Google... The Panda Strikes Back

So over the past few months Google has been rolling out its new update for ranking websites, using a mix of the old and some new techniques. Old meaning you should stick with great content (Content is King) and quality back links, and the new meaning a focus on growth of your social media marketing efforts.

Google up until the past year was mostly about link building and content but as social media has become the norm, Google has shifted focus. They bought in real time search, which allows them to sift through the likes of twitter and Facebook, plus a few other tools and more recently they have shown a big uptake with the introduction of their plus one button similar to the Facebook like and Twitter Follow buttons, offering a more user centric push - aptly named The Google Panda Update (AKA the farmer update).

Recently we have trialled our own Online Marketing Strategy with some new SEO techniques to test how fast we could achieve great rankings for a given key phrase.
So I took it upon myself to target the phrase "Birmingham Web Design", a keyword phrase that attracts 1290 searches each month (43 per day as a phrase match on Google) for services we provide the Birmingham area.

We have been trialling advertising on Facebook as an additional marketing strategy, for some of our clients, through their paid advertising platform - similar to Google Adwords (Pay Per Click), to increase brand presence and traffic through to their websites, with success.


Now the reason why I wanted to share this with you for FREE, Is because for advertising and brand exposure this is big, Google was recently quoted as saying "they were scared of Face book advertising".