Review of the Recent Google Updates

Panda and Penguin updates this year took the online world by storm. Google had made the effect of penalizing website with no added value to readers. Duplicated and weak content were abolished and eradicated. Using analytics and quality metrics, Google was able to also get rid of spam blogs with overly stuffed keywords. The focus has to be articles with cornerstone content. On the rise are content (either in the form of video, text or image) thriving with uniqueness.

So if you’re a blogger, promoter of any online content or anything of this sort, you should abide by this mandate.

What might Google come up with in 2013? Let’s find out!

Top 5 SEO Projections

1. Google Author Rank markup will be the basis of ranking.

Google+ has launched the rel=”author” markup which enables you as an author to link up all the articles you published. When this snippet of code is added to your blog and your content, your headshot in your Google+ profile will appear beside the search results. Empowering author rank, this thus makes your authority more known to the public.

Jon Payne, President and Founder of Ephricon Web Marketing, explains further that Google begins to look at trusted links coming from the same author source. The forecast is that instead of Page Rank, Author Rank will matter more to search engines in the last two quarters of 2013. So as early as now, you must claim authorship of all your content in the web with this Google author rank markup.

2. Guest posting will be devalued by Google.

Guest posting works by publishing posts in other blogs and capturing audience in the same niche to get them connected to your own. In essence, this allows you to expand your followers and fan base. But earlier this year, Penguin and Panda came to effect. They changed the original paradigm by configuring the algorithmic weights of guest posts.

There are various spam guest posts created on the web. Hence, Google is now not so much in favor of guest posting, as it sees these “post exchanges” only as a manipulator or search engine results. On the other hand, if you have been solely submitting posts with good quality, then you should not be affected negatively by any Google updates for the years to come.

Be careful linking guest posts with bad neighborhood. If your post involves duplicate content and cloaked content such as stuffed and unrelated keywords, you’ll also be in deep trouble.

3. Social signals will highly affect the SERPs.

As there is now so much traffic booming in social media, Google may have to get good use of these channels to position content in search engine. Closer to home is its very own: Google+. The Google Plus system can potentially bring much weight in determining whether or not the page or content has been helpful to readers. Posts with more social sharing points (+1’s) will be given a greater deal in SEO.

However, there are also rampant manipulations of shares. Case in point is Facebook likes and recommendations. Another is Twitter likes and favorites. Services are available in the Internet wherein these social shares can be bought with money to gain credits in turn. Google has to figure out a way to track these incidents for social signals to reign as appropriately.

4. Highly increasing personalized search results will be recognized.

Google works to provide relevant search results to users. What better way to cater this service than producing personalized search results? Google identifies the user’s location and search engine activities. For instance, location-based search results from Google will prioritize pages from your country to top in the results page. You will see a different set of posts coming out of the first page when you change your location setting in Google.

Problem is that optimizing your meta tags and description with keywords relevant to your business may do good only locally. (By default, Google learns your location by your IP address.) If you are targeting clients who belong to other locations in the world, businesses in these countries might just defeat your rank in SEO quite easily.

5. Technical parameters such as page titles and descriptions will have greater bearing in SEO.

CEO of CompeteLeap, Ryan Draving, says that spinning articles with poor grammar will not be counted by Google as a hit. Obtusely written titles and descriptions of pages and posts will also be useless. Google hunts those websites solely created to advertise brands without engagement with users. Draving adds that Google expects to see your legitimate brand or company name attached in the majority of your inbound blog links.

Conclusion

Many of these predictions are based on the natural progressions of Google updates as seen in the recent months. Keeping up with Google changes in SEO algorithms is challenging. But now that you’re more guided, you can think ahead and practice your SEO with a futuristic mindset. Analyze them and carry on with the best practices. Good luck!

New Generation of Media Marketing

1. Word-of-Mouse Marketing

Gone are the days when word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing is the most powerful way of marketing products and services. The advent of social media has given birth to the more powerful word-of-mouse marketing, a new form of marketing that reaches consumers through social media. The effectiveness of word-of-mouse marketing can be measured through the social activity of internet users in response to the ads and other forms of information (images, videos, articles, etc.) released online. Social signals such as the number of likes, retweets, and +1s are a good way to measure social activity. The following characteristics of social media show how it became the word-of-mouse marketing:

2. Social Media is Influential

The power of social media’s influence in the lives of people is intensive. It is so intensive that it has the capacity to radically change the people’s beliefs and culture. Through so many different ways, the information and insights that internet users gain through social media have affected their views and opinions on different social issues and their convictions on important life principles.

We are the stakeholders and founders of social media, but social media has the capacity to shape us. It affects our culture and lifestyle. It affects our choice of products and services and our patterns of consumption.

3. Social Media is Contagious

A contagious disease can be quickly transmitted from one person to another. Information channelled through social media also has a contagious character that is similar to that of diseases in the sense that it can be transferred from one person to another within a short period of time. In fact, every bit of information has the possibility of reaching and informing a million internet users in a matter of seconds. Also, an article or any form of work can go viral in a matter of seconds. Similarly, any person or product can become popular around the world in a matter of minutes! It is indeed the fastest way to reach your market.

4. Social Media Has No Boundaries

The amount of social activity that happens in the online world does not end there. It can go and spill beyond the confines of the internet and affect the offline world through the power of the traditional word-of-mouth. Keep in mind that word-of-mouth marketing still remains to be a good and effective form of marketing. We trust the judgement of our friends and loved ones. Their preferences sway us into believing that a product is good or not.

Utilize the power of social media to mobilize your target consumers. Influence them to be very passionate about your products and services to the point that they will be prompted to share what they think about your company’s them to their friends and relatives in the offline world. There, that’s what you call hitting two birds with one stone! Harness the power of word-of-mouth marketing through the effective utilization of word-of-mouse marketing in social media.

5. Social Media is Part of Everyone

Social media embodies our opinions, comments, and ideals about everything from images to videos, random articles to political news, music to literature, and many more. In effect, it is a virtual compilation of a part of all of us. We form social media.

However, social media also constitutes a part of us. That is what you want to happen to your products! You want them to become a part of your consumers’ life on a long-term basis. Utilize the power of social media to convince and compel them to patronize your company’s brand and products.

The relevance of social media in our life is becoming more and more pronounce. It does not simply make the world a smaller place to live in, but it has also found its niche in several important aspects of modern capitalism such as business. Social media provides a new environment for businessmen and marketing personnel to advertise their brand and product by relying on the power of word-of-mouse marketing.

Cloud computing allows businesses to be mobile, doing work whenever and wherever they need to, which is the growing trend these days. It allows a company’s employees to work with their files no matter where they are at the moment. But if you come from the thinking that I need an onsite server for my business needs, then you most probably have dozens of questions before you dive into this thing they call cloud computing.

First, let’s define what Cloud computing is. Cloud computing is using the Internet to store, manage, and process data from anywhere with a computer, tablet, phone, or similar devices. This makes it possible for users to access, collect, and manage data from anywhere with internet connection.

Pros

1. Lower costs – Through Cloud computing, an employee’s computer will be cheaper because all the work will be done in the cloud, thus, eliminating the need for a faster, more expensive computer. This might seem like small savings but if you consider how many computers you need for each employee, the savings could be very significant.

Not only that, you could also save a lot on purchases since Cloud computing software’s cost less. With Cloud computing, most of the software is paid monthly which is much cheaper than purchasing a single copy of the software per computer. In other words, you only pay for the software that you use at a given time.

Using and maintaining an onsite server can be costly. Just consider the electric bill, the maintenance, and the upgrades you need over the course of a period of two years and you’ll see what I mean. However, with cloud computing, everything I mentioned costs a fraction of what you’ll spend for a server.

2. Mobility – Cloud computing allows an employee to use a different number of devices like laptops, tablets, and even mobile phones to work on projects. This makes it possible for employees that travel a lot to manage accounts their accounts and be updated while on the go.

3. Works across different platforms – Compatibility will not be a problem if you’re using both Macs and PCs since most cloud apps may be used from either of the two. This means you don’t need to convert files to work on PCs if you used a Mac for the original file. Since the apps are on the cloud, the files you use can work on either.

4. Security and confidentiality – Most business owners are concerned about security as well as the confidentiality of their files especially company secrets. In reality, Cloud vendors offer higher security than what most small business owners can provide for themselves.

Typically, when a computer is lost, stolen, or breaks down, you lose all the information stored on it. The cost of retrieving and recovering lost information is incalculable. When files are stored in the cloud, however, your files remain safe in the cloud and can be retrieved simply by logging in through another device.

Business owners also wonder whether information can leak to their competitors through the web when the information is saved in the cloud. This concern can actually be compared to email. Everyday lots of confidential emailing happens between business owners and their clients. Yet no one asks whether the information they sent is kept between the parties involved only or if Google or Yahoo somehow read their emails. The same is true for Cloud computing. A good, reliable cloud vendor keeps your files secure and confidential even more than what you can provide for yourself.

5. Storage space – No need to buy computers with huge storage space since the files you save are stored in the cloud. This eliminates the need for more hard drives and burning files onto discs which sometimes either get lost or become unreadable. You need to pay for additional storage if your needs exceed your original request from your cloud vendor but this is often cheaper than you might imagine.

Cons

1. Internet connection required – Unlike simply saving files on your hard drive and having them readily available offline, saving on the cloud requires that you have internet access every time you open your files. If your internet connection gets disrupted, this will keep you from working since your files are stored on the web. Your internet connection speed also has to be reliable to be able to access, manage, download, and upload your files consistently especially if you have hundreds of workers using the internet.

2. Data security – As confident as we might be with cloud computing security, there are also some issues that are critical when choosing a vendor and how secure your files really are. Joseph Idziorek and Mark Tannian of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering from Iowa State University said that there are six essential aspects of security when it comes to cloud computing, according to veteran information security researcher Donn Parker, namely:

• Confidentiality (secrecy of information)
• Integrity (data unaltered without permission)
• Availability (data accessible to those authorized to use it)
• Utility (data can be processed by those authorized to access it)
• Authenticity (validation that data is genuine)
• Possession (authorized users have full control over their data)

If you don’t feel confident about these six issues from a cloud vendor, then you’re probably better off not going into the cloud at all. Data security is essential to your business.

Something to consider when choosing a cloud vendor is how secure your data is should they go out of business. Will you be able to recover all your files safely and without any losses? Can they assure you that they have enough back-ups of your files in case there are any software or hardware problems from their end?

In the end, deciding whether cloud computing is good for your business is up to you. Make sure you weigh the pros and cons well and decide from there. Spend some time getting good technical advice before going into cloud computing for your business.