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).