SEO is More Than Keyword Targeting, Some Learn the Hard Way

Many SEO companies know that sometimes their clients have in mind that they must rank for a specific keyword. No other options are acceptable for them. And even though you try to tell them that ranking for that keyword will take a great amount of time and effort because of their competition or that ranking for that keyword isn’t worth the effort they think it is, they do not budge.

It can be intensely frustrating (check out this story at Search Engine Journal for a good example) and even if you accept the request by the client, sometimes they are not happy with the results produced even if/when you satisfy their needs. What can be learned from this?

If you need SEO for your site, realize that keyword targeting is still important but is not the ONLY thing SEO does. SEO is about generation of quality traffic. If you focus only on ranking for keywords, you’re missing a lot. When you show up for keywords on the SERPs it’s good as a testament to the work that you’ve done, but are you getting quality traffic for those positions and those keywords?

In many cases the keywords you get better traffic from may not be the keywords you’re actively checking. The best way to find these are to check your Analytics tools to see what people are finding you with on the search engines.

Real SEO brings quality traffic to the site in many different ways, not purely from specific keywords you might be targeting. This has changed especially since the Panda and Penguin updates – overoptimization of specific keywords is penalized even more readily now. So if you’re focusing on just one keyword, that runs a big risk of making all of your rankings worse than they were before, even using what used to be fully functional SEO tactics.

If you do hire a professional SEO team, keep in mind that they should be doing work beyond just trying to rank for specific keywords, and if they don’t, be cautious. And don’t expect rankings to be the only positive results from this work – you should want to get some quality traffic from the work being done. Good rankings is just extra gravy on top that you can look at and be happy about.

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Major Spam Bot Named Grum Taken Down

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Security researchers at FireEye and SpamHaus have shut down a botnet called Grum whose servers were mainly in Panama, Russia and Ukraine. The people controlling the botnet quickly worked to move the command and control servers to secondary servers, but a major server in Panama was successfully shut down.

A researcher at FireEye named Atif Mushtaq said that more than 20,000 computers were still part of the botnet but that after shutting down Grum they would soon be ineffective.

Find out more details on this story at BBC News.

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A Change Being Seen In Demand For Various Tech Experts

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A recent change in the way Google indexes things may have adverse effects on search engine specialists and social media experts. Developers of iOS apps are in high demand, while .NET framework programmers are on the downfall. Google’s algorithm changes have heavily hit demand for SEO experts. Social media expert (aka Facebook and MySpace profile workers) demand has fallen drastically. Microsoft Office Word processing jobs however have had an increase in jobs, although it may be temporary.

Read the full article here:
Tech gigs: iOS apps, HTML5 in; SEO, social media, .Net out – ZDNet (blog)

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Be Cautious With SEO Related to the London 2012 Olympics

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According to rule which was passed this year in G-8 summit about Intellectual Property rights (IPR). As these day’s Olympic are in main showcase, which will be held in UK soon. Many social media sites and other gathered crowd sites have eye on it, so be alert if you are using any type of content which comes in Intellectual Property Right. The main contents comes under it are using theme patents, copyright designs etc. The London Organizing Committee of the Olympic and the paralympic games (LOCOG), has its own eye on the social networking sites. In other term the word “Olympic” can not be used by any online marketing company. The trademarks and other registered themes will only be used by the journalist. This is a try to avoid the misuse of the Olympic content from the wrong people will use it for their own profits rather then in term for the well usage and appropriate information to the crowd through net.

Read the full article here:
What You Should Know About London 2012 SEO and Marketing Campaigns – Search Engine Journal

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How To Use Facebook To Build Rapport

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A Mashable article by social media writer Aaron Lee lists six kinds of posts for building customer engagement via Facebook. From the article’s list, two items primarily involve images: photo albums and requests for photo captions. The latter is one of three types of direct requests, along with fill-in-the-blank posts and open-ended questions. Finally, the article discusses starting a dialogue with customers by posting quotations and sharing helpful tips.

Read the full article here:
6 Posts That Build Engagement on Facebook

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Google Webmaster Tools and Backlinks

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Google Webmaster Tools has always been a way to see some backlinks to your pages on a site you control. They’ve recently made a change to give you a “link download option” where you can download a full list of backlinks to your site and include a column for dates each link was discovered.

This way you can check and see how old your oldest links are as well as what links have surfaced recently.

To find this option, go to your site inside Webmaster Tools, click on Traffic->Links to Your Site. Then from there choose “More >>” under either “Who links the most” or under “Your most linked content”. On the following page you have three options:

  1. Download this table
  2. Download more sample links
  3. Download latest links
The new option is the third in this list. This is where you can get a full list of all the sites Google has listed that link to you, plus the date this was discovered.

You can see pictures and other details at Search Engine Roundtable.

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Facebook Read Receipts: Can See Who’s Watching Your Group Posts

Facebook has now announced a big change to the Facebook Groups component of the site: Read Receipts. This is something that allows anyone to see who exactly has looked at the post/update inside of the group, and works on both standard Facebook and the mobile versions.

This is causing a little bit of a stir and is making some people have concerns about privacy, since the “read receipts” are not optional. Some have gone so far as calling it “creepy”. Whether or not this is something that is taken by the community as a positive change we can only see.

To find out more details about this check this Mashable article by Lauren Indvik.

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Google Analytics Upgrade To The Next Level, Retire Old Version

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Google has finally decided to retire it’s old version of Google Analytics, a web traffic analysis tool that gives website owners detailed information on visitors’ usage patterns for free. For over a year, Google has given users the option to pick between the new and old versions of this program, but is now putting the old version to rest.

Read the full article here:
Google Bids Goodbye to Old Version of Analytics – ValueWalk

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Drop Overhead Costs For Multinational SEO Work

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This looks at some key points for the management of multinational SEO. 1. Monitor your overhead costs! Use micro reports to keep an eye on costs as they occur. 2. What’s driving your traffic? Monitor brand vs. non-brand visits. 3. What phrases do you have the potential to get into the top 3 results for? This is where you need to focus your effort.

Read the full article here:
Tips For Cutting Down Overhead When Managing Multinational SEO – Search Engine Land

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Google’s Public Announcement: $80 Billion From 1.8 Million Businesses

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Google released its 2011 economic numbers stating that it had an impact to the tune of 80 billion dollars. This move brought about a few questions regarding why they felt the need to release the numbers, as most know that Google is a successful company. The numbers reported are a bit had to figure since it is reporting on figures from 3rd party companies working within Google.

Read the full article here:
Google: We drove $80B in US economic activity last year – CNET

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