Monish Vora - Blurbpoint

5 Dramatic Mistakes In A PPC Campaign To Be Avoided By Beginners

There are a number of mistakes being committed while advertising- from poor landing pages to simple spelling mistakes, there are a number of things that may go wrong. For this purpose, I’ll dedicate this post to the most common mistakes committed in a PPC campaign:

1. Be broad minded

One of the most often repeated mistakes by inexperienced PPC advertisers while bidding, is that they miss out on the broad set of search terms. There are some clients who have less than 100 search terms, which is not at all enough, regardless of the business type and size. Some clients are smart enough to have more than 10,000 active terms.

The most apparent terms (like “hotel”) are searched the most. Thus, all your competitors will target this term, increasing the competition for the term and the cost per click. A search term with high competition and heavy searches is bound to have a huge bid on it compared to those which are low in competition and moderate searches. So, it’s better to have a broader set of search terms that will enable you to get clicks from various visitors entering different keywords.

The search terms which are less popular are less expensive. So, do some research and start bidding on a broad set of search terms. You will see that the cost per click will decline and you will outsmart your, competitors.

2. Call out for action

It is very crucial and unavoidable to add a call to action in your ads. It helps in increasing the clickthrough rate (CTR). The calls to action are often not so clear and succinct, which confuses the audience, resulting in fewer CTR’s.

Even if a call to action is included, there are many cases where we see inappropriate language. For instance, there are ads that have calls to action such as, ‘Browse Now’ or ‘View More’, which is fine if your motive is only to drive user engagement. But, if you are looking to generate sales, language such as ‘Buy Now’ or “Purchase Now”, is more likely to entice a user to purchase your product.

Never underestimate the impact of your call to action. Using an appropriate one could in fact, help you in getting sales from those visitors, who were just looking for some information.

3. Start Testing

It is strongly suggested to have minimum 3 variations of your ads. Test these variations of ads every month so that you could see the upwards trend in your CTR.

Failing to update the ads regularly, would only mean that the promotions, prices and your message are all out of date. This affects the CTR, and the user experience as well.

The most important elements to check in your ads would be the descriptions, URL’s at display and the call to action. Try testing some new messaging which mentions the benefits, prices and other promotions along with trying out new site links.

These small variations, if tested, will make it easy to monitor the variations in CTR for each change that has taken place.

4. Lack of ad extensions

There are numerous ad extensions available to all advertisers. The use of these extensions could help you direct the visitors towards the information they’re looking for.

Some of the most common extensions include location, call, and social extensions too as site links. Google has recently introduced enhanced campaigns, which allows to include app extensions, offer extensions and dynamic search ad extensions.

Google strongly encourages the use of these extensions. Google itself claims that site links can raise the CTR by 30%
Ad extensions are currently not being considered and the advertisers are rarely seen to be taking advantage of the extensions relevant to their business.

5. Ad creation best practice

Only by following Google best practices for PPC, will help in knowing the much-required guidelines for preparing the advertisements. It is a good place to start creating ads and structure the account.

Many advertisers neglect this advice, resulting in disastrous CTR’s and no success.

Conclusion:

Unless you break all of the basic rules, you should at the least witness decent results with your PPC campaign. If you are looking to spend more on your PPC advertising, or really want to optimize your advertising program to achieve the best results, consider hiring a PPC consultant, who would have all the attention on your campaign. PPC has and will always prove to be an effective vehicle to drive relevant traffic to your website.

18 Advanced Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) not To Be Avoided

You need to check the KPI or the Key Performance Indicators in order to measure the performance of a campaign with respect to its goals. This article presents the most important KPI’s for a website from the perspective of online marketing and how to monitor the same in Google Analytics.

Reporting, monitoring, data analyzing task is the daily routine for almost all online marketing professionals and webmasters. This helps them in making decisions regarding the optimization of the performance of the websites. A lot of information could be found within the charts, pivots and web metrics, which reveals new ways of optimizing the strategy.

Sometimes, all the metrics, numbers, and statistics may become very confusing. Which ratios need to be taken into account during various analysis? Which should be considered the most important stats? These are the questions that need to be answered while determining the KPI. All these questions will be answered with this post by understanding the goals and which KPI’s to be considered.

Website Goals & KPIs

Setting up specific and measurable goals is an important stage before defining any Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s). Depending on the type of website, it could have many varied goals. The most common goal for any e-commerce website would be to increase the number of sales, the number of items in the WishList, the average transaction value, and many more. In the case of websites with content, the common goals would be to increase the number of subscribers, media consumption, online game players, video viewers, and many more.

KPIs are:
• Success Indicators
• Presentable through rates
• Comparison providers
• Dependent on the industry and the kind of the website

General Key Performance Indicators for a Website

1. Conversion Rate: This ratio shows us how many visitors have taken the desired action and have converted into leads or even customers.
2. Goals Conversion Rate: Displays how many visitors have reached, at the least, one of the setup goals with the help of the Google Analytics service.
3. Type of Users (user-defined): This is a variable that helps in defining the specific types of users who have completed a specific action or a goal on the website.
4. Bounce Rate & Time on Site: These are the 2 most useful Key Performance Indicators which indicate whether your website was successful in providing the visitors with what they are looking for or if they have left your site immediately after entering it. These metrics could be found in Google Analytics inside the Visitors section. It is also very useful to focus on various channels/sources of traffic helping you to evaluate all the factors.
5. Type of Sources: This is a complex report which segments the traffic on the basis of specific sources and various mediums such as Referral sites, Search Engines, Direct, E-mail, or some campaigns. The focus is not only on the number of visitors but also on the quality of the traffic.

KPIs for Visibility

1. Traffic of Non-branded keywords: This is a common Keywords Traffic report which is filtered to exclude those with brand name combinations.
2. Traffic generated by specific terms: This segmentation helps in evaluating the long or short tail keyword strategy. Commonly, the keywords traffic report from Google Analytics returns the result with too many combinations. These filters help in breaking down the list of keywords and only focus on those which contain specific terms or you could also check 2-3 word phrases or for those terms, which satisfy a specific rule. The regular expressions which are given in the advanced filter will help in generating such a report.
3. Bounce rate per keyword: This could be easily found on the table displaying the keywords traffic report. Focus on the “bounce rate” column, which displays the average bounce rate per keyword.
4. Keyword Ranking: Check out how much traffic you are getting from each keyword ranking at the top and see if you need to make some changes to your SEO strategy by concentrating on more popular or those terms which are targeted by visitors.
5. New Vs Returning Visitors: This metric shows the loyalty of your existing followers and gives you a count of how many new visitors are you attracting to your website. Depending on your industry and the type of your website and various other factors, it is necessary to analyze the behavior of your visitors. This report is available under the Visitors section of Google Analytics.

Interaction KPIs

1. Social Media Interactions: You need to use the event tracking or the virtual pageviews KPI to monitor the number of visitors who interact with the social media profile. The customer could visit the social media profiles by clicking on the buttons provided on your website or they could even like, tweet, or share your pages, and the report of this interaction could prove to be very helpful.
2. Media Consumption: This KPI keeps a check on how the content is consumed by the users on the website. It also focuses on how many of them have read the posts, listened to podcasts, watched videos, and many other indicators. This report is given in the content section. It also requires you to set up some special tracking mechanisms in case of videos or interactive flash animations.
3. Contact/Subscribe: It is extremely useful to know why, when, how, and how many visitors are contacting the website. This could be easily tracked by the use of goal tracking or event tracking in the “thank you” pages.

Transactional KPIs

1. Cost per Transaction: This metric is useful in measuring the cost of promotion per transaction for some specific campaigns such as banners, Ads newsletters, and others. It measures the amount of money to be spent on each campaign to generate a single transaction. This is a very important metric when you want to determine your advertising budget and it proves to be very useful in the decision-making process.
2. Average transaction value: The up-selling and cross-selling efficiency is determined through this KPI. This report could be found in the Ecommerce section of Google Analytics.
3. Conversion Rate per Medium: You may opt for various channels for your conversions. This KPI helps in monitoring the conversion rate of each medium which helps majorly in distinguishing between the various mediums. The report is found in the All Traffic Sources menu when using the option “Medium” view.

Geo-Targeting KPIs

1. Transactions distribution per Country: This report provides insights to distinguish between the nationality of the customers. It could be found under the Visitors Section under the Map Overlay Report. This information could be found in the “e-commerce” tab and it shows you the distribution of the transaction by country/territory.
2. Bounce rate distribution per Country: This info is found on the map overlay table and it displays the distribution of bounce rate on the basis of country/territory.

These are the basic Key Performance Indicators that are extremely useful for measuring success and also comparing various data. A serious internet marketer will never make a move without working on these metrics before designing an online marketing campaign.

So, which is your set of Key Performance Indicators? Do let us know.

How Schema Is Playing Games With Today’s SERP’s?

Having a very important part in the web semantics revolution, the schema is changing the whole web by improving the quality of our search results and reforming the way in which we find information online. The semantic web in itself is a change of approach towards explaining the content by the use of code tags in such a way that search engines could understand.

By tagging on-page content with the content identifiers, and the ultimate contextual link is provided by Semantic Web between the publisher intent and content. This link helps the search engines in providing more accurate, specific and enriched content to the user in the search results.

In this post, we will see how today’s SERP’s are transforming as a result of the Semantic Web.

In this post, we’ll look at ways the Semantic Web is transforming today’s SERPs.
More specifically, we will explore how schema could be used to get the attention of the viewers through rich snippets.

How to Use These Tags?
For instance, we want our business name and address to appear on our About Us page. Typically, such code may look something like this:

Blurbpoint Media
T-6/7/9, Shubh Complex,
Shahibaug, Ahmedabad.
Gujarat, India.

Using schema for semantic tagging may look like this:

<div itemprop=”address” itemscope=”” itemtype=”http://schema.or/PostalAddress”>
Blurbpoint Media 
T-6/7/9, Shubh Complex 
Shahibaug, Ahmedabad, 
Gujarat 
380004</div>

Notice the words given in quotes. By adding the schema code, we have defined that this piece of content addresses and have defined each and every part of the information to create a proper association of the name of the business, address, city, state, country and postal code.

What Difference Do Rich Snippets Make?

The most wonderful, visible advantage of incorporating schema tags, are those rich snippets that grab the eye-balls, showed up by major search engines. These snippets completely transform the plain text-based search engine results into attractive, eye-catching results that very successfully describes the page’s content with the help of displaying images and review stars, along with very stylized text and links.

How much impact do these visual snippets create? Let’s have a look:

We have given 2 examples here of a same movie title called “Agneepath”. The movies’ information is given by the same site. The rich snippets over here show the number of votes, ratings in number and also star. A short description is also given for both the movies by the site which helps us in differentiating between both.

The new standard which is collaboration between major search engines expands the vocabulary of the semantic web. Schema.org supports a number of tags. To have a look at the same click on the below given link and you will get a list of all the schemas available:
http://www.schema.org/docs/full.html

While analyzing the schema tags to be implemented, it is important to see their effect on adding quality to the search results. The search engine adopts only certain schema data in its search results. You could also look into those schemas which are compatible with various search engines.

Your CTR would dramatically boost up on organic search results with the help of rich snippets.

Having said that, there is one more crucial factor on the search engines’ result page that might have been overlooked by many– attribute search filtering.

Staying Ahead in the Race with Attribute Search Filtering

How useful schema information could be is displayed in the left side bar of many a Google SERP’s. Let us take an example of dedicated search modes offered by Google for recipe schema records. This feature allows the users to filter the search results by using the attribute values given in “Search Tools”. This is a very crucial SEO tactic, as if you fail to tag your content with schema, would only mean that you are losing on those filtered results.

To check this out, I have taken the example of the “recipes for Banana Pudding”

When I enter this keyword and hit enter, I am presented with all the recipes for Banana Pudding as shown below:

However, Google provides me with a very convenient feature of filtering the searches as per my likes. So, I click on “Search Tools” and select my preference and that is less than 100 calories. The same is shown below:

It would be noticed that Google now displays only the recipes which are below 100 calories. This is possible with the attribute search filters which enhance the whole search experience and your visibility.

With the help of this feature, users will be able to filter the basic search results quickly by selecting the specific attributes as per their preference. This is what the power of the Semantic Web is all about. The main motive has always been to help the search engines understand your content in a much better way so that they could display your websites for relevant searches. What better way to directly communicate with the search engines and tell them what your content is all about.

Are There Schema Creators Available?

At first, it is quite difficult for developers and SEO’s alike, to implement and use the coding of the schema data. Thus, help is available in the form of some schema creators who have various items in their list. You simply need to provide the required information and the code will be prepared which could be inserted into your HTML page. One of the best schema creators is provided by Raven which has some items list already there on the website.

For the developers:

If you are adding schema to your site, you could try working with the Google Rich Snippets Testing Tool to ensure that you are getting the desired results by changing the code.

Conclusion

Structured data isn’t an easy deal for humans to implement on a website, but it’s easy for machines to comprehend. It is inevitable for all SEO’s developers, bloggers, and internet marketers to add schema mark-up to the content to gain the desired visibility from search results.

Lastly, schema.org does not directly impact your ranking on the search engines. It means that search engines are not going to rank you high for just implementing schema, but it will surely help you in getting high visibility for your content and bring in relevant searchers on the basis of your content.

Basic KPI to Keep a Check of Your Site’s Performance

We are living is a world where almost everything could be tracked and finding data to simplify your business decisions is quite easy. However, shaping the same data into a sensible fact for your business is not that easy.

This post will throw light on how to define and set your goals in Google Analytics, which is considered the most powerful tool for tracking the user behavior coming to your website. The first step is to decide the goal that you want to achieve.

What is a KPI?
A KPI, or Key Performance Indicator, is a way in which your success is measured. As you have defined your goals, a Key Performance Indication tells you if you have reached you goals or not. For example, if you are looking to create a website that is user-friendly, one of the good KPI to test the success of your goal is a low bounce rate.

Which KPIs should I use?
This varies on the basis of your goals, but some very good KPIs for online businesses include:

• Uniqueness of the visitors (the number of new individuals who have viewed your site)
• Total number of visitors (the total number of times that your website has been viewed)
• Page views (total number of pages viewed by your visitors)
• Visit duration (how long someone has stayed on your site)
• Conversion rate (the total percentage of visits that has leaded to a transaction)
• Bounce rate (how many people have visited your website and then left without clicking on anything else)
• New visitors vs. returning visitors (visitors who are totally new to your website vs. those who come back more than one time)
• Abandonment rate (how many online shopping carts have been abandoned rather than being purchased)
• Average value of online transactions

How do I determine if I am achieving my goals?
Now comes the main part. Before setting up any goals, you must sign up for Google Analytics which will give you the tracking code and the same should be inserted in your website’s code.

Now, login to Google Analytics and go to “All Website Data”. Once in the reporting dashboard, click on “Conversions” on the left hand side, than “Goal URLs” and then click the “Set up goals” button.

If there are no goals set up yet, click on the “Create a Goal” button.

While creating a new goal, you will have two options. The first is that you could use a template given by Google. These templates are based on the category of your website and will show you different goals that are relevant to your industry niche. You can also create a custom goal.

Once in the “Goal description” section, you could give a name to your goal and choose the way you would like to measure it. You will see 4 different goal types:

“Destination”
“Duration”
“Pages/Screens per visit”
“Event”

You could use the “Destination” option to see the number of people who view a particular page on your website or blog. “Destination” could also be used to track a particular landing page that is seen by people each time they complete a desired action on the website.

“Duration” is a setup which will tally the visitors viewing your site for at least an amount of time specified by you.

“Pages/Screens per visit” will give you a tally of all your site’s visitors who have viewed the amount of pages specified by you.

“Event” is a powerful tool which helps in tracking where people are clicking on your website, however the setup for this is rather complicated. Unless and until, you are proficient with programming, you will have to seek a developer’s help.

Another, very helpful feature that Google Analytics provides is the ability to track the goal’s value. For example, if the average online sale is worth about $10, you could put this value in field while tracking a sales confirmation page. If you are unsure if this value is of any worth to you, leave this option toggled “off”.

With the “Funnel” option, you could track from where people are coming to your site to get to your desired page.

You could also verify your goals to see the number of people who have performed an action on your website in the past seven days. It may be too higher or lower than what you expect, so it would be a good idea to take a look and ensure that your goal is realistic.

So, you’ve just set off with your first goal! If you wish to learn more, Google has a checklist for getting the best out of its analytics.

Common SEO Tactics Capable of Wiping Out Majority of Your Traffic

The Penguin updates have been successful in sweeping out majority of websites from its top pages. If people think that Google is responsible for this debacle, they need to think over it again. As, the Penguin algorithm is only developed to target spammers.

So, what are the major mistakes made by a number of persons. And how to prevent your website from facing a disaster?

You have hired an SEO who is working day and night to bring your keywords ranking up. As you are so busy with the other functions of your business, you leave everything related to your website to the SEO firm, which many of us do. But at last, you find out that your website is losing heavily in terms of ranking. Eventually, you come to know that your site was over-optimized and was badly hit by the Penguin updates.

Wiping Out Majority of Your Traffic - Blurbpoint

Apparently, Penguin wants to teach you some basic things about SEO so that you could keep the same in mind before handing over your precious site to someone else. So, what are those things that some people have learn the hard way?

# Wrong Selection Of An SEO:

“We will get your website to the top of Google!” Of course, they do. But how? In the course of time, you will see that your website is dropping and eventually it has been penalized and will not appear on Google ever. In fact, you are entrusting a small part of your business (read website) to your SEO firm. This website, in the future, will increase your business prospects and it’s inevitable that you keep a watch on it closely.

An SEO firm, although they research on your business, would not be able to relate to the people as much as you could. So, regular interaction with your prospects through various mediums will enable you to understand their needs which could be incorporated into your SEO project. Make sure that you know your SEO firm very well. You should know that the optimizer, the firm provides is well adept with your business niche as someone who knows your business well, will be able to provide a perfect SEO solution. Also, check out whether they use White Hat Techniques and not Black Hat. You could do a little bit of homework before holding a meeting with your SEO firm. Do some research work on various aspects of Link Building and SEO.

# Not Implementing Various Sources of Traffic Streaming:

Keeping all the eggs in the same basket may sometimes prove to be a big mistake. Similarly, relying on Google for all your traffic although it is the undisputed leader, will prove to be a mistake.

With the release of new updates from Google quite frequently, more and more optimizers are resorting to other ways of driving traffic as well. It is advisable to invest in other departments of inbound traffic so that you don’t have to rely totally on Google. There are various ways in which you could plan your inbound traffic wave.

Try incorporating e-mail marketing in your Internet promotion plans. Quality e-mails will help in driving traffic to your website. Offer some utilities or online services from your website which should be helpful to your audience and generate direct traffic to your website, rather than people coming through search engines. Try to make your brand a household name-something that a customer trusts. The more popular your brand, the more people will actively search directly for you and not directed to your through keywords. You could do this with the help of many other online promotion techniques.

# Ignoring the Penguin guidelines

Although Penguin does target keyword over-stuffing in your website, it also looks out for spammy links that you have used in anchor texts and triggers penalty. There are a number of articles available on recovering from Penguin. Contact site owners to have the links removed. Also, have the footer links optimized with keywords removed.

Finally, I believe that following these tips would help you in having full control as compared to the shortcuts of link building. Resorting to unscrupulous ways will only add to your worries and you will pay a heavy price for it – sooner or later.

Best Out Of the Waste: Creating Great 404 pages

First things first, this article will focus on 404 pages and how useful they could be, in addition to some of my personal favourites.

Tips on optimizing your 404 pages:

• It should contain your name and logo
• Give an explanation on why the visitor has been directed to this page
• List the common mistakes which leads to this problem
• Provide links to your home page or other relevant pages
• Provide a search engine box for the visitors convenience
• Also, provide an e-mail links for the visitors to report problems
• Last by not the least; try to grab attention with your 404 page. It should match the theme of your website, at the same time must propel the visitors to stay on the same and read more information and click on the links to other pages of the website.
• Include humor wisely with some cartoons and funny pictures. These are my personal suggestion however, you could incorporate something innovative. Also, you could describe a story which relates to the 404 pages.

Usefulness of a 404 page:

• The first advantage of a well optimized 404 page is that you could direct your users to a different page, rather than having them leaves the website. Many a times, visitors do get confused on what step they should take next.
• Your appearance on search engines could also benefit with the help of a 404 page. Let’s suppose a broken link leads to a page which doesn’t exist. The search engines wouldn’t be able to go deep and index content. If you opt to have customized 404 pages, the page could be indexed even if a page is broken, and the search engines will find links to those pages, which could be beneficial from crawling.
• A 404 page could, in fact, help you in building a good credibility, if you present the visitor with an innovative page with pictures and colors so that he wouldn’t wish to leave the site. Build a user experience so that the visitor is lured to go to a suggested page and won’t leave the website.

My Personal Favourites:

Below given are some of the best, funniest and inspirational 404 pages and I do believe the same would help you in creating the best ones:

Frye/Wiles

Agens

Apadeloup

Blizzard

Christopher Meeks

Distilled

Futureofwebdesign

Gog

Grosslandguide

Heinz

I hope this was entertaining and also gives an idea on how 404 pages should be like. Of course, a 404 error is the most boring part of the website, but you could make it interesting so that your visitor could forgive you and move on to the next page with a smile on their face.

Twitter Management – 6 Tips to Get Rapidly Followed on Twitter

Twitter, the most successful micro-blogging service of our times, has very soon become the Internet Marketers’ delight. The average boy next door to popular celebrities, everyone has been hit by the Twitter bug, and have accepted it as the most efficient medium to connect with friends, family and fans. The pure fact that the information could be shared in short, instantaneously, is what makes Twitter a sensation.

Get Rapidly Followed on Twitter - Blurbpoint

The main factor in Twitter’s success, is that you cannot leave it to fate. There are some tactics, which if followed religiously, can work wonders for your promotions. Let’s have a look at some of the most significant tactics in bringing more followers to your Twitter account. The statistics given for each tips would help for a more better understanding:

1. Engage your audience: 77% of images on Twitter are not referred to a brand however, 67% of audience is likely to buy from a brand which they follow. Brand promotion is good to a certain extent, at the same time your audience should be treated with some useful tips or facts. Say thanks to those who add you to their following lists. Address all the questions and concerns promptly. Retweet on other peoples’ tweets which builds up a good rapport.

2. Use Images and Videos: 36% of shared links are images on Twitter and 40% people are responding to the same information neglecting the text. There are more than 700 videos being shared on Twitter per minute and the most appropriate length for engaging the audience is the first 6 seconds

3. Using Hashtags (#): The whole world of Twitter is so huge, that it sometimes becomes difficult to navigate or find a particular information. The hashtags (#) will make the process simpler. If you want to be found for a particular keyword on Twitter, you could simply add “#” before that word in your tweet.
For example, if you want to tweet about this article, you could simply tweet, “Going through #hashtags use in #Twitter. In this way, anyone who is looking for #hashtag or #Twitter, would see you tweet. 2 times more retweets are received by those tweets using the hashtags

4. Tweet-Not too long: Tweets which are under 100 characters are more likely to get 21% more interaction than those with more characters. Make sure the initial characters of the tweet are impactful, and able to grab the audiences’ attention to read the whole tweet. The most successful tweet, in terms of retweets, is the one which is between 71 to 100 characters.

5. Ask for Retweets Or RT: A call to action is no exception in Twitter as well. Asking for “RT” will give you 12 times higher engagement, whereas spelling out “Retweet” will earn 23 times more engagement. In any way, asking for retweets works big time than not asking at all. So, this also throws light on how much a CTA is significant in terms of online marketing.

6. Peak Hours Tweeting: You should first determine the location from where you want to target the users. Knowing the peak hours of a particular location plays a significant role in getting higher engagement. Will it work when you tweet, when your audience has dozed off? Tweeting during peak hours works towards increasing the visibility and the engagement of your audience. A recent survey has shown that tweeting at 9 a.m., 12:00 p.m., 3:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m., works big time to get more followers and engagement. You need to schedule your tweets appropriately based on the targeted location.

Don’t be artificial while tweeting. Just be yourself and let the world know, with the help of the above mentioned tips, how you feel about a particular topic. It takes some time, but with a little perseverance and persistence you will definitely hit the bulls-eye.

Happy Tweeting!!

Matt Cutts: Link Spammers and Black Hat Less Likely To Show Up After Summer

Google’s Search Spam Head, Matt Cutts, in his new video has given us a basic idea on what to expect in the coming months in terms of SEO. Google has always strived to battle with the black hat spam techniques in a number of ways. And the message is loud and clear, that they will continue to do so.

Matt has given out 10 points to make it clear that quality sites will be awarded and the spammers will go way down: Let’s have a quick look:

1. Latest Penguin Updates
To all the keyword stuffers, cloakers, duplicate content creators, and experts of Black Hat – beware as we could expect the whole SEO community to shake up when the new installment in the series of Penguin update comes up very soon. This is forecasted to go deeper and create more impact than the earlier version.

2. Battling with the Advertorials
Google is going to be a little bit tough with this aspect of link building. There are many companies who create ads to artificially build up their links, violating the quality guidelines of Google. So, if you are paying for a coverage or ad, you should not be doing it for SEO. Google is not against advertorials however, if it is done for the sake of Page Rank, they will definitely come in.

3. Spammy Queries
It has also been made clear that spammy queries like “pay day loans” or some pornographic queries on google.co.uk, will be looked up in the future by the spam team. Earlier these factors were not often targeted by Google, but now it sounds like they feel that such queries are coming from the external sources. Though, Cutts has not mentioned how they will be dealing with it, he has just said that they will be doing it in a couple of different ways.

4. Degrading Spammy Links
In the past, Google has went after link networks and it seems that they are going to do the same now as well. They will devalue the links from spammers. They have come up with new ideas so that the ways of spam linking becomes less effective. This is scheduled to come up in the next few months.

5. Development of Sophisticated Link Analysis
They have developed a system to carry out more sophisticated link analysis. He explained that it is still in the initial stages and they are quite excited about it, and have gathered some data to start experimenting on the same.

6. An Improved Hacked Detection
In the near future, they will come up with the next generation of hack detection which will be more efficient in notifying the webmasters. More specific information would be provided to the webmasters to inform them if they are working with malware or a hacked site which could be cleaned up.

7. Authoritative – Get A Boost
If you are authoritative in your industry nich, community or space, Google hopes that in the near future, your ranking gets a boost as compared to other websites.

8. Panda Fever
They are also monitoring the Panda update, and see if they could soften the impact that many of the websites in the borderline have suffered. If there are sites, which they believe have some quality signals, they will be brought in line with those which are not to be impacted by the Panda algorithm.

9. Repetitive Domain Clusters in SERP’s
The number of clusters of the same site is less likely to be seen in the search results when you go deeper. This is something developed out of the user feedback. Many a times, we see while doing deep searches, that the same sites appears on those deep pages with a cluster of results. Google has been working continuously on how many search results appears on a single page of search results from the same site.

10. Webmaster Communication – Enhanced
Matt Cutts also added that they are trying to figure out more ways of an effective and efficient communication with webmasters. They will try to give more concrete details to the webmasters with detailed examples.

To sum it up, Matt Cutts wants to make it clear that these changes will make sure that the spammers will be less likely to show up after this summer. Also there are some changes which are targeted to benefit the small and medium businesses and regular webmasters as well.
So, let’s keep your fingers crossed and see what future has in store for us !

Battling With Negative Reviews To Save Your Online Image

It has become inevitable for businesses around the globe to maintain an online presence, as more users are relying on the Internet to get reviews on various companies prior to making an engagement with the company.

Undoubtedly, Google is the highest generator of web traffic, and the source of reviews or ratings found on the same is powerful enough to promote or harm the reputation of your brand. The negative reviews could be submitted by someone who is annoyed by your services or even by your competitors to degrade your image.

Are you the victim of negative reviews?: It’s time to act fast and try to do some online reputation management tasks, as the negative reviews appearing on Google and other major search engines are harmful enough to devastate your online existence. Although not impossible, it sometimes gets frustrating to remove negative reviews from the top pages of Google.

Let us explore some ways in which you could proactively fight the negative content which in turn will save your website from a face-hiding act.

Promote Positive Reviews: Encourage your customers who could swear by your products and services to write some positive words for you so that the ratio of both positive and negative reviews becomes well-balanced. Apparently, this is the tactic which will work for you the most as a majority of your satisfied customers will spare a little bit of time to endorse you if requested which helps in suppressing the negative reviews.

Employ an investigator: You could use the services of someone who could investigate on the reviews associated with your brand. They should be well versed in finding out the threats and tracing cyber-attacks, if any, towards your image. The analysts should be regularly checking out the reviews site and trained to respond to the reviews positively.

Responding applies to all: When it is said that you need to respond to the reviews, it means that each and every review or comment should get a prompt and honest reply. Regardless of the review being positive or negative, the visitor should feel that their suggestions or reviews are considered with the highest regard.

Be Honest and Humble: Customers will only spend time to write negative reviews if they feel that they have been very badly betrayed by you. They would never go to a consumer discussion forum or any other reviews platform if they were willing to continue to utilize your services.Be very modest and give upright responses to their comments, suggestions or negative reviews. This step is for the unsatisfied customers and also for prospective customers who would come to know how caring you are towards them.

Removal of Fake Reviews: If some false claims are made about your brand which is clearly aimed to disrupt the image of your company, you could always contact the review sites and request them to remove such reviews from the website, provided that you have enough evidence to prove that the reviews on the website are completely false and intended to degrade you. Such drastic measures are often resorted to by your competitors.

Aggressive SEO & Social Media: An effective SEO and a Social Media campaign collectively will work to create more brand awareness, which eventually will drop the negative reviews way down in the search engine’s ranking. It is better to make the customer view the best part of you rather than letting them see what could not be controlled by you.

Develop a system for Customer Care: As the old proverb goes, “Prevention is Better than Cure”, the same applies for your online reputation too. It is always better to keep a check on negative reviews or comments rather than responding to them after a heavy damage. Conduct your own customer feedback surveys, complaints follow-up and make a user-friendly system for the customers to enter their feedback so that they would directly interact with you rather than to going to other review sites.

Online Reputation has always been a serious issue and should be considered a high priority for any business. People are resorting to the information found on the web to make a decision, and the majority of them change their minds after seeing a negative review. I hope the tips mentioned in this article will help you in reducing the number of negative reviews and also to bring them way down in SERP’s.