Penguin 3.0- How it impacts your business?

Just a few months ago, Google rolled out the much anticipated penguin refresh dubbed as ‘penguin 3.0’. From the past two years, Google’s penguin algorithms has refined search engine results by targeting websites that infringe Google’s webmasters guidelines and that use back-hat SEO techniques or paid links or other strategies. The new version of penguin algorithm follows its predecessors by weeding out these results.

Penguin 3.0- What is it?

The new penguin 3.0 will be a complete rewrite of algorithm instead of just being a refresh. The main aim of penguin 3.0 is to cut down spammy links and enhances search engine results by penalizing sites that have built manipulative links solely for the purpose of boosting rankings. For instance, if you have been using automated programs to build thousands of back links to your sites in order to achieve highest page ranking, then chances are good that you are now buried deep in the search engine results. On the other hand, webmasters who are abiding by Google webmaster’s guidelines and doing everything in the right way can get their site listed on the top, thanks to the new penguin update.

According to Google, Penguin’s latest iteration frees up all sites that have cleaned up webspam signals and fixed previous errors and demotes sites with newly discovered penalty-infringing aspects.

The update as said prompts most webmasters to scramble and verify that their sites are not violating any of Google’s guidelines. Infact, it obviously affects lot of search queries and spammers, poor link builders and people who are trying to trick Google with some smart techniques. Penguin refresh affects less than one percent of queries in search engine results based on US English.

How to find out whether your site is affected by Penguin 3.0?

Google analytics

Analyzing your website’s data is one of the best options to find out whether your site is affected. Track your website data, including visits and channels that drive traffic. If you notice a sharp decline in the number of visits to your site, you may have been hit by latest penguin update. And, if your search results remains constant but there is a sudden drop in your social referrals, you may not be hit by penguin 3.0. You can’t decide on by analyzing a single day’s or week’s data, instead, you need to evaluate trends to decide on.  

Webmaster Tools

Webmaster Tools is a great way to check for penguin’s attack on your site. Using this, you can access a lot of data including search queries, click-through rates, impressions and so on. If you notice a sudden drop either in the number of impressions or average search position, then it is a good sign to note that your site has been affected by latest penguin update.

How to avoid being detrimentally impacted by Penguin 3.0?

According to previous releases, it’s worth to confiscate the following from any page of your website:

      Link schemes involving paid links or link swaps

      Using automation to create links

      Text ads passing page rank

      Poor quality backlinks

      Low-quality directory or bookmark site links

      Optimized anchor text in articles or press releases

      Widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites

Sources stated that penguin’s new iteration will affect 0.3% to 3.1% of websites that are indexed on Google.

However, this new latest update rewards sites that have natural, authoritative, relevant and valuable links. If your site has viable links and quality content, your chances of getting hit by Penguin 3.0 are less.

Google anticipates that Penguin 3.0 can churn out the most accurate and guideline-abiding search results. As long as your website is abided by Google’s guidelines, Penguin 3.0 is boom for you.

   

Find out whether your business needs SEO or PPC or SMO

You’ve made your business online. Well, what next? You need to implement an internet marketing strategy either to boost your traffic or promoting your brand or engaging audience to your business. For all these aspects, there are a number of internet marketing strategies in place. As each strategy has positives and negatives, you need to figure out which technique works best for your business, which itself makes a big difference between success and failure in the online world.

Well, Search engine optimization (SEO), Pay per click (PPC) and social media optimization (SMO) are the three popular internet marketing strategies that are essential for every online business. As all these strategies sound alike, most people are confused with what marketing strategy they need to go for? The answer for this question relies on the type of your business you own and short and long terms goals of your business.

To make your decision process easy, here we try to explain the difference between these online marketing strategies.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is a famous internet market strategy that helps to propel your website to the top slot of the search engine result pages in the major search engines. SEO is a process of utilizing specific strategies like link building, website optimization, high quality content and social media to gain highest ranking in search engines. SEO is the most important strategy for online businesses, which needs consistent and long-term results. By proper implementation of SEO tactics, one can rank their website for the keywords they want and can get continuous flow of traffic without having to pay anything. If you wish to be in the market for long run, then you need to go for SEO.

Pay Per Click

On the other hand, if your business needs immediate results or lots of traffic for short period, then pay-per-click is the best internet marketing strategy for you. Pay-per-click is the process of buying ads on most searchable websites with the idea of gaining traffic to your website. In pay per click, an advertiser places a bid on selected keywords and if someone searches for those keywords, the search engines or websites displays the ads on the page. The results of PPC will appear under sponsored ads or sponsored links on results page. The position of the ads depends on how much someone pays for a keyword. PPC campaigns are best suited for businesses, with an intention to make short term sales or limited time promotions. Also, PPC campaign helps a lot for new websites in getting lots of exposure. With the help of PPC, a small business can gain the ability to outbid larger businesses for keywords, which helps to gain an edge over others.

Social Media Optimization

Social media optimization is the process of building online exposure through various social media channels like facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, online communities, RSS feeds, social news buttons, etc. With more than 750 million users engaged in facebook and twitter, businesses are using these channels to build their brand in the industry. Also, social media optimization can be considered as a wonderful platform for businesses to interact with clients. In simplistic terms, we can define SMO is a way to augment the work done by PPC and SEO.

So, depending on the type and life cycle of your business, you need to opt a right online marketing strategy to maximize the benefits.  

Why every Business needs a Blog?

Find Why Every Business Needs a Blog

Blogging is a great way to boost the sales of any business. The main reason for this is-to grow your business you need to enhance your online visibility, which can be easily attained through blogging.

Blogging has become quite popular these days, which is deemed as a wonderful platform for many businesses to share their ideas and thoughts with potential customers. With a blog, your business has more chance to find over major search engines like Google, yahoo and Bing. Also, blogs updated with fresh and relevant information can certainly help your business to appear well in the search engine results.

Five great reasons why your business needs a blog 

If you are still confused, then here we have listed out few great reasons that define why blog is important for your business.

Gives your company a voice

In order to grow your business irrespective of what it actually deals with, you need to build credibility first. Having a blog will automatically expose you to global audience, which is something like bedrock to your business. Blogging also gives you an opportunity to build trust through which people can often find you when they are searching for particular information or service.

Connecting with people 

Blogging lets you directly interact with potential customers, thus, helping you in building an online community of loyal customers who actually values your product or services. Blog enables you to answer client’s questionnaires through which you can build a relationship, which eventually develops following and grow your business faster. This is especially helpful in case of new businesses where your products or services need great exposure. Infact, this directly affects your sales and reap benefits to your businesses.

Marking strong presence

Whether yours is a small or large business, creating significant presence in the industry is one of the most important aspects for any business. Having established a strong footprint in industry itself makes a significant difference for every business. By providing informative and useful posts, you will start to build a name for yourself in digital space. This will help you to shape public perception with regards to your brand. Blogging helps to reinforce your image and builds online exposure to you in most economical and effective way.

Helps you stay ahead of the cut-throat competition 

Content is king and the more content you have on your blog the higher will be your online reputation. Google loves content that is updated, fresh and relevant; a blog is the only best way to do this. Once your blog is growing and your search engine rankings are soaring, your blog will be seen by target audience, which ultimately powers your business.

Gives you insight to your audience

Blogging gives you a tremendous opportunity by allowing you to respond to client’s queries and requirements. Client’s feedback is the most important resource that helps you to promote your business and this can be easily acquired by making use of internet marketing blog.   

To thrive your business and enhance your online visibility, Blogging is a great way to go with. An internet marketing blog gives you an opportunity to grow your business by increasing your online exposure at a faster pace.

 So, if you are interested to advance your business with low-cost and little or no technical skills, it's time to set-up your own internet marketing blog!            

Boost your B2B business with LinkedIn premium services

With the rapid proliferation of social media networks, it is very important to have the right communication channel for every business to grow. The choices seen endless: Tumblr, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube. But which social media network you should choose is the big question?

Though every social media channel will help to boost your company’s inbound marketing strategy, you need to choose a channel that maximizes the benefits with minimal costs. The type of social media marketing you should choose for your business completely depends on the depth of your brand message and the demographics of the group being targeted. For this, it is important to analyze the age, interests and other characteristics of company’s target market.        

Why LinkedIn?

In case, if you want to boost your B2B businesses, LinkedIn is the ultimate social media network you should turn to. Today, LinkedIn is considered as the world’s largest business network with 300 million users in more than 200 countries. LinkedIn is considered as the extremely powerful tool for B2B businesses that allows you to identify and connect with influential persons in specific organizations and industries. Once you were connected, you will get an opportunity to interact with any individuals, source new business deals, share industry expertise, enhance business connections and many more. The more first degree connections you hold, the more professionals you can interact with just a click away.

What is LinkedIn Premium?

The basic features of LinkedIn are absolutely free. With the free version of LinkedIn, one can view and search for full profiles of connected people only. However, people who upgrade their account to LinkedIn Premium will get a cluster of added features that are not available through free account. The features includes the ability to message and view the full profiles of people to whom you are not directly connected to, ability to generate lead lists, advanced search functionality, save searches and much more.

Who can be benefited from LinkedIn premium services?

LinkedIn gives an opportunity to everyone starting from freelancers to fortune 500 companies to connect, engage, market and enhance their business ideas. As it offers premium services for job seekers, recruiters and sales professionals, any business can switch to LinkedIn premium services.        

Features of LinkedIn Premium services

The most important features of LinkedIn Premium services are as follows:

Build relationships with world’s professionals

LinkedIn has a very powerful search feature that allows you to search for broad regions rather than focused area. You can search professionals, jobs, companies, updates, groups, universities, etc. LinkedIn provides you an opportunity to easily find key decision-makers and influencers with just one search.

Once you click search, you can find many ways to filter search results. You can filter search results based on companies, connection and location. You can also go for advanced click option to get more filtering options such as industry, interests, etc.         

Sending messages based on filters

One of the great features of LinkedIn is it helps you to make new connections and retain existing connections. Most of the people use LinkedIn to reconnect and rediscover existing contacts based on their area of expertise, business and employer. The variety of filtering and connecting features assist you to find right people and interact with them, helping you to build the connections you need to boost your business.

Targeting right people with InMails

The data on LinkedIn is incredible. You can create any number of campaigns around content and advertising to target decision makers. Inmails is the best- part of LinkedIn that enables you to target decision makers precisely by sending mail directly to their inbox. You can specify any criteria such as any country, industry and company to build your target list. This will help to ensure that your inmail hits the right person. InMail maximizes your chances of success because they have a much higher open rate when compared to email along with a strong lead conversion rate.

Content marketing

LinkedIn enables you to create a business focused content marketing plan, which helps you to engage with potential customers and to win new business. Through this marketing, potential customers and partners can get to know you and what you do, which will actually help you to generate reactive business lead generation and to succeed with practical business deals.    

Company pages

Creating company pages and showcase pages to define your services on LinkedIn can reap many benefits to you. There is a huge difference between a company page on LinkedIn and the one on facebook. Company pages on LinkedIn are created based on business point of view. If it is done correctly, you can attract existing and potential customers, employees, shareholders, investors, media and stakeholders.

With so many benefits, LinkedIn is considered as an essential tool to enhance your Businesses. So, if you are not a LinkedIn premium user or still in the process of setting up your LinkedIn profile, quickly do it and try these strategies to see how easily you can connect with top-decision makers. B2B businesses thrive by using LinkedIn premium services.

Should SEO be directly linked to Sales ?

Should SEO be directly linked to Sales ?

SEO has emerged as one of the main requisite for every business and forms the core part of their marketing campaigns. Though most of the SME's have their in-house team working on Digital marketing strategies , bigger companies use a mix of in-house + digital agency working together help building an online presence for them.Also most of you might have also come across ads like 'Guaranteed Top 10 results in Google' promising you to do wonders with your search engine rankings. Be it any of these , linking SEO expenses to the ROI in terms of sales through the website has become part of all ventures.

As per Brian Dean of Backlinko , there are over 200 factors which are responsible for Google rankings and this is backed by many other Digital marketing Gurus also. Considering this, the basic goal of search engine optimization should be working on those factors so as to give your page ranking a boost for targeted keywords.

I always believed that SEO works for pages and not for websites. You need particular set of keywords for each page for which SEO will be performed i.e tweaking those 200 factors which will help you crawl up.

So logic unfolds like this :

Good SEO = Good Ranking = Good Traffic = Good Sales

Though this sounds great but the issue with most businesses is that they do not know the exact keywords which results in sales. PPC(Pay Per Click) campaigns might work as an good support to SEO and can be used as a testing ground to know the target keywords with good conversion rate and can be replicated in SEO strategy. This might reduce the efforts put in to a certain extent but again the results are not guaranteed.

SEO can be targeted to create awareness about a certain product or to capture leads with help of landing page or in some cases direct sales for the likes of Amazon. So its important to know what you really need and set the expectations right whether it is rankings, traffic or sales.

So what do you think..Should SEO be really held accountable for bottom line ?

Disclaimer : I am the author of this post on behalf of Growia which takes SEO training classes in Hyderabad and written the same post on LinkedIn also.

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