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).

How many people visit your website without even making a purchase or contacting you?

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.

More often than not we are asked, "What keywords should I target online?" when doing Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and generally we point people to Google Adwords Keyword tool as it shows you a great deal of information and by looking at search results on the likes of Google, Yahoo and Bing as the sponsored ads that appear when searches are performed. This can give you an idea of who in terms of competitors are targeting similar markets, services or products as you and this can also indicate that what you are targetting - has a demand.

I've uploaded a presentation, which you can now download for free. The presentation covers some topics on Successful Internet Marketing, which I delivered as part of Global Enterprise week at Birmingham Central Library to SME's and start-ups on 20th November 2009.