If you aren’t sure exactly what Panda is, here is a brief explanation: Google’s Panda update is basically a revision to the Google algorithm that penalizes low quality content by lowering organic search rankings for pages it considers to be of poor quality. Panda takes into account usage metrics as opposed to only factoring traditional ranking factors such as inbound link count and keyword usage.

With Panda, usage statistics such as time on site, bounce rate, and average pageviews are factored into the algorithm, as well as social signals and amount of branded searches.

The fact that with Panda, Google takes into account these usage metrics means now, more so than ever, it is not enough to front-load your Title Tag with good keywords, throw a few different iterations of that keyword into the body text of your page, and submit your page to a handful of directories. In addition to all those established on-site best practices, you need to also build a really awesome site – one that actually appeals to and engages visitors.

It makes sense that Google implemented this update; their goal is to deliver the most relevant search results to their users. If you’ve ever performed a search for anything that starts with “How To…” and clicked through to an Ezine article from the search results, you know that this type of content is often low quality and frustratingly incomplete. Google doesn’t want to risk losing you as a loyal user because they returned spammy results for your search.

However,  regardless of Google’s implementation of Panda, you should want your site to live up to high quality standards. The fact that Google has begun to take usage factors into account should act as an indicator to online businesses that these things make a difference to the success or failure of a site.

Adjusting to The World According to Panda.

1. Look at your site and your analytics. Be honest with yourself about your weaknesses. Once you’ve identified weaknesses (high bounce rate, for example) take the necessary steps to improve content and site interface.

Speaking of content…

2. Create high quality, relevant, usable content and remove low quality, spammy content. Give users the content they crave – not the content you think Google wants to see. Luckily, Panda brings the two closer in line.

3. If you aren’t active in social media, now is the time friends. With Google’s algorithm taking social mentions into account more and more these days, you want to make sure that you are making social work for your site.

4. Take care of any duplicate content issues on your site. Use the rel=canonical tag to specify which page of a group of 2 or more pages with similar content is the version you want Google to index.

5. Don’t plagiarize. Ever. Ever.

An analysis of 1,531 web-marketing clients showed a huge difference between those who blog and those who do not. Here is the key info:

• 55% More Visitors for Companies That Blog (a measurement of the number of people that visit any page of a company’s site)
• 97% More Inbound Links (other sites linking to any page of a company’s site)
• 434% More Indexed Pages (how many of a company’s pages can be found on Google/Yahoo!/Bing)

While the survey size wasn’t huge (around 1,531 small- and medium-sized businesses), the numbers are pretty telling. Additionally, the study’s definition of a “company that blogs” was anyone with more than one post written on their blog. Had they defined a company that blogs as one with regular blog postings, then the results would have more than likely pointed to an even bigger traffic increase for companies that blog.

See the full HubSpot post here.

Business Learning Center: How To Write a Blog That Drives Traffic to Your Website and Revenue to Your Business. Read the full article for FREE.

(photo source: Nima Badiey)

Mistakes are bound to happen! We all make them – but in life we try to avoid them. Sigmund Freud was once quoted:

“From error to error one discovers the entire truth.”

But when businesses are hard-pressed for time and money, mistakes are not an option. Even if you are a Fortune 50 company, you may be in greater danger to succumbing to SEO ignorance. Upper-level management may not understand what it is or why it’s even important. Here are five common mistakes to avoid at all costs:

1. Self-centered Marketing

Just because a landing page looks nice and has a lot of content doesn’t mean that it has any relevance. If your homepage is full of your “company”, chances are that relevance for your consumers as well as search engines is lost. Many companies make the mistake of adding too much of themselves on a landing page, without explaining to the user what they do, and how that will help the user. Make content relevant and straight-forward.

2. URL Structure

A lot of website have URL problems, but one mistake that has to be avoided at all times is long and irrelevant URL structures. Why are you making it harder for crawlers and users to see your information? Recent research shows that short URLs within Google SERPs get clicked twice as often as long ones. So by sticking to short URLs you get both better rankings and better click-through. Avoid underscores, capital letters, spam words, and digits. Use static URLs, and 301 redirects for permanently moved pages.

(photo source: frankfarm)

3. Lack of Substance

Create meaningful content and deliver it in a way that people can find it. Remember that Google’s job is to get meaningful content to their users, and the best way to do that is to produce and deliver meaningful content. Adding a few “well-placed”  keywords is not going to do that. Remember to update your blog frequently with well-written content that display thought-leadership! Keep in mind to write for a human audience, not Googlebot. Keyword-heavy content might have produced results in the past, but will definitely not work for the long-term. The priority shouldn’t just be making your site #1 on Google, but to get people to engage with your company through your website. Keep in mind that an interactive experience that is boring, frustrating and inhuman will drive your potential customers away and will hurt your search results in the long run.

4. Links for Their Own Sake

Just because you have a lot inbound links doesn’t mean that they are relevant. Since Google is trying to provide the best information available for their users, having too many links for questionable sources, especially if they’re acquired in a short period of time, can get your site “penalized” by Google.

5.  Ignoring Social Media

Social media is not optional–integrating RSS feeds, Twitter, Facebook, and even Myspace to your consumers. There are significant benefits from combining search engine optimization and social media marketing tactics ranging from increased social network discovery via search to attract links for improved SEO. Staying relevant in consumers’ minds and creating a conversation is key.

Currently, RAG NY is not running any sort of digital marketing campaign except through it’s brick and mortar stores in NYC. In the month of of July (almost a year after our SEO work stopped) they broke all previous records for traffic from search engines.

We often see record-breaking results from our clients, months after our work is done–this goes to show how important SEO is for any online businesses, especially e-commerce. SEO makes the content of your site more relevant, more attractive, and more easily accessible by search engines and potential customers.

With a dedicated team of specialized individuals that will bring your extraordinary results through constant communication, we are here to help your business succeed.

Many of our customers have learned to rely on the steady traffic growth our high-ROI SEO can bring. Others are interested in using social media marketing to increase brand awareness and really get in touch with their customers. At Blue Fountain Media, we don’t just offer best-of-breed SEO and SMM solutions — we design our campaigns to take advantage of how both kinds of marketing can work together.

The strength of SEO

SEO is simply the most effective, highest-ROI method for delivering traffic and converting users. Our SEO clients range from startups to small businesses to large companies and even charities — in every case, we’ve been able to beat both offline advertising and standard paid search advertising.

Why is search engine optimization so lucrative? It all boils down to the numbers: most pay-per-click advertisers do reasonably well when they buy ads on Google. But the vast majority of Google visitors click on standard search results: some studies claim that organic results get about 90% of search engine clicks compared to exactly the same site displayed as an ad. Paid search results are slightly more likely to turn a visitor into a customer, but even making some generous assumptions about the high value of PPC clicks, at least 80% of a site’s eventual customers will get there without ever clicking an ad.

At the same time, almost 90% of search marketing spending goes to pay-per-click ads instead of organic search. This makes SEO a fantastic investment.

The power of social media

Advertising might be one way to get people interested in a product, but people find one-on-one conversations much more convincing than one-to-many ads. Social media marketing lets companies get involved in the conversation, in a way that’s targeted and effective.

But social media isn’t just about talking: it’s about listening. An ad can’t find out what’s on a customer’s mind, or what objections they have to the product. It’s a great way to figure out what to do next.

The combination is unbeatable

How can you use them together? Simple. Social media marketing tells you what people are saying, which is a good way to figure out what they’re searching for. If you know what they’re searching for, you know what to optimize for. It’s the most effective, in-depth way to get new ideas for how to market your site.

At Blue Fountain Media, we’re always finding new ways to get the most out of our different services. Whether it’s combining SEO and SMM or combining marketing and design, we’re always ready to give our clients a great return on their investment.

New York clothing store, R.A.G. New York continues to see record traffic and sales on their website thanks to the search engine optimization performed by Blue Fountain Media between April and September 2008.  Our client was even mentioned in the NY Daily News thanks to our work.

See Blue Fountain Media in the NY Daily News

Currently, the website is not running any type of marketing program except through its 6 stores in New York City. The month of April broke all preceding records as can be seen in the two line graphs showing total visits and sales to the website since March 2008:

These results are both due to our re-design of the website as well as an extensive search engine optimization campaign which included months of link building, analysis, and a results-oriented team of dedicated individuals.

Website ReDesign: BioSpecifics gets a professional look and feel

Our Redesign: A broader, more open site with a clean and clear new design, showcasing the products, the company, and their customers, on a tight budget.

Before: A focus on the corporate side, with other aspects de-emphasized.

The Challenge: Create a highly professional site that appeals to biopharmaceuticals experts, but doesn’t intimidate non-experts. Incorporate high-level product discussion, fine-grained social features, and corporate information like stock quotes.

The Work: The focus here was on highlighting the content, rather than creating a full multimedia presentation. This site includes a stock quote module, several discussion forums, and a news page.

The Result: A great looking, informative site that offers up-to-date information on research, products, and company issues.

What’s Cool: This is a site for every audience. Customers, investors, and researchers can all see where they need to go, at a glance.

Good marketing brings in qualified traffic; good design turns visitors into customers. If you can improve both at once, the benefits compound.

The combination of traffic and a good conversion rate can be very powerful.

When we build sites, we’re looking at things from the customer’s point of view. And while our customers value good-looking sites, they’re making an extra investment in order to get a site that brings in more revenue. We’re always able to redesign a site so it gets more revenue per visitor — but what about bringing in more visitors?

If visits go up 50%, and revenue per visit goes up 50%, total sales will rise 125%, meaning that an extra investment in marketing can actually get an even higher return than the original redesign got.

We don’t just focus on hypotheticals, though. Consider one of our clients, R.A.G. New York. We rebuilt their site to make it more user-friendly and easy to navigate, but we also launched a long-term SEO campaign to get them higher rankings for the keywords that matter to them. The result? April traffic is up tenfold from where it was last year. But conversions have also soared — from 1.5% to up to 5% for some pages. This compounding effect means that revenue (and profit) have increased even faster than conversions or visits.

We didn’t stop at redesigning the site and marketing them online, though: we also talked them up in the mainstream press. That’s gotten great results, too: R.A.G. was recently profiled in the New York Daily News.

Also, while most marketing firms are forced to hire outside to help to do heavy web development work, we are able to do everything in-house. Our marketing team sends requirements to our professional development team who then execute any of the on-site edits that need to be made. Many SEO’s profess to be experts in design, development, and SEO, but we prefer to have specialists in each field work on a project.

We’re constantly on the lookout for new ways to improve the results our clients get. From building great websites to bringing in visitor to getting attention from the press, we’re determined to bring our clients attention and income.

Now that we are officially in a recession (and have been for over a year), it is time to start spending money wisely. The oversized marketing budgets of the past are set to be replaced by smarter investments like search engine optimization of websites coupled with social media marketing.

Here a few reasons why it makes sense to invest in your website right now:

Learn from the past and prepare for the future: Research shows that companies that spend money on marketing during a recession tend to benefit over companies who cut back on their marketing budgets. Not only is it a good idea to continue your online marketing budgets, but cutting back could cost you more in the long run. Place yourself in a good position to be found online now so that once people start shopping more eagerly down the road, you’ll be right there waiting. If you wait until the economy is back in shape to start an SEO campaign, you’ll be behind the game.

Check out the competition: The big “R” is forcing your competition to take a look at their spending habits and, according to eMarketer, traditional marketing budgets are shrinking and online marketing budgets are increasing. If your competition is investing in their online marketing strategies and you know in the past companies that continue to invest in marketing benefit, then it’s clear you shouldn’t be cutting your marketing budget, but increasing it.

Traditional marketing budgets are being spent online because you can measure the results more effectively! There are a number of tools and metrics to tell you just where your traffic, leads and conversions are coming from. Once you know, you can reorganize you online spending to make it more effective. Traditional advertising doesn’t even come close to giving you the direct feedback and measured results that you get online.

Follow the leaders: Warren Buffet and Rupert Murdoch are still investing and so should you. In fact, entrepreneurship is up almost 12% above the height of the mid-90′s dotcom boom.

The economy is cyclical and downturns are typically short-lived so don’t waste any time. Now is the time to be smart, learn from the past and start investing more in your online marketing. While others are cutting back, you will ready to go when we start to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Thanks to Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s Blackberry software, there has been an exponential explosion of mobile smartphones hitting the market; the average consumer is presented with at least 20 different and competitive choices when shopping for a PDA or smartphone.

The ubiquity of these phones has forced most manufacturers to undercut prices to stay in the game against tougher competitors, which leads to an abundance of phones in consumers’ hands that are full of features like Wi-Fi, web browsing, MP3 playback, movie playback, etc.  Countries like China are known for the majority of their internet/broadband users accessing websites and interacting with one another through mobile media rather than going home and logging onto their personal computers.  More and more, businesses marketing to specific audiences are taking into consideration how their websites are viewed on mobile phones; this brings us to the question: how do I optimize my website for mobile media?

Overall, search engine optimization for mobile and smart phones isn’t vastly different from normal SEO practices for websites viewed on a desktop; however there are key concerns which desktop web developers don’t necessarily have to consider such as:

1.Website Resolution: Can the website be viewed correctly?

There are thousands of smart phones on the market that are available to consumers at varying prices which means that when designing a website to be veiwed on a phone you have to take into consideration that your iPhone touch screen isn’t the same size as a HTC Tough Diamond touch screen, nor do they share the same resolution.

2.Images:  How many are there and where are they placed?

The amount of images you have is directly related to how long your website takes to load and, consequently, how long a person will stay there.  Too many images obviously causes a longer download time (despite the revolutionary 3G network) and most users will immediately bounce off your page if what they’re looking for doesn’t come up fast enough.  Images that are larger than the user’s screen will force them to scroll around just to see an entire image.

3.Filesize: Just how much content should you have?

Despite the rise in broadband networks and drop in data-usage plans, how much content and the total size of your webpage still directly influences how many hits your website will get from mobile phones.  Many phone plans charge their subscribers based on how much data (bandwith) they use every time they log onto the web from their phone; which means the longer your site takes to load, the more you are costing a potential customer and the less likely they are to come back to your website.

4.Scrolling: How much should a person scroll before reaching content?

This is something that happens with normal websites viewed on computers at home or the office; who wants to scroll around just to get the content they need?  The most important information should be available the moment a user logs onto your website to minimize your bounce rate.

Invent words. There are many domain names out there that are one-word, nonsensical utterances that do not mean anything, but are catchy and easy to remember. One example is Deezer.com, the website formally known as Blogmusik.net. To stand out from the hundreds of “music” and “blog” combinations, they went with the new catch-word, Deezer. This solution is not suitable for everyone (imagine www.lawyuz.com being used for a law firm), especially not for small businesses that do not have multi-million marketing budgets to spread their nonsensical name throughout the Web (i.e. Google).

Use keywords. Whenever possible, add in a keyword or two to give your domain name that extra little boost. Of course that can lead to some very spammy looking domain names such as mortgage-homebuyer-badcredit.net. SEOMoz has a rudimentary algorithm for analyzing a domain name and determining whether it is spammy or not. We passed the test with a score of 0.385 (1 being extremely spammy and 0 being, well, tough to get close to unless using a .gov or .edu domain extension). Remember: do not sacrifice quality for a few keywords. It is more important to have a domain name that is creative and unique.

Keep it short. Whatever you do, make sure that when you say what your domain name is over the phone, that someone will remember it. You should not have to email someone a link for them to visit your website. It should be easy enough to remember that a client can type it in themselves into the browser address line.

Use your company name. Okay, so this is the traditional way of going about picking your domain name when you are not an online company and already have name for you business. It also has its risks, though. First of all, be sure that your domain name doesn’t do something like this: www.atcibusinessschool.com. Second, the length of your company name may be too long. Consider shortening it. For example, consider using www.tahitibar.com instead of an entire company name such as “Tahiti Late Night Dancing Bar”.