WSI Buzz – News & Information on Search Engine Optimization, Internet Marketing and More

OK … so maybe Google Panda sounds nicer than what was previously known as the Google Farmer update.

Either way – it was a change in Google’s algorithm that caused a lot of sites to lose traffic and people to panic.

But then again – what is new with any change Google makes to their algorithm right? So let’s find out exactly what this Google Panda Update is all about ….

Plagiarism was a grave issue that plagued many-a websites whose content was illegally and stealthily copied by other websites. These low quality websites that duplicated content from other sources were observed to be achieving good rankings in search engines for ages. To put this threat of online content copyright and plagiarism issues to rest. Google formulated a gigantic algorithmic change – The Google Panda.

Google Panda was officially rolled out to Google on February 24, 2011. However, the UK update happened only after six weeks of the official launch. The other countries soon followed suite. Thanks to Google Panda, websites with poor quality or duplicate content lost their top ranks and dropped several positions in Google whereas those that were victorious witnessed a miraculous upgrade in their ranks and search visitor. The main implications of Google Panda update was felt by the sites that copied content from other sites described by Google as ‘low quality’ or ‘thin content’ websites, together with those that were packed with keywords in order to have them rank well in search engines. With Google Panda’s onslaught, sites that initially fetched top rankings were tipped off and sent tumbling down the order.

Google Panda has indeed triggered a set of strict protocols for website to mend their acts and have unique, original and relevant content on their websites that will not only promote their online presence but also help them churn enhanced ROI through fair means.

Below are some of the main websites that were directly impacted by the Google Panda Update:

• wisegeek.com
• ezinearticles.com
• suite101.com
• hubpages.com

Now we all know syndicating your content is important, and if part of your key SEO strategy was to syndicate your articles to these sites or similar, you are not going to get the same momentum or SEO benefit from Google.

We still encourage you to write unqiue, compellign content that people want to read/share – its just a matter of ‘where’ this content is getting shared is going to determine the value back to you.
This leads to another upcoming change Google is pushing is Google OAuth (Authentication) - where Google is trying to determine how many people part of YOUR social network (on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn etc) are sharting, rating, commenting, recommending content – because it is more likely that it will be beneficial to YOU.

For more information on this topic, feel free to contact us 1-519-894-0846 or email info@socialmindz.com

Over the life-span of your website, there is a very real possibility that you will generate great deals of content, be it through a blog, or through articles and press releases which you’ve had written.

So, what happens to the content after a couple of years, and you are no longer getting any benefit from it, or through a lack of SEO, it never provided any quantifiable benefit for your website and company to begin with? Well, that content hasn’t gone anywhere. It may have even been archived on your website. Why let it sit there doing nothing for you?

Its time to repurpose that content and give it a fresh new look and feel. Go through your blog archives and find posts that have new relevance in the changing online world. Update it and ensure the content is fresh. Remove old chunks of information which are no longer applicable and then add some new flavor. 10 minutes later, you have yourself a repurposed peice of content!

Now then, what do you do with it? Simple.

1. Determine the new title for the post, and create title tag, and meta tags accodinginly.
2. Create good internal links with strong keyword based anchor text within the blog post.
3. Re-post your new, re-purposed content item and be sure to add your title tag and meta tags so the search engines will index it better.
4. Ensure you blog platform allows people the ability to share the post with their social networks.
5. Push it out to the social networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) and let the people know it’s there. Give them some time to digest it, and hopefully, if your content is valuable enough, people will share it with friends on their social networks as well!

The same approach can be taken with articles that have been gathering dust for years. Repurpose them as blog posts or new articles. If the article is long enough, you may even be able to get a few new blog posts out of it.

But wait! Don’t stop there! Remember all of that info marketing material the company has printed over the years? Break ‘em back out again and put them to work for your business in a more productive fashion. It’s time to get them online! Take 20 minutes and type them up so you can turn them into articles or blog posts for your business. Make sure you update them with current information if needed, the get them onto your website.

And I bet you thought all of that old print material was only good for starting fires?

Again, follow the same principles here. Focus on those basic SEO elements like title tags, meta tags, good internal link practices, and you’ll be surprised just what that old content of your can pull off!

Mobile Marketing For Business: In this video I discuss how businesses can leverage mobile marketing with the use of SMS and MMS messaging.

I demonstrate our mobile marketing platform and show how easy it is to start your own mobile marketing campaign.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZUmU7sJT4c[/youtube]

Although Mobile Marketing has been around for years – it is only now that businesses are going to really start to learn the power of mobile. Especially with smartphones such as the iPhone or Blackberry, virtually everyone has a mini computer you can say in their pockets at all time.

This means as businesses we can now connect directly with these consumers wherever and whenever.

If you were to send out a traditional message via email, the average open rate is lower than 20% and the time to open an email is approx 48 hours.

Did you know by sending a mobile text message that it has a 95% open rate and gets read within 4 minutes?

This means you can reach your target audience via mobile marketing quicker and faster than ever before.

At the same time, mobile marketing does not cost a whole lot and there is probably little or no competition in your market now – so this would be the best time to act. Remember there are over 276 million Americans using mobile phones, the Internet you can reach out to 1.7 billion people but on mobile the reach is 4.8 billion.

For more information on mobile marketing companies, SMS Text Messaging Services or how mobile marketing can work for your business – please contact us at:

Baltej Gill
info@socialmindz.com
1-800-659-3638

Or to see a live demo yourself – go ahead and text:

(People in the USA) Text MOBILE to 94932
(People in CANADA) Text CELLPHONE to 54500

In this episode, I explain how you can fix your Facebook Privacy Settings so you can separate your business and personal account on Facebook.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r14SV2ygoaE[/youtube]

How To Set Up Your Facebook Privacy for Business Use:

1. First create a list

a) Click on Account — and then Edit Friends
b) Click on ‘Create New List’
c) Add users to the list you created

2. Now set their permissions

a) Click on Account — and then Privacy Settings
b) Click on ‘Customize Settings’
c) Set permissions

Do you have a question you would like answered in a video? Send it to AskBaltej@socialmindz.com

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMOpBoij5hg[/youtube]

I am going to use this post to discuss all five of the modules included within the title; FAQs, Photo Galleries, Site Search, Comments, and Site Map. My usual post contains information on just one module, but all of these are pretty simplistic, and take little to no effort to setup, and use properly. In fact most of them are pretty self-explanatory once you have gone into the back-end and selected to use it.

The FAQ module is for displaying lists of Frequently Asked Questions. Anyone can build a plain HTML listing of FAQs and set anchor links from the questions up top to the answers below, but that can be a little more time consuming, and not everyone has to know-how to get this done. This particular module takes that extra bit of work out of the equation. All you need to do to create a question/answer is go into the FAQ module, and select create new FAQ. You will need to simply fill out the question, and then provide the answer. You can then add just that FAQ to a page, add all of the FAQs, or just the FAQs within a certain classification category. The FAQ page will display with a list of a question at the top, which anchor link down to the answers.

The Photo Galleries are one of the easiest modules within the eFusion system to use. To create a gallery you should first create a separate folder within the file manager to hold all of your images. Once you have done that, upload all of the images to the folder. You should try to re-size the images prior to upload to save on load times, and disk space. A decent standard to follow of photo sizes would be 600×400 pixels, or 400×600 pixels. Once this has been completed you can go into your photo gallery module, and create a new gallery. It will ask you to title the gallery, and select the folder it should pull the images from. You will also then have the option of adding a descriptive tag to each of the images within that folder. You can then add the Photo Gallery onto any web page you wish. The images will be automatically re-sized down to 80×80 pixels.

The default sizing can, however, be changed if you wish. A default tag for the photo gallery will look like this: {module_photogallery,id}. However there are multiple attributes you can add into the tag itself. This tage will show the various attributes: {module_photogallery,id,rowLength,targetFrame,resultsPerPage,Width,Height,UseStandardMethod}. So if you wish to up-size the thumbnails of the gallery you will end up with a tag like this: {module_photogallery,id,4,,12,120,120). The large image will be shown in a light-box when someone has selected the thumbnail image.

The site search is a very basic module. All that is required to be done in order to utilize this module is go into the module, create a new search, tell it what on the site you want it to pick-up, and then add it onto a page, or template.

The comments module is more of a module add-on than a module of its own. By default a comments form is attached to many of eFusion’s modules, such as the Blog, FAQs, Announcements ect. If you are allowing comments for any of these items you can set them to appear automatically, or you can set them to need administrator before they can be displayed.

The Site Map is another pretty self-explanatory module. Clicking into the site map module will provide you with a list of all of your current web pages. You just need to drag and drop all of the pages into their appropriate hierarchy, and then add the site map onto the proper web page. It will display as a multi-leveled unordered list that you can format through CSS.

So, you’ve built a website and now you are ready to start getting some visitors! The question is, how do you do it?

The answer is quite simple. Search Engine Optimization.

If you are new to SEO, then you may be wondering just how to accomplish optimizing your website. Here are a few simple ways in which you can optimize your website to start driving organic traffic to your website.

1. Create Title tags for your web pages which include your main keywords, and correspond to the content on that page. Make it natural and informative as possible while keeping it short. Aim for no more than 70 characters, as this is the number of characters Google will display in an organic search.
2. Create meta-description tags that are unique to each page on your website. Keep it relevant and try to remember that in most search engines, this is what is going to draw people into your website. Try to use your keywords in a natural fashion, while ensuring that it does a good job outlining what can be found on your web page.
3. Use meta-keywords tags for each page on your website. This will assist the search engines in properly indexing your website. You are essentially telling it what terms you consider to be of high importance on each page of your site. Make sure that the keywords can be found in your site content.
4. Create valuable website content. Make sure that important terms are in bold and that terms being used in reference to another service or point which can be found on your site are linked to the most relevant information.
5. Create organized directory structures for your website. A URL that looks like this, “www.yourdomain.com/cms/archive/services3.html” will not benefit you quite like a URL which looks like this, “www.yourdomain.com/seo/search-engine-optimization.html”. Notice the use of keywords inside the second URL. This can be done by naming your page files in accordance with what the page is really about, and naming the containing folder in the same fashion.

These are just a few simple things you can do in which to help optimize your website. For more tips on SEO, be sure to check WSI Buzz frequently!