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Georgijevic Developer Team

Georgijevic Developer Team

SEO is Important, But Community-Building is Key

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This is part two of last week’s post, Google Shopping is Coming –Are You Ready for the Change? In it, I wrapped up by pointing out that all the search engine algorithm changes are not going to stop – if anything, they’ll only get more aggressive as technology evolves.

That said, I concluded that the single best way to create a self-sustaining, in-it-for-the-long-haul site is to use SEO techniques in conjunction with community-building exercises.

That’s the secret.

It’s not fancy, and it’s not some “turbo search-engine blaster ninja assassinator” software – but it’s foolproof. And it works. Community-building is every bit as vital to your online success as any keyword research you do. And you should do your SEO stuff too – that’s pivotal. However, for the purposes of this post, I’m going to focus solely on the community component.

The following is an outline of my five steps (which you can call my “top-secret jet-propelled blastmaster plan for traffic domination” if it makes you feel more at home) for leveraging the power of community to build an authority site from scratch. It may not be sexy, but it works.
Step #1 – Make Sure You Know Your Niche

This should go without saying, but you’d be surprised. Confession time: When I first started my own blog a few months ago, I was well aware of the importance of choosing a specific niche. I thought my blog was solidly in the personal finance niche at first, and so I began networking with other personal finance bloggers.

After the flurry of interest and comments on my blog spurred by my initial contact with the community, I noticed that my traffic numbers were still struggling even after a couple more months of consistent posting. Then, upon further analysis, I realized that my blog was shaping up as a weird mashup of a few different niches – personal finance, work-at-home mom interests, freelance writing, and Internet marketing.

What was I thinking?! All of those topics are their own complete niches with their own separate audiences, and finding my place in such separate spheres with one blog is quite tough at best and downright impossible at worst. I’m currently working to restructure my blog to focus on just one niche, but the moral of the story for you is this: Please pick a well-defined niche before you write anything or even begin to think about theme shopping. Then, you must stick to the topic you’ve selected. It may seem fun to start a blog on many different topics to “see where it leads,” but the chances are mighty slim that it will be a monetary success. When you define your niche from the get-go and laser focus in on your target audience, it will make the rest of the steps that much easier and your community that much quicker to build.
Step #2 – Post Every Day

Bottom line: If you want to build a site or blog, you must post. A lot. Like every day. You don’t have to post feature-length wonders every 24 hours by any stretch, but you must be consistent. Don’t post drivel or rely on guest posts to do your work for you. Your readers want to hear your voice and your views – it’s your job to give them exactly what they’re visiting for or they simply won’t return. So make it a priority to post quality content every day.

You should also strive to make your posts or articles as informative and witty as possible. Try to find a unique angle if you’re tackling a heavily-discussed topic. You want to present a new spin on information as opposed to simply regurgitating the same articles that your readers can easily hunt down elsewhere. For more tips on how to do this, check out What Most Webmasters Don’t Know About Their Failing Website Content.

You should also strive to pepper your site with pillar articles. To understand what this entails, I always go back to this excerpt from an Entrepreneurs-Journey.com post:

In order to make sure I have enough pillar articles on my own blog, I try to write at least one a week, and then I write my regular posts daily.
#3 – Make Connections

If you’ve successfully identified your niche and started posting quality content at regular intervals, then you’re ready to get the word out about your site. You should first figure out who the core members of your group are – and, trust me, every niche has its diehards. It’s just up to you to unearth them.

There are many ways to dig up the people in your niche. All it takes is identifying one of the key players, and the comments section of that person’s site or blog will typically be full of comments from the others – complete with a handy list of links back to their sites.

To find a key player in your niche, start with a simple Internet search. Simply type the primary keyword for your niche followed by the word “blog” or “forum” into the search bar. When you do this, you’ll be presented with a list of the heavy-hitters in your niche, so get your investigation on and start a breadcrumb trail for yourself.

This part of the plan should be a process. You may want to check out Twitter conversations and other social factors to get a feel for the way the people in your niche interact with one another. Spend a good deal of time observing, and then when you feel comfortable, start jumping in and commenting on as many blogs as possible only after you’ve determined which sites or blogs are the most relevant for your comments.
#4 – Give Shout-Outs

Once you’ve established your presence in your niche, it’s time to kick that exposure up a notch. Try weekly roundup posts or articles in which you highlight ten or more of the best posts from other sites in your niche with links back to their corresponding sites. Continue this every single week, and you will slowly begin to see people returning the favor. And those people may have a much bigger audience and far more reach than you, so this step is vital.

You should also work at least one guest post a week into your schedule. Once you’ve garnered a rep with your peers, begin approaching them one by one and offering to write guest posts for their sites. The farther you spread your site’s name, the more targeted traffic will begin to flow in.
#5 – Stay Organized and Consistent

Organization is the name of the game when it comes to community-building. Why? Because the Internet can be a huge time suck, and if you don’t go in with a plan of attack, you may never come out alive. I stick to a list of daily tasks that I must complete so I have a clear focus when I’m online.

I like to use a large wall calendar, but you could use an app in your phone or any other organizational aid to help you out with this one. Schedule your daily posts (including one pillar post per week), your weekly guest post, and ten comments on other blogs each day. This should get you started. Over time, you will begin to see your readership grow and your traffic skyrocket. The secret? Organization and Consistency.

Source: http://site-reference.com/articles/seo-is-important-but-community-building-is-key/

10 SEO and Link Building Mistakes

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Mistake 1 – Neglecting On-page Optimization:

I think more people are beginning to understand the importance of on-page optimization when it comes to ranking their web pages. With so much focus on keywords and link building though, often I see webmasters focusing too heavily on the “off page” stuff, without realizing what they do “on” their website is just as important. Proper internal linking, keyword density, LSI, image text, no follow tags, just to name a few, are also very important to search engines. There are free plugins available to help you with a lot of this stuff, so do your due diligence and implement whatever strategies need be.

Mistake 2 – Freaking Out When Rankings Plummet:

Go onto any internet marketing forum and you will see this every single time. People are literally freaking out when they see their rankings drop. Most often this is due to a thing we call the Google dance. All new websites go through what is called a “honeymoon” period where their websites rank very well at the beginning, but after a couple of weeks they settle in the search results… usually at a much lower ranking, again, this is natural.

If your websites have age and have dropped in rankings, you may need to work harder to get your position back. You may need to update your content more often, you may need to build more backlinks or you may need to re-evaluate your SEO strategy. Google’s algorithm is changing frequently these days so it’s important to find out what they want, and go give it to them. The days of gaming the system through black-hat techniques is coming to an end.

Mistake 3 – Writing for the Search Engines:

This is one of the biggest mistakes I see being made day in and day out. Webmasters are writing terrible content that is keyword stuffed for the bots. While it is important to have a certain keyword structure within your content so that the search engines know what your content is about, it is very important that you write for the human visitor FIRST. Some say for every 100 words, you should have your keyword inserted once. So, if you have a 1000 word post, you will put your target keyword into the article 10 times. I think this is a good rule of thumb to follow.

Make sure that when you read your article out loud, that it sounds natural and not robotic like. Always remember, if inserting your keyword too often into your post takes away from the natural flow of the article itself… then do not do it. Google is clamping down really hard on over optimized websites. Always write with your target human visitor in mind.

Mistake 4 – Building Thousands of Low Quality Links:

I cannot believe this is still going on with all of the changes Google has made. There are still idiots out there blasting thousands of links to their money sites in the hope of climbing the serps. I was offered 10,000 free links the other day to my website and I told the person to take a run and jump. Those kinds of links are going to have an adverse affect on your ranking. It has to be bloody obvious that Google hates these kinds of links and, if your business is solely dependent on this kind of strategy, then you are playing the fools game. One solid PR5 backlink from a relevant site will be far more powerful than a million links from low quality, non-relevant crappy sites.

Mistake 5 – Not Being Aware of Nofollow and Dofollow:

When I first started out in this industry I had no idea about these two terms. I built a lot of links to one of my first websites and it was taking forever to gain traction in the serps. After a bit of investigating I found that almost all of my backlinks were placed on web pages that were nofollow. Needless to say, those links were just not as effective for rankings as the dofollow links I needed. I’m not saying that nofollow links don’t have their place. In fact, it’s important to have diversity in your linking structure, but most of your links must be dofollow to gain maximum benefit.

Mistake 6 – Expecting Quick Results:

I know when I first started online, I expected to make a lot of money fairly quickly. Boy was I brought back down to earth over the next 6 – 12 months. I almost threw in the towel on more than one occasion because it became very frustrating, trying to make this thing work for me. I built website after website, built a hell of a lot of backlinks, wrote hundreds of articles and participated in all the social media sites, but, it just wasn’t happening as quick as I was led to believe it would.

I realized later on that NOBODY makes money online quickly. They all have to put in the hard work. Your progress can be accelerated if you are willing to spend some cash and outsource a lot of the grunt work, but in my experience, expecting to make money very quickly online usually works against you in the long run. The failure rate is so high because people find this out the hard way.

Mistake 7 – Not Being Consistent:

If you are serious about making money online then you must be consistent every single day with your efforts. This can be the biggest stumbling block for many. It almost was for me. You can work very hard to get top search engine rankings for a particular keyword, but even after the fact, you still have to be consistent with your efforts, else your competitors will overtake you fairly quickly. Everything you do in regards to your online business has got to be consistent. You must put the work in everyday if you are to see the results you’re after. Go read Jeff Olsen’s “The Slight Edge” and practice what you learn.

Mistake 8 – Not Diversifying Your Link Building:

To make your link building look natural, it’s important to gain backlinks from many different sources. Backlinks from just article directories and no other places for example, do not look natural and can hurt your rankings. You need to get links from social media sites, article directories, blogs, blog comments, forums etc. Diversifying your link building looks natural and can put you ahead of your competitors in the search results. A naturally good website will get links from many places, not just one or two.

Mistake 9 – Not Getting High Page Rank Links:

Every day you are backlinking, you should be looking to place your links onto high PR websites. Google values links placed on higher PR websites exponentially higher than low PR websites. These links are obviously harder to get, but that is exactly the point. The harder it is to get a link, the more valuable that link is likely to be. This is why all these push button software programs that can get you thousands of links are crap. You will not come across a software program that gets you high quality backlinks with the push of a button. Anyone who tells you differently is either lying or a moron.

Mistake 10 – Not Updating Your Content Often Enough:

Obviously the more high quality backlinks pointing to your content, the higher your search engine rankings will be. You will then get lots of free traffic. While this is the basic approach that everybody uses to climb the serps, there is another way. Google loves websites that update often. I have built a website that has very few backlinks pointing to it that gets me 10,000 visitors a month from the search engines. The reason for this is because I regularly update my content.

I see webmasters spending so much time building backlinks to their websites every day. This is important of course, but if they actually spent an hour each day writing a new post for their website, they would get far more traffic further down the line. I know this works because I have used this approach many times in the past. With all the Panda’s and Penguins about these days, I have found my websites gain higher search rankings, simply because I always have fresh content on my sites. If you do not want to write every day, then write at least 3 times a week – it helps.

Source: http://www.sitepronews.com/2012/07/01/10-seo-and-link-building-mistakes/

Google Isn’t Getting Freshness Right, Despite Increased Emphasis

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A study has come out from Conductor, indicating that one in five Google Knowledge Graph entries for trending keywords are outdated.

Do you think Google is doing a good job at delivering fresh results when relevant? Share your feedback in the comments.

Google announced Knowledge Graph last month, with a great deal of hype. Google seems to consider it one of the most important things it has done for search in a long time. While it may be significant, it appears that there is still plenty of work to be done.

Another thing Google prides itself on is indexing speed, which it has gotten much better at over the years. According to Conductor’s study, however, this type of speed is not being applied to Knowledge Graph.

“Our analysis of both low and high activity queries tells us that Google and Wikipedia are mismatched for a substantial ‘one out of five’ high activity queries,” says Conductor’s Nathan Safran. “And, when they are mismatched, half the time, Google is behind by 2 or more days. The implication is that searchers may not be seeing the most relevant information for their query. For some context, in our LeBron James example, this means his Knowledge Graph entry could have been without reference to his recent championship for up to four days.”

It’s interesting that Google seems to be falling behind on freshness in some areas, even while it has become such a point of emphasis with recent algorithm updates, sometimes to a fault.

The really evident lack of freshness comes where it is probably most relevant – real time. Google, as you may know, no longer has realtime search, since its deal with Twitter dissolved last year, and now Google simply can’t “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible” as well as it could with that deal in place. It’s just not happening. Twitter is the primary place for realtime info, hands down. That could change, but for now, that’s just how it is.

Now, Google is pushing this Knowledge Graph in a big way, and even it is apparently behind.

Google made some big search-related announcements at Google I/O, related to the new version of Android, Jellybean. There are Siri-like voice features, and Google Now, which we talked about in more detail here. It may take some time, but these may be very important elements to Google’s future as a search engine. Another one of the new search elements is improved visualization of Knowledge Graph results. Based on Google’s demo of the operating system. Knowledge Graph will be more front and center, at least on mobile search. It stands to reason that this will flow into other version of Google mobile search, beyond Jellybean.

While Google may use a lot of different sources for Knowledge Graph results, it’s clear that Wikipedia is the go-to source, as most of the results you are likely to see, will show Wikipedia info above all else. Wikipedia isn’t perfect, but two day-old Wikipedia is even less perfect, and will make Google less perfect.

Google has acknowledged that Knowledge Graph is not perfect. When Google announced the feature, we asked how susceptible it would be to Wikipedia vandalism. A spokesperson told us at the time, “I can’t share a ton of detail here, but we’ve got quality controls in place to try to mitigate this kind of issue. We’ve also included a link so users can tell us when we may have an inaccuracy in our information.”

On the one hand, a real time Wikipedia-based Knowledge Graph may actually make it more susceptible to vandalism. If it’s real time, it’s going to display exactly what’s on Wikipedia, even before editors have a chance to correct issues. Perhaps some lag is needed for quality control.

Safran says, “While a real time Wikipedia update may ultimately not be practical, if Google is indeed positioning Knowledge Graph as the future of search, we have to believe that they can do better than the 2-4 day lag many of their mismatched keywords currently reflect.”

Two to four days can make a huge difference when it comes to information, obviously. Wikipedia pages are often at their most relevant when they are about someone or something in the news. Conductor mentions Lebron James as an example. An outdated Knowledge Graph result could ignore a championship that was just achieved. A celebrity result could ignore a their recent death.

Source: http://www.webpronews.com/google-isnt-getting-freshness-right-despite-increased-emphasis-2012-06

Google Upsets Google+ Power User Wil Wheaton Again, What About You?

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Geek celebrity Wil Wheaton is what you might call a Google+ power user. He’s actively engaged on Google’s social network, and has amassed 1,373,118 followers to date. That’s a lot for Google+. Google, however, keeps doing things with Google+ that are pissing Wheaton off, and if they’re pissing Wheaton off, there’s a good chance they’re pissing off other users.

The sources of frustration have mainly stemmed from Google forcing Google+ down people’s throats (as some see it), and blasting out features with usability issues. The shift to Google+ for local search has certainly irritated some users as well, even if Google’s grand plan may warrant such changes. Are you happy with the way Google has pushed Google+ thus far? Let us know in the comments.

Last month, Wheaton fumed about a feature Google was testing on YouTube, which placed a Google+ like button in the spot where the YouTube thumbs up button would normally be. It would prompt users to upgrade to Google+ when not signed in. Wheaton was worried about losing YouTube upvotes, though Google told a us a very small number of users were actually seeing this test feature, which may never see the light of day.

We had a lengthy conversation with Wheaton about whether Google is forcing Google+ down people’s throats. Read our whole interview with him here.

So why is Wheaton upset this time? It has to do with Google’s rollout of Events on Google+. At Google I/O, Google announced the feature, and it soon went live. Here’s Google’s promo video about it:

The rollout, however, apparently did not go exactly as planned. Here’s what Wheaton had to say on Google+:

Wil Wheaton1 day ago

Did G+ roll out some new “invite everyone you follow to an event” thing? My feed is completely overwhelmed with “everyone’s invited to XXXXX event” notices, and I’m having a hard time actually seeing posts from people I’m following.

Oh, and the spammer scumbags have figured out that they can make an invite to an event that’s nothing but spam.

Is there a way to opt-out of event invites from people I don’t follow or have circled? Is this yet another thing Google rolled out without thinking it through clearly?
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Some of the events Wheaton was getting invite spam for included things like: “Something in Columbia, Not Giving a Fuck Friday,” and “The Guild Wars 2 Release Date”.

Wheaton followed that up with a post on his blog, where he added, “I swear to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, it’s like Google has learned nothing from Buzz…and is actually doing this sort of thing on purpose.”

In case you don’t get the Buzz reference, Google pissed a lot of other people off when it first launched the now defunct Google Buzz in people’s Gmail inboxes, due to some privacy issues that resulted in lawsuits.

Wheaton posted a follow up post on Google+, where he talked about the new Events feature more. “It’s too bad that I’ll never use it, and will kill it with fire, because Google has, yet again, made a product that may be useful and cool, but forced it upon users without giving users any control over how invasive it is.”

He later added, “As a result, G+ is useless to me today, and for as long as it takes the company to actually fix this, assuming they ever do. Yeah, it’s a first world problem for me, but it’s also a problem for Google, because even if 1% of G+ users feel the same way I do, that’s a lot of people Google has unnecessarily pissed of and possibly alienated.”

Finally, Wheaton updated his blog post, saying:

It appears that Google engineers are actively working on a way to fix this thing, and that it may not have been intentional. I sincerely hope that that’s the case, and will just point out that, if Google didn’t have a pattern of social network behaviour to the contrary, I’d be way more willing to give Google the benefit of the doubt.

And it isn’t lost on me that my G+ experience is likely quite different from most people’s, I get that. If my opinion on this is somehow distressing to you because your experience is different, and you feel a need to be really shitty to me about it, I suggest you save us both the headache and keep it to yourself. Nobody is forcing you to listen to me.

In yet another Google+ post, Wheaton provides a response from Google’s Vic Gundotra:

+Vic Gundotra says “We are doing exactly what you requested. We should have contemplated and anticipated how people would abuse this and how painful this could be for celebrities with large followings.

We have pushed a number of fixes yesterday (some were bug fixes that showed up at scale). Expect more fixes today. Sorry for the trouble Will.”

Google+ Events could ultimately be a very important feature for Google+. After all, this is a feature Facebook has offered for a long time, and this means one less thing that Facebook can do that Google+ can’t. Google also has the benefits of Android, Google Calendar and Gmail and all of their users, to make this a very integrated, and usable tool. At Google I/O, Google announced that 400 million Android devices have been activated, with 12 new ones activated every second of every day. Google also announced that Gmail has 425 million unique users a month.

It’s going to be interesting to see if the feature turns out to be a big part of the user’s everyday Google experience. My guess is that it will play into Google’s future search plans. Google also announced Google Now at Google I/O. This appears to be Google’s way of decreasing your dependence on search, while still keeping you within the Google universe, by pushing information to you before you need to search.

Source: http://www.webpronews.com/google-pisses-off-google-power-user-wil-wheaton-again-2012-06

What Most Webmasters Don’t Know About Their Failing Website Content

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Imagine your website content was so effective that every targeted visitor wanted to find out more information about your business.

Now wake up, because sadly, this is often not the case, even though it is entirely achievable.

How do I know this? I encounter dozens of websites on a weekly basis that not only fail to meet my standards, but also turn people away upon first visit.

“Why is my content so bad?”

If you are at all concerned that your website content isn’t up to par, you may want to continue reading.

Here are some reasons why webmasters have low-performing website content:
Design First

Most marketers spend the majority of their time and resources on website design. While design is an integral component of gaining leads and selling more products, if accompanied by poor-performing website content, the design is a waste. Design and content go hand-in-hand.
Lack of Knowledge

Many webmasters are not even aware that solid website copy is one of the components to successful marketing. Some are new to the internet marketing game and others never put two and two together. Your website content is the messaging that leads your visitors to take a desired action. It can make or break your online business.
Good Writing, Poor Content

If you write novels for a living, this doesn’t automatically translate into writing great website content. While grammar and word usage are one part of the formula, website content is completely different from other forms of prose.

If you write your website content with a novel-like approach, you will lose visitors within the first few seconds. They need their attention captivated fast!

Proper formatting of your website content is crucial for high conversions. Short paragraphs, bulleted lists, bolded emphasis and more, are essential to keeping visitors interested.
Purposeless Content

Even the best formatted content won’t keep visitors unless it speaks directly to them. Your website content is not a place to shout out how wonderful you think your products are. Your goal is to simply get users to take the next step, whether it to visit your product page, contact you, or opt in to your email list.

Each page has a specific purpose and must be targeted effectively. For brevity, I will target just the home page and list some common mistakes:

The home page is the most important because it is your first impression and where visitors will decide whether they want to leave or stay. Most webmasters fail to engage visitors on this page.

Some problems I encounter:

Trying to sell the farm – The goal of your home page is not the finish line unless you are writing content for a landing page. Your content should wet your visitors’ appetite enough so they desire to continue searching through your site. Just sell them on the next step, not the entire “kit and kaboodle.”

Target Audience – If you don’t know your exact market, you will never grab their attention. Before you write your home page content, identify the answers to these questions:

What are the main desires of your target audience as it relates to your industry?
What are their pain points?
What solutions do they need?
How can your product/services solve their problems?
What are their ages, income levels, status?

Too much content – In an attempt to squeeze in as much information as possible, webmasters clutter their home pages with excess content. Even if it is formatted correctly, it is still too much for visitors to take in. Resist the urge to add more and more. Less is more with website content.

Work on making what you already have MORE effective before adding any more content.

Quality trumps quality!
Where to Start?

If you notice any of these mistakes on your own website content, rectify them immediately!

In future articles I will discuss website content writing in more detail with detailed tips you can apply to your website right away. If you have some specific questions about your website content, feel free to list them in the comments below.

Happy Writing!

Source: http://site-reference.com/articles/what-most-webmasters-dont-know-about-their-failing-website-content/

The Influence of Speed on Online Advertising – A SEO-News Exclusive

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Internet advertising is big business. The latest reports from the Interactive Advertising Bureau in conjunction with PricewaterhouseCoopers show that in the US alone the industry was worth an astonishing $31 billion in 2011 – an increase of 22 per cent on 2010.

Search engine-based advertising alone represents nearly half of that total figure, with the rest being made up of contextual, banner, video and display advertising. Mobile is also becoming an increasingly important market; more than doubling in revenue a year previously.

However, where there is a market, there is competition.

This competition mainly comes in the form of advertising and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), in addition to search engines. The difference between which advertiser wins in this crowded marketplace and which one loses can come down to a concept which all of us are familiar with on the internet. It’s one which we all collectively live by and are controlled by – speed.

The effect that speed has on internet advertising shouldn’t be underestimated. There are no fewer than three parties that stand to win or lose, purely on the basis of how quickly a site and its on-page elements load – the user, the search engine and the business itself.

For the user, studies suggest that the average person has little time for delays on a website. Even if an advertising platform benefits from being separated from the main site on dedicated servers, a user will expect all on-page content to appear at the same time. This is because users trust speed; sometimes using it as a measure of authority. Those who cannot deliver their on-page content within milliseconds therefore may instantly lose a user’s trust and potentially their custom as a result.

Improving the time a website and its third party content takes to load not only benefits users but also search engine rankings. Google – the world’s biggest search engine – for one, confirmed several years ago that loading speeds now make up a small part of its ranking factor. It did so on the basis that “faster sites create happy users.”

As if improving a user’s experience while also satisfying the search engines wasn’t enough, a business stands to benefit from faster advertising in very straightforward cash terms.

Following a link could lead to revenues from affiliate networks, which offer a share of any revenue that is generated by the merchant from visitors to the publisher’s site – providing the user follows through with an appropriate action (e.g. making a purchase, requesting a quote). Therefore ensuring that these advertisements load in a very fast manner is key to the user respecting the ad, as well as the site; leading to them potentially following their visit through.

Speed is also a key concern for advertisers because of the changing nature in how ads are manifesting themselves on the web. While it might only take milliseconds to load textual or display advertising, the onset of video and even in-game advertising is pushing online advertising’s technological requirements to the max. It is now only with the fastest of connections that an advertiser can hope to have any influence in gaining a user’s extremely valuable and potentially profitable trust.

Source: http://www.seo-news.com/the-influence-of-speed-on-online-advertising-a-seo-news-exclusive/ 

Negative SEO, The Penguin Guillotine and Google’s…

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For the last few weeks, I have been exploring the whole concept of negative SEO and how it can “supposedly” affect your search engine rankings, especially in Google. Lately, since the arrival of Penguin, negative SEO (nickname – Google Bowling) has been discussed much more often.

Google’s Penguin Update examines the whole SEO layout of your site, including your incoming links and the anchor text in those links. If Google via Penguin feels you’re over “optimizing” your site to influence their index or rankings, your site will be slapped with a penalty which is severe and crippling – in other words – Google will simply wipe your site from its index.

Penguin is judging your complete link profile, which includes all internal and external links, and decides if it fits a “natural” or “unnatural” linking structure. Your link profile is no doubt compared to the normal or standard readings – if you have too many links with the exact commercial keywords in the anchor text pointing to interior pages on your site, this will show up as unnatural or inorganic. A red flag goes up and down comes the Penguin Guillotine, chopping your site’s Google rankings next to nil.

In addition, if you have many sites giving you “site-wide” links or more than one or two links, these will appear as “inorganic links” flowing to your site. Down comes the Penguin guillotine.

Since you basically have no control of who links to your site, in the past Google has stated these links can’t hurt your site. However, now with the introduction of the Penguin Update, links coming into your site can definitely harm your rankings, at least in Google.

Your ruthless competitors can now build or buy countless “spammy links” from sites around the web to trigger one of Penguin’s red flags – down comes the guillotine and it’s game over.

Now some argue that “negative SEO” doesn’t really work and no one can harm your site, Penguin or no Penguin. While this may be true for many big brand authority sites with well established reputations in Google, for a struggling site or domain, the picture is not so rosy or clear-cut. A ruthless competitor can build or buy shady links and point them all at your site. How is Penguin or Google to know it is NOT you building or buying those links?

Google probably realizes this problem and has promised a “disavow link tool” in GWT (Google Webmaster Tools) in the very near future so that a site can’t be held hostage by a ruthless competitor who simply won’t remove the offending links. A site owner can now just disavow or dismiss these links when their site is being ranked in Google.

Such a tool would also prove very helpful for older sites, which may have a very extensive list of link partners or just sites displaying their links. Removal of any of those links can be impossible, so such a tool would allow webmasters to dismiss any links coming from bad neighborhoods.

Everyone is just hoping Google does introduce this “disavow” tool in GWT because it could potentially go a long way in leveling the playing field when it comes to your incoming links, which you really don’t have any control over. Such a tool would put that control back into the site owner’s hands and would be a welcome tool for fighting any negative SEO.

Source: http://www.seo-news.com/negative-seo-the-penguin-guillotine-and-googles-possible-disavow-tool/ 

7 Must Have SEO Chrome Browser Extensions

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Whether you are a small business website owner or SEO professional, you’re always on the lookout for tools to ease the responsibilities of managing your search engine rankings. With the search engines on a warpath to increase the quality of their search results, there are endless changes to their search algorithms that keep you on your toes. This is where browser extensions can be of assistance. These are simply extra features you can add to your Internet browser to make life easier. While they are by no means as comprehensive as SEO software on the market, they help you more efficiently manage important tasks.

Choosing between the many extensions can be overwhelming, so we’ve done the hard part for you. Today, we’ll look at the best SEO browser extensions available in the Chrome store.

SEO For Chrome

This extension was better known as Chrome SEO until Google requested that they change the name. This is currently the most popular SEO Chrome extension available. It’s all about providing you with the statistics you need to help guide your search strategy. This quick and easy extension notifies you of your Google PageRank increases and decreases, the number of backlinks to your site, your social media share improvement, and a whole lot more. It’s also a personal favorite of mine so I would definitely recommend you check it out.

SEO Site Tools

Another handy analytics browser extension SEO Site Tools, focuses on gathering statistics about your website from a whole range of sources so you can quickly monitor your website’s strength and weaknesses. The best part is it filters this information into 6 key sections:

1) External page data
2) Page elements
3) Social media
4) Page terms and tools
5) Domain information
6) Suggestions for your site

SEO SERP Workbench

The flood of updates to search engine algorithms fluctuating the search engine rankings and positions of websites means SEO SERP workbench should be a staple browser extension for all webmasters. This tool lets you quickly check the position of targeted keywords for your website and your competitor’s websites. Although it is a simple extension, being able to constantly and easily monitor targeted keywords can be a godsend for webmasters relying on Google to bring in traffic to their websites.

SEO Quake

Unlike the previous two browser extensions, the SEO Quake browser extension gathers intelligence on all 3 major search engines Google, Yahoo and Bing, as opposed to just Google. This is one of the more advanced tools, quickly sorting through and revealing your PageRank, Alexa rank, nofollow links, keyword density analysis, and web archive age. Of course, it being a comprehensive tool means more effort on your part. If you don’t currently use comprehensive paid SEO software, it is definitely worthwhile checking out this browser extension.

SiteTrail

This tool lets you monitor any website of your choosing and also provides the site’s estimated value and revenue. I find that the most handy statistic it provides is a website’s estimated page views. Unlike most browser extensions that have a permanent home on your browser bar, you simply need to visit a website, right click anywhere on the site, and then select “SiteTrail” to generate the statistics.

Check My Links

This extension offers you a quick way to check the health of website links. You can check webpages for broken links or errors, identify where the link is and what error message it gives you. Not only is this a great way to check for broken links on your website, but you can also identify broken links on other websites and offer to have them replaced with a link to you instead (only if you are an appropriate replacement, of course).

Sorezki SEO Plus

This little gem upgrades Google Webmaster Tools & Yahoo and Google Analytics by offering additional social activity statistics, on-page results, social media information, PageRank and search engine ranking, as well as Yahoo, Bing and Google search engines with geo-location search tools, advanced metrics, anchor/ PageRank scanners and so on.

There you have it – a list of what I believe are the best SEO Chrome browser extensions based on my own experience and evaluation. However, you need to keep in mind the fact that as handy as these extensions are, you do not have to install all of them (and you shouldn’t!). They do take up space on your browser so installing too many will most likely slow down webpage loading speed. Most companies stick to 2 or 3 SEO browser extensions to use alongside their more comprehensive paid SEO software. Your best bet is to simply try out one at a time and uninstall any that aren’t helpful to you. You’ll quickly figure out which are the most useful for managing your company’s specific SEO needs.

Source: http://www.seo-news.com/7-must-have-seo-chrome-browser-extensions/

Top 5 Tools for Analyzing Your Backlink Profile — A SPN Exclusive

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Link-Building is difficult at the best of times, but Google has made it even harder for us as SEO’ers to build quality, high authority links after the infamous Penguin and Panda updates (I call this Penganda!). Many low quality link sources were completely obliterated by Google during Penguin resulting in lost link value for a lot of sites engaging in low quality directory submissions and blog network linking.

I have seen a lot of comments recently of people complaining that their sites have suddenly dropped and competitors starting to outrank them on their main terms. Panic seems to have set in a lot of people when they see these shifts after a notorious Google algorithm update. My advice would be to not panic, but delve into the data and discover exactly why these changes have occurred and develop a strategy to remedy the solution based on hard data. The first place to start looking is your overall link profile, and that’s what I’m here to discuss.

For seasoned SEO’ers analyzing link profiles comes naturally, although for the less experienced or those not in the know it can be a daunting to determine where to start and how to go about it. There are some great tools out there, some free, some not, but nonetheless all specifically designed to give you insightful data about your website’s backlink data.

In order of preference, my personal top five tools for analyzing backlink profiles are:

1. Google
Google?! I hear you say? Yes Google! Google should be the first place you start to analyze your link profile. Why? Well first it’s free, and secondly it’s Google that takes notice of your link profile and ranks you so the data they give you probably has some significance!

Google doesn’t offer some fancy dashboard or enable you to download massive excel sheets, but it does give you a quick and dirty picture of what sites are linking to your site. Simply go to Google and type link:”www.mydomain.com” -site:www.mydomain.com into the search box. This will give a quick set of results of sites linking to your site. This data is not infallible. I rarely find it showing every link – but I do find some of the results interesting that other tools don’t pick up. It’s a good start, it’s free and it’s easy. What more do you want?

Google also gives us numerous other free tools to help us analyze our link profiles. Google Webmaster Tools is one of them. Again, not always 100% accurate in it’s data, but it is a good indication of the links that Google can “see” and values. You need to have your website set up in Google Webmaster Tools first before you can start seeing link data.

2. MajesticSEO
MajesticSEO is by far my favorite go-to tool for link building data. The data it provides is by far – in my opinion – the most advanced from any tool currently on the market. Majestic offers both free and paid versions of the tool. If you are simply trying to analyze your own website’s link data, then a free account will suffice, otherwise, if you’re an agency or deal with multiple clients, you will probably require a paid subscription, although I guarantee it is completely worth the minimal monthly fee for the data it provides!

So what is so good about Majestic? Well simply enter your domain into Majestic and out comes a wealth of data regarding links pointing at your site. They have also implemented a trust/citation flow metric which in layman’s terms simply tells you how well that link coming to your website is trusted and whether it is passing useful keyword anchor text relevance back to your site.

The vast amount of reports and data you can retrieve from Majestic can seem overwhelming, although there are ways to quickly visualize this data for maximum impact which I am going to soon discuss in another article on my blog.

3. Open Site Explorer
It was hard to choose between Majestic and Open Site Explorer and I would have probably listed OSE as number two if it provided cool trust/citation flow graphs. However OSE is an industry standard link explorer tool from the awesome guys at SEOMoz. The tool offers a free limited account, although this only lets you see the first five results. I would highly recommend getting a paid account at SEOMoz. The data that OSE provides can be invaluable not only at finding links pointing at your site, but also links pointing at your competitors, allowing you to compare your own site against theirs.

I also believe that OSE has the best metric system – mozRank and mozTrust are two widely accepted industry measurements that can quickly show how you compare to other sites.

4. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is another tool similar to Majestic. It has some features that are pretty cool and which the other tools do not. One of the best and most notable features of this tool is it’s “lost link” feature. This data allows you to view what links have been recently lost to your site and also new links. Ahrefs is probably the best tool for finding problems in your link profile, especially if you have suddenly lost a large number of links, although it is again a paid tool.

5. Blekko
Relatively unknown, Blekko is a brilliant little free search engine with multiple uses. A simple search engine that allows you to use paramaters at the end of searches. Go to Blekko.com and try searching for www.mydomain.com/seo. This handy little tool gives you a nice, quick visualization of your inbound links as well as some other useful statistics such as the neighborhood on shared hosts or the latency of your site.

Well these are the tools I generally use on a day-to-day basis for analyzing link profiles of sites. Anyone with a bit of time and a little knowledge of how links work can have a shot at these tools and find some insightful information about the kind of sites linking to them and the quality of those sites. What you can do with all this information is a topic for another day!