This is official video from Matt Cutts that to confirm SEO is not spam. Watch the video, there are few things Matt Cutt highlights are very useful for search engine optimizers.

 

I believe you have read a lot of articles about Google Panda algorithm. If you are still confusing on what Google Panda likes and hates, check the infographic below. My prediction is definitely right, search engine is getting humanzied. Google tries to emulate human perception inside an algorithm.

Source: What Google Panda Really Likes and Hates

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Search engine opimization doesn't work in isolation!

Your Web Developers

A lot of people think that SEO can work alone without fine tuning websites, but in fact, this is not correct. What if your websites rank no.1 on Google with hot keywords but still fail to convert your traffic to be buyers? That means something wrong with your websites and you need to fine tune them with your web developers.

Your Graphic Designers

You need to work with your graphic designers. For example, if you have promotional banners on your landing pages, you need to make sure that your designers are able to design promotional banners that are able to attract your traffic to click and convert to be buyers. If your designers not able to do that, there is no point for your websites to rank no.1 on Google.

Your PR and Editorial Team

You need to work with your PR and editorial teams to produce high quality content with proper keywords, to create an attractive headlines, stories, etc to rank on search engines and to attract people to read your content. Your PR department might be asked to change the content of their press releases and how they are distributed.

Your Finance Team

You need to work with your finance team to allocate budget for your SEO project. Doing SEO is a continously job. You can't stop doing SEO once you rank no.1 search engines, otherwise your ranking will drop. Google keep changing search engine algorithms. Your SEO team needs to keep fine tuning your websites.

Your Technical Support

You need to work your hardwork techinical team, especially your server. If your server keeps having problem, you will get punishment from search engines and your ranking will drop.

Your Customer Service

If people buy from you, you need to provide quality customer service. If you fail to do that, people won't buy from you even you rank no.1 on search engine. People will talk bad (word of mouth) about your companies and your products. SEO helps you but social media kill you.

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With apologies to Soylent Green and the no doubt countless bloggers who have already used that as a title, let’s talk about social media as a marketing tool. We’re certainly not the first to do that either—in fact it’s probably one of the hotter topics in the blogosphere at the moment.

Social Media Is a Great Marketing Tool

You’ll have no trouble finding people to support that position. But here’s the thing about social media: it only works if you’re real. In other words, social media works because it’s a network of people who can engage with each other and build relationships. Those relationships range from genuine friendship to “I want to get a special deal from you.” But whatever the nature of the relationships, they work because there are real people behind them.

Some People Just Don’t Get It

We’ll focus on Twitter here, because it’s the more applicable of the two major social networks for this discussion. Facebook’s brand pages make the notion of being “real” somewhat tenuous, although the same principles of connection and engagement apply. But with Twitter, being real is critical to marketing yourself or your company.

Success with Twitter obviously depends on having followers, and the more, the better. But some people seem to think that a large number of followers is the be-all and end-all of Twitter. We won’t name names, but if you are a Twitter user yourself, you will know several of these accounts. They have tens of thousands of followers, but they never actually seem to engage with any of them. There may be real people behind these accounts, but if so, it’s impossible to tell.

Now, if you’re one of these Tweeters, and you represent, say, an SEO company—well, you may be tweeting links to interesting articles about SEO. And I may click on them and read them. But after a while, I’m going to see that that is all that you do. I’m not going to have any relationship with you at all. And, when it comes time for me to seek SEO services, I am not going to be contacting you—even if you do have 70,000 followers. Because you’re not real.

Some People Really Get It

Then there are the people that are absolutely 100% genuine. Their tweets sing with personality. Even if you’ve never met these people, you begin to feel like you know them just by reading their tweets. A great example: @LisaBarone

Lisa Barone tweets about everything—her outstanding blog posts for Outspoken Media , her boyfriend, her dad, her new car, going to a Yankees game, and just about anything else you could think of. What comes through is her passion for her work, her humor, her willingness to laugh at herself (and at others), and above all, her realness. Because Lisa is a major player in the internet marketing industry, she happens to have a lot of followers—just over 19,000.  Now that’s a lot more than most people, but a lot less than some of those accounts that don’t get it.

The fact is, even if Lisa only had 100 followers, she’d be on the short list of companies to consider if you were looking for internet marketing services. Because she gets it. She’s real. And by being real, she’s using Twitter effectively to market herself and her company.

And that’s what social media is all about. Be real, engage with people, and make connections. There’s never been anything like social media to allow us to do this on such a massive scale. And if you’re not taking advantage of it by actually putting yourself out there, then you’re not actually marketing.

SonicSEO.com is a 13-year old Internet marketing company. Originally founded as AllLaw.com, Inc. by Arvind Raichur and Becky Raichur in 1998, the company began by offering Internet marketing services to lawyers and law firms around the nation. With huge success, the company expanded their services to help all businesses with customized Internet marketing solutions in 2008. In 2010, the company sold two of its properties to Internet Brands (NASDAQ: INET) and underwent a corporate name change to SonicSEO.com, Inc. Today, with over 20 employees, SonicSEO.com is proud to offer online marketing services to businesses across the US.

This is the most timeless piece of advice that you'll ever need in the world of SEO. You don't really need to know how search engine algorithms work, since they constantly change. You also don't have to seek for the perfect link landscape and super advanced techniques to use for your campaign, knowing that everything is temporary in this line of industry.

But there is one thing that never expires in SEO, and that is trust. With trust, everything is within reach, and that certainly includes top rankings and surge in specifically targeted traffic. To begin with, this is just a recap of the principle I'm enforcing in most of my previous SEO strategies and campaigns.

In-depth Recap
The Mindset: You don't want links, you want trust!

You can never convince search engines through the amount of external links you have pointing to your site to make them believe that you are the real deal. What really matters is the trust they see through the relationship of the linking page and the destination page.

Many are saying, why bother building links the hard way when you can automate it, seeing as it works for many other sites. But do you think their high rankings would last, when search engines get much smarter in detecting those cheap shot techniques? Search engines constantly upgrade, and soon enough they'll be able to track these low class links that might put your business at risk.

How to know if you are aiming for trust?

There are risks in link building and a lot of high quality sites are getting penalized as well when Google starts to suspect them. And believe me; no matter how trustworthy your site looks like to people, it's not enough! Just think of how hard it is to earn someone's trust, right? Double that on Google's case, since they had slapped me too many times before getting to this philosophy.

I've been doing the trade long enough, and I've been optimistic, futuristic as well as traditional with most of my campaigns, but the concept of trust was always present. Let's get back to the question – how would you know if your link building campaign is aiming for trust? Simple, get links from high quality sites (that's pretty basic, sheesh, sorry for the exaggeration).

What highly reputable, authoritative and quality sites look like?

• Topically relevant to your site
• Have high Pagerank (at least PR 3)
• Alexa ranking of at least 200,000
• Have high keyword rankings on SERPs
• Good web design, site structure and active community
• Allow dofollow attributed links, if possible.

Benefits of Trust Building

• With trust, search engines are more to reward you with higher rankings, knowing that you're offering valuable information with other quality sites vouching for your page.
• It's much easier to have other sites link to yours if your site is trustworthy, authoritative and reputable.
• It's easier to sell when both real people and search engines trust you, which means more profits.
• In trust building, you're not just boosting your keyword rankings, but you're also improving your business' reputation, visibility, pagerank, community engagement, relationships, readership, revenue and potentials for growth.

Trust Factors:

• Age of site and backlinks
• Amount of quality external links from highly trusted sites (standards as mentioned above)
• Anchor text variations of links pointing to your site
• Link positioning from linking pages (the best ones are those that are included on the body copy of the page, or what we simply call "special mentions" or "awesome recommendation from a real satisfied users/readers")
• Thematic link building or link relevancy (connecting sites have similar theme)
• Frequency of links built throughout the campaign (making it look natural and not automated). 25 high quality backlinks per week are enough to boost your keyword rankings, so don't haste on it. Nevertheless, there are cases in which your contents may get out there in the open and get hundreds of people linking to it in a day (link bait materials), but those are natural links, so it just proves that there's no perfect or rather preferred link building frequency as long as links built are natural and ethical.
• Balance of link attributes such as dofollow and nofollow pointing to your site. There's no required amount for both and having both on your campaign doesn't really matter, as long as you are getting your links from authority sites! Just remember that these 2 have their own unique advantages; dofollow passes through Pagerank and nofollow is capable of passing trust, and both can serve as a vote for your keyword rankings (though dofollow links have higher value).
• Methods used in getting outbound links. Content-based and non-paid links are the efficient ones, because they provide real value to people through information (and search engines give a high score for those types of links).

There are no systematic link building patterns, frequency and landscape (nofollow, dofollow, amount and methods) in SEO. It will always differ depending on your site’s competitors and industry, given that there are some niches that have inadequate source of possible link opportunities. The important thing is to focus with quality, always, it’s the new king!

On-page trust optimization through user experience

Make it believable to everyone (not just to search engines) that your site is truly deserving of the position. Make your pages absolutely relevant to the search terms you are aiming at. SEO is a 2 way street, wherein 50% comes from the on-page part of the campaign (relevance to the targeted keyword) and 50% from the off-page optimization side (popularity of the optimized page).

Always keep in mind that you need to give value or better yet, something that that your visitors don't expect to gain from it in order to earn the trust of those who are landing on your site. Education is the best way to earn their trust, offer something they don't know to really fulfill the experience.

Improve your Pagerank to earn Trust

This one's pretty basic. The best way to build your site's PR or importance as seen by search engines is through dofollow link building, a well-staged internal linking structure and deep linking to enhance the flow of pagerank juice on your site's pages.

Advantages of having a high Pagerank:

• Crawlers will be visiting your site frequently (higher crawl rates), which allow your new pages to get indexed faster.
• Helps in getting higher rankings for your targeted keywords.
• Higher chances of getting links from other sites, since it's obvious that your site is of high quality.

10 Risk-free Trust Building Methods – Content-driven links are the most effective ones

• Link baiting
• Guest blogging
• Article submission/marketing
• Web 2.0 contents
• Build/buy quality sites
• Sponsorships
• Contests
• Social media profiles
• Widget bait
• Resource link request

How about community engagement through Blog Comments?

Blog commenting is a very powerful link building technique, since it’s the easiest way to sculpt your site’s Pagerank. Though, the risk from this artificial method in getting links to your site is very high as well. To give you a much clearer view on how to really utilize blog comments on your SEO campaign, you first need to know where it’s really best to be used.

Blog comments’ purposes in your campaign should only be:

• To build relationships with other related site/blog owners.
• To pass through Pagerank juice from dofollow blogs with high PR.
• To have your pages indexed by search engines.
• Do not use this technique in hopes of getting your keywords rank higher on SERPs. Use your name or your brand as anchor texts in leaving comments, to avoid from being flagged as spam. However, whenever there's an opportunity to use your keywords as anchor text, then do so (through KeywordLuv and Commentluv enabled blogs), but don't overdo it!
• In getting your brand recognized in the community as an expert.
• To neutralize the balance of your dofollow and nofollow external links. If you'll try to get nofollow links, it's best to get links from 100% relevant pages with PR 4 and above (your targeted keyword should be mentioned in the title page and body as much as possible to get better scores from it).

Bonus Tricks

Ebook bait

This one is very effective especially in getting links from your competitors without them knowing it. Is it black? I think not, since you own the PDF file and you’ve just allowed people to download it and put it on their website. Ok, so how does this works?

First is to make an extremely informative/useful Ebook (price lists for physical products are usually the easiest to have as bait), then submit it to several PDF directories. You can also post it on your own site/blog, though your competitors will be certain to think that you have links to your site in it, so I suggest doing the first one instead.

On your PDF, include links pointing to your site (you may use keywords as anchor texts here), and then hide them. You can just hide them by just removing the underline and changing the text color into black when making the content. Once you publish it into a PDF and have submitted it to PDF directories, crawlers will be able to fetch those hidden links through the source code, well that will also work on the sites who’ll be unfortunate to download your PDF (your competitors, most probably).

Do you think it’s black? You decide. But as for me, by only submitting it to PDF directories, it’s clear that the intent was to build trust through information to those who’ll be able to read it (hypocrite!).

Dead-link bait

Warning: this task is time consuming.

Step 1: Pick an authority blog on your niche.

Step 2: Scan their pages for dead links (links on their blog posts/pages directing to dead pages)

Step 3: Create some content on your blog/site that’s very relevant to the dead link.

Step 4: Email the site owner/manager of the authority blog/site to notify him/her about the dead link

Step 5: Wait for the response before suggesting your newly created page as an alternative for the dead link.

Well, as you can see, you have first tried to earn the site owner’s trust by letting him know that something is wrong on his site. The crucial part is getting that link replacement, so you still need to be patient on this one.

Link Magnetism

An advanced search marketing concept in which you emotionally reward or give incentive to the linker. Trust, image and personality play a huge part on this tactic. Strategic preparations are also needed to be able to attract people to this new length of bait.

You can read more about this strategy here – How to become a link magnet.

Hint: That’s a form of trust building as you can see. I’m directing you to a highly informative and trusted content.

Author Bio PR Sculpting

Include other external pages/posts (interview, review, special mention, contributor, sponsor, etc…) wherein your brand or name has been mentioned when making your author bio for guest blog posting and/or article marketing. This is exceptionally advantageous in improving your site’s Pagerank – as explained by Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz.org – particularly if the external pages you’ll include are from authority sites that can gain its own page rank.

Of course, when these pages where you were mentioned are getting the link juice from your guest posts, it will in turn pass the pagerank juice to your own site (given that you have a link to your site from those mentions).

Advantage: You’re already showing how other people trust you through special mentions, and of course it adds up the trust level that your new readers/customers will see in you.

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Jason Acidre is a Marketing Consultant for Affilorama and Traffic Travis, Link Development Manager at SEO-Hacker, and a freelance Search Strategist. Also the sole author of Philippines' premier SEO blog.

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Yes, you read me. Nobody cares about your products or services (except you). What people do care about are the benefits they can get from your products or services and the ways to solve their problems.

A lot of TV commercials, printed advertising materials, websites, social media marketing strategies, etc actually inform their customers about products or services features rather than telling their customers how and what their products or services can do for their customers. As I always say, every single marketing campaign you launch, every single brochure, every single flyer or every single poster you print, every website you build or every blog you setup, you need to answer two big marketing questions – "Why Me" and "Why Now".

To answer "Why Me", you don't tell people how great your companies are or how great your CEOs are, but rather you have to differentiate yourselves from your competitors on how your products or services can bring benefits and solve people's problems. After people have decided to buy from you, you have to answer the second question – "Why Now". How you can solve people's problems NOW, what benefits your products or services you can bring to people NOW! If you fail to answer the questions, your conversion rate would be very low compared to those companies which are able to answer the questions.

For Search Engine Optimization, even if you are able to rank your website 1st place on Google for very competitive keywords, but your websites don't bring out the messages of benefits that your customers can get, you would have lower conversion rates.

Same goes to social media marketing, if your blogs, your Facebook Fan Pages, your Twitter accounts and your Linkedin groups. If you fail to focus on your readers or your customers, you would fail in long term.

Remind yourselves next time before you started another marketing campaign – How my products or services can help customers!

 

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Need help in doing internet marketing in Malaysia, why not contact us at 017 24 30 307 (Kent) or via contact form

Internet marketing is about building relationship. If you still doubt about it, read my true story.

I was a shy guy and I didn't like to socialize. I would rather sit in front of computer for whole day to do my work than going out to do marketing. I thought doing internet marketing was more than enough for my company sales. But I was wrong.

I started doing my business as web developing business. Initially, I did get some sales from doing internet marketing. I listed my service on Lelong.com.my, on Mudah.my, etc, the response was quite good.

But everything changed when I started offering internet marketing consultation. Search engine optimization and social media marketing changed my life.

Search Engine Optimization Changed My Life
There are two very important things you have to do in search engine optimization – Keep updating your website with quality content and get quality backlinks (building authority). As I blogged before, building links are building friendship. The more links I built, the more I realized I actually built friendship through conversation (comments) on blogs and forums. I slowly realized, in order to build my authority offline, I needed to do the same thing as well. I needed go to out and talk to people. I needed to position myself as an expert offline. I read few books that really help me, e.g. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carniegie. I learnt to how communicate with people, what not to talk and what not to talk.

Social Media Marketing Changed My Life
Except SEO, social media marketing is a must have marketing strategy for your companies. When I started using social media e.g Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and blog, I realized that relationship between people even closer compared to link building. This is especially true for blog and linkedin. Through social media, I get to know a lot of friends which I have never met before share the same interest. Some of them are from western countries and some of them are from Asia. All I have to do is do the same thing to build my own social circle offline to get the same result. I started attending seminar, talk and group discussion. My life changed.

Both SEO and social media marketing made me feel more confident than before. I get even more sales both offline and online.

Human relationship is everywhere, for example family relationship, friendship, romantic relationship and business relationship. We need to build it relationship online and offline. As best selling book tells, concentrate on the relationship, not the technologies.
If you need to know how to build relationship offline and online, read these few books below.

- How to Win Friends and Influence People – Dale Carniegie
- Everyone Communicate, Few Connect – John C. Maxwell
- Groundswell – Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff

If you think internet is technology, think again!

 

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Need help in doing internet marketing in Malaysia, why not contact us at 017 24 30 307 (Kent) or via contact form

Below is the infographic from SEO Book and By Jess on how the evolving algorithm shapes the web.

Click the image to enlarge

Source: How the evolving algorithm shapes the web

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Need help in doing internet marketing in Malaysia, why not contact us at 017 24 30 307 (Kent) or via contact form

One of the most important factors for your websites search engine ranking is link building. Is link building boring? Yes, most Search Engine Optimizers know it. It was boring for me, but it isn't now.

Why?

From my point of view, each link that I want to build is a great chance for me to get to know a friend. The more links I build, the more friends I know (Thanks God for letting me to know that). It won't be boring anymore when you know each day to build three links for your websites, you actually get to know three new friends from all around the world.

I build my friendship with Jessica Lee from Bruce Clay through their blog, Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook. I build my relationship with Search Engine Watch on Twitter. I get to know a lot of friends on my blog. I even build friendship through Youtube when I commented on one's video.

Facebook just hit 700 million users few weeks ago. But 700 million users are meaningless to you if you don't know how to build your own social circles or virtual communities. You don't have to know all 700 million users, you just need to build your own social circles or your own highly targeted markets. It is meaningless to you if you have 100, 000 fans for your Facebook Fan Pages but you don't even talk to them. Your Facebook Fan Pages are useful if only you have close relationship with them.

Compared to Facebook, you can even build closer relationship between members on Linkedin and Twitter (since my business is B2B, this is my experience between Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter, but if your businesses are B2C, you may experience better relationship on Facebook compared to Linkedin and Twitter).

This is human world, only human helps human, machine won't help human. It is human relationship will help in your internet marketing.

I really appreciate what Google has done for us. Google keep changing its algorithm to help us in our internet marketing. We should thanks Google for that.

And who knows, a friendship may turn to romantic relationship! Hahaha! I hope my girlfriend doesn't read this but I am loyal to her! :)

 

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Need help in doing internet marketing in Malaysia, why not contact us at 017 24 30 307 (Kent) or via contact form