Digital Marketing Specialist, Social Media Consultant,
and Tech Geek at Heart

From the category archives:

Marketing

Looking Back on the Year of the Panda: Google Algorithm Changes

December 27, 2011

This last year Google brought a large number of algorithm changes to the table.  Although these changes helped increase traffic and rankings to many large corporations such as YouTube and eBay, it hurt a large majority of small businesses. According to Search Engine Land, some domains saw a 94% loss in visibility, and others were left picking up the pieces after they lost 80% of their keyword positions. Consider this graph by Sistrix, created to describe where mahalo.com’s keywords landed on Google search engine results pages (SERPs) before and after one of the Google algorithm updates:

Although there were several Google algorithm changes (some with more impact than others), all of them left businesses scratching their heads. One minute their tactics were working; the next minute they must change their approach entirely. If you found your business scrambling to stay afloat during these changes, you may not realize just how much treading you had to do to stay alive. In case you missed it through all the chaos, below lists all of the crazy Google changes that occurred in 2011and just what they all meant:

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Is SMS Marketing Still a Viable Strategy?

December 20, 2011

This is a guest post from James Bentham.

SMS, really?

As most brands and organizations now have a mobile optimized version of their website, the focus is now on encouraging users to travel to your site and interact with the brand itself in order to push increased revenue.

Experienced marketers will tell you that customers are much more likely to respond to campaigns that engage them on a personal level. The marketing strategy must be relevant and timely while meeting the customer’s individual needs. In terms of rate of response, the simple SMS dominates the market. It can add real value to a marketing strategy and continues to grow with the decline in consumer spending. Marketers are being forced to find ever more cost effective ways of engaging with users.

A few statistics…

When you break down the figures involved in SMS marketing, the results can be quite staggering. Here a few examples:

  • 77% of the population of the world own a mobile phone.
  • Of all the SMS messages sent on a daily basis, 98% are opened, with 83% opened within 3 minutes.
  • While only 6% of marketing emails are responded to, SMS campaigns have seen as much as 45% response rates.
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HOW TO: Guide to Performing Website Audits

December 13, 2011

This is a guest post by Harrison Jones.

Onsite optimization of websites is the most important factor in ranking better in search engine results. You can build all the links you want, but if your website isn’t optimized, Googlebot won’t be able to crawl the site properly. Over the past several years, Google and Bing have released guidelines for webmasters to make websites more crawlable. This is a consolidation of all the guidelines released by Google and Bing over the years to improve onsite optimization. Audits should be performed before the launch of any new website design, and at least twice per year to keep up with changes in industry standards.

Canonicalization and URL Structure

www or non-www, that is the question. Rather than wasting your time rehashing this topic, I have written a handy guide that explains URL structure best practices in full. To summarize the article, there should only be one URL used to get to the homepage of your website. Whether or not you choose to use www is your choice. Just make sure there is only one version, and it’s not followed by an index.php, index.html, etc… URLs should contain words only and no numbers or symbols. The words should be separated by dashes instead of spaces or underscores. All words should contain lower case letters. Each URL should contain a keyword phrase, and should be no longer than 5 words in length overall.

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How to Hire Your SEO Partner

November 29, 2011

This is a guest post by Brad Shorr.

Hiring an SEO specialist is one of the most important decisions you will make in your pursuit of online marketing success. It is also one of the most perplexing.

There are two enormous issues with search engine optimization that hinder your ability to zero in on the right partner:

  1. Rapidly changing, constantly evolving rules. Google’s algorithm – the formula it uses to determine page ranking – has undergone significant changes recently, and I believe we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg.
  2. Lack of industry standards. Lawyers pass the bar, doctors have diplomas, but SEOs have nothing of the sort to give you confidence in their level of training and talent.

With this in mind, the first two things you want to evaluate in a potential SEO partner are:

  1. Methodology. Are they are using today’s SEO best practices or yesterday’s?
  2. Results. Do they walk the talk? Are they surgeons … or butchers?

Let’s take these decision-making factors one at a time, and then move on to a few more very important factors that need to be addressed once these two are nailed down.

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How To Monitor Your Three Essential Internet Marketing Strategies

November 22, 2011

This is a guest post by Andy Havard.

Internet marketing strategies vary depending on the nature of the blog, brand, or business and alter with accordance to their physical and digital size and their particular niche. When it comes to marketing any organization, product, or service on the web, there tends to be three essential ways of doing so:

  1. Dominating social media platforms
  2. Utilizing Internet video
  3. Driving traffic to websites

This three-fold plan appears to be a timeless marketing approach on the net, but how do you know you’re succeeding in these areas? How do you know your campaign is ticking all the right boxes?

The following article addresses the best practices for measuring and monitoring your marketing campaign in these three areas, and provides an easy to digest guide to some of the best tools for the job.

Broad Social Media Monitoring

Depending on how social your Internet presence is, you might only be interested in certain aspects of social media data. Let’s imagine your blog, brand, or business operates a wide variety of social media from the likes of Facebook and Twitter to StumbleUpon and Instagram.  The time it would take to collect such a wide variety of data could eat up a good chunk of your day. When you’re operating in this way, the most time- efficient data to gather is a broad overview of how your overall approach is going down on the ‘net.

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