5 Steps to Pleasing the Panda in Under 2 Hours

Are you still struggling to regain your pre-Panda traffic levels? Then following these five steps may be just what you need to get back on track:

Understand That The Panda is a Different Kind of Animal

Many of Google’s big algorithmic changes are related to off-page elements. When a site is impacted by one of these changes, they can commonly fix it by attracting more quality links. From holding a blog contest to putting real effort into guest blogging, there are plenty of ways to tackle this challenge.

But the Panda update does not fit into this mold. This change is about the content and structure of your website. It’s also different because any changes you make may not have an immediate impact on your rankings. Although Google has rolled out at least 5 versions of Panda, it can take some time for any changes you make to be registered.

The good news is while you may have to wait for any changes you implement to sway Google’s opinion of your site, the improvements themselves don’t have to take a long time to make.

Find Where People are Leaving

Although there are shortcomings to using bounce rate as a metric, it can provide valuable insight into areas of your site that are falling short.

You should pull up your analytics data and sort your content by bounce rate. For your pages with the highest bounce rate, you need to ask yourself whether or not people should be leaving that page.

For example, a landing page that sends visitors to a third-party payment processor probably won’t have a low bounce rate. However, if it’s an article or blog post, you want people to engage with it and then continue exploring your site.

Bring in Visitors with the Right Headline

A strong headline is an extremely powerful tool. In addition to including your keyword phrase so Google knows what a page is about, you want to grab searchers’ attention when they see your listing on a SERP.

In addition to not being dull, you also want to ensure your page delivers what the headline promises. If you have a killer headline but lackluster content, people are going to hit the back button, which is not something Google wants to see.

By sharpening the headlines of your worst performers and adding any needed polish to the content of those pages, you can provide users with a top notch experience.

Add Related Links

Have you ever gone to Wikipedia to look up a single fact, only to then glance at your clock and realize you’ve been on the site for over half an hour?

The reason it’s so easy to get sucked into Wikipedia is the site does an excellent job of interlinking. You should do the same with your own content. One reason people may be quickly leaving your blog posts or articles is because you don’t give them anywhere interesting to go.

Look at your pages that are performing the worst and make them more interesting by adding relevant links in their body or at the end. If you’re using WordPress, the Related Posts plugin can help make this change extremely easy to implement.

Add Relevant Videos

There’s no value into pulling a bunch of random videos onto your site. However, a video that relates to the topic of a post or article can make that content much more engaging.

By browsing around YouTube for just a few minutes, you should be able to find at least a couple of videos that will increase visitors’ engagement with your content.

If you or your clients were impacted by Panda but have since recovered, let us know what change(s) were most effective!

How to Make Your SERP Listings More Attractive to Searchers

On Friday, Search Engine Land confirmed that Google is testing frames for search options and results. If this becomes a permanent change, it will give searchers even more control over finding exactly what they want.

Because of Google’s push towards giving users even more control over searches and the fact that SERP CTR can influence your rankings, it’s more important than ever to ensure your SERP listings are as appealing as possible.

To accomplish this important goal, here are effective options you can implement today:

Microformats

Have a page that includes reviews? What about dates? Since Google supports 5 different microformats, you should be able to incorporate this option on quite a few of your pages.

Because microformats can add rich details like stars or dates directly to your SERP listings, they can make your listings stand out from others and attract clicks from interested searchers.

Google +1

SEO Effect did a study in June to determine the impact of the Google +1 button. In addition to their other findings, the study determined that “the Google +1 button saw a 20% increase in rankings which led to a corresponding lift in Clickthrough rate (CTR).”

Even though the exact measurements of this study are likely far from perfect, the bottom line is it’s well worth taking the time to install this Google feature on your blog or site.

Include a Price

While this won’t apply to every page of your website, it is relevant for listings tied to products or services. If a page is showcasing something that a visitor can purchase, include the price in your title or description tag.

Although including a price in your title tag can provide the biggest boost, there is a potential downside. According to RedFly Marketing, “if you’re not the cheapest, your CTR will suffer.” To minimize the potential for this problem, you probably want to stick with including the price in the description.

Entice Searchers to Click

Your title tag isn’t only for including a relevant keyword phrase. It’s also the perfect opportunity for you to entice searchers to click.

You should put the same amount of effort into writing a title for each page of your website as you would for writing a blog post or newspaper article title.

If you don’t have much experience writing persuasive titles, Copyblogger has a great crash course that will show you how to craft juicy ones for your SERP listings.

How To Get Google Angry – Google Penalties And How to Avoid Them

One of the most frightening aspects of website ownership is the constant threat of being penalized by Google. This morose uncertainty is like living with a cloud over your head. Not everyone is entirely certain causes the “Wrath of Google” to come down on them. A lot of honest webmasters often times think they are being penalized and sometimes this is just not the case.

What is the reason for this confusion?  Basically no one knows form day to day exactly what will result in a penalty. The actions that will cause one to incur a penalty are changed and updated without much warning. Using only the “White Hat SEO” practices is one way to ensure that you never have to worry about a penalty. If this were to happen only those who are not honest or legitimate would incur Google’s censure.

By doing only what is considered appropriate and safe you can avoid many of the known triggers and this will allow you to work online with peace of mind. It will also ensure that you have better results in the SERPs. (Search engine results pages)

The people who regularly incur penalties all have one thing in common. That is, they did not thoroughly read and understand the policies of Google and their terms and conditions (or perhaps they read them and intentionally ignored them). The worst possible penalty is that your site could be banned from this search engine industry leader. This is a potential revenue loss that few of us can afford. Why risk this when it is so simple touse only good search engine SEO practices.

Google is like any other business and it has a department that only handles terms of use violations. This department can hand out a wide range of penalties from th every light “slap on the wrist” to “lifetime banishment”.  Just like the laws that govern society in the brick and mortar world, the penalties get steeper each time an offence is recorded. Repeat offenders are finally banned from the engine, sometimes for a period of weeks or months and others, depending on the severity of the infraction will be for life.

The following are the major reasons users get banned from Google.

1) “Buying Links” from shady Web sites (or really buying links from any Web sites)

2) Participaing in link farms

3) Intentionally constructing your Web site to “trick” google spiders

4) Overlinking to you Web site too quickly, using the same anchor text

5) Cloaking your Web site and using doorway pages

6) Optimizing more than one similar Web site for the same keyword

The most minor infraction of a term of service or policy can result in your webpage losing rank in the search engine’s ranking. Of course this is relative and could possibly seem harsh to some. It may result in you falling 3-4 spots, 10-20 spots, or it could even drop you out of the first 1000 spots.  It all depends on the severity of the infraction and the mood of the Google employee on the other end on that particular day.

As a webmaster it is much easier to follow the rules than to bounce back after censure. So learn what the terms are and use only acceptable SEO to avoid making Google angry. To paraphrase the Incredible Hulk, “You will not like Them When They Are Angry!”

SEM, SEO, Social Media and their Connection to Each Other

This is a guest post from Melvin Dichoso . It is part of The “Bad Ass” SEO Guest Blogging Contest.

Most people who have just got started in their online ventures usually focus too much on SEO. It’s no secret that its really one of the biggest misconceptions most beginners and even experienced guys run into as far as their online businesses are concern. Today in this blog post, I’m very much hoping I can address this by writing about SEO as well as its connection to SEM and Social Media.

First and foremost I’m not an SEO guru or whatsoever. Heck, my blog is even PR0 up to now, although I have managed to reap a lot as far as  the blog’s traffic is concern. Just consider me as you’re typical online entrepreneur and blogger.

Setting up some Initial things

So what does these three things I mentioned above have something in connection? When building a website or any online-based project, you want to build SEO in it from the get-go. You want to optimize it for those key terms that you’re looking into from the start. I know you’re saying, “how can you do that, you don’t even have content yet?” Yes, you’re right but what I mean is that with every websites you can already set up things from the start that would give you a dramatic effect later on. Let me explain.

For example, if I’m building a site based on a WordPress platform, I can start fine-tuning the site’s search goals by doing the necessary things like adding an All in One SEO pack, canonicalizing the domain, setting up the meta descriptions properly and creating a robots.txt (and many more of course). You see, these are the things that you can already do from the start yet it doesn’t take that much to do those. On the flip side, it may not yield that much results for the first few months but its future benefits would be enormous for sure.

Search Engine Optimization isn’t a short-term goal in the first place right? Organic rankings is something that can be achieved over time and if you’re getting lots of traffic from search engines then you know what I’m talking about.

Before the SEO our site picks up

Now we all know that ranking in search engines does not happen overnight, but does that mean we’re going to wait that long before doing anything? No! That means we have to work on something that would alleviate the lack of traffic from our new site.

There are two things that you can do that would offset the need for SEO for short term. One is utilizing social media and the other one is via search engine marketing. Let’s tackle both of those things here.

Social Media

Social Media is something that everyone these days wants to utilize but only few can do it well. With that my tip has always been to focus on one niche targeted network first and forget everybody else. If you’re into Stumbleupon then focus on it, work on it first.

The problem with people is that they try to get everything from each and every social media sites but the truth is its never gonna happen. These social sites have different audiences and you can only target the ones which is the most relevant to what your business is. Also social media has an effect to search rankings. Indirectly you can see that it can boosts links, search rankings and web traffic in particular.

Popular site Mashable has even written an article on how SEO and social media goes hand in hand together.

Search Marketing

Unlike social media, search marketing does not have an effect with your search rankings. Instead this can be a quick way to boost your site’s traffic immediately from the start.

Let’s go back to our WordPress Site example. After we’re able to set up all the basic SEO-related stuff to our sites, we can immediately focus on running search campaigns for our sites via Pay Per Click. The way I do it is I focus on the top three networks, Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN Ad Center. These three have the biggest market share and there’s no reason to go to other 2% of small search engines that can give you almost no traffic.

Running pay per click campaigns can be really tricky and hard. You need to focus on a lot of things like Ad copy, keywords, targeting different demographics, quality scores and a whole lot more. I had learned all of this for quite some time and to be honest, I spent a lot of money testing things but  I could say it’s all worth it.

I know not all of us can run PPC campaigns so there’s always an option of hiring a search marketing person or a team to run your campaign for you. This can be an investment on your part but the way these guys could do the job for you could later on offset the cost.

The logic behind running search campaigns is to immediately drive traffic to your site, find the top markets and top demographics for what you’re business is about and penetrating that market. We could also experiment on our campaigns and as a return this could only give us the whole pie of what we’re trying to achieve. We could forever do these campaigns until our search traffic starts picking up. In short, SEM is for short term and SEO is for long term.

Conclusion

Driving traffic to our website, more generally our business is an unending cycle. We as business owners continue to tweak and test things and try to find more sources that could give us the maximum return for what we spend.

These three components that I mentioned namely SEM, SEO and social media play a key role for that. They have their own ideal time to get implemented and it’s all about connecting them and making  them work harmoniously.What do you think?

The Number One Keyword Metric: Profit

This is a guest post from Jason Capshaw. It is part of The “Bad Ass” SEO Guest Blogging Contest.

It is tempting to make SEO-related decisions simply based on search data, such as traffic volumes and competition. Yet, there is a far more important factor involved–profitability.

I have seen webmasters rank for ridiculously competitive keywords with tons of traffic, and have it bring very little value to their business. On the other hand, I know webmasters who rank for low-competitive keywords that convert better than their head keywords, and as a result, bring in much more profit.

There are a couple of factors that can cause this phenomenon:

1. The site’s product offerings do not match the searchers’ intent
2. The site offers good information, but does not brand itself well, so the viewers do not come back when they are ready to purchase

I have found that a large number of searchers type generalized keywords when they are conducting research in the early stages of the buying process. If you can provide that information and facilitate all the buying stages, you will do well with generalized keyword searches.

However, searches that are done in the later stages of the buying process are usually more specific, and these searches will include specific keywords that indicate their intentions, such as “buy,” “discount,” or “price.”

Identifying these keywords in your research and targeting them on your landing pages will help you cherry pick the best traffic from the search engines–traffic that converts well.

The Use of Brands in Searches

I have a close friend that runs a start-up ecommerce store that is a little over a year old that sells equipment to builders and construction workers. Let’s just call this equipment the standard “blue widget.”

He has good top ten rankings for both the head keyword “blue widget” as well as other mid-level keywords: specifically, “brand-blue widget”, where a specific brand or model number is used in the search. Originally, all he cared about and obsessed over was his head keywords. However, he didn’t see quick results for his new site, so he relegated himself to mid- level keywords.
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The Value of In-Content Keyword Links

This is a guest post from Carol Wiley. It is part of The “Bad Ass” SEO Guest Blogging Contest.

I get a lot of link requests from sites that want to exchange links and put my link on a long page full of links. I usually delete the requests without replying.

Why? How much credibility do you think search engines give to a link amid 50 or 100 other links? Here’s what Google has to say: “Some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines [emphasis mine] and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results.”

What’s the option if you want to exchange links? Relevant in-content links – links from within a content page using a relevant keyword.

Taking this approach means you have to find relevant sites (that don’t directly compete with your site) related to content pages you already have on your site. You contact a site and offer to link from a content page using anchor text that includes a relevant keyword in exchange for an in-content link from a quality page on the other site.

This approach offers the opportunity for deep-linking (getting links to pages other than the homepage). For example, if you have a landscaping site, you could approach a rose-growing site and ask for a keyword link to one of your pages that complements, but does not compete, with the rose site. You also offer to link from one of your rose or flower pages to a page on the other site that contains information you don’t offer.

Or you have a beauty-related site with an article about pedicures. In your article, you can link to a site with more detailed information about sterilizing pedicure tools – as I just did here. In return, you might request a link to one of your pages about relaxation (with the anchor text ‘relaxation’) from the other site’s article Relaxation Benefits of Pedicures.

Two points to keep in mind when choosing link exchanges:

(1) Make sure all links on your site provide value to your reader. In other words, choose links to benefit your site’s visitors, not to artificially attempt to influence search engine rankings.

(2) Link only to quality sites, and generally only to sites with similar or related topics.

Although links are important for SEO, Google explicitly says that the best way to get links is by creating content to which people want to link. Using your time to create this content can provide a higher payoff than excessive time spent trying to set up link exchanges, especially because you have to educate many site owners about in-content keyword links.

6 Shocking Truths About Internet Marketing

This is a guest post from Mark Thompson. It is part of The “Bad Ass” SEO Guest Blogging Contest.

Expectations, Expectations, Expectations…I just can’t say it enough.  No matter how many times I try to provide realistic expectations to my clients or myself for that matter, I need to keep reinforcing those expectations.  For anyone who is managing Internet Marketing clients or is working on trying to market their website via the web, it is imperative that expectations are discussed on a regular basis.  Everything from expected goals/objectives, traffic growth, roles and responsibilities (client & agency), marketing budget, communication frequency…the list goes on.

So the following list is not meant to be a scare tactic to anyone, but I will say this, if you are able to communicate these crucial truths to your client/company, you will be trusted, respected, and be able to maintain your strategy for the long haul.

1.  Internet Marketing is Not a Silver Bullet

So many people, especially smaller business owners are under the impression that Internet Marketing is a silver bullet to increased traffic, viability, and sales.  There seems to be something about Internet Marketing that because its a new form of marketing and there is a lot of BUZZ words surrounding it, that is must be a magical source to sales.  Unfortunately that is not the case.  Yes, Internet Marketing is probably the best form of advertising you can do (little bias), has the best ROI if done properly, and can yield some outstanding results, however there are no guarantees.

2.  It Takes Two to Tango

I know many clients feel that because they don’t understand Internet Marketing that they can’t help or think they can hire an agency and they are completely hands-off. Yes, to some degree that is true, but to see the BEST results, you need both parties involved.

Here is Why:

• Content Development: In order to create really valuable content, it really needs to come from someone within the company that has the knowledge and expertise.  If you are looking to outsource the content creation, I would strongly recommend finding someone in the industry that is an expert.  This will prove to be a big part in creating content that is not just the same re-written stuff that everybody does.  It will make your blog/site stand out!
  
• Link Acquisition: The agency should definitely be the driving force behind the link building strategy, however with the help of the client you may be able to gain some high value links just by reaching out to their partners, organizations, and groups that they are affiliated with.
  
• Off-Line Engagements: Yes, off-line marketing is still a great way to build your brand and credibility, so having the client attend conferences, local meetups, and other events can in-turn help your online strategy.  A plus would be if they are able to speak or sponsor certain industry events.
  
• Specials/Offers: As an agency, they can provide suggestions and examples of specials/offers that they feel would entice more people to take action.  However, the client needs to have some input since ultimately it is there business.  Gaining some feedback on what has worked in the past, their margins on their products/services, and what are their “bread and butter” products/services will help to create a well crafted offer.
  
• Industry News: Let’s face it, even if a client hires an agency to help with their marketing, the agency is not necessarily going to be keeping up with the industry on a daily basis.  Hopefully the client is already doing that, so it should be their responsibility to let the agency know of any upcoming events, industry news/buzz, or anything that could affect their marketing strategy.
  

3.  Your Company Has to Buy Into It

So this has happened a few times from my experiences.  Where you start working with a marketing department on an Internet Marketing strategy, then the CEO of the company comes in and is wondering what this charge is for 3rd party internet marketing services.  Not to stereotype older CEOs, but they are typically fans of “old school marketing”, so when they find out they are spending thousands of dollars on a Facebook Campaign, they freak out because its out of their comfort zone.
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SEO vs PPC Which Do You Think Is Better?

Two of the most prominently used methods of internet marketing are pay per click advertising and search engine optimization. How do they compare? When should you use either? Knowing how to properly use each can make a big difference in your ROI and traffic results.

• Speed of results. As much as some extreme cases for SEO may be flaunted, on average search engine optimization takes a while to have full effect. This can be a few weeks, a few months, even as long as a year to get desired results. Pay per click on the other hand will have results within a day. If you're interested in getting immediate results with a marketing method, PPC is your choice. You'll find out what keywords are more effective much more quickly and can adjust them almost real-time. SEO is better used for a researched keyword list using keywords you know will have desired results.
• Cost, immediate and long-term. PPC is very fast to produce results. You pay for the amount of traffic you want. If the traffic that searches for those keywords or browses the sites you advertise on exists, you can potentially pay thousands of dollars a month. For SEO, you generally will pay a large amount up front to get initial SEO work done, then a monthly amount to continue the SEO services. (This varies heavily, depending on where you pay for your SEO services.) On average, this is a higher cost than PPC for the same markets. If your PPC costs are high for every cost per click, chances are your SEO costs will also be high, and the same for markets with lower competition – both PPC and SEO will have costs relevant with the market value, and SEO is usually a higher cost.
• Results, long term value. PPC is good because it can provide instant results, and you can get immediate return on investment. SEO will not produce results immediately, but the long term value is much higher. The traffic growth on a good SEO campaign is exponential, and growth for a PPC campaign (if any) is usually linear. The difference between an organic position on page 2, position 9 on page 1, and position 1 on page 1 is immensely different. For PPC, the response for difference in positions is quite different, but the it is not as large as those from organic results. SEO will cost more but will provide a bigger long term result, if the keywords being optimized for are quality ones.

Knowing these details, it's recommended that you use PPC to do keyword research fully and test which keywords convert best before pushing into SEO. That way your costs can be adjusted quickly for different keywords, and the commitment to SEO can be done with tested keywords that have verified results. This will save you large costs and help produce definite outcomes.

7 Tips for Winning SEO Copywriting

SEO Copywriting is typically not a difficult skill to master. Provided that you have some grasp of how keywords function in your writing and write well without grammatical mistakes, you can usually be sure that the search engine optimization of your writing has already been taken care of for you. However, there are ways that you can take your SEO content to the next level.

1. Think About the Man AND the Machine. Do not make the mistake of assuming that only the crawlers need to like your SEO Copywriting. You can write pages that earn you a very high rank on Google but, if visitors do not enjoy reading it, they will likely not trust the content or link back to it.
2. Get Rid of the Fluff.Whenever you complete a sentence, ask yourself what value it gives to the reader. Of course, introductions will have some expository information. However, the remainder of your SEO Copywriting should be good solid facts and information.
3. Dense Keywords – Not Saturated Keywords. Your main keyword should be situated at the beginning of your article, in the majority of paragraphs in your main body and relatively close to the end. Do not try to overuse keywords in your article. Total keyword saturation should be around 2-3%.
4. Bringing Words Out With Accents. Save your bold, italic and underlined words for keywords. This will bring keywords not only to the attention of your readers, but to the attention of search engines. However, using these techniques too often, especially when the words are not keywords, can have a detrimental effect on your SEO Copywriting.
5. Content is King, Lists are Emperors. Today’s Internet readers love lists. If your article cannot be a list, be sure to include a few within your article. Lists are a great way to squeeze some keywords economically into content and are easy to scan.
6. Frames = Mistakes. It’s very simple. Do not use frames. They will destroy your content and likely prevent it from being recognized properly by search engines. Enough said.
7. Keep HTML Code Simple. HTML code is a simple tool to help you keep your content organized. However, stick to simple HTML codes when creating content. Paragraph, header and list tags as well as a few strong tags on keywords are all that are needed with good SEO Copywriting.

This is a guest post by Corry Cummings, who enjoys internet marketing and content writing. He runs a custom content creation business.

How To Do Keyword Research With EBay

This is a guest post by Adriana Copaceanu who loves doing
keyword research and talks about her online adventures at My Online Business Journey

It’s a fact: in order to start a successful online business you need to research your market first. Do you struggle finding the right keywords for your niche? It’s not hard if you know how to do your research. Many use Google’s External Keyword tool, the WordTracker tool, or a tool that pulls their data from one of these. And there is nothing wrong with it, but if you want to be ahead of the game, you need to be a little more creative, and research in ways that others don’t.Today we’ll take a look at how eBay can help you with your keyword research.

Go to the home page of EBay, and start typing your main keyword in the search box. Let’s say I was researching “men’s watches”. As soon as I start typing my phrase, there is a drop down box that shows several potential key phrases.

Click on search and you’ll be taken to a page that lists men’s watches, of course.

But what’s important is that you look right under the search box, at the related searches, and you’ll notice some more specific phrases:

mens fossil watches

mens watches seiko

mens watches rolex

If you go over at the google keyword tool and search for “mens watches”, you won’t see any of these searches, yet, they have many exact searches daily. Let’s take a look:

As you see, none of the 3 key phrases discovered above with the eBay search are on this list. So let’s just enter those individually in the Google tool and see what happens.

Surprise, surprise! These key phrases have quite a good number of exact searches.

What you do next, is go back to the EBay search and dig for more key phrases. Click on any of the “related searches” and you’ll get more specific terms. For example, if I click on the “mens fossil watches” which I discovered above, here is what I see:

This search uncovers at least 2 more key phrases I may be interested in: “mens guess watch” with 5,400 exact searches and “mens diesel watches” with 1,600 exact searches. You can go on and on and on, and discover key phrases your competitors won’t, just because you dug a little deeper and thought creatively.