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Engineering the Correct SEO Strategy for Today’s Market
Internet Marketing Strategy
With the internet changing everyday staying on top of new trends and changes surrounding SEO should be a top priority of any professional SEO Company. Within the last year or more the SEO industry has changed immensely. Some of these changes include the Panda and Penguin filters and the recent changes of the exact match domain (EMD) filter as well. Many companies have shifted there marketing tactics and strategies to other areas such as social media marketing and other forms of inbound marketing.
The internet has also seen a shift in area’s such as more video marketing and running ads on T.V. commercials. These recent changes are forming company mergers, more sophisticated audience targeting and the need to stress more personal awareness for customers and the needs of each customer. Becoming more in tune with customers has always been a strong client to relationship method for businesses abroad, but today these changes mean even more to compete in an already competitive market.
Make no mistake about it; getting a piece of the already competitive pie is getting even tougher now a day’s. Finding new strategies and tactics to reach potential customers while retaining the customers you have already brought on board can be invigorating to keep up with in an already challenging market. Employing new methods, hiring the right people and introducing new and innovative ideals can help your company build your brand, establish new customers and help retain already loyal customers.
What Does This Mean for Your Company?
Asking your potential customers to reach into their pockets is not always such an easy task. Your customers are savvy enough to research other competitors, look for special incentives for doing business with companies and well aware of how to find information regarding your company. This is another shift in today’s modern marketing arena. Customer reviews are a great resource to learn about a business such as yours. It is also a great way to reach your customers as too. Customer retention is an important part of keeping your company competitive. In a non complicated and un-realistic market making that easy sale is would be great. But truth be told, you would be living in a fantasy world if you think it was that simple.
Knowing Your Target Audience
Your company must employ modern strategies to survive. Whether your running a contest or giving away some kind of free gift; tapping into the right target audience is a core strategy your company must find. For example, if your trying to sell ice cream, you are not going to try and market it to Eskimos during winter. Your company should market to kids and adults in the summer. This is a simple analogy of course, but it does get the point across.
This correct targeting will bring more profits through increased conversion rates because you showed your brand and company to the right people at the right time. Learning demographics and doing research before marketing your product or service should be done first and foremost. Know your competition, what are they doing?, what are they offering?, are they successful with what they offer? Just asking some of these questions can start you off on the right foot. You must also keep in mind that not all companies have the same size of targeting potential. Some products and services do not fit all.
Other Areas of Change in Marketing
The mobile industry is growing at a high rate and will continue to increase more and more of the next four years. There are currently more mobile users available than any other device. Tapping into mobile market is the next big thing and actually, it is already here. If you are a business owner and have products and services to offer then make no mistake about it; get going now. Mobile markets have higher conversion rates, can put your company in front of customers no matter where they are located and have been shown to generate faster response’s and sales than most areas of the internet.
Is SEO Dead?
Is SEO Dead
By no means – SEO is not dead. This is a topic of discussion that has been running the internet rampant for some time now. There are changes happening in the SEO industry and remaining current on changes is an important factor. These changes have caused new marketing strategies to be created as well as forcing companies to find new ways to reach potential customers. Parts of SEO are still the same, but other parts of it have been said to be more marketing based now. Professional SEO companies must employ old school and new school strategies and tactics. It is just not about building links anymore. SEO Companies must think about the entire ball of wax. These companies must bring innovative design, sold calls to action (CTA’s), great content, and know their customers.
Conclusion
If your company has not adapted to these changes yet, then you are already behind the curve. Your company should re-evaluate your strategy and determine what changes should be made. Some marketing areas to include if not already in your arsenal of tactics and strategy have already been briefly covered. Make use of video marketing, social media marketing and definitely start building on a mobile presence. Generate quality content and try establishing a solid e-mail marketing plan. Include some of these areas but not limited to just these marketing suggestions along with a solid foundation of SEO will most definitely create better results and produce higher profits if done correctly. Leave no stone un-turned.
The Current History of the Google Panda Releases
Google Panda
You Should Create Unique Content
From Panda’s initial launch Google has been gradually updating the algorithmic formula for the Panda. These changes have been aimed at reducing content duplication primarily while allowing for better returns for searchers when searching Google. Quality content can not be stressed enough. Panda filters out the low quality content on content farms or content that is thin or poorly written.
Making unique content is an essential part of SEO today. If you were an article spinner you may have been hit pretty hard by these Panda updates. A large amount of the content being created was being written for the search engines and not for the individuals reading the material. The Internet has always had an absorbent amount of spam and this spam was being created at an alarming rate.
First of all, the reduction in content allows the search engines to index content faster; which in turn produces better results. Today’s search engine markets are trying to produce the best results for the searchers. These results have improved because of quicker indexing and better quality content and sources. The impact of these changes has been enhanced by the implementation of the Panda by forcing better content and quality.
Content Spin off Test
This need to produce quality vs. quantity is still of the utmost importance today. Writing informative and helpful content that educates and adds value to someone reading your material is a good example of quality content. During the first stages of the Panda I myself wrote one article and spun it into five different articles for testing purposes. This allowed me to measure the impact of the Panda while the process was starting. Although I did not see a significant decline in results, there definitely were some adverse effects from doing this testing.
Although I did manage to alter the different versions of the content enough that it possibly made them fairly unique actually. I think where the real adverse effect came to play was when Google Panda actually started penalizing the sites the articles were submitted too. This is the only reason the site decreased for a short time in ranking. The sites the articles were submitted to, may have lost some of their luster or juice because of Panda. All in all, not sure of the correct reason, but since then the site has recovered.
Content Spin off Results
Since completion of the testing it was clear that the results and benefits of writing unique content is for sure the correct way to go. There are several reasons for this:
- Proving you’re an authority in your industry
- Makes it easier to claim your content
- No risk of declining results
- Knowing you followed guidelines
- Not being a spam contributor
- Not being hit by DCMA
Duplicated Content on Site
Duplicate content on a website is another area Panda has affected. An example of this type of content is when you have more than one page with the same information on each page. This is considered duplicate content. Although this is not a copyright issue, you essentially are producing the same content when placing the same information on your pages within the same domain. Why should this matter, you might ask? Well the goal of Panda here was to prevent the creation of pages aimed at just creating pages for the sake of it. Some websites were posting the same content on different pages to generate more keywords in titles and descriptions to produce more results. This is actually a spam method/strategy focused at capturing more search engine results based on mass production.
Although this was one of the principles behind the Panda, I can not actually say I saw much of an impact concerning duplicate content on websites. For example, some sites have multiple landing pages directed at different locations, but the content is the same except for the meta title’s and description’s and a few minor changes to location names on the pages. I suppose these can be considered landing pages, but the Panda do not seem to pay much attention to the fact that some of these sites have the exact same content on the pages, hence duplicate content. The only difference as said already, was the title’s and descriptions. Some of the descriptions were even the same except for a location name.
Avoiding Duplicate Content Issues
- Make use of canonical URL
- Use noindex and nofollow
- Use cookies in place of session id’s
- Avoid identical content
- Do not scrap for content
- Make sure body, title and description tags are different
Conclusion of Duplicate Content
Not exactly sure how much has to be changed to make it unique enough not to matter, but apparently not much from what I can tell at this point. The proof is in the pudding. I can truly come to this diagnosis because I have done the thing’s written about here on this post as well as tested it. One site in particular still has solid results in the SERP’s and has tons of duplicate content to this day. I believe it is safe to say that website’s with high authority were not hit to bad even if duplicate content is on the sites. Although the pages with duplicate content from the same domain may have been penalized on a page per page bases the overall domain was not impacted.
Where you effected by duplicate content or were your outcomes the same?
Click here for more information about controlling duplicate content and canonical url’s.
Google Panda Release Dates
Here is a complete list of the Panda updates provided by Search Engine Land:
Panda Update 1.0, Feb. 24, 2011 (11.8% of queries; announced; English in US only)
Panda Update 21, Nov. 5, 2012 (1.1% of English queries in US; 0.4% worldwide; confirmed, not announced)
Panda Update 23, Dec. 21, 2012 (1.3% of English queries were affected; confirmed, announced)
Panda Update 24, Jan. 22, 2013 (1.2% of English queries were affected; confirmed, announced)
Thank you for reading and all questions or comments are welcome. If this is helpful pass it along, join our news letter or just share a little. Will try to update this list when the next release comes out from Google.
“Do not let the Panda eat all your website traffic.”
How Canonical URL’s Effect Search Indexing
Avoiding Duplicate URL’s From Being Crawled
The canonical tag was introduced in 2007 and tells the search engines what should be indexed. By allowing the search engines to know the preferred page it eliminates duplicate page indexing. E-commerce or large websites usually run into more issue’s surrounding duplicate indexing problems. This is due to multiple products, lots of dynamic content and an abundance of categories.
Since the first release of the Panda in February, 24th. 2011 webmasters have been poised with avoiding duplicate content issues across websites. The Panda update was huge and hit around 12% of global search engine queries. Some websites saw a drastic change in the amount of website traffic the were receiving. These changes forced content creators to create unique content that is quality as well as causing Webmasters to remove or submit request to other websites that had dubious low quality content they created to be removed from those other websites.
Canonical allows the crawlers to know what link is to be indexed. For example if you have link that is yoursite.com?id=1 the canonical link can tell the crawlers to index yoursite.com instead. You can also set parameter preferences in Google Webmaster Central Console as well to aid in the process of determining what to index. This is also beneficial if you have more than one domain name linking to a website. <link rel=”canonical” href=”URL” />
Avoiding Duplicate URL’s
Robots.txt file Usage
Avoiding Duplicate Canonical URL’s and Content
Use a Constant URL Pattern
Using a different URL pattern such as http://www.linkworxseo.com vs. http://linkworxseo.com can cause confusion to the search engines. Search engine’s perceive this as different url’s, which leads to another form of duplicate content. Avoid these patterns of URLs so the search engines can make sense of your domain. A solution to overcome this problem is to use the canonical tag to indicate the right URL. You should indicate this inside of the Google Webmaster Console as well. You can find this under Configuration > Settings > Preferred Domain > Select Your Option. Click here to learn more about setting a preferred domain.
Conclusion
The necessity to resolve duplicate content issue’s at hand are a most due task for proper search engine optimization. Removing duplicate content enhances a websites search engine results and helps prevent spam as well. If you have not done this by now, you should do it immediately.
“There is always a way to resolve the issue.”
