SEO Tactics Die, But SEO Never Will

This article isn’t about review for broadening our brand; it’s all about why we think every statement of SEO's termination misses some foundation about our future.

The Essence of Search

The internet is so large that even Google get weary of counting and it’s increasing in size exponentially. It’s been five years Google has notified the trillion mark, and the article suggests that URL changes now make the potential indexed page count theoretically infinite.

We can't simply print out the internet and read it at our spare time. We need a filter - a way to sieve and classify our collected content and that's basically all that search is. However search develops gradually or whatever happens to Google, the extension of human knowledge is accelerating. Unless we endure a technical deluge, we will need search in particular form for the rest of human history.

Searchers and Searches

Until search exists, there will be two groups of people: 1) People want to search some things and 2) People who want to be found in the search or both and the people who want to be found could be businesses, governments, etc., but for each search there will be some essence who wants themselves to be in good position in search engines.

They want to be established in search which isn't new or unique to online search. What’s unlike to online search is that the process has become so complex that automated techniques governs who gets found, and as the range of knowledge grows, that's not about to alteration. The end result, whenever a system controls who will be found in search and the people who understand that system well sufficiently to help being end up on the results.

This goes across manipulative, black hat practices - data needs to be give a pattern, regulations complied with, and many flinders put into place to make sure that the information should be systems friendly that make a systematic list and filter it. As time passes these systems will get more refined, but they will never be absolute. As long as the search exists, we need experts who can optimize data so that it can be found without difficulty.

SEO Is Not One Tactic

When we say "SEO Is Dead!”, we’re normally reacting to the latest tactical fad or notice from Google. Finally, we can say that SEO is not one strategy and however Google at present dominates the market but SEO never live and die with Google. There's no question that search is changing, and our diligence is hardly out of its state. In the broad feeling, though, the necessity for people who create good information and attract people to that data will outlast any single tactic, any single SEO expert, and even any search engine.

New Feature in Adwords: Sitelink Descriptions

   Google Adwords is introducing new feature called sitelink extensions. You can add descriptions to the sitelinks which displays along with your ads. You can be able to easily click on the page which is mostly relevant to you and helps advertiser by reducing irrelevant clicks. In February 2012, sitelinks with further details are shown in the ads but they were pulled from other ads in the campaign.

   At present Google allows advertisers to mention the specific text advertisers to appear in the sitelink descriptions. Advertisers can also control the copy of sitelinks and what appears on enhanced ads. They will also be specific in choosing what text should appear.

   If your campaign is not converted into enhanced campaign then this option will not be active. If your campaign has been upgraded to enhanced campaign you can see the description field while you create or edit sitelink.

   Below is the screenshot for adding new descriptions to edit existing sitelinks or creating new sitelinks:

Tech Specs:

   The character limit of link name in sitelink is 25 characters. Both the descriptions 1 and 2 can have 35 characters. You can use 95 characters for sitelink extension. Sitelinks should not be similar as others which are in the same adgroup or campaign or ad and also should not use keyword insertions.

   For example, you can see how sitelink descriptions appear in search results for the keyword ses san francisco:

   The click-through rates are high for the ads which appear with sitelinks with additional details. These sitelinks provide additional information which will be useful and relevant for searchers. You can add up to 4 sitelinks in a text ad.

   Using these sitelink extensions you can expect high click through rate and quality of traffic from your campaign and increase in conversions. So start upgrading your accounts and use the new sitelinks with descriptions.

Five Ways To Get Response When SEO Clients Are Unresponsive

In this business world, clients are busy with their multiple responsibilities. So this might be one of the reasons for not responding to your SEO efforts. In such situation in order to drag the minimum response from the busy clients there are few tactics to be followed.

The following are the five tactics that you can follow up to get response from unresponsive clients:

1. Check and buildup existing content assets:

If you want to get a new content on to site, check for the existing assets available for promoting it to clients’ site. Look up for most visited posts, widgets, highlighted content etc. With this analysis you will get an idea about linkable content assets on blogs. Also you can find with tools like majestic seo, ahref's and open site explorer. With these you can come to know the links to the particular site. You can also check specific traffic in referral traffic of webmaster analytics.

2. Check and buildup existing press announcements and leaderships:

You can check up for existing press announcements and leadership profiles
to find opportunities. Check out the new events that didn’t drag the press but it is useful to target the resource oriented outreach. Have a glance over company leaderships.

3. Competitive link research:

Identify the circumstances with competitor's sites to get an outreach. There are few tools to identify where your competitor's having links like SEO book's hub-finder tool, the link research tool, competitive link finder tool. Apart from these, you can also check up with these resources like:
i. http://www.buzzstream.com/blog/how-to-use-buzzstream-with-the-competitive-link-finderfrom-seomoz.html
ii. http://www.johnfdoherty.com/competitor-link-prospecting-microsoft-excel/
iii. http://searchengineland.com/the-link-builders-guide-to-analyzing-serp-dominators-for-linkopportunities-21076

4. Find out citation that aren’t links:

With the analysis of citation you can identify the brand citations which may not include links. There are few ways to find citations and can be converted to useful actual links, so that you should use Google alerts, buzz stream social monitoring tools and SEO Moz's fresh web explorer.

5. Guest posts placed on clients behalf:

Whenever your client signed off on your guest posts, this could be a better way to get quality links with client’s involvement. If you are not having idea on this, you can opt for another resources like:
i. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/five-common-guest-posting-mistakes-how-to-avoidthem/38959/
ii. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/5-important-post-penguin-guest-post-prospectingquestions/49672/
iii. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/quick-ways-to-choose-better-guest-post-opportunitieswith-audience-social-metrics/59499/
iv. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/37-mind-blowing-secrets-about-guest-blog-posts/61220/

Few Reasons Why Small Businesses Often Fail With AdWords

   For few advertisers managing adwords campaigns offer a challenging task. Small business marketers don’t have an idea about how Google Adwords works. Lack of knowledge and experience in adwords field is one of the biggest reasons for most of the advertisers to fail in online marketing.

By avoiding below six biggest mistakes you can have a better chance of achieving success in your business.

1. One Campaign with One Ad Group For All Keywords

For new advertisers, to setup and manage adwords account properly is a time taking task. But with a planned and decent budget you can easily be successful in adwords campaigns.

An Adwords campaign is about relevancy. Creating a campaign with one ad group and lumping together all the keywords in one ad group is a waste of money. Keywords play an important role for your ads. If you group all keywords into one ad group, few keywords become high priority to the ad group while others are not.

This is the biggest mistake most of the advertisers make to boost impressions. You can use tools like webmaster Wordtracker Free Suggestion Tool to find which keywords to begin with.

If you create more ad groups while setting up a new campaign, the more response you will get from the visitors.

2. Limited By Budget

At the beginning stage, conversions and ROI are the important factors for visibility.  When your campaign budget limit reaches to the end before midnight, your ads will stop being enabled until midnight.

It displays your ads when you reset your budget.  Small business owners have to really care about visibility factor. By reducing your budget, you will get low position.

3. Too Many Changes All The Time

If you keep on changing your adwords campaign settings, adwords account performs bad and reaches worse.  Optimizing adwords account is necessary but making changes on regular basis will be a bad practice. You need to optimize accounts based on few statistics.

 4. Wrongful Implementation of Conversion Tracking

With the improper implementation of adwords conversion tracking instructions with analytics instructions may lead you to not get exact information of your adwords campaigns. You need to implement conversion tracking code into the landing page for tracking return on spend.

5. Only Using Broad Match

Many of the marketers don't have an idea about keywords in adwords have different types. In adwords, the standard type is Broad Match.  It has expansion option that makes your ads enable for keywords that has relevant meaning.

For example, for lawn care services keyword, broad match type enable your ads for following queries:
lawn moving job
how to move a lawn
lawn mower maintenance

Advertisers feel working with adwords is simple and easy when they understand how adwords play prominent in online ecosystem.  Having a basic knowledge on Adwords will give you a better chance of achieving success in online marketing.
 

Attribution Modeling Works Effectively & Smarter in 3 Ways

          Digital marketers main target is “impulsive buyers” that is who just do not bother about information or details related to store and purchase what they see at first with in impulse (no time).  The majority of marketers evaluate hard work of achievement through first and last click conversion of these impulsive buyers.
   If there would be high number of impulsive buyers then marketing would be very easy for digital marketers. But enormous number of buyers will first get information about the store then browse the products, compare prices and then purchase products by becoming customer of that particular store.

Use of Attribution Modeling:

When the above scenario is applied to online world it can be illustrated as below. First time when a buyer views a display ad then he just does not blindly purchase the product. Because it is the first time he heard about this online store, but second time when he comes across your text ad or banner he will just consider your store in to list. But before his purchase starts he does searching as [your brand] + “reviews” and [your brand] + “return policy”. Then after analyzing site thoroughly he starts purchasing from the site and bookmarks it for future purchases.
Above steps can be viewed in analytics in the following way:

From the above table we can make a point that marketers rely highly on last-click conversion attribution when making decisions about budget and resources. This is because digital marketing and attribution marketing are too complex and also digital markets are under extreme stress to produce high ROI with less span of time. But in this present day everything is carried out in online world, sales are done with online ads. Online ads are carried out on optimization of campaigns and allocating budget quickly as the data arrives.
It is the best method to carry out attribution modeling rather than keeping our hopes on last click. Better to work on it as soon as possible. Here are three ways of attribution modeling that helps to work smarter and effectively.

1. Real picture is shown to you:

As we know that a customer will never make decision in vacuum, so does the marketers never rely on one digital channel. Results will be limited if evaluation is solely based on last click conversion in all channels.

                 From above table we can make out that for display ads, assisted conversions are higher than last click conversions while in search, last click conversions are high than assisted conversions.  The channels that provide assisted conversions are that which appear at someplace in the path of consumers’ purchases but are not always the last exposure the consumer has to your brand prior to purchasing. Channels such as display are stronger in leading consumers down the purchase funnel while others are good in closing sales like search.

             We can conclude that interaction of display ads and search ads will be more powerful for a site than individual.

2. Making Higher Impact Campaign Optimizations

To yield good results we need to focus our attention on optimization with help of attribution modeling and also helps in avoiding fixing things that are not broken. If we find any changes in performance then before we take any change it is important to consider interaction in broader digital marketing portfolio. Let us consider an example where ROI of search campaign has declined over past 4 weeks and also display budgets are very low at present.

 So if we just rely on search data then we fail to revive campaigns performance because as there display budget has not been considered and had demand on lowering keywords. Below is the table that gives results of both search and display conversion combination.

               By evaluating and analyzing combinations of various working channels in conversion path reports will help us to think various ways of optimization that leads to a privileged impact on overall performance. It is much important to spend time on search campaign before expending amount on display campaign and vice versa. This is the process where we can save time and boost performance.

3. Achieving A more Unified Digital Strategy:

Above are the two examples that illustrate, digital channels work in combination even though how much importance we put on last click conversions. Once we gain the knowledge of incorporating this in to our daily routine then we can create campaigns that yield better results when unified.  A precise estimation of first- and last-click conversions, as well as consumer paths to purchases, will give us more insight into the consumer experience.

        If we provide consumers with the information they need at each step of their purchase decision, even though we take a narrow approach we will be able to see an increase in overall conversions.

So we can conclude that campaigns should not be optimized for impulsive shoppers but for vast majority of consumers who think before they purchase. To get new customers to our site, attribution models with path analysis and channel interaction are highly important for brands. 

Structured Data: Content, Rich Snippets & Authorship vs. Author Rank

Over the past few months, webmasters have noticed a rapid change in search as well as in social media marketing techniques. This evolution has brought a change in the way webmasters produce and consume content and data.

1. Relevant content and structured data

Data exists in different formats such as unstructured, semi-structured & structured data. Before stepping into the structured data and markup in search, as the first step you need to build up relevant, targeted, and engaging content.
When you’re thinking about marking up the content on your website, you have to consider both structured data and content conversations factors primarily. So, that search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing indexes your content in a unique way. Google clearly instructed webmasters to focus mainly on quality content along with structured data in GWT during panda updates.
As a marketer, your job is to ensure whether site is visible and have relevant results in SERPS. In addition, both structured data and semantic markup allows search engines to crawl more effectively by providing websites data and content structure.
Before crawling website, Semantic markup enables search engines to understand about the content format.
As well as, structured data enables search engine to understand about what the website content is about. In addition, it makes users to look at the value of website before they begin to click and visit the website via rich snippets in the SERPS.

2. Rich Snippets and Schema.org

To help searchers to access relevant search results, search engines employed additional rich information in the snippets. Through this marketers can get high CTRs and revenue from search engines.
Rich snippets such as reviews and pricing information allow users to quickly search for precise information. To get rich content information in snippet, search engines rely on markup on the source page while crawling.
For search engine spiders there are various formats to approach markup pages. Google supports formats such as microdata, microformats and rdf-a. Mostly all search engines including Google uses schema.org markups to provide relevant results for users.

3. Authorship

Within the search results, verified online websites will rank high when compared to sites without such online verification, which in turn users click on top (verified) results.
Search and social media factors have distributed locally and globally across multiple devices such as smart phones, videos, images etc. The content which you create must be unique and relevant based upon your channel distribution.
Authorship is more useful social signal because social signal affects website rank. Over the last few years, the social graph has been increased extensively when compared to the link graph.

Building Authorship

While building, ensure whether you’re online content is properly linked to g+ profile.
Post your content on number of important sites that are relevant to your website.
Once again check whether your authored content is properly verified or not.

4.  Author Rank

Both Authorship and Author rank techniques are different. Through authorship you can connect your website anywhere on the web. With author rank, you can potentially gain a score for your website content. Ranking scores are determined through trust and how your content is shared among web. The word Author rank mainly comes from SEO space.

Link Removal Request Tips for Webmasters & Business Owners

Why do people ask for links to be removed?

   The site owners who have received unnatural links warning from Google will send the link removal requests. The site receives a warning that it is penalized and will not perform well in search. To remove penalty, the site owners should remove all the unnatural links. Site owners also go for link removal requests so as to recover from penguin. If you send an email asking to remove the link it seems you are trying to get away from the manual linking penalty.

   Most of them think that unnatural links will be on spam and low quality sites. The sites which have done a lot of reciprocal linking and used number of advertorial links got unnatural links penalties.

Why would you ask for a totally natural link to be removed?

   Some of them will ask for the link to be removed even though it is a natural link. You may receive email request for the natural link to be removed for various reasons. In most of the cases the person who asks for the link to be removed is not the one who got the links to be penalized. The site owners are appointing the persons who are experienced in SEO to work on the unnatural link penalties.

   When you analyze your link profile, it is difficult to examine whether a link is natural or not. If you are not confident about the link then you would ask for the link to be removed. The process of removing penalty of a site which has high number of links either from links or resource pages of other site is the linking scheme. Many of the links may be reciprocal links and also paid. You can mark these types of links as "resource page" link while analyzing your link profile and some of the resource pages links are natural.

   One of the reasons to get natural link removal request is if you use an automated tool to remove the penalty. Some of the tools can mark a link as unnatural if it is from low page rank sites and also contains keyword as anchor text. But all the sites which have low page rank are not spam. These are the reasons for natural links to get a link removal request by mistake.

How should webmasters respond to link removal requests?

   When you send emails asking for links to be removed you need to be polite. You may also receive some nasty responses from the site owners. One of the response from them would be that link from their site is not unnatural. Some of them respond as "you only made the links and why should I remove them?" If you think that the link is natural and should not be removed then the site owners should email "This link is the one that was not created by an SEO. I liked your site and wanted to link to it. Do you still want to remove it?" This would be helpful to keep good link.

Some tips for business owners sending link removal emails:

   When you send emails for link removal request you need to follow few things which can increase the chance of getting your link removed.

Be Polite:

   If site owner feels that your emails are threatening then they refuse to remove your link. So, be polite while sending link removal requests.

Explaining that the linking site is not at fault:
   You can include the line in the emails as "Please know that your site's integrity and business practices are not in question here". By this you can let the owner know that you are not criticizing them for client's unnatural links problem.

Where possible include a link to the page that contains your links:
   You can include the link to the page containing your links in each mail but your time burden increases if you have large number of sites to contact. So you can give link wherever possible or cut and paste or bcc to the list of webmasters. You can improve the chances of getting your link removed if you give the link where it is in the site. You can also ask the webmaster to mail if they need entire list of links so that all those links can be removed if you include full list of links.

Don't spam the site owners with crazy number of emails:
   If you send emails to the site owners a number of times your email address may be spammed. If you didn't get response you can send email to an alternate email id or submit the contact form from the site.

Data Centric Approach For 404 Optimization

To find the 404 error pages for few pages it is not hard but it is very critical when it comes to find out thousands of 404 pages.
To sort out this problem there are two metrics, to have a glance over back-links which are the quality links to your site and landing page visits of your site in analytics.

Pull Landing Page Data

Prefer to check the landing pages in analytics Content > Site Content > Landing Pages.

Get Your Backlinks Data

Check the back links to your site using avail of different tools like
Open Site Explorer
Majestic
Ahrefs
Google Webmaster Tools (Traffic > Links to Your Site > Your Most Linked Content > More)
There are two metrics to find out huge number of 404 pages. They are:
Screaming Frog
GWT(Google Webmaster Tool)

1. By using Screaming Frog:

With the use of Screaming frog, find out 404 errors after running a scan of the site, go to Response codes > filter:client error(4XX) > export.

2. By using Google Webmaster Tools (GWT):

To remove 404 pages with Google webmaster tools, go to health > crawl errors > URL errors > Web or Mobile : Not found > Download

Remove downloads related to csv except the list of 404 URLs and save the file as an xlsx file.

By this data-centric approach, you can easily identify the address of back links and you can easily fix it.

An Easy Win with Local Link Building

        Link building is done regularly by SEOs but they ignore local link building in link building campaigns. Local link building helps in gaining grip with in competitive search verticals, also helps in driving and converting relevant traffic. Importance of optimizing links of local searches is that it aids in building national industry links by using geo-specific anchor text and get great links from local authorities.

       Local links are important because it is the simpler and easiest way to knock into Google’s effort which aims to provide deeper information about any site in their SERP’s. Also we can see the effect of local listings in SERP for organic spots as there will be crowding in search results.

Creating a Local Mind Set:

The essential step in creating local mind set is that there is need to launch a local link building campaign and build local authority links. In this campaign it is highly important to build links relevant to our industry along with measure of authority. Because in local link building campaigns, measure of authority is considered as important point.

Following are two vital and primary questions that are to be analyzed while beginning a local link building campaign:

1. With-in the community who has highest authority

2. Do my site have any interaction with any of the local:

Businesses
Service Providers
Charities
Media organizations
Social Events
Educational Institutions
Groups
Societies etc.,

If we work out on above points then we can create great opportunities in local localities.

Local Authorities:

There is a need to find out local authorities in community for the following two reasons:

1. To clue Google in to our own authority, it is utmost important to build a link from the authority site to our site.

2. To achieve authority in local community what are the methods they are following and also further our own detection of local authority.

In above two steps first one should be goal and second one will be an extra “above and beyond” depending on how involved we are in local community with our interest in achieving authority. First step will be achieved only if you reach them and build relation with local authorities.

To achieve a link from local authority there is a need to create positive interaction between our company and authority, community. Some of the possibilities that help in interacting in positive manner with the community or local authority are:

It is a good step in sponsoring or participating at an event where they are member.

Inviting local authorities by creating a community event.

If there is a possibility then we can even employ there services and give a positive feedback.

Creating and promoting content that will be useful to the community such as local maps, pet friendly locations within community, a local entertainment guide or a map, review of nearby great outdoor opportunities.

Give positive news about your company whenever there is opportunity in local community.

Above are the few suggestions that help in gaining a link from local authority. But solution to local link building is that every campaign will be special based upon industry, locality and current standing within the community. Thinking imaginatively will constantly yield us with the best results.

While step 2 is important for understanding, level of involvement is important in achieving local authority. But the best way to get good amount of local links is to gain local authority. Following are some of the actions that help to create authority within local community:

Investing time, money and energy in community.

Providing helpful news, information in community.

Leading to discussions in community on current topics.

Taking a step to organize community events.

Multiple ties throughout the community.

Local link building involves around finding local authorities, creating positive interaction, and bringing your relationships into the online world. Creativity and unique thinking will help in building high quality, great links that will never achieved with any tool.


   

Why Asking StumbleUpon To Remove Your Links Is Dumb

StumbleUpon is receiving regular requests from people asking for it to take away their links to their sites, as the site owners are not comfortable in connecting to from a popular and long-standing social media sharing site is somehow hurting them with Google. The linksanity sorrowfully continues.

Ever since Google stepped up its onset on bad links, in specific with its Penguin Update, there’s been panic in some quarters about getting links removed. It’s not about taking off all the links but about removing bad links.

StumbleUpon is an established, good social media site. This site helps people to share links with others, in a channel surfing approach.

That is a much diverse situation than acquiring links from article websites that frequently appear to have no other intention but to let people gain links. These types of links, where they don’t obtain and subsist mainly for the intentions of just having a link, such type of links have tended to Google targets.

It is true that Google does want people hit by its Penguin updates to remove bad links from the sites. Google doesn’t want people to just depend on the disavow link tool. But asking smo sites to remove your link is a no purpose in it.

What’s Google’s judgment on this? It wouldn’t comment on StumbleUpon especially, but Matt Cutts who is in the leading position on Google’s web spam team advised that people should use the disavow tool if they can’t remove a link they want to from a site.

As for StumbleUpon, it’s not overwhelm with these requests, featured them as “handful” per week. But they’re really unnecessary. If you indeed don’t want your links on the site, you should use the disavow tool. But you should put your effort into other areas.

Ways to Evolve Link Building into SEO after Google Penguin 2013 Update:

Penguin 2.0 which has been rolled out is more powerful than the 2012 Penguin release. This again affects owners of small online businesses which are purely dependent only on SEO. To with stand the effect of Penguin 2013, small businesses have to follow the same messages from Google:

A great website has to be built.
Content should be amazing with high end-user value.
Appearance of visitors will be magical.

In real, visitors never come magically but SEO efforts make them to visit the site. That means a site need to have organizational promotion which is possible with SEO such as gaining high ROI than any other marketing strategies.

Long Live Online Marketing:

Webmaster still put their efforts to shift their link building activities in to real time SEO strategy. But now in 2013 SEO is an integral of online marketing and is no longer a standalone activity. Previously SEO was about tuning a website for optimal consumption by spiders where as in present SEO means earning recognition, social spread and backlinks from best sites with the help of content marketing.
In comparison, SEO was one-time but now it is on-going. It was isolated but now it is integrated and it was technical where as now it is strategic.

Real SEO:

Practical activities need to be done frequently to achieve Real SEO and this will be the prescription for those who are feared of Penguin 2013. Following are the tips to be taken care of:
Identify the demand of audience continually.
Content Marketing
Work on Brand
Syndicate

Summary:

Penguin 2013 feared many small business owners who depend on SEO, but as per now SEO is one of the best online marketing channels. Real SEO makes a path for those business owners who wish to invest in long-term SEO. Real SEO makes webmasters to prepare their sites for future updates of Penguin also. It also helps in well-researched, end-user focused content marketing that provides strong audience value.

Penguin 4 Is Now Live

On May 22nd 2013, Penguin 4 algorithm was updated by Google. In this algorithm, Google used penguin 2 algorithm and technology. This algorithm mainly targets the web spam websites which impacts 2.3% of queries. Google says that it is a new generation of technology that should better stop spam.

Google web spam team head Matt Cutts says, 2.3% of English queries or search terms will be noticeably impacted by penguin 4 update. This change will effect in all language websites all over the world. But the penguin 4 update impact differs from language to language. E.g. languages with more web spam will see more impact.

Previous Penguin Updates:

Penguin updates started from 2012 and continues till now. Below is the previous penguin versions rolled out by Google.

1. Penguin 1 Rolled out on April 24, 2012 (impacting - 3.1% of queries)
2.Penguin 2 Rolled out on May 26, 2012 (impacting - less than 0.1%)
3. Penguin 3 Rolled out on October 5, 2012 (impacting - 0.3% of queries)
4. Penguin 4 Rolled out on May 22, 2013 (impacting - 2.3% of queries)

First update was a basic update. From second version, it focused on data refresh and same basic penguin algorithm. But compared with the previous versions, penguin 4 is a major update by Google.

Penguin 2.0 Goes Deeper, Impacting More Webmasters

Penguin is a major update that goes deeper than the previous penguin updates. This will impact many more SEO's and Google webmasters when compared with the old versions.

Now Google gives a form to tell any web spam sites that you have to report through a form. This means, if you see any spam web site, you can inform to Google, then Google web spam team will check thoroughly and take a discussion on that site. The form is; http://bit.ly/penguinspamreport

Conclusion:

So be steady to face the penguin updates and update your website as per penguin updates. Don't use any black hat techniques as it will effect in the future. My advice is to bring the back links from themed websites and refresh your content regularly in your websites.

New Features in Bing Ads

   Bing Ads gets few updates like new filter options in the campaigns, search query reports, visibility of appealable ads and keyword competition values. Bing advertisers in UK had the feature for keyword suggestions. Bing new features updates are given below:

New Filter Options:

The advertisers can search and filter by using new filtering options which is under the Opportunities tab in the Campaigns page. You can see keyword suggestions and a set of bids which meets the criteria of the campaign without looking for any individual suggestions.

The following screenshot shows the new filter option in the opportunities tab.

Improved Search Query Reports:

  Search Query Report is crucial and vital tool for every Campaign Manager. You can use this report to identify the various opportunities for the new keywords and adjust their bids to maximize ROI and also to control the search traffic which is engaged with your campaign. You can find stop words and additional characters in the new search query report of Bing Ads.

  You can find some of the examples of stop words and additional characters in the below screenshot:

  Search query report would be helpful for the advertisers to refine keyword and negative keyword lists and enables them to see the performance of individual search term and optimize them.
   For example let us see the difference between previous and new search query reports.
  When "learn golf" keyword is targeted and golf teaching center at Seattle is bidding this keyword the search terms such as "learn golf in Seattle", "where to learn golf in Seattle" and "how to learn golf in Seattle" generates clicks. The previous search query reports would only show the search term "learn golf Seattle" but the new search query reports include the stop words.

More Visibility with Appealable Ads:

   Earlier, the advertiser could not appeal the ad if an ad was approved in few countries and disapproved in other countries. But now the ads whose status is Active Appealable can be appealed. Bing shows the Active Limited error message outside the status column separately for the ads which are approved in some countries and disapproved in other countries. The appealable keyword status has been turned over to Active Appealable to know whether an ad is active or not.

Keyword Competition Insight:

     A new column for competition scores to specific keywords has been added under opportunities tab in the Campaigns page.

   Advertisers can view the keyword competition values and know which are less and more competitive using this new column. The average number of advertisers who are participating and getting the impressions for the keywords in various aspects is the competition score.

How to Use New Keyword Planner Tool From Google AdWords

Google AdWords has announced a new tool that integrates functionality of both google keyword and adwords traffic estimator tools to guide advertisers for finding target keywords for their new PPC campaigns or ad groups and this new tool is named as "Keyword Planner".

The new tool replaces both keyword tool and Adwords traffic estimator tool. This tool helps you to choose bids and budgets for your new or existing campaign. If you are new to the online advertising, this keyword planner tool will help you for a successful campaign and this has wizard type interface feature.
To start up campaign with Keyword Planner tool, you have to pick one of the following cases:
Search for keyword and ad group ideas
Enter or upload keywords to get estimates
Multiply keyword lists to get estimates

1. Search for keyword and ad group ideas 

The new Keyword Planner tool behaves like a standard keyword research tool and it provides relevant keywords for searching and picking to add it to your adwords account. It provides features like:
Keyword Search Option: You can pick up new keywords to add to your new campaigns based on following factors such as, product/service you are marketing, your landing page URL and your product category.
Keyword statistics and performance estimates: You need to specify options such as region, language and search network to get accurate PPC results for each keyword.
Keyword filters: You can even exclude or include the keywords that exist already in your account. Based on various terms such as average CPC and monthly search volume, you can reduce your keyword list.
Group view and list view: Through Keyword Planner you can view keywords as list which is there in keyword tool or you can view them in a group according to the relevancy.
With these features the new keyword planner tool looks like more robust than previous tools.

2. Getting Estimates & Reviewing Your Plan

You have to give information to Google to customize your estimates because keyword volume and bid estimates are based on budget, bid and location. Keyword Planner displays Clicks, Impressions, Average ad position and costs according to estimation report.

3. Create Campaigns Based On Your Own Keyword List

In Keyword Planner tool, you can start the new campaign with your own keyword list instead of using Google Keyword Suggestion Tool. You can transfer your own keyword list into the Keyword Planner interface and can do all the same keyword researching tasks like make use of keywords, get estimates, filtering keywords and more.

4. New Keyword Mash-Up Capability

Final way of running through keyword Planner is to mash-up multiple keyword list and this new feature is not available in Google keyword tool or traffic estimator. Consider an example, you can multiply bunch of colors and  names to get a combined single list and then clicking on the Get Estimates button switches you to the workbench area.

Conclusion

The new keyword tool supports different workflows for creating ad groups and campaigns based on your existing lists. It provides a reliable user experience by integrating functionalities of keyword selection, grouping, analysis and filtering aspects of the keyword selection workflow.

This new tool currently available in few adwords accounts. Check your tools and analysis bar in adwords account for keyword planner. Google says that they are planning to roll out this tool to more accounts as soon as possible.

How to Improve Your Outreaching Emails Response Rates

   In modern SEO world the tools such as Gmail, link prospector and others play a prominent role as website owners and content producers are dependent on most of the part of link building. In link building, sending and receiving quality emails plays vital role as it has impact on the response rate of email. Even though you are sending emails to acquire links, quality matters a lot.

To improve your email quality and response rates consider the following factors:

1. Use Branded Email:

   On a daily basis most of the people receive emails for direct and indirect links and you may not get response if those emails have free email address from yahoo or Gmail etc. You should try to send emails from your company email address. This shows that the email is originally from the company and not through any bulk email sending software. By using your branded email address it gives trust and chance to open and see your email.

2. Contact People Not Brands:

   You may not get responses for your emails if you do not target right people. It would be difficult to target right people where there are several persons for various jobs in big companies. By targeting right people you can improve the rate of response for your emails. This can be done by using social media sites like Facebook or Twitter to connect with them and email them.

3.Spend Time on the Subject Line:

   Most of the people do not spend time and consider subject line as unimportant. You may not receive the response rate that you look for if you do not spend time in creating the subject line of email. A best subject line must be interesting for recipient to open it and see the message.
Let us see an example for wrong and correct way of subject lines:
Wrong way
Hey checkout this life changing email for you
Right way
Hey Mike, Would appreciate your response on my latest post about link building

4. Personalized, Personalized and Personalized:

   Writing only the name of the recipient in the email is not enough. You need to be personalized by spending time to find about the recipient and write in the email. By this you can increase your outreaching emails response rate.
   For example, your email should be like this:
Hello Mike,

I was going through your blog post last night and it was amazing how you differentiated good content and a great one. The idea of marketing a great content was impressive.

After reading that blog post I thought to write the case study about it to follow your idea. Here is the link of my post [post link]. I would love if you can take some time and share your views about it.

Looking forward to see your comment on the blog post.

Regards,
Lalit.

5. Keep it Simple and Quick:

   In these days people do not have time to read huge content in the email. So, your email should be short and simple. The recipient can read and respond easily if you write an email which is of maximum two paragraphs. If you write long emails the response rate of your emails decreases because people have no time to read such long emails. If you draft your email simple and short you can get response for your outreaching emails quickly.

6. Follow Up Once:

   If you didn't get a response back when you send the email you can follow up the email after 2 days so that the people who forget to reply may see the mail and respond to you. Your follow up email to the recipient should be in a kind way and not irritate the user.

Conclusion:

Sending emails seems to be an easy task but the above factors should be considered when doing it for businesses. Most people forget these important factors by which you can receive higher response rate.

Google Penguin 2.0 Goes Deep - But What Does That Mean?

As we all know that Penguin 2.0 is live and webmasters and SEOs are mostly talking about that. There is some misunderstanding about Penguin 2.0 that drive us absolutely crazy.

Matt Cutts in latest video talks about Penguin 2.0 that how it will be "more extensive" and how it goes deeper and results in more of an impact than Penguin 1.0.

So what does this new update focus on?

Advertorials
Black Hat techniques
Link spam
Hacked sites
Authority

The SEO society is rendering "goes deeper" to signify that Penguin 1.0 only impacted the home pages of a website which is completely untrue. Deeper has nothing to do with that. Those sites which hit by Penguin 1.0 knows very well that how their whole site suffered, not just their home page.

What Matt signifies by "deeper" is that Google is going deeper impact on their index, link graph and other sites will get affected more than the previous update. The impact is not only for a specific web site but also for other general sites.

For example, Ross Hudgens tweeted "Penguin 1.0 targets only homepage, 2 goes much deeper." The Webmaster has confused about it also. It is quite wrong that the impact is only on the home page of sites.

The whole confusion started from, via TWIG, where Matt said that Penguin looks at the home page of the website but it may mean that it analyzed the links of the home page. But anyone who had hit by Penguin noticed that their whole site ranking suffered and not just homepage.

Google Penguin 2.0 Causalities & Reasons Why Sites Got Hit

Google Penguin 2.0 went deeper and had impact in certain small areas very effectively. This Penguin update is a brand new generation of algorithms and has serious effects on web spam.

Does Google Penguin 2.0 Go Deeper on Spammy Links?

Following are Google Penguin 1.0 analysis and issues which resulted in losing traffic and rankings of sites:
If exact match anchor text was used for paid text links.
If there is any spam comments present.
In case if there are any Guest posts on questionable sites.
Article marketing sites.
If there are any links present from dangerous sites.
In this Penguin update Google looked more in to links to other pages apart from links to home page. After Penguin 2.0 update, some of the 13 sites which lost traffic and rankings were examined with more concentration on content and link profiles. There was a point that all these 13 sites uses exact match anchor text heavily and links were aimed at inner pages rather than home page.

Google Penguin 1.0 and 2.0 targets unnatural link profiles and only difference is that penguin 2.0 targets even internal pages rather than just home page.

Google Penguin 2.0 Case Studies:

Two major tools Sistrix and Searchmetrics both have put lists of sites that were affected with Penguin 2.0. Link research tools have taken couple of sites that were affected by Penguin 2.0. Two of these which were analyzed are HOME24.DE and cheapoair.com. These sites have massive drops in search visibility. These both sites have high exact match anchor text keywords and as per Google they are spam sites. But these sites are affected highly than their competitors in their link profiles in various ways due to high usage of exact match anchor text. It is better to remove high number of unnatural links if present in the site before they are disavowed.
Penguin 2.0 is not a manual penalty but it is an algorithmic update. There are still some changes which are to be improved before our site gets penalized.

Data Highlighter Tool

Data highlighter is one of the webmaster tools which make easy for webmasters to markup their pages with structured data. This is a point and click tool which enables to tag the data of your site and it doesn't involve in coding part. Markup data counts name, date, location, image, URL and category. With these markups, the data of your site can be high-lightened and can be indexed easily by Google.

By the help of this tool you can make your site to get crawled by bots in very les time in such a way that it is a point and click tool, you can point and click on one page then Google will make markup pages for your site. If at all you need to markup for more pages then you can use this tool for one page and it instantly markup for entire pages. Upon doing this, these markup pages can be easily identified by search engines and traffic rate can also be increased.

Here are the few steps for how to use the 'Data Highlighter Tool' with Google Webmaster Tools:

1. Login with Google webmaster account and go for the 'Optimization' which is on left menu. Then select the 'Data Highlighter'.

2. Upon selecting this tool, you will notice information regarding tagging and also to click the 'Start Highlighting'.

3. After clicking on the start highlighting, you can get the options for tagging and it’s your choice to highlight the page. Options are like,
I. Tag the page and others to like it
II. Tag only this page

4. Further step is to select the URL of one page. If you select for second option of tagging then select the first page URL of set of pages. If you prefer for first option of tagging then click ‘OK’. Then the page will display which you have selected the URL of a page.

5. Highlight the structure data which you want to highlight and after that right click on the highlighted data.

6. Then go for 'Next' button which is on top right of the page.

7. After that you can get the information, once go through it and proceed further if everything seems correct.

8. Then select 'publish' button which is at top right of the screen.
Once done with above process, Google takes time to list your highlighted markup structure data. Data highlighter mainly extracts the data like events, dates, movies, etc in set of pages or in one page which is a rich snippet and contributes more click through rates (CTR).