days when more keywords in your text, website content or article submissions could instantly pump up the rankings.

Secondly, create content that is favorable to or would easily attract the users in the various social media platforms. If your content, in your web pages and articles, is useful and persuasive, it can be the most talked about thing in the various social networks. Along with the social networks, it is also important to create content for online forums. Forums are where the hot discussions take place and whether you get backlinks from these sites or not, they offer great publicity for your website and increase the possibility of traffic.

Content for Maximizing Conversion Rate

With the content you have, look to maximize your conversion rate. This is important because when you go through periods of low traffic, higher conversions could compensate for that. You need to keep assessing your content to measure your conversion rate. Making your content persuasive and useful can increase the time users spend at your website. This is an important factor in facilitating conversions that help fulfill the purpose of your website in terms of acquiring customers and earnings.

These are some of the tips on improving website rankings that have been affected by the Google Penguin update. Professional SEO services from an SEO company offer the best chance for you to recover from the effects of an algorithmic update such as this.


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Pay Per Click (PPC) Optimization Strategies

It is not uncommon for search engine marketers to find difficulties in developing successful Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaigns. In essence, the reason for their failures in PPC advertising is primarily a lack of experience and understanding as to how to use Google AdWords effectively.

With some basic knowledge and AdWords awareness, one can optimize their Pay Per Click campaigns for greater performance. Knowing of the intricacies of the Google AdWords platform and how organize cohesive campaigns and ad groups can lead to a much higher return on ad spend (ROAS).

PPC optimization is imperative to sustain success using Google Adwords. Below we touch upon many strategies to optimize your campaigns for better profitability.

Understand Keyword Match Types

Although an elementary concept in Pay Per Click advertising, understanding keyword match types is essential to be successful. Google breaks down keyword match types in three primary ways: Broad, [Exact], and "Phrase" match.

In Google search, a broad match can often times be extremely broad. For example, for a keyword phrase like "Kids military uniforms," under the broad match setting, your ad may be triggered for searches like "childrens army suit" or "youth navy uniform." In essence, broad match is very broad, so be sure you know what you're getting into if you choose to leave your keywords as broad (without "quotes" for phrase match or [brackets] for exact match.)

Using exact keyword matching by surrounding the keyword phrase in brackets will ensure that your ads are only triggered when search engine users submit that exact phrase, and nothing else. By using exact phrase matching, you can better minimize wasted impressions from broad searches and reduce budget-sucking click-throughs.

Because exact phrase match might fail to display your ads for searchers that you actual do want to capture, a great alternative is using modified broad matching. Modified broad is simply placing a "+" symbol directly in front of each keyword (with no space) that you want specifically mentioned in a user's search query. The "+" symbol ensures that this word, and only very close variations (such as plural and singular variations) are what trigger your ads. So if we bid on the keyword "+kids +military +uniforms" our ad will still be displayed for search queries like "kid military uniform" or "kids military uniforms for sale," not "childrens navy uniform."

Do Negative Keyword Research

Negative keyword research is the effort of pinpointing undesirable keyword variations that are resulting in unwanted ad impressions. For instance if we are an ecommerce store that selling NEW "kids military uniforms," we would want to implement negative keyword variation for "used," "how to make," or "free" kids military uniforms.

By using exact keyword matching, we have no need to worry about negative keyword research; however by using modified broad match, we will need to research those unwanted variations. For many marketers, this is a crucial step to the PPC optimization process.

One of the easiest ways to conduct negative keyword research is to open the "See search terms" feature. This is located under the "Keywords" tab of the ad group you are in. Here you can view a list of all of the search terms that have triggered your ads over a certain period of time. Taking a look at all of these search queries can be very eye-opening as well as enlightening to pinpoint negative keywords to implement into the ad group.

Once you have drilled down on the keywords that you want to add as negatives, just click the check box for the unwanted keyword and hit "Add keyword as negative," which is found above the list of search queries. This will automatically implement the full keyword phrase as an exact match to your negative keyword list for that particular ad group.

Create Tight Ad Groups (with Few Keywords)

A typical mistake that online advertisers make while developing PPC campaigns and ad groups is poor keyword grouping. In most cases, ad groups with too many keywords are destined for failure. Because only one ad can serve an entire ad group, only a few, very closely related keywords should be included.

By segmenting keywords into highly focused ad groups, marketers can write targeted ads with greater relevancy to the user. In addition to ad copy, keyword-tight ad groups allow advertisers to use better landing pages. Not only does creating more focal ad groups increase the precision of the ad and its landing page, but more narrowed ad groups can increase keyword quality scores and minimize CPC's (cost per clicks).

A solid first step to optimizing your ad groups is to analyze the nature and quality scores of each group. How many keywords are in your ad groups? What are the quality scores of your keywords? How much activity is each keyword receiving (impressions/clicks)? How closely related are the keywords in the ad group?

Hopefully the answers to these questions will enable you to pinpoint the keywords in your ad group that can be applied to a new ad group. In more extensive AdWords accounts with many campaigns, sometimes a keyword can be transferred to more relevant ad group that already exist. This is a common PPC optimization strategy referred to as the "Peel & Stick".

Split-Test Your Ad Copy & Landing Pages

AdWords allows you to run multiple ad variations for each ad group. So instead of creating just one ad for each ad group, try writing three to five ads with different ad copy. By default, AdWords will begin to display the ads that are performing the best, however, AdWords does not take into account the importance of statistical relevancy, or validity. That is, AdWords will start favoring one ad over the others only after a handful of impressions and clicks when often times more data is needed to make a valid decision on which ads are working better than others.

If you are split-testing a number of ad variations, be sure to choose the option to "Rotate to show ads evenly," which is in the settings tab for the particular campaign. This way you can let your ads run for awhile before gauging the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of the ad copy.

Equally important (if not more important) is split-testing your landing pages. This may not be an option if you are advertising an ecommerce store with specific product pages as the destination URL of the ad. However for other businesses and industries, testing various landing page designs and concepts is critical, especially for competitive keyword targets. Try testing various types of call-to-actions as well as using different landing page copy. Another great strategy is to make use of videos and images where relevant.

Users have a lot of expectations these days while browsing the Web, so be sure to optimize your Pay Per Click campaigns to their fullest potential.


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Google Panda Update - SEO Tips to Survive

Google's latest update to their search engine ranking algorithm, code-named Panda Farmer made some drastic changes to the key factors responsible for providing relevant, high quality search results.

Although Google Panda was only meant to filter out low quality spam websites, many legitimate websites and blogs have found themselves penalized and losing a major part of their organic traffic. If you are one of the victims of collateral damage caused by the update here are some of the top tips to survive the Google Panda update:

Find and remove duplicate content.

This should be a priority, go through content on your websites, find all the duplicate content and get rid of it pronto. Not only the content copied from third-party websites but also content used on multiple pages across your website.

You might not have added duplicate content from third-party websites yourself but it could be user-generated content in form of comments or guest posts. Identifying plagiarism is easier than ever thanks to tools like copyscape.com and plagiarismchecker.com

Fixing content used on multiple pages across your website is easier than you might think, all it takes is adding a canonical tag in your HTML header. A Canonical link element notifies search engine crawlers that among the several duplicate pages a 'preferred' page is located at given URL and request them to index it instead of other pages. If you are using any of the major CMS like WordPress or Joomla this will only require installing any of the many SEO plugins available for free download.

Choose quality over quantity, always.

Google has made it pretty clear in their guidelines that websites should be built for readers not for search engines. You might have been able to score top positions using mediocre content and keyword stuffing but it will not be entertained anymore. Stop replying on methods like automated content generation using bots or outsourcing to cheap writers who don't even know what they're talking about.

As a webmaster make a note to provide informative, relevant content to your visitors and stop worrying about the keyword count or number of articles you can get for your dollar. If your website is about custom car parts stop posting articles about something that doesn't appeal your niche just to promote a sponsored link or spreading links to your new venture. Links from irrelevant websites won't do any good for SEO anyway.

If you maintain a strict quality standard for the articles that you post not only you increase the chance of getting better positions in search engines but also help you build an audience on social media.

Get Social, at least on the Internet.

I know webmasters aren't exactly what you'd call a social creature, most of us would prefer a computer screen over interacting with people. But then if you want to see your website succeed you must interact with your audience, start a discussion, answer their questions and most of all allow them to join your social networks. Highlight links to your fan pages, and add buttons to share your links on social networks.

Being active on social networks and discussion boards will not only open new doors of traffic towards your website but boost your reputation as a quality website.

Inbound links from Google+ circles, Facebook or Twitter will prevent your website to be flagged as a low quality resource by Google's algorithm. The logic behind this is that if your content is good enough readers would have shared it on social networks or linked from other high quality websites. But do not try to beat the system by spamming your links on social networks, spam will be filtered out by social networks as well as Google.

Now that you know what needs to be done, get busy and fix the issues before it's too late.

SEO Services - What Have You Used?

There is so much that can be done by any business to be able to make more money. While some look to reach out to a larger section by improving on their products and services, still other companies try and add on new features to their products to make them different. What some people tend to overlook is the fact that there is a market which exists beyond the tip of their nose. This is a market which can easily be tapped into and converted.

The world of the internet allows us all to be open to everyone everywhere. While there is an avenue that is open through this channel, we must know how to exploit it. To be able to meet more people and find new customers on the internet, you must be easy to find. This is possible when you have optimized content.

The process of optimizing means modifying your material to make it relevant to what people are looking for. When you get out to the people rather than wait for them to come to you, you have already made great progress in promoting your business.

SEO services are available at various levels which make it possible for start-ups and small companies to avail as easily as the bigger businesses. SEO services help modify your content and make it suitable to what people are looking for. When you have optimized content, it is more likely that you will feature higher on search engine rankings, and also that you will be easier to view by people. Optimized content helps you make better contact with those around you, and also interact with people who are in the same or similar businesses.

SEO services providers take into account everything that is needed about your business. They work within the budgets that you have provided, can work with the relevant keywords that can help you feature better, and also place your content and links in places that can benefit your best.

Once you look like you need to, and are found in the right places that you need to be, the opportunities start to open up like never before. The outcome of this process can be seen through better traffic and more conversions. The biggest win with SEO services is that the impact is immediate.

Look for the best SEO services around you. While there is so much you may have missed out on, you do not want to stay behind forever.

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