• Associate your business with other local businesses
• Have local businesses link to your website on their website with defining keywords
• Link to nearby attractions on your website
• If any celebrities or important people in history have visited your business make sure to list them in your website and link to a biography of them (most likely on Wikipedia)

With the graph taking up the right corner of the screen and ads taking up both the right side and upper center, where will your results show? Just as Yahoo and AOL added hundreds of things to their pages and lost millions in market shares (popularity as well), maybe this move is the beginning of the end for Google. Now that the “Knowledge Graph” has been added, who knows what will be spamming our eyes next.

Most of you have noticed the newest Panda update to 3.4 dubbed “Penguin”, and some of you may be hurting because of it. One of the biggest sinkers is link-over optimization, if your site had more than 50% of its incoming links with SERP keywords you were bound to be affected negatively. However, if your incoming links were other words, anything other than the words you were trying to rank for, you weren’t affected negatively. Most likely you wouldn’t have noticed anything! To add to the hysteria, Google is actually penalizing you for over-optimizing. However, if you are not an over-optimizing culprit you can rejoice in the benefit of a higher ranking given to you by Google for being relevant.  To summarize what Google is doing in case it’s difficult to understand, they’re replacing the value of using anchor text with the value of content relevancy. In other words, your fitness blog should get rid of the links it has on office supplies websites. Now that you know what to fix to get your rankings back, here are some tips to bring that ranking up.

1. Create median-sized sites with useful content relative to your theme or department and cite it directly back to your website as the main source of information.
2. Build a centralized blog network of what your website is about.
3. Change up your anchor texts (Of course!). Use your web address or the title of a post on your blog or even your name.
4. Become more involved in your SEO (i.e. Write actual articles on your mini-sites)
5. Go outside of Google, don’t put all your eggs in one basket and Google will notice your try at diversifying.

Each year, Google changes its search algorithms innumerable times. While most of these changes are minor, every few months Google rules out a ‘major’ algorithmic update that affects search results in significant ways.
In short: Old Link Building strategies are passé. To stay ahead in the game, we need to be in tune with these ever changing prerequisites. We have specially worked on these changes with more focus and deep analysis. We have covered all the Google check points like :

• Links from pages having no content
• Poor quality links from irrelevant sites
• Links from sites crammed with advertisements
• Same content for multiple submissions
• Absence of SMO in the overall SEO plan
• Content farming with low value articles and blogs for Google/users
• No Site Moderation

I would also request you contact us on the current and improved Link Building with changed SEO.

Strategy Going Forward ;-

Over the past few months Google has accentuated the importance of social media, guest blogging, link bait and press releases. Panda seems to have been focused primarily on unique value and user experience. We expect this trend to continue, and possibly even accelerate. Thus as SEO specialists we need to go beyond old-fashioned link building. While that type of link building can and should be a part of any marketing mix, doing it in isolation will send unbalanced signals to search engines.

The central point search engines are looking at is: if so many sites are linking to this page why isn’t social media abuzz with talk about them. This means that one form of link popularity will have to be complimented with word popularity.

1. Figuring out what kind of video to shoot
2. Serious or Funny
3. Targeting the audience
4. Video editing abilities/software
5. Promoting the videos

Here at AZ SEO we have a trained video technician, state of the art editing software, remarkable studio and of course the latest technology to record the most amazing broadcast you may ever see. Combine our excellence in video recording and internet marketing we’ll be more than happy to help you reach the top.

Scott Thompson, CEO of Yahoo, took the first steps today to try and turn around his plagued company in hopes of becoming known in the mobile computing market. This move marks the sixth lay-off in the past 4 years while also moving through 3 different CEOs. The employees being let go will be notified Wednesday and will shear off about 14% of the current workers Yahoo employs. By making these cuts Thompson hopes that the company can hire the much needed specialists in mobile technology and build the remaining company into a faster and better equipped entity ready for the coming consumer trends. To add to the mass lay-off, Yahoo has hinted at selling one of its services, Right Media, which in turn will allow them to shed even more workers.

Saving nearly $375 million with the completion of the 2000 removals, this, as before, will most likely not reverse the revenue downturn. Thompson also plans to take focus more on selling advertising and building its department dedicated to smart-phone and tablet applications. As Yahoo turns its focus onto the mobile application market it seems that Yahoo is no longer concerned with being known in the search industry which will allow Google to scratch them off the list and focus on the potential threat that is Facebook. While Yahoo makes changes deciding to switch gears I doubt anyone will be interested in advertising with Yahoo since Google and Facebook are industry dominators.

It may seem as though Yahoo is short on cash and profits and is trying any which way they can to cut corners and stay afloat, especially with the patent lawsuit against Facebook currently in progress. Since Yahoo advertising will most likely be overpriced and under sold, optimizing your website for search engines is the best bet and if you do business offline as well local search engine optimization will make sure you can be found on Google and Facebook on the front page, SEO Local will show you how. And if for instance you find yourself looking to be on a high profile lawsuit like Yahoo, Web Marketing Attorneys can help your firm be found.

Sources: Local News

Most people know Facebook as a way to connect to long lost high school friends, or keeping up with the Joneses’ son down the street, but never as a tool to find out the restaurant that your uncle favors the most with his after-work buddies. Google+ tries to offer that aspect, but is considered by critics to dilute efficiency. Search, being a $15 billion market, is an amazing step for Facebook and a clever way to attack not only Google, but probably crush any life that Google+ may have after their search aspect has taken off. Adding to their initiative, Facebook hired in 2010 Google Maps co-founder, Lars Rasmussen. Rasmussen stated that same year, “I do think that social is a significantly less explored area still than search, and it is sort of the frontier of technology in many ways.” So the key may be to not only focus on Search, but the perfect blend with Social. Also, with Facebook likely going public in May, Zuckerberg may be pushed by investors to find new sources to profit from.

For months, each played this coy game by refusing to directly engage or discuss the other. That changed yesterday with the arrival of the Don’t Be Evil tool, created by a conglomeration of engineers from Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and other unnamed social networks.

The Chrome extension bookmarklet and accompanying Focus on the User website have been designed to call Google out over the prominent placement of their own Google+ posts and pages in organic search results. This coincided with the launch of Search Plus Your World, the latest Google initiative to customize search engine results.

The creators of the bookmarklet say that Google’s new Search Plus Your World search results run counter to everything the search giant has said they stand for. That instead of using the entire social web, it unfairly gives precendence ato a Google product.

The group has created a video that details the difference in how a fairer Google results page might work that incorporates all social media platforms:

In an interview with Search Engine Watch, a Facebook spokesperson commented dryly that “I think the content of the site and the video say it all best and we don’t really have anything to add beyond that.”

No one is quite sure who sponsored the creation of the tool, but it seems to be just one more quiet blow in this war over social media and the web. This is a strange war to watch. It’s easy to see where Google is coming from. They have a new product they want their users to be exposed to, so they include it on their page. If users find that unfair, then perhaps they might try out Bing or go back to Yahoo. Our money is on users sticking with Google.

The real lesson to take away from all of this is that Google Plus is here to stay. “Evilness” doesn’t really enter in to the equation, Google is going to do what it’s going to do, and it seems unlikely that this new inclusion of Google Plus content will so thoroughly turn of f their users as to cause a mass exodus. By that same token, however, it seems unlikely that Facebook (or Twitter, for that matter) will lose users to Google Plus solely because Google is featuring results from that platform. Perhaps “war” is a bit too strong of a word. Schoolyard tiff might be more accurate, hmm?

Facebook’s continued growth is not really news, but this report does solidify our opinion that as more and more users come to associate Facebook (not just any social networking site, but specifically Facebook) with the web, it gives that organization more and more influence in terms of how people find and use information.

The social web is not just a fad, it’s a paradigm shift for web use. That’s why ArizonaSEO has a sister blog, PhoenixSMO, that reports and discusses recent social media news and information. For a complete picture of online marketing, we can no longer just rely on traditional SEO. More attention must be paid to Facebook as it continues to dominate the web. Below the cut is some more of the continued report from Hitwise:

Top-visited Websites in 2011
Facebook was the top-visited Website for the second year and accounted for 10.29 percent of all U.S. visits between January and November 2011 – a 15 percent increase from 2010. Google.com ranked second, with 7.70 percent of visits – a 7 percent increase – followed by YouTube (3.17 percent), Yahoo! Mail (2.95 percent) and Yahoo! (2.47 percent).

The combination of Google properties accounted for 11.98 percent of all U.S. visits – a 22 percent increase compared with 2010. Facebook properties accounted for 8.93 percent, and Yahoo! properties accounted for 6.81 percent. The top 10 Websites accounted for 32 percent of all U.S. visits between January and November 2011, which was flat compared with 2010.
The fastest-moving search terms based on absolute change in 2011 included hurricane irene, bin laden wives, osama bin laden dead, les paul, nick ashford dies, apophis asteroid, sheen dumped, osama bin laden dead, hurricane irene path and amber cole.

Important changes to note:
• Refining official page detection: We try hard to give our users the most relevant and authoritative results. With this change, we adjusted how we attempt to determine which pages are official. This will tend to rank official websites even higher in our ranking.

• Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors: We look at a number of signals when generating a page’s title. One signal is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. We found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content.

• Fresher, more recent results: As we announced just over a week ago, we’ve made a significant improvement to how we rank fresh content. This change impacts roughly 35 percent of total searches (around 6-10% of search results to a noticeable degree) and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query.

• Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content (page description): This change helps us choose more relevant text to use in snippets. As we improve our understanding of web page structure, we are now more likely to pick text from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a header or menu. Google is extending these for pages with specific technical information. Snippets will now include more samples of the direct information sought such as prices and consumer reviews. Along these same lines Google is now culling the content for these snippets from the greater context of the body copy or text of a page. This is as opposed to grabbing a handful of header info and forming a page summary with it.

• Retiring a signal in Image search: As the web evolves, we often revisit signals that we launched in the past that no longer appear to have a significant impact. In this case, we decided to retire a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web.

“What this is talking about is where it shows your actual search title in the results. The blue link you click on, that’s the title of the search result that’s built into the page.”
“A lot of the time these will be auto-generated based on back links, so Google is now choosing to pay less attention to that, and more attention to the actual content of the page and possibly auto-generate the link based on that content.”

“What might happen is that companies will go out, buy a whole bunch of back links, or they’ll have anchor text that points back to one page in the hope of ranking that page.”
“If that link is across the whole site and is part of the structure of the site, it doesn’t necessarily add any value. Google is going to pay less attention to it as a result.”

1. Do not offer incentives, monetary or otherwise. You’ll be pleasantly surprised the percentage of customers who will do it for free if you just ask. If you offer to pay these “brand ambassadors” it may be that they will get turned off to the whole idea. This could backfire in a big way.

2. Make it easy for your customers. Don’t send them a link to review you on Google unless they have a Gmail address.

3. Don’t ask people for Yelp reviews. You may get a few positive reviews in the short term, but if your customers are not active Yelpers, Yelp’s SPAM filters will eventually toast their reviews. You’ll end up with no reviews and potentially some angry customers who wonder why their review disappeared. if they happen to be active Yelp users, then excellent, but not a significant portion of the population is.

4. Do it promptly. Don’t wait. People are most likely to give you feedback right away. The longer you go from the time of service to the time of request, the likelihood of getting reviews drops precipitously. According to Ted Paff, CEO of CustomerLobby, a review service, “Comment card reviews solicited at the time of service can see completion rates of 80-90%” vs. much lower rates for other forms of review solicitation.

5. Follow up! If you have the customer’s email address, follow up your initial request three days later with a reminder email containing links of where to for review submissions. Reminder emails can account for a huge percentage of review conversions.
While positive reviews are great, the real power is in the reviewer. A customer willing to spend the time to review you is a brand ambassador. Instead of just asking them for reviews, you should be thinking about how you can harness your relationship with these valuable people to help spread the word, both online and off.

Which method is right for you depends on how you conduct your business. Consider the following:
Do you collect customer email addresses? Most of the businesses I work with know they should but rarely do, or rarely do it with any rigor.
Do you have more than 50% of your customers’ up-to-date email addresses? If so, then you can use email solicitations where you can ask them to provide a review via email or you can direct them to a website where they can leave a review.
If email doesn’t work for you, then you’ll need to consider how you typically interact with your customers. If most of your business is done in person then give them a comment card. If it’s over the phone, you may have to do it via mail. Try stapling a comment card with return postage to your invoice.

If you have any questions about why online reviews are so important for your business online marketing strategy, get in touch with the experts over at Phoenix Synergy.