Articles Posted in Internet News

The constant factor in the relationship between Internet marketing and website development is Change.

Whether you work in the field of online marketing or run a business, the evolution of content, SEO, web design, social, and local listings significantly impacts how a website is structured and how it targets visitors for conversion.

Since listing all of the changes that have occurred since the Internet’s inception would take until Thanksgiving, the below blog focuses on the main evolutionary changes that we’ve seen at SLS Consulting.

1. Write for Your Audience First – In the past, content was more about keyword stuffing, linking, and organization that appealed to the search engines for higher rankings. These tactics just don’t work anymore, or at least, they don’t last for long. Whether you’re creating content for your blog or website, putting writing for your audience before writing for the search engines is more effective for increasing visitors, lowering bounce rates, getting favorable search placement, and converting visitors into clients.

2. Quality Links Over Quantity – The amount of links you have isn’t always as important as the quality of those links. Linking quality is affected by the variety of phrases being linked and where the links are going. Search engine optimization is no longer about “how much,” but more about substance and tact. The change in SEO may be more time consuming, but with the waves of recent algorithm updates, it’s worth it for your website’s success to change how you optimize your site, blog, and on other platforms.

3. Simple & Responsive Design – Making a website easy to navigate and respond to the type of device being used has shaped how website designers cater to the needs of both the target audience, search engines, and the client’s preferences. Because so many people are using computers, laptops, iPads, smartphones, and other devices to browse the Internet, a website now has to adjust its design intuitively in order to keep the attention of and engage a visitor.
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We all know the feeling of waiting for that foretold Panda update and seeing what havoc it may wreak, but this does not seem to be the way things are anymore.

Google Panda Update

According to Matt Cutts, Google’s Distinguished Engineer, future Panda updates won’t be the usual monthly or so manual refreshes they have been, but a part of Google’s real-time algorithm. This means it will be “rolled out” or deployed more gradually as Google is rebuilding the index.

That is all well and good, but what does this mean?

Panda updates won’t just hit your website(s) on a given day as they did before. It is less likely that you will notice any huge changes in analytics should the new Panda method ding your site for “low quality” content because it’ll hit it little by little. But this may make it faster to recover from any negative impact. That is, if you realize that you’ve been hit.
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Staying clam may not be so easy if your website was hit – and hit hard – by Google’s new exact match domain (EMD) algorithm update, which was launched this past Friday, September 28.

But, wait – there’s more.

Google has also confirmed that another Panda update (the 20th) was released on September 27. While Panda 20 continues to roll out, it is said to affect 2.4% of English search queries. The release of these two algorithms has had many business owners and SEOs in a whirlwind as far as which algorithm is the culprit.

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EMD is intended to remove low-quality exact match domains from high search results in Google. So, if your website rankings have plummeted and you don’t have an EMD, then you were most likely hit by Panda 20.
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Just when you were starting to get comfortable with managing your Google+ Business Page and Google Places Page, Google decided to change everything. At least, that’s what it may feel like.

The creation of Google+ Local Pages, which is the combination of a Google+ Business Page and a Google Places Page, has made many heads spin so far. Although this process may seem daunting at first, here are some tips for making the process as smooth as possible.

How to Verify – Since the official verification process is now in effect, you can initiate this by logging into your Google+ Business Page, clicking Verify now next to your business name, and requesting a postcard be sent with a pin to your location. The only way to overcome any frustrations from needing postcard verification is acceptance and patience – sorry we can’t help you more on that one!

Why Verification May Have to Wait – Because the merge is only possible at this time for businesses that have pages established in the ‘Local Business or Place’ category of Google+, anyone that falls outside of this will have to sit tight and wait out the transition. At this point in time, Google has not discussed when or if these pages will even be allowed to merge with their corresponding Google Places listings.

Google+ Local Pages are not giving support to service area businesses or businesses with more than one location. This is another reason why you may have to wait on verifying.
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The recent merge of Google+ company pages and Google local listings pages has sent shock waves – both good and bad – throughout the Internet world.

The video below addresses the following questions to help explain what Google+ Local is and how your business can transition smoothly to this new change:

  1. What do you think about this merge? Good for Google+? Bad news for competitors like Facebook?
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google.jpgHave you ever wondered what Google does to improve search results and keep users happy with such a reliable and trustworthy search engine? So have we, and so does everybody else; and with good reason: the Internet is always evolving.

To stay ahead of the competition and effectively promote your law firm or business online, you need to know how the Internet is changing, especially when it comes to search.

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It may seem like top secret information, but a recent SearchEngineLand article discusses the most recent Google search results improvements made in December. Some of the highlights, with their respective Google codenames, are as follows:

  • “Megasitelinks”Sitelinks in search results are invaluable and help with SEO in that they provide additional links to your website by showing specific web pages. Google recently improved their algorithm (guidelines/processes that apply to search engines for ranking a site’s listing within its index) for selecting sitelinks so that results are more relevant. One example of how this improves search results is that sitelinks may be displayed based on precise geographic locations.
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FacebookOver a month ago, Facebook announced the most expansive and innovative update to its site to-date: Facebook Timeline. However, the general public has yet to experience this new update for itself (at least those users who haven’t already gone out of their way to add the new layout to their profiles). While Facebook has hinted at multiple release dates over the course of the past month or so, the redesigned profiles have yet to become official, which has some people asking what the hold up is about.

For anyone who has kept on top of Facebook news since the social network’s f8 conference, it’s no secret that Facebook Timeline has fewer fans than the company anticipated it would. Given Facebook’s poor track record of user-pleasing platform updates though, it’s really no surprise that the general sentiment towards Timeline was less than positive. This time, however, it’s another web company that is possibly the most displeased opponent of Facebook’s new update.
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According to Mashable, Google Realtime Search will be returning, and this time, it will include data from Google+, as well as other social media sources.

Back in 2009, Realtime Search was launched in which real-time search integrated into search results pages. The search would incorporate information as things happened around the Internet-for example, live tweets from Twitter, news articles, data from public Facebook Pages, Yahoo! Answers, and more, would be on the actual result pages for a search. Anytime a major current event was making headlines, Google Search would display Facebook updates, live tweets, and data from other social media services that discussed the recent news, making the search engine more relevant during these major events.

Also in 2009, Google’s main competitor Bing made deals with both Facebook and Twitter to integrate status updates into its search engine. Recently, Bing further expanded on Facebook integration in its search results, displaying much more data from Facebook profiles and the Facebook Like button.
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Recent data provided to Mashable by Cisco found that Internet traffic worldwide is estimated to quadruple between 2010 and 2015. By then, close to three billion people will be regularly using the Internet, which will be over 40 percent of the projected population for the world at that time. On average, there will be more than two Internet connections per person in the world, largely as a result of the explosion in popularity of web-enabled mobile devices.

In North America, a 26 percent increase in online traffic growth is expected, with other regions, notably the Middle East and Africa, seeing larger increases in Internet traffic. However, in North America the number of devices per person is expected to dramatically increase: It is estimated that there will be approximately 5.8 devices per person, meaning people will be connected like never before.
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Tech Crunch reports that shares of career-orientated social networking site LinkedIn (trading under the symbol LNKD) began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday, May 19, and skyrocketed by 140 percent from its debuting cost of $83 per share, to a high of $122, to close at $93.86 per share. Originally priced at $45, it was expected the stocks would open between $78 and $82. Now, LinkedIn is valued at over $8.9 billion.

These numbers mark the biggest Internet company initial public offering (IPO) since shares of Google became public back in 2004. LinkedIn is one of the first social networking sites to go public, and rumors abound that other social media companies such as Facebook and Groupon are readying their own IPOs.
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