Monthly Archives: October 2013

Customer Support With Social Media: How Not To Do it

socialAuthenticity is everything; If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.

The above quote is a paraphrasing of a line sometimes attributed to Groucho Marx, and sometimes to others. It’s an important lesson for businesses to keep in mind when they are interacting with their customers online.

Many would say that it’s authenticity itself that matters, but anyone who has used the Internet for longer than five minutes knows that one does not have to be truly authentic to have a positive effect. Although, if a business can manage to be authentic, sincere, and genuine in its communications with its customers, so much the better. Continue reading

ASEOHosting Advises Webmasters Not To Put Too Much Faith In Public PageRank Data

Hudson, FL, October 22, 2013 – ASEOHosting, a provider of premium multiple IP hosting, has commented on the risks of relying on publicly available PageRank measurements as a metric for determining the efficacy of search engine optimization campaigns. The company, which offers industry-leading SEO-focused web hosting, is concerned that its clients and the wider web development and search engine optimization communities are privileging PageRank measurements compared to other data, which can be detrimental to their efforts to achieve higher ranking on search engine results pages. Continue reading

Google Overhauls Its Algorithms: Hummingbird Explained

image(Flickr/Dawn Ellner)

image(Flickr/Dawn Ellner)

Two of the biggest SEO news stories of recent years concerned the Penguin and Panda updates to Google’s algorithms, which were aimed at improving search engine results by combating spammy black hat techniques and returning higher quality results at the top of the SERPs. While these changes had a huge impact on SEO, they were just tweaks and modifications of Google’s existing algorithms. It appears that Hummingbird, which was silently implemented a few weeks ago, is a much more technically significant, perhaps the most thoroughgoing update since Caffeine in 2010 or even since the algorithms were significantly rewritten by Amit Singhal in 2001.

Hummingbird is estimated to affect 90% of search engine results and is likened by Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan to a complete replacement of the engine of search. Continue reading

SEO, Content Marketing, and Social Media: The Best of September 2013

Last month, at the beginning of the roundup, we asked, “Is SEO dead?” After September’s “Keyword Not Provided” announcement, we’re willing to bet that more people are worried the answer to this question is “Yes.” The truth is, it’s just as sensationalist a question as it was a month ago. As always, the SEO industry will react and adapt. In the meantime, it wouldn’t hurt to put a renewed focus on your content marketing and social media efforts. To help you on your way, we’ve gathered up the best SEO, content marketing, and social media articles from August. If you’re looking for the same great content the rest of the month, don’t forget to check in with us at Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

SEO

What Google’s Latest Panda Update Means for Your SEOpanda3

When Google’s so-called Panda update dropped in 2011, it turned the world of search on its head: quality, not keywords, would dominate from here on out and content would be king. Now Google has updated its algorithms again—call it Panda 2.0—and every marketer and small business needs to adapt once more. Continue reading