Quality, highly relevant content is an essential aspect of the SEO game. Gone are the days when keyword stuffing could produce higher organic search rankings.

After Google released its Panda update in 2011, many websites were penalized due to overly keyword-stuffed content. Now websites are focusing on link building, which is considered the greatest factor to better search engine placement.

+1's Will Slowly Replace Backlinks 

Just like copy was abused with mind boggling word repetition, now link building is becoming an automated and unnatural sub-service to organic SEO. In short, the web will soon be scummed up by way of "gray hat" link building.

So what does this mean for the organic SEO game of 2011?

Backlinks will soon loose their credibility to Google "+1's," and relevant, compelling copy will be MVP. 

Think about it. What better way for Google to overcome poor quality websites holding top rankings on competitive SERPs?

The answer is by hinging a ranking system based on its own in-house mechanism: The Google+ social network.

In addition, what better way for Google to take over Facebook?

SEO and Internet marketing are two very influential practices, especially upon the masses. Once one hundred Google +1's replace the the PR4 backlink, the professionals of the media world will be swaying society that if your not on Google+, your not in "the game."

Moving Forward

So how does a website prepare for this momentous shift in 2012?

It all comes back to content and how well it is marketed.

The strongest of the organic SEO strategies will include masterful content marketing combined with a spread of social media.

In essence, for businesses to catch the big fish, they must lure in the +1's by compelling users with their awesome content.

Rank on.

Many websites fail to attract the amount of visitors they desire. This is often because the preliminary keyword research of the SEO process was insufficient and viewed from the wrong lens.

For the best direction leading to SEO success, there are many elements that must be analyzed. Most of these stem from using the right Internet marketing tools.

To help you become more successful with your SEO efforts, we outline four essential tools that the best Internet marketers use.

The Google Keyword Tool

Google provides a keyword research tool intended for Pay Per Click advertisers that displays the number (or volume) of people per month that are searching a given phrase. The data provided by the Google Keyword Tool helps to determine both the worthiness and the competitiveness of certain keywords. These two factors may be interrelated, because often a keyword that appears worthy of optimization lacks heavy competition.

Traffic Travis

Traffic Travis is a software platform that comes in both free and paid versions. It offer a fantastic competition analysis tool that provides a “difficulty rating” for a website's ability to rank on select search terms. In essence, Traffic Travis enables you to analyze how difficult it will be to rank and get traffic.

SEO Spyglass

Backlinks are the most powerful indicator of a strong site, especially for SEO. The link analysis provided by SEO Spyglass allows you to see where a site's backlinks are coming from. Spyglass will also provide statistical analysis on the pages containing those links, such as the Google Page Rank and anchor text. The information provided by this tool allows marketers to gauge how strong their websites are as well as their competitor’s. 

Google Website Optimizer

Conversions are key for SEO, and if your landing pages are not converting, your efforts are going nowhere. The Google Website Optimizer allows you to test different versions of a page to analyze which aspects of the page contribute to greater conversions.

Making decisions based on the factual statistics that these tools collect is likely to improve a website’s SEO efforts. By using these Internet marketing tools, you can give your website the SEO TLC it needs to move in the right direction.

For marketers and entrepreneurs alike, implementing QR codes is extremely easy and sometimes a great pursuit to improve profitability.

Creating QR codes are very low-cost, simple to create, and implement. QR codes are on the leading edge of business marketing, offering something new and innovative to enhance a business.

So Why Use QR Codes for Business Advertising?

Based on research conducted by Google, about 90% of all smartphone users are searching for a website or a phone number for something that they plan to act upon (or purchase.) This means that being ready for such impulse mobile searches can result in a better stream of business.

By the end of this year, Smartphone owners are anticipated to double. As a result, preparing your marketing strategies around mobile marketing is further essential. QR codes are quick and cheap way to start.

How to Use QR Codes to Advertise Your Business

QR codes carry a number of uses. They simply act as links and can direct smartphone users to just about any webpage or promotion. In fact, QR codes are common on basic materials and publications, such as business cards.

QR codes are said to increase the response rate of direct advertising campaigns. So for tangible retailers, placing QR codes in the store so that customers can easily view and scan them can really help promote certain products. This can help get rid of lingering inventory, among other things.

In addition, QR codes are very effective on print ads. This allows consumers to go from ad to webpage in a quick scan. Such "calls to action" are revolutionizing the way we do marketing.

Following the trend of its social media counter-parts Facebook and Google+, Twitter has recently announced the launch of branded, business-specific pages on its site.

The new Twitter business pages are an effort to provide a more concrete and tangible fan-base in which brands can have more interaction with their consumers.

What's New About Twitter Pages for Brands?

The new Twitter pages for brands offer a rich and sophisticated user experience. The new pages offer more interaction for users and have become much more presentable from a marketing point of view. In essence, the new Twitter brand pages have become an ideal platform to lure customers.

We have found a number of benefits of the new Twitter pages. Some these include:

• Large, Customizable header images - probably the first thing you would notice about the new Twitter brand pages. This enables brands to a logo or image, as well as a tagline or any other visuals that format to the new 835 x 90 header space.

• You can move a Tweet to the very top of your profile page’s timeline to emphasize your most engaging and vital content.

• Also nice for business are the rich media (photos and videos) links embedded in Tweets. Instead of sending a visitor away upon clicking the tweeted link, a sub-window will expand to show that media within your page.

• The look and feel of the new Twitter brand pages has been optimized for mobile with a consistent across many popular smartphone platforms.
• Twitter brand pages are available to the global public and do not require visitors to log-in to a Twitter account to see your company's page.

Marketing Advantages of Twitter

From a marketing standpoint, this is a great leap by Twitter. Earlier, brands preferred Facebook over Twitter, as it allowed more customization and interaction. The move by Twitter now integrates such features into the new Twitter brand pages.

Brand pages for several large companies like American Express, Chevrolet, Coca-Cola, Dell, Disney, Intel, and Nike have all been customized and offer a more unique, customized feel. These new branded pages provide an elegant platform for consumer interaction and promotional presentation. In short, Twitters new pages hint at the future of advertising and marketing from more social platforms.

Are you interested in the benefits of guest blogging? Did you know that you can reap more website traffic all the while promoting your product or services with guest blogging?

Well this is your opportunity to expand your mind, and see what you have been missing.

What is guest blogging?

Being a guest blogger simply means that you are included as a writer on another blog. There are different arrangements, but it in essence, guest blogging is when you write content for other blogs.

How to become a guest blogger?

Some popular blogs have a link like 'become a guest blogger,' if they offer this possibility. But even if you can't find such a link on the blog, you simply write to the blog owner and ask how they feel about guest bloggers.

As a guest blogger, you often need to present on-topic content that relates to the blog, or follow the blog owners instructions. If you find blogs that are relevant to your interests, then you can gain even more value.

Benefits of being a guest blogger

Once you jump on the guest blogging bandwagon, you can realize a number of benefits:

• Guest blogging can allow you add links to you blog posts that direct back to certain websites for SEO purposes
• When you write blog posts on other domains, you are using an additional channel to you or your business's name out there
• The link building advantages of guest blogging will help you to rank better in search engines
• Guest blogging is great networking tool that can result in many valuable relationships

Guest blogging for SEO

When you write for other blogs, they often allow you to link back to your domain through the content you provide. These backlinks give your website more credit and can contribute to a greater PageRank.

This is a very easy and simply way to build links to your domain, which is now known as the most influential factor in SEO. Just imagine if you could write a few posts per week for a few high authority blogs. In time, you website's search engine performance could skyrocket.

Guest blogging can be a very powerful marketing and advertisement tool. It can help brand your online business as well as increase your rank.

For all the newbie’s in the SEO game looking to increase your rank, the term anchor text is used to define the visible words that are displayed on a link. Anchor text substitutes the need to link using the URL and enables search engine spiders to crawl the site being linked to with better sense of direction. The spider can gauge the relevancy of the anchor text to that of the webpage’s content, making it more popular to certain keywords.

For example, a link with the anchor text free rank checker that directs users to http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/ tells search engine that this webpage is about a “free rank checker" and will better rank the site in the organic search results for users searching for similar keywords.

Optimized Anchor Text for Partial Linking

The practice of applying anchor text may seem simple; however there is one strategy to better your organic listings in the search engines. Using anchor text for partial linking a powerful tactic is often overlooked by many in the SEO business. Partial linking is just like it sounds – using only part of the keyword phrase for SEO in the links anchor text.

A few examples of solid partial linking in anchor text (when targeting the keyword phrase “Felt triathlon bikes") would be “top triathlon bikes", “Felt brand bikes" or “learn more about Felt."

As link building continues to be dominant in SEO, using the best practices of anchor text is critical. Start using creative SEO anchor text links to better your organic search performance.

If you are an online business owner and want to keep up with the most important changes in online business trends, then it is important that you get familiar with mobile website optimization and how it works.  According to Google, “by 2013 more people will use their mobile phones than P.C.’s to get online.”  This is a growing trend that is expected to continue well into 2015 and beyond.

So, what does this mean to you as an online business owner or marketer? Well, usually when a user is using a mobile device to get the information that they need online, they are usually need the information in a timely, efficient manner. 

Most users will expect their mobile experience to be just as good and just as fast as their desktop access.  When someone tries to access a website from their mobile device that has not been optimized for mobile, they often leave that site and try the next one.

This means that without mobile website optimization the potential of losing website visitors to your competition is very predictable.  This can leave a very bad taste in the mouth of your visitors and cause them to speak negatively about not only your website, but about your company as well.

How to Optimize for Mobile

The good news is that mobile optimization is not that all that difficult when you follow a few basic steps :

1. Have a separate mobile user website created for your users. This should include, at a minimum, iPhone and Android users. The menu options or navigation should be designed to give visitors quick and direct access to the key content or contact information that they are looking for.  The mobile website should also be designed to load quickly.

2. Create shorter versions of your main pages that are better suited for viewing on mobile screens.  This is where formatting is critical for mobile users because content will appear differently on a mobile device.  Titles and headlines may need to be shorten or re-written to accommodate the smaller screens.

3. Setup a separate marketing campaign for mobile users.  Allocate resources for growing your mobile marketing, support, and customer feedback.  This will allow you to track, do split testing and make tweaks and changes to improve your results.

Begin Your Mobile Website Project

By starting out small and improving as you go you will be able to take full advantage of the current and future growth of mobile phone users.  This is a trend that can have a significant impact on the success of your business and can put you ahead of your other online competitors.

The key to achieving the best results from your mobile website optimization efforts is to first make it a priority to create and implement a mobile website project, which should include identifying your target mobile users. 

Do research to learn more about what others in your market are doing that is working.  Implement your own mobile SEO strategy with an eye towards making it better than your competitions. This can help ensure that you maximize your return on investment as quickly as possible.

Try testing your website's currently mobile-friendliness by using the GoMo tool by Google.

On the heels of the much improved analytics for Facebook advertising called Facebook Insights, YouTube has launched YouTube Analytics, replacing an Insights tool that allows users to view data through their channels. What improvements are to be expected from the new YouTube Analytics? Here's a peek:

New Look, More Efficiency

The new YouTube analytics page offers all the essential data in one screenshot. Previously featured in YouTube Insights, a summary of videos, views, demographics, and video popularity are still displayed, but with YouTube Analytics, the dashboard also displays overall channel performance, engagement, plus data about how viewers found your video. More detailed information is available if you click the report option.

Detailed Data & Information

Starting from the overview page, you have access to various reports from the left navigation. Over all, the reports provide better understanding of how the audience responds to your content. A data filter for content, location and dates allows you to get specific details depending on the chosen category. Charts are able to display daily, weekly and monthly data and allows for comparison of two metrics in a single chart. Additionally, you have the option to toggle from Line Chart view and Map view. Hovering over the map if it is available in your report, allows you to get more detailed information about the area.

Viewer Interest Percentages

YouTube sets the number of views at 300 for new videos and 600 for older ones for statistical significance. The Audience Retention report was formerly known as Hot Spots in YouTube Insights. The report indicates viewer interest on your video and how long before they decide to move on. It is based on absolute and relative retention with absolute retention showing up as a percentage from the start of the video. The graph will most likely fluctuate as viewers stop, fast forward or replay the video. If the viewer decides to replay your video, the graph goes up but if he decides to fast forward or stop playing it, the graph goes down. Your video's ability to retain viewers during playback as it compares with other videos of similar length is shown in the Relative Audience Retention report.  A high percentage means more people are viewing your videos over others at the same moment during playback. 

The information that can be gathered through this is at what point in your video your viewers get bored. This allows you to pinpoint the exact moments viewers lose interest as YouTube allows embedding of the video in the report. This means you have the necessary data to start improving your content on the moments when your audience starts to lose interest.

Monetary Estimates

The Estimated Earnings tab allows analysis for earnings based on YouTube presence. The Total Estimated Earnings report shows net earnings realized through Google advertisements. AFV Earnings display revenues through Adsense for Video while YouTube Earnings provides data for earnings made via Doubleclick advertising and other YouTube affiliates.

Marketers engaged in video advertising will be able to get better insights as to video performance and make improvements using the data made available by YouTube Analytics. Allowing for informed decisions to be made, the improved YouTube Analytics allows for optimization of video marketing for your target audience. YouTube's goal for launching YouTube Analytics is for video marketers to "earn more money" which, hopefully these improvements will help materialize.  

Learn more about the analytics features of Youtube by watching this video: Youtube Analytics Tutorial

For many companies who hinge their advertising and marketing efforts on organic search engine traffic, a penalty from Google can result in life-threatening situation for the business.

Most websites are rightfully deserving of Google penalization by way of sketchy SEO practices and unethical motives. However some recipients of a Google penalty are simply unaware of the errors and risks that exists.

Below we outline the basics of the Google Search Penalty and how to go about avoiding it.

How the Google Penalty is Issued

The Google Penalty Box, also known as the “Sandbox Effect," is the practice of filtering websites by Google's web ranking algorithms. The penalty is generally issued under two circumstances:

• If a website does not conform to Google's standards for quality and content.
• If Google finds out that the website is using subversive optimization techniques.

Results of the Google Penalty

Google penalizes websites that fail to use proper and ethical SEO techniques. The search engine will manually demote a website, or if the issue is prominent, Google may alter the search algorithms to cause the site, as well as many others like it, to move down in the rankings. Here are the specifics.

• Manual demotion eventually expires after 30 days if it involves hidden text. Penalties last longer for cloaking and malicious activities.
• Changes in algorithm can be managed if you improve your site, after which the penalty is lifted upon re-crawling and re-indexing of the page.

There are also varying severities of Google Search penalization. A “-30 day" penalty causes website rankings to slip 30 places from its original position. A “-60 penalty" lowers rankings by 60 places. A “-950 penalty" places your website on the 95th page, which is virtually non-existent to search engine users.

How to Avoid the Google Penalty

Given the reasons for the Google Penalty, it often general logic to avoid such devastations. Take in consideration these points to avoid the Google Penalty.

• Website owners should conform to Google's standards for quality content.
• Refrain from subversive optimization, such as unethical link building practices. Google has already filed patents to reduce or qualify the impact of these manipulations.
• Google recommends checking on their Help Center articles to identify and fix what may be causing the problem.

What Makes Websites More Optimized?

Google also recommends solutions for making websites more "optimized" or searchable. This includes:

• Using a text browser like Lynx because other search engine spiders interpret websites like Lynx does. You should also allow your search bots to crawl your website without session IDs.
• Ensuring that your web server informs Google about content changes since the last time Google crawled it.
• Writing pages that provide a clear and accurate description of content. Try to use keywords users type to find your pages and ensure that your site includes these words. 
• Using text rather than images to display relevant names, links, and content. Texts contained in images are not recognized by Google Crawler.

Writing compelling press releases and distributing them through the right platforms is a start, however when taken a step further, press releases offer great potential for Internet marketing and SEO. An optimized press release can result in better search engine visibility and a greater contribution to a website’s SEO efforts.

Consider the following 5 tips to optimize a press release.

5 Tips For Press Release Optimization

1. Like an optimized webpage, an optimized press release should contain relevant keywords. Think in terms of what someone might be searching on the web that may lead them to your press release. Include such phrases in the title and throughout the body of the press release.
    
2. Format your press release using headers, bold or strong tags, and italics. Take the keywords in which you pinpointed from step one, and use them in headers or bold them in appropriate instances throughout the copy.
    
3. Include links in your press release. Whether back to your website, or to a credible source relevant to the press release, including links can make your press release more valuable. In addition, links with custom anchor text can be a great tool for SEO.
    
4. Utilize images and videos to better optimize a press release. Take this one step further by using your keyword targets name these files, and if allowed, use keywords appropriately as alternative text (alt tags).
    
5. Invest for distribution. Free syndication is not always as effective if your goal is to optimize your website and press release visibility. A pay-for-use press release submission site increases the chances of your press release being ranked well in the search engines. PRweb and i-Newswire are two that offer great features.

Press release optimization offers a number of advantages, from generating valuable backlinks to expanding your search visibility. Don’t just publish your press release, optimize your press release for greater opportunities.