Official Google Panda Update Version 3.8 On June 25th

Google has announced they pushed out a new refresh to the Panda algorithm recently.

This update “noticeably affects only ~1% of queries worldwide,” said Google on Twitter.

There were earlier rumors of an update over the weekend but Google said the rollout started today and not over the weekend.

The previous Panda update was on June 8th and before that on April 26th. Typically, Google pushes out algorithm updates for Panda and Penguin every month or so. While the last Panda update was just over 2 weeks ago, Google felt they wanted to push out a new refresh.

Google said there were no updates to the algorithm or changes in the signals. This was simply a basic data refresh where they ran the algorithm again.

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6 Ways to Boost Your Rankings Using Google Authorship

Google authorship is big on the agenda for a lot of SEOs at the moment, and rightly so considering how heavily Google is looking to push this into search results.

Creating a personal brand is incredibly valuable toward building and strengthening great relationships. After all, you’re always going to have more trust in recommendations from your own circle of friends.

This study from Nielsen strongly backs this up, with 90 percent of people trusting recommendations from people they know. In comparison, only 41 percent trust search engine results!

That stat alone shows the importance of why Google had to become more social. If searchers are given more buying trust in their results, then advertisers are going to get a better return on investment. And Google authorship appears to be a key part of their solution toward achieving this, essentially merging personalized search with your social circle.

So what can you do to capitalize on this?

1. Build a Personal Brand Online

Google have realized just how important social media is as an indicator toward assessing the quality of a website. And because in many ways social media is more about personal branding, (as opposed to company branding) authorship starts to make a lot more sense.

Google doesn't want to just measure the influence of a brand profile on Twitter/Facebook/Google+ – it wants to know about its employees, its writers, and online fans/followers. Treat your own reputation management seriously and look to build a strong profile on key social sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.

If you’re not an active blogger, you really should start now. It’s never too late! Blogging is a great way to build a personal brand – plus it opens doors to further opportunities such as writing on higher profile sites, conference/event speaking or media interviews, meaning that you can leverage your online profile even further.

2. Setup Google Authorship For All the Websites You Write On
By connecting your Google+ profile with all of the websites you publish content on, it means that your profile is going to be displayed whenever an article/blog post that you’ve written appears in Google’s search results.

On its own this should naturally increase your following – because people will also click through to your Google+ profile as well. So that’s already helping to build your profile and make you more influential.

Plus it’s going to get you extra traffic by positively influencing rankings within your social circle. Which is also another key reason Google promotes this: it pushes large volumes of traffic through to Google+ and gives users a reason to re-visit.

3. Use Google+ Daily
Even if you have to force yourself to do it – try spending a small amount of time each day commenting and sharing your connections content, not just your own, to strengthen those connections.

By making a small effort each day, you'll gradually start to build up a stronger profile.

4. Use Tools & Interact With Influencers in Your Niche
Firstly identify the key influencers in your industry. Tools like FollowerWonk, Topsy and FindPeopleOnPlus are great for this.

Then get their attention – definitely don’t overdo it by stalking them and replying to everything they say. But make the effort to interact with them occasionally and share their content and hopefully this will go both ways.

In Twitter you can build private lists of people you want to interact with more frequently. Why not do the same with a Google+ circle too?

If you can start getting retweets from people with 10,000+ followers it’s likely to help build your social reach. And again, the same rules apply with shares on Google+.

Another great tool is Google Ripples (see this guide on SEOmoz to show how to use it). Basically, it means you can see who the influential people are when sharing a post and how far it has reached. See this screenshot for the recent announcement of Google Drive:

5. Hire Great Writers With Strong Social Profiles
This is one of the most important lessons to learn. Finding the right people is critical. Making mistakes in new hires can set you back massively.

Take the time to find someone who is great, as opposed to someone who “can do the job.” It's much more rewarding in terms of the results you can achieve.

This fits in incredibly well with Google authorship – personally this is something I looked for in a writer beforehand anyway. But now there is even more incentive to find a writer who has a great social profile and can reach out to their own audience and network.

In many ways, authorship is almost a Panda-style algorithm update, meaning that Google will reward quality over quantity. Look for top writers within your industry to hire – forget about the $10-a-go copywriting services and find an actual individual who can help promote yourself my using sites such as the Problogger Job Board or AuthorPress and most importantly reach out to your own blog and social network.

If Google is going to measure the influence of a writer’s social profile when ranking content, you should do the same when looking to hire them too!

6. Meet Bloggers and Writers in Person

Meet people in real life. Go to industry events, find blogger meet-ups – figure out where these guys hangout and get to know them. But do it offline – it’s far more personal!
Recently I analyzed the people I had most frequently interacted with on Twitter using WhoReTweetsMe.com because I wanted to see how many of these people I’d actually met in person. Even I was surprised by the results, I’d met 88 out of the top 100!

Having a personal brand is a great first step – but really getting out there and meeting people is the way to take it to the next level.

What Impact Will Authorship Have to Rankings?

At the moment it’s unclear how much of a direct impact authorship has, or will have, to influencing rankings. However, even if it’s not a ranking factor just yet, Google authorship and Google+ already influences personalized search results – which in itself can boost the rankings for connections within your social circle. This opens up huge opportunities for individuals, because it means Google is likely to reward you personally for being an authority online.

Google are also fully aware that a website’s reputation is no longer just based on links. People will much more commonly tweet a link now than they would blog about it, so to ignore social from their algorithm long-term would make no sense to them if they want to continue providing the most relevant set of search results possible. Which of course they do!

It seems pretty clear that this is the way Google intends on heading. There's no reason not to set up Google authorship. So get in there sooner rather than later.

Ref: http://searchenginewatch.com

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A List of All On-Page and Off-Page SEO Optimization Steps

1. Website analysis = A website analysis is a must for every website owner and if you are an SEO you must know how to do a website’s analysis. A website analysis is more than a checklist in which you check if everything works fine and according to plan or not like content, programming, competition etc.

2. Keyword Research = Keyword research is necessary for a website. It helps in getting best keywords which will help you to get only the targeted traffic from search engines.

3. Bold, Italic effect to main keywords = These tags shows the emphasis given to a particular word. This kind od tagging helps the bots to understand that what the owner want to tell the user and what are the main key points of the content shown in that page, for which it would have higher ranking in SERP results.

4. Canonicalization = Url Duplicacy, if not solved then can harm your website. It happens because one don’t redirects the unnecessary page that show the same data which is somehow considered as duplicate data by search engine bots.

5. Competition Analysis = It is must to understand the market and your competitors. One has to make some plans to top the completion that can only happen after doing the competition analysis about the every step they have taken so far and probable future plans, this helps a lot to perform better in the market.

6. CSS Validation = You website must look good not from outside but also from inside to the bots which crawl your site, so make sure that you have 100% correct CSS, so validate it CSS validators.

7. Google Base Feeds = Better known as FeedBurner, It will help you to have more subscribers from google reader which leads to more and better traffic.

8. H Tags Optimization (Eg: H1, H2, H3) = An important part of SEO, which helps you to make the robots understand that what is more important in your website and what is less.

9. HTML Code Clean Up & Optimization = HTML also needs to be optimize to provide optimal results, one must not create a website full of codes, try to make them as small as you can so that the load time can get better and this also helps in ranking better in SERP results.

10. Image Optimization = It refers to use alt tags properly. Using alt tags with every image will help you to get traffic from image search as well.

11. Hyperlink Optimization = The anchor text used to create hyperlinks of your website always helps you to rank better for those anchor texts, so try to use keywords as your anchor text to create links, internal or external.

12. In depth site Analysis = A deep analysis of your own website is necessary to do. It helps you to detect all the errors and other malfunctioning in your site.

13. Link Validation = All the links must be correct and must not be broken.

14. Meta Description Tags Optimization = You Meta tags help you to rank better but you must also know that how to manage them as there are some limitation and rules that you must follow to get maximum benefits from it.

15. Meta Keywords Tags Optimization = Just Like Meta Description tags Meta Keywords tag is also important most of the people thinks that it does not help in any way but it really does.

16. Navigation & Design Optimization = Your Navigation bar or any other navigation system must be good and user friendly, with it a good design which attracts the eye of the user is must.

17. PR Sculpting = It’s a way to get PR from the websites which already have good PR. One can have the PR juice from good ranking websites by having

18. Robots.txt Optimization = It a file which tell the search engine bot that which place to crawl and which to not.

19. Text Modification Optimization = Text optimization also plays important role in ranking better in SERP. One must apply the keyword density rule to gain more benefits from their site.

20. Title Tag Optimization = A title is most important tag, a good not only attracts the users but also the search bots.

21. URL Rewrite = URL rewrite helps one to increase the visibility of their site by making url understandable in human language which are highly recommended by search engines as well.

22. W3C Validation = With help of W3C you can validate your website to make sure that it is up to dated and working fine according to the latest rules of programming.

23. Broken Links Checking = It’s necessary to find out every error in your website even if it is a broken link. These kinds of error can happen internally or externally which may lead to bad reputation from both users and bots.

24. Directory Submissions = Directory Submission will help you to set the category of your website and to get good free one way backlinks which will help in faster indexation of your website.

25. Extraction of Site Url’s ( Link Level Depth) = It helps in detecting the duplicacy of title and meta tags of those pages.

26. Internal Link Structuring = Internal link structure refers to a structure which let you link the other pages of your website with any other relative pages, these also may serve as backlinks.

27. Link Building ( Link Bait ) = It is a procedure of a reciprocal linking with websites which already have good PR to share the link juice.

28. One way link (PR4 or Greater) = This steps may include all of the off page optimization steps to get one way backlinks, sometimes they are paid and sometimes they are free.

29. Site Back-links count = Try to get more backlinks everyday, more backlinks means better ranking and more traffic which leads to more income.

30. Local Search Engine Optimization = If your business is local then Local search engine optimization can help you a lot. Submitting in local directories and search engine apps will increase your chances to appear more in a local search.

31. Customer Review Submission = This is just like the testimonials but on a large scale, it includes testimonials, customer feedback, their comments etc. You can show this on many pages of your website which will increase customers’ trust in you.

32. H card Integration = hCard is one of several open microformat standards which helps in representing vCard properties and values in semantic HTML or XHTML.

33. Testimonial Submission = Try to get more testimonials from some reputed customers of your which will increase your goodwill.

34. Local Search Engine Optimization = This helps in getting better response from internet users if you have a local business. It is helpful for small businesses like shoe makers, restaurants, pizza shops, marts etc.

35. Google Webmaster Tools account setup & monitoring = It will help you to understand the flaws and errors in your website with many other facilities to be used to make your website a better one.

36. Installing Usability Tools on Website = If there are any tools that can be used by your customers, please provide it to them.

37. Optimization for Multiple Browsers = Making a website look good in all of the web browser is necessary because you don’t want to lose your user just because your layout does not open correctly in some browser.

38. Article Submission = It helps in having a good backlink and also some visitors from good article websites.

39. Blog Comment on Relevant Blogs = Commenting on relevant blogs, increase your popularity as well as provides good backlinks, just make sure that you do not spam.

40. Blog Designing for the website = A blog of your website must look attractive as well it also must be similar to your website, so that the user may not get confused about its ownership.

41. Classified submission = It is a free facility given my many websites mostly forums to promote your website, products on it or any service that you provide for free, but please just don’t spam there.

42. Creating Promotional pages on hubpages, squidoo, etc = Hub pages are good sources to attract more users, keeping the relevancy of the content you submit there can bring more users to your website.

43. Face Book Twitter Marketing = Social Media Marketing (SMM) with Social networks like Facebook and Twitter can also help you to spread the word about your website.

44. Integration of page bookmarking tools = You can also bookmark your bookmarks like creating a linkwheel between them.

45. Integration of page sharing tools = Sharing tools help you to increase your link popularity through those users who like to share the info with other with help of your sharing tools.

46. Paid Submission = One good websites people usually get paid links on targeted pages from  where they get backlink, PR juice and traffic as well.

47. Photo Sharing = Sharing images on websites like flickr, photo bucket etc helps to increase traffic through image searches.

48. PPT Submission = Uploading PPT presentation or pdf files with good knowledge also attracts the users eyes.

49. Press Release = Any small or major change must be released in market to aware your customers, Press release do this work.

50. RSS Feeds = RSS feed helps reader to read your content without any fancy layout and irritating ads and many users use different RSS feed directories to find the content that they like to read and these website also keep track of your every single post which also counts as backlinks.

51. Social Bookmarking = Bookmarking is one of the best way to get good one way dofollow backlinks all you need a good list of bookmarking websites.

52. Video Submission = A good video can make a huge effect on your user, submitting to video websites like YouTube, MetaCafe, Vimeo etc can bring more targeted traffic.

53. Article Writing = It is the same as blog writing but article you write can also be submitted in other article websites or article directories.

54. Blog Writing = By providing good content to users that they like to read about your website, your service or your product, whichever the case is keeps your users stay in your contact.

55. Press Release Writing = Press release helps one to look like more profession, press release helps in spreading the word about your site or

56. Website Spell Check = One must keep their content correct even from the point of view grammar rules.

57. XML Site Map Creation & Submission = XML sitemap helps bots to crawl your website without tackling any difficulties usually created by JavaScript, HTML error and other malfunctions.

58. HTML Sitemap for users = HTML sitemap helps user to find out all the links available on a website and they can go at the desired place.

59. Log file analysis = By keeping a track of who is coming and when is coming you can provide content or do SEO according to that region. It also helps in tracking the incoming of search engine bots and you can know that when to expect them again.

60. Google, Yahoo & Bing Site Map Creation = XML sitemaps helps in getting site indexed much faster by letting the bot to know about all the urls of your website.

61. Deep Indexing Recommendations = Deep indexing helps to get more backlinks from your own website, though as internal links they still help a lot.

62. Check Search Engine Road Blocks = Check if there is any problem for robots to crawl your website, you can check it through use of fetch as bot from Google webmaster tool.

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