Latest News in Internet Marketing, SEO and Web Design

Google just rolled out a new update for its pagerank parameter (on June 27 2011).

If you don’t know what Google PageRank is, it’s one of the parameters used by Google in their search engine ranking algorithm.

GooglePageRank parameter is dedicated to the calculation of different factors related to the authority of your site. In basic terms, it estimates the quantity, quality and relevance of incoming links for your webpages. The higher the PageRank the higher is a probability that the site has some quality backlinks.

The last Google PageRank update was in January 2011, so it’s been almost 6 months between updates. Until this year pagerank updates were pretty stable – usually you could see a new update every 3-4 months.

That pagerank update was related to the introduction of the new parameter in Google SERP placement algorithm known as Google Panda. January Google Panda update hit hard content farms, and it also affected many established article directories.

So if your site had a lot of backlinks from article directories, many of them lost value and as a result your PR probably went down during the January PageRank update.

I am not quite sure what was the target objective for the latest pagerank update but it seems several social networking sites had lost some of the PageRank. So may be Google is looking more closely now at Social SEO to decide what value to assign to the links distributed through social networks.

But this is only a speculation.

Funny thing is Google own PageRank went down from 10 to 9 which leads to the open question:
“How the most authoritative website in the world can lose a PageRank?”

Real Google PageRank

Important notice: when we’re talking about Google PR updates we actually are talking about Google Toolbar PageRank Update, and not about real-time PR updates.

According to Matt Cutts, Google actually updates its PR almost daily, so there is a difference between a visible PR that shows up in a toolbar and a real PR value that might change often and is known only to Google.

In reality the value you see on the toolbar and the value Google actually assigns to your pages might be quite different (or it could change rather quickly).

Real and Perceived Value of Google PageRank

Should you care about PageRank? Yes, but no more then you should care about your “Panda Rank”, for example.

PageRank is only one of hundreds parameters used by Google to define your ranking in SERPs. It’s not by any means the most important metric to define your rankings in search results.

Yet webmasters became so obsessed with PageRank that Google removed it from its Webmaster Tools at the end of 2009 just to prove that it’s not the most important factor in calculating SERP placement.

There are many sites with low PR that outrank their high-PR competitors.

And the only reason when you should really care about your PageRank is when you decide to sell links from your site. But in this case Google will catch you sooner or later and since it discourages paid links your site PR can go to 0.

Here is another interesting article on the topic: Does Google PageRank Still Matter?
————-
Opening image from on Flickr, used under Creative Commons license.

Tagged as: 4 Months, Authoritative Website, Funny Thing, Google, Google Pagerank, google pagerank update, google PR, Google Search, Google Toolbar, Important Notice, June 27, Matt Cutts, Open Question, pagerank update june 2011, Panda, Placement Algorithm, Probability, Relevance, seo, Social Networking Sites, Social Networks, Speculation, Target Objective

{ 1 comment }

Social media strategies used by social media marketers can be divided on categories based on several criteria.

They could be categorized by:

• social network (many strategies could only be applied to one or several particular social networks, and they won’t work at other networks.)
• timeline (some strategies could be implemented quickly, and they produce results fast, other strategies require more time and resources)
• permanency (whether this is a one-time fix to generate more traffic and exposure or this strategy delivers long-lasting solution)
• complexity (is it a one-time step which could be repeated again and again or is it a multi-step approach?)

Today let’s take a closer look at specifics of multi-step social strategies. Such social media strategies concentrate on development of multi-step relation-building channels to increase conversions and ROI.

There are several components that should be properly implemented to ensure the success of a multi-step social strategy. Some of them are more important than others. But there is one component that is absolutely crucial for a success of multi-step social media strategy.

It’s the creation of highly converting landing pages. In practice landing pages are effective only if you implemented efficient built-in tracking and testing modules. And for these purposes it’s very helpful to have your own website or blog.

Social Media Strategies and Landing Pages

Of course one can argue that many social networks (though not all) give you tools to build your own landing pages, so you don’t really need your own blog.

First of all, not all social networks give you the opportunity to create landing pages.

Second, some of the networks that give you such opportunity, in reality only provide a section to insert built-in subscription form for your newsletter. And there is a big difference between a full-blown landing page and a simple signup form.

If landing page is built correctly, signup form is seamlessly integrated as part of the whole user experience. Visitor is provided with relevant information, which is often enhanced with rich media – audio or video, and sign up form serves as a logic conclusion for the landing page, not as an abrupt piece of somewhat relevant call to action. Landing pages which enhance user experience lead to much higher sign up rate and increased conversions.

Third, even if a social network allows you to build full landing pages, you have limited tracking options to analyze user behavior on such pages. And your ability to split-test different versions of a landing page on a social network to improve different conversions factors is slim to none.

Social Media Strategies: Do You Need Your Own Blog?

Your blog can help you to easily track your visitors and monitor various stages of conversions. You can implement very granular testing and tracking solutions tracking every activity on your blog. You can even see what part of the page has the most number of eyeballs, which links were clicked the most, and many other interesting parameters. This kind of detailed analysis is simply not possible if you decide to build your presence on one of the social networks instead of creating your own blog.

(If you don’t know how to build a website or create a blog, we can do it for you. The price is affordable for any business, so now there is literally no excuse for you not to have your own online presence.)

Social Media Strategies and Email Conversions

Let’s get back to signup forms and conversions. Aside from analyzing your visitors and signup rates, you also would want to know the open rate of your emails, have ability to test various professionally designed signup forms to see which one produces better results, split test different versions of emails you send to your newsletter subscribers to increase the ROI of your campaigns, and do many other things. It’s not as difficult as you think. Watch this video to see how you can do it yourself.

Automate Your Email Marketing with AWeber

Social Media Strategies: Social Network or Your Own Site?

There is one more argument against building your entire presence on any particular social network. If you’re relying on any third-party social network as your place of online business, you’re putting too many eggs in one basket.

You never know when a social network will change its rules and decide to take away your fan page or shut down your social account. Facebook, for example, is notorious in taking away “community pages” from people and organizations which put a lot of sweat and labor to make them popular.

Sure, Facebook claims that the outcome would be different if they would use a business-specific name instead of a general name for a page. But the thing is, it’s just one of their policies. Social media policies can change in a heartbeat, and if you’re an average user, you don’t have any say in this.

Conclusion: Social media sites are a good addition to your social media strategy but they never should be a key stone of your online presence. (Read Social Networking and Blogging for more details).

Tagged as: aweber, Blog, blogging and social networks, Closer Look, Complexity, Conversions, Generate Traffic, landing pages, Marketers, Media Strategies, Media Strategy, Newsletter, Opportunity, Own Website, Roi, social conversions, social landing pages, social media strategies, Social Networking, Social Networks, Social Strategies, Social Strategy, Specifics, Step Approach, Subscription Form, Time Step, Timeline

{ 0 comments }

It’s not a secret that social networks have been used for a while now to get substantial traffic to the targeted sites and also to boost the rankings in the SERPs. SEO experts always try to find a new ways to stay ahead of the crowd, and social networks seemed like a nice way to covertly play a new card in the search engine optimization game. In fact, it appears new area of SEO is on a rise called social SEO.

Link building through social media otherwise known as social media seo, can be roughly divided into two parts – spreading links through social networks and using social bookmarking sites to bookmark different links and rss feeds.

Both tactics could be used the right and wrong way. In other words they could play important role in both white hat and black hat seo strategies. Until a few years ago search engines were the most popular venues to generate free traffic, so the efforts of all SEO experts were concentrated on optimizing and sites (white hat) and tricking search engines (black hat). Now both search and social marketing can drive considerable traffic to your online business, so SEO guys moved their focus to social media.

The white hat SEO is when you build links manually, and provide different content to different networks. You use only a few social bookmarking accounts, and you bookmark valuable content of other webmasters, not only your own links, and you honestly vote for the bookmarks provided by others. In time people will start to respect you, and pay more attention to your votes. Which gives you influence on social bookmarking sites.
In black hat social world you fire up some automatic software, create thousands of bookmarking accounts and make them vote for one another thus artificially raising your content in rankings.

You can get a lot of traffic from social bookmarking sites themselves, and you get additional benefit of boosting your SERPs since search engine pay attention to the rankings in social sites.

There are indicators that search engines begin to wise up and search for the methods to prevent this new spam. Easy days for black hat SEO in social networking are almost over. The same happened with blog and ping technique. It was like a traffic mantra a few years ago. Now this tactic is less efficient in search engines.

In addition, social networks became more accurate in estimating the actual popularity of the posts and bookmarks. It was easy to create dozens profiles early in the game and get them all vote for the same post. And – voila – you suddenly had your post at the first page of a popular networking site. Now you need not only to play with proxy servers, but actually create your own networks of voters to be successful in this technique…

So, what’s next? Well, it looks like a Wiki might be a new solution for SEO experts. They just need to figure out a way to insert the right keywords and links in the popular Wikis.
The tasks seems easy enough.

The problem is that Wiki content can be updated by anybody, so how do you preserve your version of the content on the page?

The answer is yet to be found…

Opening image from sachin shelar on Flickr, used under Creative Commons license.

Tagged as: Automatic Software, Benefit, Black Hat, Crowd, Focus, Free Traffic, Game, Media Marketing, New Ways, Online Business, Pay Attention, Right And Wrong Way, search and social marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Seo Experts, Serps, Social Bookmarking Sites, Social Marketing, social media seo, Social Networks, social seo, Substantial Traffic, white hat seo

{ 2 comments }

In the previous post I explained the difference between social media marketing and digital marketing.

Today let’s talk about the difference between social media marketing and online marketing.

Whereas we can say that online marketing and internet marketing are synonyms, the same statement won’t be true for social media marketing.

Social media marketing is an area of marketing dedicated to marketing products and services through social media in its entirety. It’s not limited to Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin or to the combination of those or any other social media sites for that matter. There are thousands of social media outlets, in every possible flavor and marketing vertical. Yet they only represent a part of social media marketing landscape.

We should not forget about social bookmarking or various wikis and “how to” web communities, such as Wikipedia and Yahoo! Answers.

And of course there is a huge layer of social interactivity known as a Blogosphere.

They all represent a variation of active two-way user communications, and as such all are components of social media.

Yet with the exception of mobile networks all social media properties are located online. (Mobile marketing can be arguably considered a part of social media marketing though I think it’s a more of digital marketing component). And since the majority of social media properties are online they fall within the online marketing limits.

Of course online marketing is not limited to social media marketing, far from it.

Email marketing, SEO, SEM, PPV, banner advertising, media buys -all those “tools of the trade” are very important and can increase online traffic, conversions, and ultimately boost company’s ROI.

In this regard a person with the job titled “Director of Online Marketing” can have much bigger impact on company’s revenue than the one with a title “Director of Social Media Marketing”.

Of course the job titles used in this and previous blog post were only used as an example. You can use “Digital Strategist” /”Internet Strategist”/”Social Media Marketing Strategist” instead. Or any other job title you want. That’s not the point.

The point is that with each job title come certain responsibilities, so it’s beneficial to know the differences between digital, social media and online marketing.

As always looking forward to hear your comments.

Opening image from Danard Vincente on Flickr, used under Creative Commons license.

Tagged as: Advertising Media, Banner Advertising, Blogosphere, digital marketing, digital strategistd, director social media marketing, facebook, Interactivity, Job Titles, linkedin, Marketing Products, Media Marketing, Media Outlets, mobile marketing, Mobile Networks, online marketing, online marketing director, social bookmarking, social media marketing, Title Director, twitter, User Communications, Web Communities, Wikipedia, Wikis, Yahoo Answers

{ 0 comments }