The inception of social media into the world of marketing is quite dramatic, and it has managed to hypnotize all groups of companies, people, new ventures and even, the marketing experts. While some understands its scope and power, many are just following the trend blindly and investing into the social media marketing services. If you consider this to be a revolution, then you are wrong because this is just the tip of the iceberg. The actual Tsunami is yet to come. However, it is essential to clear the cloud over some of the myths.

Social Media experts: There are people who call them expert in social media. If you go into the depth, you will find they just understand how to operate Facebook, twitter and other social websites like LinkedIn, but they don’t actually know the logic and core operating technique behind these social media. Everyone who can operate these social websites cannot be called an expert, until and unless, he has knowledge on the tools that can manipulate them. Thorough knowledge in content creation, trend and search engine optimization through social media can make a person an expert. It is not about investing in the social media, it is about earning the maximum through analyzing power.

Social Media is cheap: Social media is about communication with people and thus, it takes time. You get back equivalent to the effort and time you employ. Being weary of the market and its changing trends pay off and this cannot be achieved spending 15 minutes a day. Value your time, first, and then invest on understanding the audience. You give value to the audience and the social media will provide value to your campaign.

Anyone Can Do It:  It is crucial to understand that speaking English does not make a talented writer and similarly, twitting does not make anyone a marketing professional. It is not something that can be done by anyone. Elaborated knowledge about the social media and its operation is required for proper analysis. Proper analysis holds the key to marketing success, and you should possess the skill.

Social Media is a Fad: Social media are not a crash diet which has its impact for a limited time. The concept involves customers and their decision while purchasing any product and services. The communicative platform provides awareness building and knowledge sharing, and this has induced trust among the users. Modes of marketing have changed due to this and this will make social media stay for a long time. There may be migration from one social media to another, but its consistent approach will keep on appealing to the customers.

Social Media is the only requirement: Marketing has been evolving since its inception, and social media have given it a new direction. However, that does not mean that it is the sole form of marketing, and you can forget other tools. Marketing has seen tools such as digital advertising, launch of websites and many such things. All these are absorbed by marketing, and this will happen to social media, as well. It will get its place and will settle down in the future.

Social Media means different things to different people, but in its inception it was a point of communication which was made to benefit its users. There are lot more evolution to come, and the power of social media is yet to be unleashed. There are many SEO service providers who nowadays are also offering Social Media marketing as part of their SEO package.

Duplicate content is defined as online content that is found in more than one place on the World Wide Web. When there is indistinguishable content floating around on the internet, search engines have a tough time figuring out which content is more pertinent to a specific query.  This makes things complicated for organic ranking. Now, organic ranking is the rank that is given to a website on the results page of a Search Engine for distinctive keywords depending on website content. It is called ‘organic’ as it is supposed to be pure and natural. Duplicate content in websites always sabotages your search engine ranking due to the mentioned confusion.

Duplicate content can be either completely similar or substantially similar. Content is sometimes meditatively copied across domains to mold organic rankings and score more website traffic. Search engines never tend to show similar or duplicate content and are strong armed to choose from the best content available. Search engines do this by relating this to a website’s organic ranking.

There are several reasons why duplicate content can be harmful for organic ranking.

Firstly, Search engine has no clue which versions to incorporate from their indices. They can’t figure out whether to point the link metrics to a single web page or isolate them.

Secondly, they don’t know how to rank the similar content for keywords and specific queries. Hence, Search Engines have a hard time providing germane results to the users. They generally omit the duplicate results.

Thirdly, building trust is impossible with duplicate content and customers may also notice this.

So, duplicate content is really harmful for your websites as you suffer from bad rankings along with traffic losses. Another very important issue is that the other websites, which have your syndicated content may have a greater ranking than you. This might just occur due to their muscular domain authority. Why would you want duplicate content floating on your website anyway? It’s plagiarism to copy someone else’s work, and you surely don’t want your website to become noted as a spam site. If you do want someone else’s property in your website, be sure to provide a link back to the original content.

If a website has more than one page with extensive matching content, there are quite a few ways to pinpoint the preferred URL (Universal Resource Locator) to the search engine. This method is known as ‘canonicalization’. Content should always be canonicalized whenever duplicate content is found in more than one website. A 301 redirect to the correct URL is one method to do this. This is the process of combining multiple pages into a single page, which cuts out the competition between the pages. This results in a greater ranking, a better relevancy and more popular signals. Some more ways of removing duplicate content have been noted to work. Prolonging consistency is one way to do it when you are conjugating internally through a website. You also need to check that the syndicated websites add a link back to the genuine content. You should always try to find new ways to minimize similar content swimming around as they only end up harming your organic ranking. Contact any SEO services provider which can help you in dealing with the duplicate content issue.

Webmasters are having a tough time redoing their website after Google came up with a couple of revolutionary algorithms based updates namely Penguin and Panda. These two updates brought in a paradigm shift in the way search engines ranked websites. Voluminous backlinks are passé, spun content is a crime and black hat SEO is dying a natural death. The latest updates use artificial intelligence to inspect websites on the basis of their quality, authenticity, usability and popularity. Only those sites are awarded a high rank which toe the guidelines laid down by Google webmasters.

Google compares and ranks websites from the end- user point of view. Simply creating backlinks and navigating through a big number of sites is not going to work anymore. The new algorithms are based on user experience. From its database, the updates run a check for the credibility, loading time, quality of information, natural links, a relevant network of supporting sites and blogs and appropriate ads. In order to climb the SEO rankings ladder, many websites resort to using black hat SEO techniques, and Google has devised this technique to actually downgrade such sites. This has caused no less than 12 percent loss in ranking for several web sites.

How to remain competitive after Google penguin & panda updates is perhaps the most frequent query from webmasters. It is important to learn the Google game if one has to stay alive in the competition. Both Google Penguin and Google Panda are attacking dishonest websites from two different angles. Penguin is punishing websites for duplicate content, overuse of keywords on a page, purchasing or sharing bulk links and other shady but widespread practices. Panda, on the other side, is busy downgrading websites it considers ‘thin’ or low quality. It has simultaneously upgraded sites which conform to white hat techniques.

In order to survive the continuing arm twisting by Google, webmasters must keep in mind a few handy tips. For example, overstuffing a page with dozen ads is not going to work in their support any more. Instead, they should look to include the most appropriate and genuine ads on the page. It helps to remember that the algorithms affect the entire site and not just a page. Therefore, the complete site needs to be checked for possible oversights. Google was built with the idea of providing information to users. E-commerce is simply an accessory. Thus, any site which gives out information that the user is searching invariably gets to a higher rank.

Websites need to be of high quality in order to remain competitive,. It is well known that links are not built in a day nor do guests start pouring in from day one. If one is able to check these practices, trust Google to reward the site with a higher rank and greater visibility. To attract more traffic, the entire online marketing and search engine optimization practices have to be altered. There are no short cuts to success, either in real life or in the virtual.

The recent days have witnessed Google relentlessly updating its algorithm to upgrade the content quality and user experience, along with clawing the sites which attempt to manipulate the link schemes. This aggressive stance has made it crucial to do a technical audit of your web site on a regular basis. This audit are more or less like a routine medical checkup with your doctor (for health issues), to cure as well as to prevent your site from the wrath of Google updates. This audit can help you in eliminating or minimizing the hidden issues which pull down the ranking of your site.

Benefits of a technical audit

A technical audit presents a clear picture of the effectiveness of the website and aids the SEO team to formulate a powerful strategy instead of making blind moves towards SEO. With an audit, you can discover not only the snags in a website’s internal structure, but also the potential areas which if cared, can help in achieving higher rankings in the search engine results pages. A technical audit addresses the following issues,

How to perform the technical audit?

Search engines prefer websites that have unique and effective codes and architectural structure. There are two methods to check that –

The first method does not call for an indepth knowledge of HTML. The major efforts lie in searching for the best technical audit software online, downloading and installing it, and you’re ready to go.

The second and best option, calls for an extensive knowledge of HTML, imperative to construct and reconstruct the site. The SEO technical audit offers a wealth of information, acquired through an extensive series of steps. These steps begin by reviewing the site architecture or coding of the web site. The second step is put forward towards a deep analysis of the content. It ensures that the content is unique, informative and employs useful keywords with appropriate density. Also, attention is drawn towards perfect placement of advertisements and images. Category pages, are reviewed and sorted, and the URL is checked to make the page easy to open. Every aspect of the site, from the meta tags, duplicate pages to the site speed, is taken into consideration. Undoubtedly this requires great skills and experience and  lies exclusively in the domain of SEO consultants. Contact an SEO company and take the benefit of a comprehensive  technical SEO audit. With their skills, they ensure that the website complies perfectly with the Google guidelines and reach the desires ranking in the SERP.

The recent panda and penguin updates by Google have created a stir in the world wide web. Countless websites lost their rankings overnight and the most popular black hat SEO techniques like unnatural back links were tagged as the culprits.  The search engine giant has now its clear focus on delivering informative, high quality and original content besides enhancing the user experience to the best.

The Panda update from Google emphasizes on the importance of the “quality” based factors.  This change in the algorithm focuses on the depth of information a web site is providing.  With This step Google has made the sites showcasing duplicate and inferior or irrelevant content fall down in the rankings in the esteemed SERP. It largely targeted low value onpage optimization, focusing on unoriginal content and spammy outbound links. The Penguin on the other hand addressed issues related to inbound links, principally targeting the sites having many unnatural links pointing to them. Both the updates have left the site owners on the edge of big penalties in the form of lost ranking or even being dropped from the coveted Google’s search index.

The aggressive stance has made Google’s  attitude towards content, crystal clear. No short cuts would be pardoned and only high quality content sites would be able to claim places in the SERP.  

The Panda and Penguin have redefined the role of search engine optimization (SEO) for the present and as far as vision could reach. Though the keywords still occupy a major position, the content has acquired a dominant role. No more blackhat SEO strategies, like stuffing keywords into irrelevant and low quality articles, can pull up the rankings but now the opportunities to reach high lies around the quality content. The web site owners would have to adopt a few changes in their content strategy with the emphasis on,

The shift from the less than penguin friendly shortcuts, to the more content oriented strategies would certainly not be swift, yet it is bound to pay off with good as gold organic links. Here, we have brought for you  some of the best content based strategies, which can help you pull through the Panda and Penguin turmoil.

Link building with social media

Social media is surfacing as an important vehicle to support the search marketing strategies. Once you have created informative and engaging content, it is crucial to share it with all. Several social media channels like the Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and the likes, are perfect to share and attract traffic to your web site, but you must ensure that the content is easy to share by including the social media buttons. 

Link building with the content based strategies is indeed a lengthy and cumbersome process, when compared to the paid links or the ever famous shortcuts. Yet the content based strategies boast of being Panda and Penguin friendly, ensuring you solid organic links and consistent rankings.

Monitoring the brand or your own nameonline has become an essential task for any business corporation or individual. Now the days are gone, when people used to talk about a brand behind closed doors. Now, there are a number of locations from where you can get to know the conversations which are being held on the web about a brand. These conversations can create havocs in the long run and therefore a basic reputation management is essential to help present a positive image on the web.

But before that, it is important to ascertain the current reputation of you or your brand in the web world. You can get started by the following ways. Monitor the following tools regularly or if you are a large and popular company, hire someone to manage these tools.

•   •  Subscribe to Google alert through RSS and email by using different keywords. They will keep you updated with the latest relevant Google results based on your choice of query or topic. Set a “comprehensive alert” which will notify you of stories and happening which happen on your name, topic or company. The keywords can be a brand name or your own name, it depends on what you would like to track.
•   •  It’s advisable for you to be on Technorati if you have a blog. Technorati tracks your “blog creations” or blogs that are linked to yours. When you subscribe to RSS alerts they will send you an alert whenever someone blogs about you.
• Blog comments can be monitored by a tool named Backtype. Their service lets the user find, follow and share comments across the web. If there is a comment written with a link to your website, Backtype attributes it to you.
•   •  Discussion boards are places where people can gather and talk about you in a community. You should also keep a track on discussion boards.
• Tweets move at light’s speed and spreads like virus if not caught at the right time. Use twitter search to locate tweets about your name. Conduct a search for your company’s name or your name or of the topics you are interested in and subscribe via RSS. Email alters can also be received by using additional tools like Twilert and TweetBeep.
•   •  Filtrbox delivers the most credible and relevant mentions of the things you want to track. The content tracked by them is based the dimensions of feedback, popularity and contextual relevance.
•   •  A robust network helps a lot as you will receive important updates even without asking for them.

Some companies in the online space offering SEO Services including online reputation management can help you with your specific online needs and can get top SEO rankings for them in search engine results.