Why Reports of SEO’s Death are Greatly Exaggerated

People think it’s dead for many different reasons. In 2007 Facebook was launched in a world quite unlike the one we live in today. It was still relatively easy to get listed in the search engines – even without having a social media presence. This all changed when Google’s Panda and Penguin updates inflicted damage on websites that ultimately helped improve search engines as we now know them. Now we must focus on producing great content that meets our visitors’ needs. Initially this is when many people started saying that the search engines were dead, but this wasn’t true. Our relationships with the search engines were merely changing.

Finding ‘Greener’ Pastures

For a while, many marketers chose to use Facebook instead of the search engines for their platform. This is because they’ve highly encouraged businesses to use their brand pages to build a fan base, saying it’s “easier” to ensure your audience sees your brand and your website receives relevant, engaged traffic. Of course, in the beginning you could get 1,000 – 5,000 visitors per 10,000 engaged fans daily by making a few posts, but now Facebook is starting to limit these pages’ organic reach to the point that most pages barely reach 1% of a business’ audience. This is because without paid ads your brand pages are invisible. This is why it’s foolish and irresponsible to completely rely on a single traffic source.

Why you Can’t Rely on a Single Advertising Medium

Marketers who invested heavily and relied primarily on Facebook advertising, as well as those who spent most of their time marketing firearms, cryptocurrency, and bail bonds have learned this the hard way. When the advertising medium makes changes (something that can happen at any time without any warning), you could be left with nothing. However, this is something that doesn’t happen with SEO because it can’t since you’re creating content you’ll always own. Of course, your rankings may fluctuate, but unless you engage in spammy, high-risk tactics, you won’t disappear from the search engines.

Long Live SEO

SEO isn’t dead, nor will it ever die. What it will do is continue to evolve as part of the continuing digital landscape. In doing so, it’ll grow increasingly more complex as things like structured markup, voice search, and artificial intelligence are introduced. This evolution will make this form of advertising even more important than ever. It’ll also help make search engines an even more powerful and reliable marketing channel. This is why it’s worth spending your time and effort to create amazing content today – something that really is no different than the time and effort social media require. Considering how you must create this content either way, you should simply choose to optimize it for the search engines so you can get some valuable organic traffic while you’re at it.

What you Need for Long-Term Success

Your long-term success here depends on you keeping up with search technology’s advances. Failure to keep up, the desire to find a cheap means to success, and trying to find the easy way out will lead you to say that the search engines are dead, but your website and business will soon be dead too. However, there’s still a need for SEO. As such, you may wish to consider hiring Affordable SEO Company. They have many years of experience providing customers with powerful results that have propelled many of them to the top of their niche. This is exactly what you need too so make sure you contact them today.

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Briefly, linkbuilding used to be a part of a chaotic universe. The old ways allowed for scammers and spammers to just focus on quantity of links instead of quality. This led to people just slamming any links they could find, join linking webrings and all sorts of stuff. This worked until the search engines got tired of their surfers looking for a topic and ending up being redirected to all sorts of nonsense.

Google invented new software and algorithms that put an end to this practice and then started focusing on quality and authority of the links instead of quantity. If site A had 100 links from a variety of sources, it won’t rank as high as site B that has 20 links, but those links come from sites specific to topic and niche. This then makes those sites authoritative instead of just spammy foolishness.

Nowadays the smart webmaster or marketer knows that getting those authoritative sites is the proper way of linkbuilding. It’s a long and tough process and in some cases expensive but in the long run it’s the best way to get things done right.

Google goes for so many new parameters that it takes some studying to get it all right. Basically, it’s a matter of honesty and integrity and relevance. To get these types of people to pitch in on your linkbuilding you’ll have to work hard or hire a professional linkbuilding company. These companies know the ins and outs of the SEO industry and will apply the latest techniques and technologies to get your sites as high in the search engine pages as possible.

The big challenge has been Google, but that challenge isn’t enough to put the kibosh on linkbuilding, at least not yet.

Penguin and RankBrain and Google’s other software that determines page rank, have constantly changing algorithms. Webmasters and marketers are put to real task trying to keep tabs on these changes. They may spend hours of time and money and effort indulging in engineering websites to accommodate or best take advantage of these search engine changes, and it can sometimes end in major frustrations. If it’s tough a job for professionals, you can imagine what a nightmare it can be for the average webmaster.

Google has gotten so tired of scammers and spammers that millions of such websites have dropped like rocks from their previous high positions on the search engines. Google wants quality sites to appear at the top of their pages. They know that an unhappy surfer is an unhappy customer. Yes, Google has its own paid advertising spots at the top of their search engines, but the main positions pots are hard fought for and Google wants to make the playing field level. This forces webmasters and marketers to look for and solicit quality links so that surfers can find the best via the search engine ranks and not be led away to some up selling scam site.

As mentioned before, just because Google and other search engines have the watchdog on the front porch, it doesn’t mean that linkbuilding is dead or going to die. What it means is that webmasters and marketers are going to have to work hard for their money. It isn’t pleasant, but it is important if they want to stay on top of the search engine pages.

This is where Affordable SEO in Florida comes in. They have an excellent staff and years of experience. As mentioned earlier, they’ll use the latest tools and technologies and tactics to bring you to a solid ROI or Return On Investment so that you can see your website established on the search engines with the right kind of expertise that sends your sites to the top of the search engine pages.

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Penguin Legacy in Brief

It was in the year 2012 when Google rolled out this update with a clear cut goal of enhancing the user experience. A lot more emphasis was given on quality of content and the benefits that websites were offering to its readers. Eventually, the update with time made the SEO strategists follow white hat strategies and end up creating content that was amazing as well as compelling in nature.

The overall approach for the marketers changed drastically as the focus was now on creating appealing websites for the users instead of the only objective to create a high ranking website. Basically, the idea here was to target and curb the increased number of websites that were made using black hat SEO techniques. The other areas which it addressed were keyword stuffing and other unethical link building measures. On one hand, keyword stuffing meant users were unnecessarily plugging in as many keywords they could in an attempt to elevate their rankings. Link building practices, on the other hand, was majorly done by buying low-quality links in bulks and helping the website attain better rankings.

However, with Penguin being introduced and a number of follow-up updates being attached, it has always been a separate algorithm for main search engine ranking. However, with the recent minor changes released in the month of September this year, there has been a major announcement coming from Google. It states that going forward Penguin will be integrated into Google’s everyday processes for evaluating the ranking mechanism for millions of websites from across the world. It means Penguin is now a core algorithm for Google’s ranking system.

Although it might not sound to be a major change, but the eventual consequences might definitely make you feel so. The core algorithm of Google refreshes on a continuous basis and offers real-time analytics to the search engines. It is further used to develop the rankings. While on the other hand Penguin largely relied on offering infrequent refreshes for updating the results. It’s almost 700 days since the last major update.

Coming to the larger point, you might be wondering what grave impacts this new change could bring to your website. Yes, this calls for evaluating your SEO strategies and making it align with the continuous Penguin changes.

How does it impact your website and what to do to remain safe?

With real-time updates, the possibility of leveraging from any black-hat link building strategy or keyword stuffing will get a direct hit. This means, if your strategy includes any unethical strategy among the two mentioned above, there can be immediate impacts of the rankings. It would no longer mean that your rankings are affected only after the next Penguin update.

For many, SEO is regarded as a manipulation strategy as the end goal is to improve the rankings on search results. As per the recent Penguin 4.0 updates, there is a clear indication that there needs to be an end to philosophical approaches. It means with depletion of the manipulative practices having any relevance, the SEO industry will set to move towards a legitimate marketing business. With improved practices, there will be improved reputation.

Recommendation

To remain protected and ensure that you are doing well over the search engines, the 1^st and foremost thing to do would be not to underestimate the power of Penguin. It is simply a lifeline for the marketers irrespective of their industries. With instant recovery from past penalties, especially for brands banking highly on their digital exposure, the new changes can be a life saver.

Another benefit of this change would mean that the punishment would be far more specific in nature. It means if any of the pages on your website experiences low-quality links, the rankings for that page, in particular, would only be affected. Once you fix the page, the rankings will improve while having no impact on the overall SEO of the website. It, in turn, protects the websites from any form of malicious SEO tactics or even from their own mistakes.

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Their first line of defense is the recent upgrade to Penguin. It took two years and Google announces this will be the last update of their algorithm software. Now Penguin is loaded for bear and woe be unto the crooked and spammy and unprofessional website! It’s going to kick out penalties and take names. This should clear up the web in no time as Penguin will dish out the rewards and punishments after each time they crawl a webpage. This behooves a massive undertaking of immeasurable proportions for webmasters to clean up their websites and do so fast. For the small guy, it’ll be no problem, but for the over bloated marketer who hast umpteen billion websites, you’re going to see a massive drop in your rankings and any revenue you now bring in. It was long due in coming and perhaps the other search engines will follow suit thus providing the public with search engine results that are informative and of greater value.

This is what we call real time signal processing. In addition, Google has doubled their search algorithm power by adding their Panda to the roster. The good old’ days of spam and cheap content will soon be over.

AMPs weigh in big on the Google rehab scene. Accelerated Mobile Pages allows for far more reach of a webpage via the massive mobile market. Google is now listing AMPs and it’s bound to get bigger and better. This is a sign that webmasters and marketers had better design their pages for AMP status or they’re going to be left behind severely. Time and technological advances wait for no man. You have to not just adapt to new technologies and techniques, you have to own and dominate them for greater returns and better efficiency. Far too many webmasters are now sitting with their heads in their hands wishing they’d moved faster but all is not lost. Since AMPs are still relatively new, the jury is out statistically, so the impact is unknown but should be sound withing six months to a year so you need to make hay while the sun shines.

Let’s not forget the Knowledge Graph and Rich Answers! Another wham bam set of algorithms that scour the web for knowledge and information to make such results universally accessible. Some speculate that it’s competition to the other knowledge bases such as the online encyclopedias. It uses semantic search information that is gleaned from a massive variety of online data. You can spot the Knowledge Graph data as it’s usually displayed as boxes of well structured data that include links to the authoritative sources for more in-depth research. Believe it or not, but over a third of Google’s results show Rich Answers. They’ve been dishing it out all along and you didn’t know it.

Finally, comes the mysterious Google “Rank Brain”. This self-learning AI has so many people confused as to what it does that no one, not even Google can give a definitive answer. What is known is that it improves the search results of Google and is active in every search done on Google. Combined with the rest of Google’s suite of tools makes it a formidable presence none the less.

Overall, the changes Google has implemented sends a message to the web that cheap, sloppy, illegal, spammy websites and content are going to be extinct. The cheap copywriting mills and graphics mills will be hammered out of existence. SEO professionals will be able to fine tune their skills with the promise of providing clients with sure-shot service that won’t collapse over time.

It’s going to be a major changeover so don’t be surprised if you see some websites go the way of the dinosaur, Google is the 800lb gorilla on the web and it’s cleaning up the jungle.

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First of all, Google looks at links to your website using several algorithms, most notably the Penguin software they use. What they’re looking for are links that are useful to the surfer and provide clear cut answers to queries as well as valuable information without interfering with the web surfing experience. Google has had to battle tooth and nail to keep unscrupulous webmasters and web marketers from using technologies that cheated and undermined the integrity of the web. There were vast Black Hat tactics that far too many people fell for and SEO Gurus who swore up and down and charged big money to suckers who thought they would really get top spots on Google. This type of scamming continues to go on just like the late P.T. Barnum said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” and the way these SEO ripoffs work proves him right.

The honest webmaster, however, can now gain ground so that the playing field is fair and the bad guys are getting slammed. The bad linking practices you should avoid aren’t overwhelming, it just calls for being honorable and applying the techniques correctly.
Never join a linking group or linking ring. Those things are sure enough to get you penalized by Google. Not only that but it may be next to impossible to remove those links to your site and Google is unforgiving in this area. It’s one of those, once you made the mistake it sticks to you like glue, situations.

Having links that are misspelled or full of hype is another way to get the stink eye from Google. Google’s software can detect with advanced AI if text is artificial and full of BS. Yes the good ol’ days are gone for greedy marketers, they now have to work for their money.

Links from low grade authority sites will definitely put you outside tied to the tree. Look for quality links from relative authority sites. Sites with real social networking architectures. Stay away from the boasters who say they can do wonders for you. They can’t. The only wonder they can do for you is get you penalized. You’ll have to keep a sharp eye out for these kinds of SEO linkbuilding solicitors. They know you have money, they know you’re eager, and they’ll try anyway to con you that they can. Some might even friend up to you via social media and look for your weaknesses. It’s because one client could mean a windfall to them so they go that extra mile to hunt you down.

Cleaning up the links on your website can help considerably. Don’t link to sites that link to the con running sites. It’s the old adage, guilt by association. Best to put a post on your blog disavowing the sites that are disreputable that link to you and name names. Google will see you protesting these sites and look at it as a helpful tip to others not to do the same.

Never use Black Hat techniques. Matter of fact don’t use any techniques and tricks at all. Google has tools and tutorials on how to build great SEO on a website and you also have the option of hiring a professional SEO company, one that is recommended by customers and industry heads alike. This way you’ll be steering clear of rough waters. If you do hire an SEO pro, they’ll explain linking to you and you in turn need to make sure that they don’t use Black Hat SEO techniques.

Finally, look at your stats and check on every incoming link to your site as well as outgoing. See what is coming from where and if necessary contact the webmasters of sites that are troublesome and ask them to remove the links to your site. If you’ve bought a site or are looking to buy a site, look at its linking history of present and troubleshoot. Better to have a clean site through rehab than a bad one leading you down the road.

Overall, linking is up to you. Get a professional SEO pro to come in and evaluate your linking status and follow through. You and Google will be good friends from then on.

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In the old days, when webmasters found out the more keywords that were put on a website, the higher it ranked, led to an industry and haphazard practice that involved webmasters and marketers to engage in what is called as “keyword stuffing”. It worked for quite a long time until the search engines like Google finally developed ways to combat the practice. Google’s software arsenal like Panda, Penguin, and RankBrain have gotten smarter and not only know when keywords are strategically placed to gain unethical advantage, but these software can detect other issues thus making keyword stuffing a sure step to harsh penalization.

Over the past several years, SEO pros and marketers have been intensely studying what they need to do with keywords to get the big rankings. Of most importance, is whether or not there is an optimum keyword density. This has taken much experimentation as well with keyword research which is still essential. SEO has moved from a practice to a science and there are restrictions as well as new frontiers. SEO engineers are working feverishly to find some solution and capitalize on it. It’s going to be tough because as soon as they discover something and put it into practice, Google will be hot on their heels figuring a way to stop it if it can and has been used to unfair advantage.

At present what seems to be working best is expansion and diversity. This means creating interesting and engaging content that spans the breadth of the website and social media. Content like pics and videos should be properly tagged with your keywords in it in a relevant way, not just to show face.

For example, if your keyword is “candy apples” there are some things you can do to get the best results by incorporating it into your copy and content the right and ethical and advantageous way. First of all your tags should have the keywords in them, but in a relevant way. The wrong way would be to tag a picture with “Kids enjoying themselves, candy apples”. It’s not good grammar and Google will see that. Instead you would write, “These kids are enjoying their candy apples”, simple correct grammar and relevant. If there is another picture on your site showing something not relevant but you apply your keywords, the search engine software will discover this and give you the boot. So if your company sells more than one product than “candy apples” yet you attach that keyword to other content that isn’t able to integrate then you’ll be discovered and punished.

So the best bet looks like doing three things, using keyword research, structuring your site with an ethical and necessity to your keyword base, and creating lengthier and more engaging content with your keywords incorporated. This will allow Google to see your site is important to others and shows you provide value to their surfing experience.

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First of all, don’t give up linkbuilding. It is of utmost importance. The difference now is that honesty is the best policy, and quality is even more so. Quality in the form of content and layout. Stuffing your site with keywords, putting up paid inbound links, joining link exchanges, are all out. Don’t even think about using those tactics or Goggle will comedown on you like a ton of bricks.

What you want to do is look at your site, evaluate how spam my or unprofessional it appears and clean things up fast. Next, you have to look at your overall battle plan whereby you use quality content, well tagged pics and videos, co-citations, reviews, and of course, social media. Social media is a great way to promote and get interest and authority. People who have similar sites may well link to you and that will make you look good in the eyes of the search engines. On top of that, when other authority sites recognize your work and link to you and may ask for a link back, that will show the Penguin software that the big boys think you’re something special and you will see those gains in traffic, authority, and search engine rankings.

If you want to be daring, ask people to link to you. If you have one or more Facebook pages, which you should have, then post about how you would appreciate links to your site from similar sites. If there’s a site you are impressed with, don’t be shy about requesting a link. All they can say is no, and down the line when you do get large, they may come a-calling to swap links. Don’t get vengeful, see if they have maintained their status first and then grant them the exchange. If their stats have dropped, tell them to take a walk in a nice way. You’re trying to build your brand, not build extra problems.

What are the risks?
The risks being two. One, that you’ll screw up and make Google angry. Nowadays when they penalize someone, they really penalize someone. It could take months or years to remedy the situation and that means loss of traffic, revenue, and reputation. You would then be called upon to do some damage control and that isn’t cheap. Two, you’ll make your link partners angry as well as your surfers and they above all can cause you great misery. It’s all about providing a service or services via your website more than anything else. If a surfer needs something your site should be one of , if not ‘the’ website for them to come to. Google’s software will see the flood of traffic to you via the links, then scour the web for where the links are located and via what venue, i.e., blogs, Facebook, review sites, forums, or other sources. If it looks like you’re the one stop shop for these surfers o get their answers, you’ll not only get higher rankings, but your authority will be hard to challenge and take down.

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This time around, Apple and Google are focusing on apps as a primary parameter for indexing search results. This throws a monkey wrench big time in the SEO world as now the pros have to restructure their game plans across the board.

What it means in essence is that the use of apps will give both companies better insight into what surfers are doing and why. It’s sort of part of their game plan for focusing on engagement more than how well one’s website is structured for SEO. You have to still follow the basics of SEO with no black hat ricks, but this time, your future depends on what apps your surfers are using that are relevant to your site’s subject matter.

Let’s take a look hat how this applies. Let’s say there’s an app that focuses on finding the nearest restaurants that serve lobster at the cheapest price. This is where local SEO comes in a swell as the big mobile market that is taking over. The app looks for the pertinent data that reflects what your site focuses on. People might go to Google and search, but with the new focus on apps, those apps might be far more precise and more popular in use and by their parameters, focus on location, zip code, address, name, products, down to the last molecule. If your competitors have better and more precise and relevant data than you, this app might target them more. In addition, Google and Apple might rely on the metrics of the app to determine how popular your site is as well as how much engagement is going on regarding the app, similar businesses in the area and yours. If the app is showing more interest in you, you get the high ground. If not, your competitors win out.

The plus side to this is obvious. Instead of scrounging through tons of data via their search options, both companies can allow the apps to do it for them. The apps collect metrics and those compiled figures give a profile of what people like, do, and engage in. It’s basically letting the app do all the work. This allows for Google and Apple to quickly gather that data and incorporate it efficiently into their search results. Add to that Google’s Penguin, Panda, and other software, and you’re talking about search data on a massive scale that is automatically sifted through and compiled in relevance and popularity.

With that kind of efficiency, it will be difficult to compromise. As security and advancement continues, the apps themselves will be sharper, and more fine tuned thus providing greater results. SEO pros can only take advantage of this by making sure their sites are professional, and most of all, mobile friendly.

Keep an eye out for the new apps procedures. It’s the wave of the future.

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Here’s how it goes from now on. Your site has to have quality content. It has to be specific especially if you’re employing local SEO. You’ll need to have fresh, relevant content, no misspellings, your company’s name, address, and contact information as well as well tagged photos and graphics. That’s for starters. Next is the link building process itself that is now in a whole nother ball park.

Now, with link building you have to step up tot the plate and do it the right way. It doesn’t work to put a ton o f links to other sites or getting tons of other sites to link back to you. It’s the quality of links that is important. Are the links relevant to your site and not just there to grow a keyword or keyphrase farm. In other words, if your site is about lawn mowing in Deerpark, New Jersey, then every link from your site and from other sites, had better have all those keywords somehow involved. It’s a powerful local SEO tactic as well. Your images and contact info, and mainly your links need this data.

A major change in strategy for SEO is in the value of good reviews, or any reviews that contain your website or blog’s data. These review sites are so important now that they override just about everything else other than social media shares. The reason is simple. Google is looking for authority associated with your site. Not nonsense. Review sites will often have customers who’ve actually partaking of your services or goods and have reviewed and testified to the level of satisfaction they had. If you have a restaurant, you want honest reviews. You want as many people who’ve tried as many dishes of yours and enjoyed the hospitality. If several people of the same family write reviews then those links go back to your site and that is what Google is looking for. If you are a band and are rising up the ranks, you want your fans to go to review sites and boast about the concerts and so on you’ve performed at. These reviews turn into direct links back, with the advantage of local SEO too.

There’s a right way and a wrong way regarding link building in today’s market, and knowing the difference is what’s going to see you through.

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The latest Penguin update affects SEO in a number of ways, so if you specialize in managing websites and optimization efforts, you need to pay attention. Current knowledge indicates that Penguin targets the same things that its predecessor did. It’s just more in depth and goes into more detail when weeding out sites that violate Google’s webmaster guidelines. In particular, this update targets low quality and spammy links primarily. It also punishes sites with paid links that aren’t marked as nofollow.

Any SEO tactic that could be considered “black hat” is also the target of this update, so no shady business! You won’t be able to get away with it. Posting on forums and blog comments excessively without contributing anything worthwhile can also get you penalized, especially if you consistently use the same keywords in your links in the signature area. These attempts at getting backlinks aren’t effective and will see your site drop in rank thanks to this update.

Backlinks in excessive numbers coming from one site via site wide links will also result in your site being punished. If you notice this happening to you, contact the site who is linking to you in this way and ask that they remove the repetitive links and only keep one. Other backlinking problems that send up red flags through Penguin 2.1 include widget links and link exchanges. All of these tactics can negatively impact SEO in a major way. So why not play it on the safe side and just avoid them altogether? You’re not going to get away with them. And Google penalties can be very difficult to recover from so why go through all the hassle?

It’s a much better idea to follow the quality guidelines Google has created. They tell you what you need to do to optimize a site in a way that they will recognize and uphold. So why not actually do what they tell you to? You’ll save a lot of headache later on and actually see your SEO efforts work for the long haul.
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