Google made waves this week taking 4 out of 5 internet marketing headlines this week. Here are the top 5 stories you need to know about: Google talks SEO; link building tips for new sites; how Google monitors its ads; a revamped Google Display Network interface; and why you should pay attention to meta descriptions.
This Week in Internet Marketing 2012 03 27
Straight from the Horse's Mouth: Google Talks SEO
Google published a blog and YouTube video about five common SEO mistakes and six helpful ideas. One of the most common pitfalls is slow iteration of webpages. To combat this try A/B testing different designs; thereby improving the user experience. This can actually help your site rank! This shows Google that you're working to make your site better. Other tips include creating a strong value proposition and staying fresh and relevant with social media, blogs and mobile accessible sites).
5 Link Building Strategies for New Websites
This piece talks about how to get inbound links for a new site. The top strategy discussed is guest blogging. Guest blogging is simply the idea of contacting another blogger and asking them if you can write a guest post. It's a win/win situation whereby they get new content that helps their site rank and you get a valuable backlink in return. Read the rest of the article for some more great tips.
How Google Keeps Ads Safe
Google put together a nicely packaged video about how well their ads protect the user. It's a bit self-serving, but also kind of interesting. Out of the billions of ads submitted to Google, they shut down roughly 130,000,000 ads using a combination of automated systems and human review. When their algorithm finds a site that violates its privacy policy it automatically looks for any other pages on the web that contain similar content and blacklists them.
Google Revamps Display Network Interface in AdWords
Display advertising has evolved quite a bit and that will only continue. We've seen changes from what's shown on the front-end and how ads can be targeted, to how PPC managers control and execute display network campaigns. Google announced the new Display Network Tab for the AdWords interface that includes an enhanced contextual engine that gives advertisers "the ability to combine the reach of display with the precision of search."
Conversion-Minded SEOs Should Pay Attention to Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions often appear as the snippets underneath search results. There once was a time when meta tags helped you rank, but they quickly became abused and no longer impact your ranking. So why do they matter? Because the snippet helps to sell people when they see your link on the SERP (search engine results page). So if you're just looking to rank highly you can ignore them, but if you actually care about click-throughs, then time spent writing great meta descriptions is time well spent.
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