Years ago the internet was a research tool, but with the increase of social media networks people are spending their time very differently on the internet.

In a recent survey compiled from Comscore, Nielsen, and more online data resources the following information about how people spend their time online has been determined.

How People Send Their Time Online
22% Social Networking
21% Searching
20% Reading Content
19% Emails Communication
13% Multimedia Sites
5% Online Shopping

Top Visited Web Properties

Google – 153 Million visitors per month
Time spent per person per month: 1 Hour 47 Minutes

Facebook – 137 Million visitors per month
Time spent per person per month: 7 Hours 45 Minutes

Average Time Spent
Global Internet User: 16 hours
US Internet User: 32 hours

What we can learn from this data is that the United States makes up a huge percentage of people that use the internet. In fact, 78% of the population is currently online in North America! That’s 272 million people. To put that in perspective please consider that only 30% of the entire world’s population is currently online, so that US very active online.

The takeaway from all this data is that online businesses can reach millions of people simply by optimizing their websites for search engines and engaging with social media networks. The traffic is ready, but are you taking the steps to bring to your website? Let SEO Services guide you through the process of SEO and social media marketing to launch your business to new heights.

Nothing is ever easy. It’s universally true whether you are talking about baking a cake or advertising your business.

While the majority of our focus is on SEO, we also provide paid search services. More specifically, we can optimize your Google AdWords campaign to achieve more sales and leads.

Google AdWords is a very powerful sales engine that can bring in pre-qualified traffic to your site. A major difference between SEO and PPC (paid pay click) is the the amount of control you have on your account. SEO has much less control over the location, message, and keywords that you show on search engines. However, many advertisers on PPC campaigns don’t take full advantage of their acute control. Instead they let Google manage their campaign for them.

Google has a very different focus than what you focus on as a business owner. When a user sets their AdWords campaign on full-auto mode they are basically telling Google to focus on the volume clicks and traffic rather than what’s really important, sales!

Don’t let Google manage your campaign for you, because they don’t have your best interests in mind. Google focuses on volume, but when you get your campaign managed by an AdWords professional the focus shifts to sales and ROI. It’s the classic argument between quantity and quality. Value is always better than volume.

What is the Google Penguin Over Optimization Update?

Google has been trying to rid their search engine of low quality websites considered spam since it’s inception.  People have also been trying to manipulate the Google search results for years.  This has produced many low quality sites to rank on the top pages of Google, and hindered the ability for quality sites to rank, as quality sites have to constantly compete with those that use black hat seo strategies.  The biggest culprit in recent days have to do with keyword rich anchor text.  Producing low quality incoming links has produced incredibly positive results for web businesses, and has given rise to low quality content distribution networks.  Examples of these are:

• blog networks
• blog carnivals
• 3 way link building schemes
• article spinning networks

With the use of the above tactics, websites are able to produce hundreds, if not thousands of in content keyword rich anchor text links pointing to their domains.  And it worked!

With the Panda algorithm updates, many of these networks have been identified and de-indexed by google.  This is a good thing!

If you were participating in producing low quality content on any of these networks, you most likely have seen large decreases in your rankings over the past few months.  It appears that Google has not only devalued the links from these networks, but have also implemented a penalty to those sites that have used them.

If you have seen a large decrease in you rankings in the past few days (starting around April 23rd 2012) due to the new Google Penguin Over Optimization Update, then I would take a close look at the anchor text distribution for your website.

I use seomoz’s Open Site Explorer (http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/) to see this.

My site http://www.seo-services.com has seen a large decrease in rankings from this Over Optimization Penalty, and I believe it is due to my anchor text distribution.

If your site has too high a percentage of incoming anchor text as your keywords… I believe a flag has gone off in Google, and your site will be penalized for Over Optimization.

In my particular case, I have a strong issue with this.  I have an Exact Match Domain, which means the name of my site (SEO Services) is my main keyword.  Many sites with exact match domains (EMD) have been hurt by this penalty.

Exactly what the limits are to have this Penguin Over Optimization Penalty flag your site is unknown… if I had to make a guess, I would say if over 25% of your incoming links are for one of your keywords, this would set the flag to the Google Algorithm.

I have looked at many of the websites that now rank on the first page of Google for competitive keywords, and have noticed that the highest used anchor text was either:

1. The Company Name
2. The Site’s Url
3. Some other anchor text like “click here”, “visit the site”, etc.
4. Partial match keyword anchor text that is very evenly distributed

How Has Penguin Changed Online Marketing?

Why the New Google Penguin Over Optimization Update Needs to be Changed

What to do Now?

When a business first launches into a social media campaign they typically make a few mistakes.

1. They focus too much on their fan and follower numbers.
2. They don’t share interesting or relevant information.

The only reason a person will ever LIKE or follow you as a business is because you are providing interesting content about something that person is interested in. Your status updates should do the follow things for you:

• Confirm your status as an expert of your industry.
• Add valuable insights about your industry.
• Share information that is relevant and thoughtful.

Back in 2011 there was a very interesting study about the best times of the day and week to post your social updates. It was from an infographic entitled The Science of Social Timing from KissMetrics. Here’s a few key points taken from that study.

How to Optimize Your Status Updates and Tweets

1. 5pm is a great time to tweet because of the high percentage of tweets per hour at that time.
2. The best time to tweet is midweek and weekend, which has the highest click through rate of links.
3. Tweeting should be done the most between noon and 6pm which has a higher click through rate of links.
4. Best time to share on Facebook is on Saturday, when the most sharing is done.
5. Best time to share on Facebook overall is around noon.
6. The best number of status updates per day on Facebook is 0.5 (one post every two days).
7. Tweets can be much more frequent, up to 1-4 tweets per hour.

With all of this information, don’t forgot the MOST important rule of social updates, keep it focused and make sure it is valuable to your readers! Also, keep in mind that these times are based on Eastern time, so please adjusted as needed.

When you have a strong competitor selling products or services similar to your own business, then you may find yourself in a bidding war for new customers. When this happens you may find value in starting a pay per click campaign that places ads for your own business when someone searches for your competitor’s company name or brand.

For example, you sell Brand A and your competitor sells Brand B. The searcher would type “brand B pricing” and they would see an ad stating “Brand A is a better value. Learn more!” Tricky, but for many industries it works well.

Many businesses launch a direct marketing campaign against their competitors for the following reasons:

1. Easy Click: When someone searches for a business name and your competing ad shows up at the top of the search results it can lead to an easy click gained directly against your competitor.
2. Branding: Even if the person does not click on your ad, it is likely that they will notice your ad and may decide to explore your company’s offerings at a later date.
3. Pricing: If you know how much your competitor is charging for a product or service, you can launch a campaign that undercuts their cost by a small amount.

While these are all great reasons to place ads against a competitor’s company name or brand, there are also a few draw backs.

1. Expense: Bidding on keywords that are not directly related to your website (like a competitor’s business name) are going to be more expensive because your keywords quality scores are lower. In the end it may cost you a lot of money to acquire these clicks.
2. Eye or an Eye: If you start this kind of advertising war, there is nothing that is stopping your competitor from doing the exact same thing to you.
3. Negative: Some customers may view this type of direct competitive marketing to be deceptive. This would put your business in a negative light for some online shoppers.

In the end it comes down to making a decision based on your own industry. If you find yourself in a constant bidding war against your competitors then this may be a easy choice, but if you launch something like this be prepared for the effects it could bring.

If you own a Facebook Page for any purpose, business or personal interest, as of last month your Page was converted to a Timeline. That means you have the ability to add a Cover Photo, which is a great way to add a little personalization to your Facebook Page.

Cover photos are very wide images (800 x 315) used to give your Page a unique feature at the top of your Page timeline. Below is a screenshot our own own Facebook Page.

Many businesses have been using cover photos to add some very creative touches to their Page, but there is one aspect of a cover photo that Facebook will not allow.

Facebook Cover Photos Are Not Ads!
While many businesses use Facebook and other social media sites the right way (to engage with customers), others are making their accounts into a marketing engine. While this is okay market your business on many social sites (although not always welcome), it is not something Facebook will allow.

All cover photos must adhere to a specific set of standards:

1. Cover photos must be at least 399 pixels wide.
2. Cover photos can not contain prices, coupons, or discounts.
3. Cover photos can not show contact information.
4. Cover photos can not make reference to Like or Share features of Facebook.
5. Cover photos can not have a “call to action”.
6. Cover photos can not be deceptive or false.
7. Cover photos can not be stolen.
8. Cover photos can not ask people to upload the Page’s photo to their own personal Profile.

As you can see from this list, Facebook is taking cover photos very seriously. We think it is great because it encourages Pages to be a place of discussion and not simply a marketing pitch.

Do you find Facebook Pages to be a place where you get great information about a company or does it feel like a sales pitch? Let us know in the comments.

Pay per click marketing is a proven network that has consistently brought a high return of investment to businesses all over the world. We’ve seen enough PPC campaigns to know that what holds back most companies from a successful campaign is because they focus on the wrong analytics. The key to a successful PPC campaign is to focus on these three aspects.

1. Conversions: This is the single most important factor in a paid search campaign. A conversion is a pre-determined action taken by your visitors. For most business websites it is a sale or lead. Other websites would consider a conversion to be a newsletter signup or a whitepaper download. Whether the conversion begins the sales cycle or completes it, it is important to track the return of your PPC investment.
2. Quality Score: This is variable used by Google, Yahoo, and MSN that can influence both the rank and cost per click of your PPC ads. A lower quality score will result in a low return on investment, signaling a poorly implemented campaign. A well built campaign will have a strong quality score.
3. Click Through Rate: If the quality score is how Google sees your campaign, then your click through rate is how people see your campaign. If they are not clicking on your ads then it will reflect in your click through rate. If you have a high click through rate percentage then you can rest assured that the keywords and ads are strongly related and providing the kind of results your searchers are looking for in their search results.

As we’ve stated in many of our blogs before, the best online marketing campaign is a diverse portfolio of tactics. All of our clients enjoy high organically ranked keywords, but a strong paid search campaign can further enhance the percentage of leads and visitors.

Last week we discussed how recent changes in Google’s search algorithm had resulted in blog networks getting deindexed from Google’s search results. This week more news of further link network banning has surfaced.

A large majority of links from the website buildmyrank.com (BMR) were eliminated from Google’s search results. It officially happened on March 19th, but the official blog wasn’t posted until the next day. In the blog, BMR stated that their

…scripts and manual checks have determined that the overwhelming majority of our network has been de-indexed (by Google), as of March 19, 2012.

The result has been a massive shutdown of its service. Refunds, data exporting, and full link removal has been initiated by BMR. It’s amazing to watch a service that just a few days before was touting the results they’ve seen their customers get only to have to completely shut down due to Google’s new algorithm. This short quote pretty much sums it all up.

In our wildest dreams, there’s no way we could have imagined this happening.

The truth is that no SEO service will ever tell you that they are working in the grey area of search engine optimization. You have to know the difference between grassroots search marketing and taking shortcuts for quick results.

At SEO Services we host a team of professionals that each have a separate function in managing our client’s organic optimization. There are no shortcuts to SEO success and BMR’s recent failure is a testament to that.

Search engine optimization is a moving target as Google continually makes changes to its algorithm. In fact, over the course of a year Google changes its algorithm up to 500 times! It’s a full time job just to keep up with all the minor and major changes, but at SEO Services that’s our specialty.

The topic of this week’s blog focuses on some recent changes in Google’s search results due to changes in the algorithm. There were certain blog networks that Google determined were not valuable and, thus, these blog networks were “deindexed” (dropped from Google’s system).

The SEO industry forums have seen many new topics submitted in pure panic as their Google search rankings dropped almost overnight. SEO Services has always focused on quality content and diversity in its strategy and because of that high standard our clients are largely unaffected by this algorithm change. While these sites historically provided valid links for our clients, they have only composed around 5 to 10 percent of our strategy. But as of today we are discontinuing participation in these blog networks.

The bottom line is that changes are expected within Google’s search algorithm and we are well aware of the recent change and have already changed our strategy to minimize any negative effects to our clients. For more information about how SEO Services is different take a look at our SEO process video on YouTube.

American Express and Twitter are teaming up to enable users to get coupons from top retailers like Best Buy, Whole Foods, and Virgin America. Here’s how it works. By tweeting hashtag #AmexWholefoods, consumers will receive $20 off purchases of $75 or more at the natural foods market made with their Amex cards. Mcdonalds is offering a $5 discount through its #AmexMcDonalds hashtag.

Other companies involved in the initiative are 1-800-Flowers.com, FTD, Century 21, H&M, Sports Authority, Zappos.com, Dell, FedEx Office, The Cheesecake Factory, Seamless.com, Gulf, and Ticketmaster.

This is in addition to the current ability for Amex customers to get exclusive deals by syncing their card with their Foursquare account. Much like the new Twitter deal, Foursquare and Amex customers can enjoy money back simply for checking in with the geo-location app.

So how is the new social campaign working out for Amex and Twitter? Well it is going so well that some of the merchant partners have already had to increase their cap limit to accommodate demand. They launched the campaign just five days ago!

The truth is that you don’t have to be a big name retailer to get some kind of boost out of your social followers. While you may not have the ability to offer your customers an exclusive deal with American Express, you can launch your own social media coupon simply by posting it on your Facebook and Twitter to see what kind of results you get out of the promo. Give your followers a specific code to share on Twitter or require them to Like your fan page. By requiring this you will gain a stronger influence in social media and increase your exposure on social sites. But remember, you must track the results because you will never know the benefits of a social campaign unless you can track the results of the promotion.