How and When to Diversify Your Anchor Text

Though the Google Penguin update wasn’t technically the over-optimization that spokesperson Matt Cutts hinted might be coming, the algorithm change definitely had an impact on today’s anchor text optimization best practices.

To understand what this means and why this matters, it’s important that you first understand how anchor text is used in Google’s ranking algorithms.

Google, Bing & Yahoo Tracking the 2012 Presidential Election Results

All three of the major U.S. search engines are catering to Americans’ insatiable need for election data today, alongside a few get out the vote initiatives and helpful voter resources.

Dislike Timeline? Facebook Testing New Layout

The wizards of smart at Facebook are testing an new layout for Timeline. This version features a single column for posts, instead of the two columns. The user timeline would still be divided into two columns, but all of your status updates, photos, and other items posted to your timeline would be featured in a wide column on the left. Modules like “photos,” “friends,” “likes,” and any open-graph apps like Spotify and Instagram would appear in a narrower column on the right.

Deconstructing The Google EMD Update

Well, it’s official – no more free lunch for EMD, now that the Google EMD Update has launched. It worked well, for a long time. A whole industry of exact match domain tools and brokers came up. Huge premium prices for good names just went through the roof when it was a real “money keyword.”

For quite a while, it was possible to rank in the TOP3 with literally no backlinks, compared to non EMDs, often after only a few days in literally every niche you can dream of.

Exact Match Domains (AKA Keyword Domains) are, in general, domain names that exactly match the keyword a website wants to compete for. For example, if a website wants to rank for the term [minor weather report], an exact match domain would be [MinorWeatherReport.com].

Foursquare Takes On Yelp With New Homepage Search Box

Perhaps it was always inevitable that Foursquare would shift its emphasis from location-based social networking to local search. Indeed, the site has been moving in this direction for quite some time, and very self-consciously for the better part of the past year. 

This afternoon the company is rolling out a new PC homepage for users who aren’t logged in: it prominently features a search box. In doing so Foursquare takes aim at Yelp as its chief rival in the local space. And in some ways the move completes Foursquare’s evolution from a more narrow and novelty oriented friend finder, game and check-in app to a genuine local search utility with much broader “mainstream” ambitions and appeal.

5 Important Post-Penguin Guest Post Prospecting Questions

Several months have passed since Google announced its game-changing Penguin algorithm update back in April of this year. In terms over overall site impact, most SEOs noticed an immediate impact in rankings as a result of Penguin, however, only the ones who tried to get away with SEO shortcuts (like deliberate keyword stuffing, spamming, and link exchange schemes) rather than legitimate link building methods experienced truly negative impacts.

But regardless of whether you have ever practiced any of the shortcuts above, there are several considerations that any SEO professional with any kind of link building strategy can benefit from to ensure that your site performs well with post-Penguin Google bots.

6 Steps on How to Cash-In on the New SEO

Author Rank. Panda. Penguin. Mobile. Google+. If you think about it, these things were not on most SEO and online content marketer radars in the early 2011. But in just a year’s time, they have become major components of Web marketing.

Media.net Partners with Yahoo! Bing to Provide Context Ads

The doors are now open to a fresh supply of targeted contextual ads for Web publishers from the Yahoo! Bing Network. Thanks to a partnership with Media.net, Web publishers can now create and customize highly relevant, targeted contextual advertising units for their websites from among the ads running on the Yahoo! Bing Network.

Here are the key features of the program for publishers as outlined by the press release:

Facebook Fakes: Did You Lose Fans?

Yesterday, Facebook confirmed that it was indeed purging fake accounts and page likes from the system. According to Josh Constine of TechCrunch, “Illegitimately created accounts are being deleted, and Likes gained from malware, compromised accounts, or deceived users are being removed.”
Business pages with huge fan numbers could have seen losses of hundreds to thousands of fans.  For many businesses, this sort of thing could be panic inducing.  But let’s take just a moment to understand a social media reality.

A fan or follower count is a raw number with very little real meaning or intrinsic value.

Ruminate on that for just a moment. A steadily climbing fan count makes us feel good, and that’s about all its really good for. Its a number that’s easy for community managers and marketers to point to and tell decision makers that somebody (lots of somebodies) is paying attention. It makes us feel good. It makes us feel as though the time we’ve spent curating that account has been worthwhile.

Social Meme Monday

For today’s Meme Monday, we have some funny cartoons about Facebook. Have a good and happy Monday, everyone!

Source: 3.bp.blogspot.com via SEJournal on Pinterest

A Day in the Life of an SEO

Working in the field of website optimization may be many things,

 but it’s certainly never boring!

If you’re new to the industry and wondering what your day-to-day activities should look like, consider the following elements for guidance on how good SEOs structure their word days:

Link Building and Monitoring

Because link building plays such a vital role in website success, all good SEOs try to make this practice a part of their daily routines.  The only exception to this rule occurs in large SEO agencies, in which workers are specialized to handle different aspects of the SEO process—whether that’s content creation, on-site optimization, link building, or some other element of the digital marketing process.
In all other cases, SEOs are constantly looking for new opportunities to create links, reading industry blogs to find new link building ideas, or tracking existing links in order to monitor and correct changes in a website’s backlink profile.

Do Young CEO’s Have Their Pulse on SEO Strategy?

As a young CEO and one that has come of age during the computer era, having your pulse on how to best utilize search engine optimization (SEO) to your site’s advantage is critical.

Use SEO marketing the right way and you can drive significant amounts of traffic to your site. Use it the wrong way and you can not only be missing out on potential traffic, but your return on investment (ROI) can suffer as well.

Social Meme Monday

Mondays can really be a drag sometimes. Getting back to work after the weekend isn’t always easy. SEJ likes to start each week with funny memes because you deserve to start your week right, with some humor. For this week, we found some fun social cartoons to make your day brighter. We hope you have a wonderful week ahead!

 

Source: growmap.com via SEJournal on Pinterest

50 Best Internet Marketing Blog Posts of 2012 (So Far)

As we approach the Labor Day holiday, it’s a good time to look back and review all of the great content that’s been published so far this year. It’s been a busy time in the world of digital marketing, considering everything from the highly influential launch of the Penguin algorithm update to shifts in the way consumers engage with social networks and mobile devices.

If you’re feeling behind the times, here are a few of the best articles I’ve seen published so far this year:

SEO Industry Changes

So far in 2012, Google’s Penguin update launch has been far and away the biggest story in SEO.  However, don’t let the dominance of Penguin-related coverage fool you. There have been plenty of other important tweaks as well.