There Was A Google Panda Update Data Refresh Nine Days Ago

Remember about a week and a half ago when there was supposed to be a Panda refresh coming within the following week or so? It turns out that it happened the next day, so if you’re still waiting for it, you probably got by unscathed.

Search Engine Land is reporting that it has confirmed with Google that the refresh occurred on November 21, and affected 0.8% of English queries “to a degree that a regular user might notice”.

That would be the second known data refresh of the Panda update in November, with one having taken place around November 5.

We’re now at the end of November, heading into December, which means there are now two full months for which Google hasn’t released its lists of “search quality highlights” and algorithm changes. Lately, they’ve been doing them two months at a time, so we may be able to expect the latest lists very soon. Then, we can look at the other types of changes Google has been focused on.

3 Onsite SEO Tips for the Internal Pages of Your Website

Every single page of your website needs to be optimized for SEO, including those deep internal pages. One very important thing to remember about onsite SEO is that the search engines rank individual pages, not the website as a whole. This means that each page (in theory anyway) has a good chance of showing up in the search results for the right search. Obviously some pages of your website are probably going to do better in terms of attracting links and building search engine trust. People will happily link to your homepage; they don’t usually link to your privacy policy.  But there are a lot of pages between your homepage and those “end” pages that need to be there but are hardly ever used. Each and every single one of these internal pages needs to be optimized for SEO.

Here are 3 tips for optimizing the internal pages of your website for SEO:

1. Don’t repeat your “priority” keywords:

A common onsite SEO mistake I see many site owners make is that they target the same priority keywords, say a short list of ten, on page after page of their website (especially if those pages are connected by the site structure and navigation). While I can understand the rationale behind targeting the same keywords again and again, you’re actually undermining the effectiveness of your onsite SEO by doing this. By repeating your priority keywords on those deep pages of your site you are hindering their chances of doing well in the SERPs. Chances are your deep pages don’t get quite as many links as high level pages, nor do they have the same level of search engine trust, so those high level pages are almost always going to outrank deeper pages if they both target the same keywords. Repeating keywords can actually cannibalize your potential SEO success!

2. Make sure your deep pages are properly interlinked into your site:

Not every page of your site needs to be in the high level navigation or the footer (those are typically the most important pages on your site) but no page can be an island either. No matter how deep a page may be buried in your site it needs to be properly interlinked into the overall site structure. Internal linking in a crucial component of onsite SEO because it helps spread the link juice and search engine love from the top down (and horizontally) throughout your site. Pages that aren’t connected to the rest of your site also run the risk of not being crawled and indexed by the search engines meaning your onsite SEO is doing you no good.

3. Go after the long tail keywords:

Those deep, internal pages of your site are the perfect place to target long tail variations of your priority keywords. I know a lot of site owners get blinded by the search volume and think “Why bother with a keyword that only gets 100 searches each month when this keyword get 3,500?” But those long tail keywords are typically going to drive the most targeted visitors to your site. Let’s say you target 20 new, long tail keywords on your internal pages with your onsite SEO. If each of those keywords sent only 5 new visitors to your site that’s 100 new, qualified visitors each month! I can’t think of any business that wouldn’t want 100 people that are looking to convert coming to their site.

SEO Competitor Info to Look At

When developing any kind of business or marketing plan it’s always important to consider the competition. If you are entering a market that has lots of established players, you are going to have to do one of two things. The first option is to provide something that is exemplary that will allow you to set your business apart from the rest. If you can’t do that, you may have to try and beat them on cost without sacrificing a quality product. If there is no way to really differentiate yourself, your best bet is to reevaluate your offering and try to find a niche that you can make all your own.

Looking at competitor information for SEO can help you cultivate your own SEO strategy. The first step is to decide who your SEO competitors are. A business owner should be able to quickly rattle off a list of competitors, but sometimes they aren’t quite realistic from an SEO perspective. If you own a small business that sells specialty stationery and envelopes, Staples really isn’t an SEO competitor. Due to Staples’ size and trust the small stationery business would never be able to compete. For SEO, you may not even know who some of your competitors are. To find out, do some searches using your primary keywords and see what sites come up.

Once you’ve chosen your top competitors, take a look at the following:

The website:

OK, this first one is obvious but it’s worth mentioning that you shouldn’t just do a casual gloss over. Actually spend some time getting to know their site and how they are using it. What kinds of call to actions and lead forms do they use? Take a look at not just the homepage, but also interior pages and analyze the meta information and the keywords that they are going after on each page. What is the linking structure? Do they have a blog? How do they incorporate videos and images?

Inbound links:

Throughout an SEO campaign it’s important to continually be analyzing and improving upon your own link portfolio, but don’t forget about the link portfolios of your competitors. Looking at competitor links can provide you with valuable information and ideas for potential places to build your own links. It’s just important to not put too much emphasis on their links or try to copy every single link that they have. Some of their links may be spammy or low quality and that kind of link building practice will catch up with them eventually. Be smart with competitor link data.

Social media activity:

Social media activity is now directly tied to SEO success with increased emphasis and value placed on social signals. Check in to see how the competition is using social media. What kinds of content/links are they sharing? Are they actually interacting and engaging with followers? Are they using it as a customer service tool? See if there is anything that they are doing incorrectly or look for ways that you can do something better in order to stand out. Business social media profiles are public so you don’t need to actually follow or Like your competitor. All you need to do is search for their brand name + the social network.

Key Components of a White Hat SEO Campaign

There are two primary schools of thought when it comes to SEO. The first is white hat SEO, in which the SEO Specialist, agency, consultant, etc. carries out SEO activities that are deemed appropriate in the eyes of the search engines. The second is black hat SEO. This involves using tactics that aren’t approved by the search engines in order to attempt to gain a quick improvement in rank and SERP (search engine results page) presence. The search engines continue to get more sophisticated as time goes on and Google has been making some huge tweaks to the algorithm in the last few years (Panda, Penguin). Conducting black hat SEO activities will catch up with the site owner sooner or later and they will receive a penalty or get de-indexed completely. In order to protect your site in the long run, white hat SEO is the way to go. Follow these 4 white hat SEO guidelines: Quality links trump quantity of links: The Penguin update made it clear that not all links are created equal. There is a big difference between good links and bad links. Penguin went after sites that had links that were considered to be “unnatural” including links from unrelated websites, link exchanges, hidden links, and more. If you practice white hat SEO you won’t engage in any of these link building activities that are questionable. Instead, you will focus on building quality links from a variety of trusted sources. In addition to getting a link to build the link portfolio, focus on locations where the link can also help to generate website traffic. Use a variety of anchor text: Another target of Penguin were sites that relied too heavily on exact match anchor text. Using the same anchor text over and over again isn’t natural. Think about how an outsider would link to your content. It’s doubtful that they would link to one of your “money” keywords. They’d probably link to the name of the business, “click here”, or even include the full URL. To keep things natural when link building, keep this in mind. Vary the anchor text so that it includes branded keywords, some priority keywords, and many long-tail variations. You don’t want to make it look like you are trying to manipulate the search results for a particular phrase. Write for the reader: Content is a huge component of SEO. Without content there is nothing for the search engine spiders to “see” and rank. However, you don’t want to make the mistake of writing content specifically for the search engines. This kind of content is usually stuffed with keywords and is useless for a human reader. Instead, focus on the person that actually may click over to your website and buy from you. If your content doesn’t consider the user-experience it will be rejected by the search engine spiders and your target audience. Keep the back end of the website clean: When practicing white hat SEO, it’s also important to consider what is going on on the back end of your website from a technical perspective. Sometimes during the website design and development process things can slip through the cracks that unknowingly are affecting your SEO success. Analyze the site and check for broken links, consider the load time, and make sure that content isn’t being duplicated. The user experience and internal linking structure of your site are also considered by the search engines.

Create a Search Engine Spider Friendly Site

The whole purpose of having a business website is to get visitors to the site that will ultimately become clients or customers. For most websites, the number one referral source of traffic is Google. For most people, Google is the first place they go when they are looking for just about anything. If you want your website to be successful, it needs to rank well in Google. The Google search algorithm is complex but we do know that the data is pulled from search engine spiders that are continually crawling the web link to link in order to determine where sites should rank.

If you want your site to rank well, it’s necessary to create a website that is search engine spider friendly. Here’s how to do so:

Create backlinks and content:

The search engine spiders go from link to link to link. The number of inbound links pointing to your site and the amount of content that you’ve produced across the web correlates with the number of visits from the search engine spiders. If you have a stagnant site that doesn’t have many inbound links, the search engine spiders may pass right over it. That’s why SEO link building is so important. A great way to make sure that your site is always “fresh” is to add a blog that is updated regularly.

Optimize titles and headings:

The title is the most important meta element for SEO purposes. Be sure to write a unique title for each page of content that includes keywords. If every title is simply the name of the company or brand, it’s not really telling the spider what that page is about. Always include unique keywords first, and then the brand name second if it’s even necessary. Within the page of content, always utilize h tags. The main heading of the page is typically an H1 while sub headings might be H3 or H4. H tags stick out from the rest of the content and tell the spider that it’s important.

Submit an up to date sitemap:

Once the site is fully functional and up and running, it’s best practice to submit a sitemap to Google through Google Webmaster Tools. This gives the search engine spiders the ability to find all of the pages of your site. For a larger website, it may make sense to have a sitemap of sitemaps. If you are constantly adding and removing pages (like an e-commerce site) it may make sense to resubmit the sitemaps on a weekly basis to get the new pages crawled and indexed more quickly.

Internal linking:

For SEO and usability purposes, a website must have a strong internal linking structure. This helps the spider understand the layout of your site and what you have to offer on different pages.

Redirects:

When a spider lands on an error page is comes to an immediate halt because there is nowhere to go. This is bad because you want it to continue to crawl the site. If a page is no longer available or relevant, don’t just let it go to a 404 error page. Instead, use a 301 redirect to send the spider to a page that is the most similar.

Google’s Venice Update—The Forgotten Local Update

In the last few months I noticed that Brick Marketing was ranking in the top five search results for incredibly broad, national keywords like “SEO company.” We’ve been doing very well for localized keywords for a long time, but to see the company crack the SERPs for a national keyword (especially one as competitive as that) was a huge win. But something was felt amiss and I couldn’t put my finger on it until recently when I remembered the Google Venice update and its impact on local SEO. Chances are you don’t remember the Google Venice update either—even though it was released back in February 2012. Amid the hubbub of Pandas, Penguins and a slew of other Google updates, the Venice update was lost in the shuffle.

The Venice update might not seem as Earth-shattering as the Google Panda or Penguin updates, but it had a pretty significant impact on local search!

What is the Google Venice Update?

In their attempt to create a more personalized search experience, Google used the Venice update to automatically account for the location of a searcher, even if they didn’t use localized keywords. For instance, if I search for “hair salon” Google recognizes the location of my computer’s IP address and pulls a list of local results. If you look in the left hand column of the search results page you’ll notice your “current location” (which can be changed); that is the location Google used to determine what kind of results you should see in the SERPs.

From a usability standpoint it makes perfect sense—plenty of users don’t bother to localize their keywords when they search, so Google is taking the next step in personalization and doing it for them. After all, what good does a hair salon in Boston do for me if I’m in Arlington (they are several miles apart with a few towns in between)? But this also means that small, local companies that could never effectively compete for national keywords like “pet store” or “Thai restaurant” or “commercial cleaning” might think their SEO is doing much, much better than it actually is. After all, if you think your company is ranked #1 nationally for a highly competitive keyword with tens of thousands of searches each month you’d expect to see a massive spike in traffic, right? What might you think when the analytics don’t back up your expectations?

How does the Venice update impact local SEO?

While it is still incredibly important to optimize your website for local keywords, the Venice update also means that you don’t have to sacrifice the quality of your content to ensure it has been optimized properly. Think about how well (or not) this sentence reads: Boston SEO company Brick Marketing is headquartered in Boston, MA. Our team of Boston SEO specialists ensure that any local company looking for Boston SEO services gets the help they need.  Not the most beautiful sentence every written, right? But thanks to the Venice update your content doesn’t have to be jam-packed with local keywords in order to tell Google you’re a local business, provided the rest of your site is properly optimized.

How can site owners make their sites better for local SEO and use the Venice update to their advantage?

1. List your local address and phone numbers on the “Contact Us” page as well as in the footer of your site so Google can crawl it and recognize the location of your company.

2. Optimize your content for local keywords naturally. Include your city/town when it makes sense, not just every time you add a keyword to your content.

3. Claim every local listing you can find including Google+ Places, Bing Local, Yahoo Local, Yelp, YP.com and more. You can also add Google Maps to your “Contact Us” page.

4. Build local back links from community sites and organizations to further cement your location in the eyes of Google.

Bing Webmaster Guidelines: Does Anyone Care?

According to Bing:These Webmaster guidelines are broad, but provide guidance on major points such as:
1. Technical SEO
2. Social Media
3. Content
4. Links
5. Things to Avoid

Changes should be infrequent as these current Bing Webmaster Guidelines cover most major topics. They are not exhaustive and you should not expect to find deep, technical answers in them. They are intended to help most business owners understand the broad strokes of search marketing.

Here at Brick Marketing we had an internal discussion about the release of the Bing Webmaster Guidelines. This is pretty big news, right? How can we leverage this with our content marketing efforts? Should we develop a white paper that displays the similarities and differences between the Bing Webmaster Guidelines and the Google Webmaster Guidelines? Or maybe we could create a fancy infographic that would hopefully be shared again and again. After all, this is information that people are going to want. The time that it would take to review and analyze both Webmaster Guidelines and then package all of the information together in one neat attractive document would be well worth it. Or, would it be?

As the discussion went on a few employees admitted that they didn’t even know that Bing didn’t previously have Webmaster Guidelines which brings up a few good points. First, hasn’t Bing been around since 2009? Why are they just now releasing their search engine Webmaster Guidelines? Second, we’d like to think that we’re pretty knowledgeable about SEO and good at what we do. Clearly we’ve been surviving without these Guidelines all of this time, as has every other person in the SEO industry.

After further review of the Bing Webmaster Guidelines it was determined that there really wasn’t anything groundbreaking about it. The Webmaster Guidelines outline that Bing seeks good content, inbound links help establish trust, you should submit a sitemap, page load time is important from a user perspective, 301 redirects should be used when moving content, and what the main focus areas of on site SEO are. All of this should sound pretty familiar if you know anything about the search engines and SEO. One difference that we did notice is that Bing directly states that “social media plays a role in today’s effort to rank well in search results”. The importance of social media isn’t outright stated in the Google Webmaster Guidelines but Matt Cutts has certainly conveyed this many times in other outlets.

We also noticed that there didn’t tend to be too much industry chatter about this release and it happened somewhat quietly. When Google makes any kind of change it’s usually all you read about for days. So we had to wonder- do people even really care that Bing released Webmaster Guidelines? It wouldn’t really be surprising if they didn’t. Google is by far the most popular search engine and people want their website to perform well in Google. If it happens to perform well in Bing too (which it probably will), that’s just an added bonus.

Technical SEO Items to Look Out For

When it comes to SEO it’s important to remember that the search engines look at all aspects of your website when determining rank. A website may look beautiful and be easy to navigate, which is important from a user perspective, but what’s going on on the outside of the site doesn’t always accurately reflect what’s going on on the back end of the site which is really what the search engine spiders are seeing. If you’ve incurred a penalty, you will obviously need to conduct a technical SEO audit to figure out what went wrong but it’s recommended to conduct an audit on a regular basis to try and prevent a penalty from happening in the first place.

Here are 4 important technical SEO items to be aware of:

Duplicate content:

If you have duplicate content on your site (different URLs that have basically the same content on each page) it appears to the search engines that you are trying to dominate the search results by creating multiple pages that include the same keywords. Most of the time, site owners don’t even realize that this duplication is happening since it’s something that originates from how the site was set up during the web development process. It doesn’t affect the usability of the site and visitors probably don’t even notice it, but the search spiders do. A common occurrence is when the homepage is duplicated unknowingly. Some websites have the homepage.com version, a hompage.com/index version, and a homepage.com/default version. In addition to creating a duplicate content issue, this can also hurt SEO because it is splitting the links to the site. If a duplicate content issue is found, be sure to redirect to one of the pages so that some of the link trust can be preserved.

Broken links:

Broken links are bad from a search engine perspective and a user perspective. If a search engine spider lands on a broken link, it’s like a dead end. This conveys to the search engine spider that your site doesn’t have good usability. When conducting a technical SEO audit, generate a list of all of the broken links and implement 301 redirects to existing pages that are related.

Inbound links:

The Penguin update targeted sites that had “unnatural” link portfolios. Over time your site will build links naturally and it’s important to be aware of what kinds of sites are linking over to you. If you find any links that you don’t want associated with your site, you can request that they be removed.

Anchor text:

It’s important to be aware of what kind of anchor text is being used to link to your site. If you run a report and find that the majority of your anchor text links are associated with one or two of your important keywords, this could be a red flag to the search engines. It could appear as if you are trying to manipulate the results for those keywords. An anchor text link portfolio should be natural and include branded keywords and long tail variations.

Most Popular Photo Sharing Sites 2014

1	http://instagram.com/	9
2	http://www.flickr.com/	9
3	http://picasa.google.com/	8
4	http://www.twitpic.com/	7
5	http://www.photobucket.com/	7
6	http://www.smugmug.com/	7
7	http://www.deviantart.com/	7
8	http://tinypic.com/	7
9	http://imgur.com/	6
10	http://www.shutterfly.com/	6
11	http://weheartit.com/	6
12	http://www.webshots.com/	6
13	https://imageshack.com/	5
14	http://photosecrets.com/	5
15	http://www.phanfare.com/	5
16	http://www.23hq.com/	5
17	http://www.imagevenue.com/	4
18	http://www.snapfish.com/	4
19	http://galleryproject.org/	0
20	http://www.carteland.com/	0
21	http://www.dotphoto.com/	0
22	http://www.dphoto.com/	0
23	http://www.fotki.com/	0
24	http://www.darqroom.com/	0
25	http://www.phanfare.com/	0
26	http://www.ipernity.com/	0
27	http://www.panoramio.com/	0
28	http://www.photobox.co.uk/	0
29	http://www.pbase.com/	0
30	http://jalbum.net/	0
31	http://www.fujifilmusa.com/	0
32	http://www.picturetrail.com/	0
33	http://www.ritzpix.com/	0
34	http://www.zita.be/	0

Best Free Blogging Sites List 2014

1	https://www.blogger.com/	9
2	http://wordpress.com/	9
3	http://www.weebly.com/	8
4	https://myspace.com/	8
5	http://www.livejournal.com/	8
6	http://boingboing.net/	8
7	http://bravenet.com/	7
8	http://www.webs.com/	7
9	http://angelfire.lycos.com/	7
10	http://www.idealab.com/	7
11	http://squarespace.com/	7
12	http://edublogs.org/	7
13	http://thefreesite.com/	7
14	https://www.tumblr.com/	6
15	http://open.salon.com/	6
16	http://twoday.net/	6
17	http://blogowogo.com/	6
18	http://weblogs.us/	6
19	http://www.vox.com/	6
20	http://www.blogher.com/	6
21	http://blog.com/	6
22	http://blogs.botw.org/	6
23	http://blog.co.uk/	6
24	http://freevlog.org/	5
25	http://www.bloghub.com/	5
26	http://portal.eatonweb.com/	5
27	http://www.blogsearchengine.com/	5
28	http://diaryland.com/	5
29	http://9rules.com/	5
30	http://blogdrive.com/	5
31	http://www.alivedirectory.com/	5
32	http://www.blogger.de/	5
33	http://blogharbor.com/	5
34	http://fotopages.com/	4
35	http://www.blogrankings.com/	4
36	http://www.motime.com/	4
37	http://www.htl.uk.com/	4
38	http://www.ziki.com/	4
39	http://www.insanejournal.com/	3
40	http://newsisfree.com/	3
41	http://bloghi.com/	3