Web Marketing Strategy Update

If you run a website or otherwise operate online, then keeping a watchful eye on Google is highly advisable. After all, Google is the most popular search engine of all with a massive global market share of around 80%. For that reason alone it has the ability to ensure that your website is either a big success, or conversely that it is not seen by anyone.

If Google makes a change to its algorithms or policies and you should happen to miss that this happened, then you might find your site suddenly penalized and your traffic halved or worse.

And Google does make changes to the way it operates – a lot actually. Furthermore, this is truer now than it has ever been before and of those changes made recently there are several that have already had a big impact on the rankings of sites. Here we will look at just some of the many big changes that have happened in the last year or so.
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One of the most important ways to increase awareness of your brand is to create a buzz around your products or services.

As someone once said ‘no publicity is bad publicity’ and getting people talking about your website and brand can really give your sales a big boost.

Aiming For Viral Buzz

I run a small website and don’t have a big media budget to work with. However I have found some great ways to create a buzz online for my product that does not involve spending lots of cash.

• Ideally I am looking to ‘go viral’ with my little promotional campaigns.
• This basically means getting people to spread my message themselves to others through blogs, forums, chat rooms etc.

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Just about everyone knows Twitter: the social platform for broadcasting whatever is on your mind in 140 characters or less. The popularity of Twitter is at an all time high and shows no sign of slowing down. In fact, Twitter is so popular that the general public now knows the word “tweet” to mean a 140-character message and not the sound a tiny bird makes.

Whereas Twitter’s biggest competitor Facebook seems to be constantly evolving and adding new features (think Timeline and Open Graph), Twitter is comparatively stagnant. Little has been brought to the social service lately and some much needed updates or changes are way past due.
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Link building schemes based on private blog networks appear to be the latest to fall foul of Google’s Panda updates. The recent update released in February comprised of what was at the time a record-setting 40 algorithm changes that aim to improve search quality (another 50 changes were made in March).

I’m not going to detail all the changes, you can find those here, but the February updates appear to subtly improve local search relevancy, personalized search results, and overall, a greater emphasis on weeding out spam and duplication.

Build My Rank Deindexed

Less than a month after the changes have taken effect, the big daddy of private blog networks—Build My Rank (BMR), announces that it is closing its doors to new members. A few days later, BMR admits that most of its websites have been de-indexed by Google. As a result, they have ceased operations.
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