Why the Future of The Web Rests in the Hearts and Minds of Fanatics

For decades gatekeepers have kept creators from being able to create. You had to be chosen to publish your book, create a radio show, or make a movie. But the rapid development of technology is causing a dramatic shift in the power dynamic. We saw it happen in the music industry first with the creation

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10 SEO Industry Trends in 2013 & 2014

Now that most of us have our footing back after Penguin 2.0, what’s ahead for SEO and social media marketing in the year to come? It’s clear that Google’s focus is on eliminating spam and enhancing the user experience through better content. Evidence has shown that both site quality and link relevancy are going to Content continues to be important, but requires more depth and detail Different kinds of content help you get traction Original Source

Google Penguin 2.0 goes Live - Discussion and Comments

We started rolling out the next generation of the Penguin webspam algorithm this afternoon (May 22, 2013), and the rollout is now complete.

- Matt Cutts
Mattcutts.com - While I do applaud your efforts to reduce webspam. The net would be so much nicer if the utter garbage affiliate spam would completely vanish.

As we all know that first update was Penguin 1 on April 24, 2012 which impacted about 3.1% of queries, after that small updates came on May 26, 2012 (less than 0.1%) and October 5, 2012 (0.3% of queries).

by SubmitShop
"Panda is sitewide. Penguin is on a per page basis. According to Cutts, Penguin 1.0 was home page only. Penguin 2.0 goes deeper." It targets lower level pages of a site and not just the top level.
Government websites, news sites and advice driven resources have all fared well from the recent update, as you would expect.
So, you may not have been penalised, or hit by the algorithm update, however you may have lost visibility to websites with more authority.

Update: Matt Cutts tweeted that you can submit feedback to Google via this form about spammy sites this update missed. https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/337586357822169088

So unless you have managed to replace all the authority your low quality links were giving you, don’t expect to see your rankings come back. Unfortunately, any investment in low quality links is lost, and the only way back is to invest at a higher level in developing a solid SEO strategy. and removing links will give you a clean sheet but won’t bring you back.

Cutts briefly discussed the new Penguin update in a conversation with Leo Laporte on Wednesday right before it was getting ready to roll out. In that, he said, “It is a leap. It’s a brand new generation of algorithms. The previous iteration of Penguin would essentially only look at the homepage of a site. The newer generation of Penguin goes much deeper. It has a really big impact in certain small areas.”
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What is followerwonk

Followerwonk helps you explore and grow your social graph.

• Dig deeper into Twitter analytics: Who are your followers? Where are they located? When do they tweet?
• Find and connect with new influencers in your niche.
• Use super-actionable visualizations to compare your social graph to others.
• Easily share your reports with the world.

What is ubersuggest.

Suggest on steroids

Get keyword ideas with Übersuggest the free keyword suggestion tool that makes good use of Google Suggest and other suggest services.

How it works?

Write a term in the box.
Choose a language and a source. Übersuggest can get suggestions either from regular Web search or from search verticals like Shopping, News or Video (more to come).
Übersuggest takes your base term, add a letter or a digit in front of it, and extracts suggestions for it.

Click on each word to get further suggestions based on that term.
Add each keyword to your basket clicking on the plus sign on its left.
Add all visible keywords to your basket clicking on the large grey button.
With this free keyword tool you can instantly get thousands of keyword ideas from real user queries! Use the keywords to get inspiration for your next blog post, or to optimize your PPC campaigns.

PPC Management Software and Tips

One of the best ways to drive interested visitors to your site is through pay per click (PPC) advertising. It is common sense that if you provide someone who is looking for a specific product with a link to that product they will buy it instead of just getting more information about it.

If you use an automated bid management system which both analyzes your conversion data and CTR you can reduce the amount of time and effort you need to dedicate to your campaigns. This means that you can react much quicker to campaign fluctuations because they are identified sooner. But when looking for a good automated system you need to remember that often times you get what you pay for.

As a pay per click advertiser you need to consider four things when choosing a bid management system:

1. The number of keywords you are currently bidding on.
2. The size of your budget.
3. Is the system going to do a better job managing your budget across all your campaigns?
4. The number of campaign that are currently being managed.

As much help as a PPC tool is they are still not as useful as regular, hands-on maintenance. Software can only interpret data in certain ways, requiring a human to properly understand the numbers and information. Constant scrutiny is required in order to get the best possible performance from your PPC campaign. Still, as your campaign becomes bigger and the scale or budgets increase, an automated bidding system becomes an invaluable tool for PPC advertisers.

Innovative methods of Link Building for local rankings

A detailed post on innovative methods which can really help to increase your local search engine rankings in 2013, Submitshop blog discuss various methods from reviews, local guest posts and even giving discounts to get real reviews to enhance your local SEO rankings.
Source

Best Practices for SEO Content Writing

Read about SEO content writing methods to enhance the notability and popularity of webpages and websites in various search engines, keyword research, use of right keywords, variations, percentage, linking and use of subheading to increase genuineness of your contents

Experts thoughts from search engine industry on Directory Submissions

A debate on directory submit services, and views from trusted blogs and authors like SEOMOZ, Search Engine Journal and Google Webmaster blog recommended or voted in favor of directory submission which are of good quality, moderated, or niche directories Source

Google's Penguin Updateam Talks, Chats Stories and News

Again, there were several updates last month – Penguin was happened on the 24th. But there were two Panda refreshes, link network penalties, bugs and many more updates. Story here Matt Cutts advised watching these two videos if you’ve been hit by Penguin. He also endorsed these tips.

They’re people who simply wanted to share their passion for pets and sports and art and found they could turn that passion into profit. Now, though, you can bet that passion is waning as they scramble to regain what they lost through no fault of their own. I’m not saying Google is wrong. They’re right to want to clean out the spammers and the snake oil salesmen. 

Google declines to divulge specifics of its search-ranking algorithm, but it discourages paid links and low-quality website links. According to Google, the recent shifts in its algorithm, known as "Penguin," will enhance the user experience and don't punish businesses that follow its guidelines.

"It was vindication," he says, because he believes that some of his competitors engaged in unfair practices to get their sites to rank higher than his. "It's been frustrating. We'd been doing the right thing for so long."