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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!

Building your fan base in Facebook can be done quite easily and in a number of different ways. The easiest is done by adding a social “badge” to your website. A social badge can look like this,  but there are numerous variations:

This badge will link back into your Facebook Business Page, giving visitors to your website the opportunity to become a fan of your Facebook Page. If you’d like to increase the number of followers, or people visiting your Facebook Page, try adding something valuable which will encourage people to become fans. It could be a promotional offer, or information which can only be found on your Facebook page.

When you offer people something they find useful, they will keep coming back for more.

Another option is include Facebook directly in your website by utilizing Facebook Connect. This will allow people to post to Facebook directly from your website, commenting on your content and spreading awareness of it for you.

Additionally, if you have the budget, you could advertise directly on Facebook, giving people the option to become a fan of your Page. This method will allow you to target your exact demographic and build out a quality fan following.

Now, you can also invite your friends on Facebook to become fans of your Page, provided they have interest in it. Look around for Facebook Groups which are about topics you are trying to market to also. You can normally get a decent number of Fan’s from these groups, provided you engage the community. Provide them with something of value, I cannot stress that enough, and you’ll hear me say it numerous times! Social Media is all about word of mouth, so give people a reason to start talking!

In Part 3 of “Social Media Optimization The Easy Way”, we’ll discuss how you can leverage Twitter for brand building and management, as well as increasing sales.

If you don’t know what social media is, you’ve obviously been living in a cave for the past few years. We won’t hold that against you though. But, I digress! Social Media Optimization; what is it? How do you do it? Is it difficult?

Social media is media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. It is created to be shared with a community or network of individuals, and social media optimization is the process by which we ensure your message or content is seen by the people!

So, how do you do it? Is it difficult?

It is actually very simple, and I will show you how to do it the easy way, but first, let us break down some different elements of social media.

Types of Social Media

• Social Bookmarking (Digg, Del.ici.ous, Reddit, SumpleUpon, etc.)
• Social Networking (Facebook, LinkedIn, Naymz, MySpace, etc.)
• Social Blogging/Micro-Blogging (LiveJournal, Blogger, WordPress, Twitter, etc.)
• Video (YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo Video, Cafepress, VIMO, etc.)
• Podcasts (Podcast Alley, NPR, Podcast.com, etc.)
• Photos (Picasa, Flickr, etc.)

Now, these are by no means the only forms of social media, or places where you’ll find it. There are thousands of sources online where you’ll find it, and chances are you are already using some of them yourself. If you are a parent with a teenager… ask them. They are probably using at least 3. At the same time. Right this very second! I’m serious. Go and check for yourself, I can wait…

See? I told you they were using it!

Now then, do not be misled. Social media is by no means only for the young. 29% of Facebook’s users, and also the largest portion of them, are between the ages of 35-54, with the largest growing user segment being those over the age of 55. Staggering, isn’t it?

So, how can you tap into social media and leverage your business, or a client’s? Let’s start you off with a few places where a social media presence will have the most impact.

1. Facebook – Develop a Facebook Business Page for yourself or your client. Fill it in with the required information, such as business location, office hours (if applicable), telephone number, fax number and other contact information. Add an image for the Page, normally the company logo. Now, start adding content which is valuable to your visitors. There is a lot you can do. The discussion boards will allow you to communicate with visitors and create a dialog. Your Wall will let you post short information items which can be seen by visitors at a glance. Get creative with your Page. There are thousands of Facebook Apps available to enrich your Page. You can even create your own if you are savvy enough, or hire someone to do it for you!
2. Twitter – Creating a Twitter account is a good way to start generating a bit of buzz. Don’t just flood the web with posts, or “tweets” as they are known. Find people tweeting about areas you share knowledge in which is relevant to your business, or your client’s. Engage the community! If you have valuable insights, people will follow you. This is how you can effectively build out your Followers. Create a custom Twitter design so that your page is memorable and in-line with your brand.
3. YouTube – If you have video, or can create some… you need to have a YouTube channel. YouTube is owned by Google and video optimization is a sure-fire way to get some page 1 listings with Google. Again, create a custom channel design and start uploading some video. Be sure the Titles of your videos and their tags are in-line with what the video is promoting. Remember that YouTube’s search functionality works exactly like Google’s.  Your titles and descriptions have a massive impact on your visibility.

Don’t fret; I’ll explain how you can build a following leverage your newly created social media channels. In Part 2 of “Social Media Optimization The Easy Way”, we’ll focus on Facebook!

The actual process of blogging is simple, right? Sit down in front of your computer with a cup of coffee and start typing, right? Wrong.

This is actually the very last step in the process of blogging. First, you need to know your audience. What type of people do you want reading your blog? What type of blog is it? Is it a personal blog where you are simply blogging about your day, your thoughts and feelings? Or, is it an industry related blog, where you will be blogging about new developments in your field of expertise?

These are very important things you need to take into account. So, let’s break down what you need to know before you actually start blogging!

1. What type of blog are you creating? (Personal, Industry, News Aggregation, Political, etc.)
2. What is your target demographic? (Teens, adults, industry professionals,  bloggers, etc.)
3. How often are you going to blog? (Daily, Weekly, Bi-weekly, monthly, etc.)
4. What blog platform are you going to use? (WordPress, Blogger.com, TypePad, etc.)
   • It is important to consider a few things here. Are you planning to host the blog on your own server/URL and does it support certain blog software, or are you going to host it for free through blogger.com or wordpress.com, for example.
   • Each option has positives and negatives. Free hosting, you don’t have as much control over your blog. You can’t completely customize your blog. When you pay for hosting, it’s all yours. You can modify your blog to your heart’s content. Custom templates, widgets, plugins… you name it!
   • Do your homework. Always make sure the information you are putting out is accurate. If you are writing a personal blog, you need not worry. However, if you are writing an industry blog, you need to ensure you information is factual and has value for your readers.
   • Do it from the heart. If you don’t enjoy doing it, it’s going to show in what you do. To quote Dale Carnegie, “People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.”

And please keep in mind, if you can’t find the time to write a blog post every few days consisting of about 200-300 words, you are working too hard. Take a breather. In the words of Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

In other words, do what you love, and love what you do. If you don’t like blogging, then don’t torture yourself into creating new posts every day, every week, or even every month! Myself, I enjoy blogging. This post actually has 465 words right now, and I have only been writing for a few minutes. The trick is, don’t stress about what you are writing.

Just let it flow.

In today’s society, it is difficult to imagine a time before the blog. It has even gotten to the point where we are addicted to micro-blogging, which comes to us in the form of the “tweet”, made possible by Twitter. But where did it all start? Well, for that we need to take a trip way back the early 80’s.

The concept of blogging has been around since 1983, but technology didn’t quite catch up until the rise of HTTP in the early 1990’s. Before the modern web, there was Usenet, which was the original internet. Usenet had a number of moderated newsgroups which allowed people the opportunity to share their thoughts with a group of people under the moderation of a certain individual or a small group of people. For the most part, they were simply discussion groups.

Not everyone had access to this medium in order to express themselves, however. We must bear in mind that this was the early days of what would one day become the internet.

In 1983-1984, this began to evolve, thanks to a man by the name of Brian E. Redman and some of his friends. They began to make summary postings on Usenet about other interesting postings being made in different “threads” on other discussion boards. The original news aggregators.

Let’s take a step forward into the 1990’s and what was then the “modern” blog.

In the early 90’s blogging, or “weblogs” as it is actually known, began to evolve into an online diary format. These early blogs were basically difficult to update web pages where people would write about their day, their thoughts or their feelings. These writings were thrust out onto the web, often with very few people ever even seeing them. At this time, due to the limitations of design and connection speed, these blogs were often bare-bones in styling.

Jump forward again to the late 90’s.

Now, we are beginning to see blog platforms being introduced to the online-world. In 1998, Open Diary launched. This was the innovator of the “reader comment”, giving your follower the chance to comment on posts and actually open a line of communication with a web author, or “blogger”.

One year later, in March of 1999, Brad Fitzpatrick, who is also a well-known blogger, created LiveJournal, an online journal which is open to the public, and still around to this day.

In this same year, Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan of Pyra Labs launched Blogger.Com, which was purchased by Google in 2003. Blogger.com enjoyed massive success as one of the most advanced blog platforms the world had ever seen. This platform started a new revolution in blogging, making it easier to combine personal pages with valuable tools such as permalinks, blogrolls and trackbacks.

When this was combined with weblog search engines, it opened a whole new door for blog enthusiasts to find new blog authors and connect with bloggers who shared similar interests.

In May of 2003, the blog game changed once again with the launch of WordPress. Sources say that WordPress blogs comprise 2% of the 10,000 biggest websites online today. Created by Matt Mullenwag, as of September 2009 WordPress was being used by more than 202 million websites globally.

This open source blog publishing application revolutionized blogging, allowing for a simple, yet sophisticated templating system that made for seamless integration into a websites which supported PHP and MySQL. The user-friendly workflow and stunning plugin architecture employed by WordPress attracted many new users and, as far as this author is concerned, started the era of the modern blogger.

So, into the blogosphere, you ask? What is the blogosphere, exactly?

The term “blogosphere” was originally coined back in 1999 by Brad L. Graham as a joke. In 2002, it was re-coined by William Quick and quickly propagated across the internet. This term originally stemmed from the term “logosphere”, from the Greek “logos”, meaning “word”, and “sphere”, meaning “world”. So, in other words, the world of words.

Welcome to the Blogoshpere

With the current rise of social media and many companies now learning the importance of having a presence on social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube, the importance of analytics has only grown.

The question I most frequently hear when it comes to social media is, “How can we track social media campaigns when they aren’t happening on our websites?”

Well, the answer is simple folks. Analytics doesn’t end with your domain. You can track the effectiveness of the links you are creating. It is very simple to do, and you can even use Google’s free URL Builder tool to tag your links with the script necessary to track them.

Now, a quick run through of this easy-to-use tool

So, as you can see, it is very straight-forward. Put in the URL of your website or page that you are linking to, and then include some info in the fields below.

Your Campaign Source should be where you are posting the link, so Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.

You Campaign Medium will allow you select what capacity the link is being used in. Is it the link from a banner?

The Campaign Term will allow you to identify what triggered your ad. If you ad only shows when people search for the term “web analytics” or have an interest in web analytics, that is the term you’d use for this field. It will help you to distinguish how effective that term is and you can then use it in later campaigns.

Campaign Content will let you differentiate your ads in the event you are running multiple ads for A/B (Split) Testing – which you should be, I might add! Make sure what you put in this field matches up with what you’ve named the ad in your advertising account with these different networks. It will make things easier on you when you pull you analytics reports!

Finally, your Campaign Name. This is pretty easy. Whats the name of your campaign? It can be something simple and easy to remember, so don’t worry about it to much. You can see that I named mine “Understanding Analytics” so I know what site it is for!

Once you have filled in these fields, or only the required ones if you like, click the “Generate URL” button and the tool will build your URL for you. Copy it, and paste it where needed for your social media campaigns. People who click on those links will be easily identified in your analytics reports. You will now be able to track how effective your Social Media Optimization is using Google Analytics.

Now, that was nice and simple, wasn’t it?

In closing, always be sure that you are using proper A/B Testing, or “Split Testing”. Every week you should be trying to beat the performance of your control ad. If you manage it, you’ve got yourself a new control ad! Try and beat that one now! This will help you create better performing advertisements, increase your conversion rates and your ROI. This means more money for everyone, which is never a bad thing. Unless you don’t like money. And if you didn’t like money, you wouldn’t be reading this!

Here is to your success folks!
Ryan Dinelle