Penguin 2.0 is going to be released in the Next Couple of weeks.  Are you prepared to weather the storm that is about to come? Are you 100% confident that your SEO Company knows how to react to the changes that Google is going to make? At Noxster we understand you are busy running a business, which is why we want to ensure you’re not caught off guard by Google’s latest major update. Here is a quick summary of what is going to happen in the next couple of weeks.

Google’s new update is coming out in 2 weeks.

The purpose of the Penguin 2.0 update is to make sure that relevant content is being produced. Google is trying to prevent blackhat SEO techniques for companies trying to trick the search engine. If you or your company have been “playing fairly” or according to the Google guidelines, you can sleep with no anxiety at night. If just the thought of an update has you nervous, break out the SEO-guns and dig a bit deeper into your current content to ensure you are in compliance. Here are 5 quick ways to prepare for the Google Penguin 2.0:

1) Generate High Quality Links from Content:

• Penguin 2.0 isn’t a bad thing. The intent is to stop spamming. Try to avoid spammy the web with 100’s of press releases when you’re not doing any other link building.  Other do not rules include:
  • Buy links (in general, but especially on unrelated sites)
  • Build links that come to your site from “spammy” sources or other sites that may have “questionable” content
  • Build links from sites that are in no way relevant to yours
  • Over-optimize link anchor text. Keep it natural.

2) Understand the link profile of your site:

• Who is linking to you? When you are attempting to generate backlinks to your website are you just utilizing one method? Do you have relevant websites talking about you? Are you making the appropriate changes to those landing pages to warrant the popularity? Those are all ways you can identify if you have a quality linking strategy.
• Chances are you have no socially integrated links. They are hard to create. They happen by blogging offsite and people sharing your information. This is the same thing as a backlink. Try and get your information shared as much as possible. Social platforms are the highest quality backlink that you can get.
• If you do have low-quality links pointing to your site (from a spam site, for example), make sure you leverage Google Webmaster Tools’ “Disavow links” functionality and continue to make efforts to clean up unnatural links.

3) Build relationships with Partnerships

• The best SEO value on the web is the relationship you have with your partners. In the end that was the reason why the concept of backlinks exist. It is the same as the “I like” button, but 20 years ago. The best way to move forward with quality SEO work is by building relationships with high quality, relevant partners. Have a strategic partnership review 2 or 3 times a year to identify high quality website that are willing to give you credit for your services. They are tough to come by but they are worth it.
• Know that despite the fact that it may seem like a single backlink from a quality source it is 10 times harder to get, you will realize the benefit in that single link providing 20 times more valuable. That is why page rank hasn’t been terminated from Google’s algorithm.
• Linking with quality relationships will keep you safe from future Google algorithm changes, as well as make it easier to keep and build relevant content moving forward. Make sure that you maintain those relationships so you don’t jeopardize that link.
• Building relationships isn’t exchanging links. If a website has 100’s of outbound links the link juice associated with that relationship is pointless. Make sure you work smart.

4) Focus on Your Company

• Unique content will be read and then shared. If you write for the “DNA” aka the people your blogs and information will be shared. You will naturally generate high quality backlinks that are relevant, not to mention people will share the content on social platforms.

5) Quality of the Website

• The quality of your website matters. If your website hasn’t been attended to you are probably outdated, which means that other people are going to a better website to find the information they are looking for.
• The better the website the longer viewers stay on your website. Time on site has profound positive affect on your rankings. Make sure you have an astatically pleasing website that is easy to navigate. Having 100’s of specials on a homepage is usually counterproductive.

For more questions contact Noxster a Proven SEO Company.

Currently the world offers a variety of different marketing platforms to businesses. Since there is a bifurcation of the audience across all marketing platforms, it is very important for businesses to understand and evaluate cross-channel consumer behavior.

Majority of our time is usually spent in front of a technological device, like: – TV, computer, Smartphones, tablets, mobile phones and other portable devices. Each of these platforms has its own reach and their own respected benefits.

Amongst this list, Smartphones are increasing in popularity the fastest. Smartphones attracts all age groups ranging from: teens, housewives, working professionals, everyone is attracted towards the instant search facility of this medium. So when you optimize your website for smartphones, you really cannot ignore the primary channels as well. Hence, drafting an effective content and mobile strategy is a must.  There are two ways to have a website that is cross compatible with tablets and smartphones, two options are by building a responsive website or building a custom mobile website.

To better understand the multichannel consumer behavior, here is what you need to do: -

1. Latest information and deals
   This class of consumers is always in the quest to buy the product right away i.e. without any delay. Something like same day delivery or even delivery within the next few hours. Companies need to ensure that the information about the latest products, services and deals is updated on their website or mobile platform. It is because these consumers want to buy the specific product/service; they would ideally type the exact keyword. So it is important to optimize the website accordingly.
2. Price comparisons
   This category of consumers prefers to do price comparisons before buying a product/service. For example: – you can track the IP address of the Wi-Fi to find out the search count per day, month or year. 
3. Suggestions based in searches
   Consumer behavior can be assessed and understood by analyzing their purchase and/or search history. For example: – as an online store owner, you can find out the number of abandoned shopping carts you have, preferences of a particular customers, etc. So the next time when they visit your site, you can suggest them new products/services based on their past searches.

The purpose is for companies to figure out their search behavior of the consumer’s base. Once that is figured out it is important to have an effective search engine marketing plan to reach on top of all searches engine rankings and to optimize your website for different devices and handsets. To find out more, please Contact Us SEO Consultants.

Just like the way you get bored of eating the same type of meal every day, your customers may also get bored of reading same type of blog posts,EDMs, infographics, or probably seeing your old website every time they visit your website. Obviously you don’t want to consider revamping your website every month or at regular intervals, nor you may not be selling different type of products and services at regular intervals, but you can always present the “old wine in a new bottle”.   

Since there is stiff competition, it is important to offer something new and unique to your customers and prospects. Without updating your website you fall into a static website with no reason for return. By failing to update your site, you might lose some of your important leads. This is the reason why you see glossy wraps and attractive packing materials used on print packages being sold in the market. Those satin ribbons, hand-made packing wraps, and unusual packing style works best to mesmerize you and urge you to buy the displayed products.

Right from the products displayed on the shelves, to your website, everything should be created to catch the attention of your audience. Placement of relevant text, images, videos and infographics is a must to garner more user traffic. A redesign also helps with increasing your rankings. Let’s face it the website you built is probably a couple of years old and doesn’t adhere to the same marketing principles that are common today. It also helps you restructure your sitemap to allow you to target services and products in a way that they are being searched. Not to mention, if a user tries to open your website on different devices, the USPs of your company, discounts and price offs, latest deals, important call-to-action and your products and services should be easily visible.

Once your call to actions and your design of your website is finalized it is time to start marketing your website. And then, the job does not end with the mere launch of your website, you need to optimize your website so as to rank on top of all the search engines. Seeking consultation from an experienced and reliable Web Design and SEO Company like: – Noxster SEO Company will not only help you improvise your existing web design, or revamp your SEO strategy but it’ll also help you improve your ROI. Coz at the end, it is all about the money, honey

Wanna know how you can do this? Just Contact Us today!

Imagine that you are with friends and after few hours you guys begin to feel hungry. The place is quite unknown to you and you aren’t familiar with the eating joints close by. In this situation, you would either ask a local or you may search for the best restaurant within the vicinity.

Ok, now here is another situation for you. Your handset has stopped working smoothly and has started causing problems, and now you need to buy a new device. What will you do? Naturally, you would turn to the web to research for various options available in the market. Those online include- reading online, consult your family and friends, or simply ask for suggestions on Facebook, Google +, Twitter, etc.  Thanks to social networking websites we are able to get reputable advice at the tip of our fingers. Between search and social we are able to instantly interact and attract a lot of users.

Both these examples exemplify the importance of promoting your business online. Since, a large percentage of customers prefer to do online searches, it is essential for you to develop a strong online presence. You should be visible on all search engines and on every device- PCs, laptops and handhelds. And if you don’t do this, your competitors will be found before you.

A strong online presence calls for a thoughtful SEO strategy. First, you need to have a website and second, your website needs to be fully optimized. Right keywords, proper meta tags, quick loading speed, smooth navigation structure, relevant content- are some of the basic search engine optimization techniques used.

Engaging within the social community is also a great way to generate the unexpected leads. Having a good reputation only enhances with a good Social Media and SEO presence. Online marketing services are key to drive business. If your business is doing well without it, can you imagine how good you would do with it?

Paying for PPC ads, Facebook ads, or maybe having your presence on Google places isn’t enough. No doubt that these activities are important and result oriented, however for long term online visibility you need to opt for search engine optimization services.

Remember- SEO is a standalone activity but if you are willing to spend money in PPC ads or SMO activities, you can truly enhance your Online Marketing presence.  

This question is continually asked time and time again. Why does my competition outrank me for X number of keywords?  A lot of business owners will take a look at a couple of key features when analyzing why a company is doing well online. You have probably heard about Domain Authority, Page Authority, link quantity, and MozRank. These metrics are readily apparent and easy to track online. SEOmoz put out a great article that we will reference from Time to Time within this blog.

Over Analyzing SEO Data?

The common occurrence by a start up company or entrepreneur is over analyzing their competition. By now you have probably download an SEO tool online you will be able to see credentials that look like this when browsing a search engine:

We used an example that was shared by SEOMoz to help relate the following points. The keyword difficulty for the keyword “credit card debt” was a 53 in Australia according to their example, which is rated as “highly competitive”. When you take a look at debtrescue’s it will show a very high ranking in aberration. You can possibly classify this keyword as an anomaly and claim other sites do not make sense based on the metrics either. Either way that is not the case. In fact, the ranking (debtrescue is 2^nd on the search, 4^th by the keyword tool’s search) yet that domain has the lowest domain authority by over 15 points and the 2^nd lowest page authority by over 22 points.

With this example they also shared what URl had the most top 10 rankings of the bunch.

As you can see from the chart above, this race wasn’t even close. By the stats, debtrescue.com.au really had no business ranking on page 1.  So after digesting this information and analyzing all the little details, why doesn’t this website out rank the others? The DA/PA charts on the keyword difficulty clearly states that the site doesn’t rank on based on metrics.

SEOMoz then shared what the external backlink strategy looked like, to help us better understand the possible impact link building could have had on this example. See the chart they provided below:

The findings were simple:

“The target site within the case study had nearly the lowest mozrank, by far the fewest links of the non-.govs, the lowest subdomain mozrank by a lot, the lowest Page authority by a wide margin and the lowest domain authority by a mile. The page 2 results for the same search shows a trusted bank site – NAB.com.au – they have a DA of 82, PA of 44. They have 300,000 links.”

So how did a website like debtrescue outrank anything else on page one? The metrics all say these other sites should be winning handily.

Never Get a Straight Answer from an SEO Company?

Talk to 100 SEO companies and get 200 different answers. There is no real answer that is going to make you feel comfortable. The truth is, metrics count, but they don’t come close to telling you a concrete answer. Google is getting more advanced and 100’s of influencers affect a ranking.

According to the 2011 Search Engine Ranking Factors on SEOMoz, many SEOs think Page Level and Domain Level Link Metrics account for roughly 43% of the algorithm. Over half of your total ranking is determined by factors other than Page and Domain link metrics.

How your website ranks on Google depends on a ton of different factors other than a few you are continually read about in blogs, forums, and online communities. Pagerank, inbound links, external links, domain authority, tell a compelling story, but will never give you the answer.

So what else matters?

Truth is that Google will never come out and tell anyone the whole story or in their case the algorithm. It would leave them vulnerable to having poor quality websites ranking on the web which would devalue the value proposition of the organization. But we can share with you what we do know.

Here is what we know:  The penalties were enforced to stop spamming. Content was once king and that strategy got abused. Linking strategy was once the answer, then it got dethroned, and now it is a combination of both. You have to have a unique combination of fresh new content, show an effort to stay modernized, proactively share your information, generate a buzz, and organically gather links back.

Data Matters: Google tracks certain data. Google tracks data it finds relevant and reliable. So what can you find in Analytics and with a bit of testing?

Time onsite matters. One of the biggest suggestions we can make to enhance your SEO is to increase the quality score of your website. This metric tells Google that someone found your page and enjoyed it enough to stay on your site longer than your competitors. We believe that the duration of a visit is a direct parallel of the websites overall quality and usefulness.

Pages Visited matter. This goes back to the time onsite theory above. If an end user searches for a specific keyword and visits just one page on the #1 site, then seconds later goes to the #2 listing and spends 15 minutes, what do you think that tells Google?

Algorithmic and manual penalties matter. If you put that keyword fifty times on your page, as we discussed above, you will run into an algorithmic penalty. This means Google knows you have “stuffed” the page and will take a bit off your ranking. Do it repeatedly and you’ll get a much larger penalty. If a Google manual reviewer catches you doing this, or a competitor reports you for it, you may get a manual penalty. You will get a notification in your Webmasters Tools about this one and you do need to fix it or suffer a harsh penalty.

Social Integration- Depending on what SEO Company you talk to they will tell you that social metrics matter very little. We have found that every quarter social metrics are influencing rankings more and more. If you get 2 or 3 retweets on your links, it won’t help you very much, just like adding one backlink. However if you get 200 retweets to that same link, which was shared 50 times, and pinned 8 times, now you’re talking. That will influence a ranking.

The Text of the Link still Matter. Hurts to hear if you have just been penalized, so don’t misunderstand this section. Anchor texts can be positive and negative. If you over-optimize a handful of keywords, it will hurt your rankings. It is all about balance, if you have the right combination and variety you will see your organic rankings improve.

301 redirects matter. You just redesigned your site and you got ride a lot of content, created new landing pages, but forgot to 301 your existing content to your new pages. This stuff matters. When you are spying on your competitors and they show poor SEO metrics, reality is they might have great metrics, just with another site. They may have changed domains and redirected all those rankings over to a new site.

Outcome to the Problem:

Search Engine Marketing is a great way to enhance your online marketing presence, but there are a ton of factors that go into converting a website to the top of the search engine. What was once an easy process has morphed into a complex strategy that involves different skill sets to perform different tasks. The day’s where throwing up a cookie cutter website with cheap SEO is extinct. Small SEO companies can’t compete, while smaller mom and pop companies have to wrap there head around the fact that online marketing is a bigger investment than they are used to.

Matt Cutt’s just released a new video talking about proper on site SEO strategy. The question was asked if you have to many internal links anchor tagged with the same keywords on the same page would you lose your rankings since the Penguin update? Matt goes on to talk about this tactic and how it won’t have a negative effect on how your website ranks online.

At Noxster we have to links on our homepage that are tagged “SEO Services” that lead to our “SEO Services” landing page. If we did that 100x however Matt Cutt’s did say that there can be some consequences for doing such a maneuver.

Watch the Video below:

In part 1 of this 2 part blog we addressed a ton of ways that SEO companies incorporate a spammy linking strategy. In part 2 of this blog series we will address when to properly utilize the Disavow tool. As a top SEO Company in Los Angeles we have worked with a ton of companies helping them get out of the Google dog house. The disavow tool is one of the most critical parts to recover from  a Google link penalty.

If you missed our last blog let us recap what we’ve discussed so far about link spamming. Paid links, blog spam, comment spam, guest books, low quality auto calls, all these are considered as unnatural links. Paid links or links that are earned by using a link scheme which do not adhere to the quality guidelines provided by Google.

Google may strictly penalize the websites that adopts such an artificial link building program. Ideally, a message is sent by Google to the websites that have unnatural links. This is what a link warning message looks like that is sitting in your inbox:

Disavow steps after your get a Link Warning

If you received a message like the one above you should perform the following steps needed to get out of this sticky situation:

1. Look at all the recent links.
2. Examine the unnatural links about which you’ve received a warning.
3. Figure out what type of a link it is.

Once you’ve followed these steps, the next important thing to do is to manually remove all the low quality and irrelevant links. This is a step to guide the search engine to index your website the way you want. However, even after deleting such links if you find that there are still more that falls in the same category, you may use the Disavow Links tool.  Typically this is a long and methodical process and a majority of people in this situation will outsource this task to a SEO Company with Google recovery program.

As the title of the blog suggest, the Disavow Link tool is used to tell Google which links you want the search engine to ignore while crawling your website. It is just a citation that helps Google know which links you think are artificial and thus, retain your website’s ranking performance.

Google uses a number of algorithms to restrict other webmasters from hampering your website’s performance. ‘No-follow tag’ and ‘robot.txt’ are widely used by several SEO firms to allow the search engines to act in a certain way.

It is only when you are unsure about the presence of some problematic links and you aren’t able to handle this kind of a situation, you should opt to use the Disavow Link tool.

Once you use this tool, it will take a couple of weeks for Google to re-crawl and re-index your website. After a period of time passes, if you think that you want to un-disavow a particular link, it may take too long.

In essence, the Disavow Link tool acts as a rescuer when you aren’t able to clean the unnecessary backlinks. Be cautious and be careful while you use this tool. For further assistance and clarification, please Contact our SEO Consultants.

Warning: - If you aren’t a technical person, don’t use this tool on your own.

Unnatural links and its consequences

Link building is one of the common practices used by a number of SEO companies across the world. It is essentially a technique wherein a link of your website gets placed on someone else’s website and vise-versa. It can be one-way or two-way link. The idea is to grab the attention of as many visitors as possible and urge them to click the anchor text. However, in the quest to increase the clicks it is important to ensure that the websites with which you exchange your links with is related to your business; or else you might lose your rankings.

Different search engines have different ways of penalizing a website, so while you indulge in link building, ensure you don’t try to make up ground by link spamming. Link spamming can be in the form of:

1. Exchanging links in excess.
2. Creating way to many directory links
3. Link Farming
4. Excessive internal page linking or probably link exchanges with partner sites.
5. Using automatic link exchanging tools.

It is like trading your links with someone else for the sake of earning better page ranks. There are paid links where some companies provide backlinks in exchange of a definitive sum of money. However that can’t get pretty expensive and too much of anything is not a good thing, you may then incur the grave consequences of being hit with spammy activity.

Google, the most used search engine of all allocates a lot of importance on the quantity, quality and relevance of links.

How do you know if a Link is Spammy?

Take a look in your Google webmaster tools. If you notice any form of unnatural links pointing towards your website or if you received a notification from Google about the unnatural links. At that point you should attempt to remove the links.  However don’t forget the point of linking is for people to share your information, so you cannot control every inbound link you receive. Google encourages people to share links and information as long as it is natural.

Unnatural links can be: -

1. Forum commenting inclusive of links in the signature.
2. Unrelated or low quality bookmarking or directory submissions website.
3. Links included in the footer.
4. Paid links, etc.

Since the Google Penguin update in mid-April 2012, the search engine started penalizing all the websites with low-quality links, keyword stuffing and over-optimized anchor texts.

So, if you’ve also been using this artificial technique of earning backlinks, BEWARE…!

Seeking assistance of a professional SEO company would help you get rid of link spam. Contact Us to find out how..?

The most scrutinized aspect of SEO is the concept of link building. Link building was single handedly one of the biggest reasons why a website ranked on the search engines. Then the google panda and penguin came to prevent spammy links to be being built.

As Google continues to upda
te their algorithm link building is getting more and more complicated. A lot of companies are scared to continue to link build because they have been hit with the penalty. So what is the truth? The truth is Matt Cutt’s came out and said only 12% of the companies got a link building penalty in the year 2012.

What is a Link and How Important Is Link Building Still?

To break it down for you a backlink is a link on someone else’s web page that directs back to your page. The more links or friends you have online the more popular you rank within a respected search engine.

Linking is so important, Google continually mentions it in their doctorial theses, “The Anatomy of a Search Engine”.

Can you build too many links?

When you are optimizing a website every little change you make can potentially result in either over or under optimization of a website. While you make a relatively small change to your website it could drastically affect how you rank online. When you are dealing with keyword silo’s, keyword density, page titles, and onsite optimization, something as simple as changing a keyword in a h1 tag to match the content better on a specific landing page can impact a SERP ranking.

We have made a couple of changes to our own website to demonstrate the significance in a minor change. We have 3 studies we want to share with you that have positively affected either our own website or our clients. It is to be noted that in all three examples we have re-established or improved the rankings then better than before.

Case Study One: Noxster’s website

Strategy: Removing Blogs/ Content on a website that has previously been stumbled, liked or shared

Five months ago we decided to remove a couple of blogs that were very generic relating to general news. These blogs were either related to changes in the online community or technology related. These blogs were quoting various new platforms who released the information and which we appropriately quoted within our blog. Our strategy at the time was simple, take the news, add our input towards the situation, add it to our blog, and submit them to various social platforms. After 24 hours of sharing the blogs, they all generated roughly 50+ people to stumble upon them, like them, tweet them, or + 1 them.  At the time we were ranking #13 in the world for the keyword “SEO Company”. Since the blog had very little to do with our company, the concept of SEO or that keyword we figured there would be no harm in taking them down.

Result:  For the first time ever, we were wrong. Within 48 hours we were ranking #113 on Google for SEO Company and dipped for a couple other keywords. We immediately launched those blogs under the same URL title and structure. Within 3 more business days we successfully recovered back to #13. As of today we are sitting strong at the #6-8 position for the 2^nd biggest keyword in our industry.

Moral of the story, don’t take down content that people liked, shared, or generated you positive traffic.

Case Study 2: Client A

Strategy: Redesign the Website and installing a content management system.

We have had a client for over a year that once started working on 15 keywords and a year later we had them ranked for over 100 regional related key phrases dominating there industry. As we successfully ranked them all over the west coast we decided to approach the 2 biggest keywords in their industry. Being stagnant in the 14^th position for over 3 months of work we suggested we redesign the website and modernize it.

Result: After switching the website over to wordpress and out of a static depreciated  HTML site we sky rocketed to the #2 position for the national level keyword. We also have a blog, social media integration, and user ability functions that that the client never had.

Moral of the story, keep your site up to date with the latest trends and technologies.

Case Study 3: Client B

Strategy: Content Creation, Keyword Silo’s and updated Site Structure

Client B had a poorly designed website, very little content. Any content they did have belonged on different pages.  The good news for Client B was that they were getting away with it for a long time; the bad news is Google changed their algorithm. The results were a drastic drop in rankings for a majority of the keywords that they were once ranking for. After further analysis we not only restructured his URL’s, re-coded his entire site properly, created fresh and unique content,  created keyword silo’s, updated the existing photos to new ones, created a new flow for their website, and made sure that there was a universal theme throughout.  

Result: Within 2 weeks he was back on track and showed a jump in 40-50 positions for the same keywords that he fell for.

Moral of the story, the quality of your website and content placed on it matters. Having a poorly structured website and only one variation of a keyword restricts your placement online.

That’s all Folks:

So there you have it. Every change we made had nothing to do with link building which is what most SEO companies would have suggested to generate a higher SERP. Onsite optimization and proper content placement makes a world of difference in your rankings online. When those two entities are correct, then and only then a proper link building strategy can make the difference in a SEO ranking. A quality link building campaign based around social integrated sharing is the best way for your company to be shared, go viral, and take that great content you spent either time or money creating to be effective.