We are delighted to welcome Costa del Sol based golf tour operator, Golf Breaks in Spain on board and look forward to promoting the site in the coming months.

Golf Breaks in Spain have been established for a number of years and aim to make their clients golf holidays as stress free as possible by providing not only accommodation in some of the Costa del Sol’s best hotels, but also tee times, golf club hire, airport transfers and even car hire.

For those who are looking for something a little different, they are also able to provide holiday packages that also include excursions such as dune buggy and quad bike safari!

With over 300 days of sunshine each year, the Costa del Sol has become a golfing Mecca and has approximately 50 golf courses on offer, with a number of these being ranked among the top 10 courses in Europe.

So if you’re looking to play a few rounds in the sun this year, give Golf Breaks in Spain a try.

If so, why not get in touch with our latest clients. Riviera International are one of the leading holiday rental companies on the Costa del Sol offering a wide range of luxurious (but affordable) self catering apartments and villas in the Riviera del Sol, Mijas area of the coast.

Located just a stones throw from all the local amenities including restaurants, bars, supermarkets, banks, beaches and golf, the Atalayas y Flamencos developments are the ideal location for those looking to explore the Costa del Sol.

Riviera International approached us recently as they wanted to grow their business online and form a presence where they could start generating more business.

At Amby Marketing, we are really delighted to welcome Riviera International and are looking forward to promoting their brand and becoming a part of their success!

Golf4U Spain are an Iagto approved and fully licensed golf tour operator in the Malaga region of the Costa del Sol, Spain. Established in 2006, they have since established excellent business relationships with over 50 first class golf courses and hotels on the Costa del Sol enabling them to offer good, affordable, tailor made golf holidays and breaks to those looking to improve their handicaps in the warm Costa sunshine.

Under the leadership of the Director, Stuart Eaton, Golf4U Spain has become one of the leading golf tour operators on the Coast and to date has provided golfing breaks to over 15,000 golfers.

With a new website re-design imminent, we are extremely excited about the prospect of helping to promote the Golf4U brand and helping them to gain further mind-share within what is a competitive market place.

So if you are thinking of a golf holiday this Summer in sunny Spain, you know where to look first! http://www.golf4uspain.com

No doubt the vast majority of the sites that were hit were of a very low quality, built for adsense, over optimised and offering very little in the way of value to any visitors they may or may not have received prior to getting dumped.

There were no doubt many other sites that do offer something of value but most likely over did things a little on the search engine optimisation front and today find that they have lost 99% of their traffic. Not a nice position to be in for sure.

In my previous post, I discussed what to do if you get penalised by the Google penguin update. If you have found yourself on the wrong end of the Penguin update, have a read and find out how you go about recovering your positioning and traffic.

As Google changes it’s algorithm around 400 times each year (some big changes and some small), it’s really important that we understand what it is that Google is looking for and how we can prevent ourselves being affected by any future updates. The Penguin update focused (it would seem) on on-site over optimisation as well as manipulative anchor text distribution. For example, having 80% of your inbound link anchor text using commercial anchor text and the other 20% using your brand name or url. It should be the other way around. 20% max on commercial anchor text and 80% on branded search terms.

So what does Google like to see in those coveted sites that it is so keen to promote to the top positions?

We know that Google uses hundreds of signals to organically rank a site and I won’t be attempting to cover all of those here!

Below you will find a few of my own thoughts on what I believe some of the key elements are and if you implement the following, you will be in an excellent position to do well and prevent any future penalties.

1. Make sure that your site focuses primarily on users rather than search engines.

What you need to do here is ask yourself the question “If search engines did not exist, would I do this?”. If the answer is no, don’t do it.

As an example, if Google did not exist, would you still have that spammy links page linking out to non relevant websites? Probably not.

Google is looking for pages that are intended for humans, not computers.

2. Check your grammar 

Users hate spelling mistakes and poor grammar. There is nothing worse than reading something that someone clearly doesn’t care about. After all, if they did, they would have taken two minutes to run it through a spell checker.

As for search engines, Google is becoming very clear on this. Google is looking for quality that it is happy to show to searchers. Do you think that Google can tell if a blog post or article is well written or not? See how many grammar checking applications there are on the Internet? You bet your butt they can. If they see that your content is full of errors, they are more likely to demote your page.

Google is looking for well written quality content.

3. Create Something Of Value

Like users, Google is looking for value. When you create something of value people link to it, share it, bookmark it and tell their friends about it. It only takes one or two good natural links for Google to get a good idea of the value of a piece of content.

So make sure that your content is well thought out, serves a purpose and provides the viewer with a solution to a problem. Think value!

Google is looking for valuable link worthy and shareable content.

4. Don’t Try To Manipulate Google

Stop looking for that short cut. Promoting a site takes hard work and a lot of effort. By undertaking black hat SEO strategies you put yourself in the firing line. If Google catches you (and they will) your site will be penalised and it’s quite possible that your site will never recover.

So forget hidden links, keyword stuffing and sneaky redirects. Start putting your creative juices to good effect and build something of value.

Google is looking for trust and sites that are willing to play by the rules.

5. Become A Brand

By promoting your site consistently and offering something for nothing, you will slowly but surely build your follower numbers, links and social media sharing activity.

Google has been saying for a long time that brands were the future. So take note.

Start by dropping that 10 worded keyword rich domain name because you think it ranks you better. Google will reduce their reliance for such signals real soon so you may as well start building a real brand today.

Google is looking for strong brand signals. Brands are trusted, keyword stuffed domain names are not!

6. Improve your site speed and load times

Google now provides tools within Google Webmaster Tools for checking your site speed. They have even incorporated this into Google Analytics.

Speed is very important to Google and to users also. Although Google says that this is not a major ranking factor, every little helps and one day Google just may decide to give it more weight and emphasis.

So make sure you follow Googles tips on speeding up your sites load times. You’ll please both Google and your sites visitors.

Google is looking for speed and fast load times.

7. Build A Social Media Presence

By building a social media community around your site on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn, you are sending all the right kind of signals to Google. Sites that are popular, generally have good social media interaction and engagement.

So build a site with great content and create a community of social media followers to help you promote your site further. Google is paying more and more attention to social signals so it is only right that you make good use of this.

Google is looking for social media signals.

Of course there are many other signs of quality that Google is looking for in a website, but by following the seven above, this should give you are good starting point.

The aim of the Penguin update has been to penalise sites that are over optimised and using “aggressive web spam tactics” that go against Google’s guidelines.

The update is said to affect 3.1% of search queries and judging by the hundreds of complaints I have read via various blogs, many sites have seen there rankings and traffic levels plummet.

Google’s head of  webspam Matt Cutts, recently said the following

In the next few days, we’re launching an important algorithm change targeted at webspam. The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines. We’ve always targeted webspam in our rankings, and this algorithm represents another improvement in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content. While we can’t divulge specific signals because we don’t want to give people a way to game our search results and worsen the experience for users, our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience and employ white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics.

If you have been affected by the update you will no doubt understand how damaging it can be to your business. Your sailing along, ranking well, lots of traffic and business and one day, BAM! Google takes you out! What’s worse, Google won’t even tell you why, which means you need to find out and take immediate action to minimise the impact and reduce downtime to your site.

How Do I Know If I have Been Hit By The Google Penguin Update?

So what do you do, where do you start? Below I give you a few things to look for to get you started.

1. Have you definitely been penalised? – If your site saw a major drop in traffic just after the 24th April, there is a good chance that your site has been hit.

2. Do you rank for broad keywords that your previously ranked well for? If not this is a good sign that you have been penalised.

3. Take a snippet of text on your home page, quote it in Google and see if you appear at the top of the search results. If not you may have a Penguin penalty.

4. Search for your brand name or domain. Do you show up in Google? Are there site links?

5. Are you still receiving traffic from the other search engines such as Bing and Yahoo?

I have noticed with one site that has a Penguin penalty that it still has site links,  page rank, is still indexed and continues to receive a tiny amount of traffic for long tail search terms.

I also noticed with the site that it had approximately 20 internal links pointing back to the home page using highly targeted broad search terms and also previously been using link exchange and link exchange pages.

How Can I Recover From A Google Penguin Update Penalty?

The first thing you will need to do is be honest with yourself. If you feel that you have been over doing your SEO, i.e. using too many iterations of targeted keywords in your titles, alt tags and text or doing too much highly targeted internal linking, admit it too yourself and begin to clean things up.

1. Make sure that your internal linking is natural and varied. Don’t link back to your homepage too much using highly targeted anchor text.

2. Remove all of those spammy footer links from your site.

3. Linking out to sites that are not relevant to your own? Remove those links or at least no-follow them.

4. Make sure that your site contains original content and not spun content. Your site really needs to be 80% original. It’s ok to put the odd piece of duplicate content on your site but do not over do it.

5. Check your keyword density. Make sure that you are not constantly repeating keywords and that your content can be read and understood by a human being.

6. Remove any hidden text.

7. Do reciprocal linking? If you have a number of reciprocal link pages and these are linking out to non relevant sites this may be causing you issues. This is an old SEO technique which provides very little benefit. Your time could be used so much more effectively. Either remove all those links, no-follow the page and links or de-index it via the robots.txt file.

The main rule of thumb is to look at each of your pages and ask yourself.

1. Would I do this if search engines did not exist?

2. Does this look natural?

3. Are my primary viewers search engines or humans?

4. Am I building for the future?

I definitely feel that this update is a penalty against on-site practices only and NOT links. The reason I say this is that I know of a few sites that have very spammy link profiles with hundreds of highly targeted anchors yet they are still ranking well.

As this is an algorithmic update, filing a reconsideration request via Google Webmaster tools may not help at all but you can send feedback to Google if you feel that your site has been unfairly penalised. You can do this via the Penguin update feedback form.

It’s worth mentioning again that if your site has been manually penalised you will need to file a reconsideration request. If it is an algorithmic penalty, you will need to implement changes to your pages and then await a re-crawl. Matt Cutts, head of webspam at Google explains more in the video below.

If you have been hit by the Penguin update, I would love to hear about it. What measures have you taken? Are you back on track?

UPDATE

There are also unconfirmed rumours that the Penguin update also targets spammy link profiles, particularly over optimised anchor text. Try and keep your non branded links to around 10-20%. The rest should be “your company name” or “www.yourcompanyurl.com”.

So, you may also want to go through all those back links that you have been building and start doing some link pruning. Want to find out more about link pruning? Check out this post from Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting.

Amby Marketing recently had the pleasure of being contracted to provide the inbound marketing services for this established hotel in the French alps.

The Lodge Morzine is located near the centre of the ski resort and offers high quality self catering and half board accommodation for those looking to spend their Winter or Summer break in Morzine.

Morzine is located around 1 hour from Geneva airport and offers some of the best skiing in Europe. Come May though, the snow melts, the flowers bloom and the skiing equipment is replaced by bikes, hiking boots and golf clubs. Morzine is a great place for your Summer holiday with many activities on offer including hiking, mountain biking, fishing, walking, rock climbing, tennis and although rather hilly you can even play golf in Morzine.

At Amby Marketinig, we are really looking forward to putting The Lodge Morzine on the map and help to give it the exposure it fully deserves.

Take a look at this video below of what the Lodge Morzine has to offer.

Trudder Lodge is a georgian building situated in Trudder, Newcastle, Co. Wicklow which is about an hour south of Dublin in Ireland.

The Lodge is simply stunning and is the perfect location for any social gathering including weddings, vow renewals, family parties, private functions and corporate receptions.

They also host other events including alternative weddings, murder mystery nights, garden parties and even masquerade balls!!

We are really looking forward to working with our new clients at Trudder Lodge and helping them to gain greater visibility and brand awareness via our inbound marketing solutions.

Have a look at the video that we created below to find out more or visit the team at http://www.trudder-lodge.com

Although the Spanish medical system is very good, if you don’t have a full grasp of the language, it can be extremely daunting having to communicate using pigeon Spanish. And let’s face it, when a loved one is sick, it is imperative that you are able to get your point across quickly and with clarity.

At Amby Marketing, we recently took on a new client who provide health insurance for expats in Spain. Health Plan Spain offer a wide range of healthcare insurance policies for those who have moved to Spain permanently or for those who split their time between Spain and another country.

The added bonus is that they offer cover as part of the Sanitas network which means that they are fully authorised and have access to approximately 500 medical centres in the country and over 28,000 healthcare professionals!

Another important aspect is that many of the healthcare professionals are English speaking, as to are the Health Plan Spain agents.

At Amby Marketing, we look foward to working with Health Plan Spain in 2012 and promoting their health insurance products to the expat community in Spain.

It’s actually extremely important that you’re aware of the level of engagement and return on your social media efforts. When are people commenting, liking, retweeting and sharing your content?

This is something that you simply must be aware of, if you are to maximise your marketing efforts via the multitude of social sites that are available to you.

The questions that you should be asking yourself are:

• Am I tweeting, updating Facebook or blog posting to fit with MY schedule rather than my followers?
• When is my community engaging most often with my updates?
• Where are my followers located in the world?
• Am I posting at the wrong times?
• Am I posting on the wrong days?
• Is anyone actually seeing my updates?
• Should I automate my posting to increase engagement?
• What tools can I use in order to track engagement?

So, as you see, it’s not a case of just updating your status every few minutes. You need to understand what is and is not working and why.

STEP 1 – Find out WHEN people are engaging most?

There are a number of ways of gathering this kind of data. If you use Hootsuite like I do, you can use the analytics feature which will tell you which of your tweets are getting the most retweets and clicks.

If you are using Facebook, use Insights to work out the same thing. Take a look at your last dozen posts. When do people comment, like and share your posts?

But don’t just look at the times, look at the days as well.

Research has been done to determine which days certain industries get the most engagement. Believe it or not, some industries are getting better results on specific days.

Make a simple table to get a quick idea of what times and days are the most active.

STEP 2 – Find out WHERE your users are located

I did a little research on this and found MapMyFollowers which is a handy site that allows you to view the geographical location of your Twitter followers via a world map. Really good for getting an instant idea of where your Twitter follows are coming from.

STEP 3 – AUTOMATE your posts (if you like to sleep)

I must admit that I am not a huge lover of automation. For me, it’s not in the best interest of my followers. Social media is about personal relationships and I think by automating the majority of your work, you will ultimately damage your relationships rather than enhance them.

Saying that, I think a little automation is fine. For example, if you have followers who are located in different time zones it makes sense to automate some Tweets and updates so that when you update your messages will be viewed.

For example if I have a lot of users in the UK (GMT) and other users in the U.S (different time zones ranging from GMT -6 to GMT -10) and update at say 12pm UK time, these tweets most likely will not be seen by users in the U.S as they will still be fast asleep. But, If I were to update at around 4pm UK (mid morning U.S) and then maybe 1am UK (early evening U.S) I am more likely to get more clicks and engagement than if I were to update at other times.

Some users may have you in a list, so may use this kind of filtering to view your tweets, but you cannot rely on that.

So in the above example, it could be worthwhile tweeting at 4pm and then duplicate the tweet and send again around 1am (automated).

For me, this is perfectly ok as we all need to sleep…at some time.

I found a cool site recently which analyses your previous engagement and then schedules and sends your tweets at times that it determines to be best. The site is called Timely. Give it a try and see what you think.

STEP 4 – Track User Engagement

I personally user Hootsuite for managing my Twitter activity. Hootsuite has a great analytics section that can tell you which countries users are clicking from, referrers, clicks and more.

There are a number of other Twitter clients out there and I am sure that they offer similar features.

Make sure that you are monitoring your stats on a weekly basis so you can get a good insight into user activity and engagement. If you do this regularly, you will get a good feel for when it is best to Tweet, update your Facebook page and add new blog posts.

Take a look at the report from Buddy Media for some great data and tips on timing your updates.

Well, what do you think? Do you have any tips on how you can improve user engagement on social media sites?

Let us know below in the comments.

Images courtesy of julianlim, 34818713@N00 and gadgetera on Flickr.

If so, you may be in need of some new year tweaks to improve things.

Google announced back in April that page load times were a part of the ranking algorithm and hence can affect your rankings negatively.

Google are almost obsessive about speed, and for good reason. Slow websites are a pain, not only to users but also to search engines. Google and the other engines do not want to rank your site high in the rankings, only for users to experience slow load times and a poor overall user experience. This looks bad for the engines as they are in effect voting for your site.

If you have a Google Webmaster Tools account you will find some really important information in regards to site speed. Under “Labs” we have “Site Performance”. Here, Google reports on your overall site speed. This info is taken from a number of sources including the Google toolbar. I can’t confirm if the info is 100% accurate, but it does serve as a good overall guide.

Another important section of WMT is the section just underneath the load time chart above and is labelled as “Page Speed Suggestions”.

Here you can find info and advice on files on your site which Google believes can be reduced in size to provide better performance. This could be via one of the methods in the section further below.

So what to do?

Well, there are quite a few things that can be done to improve your sites load times and keep everyone happy. But in the interests of brevity, I will just cover three of the main suggestions here.

HTTP Compression

In its simplest form, HTTP Compression is where the data sent between a browser client and server host is compressed or reduced in size in order to speed up the transmission of the website files and data.

In order for this to be achieved, the server and the client have to agree when they first handshake and agree the protocol.

Live HTTP headers http://livehttpheaders.mozdev.org/ is a great piece of software that you can run in order to view the http header information when establishing a connection to a website. This can provide us with a lot of useful information. (Note: Live HTTP Headers is an extension for the Firefox browser)

In the image below you will see that on initially requesting the webpage my browser requested the page and also said that it can accept gzip or deflate encoding. These modules are typically installed as a part of the Apache web server software. So basically my browser is saying “throw me the page across, and if you can make it smaller using gzip or deflate and save us both time and trouble, please do so”.

The image below is the next part of the conversation between server and host. The server is replying OK, I have this page and includes other info such as last modified date and the server software. What we are looking for is the area highlighted in red which says “Content-Encoding: gzip”. Happy days! The server is saying OK, you said you can handle compressed content, so I will send it to you in gzip format. Job done!

If the server did not support HTTP compression of some sort then no problems, the data would still be sent, just not compressed.

For further information on setting up your Apache web server software have a read of this post on how to optimize your site with gzip compression.

To check if your website data is compressed already, use this http compression checking tool.

Combine JavaScript and CSS Code

Most websites today use JavaScript and CSS. JavaScript is a scripting language and can be used with many programs, widgets, graphics apps etc. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and is mainly used to render and format HTML.

Unfortunately when developers and designers work on websites they sometimes use code and place the code in multiple .css and .js files. This means that these files need to be “called” a number of times in order for the browser to run the required code.

Now. A better way is to copy and paste the code from any .css files and .js files and combine them into one file for each of the CSS and JavaScript.

For example I recently combined the JavaScript code from a few different applications into one file on one of my client’s site and call the main file combined.js

The reference at the top of the HTML code would look something like

<script src=”combined.js”></script>

Then something similar for all the CSS code.

<link href=”layout.css” rel=”stylesheet” />

So now, whenever any Javascript or CSS code needs to be run, it is all searched for and run from one file.

Reduce DNS Calls

Without going into DNS too much, DNS is the Domain Name System and is used to resolve domain names to ip addresses. So when you type in a URL in your browser, your browser goes off and checks with the server which is authoritive for that domain and asks for the ip address for that particular site. The server then returns something like 195.56.87.99. Your browser then tries to connect to this server requesting the contents of the website and page. IP addresses are like postcodes in that they pinpoint the exact location of where the site is hosted. They are also unique.

So, anyway. The point is when someone connects to your site, if your code includes calls to things such as Google Analytics, Statcounter, Widgets, Chat, Banners etc these all have to be looked up and resolved before the page is fully loaded. The more calls that are made, the longer the page will potentially take to finish loading.

So, in this case, make sure that you are not making any unnecessary DNS calls. Keep it nice and clean.

For further tips and techniques for reducing page load times, take a look at http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

To receive my latest updates you can catch me on Twitter, become a fan on Facebook or why not subscribe to my newsletter (top right of the page).