One simple way to share information with mobile customers is to include a QR code on your signage, brochures, and other marketing materials. A QR, or “quick response”, code is a set of instructions within a graphic image that, when scanned with a smartphone, tablet, or other mobile device, directs the device to a landing page where you can share more information with your customers.

For those companies that have a digital presence (a website or dedicated landing page), it is important to format each page to render on a mobile device. Images, buttons, and other content often do not appear or function in the same manner on a mobile device as they do when viewed with a desktop or laptop computer. There are services that small business owners can use which convert traditional websites to mobile format in as little as one hour.

Mobile marketing strategies can be beneficial in two ways:

• Attracting New Customers – small business owners can reach out to prospects more quickly by establishing a mobile presence that can be accessed as they are travelling or away from a traditional computer. Registration on geo-trafficking sites like FourSquare puts you in front of prospects that are nearby.
• Staying Connected – your customers can be updated or sent a message requiring immediate response through their mobile device. As consumers become more attached through mobile devices, small business owners can gain an advantage by marketing on the devices they use most.

Small businesses in many industries have been gaining traction in the mobile environment. For example, real estate agents have used QR codes to provide prospective buyers with details about a property that can be displayed while they are onsite. Restaurants and small retail shops use QR coupons to attract foot traffic as shoppers are out and about. In some cases, instant promotions have been successful in attracting new business.

In other cases, mobile marketing used to stay connected has strengthened relationships between businesses and their customers. A regional coffee roasting company has used QR codes to describe their ethically-grown products to customers. A perfume company has promoted brand loyalty by extending exclusive offers to previous customers through text messaging.

There are countless examples of small companies using mobile technology to increase new business and connect with existing customers. According to one industry analyst, mobile will “overtake fixed Internet access by 2014″. Is it time to explore mobile marketing for your company?

Whether for good or bad, webmasters and SEO companies that were using questionable techniques that were accepted and effective for years have had to revise their strategies and come up with better solutions.
In a nutshell, Penguin has penalized sites that have link portfolios that are considered ‘suspicious’ of being ‘over-optimized for SEO’. Sites that have used too much of the same text in links (having 100 sites link back to you with the term ‘batman comics’) or creating too many links in a short period of time (100 links in one day), or having links present in obviously scammy, low-level sites (social bookmarks, link profiles, footer links) all were hit if they relied on these tactics.

Many have said that Penguin has ‘changed SEO forever’. For several SEO companies and service providers it has. For those who were doing it ‘right’ in the first place, not so much. Penalizing an industry for ‘over optimizing’, when their sole purpose is to optimize for keywords seems a bit silly to me. However, the SEO world has gotten very impatient and reckless over the past few years, and Penguin is forcing people to take it ‘nice n’ easy’, and that’s exactly what I think people should do.

Atleast for now, the days of building 1000s of low quality, directory links in order to rank a site seem to be behind us. Instead, the new online currency is ‘relevance’. Prove to Google that your site is relevant to a keyword, not solely on the quantity of links, but more on the quality of those links, and you’ll see your results react.

Good SEO Companies are essentially morphing into ‘Social PR firms’, connecting their clients with other relevant websites out there. Instead of having 100 links from random websites, have 5 good links from sites related to your industry. Have a website selling batman figurines? Get links from sites related to toys, games, comics, and anything else related to your product. Sell your product and site to other websites and encourage them to share. Those 5 links can be more powerful than 100 low level directory or social bookmark links.

Over the past month, we’ve been able to help clients in highly competitive industries jump several spots and even pages just by getting their site on relevant blogs. Reach out to news, blogs, and association websites in your industry via social media, emailing and meets up, and ask that they write about you.

Overtime, these relevant sites will serve as your proof that your site is relevant for your keywords. Rather than having 1000s of links with anchor text that says “Batman Comics”, have several blogs about comics write about your batman site. It may seem like a slow and ineffective process, but once you get past the misconception that 100 links are better than 5, you’ll see how effective it can really be. It’s really that simple. It’s never too late to start repairing your relationship with Google, so get started today!
Where you hit by Google Penguin? What are you doing to repair your rankings?

To combat this, Google has recently announced a major algorithm change to their search spiders, which is aimed at combatting ‘over-optimized’ websites that modify their content and links to manipulate search engine results. Without getting into the discussion of what Google has recommended in the past (for responsible SEO) versus what they now consider ‘over-optimization’, it’s fair to say that Google’s efforts are noble. It’s a hard, almost impossible task to clean up the web of spam, but they have to do it to maintain their quality searches.

However, does their new algorithm go too far? Numerous reports are flying around the web about ridiculous search results, that contradict everything that Google is aiming to do with this release. Basically, any site that has typical ‘cheap’ SEO tactics, such as keyword stuffing, SEO content, or over-optimized link building, are set to be punished. However, labeling a bad guy is not as easy as simply detecting suspicious links and reading a few paragraphs on a person’s site. Here are my concerns:

• Penalizing people for something they didn’t do. As far as we know, link building can’t be traced to an individual or company. Recent evidence shows that websites with suspicious back links, ex. Links from spammy sites with exact keyword text, or tons of links built in a small amount of time, can be used punished using the new algorithm. If it doesn’t look ‘natural’, it’s suspicious. However, ANYONE can link to any site they deem fit. The company or website has no control over who links to them. So this brings in the rise of Negative SEO. Black Hat SEOs now have the chance to use malicious, irresponsible link building techniques on their competitors sites, causing Google to potentially punish those sites, clearing the way for the SEO’s money site to rise. Essentially, anyone has the potential to ‘frame’ another site. If the news is true, then we might be in for a very dirty time in the SEO industry.
• Google sets unrealistic expectations. There’s no doubt that the best tactic for a website or business is to write great content, build great online relationships, and spread their brand across the web. This builds natural, high quality and relevant links which will eventually reward the website with great rankings. However, when the SEO world is already so integrated with powerful domains, with amazing reach, or years of natural (and unnatural) link building, how are newcomers supposed to compete? The fact is, that for years, Google has recommended an action plan that’s less effective (for most people) than the conventional SEO method of gaining a large mix of both low and high quality links. Whether Google has liked it or not, it’s works. To see clients spend months trying to build naturally, while their competitors use less natural method of linking but reap the rewards of high rankings (and higher sales) is frustrating to see. I haven’t seen any evidence to show that the new algorithms are helping the ‘little guys’, if anything, it’s seeing a rise in rankings for large corporations, who have massive sites and tons of links. How is the small business supposed to compete with that?
• Black Hat SEO will always outsmart the Algorithm. From a pessimistic point of view, those that develop the ‘black-hat’ methods of link building that Google despises will always be one step ahead of the algorithm. In the end, it’s a computer attempting to distinguish what’s relevant for humans. Once a certain type of link building is deemed ineffective, SEOs will find ways to appear natural to Search Engines, and continue to dominate in rankings. By giving more arsenal to the bad guys (by punishing ‘bad’ link building), Google may be heading into a period of odd, strange rankings dominated by clever spam artists and major corporations.

I’m by no means against Google’s move to combat the SEO villains. However, I’m concerned that this latest move is a bit too harsh, too aggressive, and may be punishing the wrong people. Google has a very very hard task ahead of them, I just hope they tackle it responsibly before they cause the complete opposite of what they want.

What do you think Google should be doing to help clean up our search engines?

Google Panda 3.2 Update

The Panda 3.2 update occurred in mid-January and served as a data refresh of Google’s Panda algorithm and Google indicated that there weren’t additional changes to the algorithm. Shortly after the Panda update took effect, some webmasters had commented about losing rankings, but others mentioned that sites originally affected by the Panda update had recovered their traffic levels that were occurring prior to the Panda update. This supports Google’s explanation that this update was a data refresh in that Google ran the data refresh and updated sites based on whether or not they should have been affected by Panda or not. There is speculation that Google actually issued a Panda update back in November of 2011, but there hasn’t been a great deal of information regarding this. The reason stated for the large gap of time in between updates was due to Google’s promise of not launching any updates during the holidays.

Google Updated Privacy Policy

There has been a lot of buzz about Google’s updated privacy policy around the globe stemming from questions regarding whether or not the new policy violates domestic rules in Europe and Japan. The updated privacy policy went into effect on March 1st and the advocacy group EPIC has made attempts to block the new privacy policy on the grounds that it violates Google’s earlier Buzz case/investigation settlement with the FTC. EPIC’s effort to block the policy has so far been unsuccessful.

Representatives from Google state that the new policy is intended to simplify privacy issues across Google’s many properties and enable the company to roll-out a host of new consumer products and services. Some have suggested that the simplification of privacy being carried out by Google’s new policy is actually in response to mandates resulting from the settlement in the Buzz case investigation by the FTC. Representatives from Google have said that users will still have control over their browsing and search history and that the policy won’t change existing privacy settings or the manner in which personal information is shared outside of the company.

Google also states that it will not be selling the personal data of users or collecting any new or additional information about users. Google is taking responsibility for its mistakes in the past and appears to be making quite an effort to ensure users that its intentions remain guided by its principles of control, notification, and transparency in its attempts to balance the interests of both consumers and its advertising interests.

Over the past year or so, Google has been updating it’s algorithm with their new Caffeine web indexing system, which allows them to scan the web faster, and provide fresh content for search results. Just this month, they’ve made even more improvements, making searches even more current. News Articles or content that discuss current events pertaining to a user’s search query will appear ahead of older material. Writing about hot topics, such as the Occupy Wallstreet movement, or making articles about recurring events, such as industry tradeshows, are all what Google considers to be more ‘relevant’. So what should you do? Create new content! Focus on what’s important to people in the moment.

In addition to this ‘fresh’ new change, Google has implemented several new tech-based changes to their algorithm. You can check them out here: http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/ten-recent-algorithm-changes.html.

For the most part, most prospective clients tell us that they ended up spending thousands of dollars over the course of a few months to a company that kept ‘promising results’ without actually producing any. When we ask for the specifics of what the company did for them, we’re usually surprised to hear that the client had no idea. This is a big problem we find with most SEO companies; their insistence in being vague about their processes and refusing to disclose their ‘secrets’ to their clients. Don’t let your SEO company fool you into spending unneeded funds and time with them, here’s why you should force them to ‘open up’:

Proper disclosure = better understanding. The fact is, that as a customer, you need to be able to understand why and what you’re paying for. This allows you to build a better relationship with your service provider, and give you better insight as to how your business is performing. While you may not need to know the technical details to everything that’s done for you, you should at least know why and how it works.

They should have nothing to hide. For the most part, the SEO industry has no ‘magic secrets’, so if an SEO company tells you that they can’t release ‘proprietary information’ to you, fire them right now. The service you pay for should be designed to benefit you and get you closer to your goal of reaching more people and gaining more sales. If a company is refusing to disclose exactly what they’re doing for you, chances are they’re using antiquated or prohibited methods, or simply don’t have a full understanding of what they’re doing for you. No SEO company should have anything to hide.

Collaboration between client and agency is crucial! The fact is, that good SEO campaigns should be customized for each client. This means tweaking and organizing the campaign for different industries, objectives, and locations. If your SEO agency is working ‘behind closed doors’, that chances of them taking in your feedback and implementing things that are important to your goals are slim. Proper communication between you and your SEO agencies will ensure that you’re both well informed and working together to reach your goals.

Every SEO company should be 100% transparent about their methodology and workflow. The benefits you gain from a great SEO firm is not in their tactics, but in the strategy and professionalism in which they implement. If you’re company refused to acknowledge your questions, it’s time to move on to someone new.

Motoza Marketing is an online marketing strategy firm based out of Austin, Texas, with services ranging from basic SEO strategy consulting, to full marketing campaigns tailored to each client. For more information, visit www.motoza.com or call us at 1.855.9.MOTOZA (1.855.9.668692).

1. It’s not All about Just Translation -Localization, the process of turning your website or product accessible to a certain country/language, stems deeper than simply changing the language. While there are many automated systems out there (ex. Google Translate), the results are usually very poor and can hurt your marketing strategy. Straight translation can often cause confusing content in other languages, not to mention the variety of different cultural influences that go into languages. Spanish websites directed towards south americans may have completely different meanings, sayings, and even grammar, versus those directed towards the Spain.

2. Social Media still Works Overseas – Don’t just restrict your social media usage to your main country, Europeans and Asians have been shown to be very interactive when it comes to social media. In addition, by interacting with consumers in different countries, you’re engaging in highly valuable market research. The feedback your social media team can get out of these interactions can allows you to customize each localized campaign in order to improve your business globally.

3. Use TLDs - Buying up specific TLDs for your country, like .co.uk, .es, and .fr allows you to better protect your brand and presence in that country. As soon as you break into a different market and gain some sort of traction, you can be almost guaranteed that someone else will buy your domain name and use it to their advantage. Buy them before they can. If you plan to use the domains separately and hosted individually on servers, make sure to assign geo-targetting via Google webmaster tools in order to tell Google where the site is intended to be seen in the google ‘universe’.

4. Research Website Layouts for Each Culture – Make sure to research the browsing tendencies of each country before designing landing pages and websites for them. For example, it’s been shown that the Japanese market actually enjoys reading more information before engaging in a service or website. This is in contrast to American browsing habits, where bullet points, headlines and small paragraphs are shown to convert better.

5. Use Specific Country Folder and Redirect Accordingly – It may be too expensive for some businesses to have multiple domains and websites hosted across multiple servers around the world, so a good option to fix duplicate content and multiple localized sites is to create sub-folders on your domain for each country (ex. /uk, /espana) and have your localized TLDs remap to those sub-folders. Within the domain, you may be able to use canonical tags for any duplicate content you’re using across same language countries. It will also allow you to share the appropriate link juice across your domain and country sites, helping you rank better.

Inbound Marketing mostly takes place in Search Engine Marketing, since people are usually already searching for a product like yours, therefore they’re coming to you rather than being lured by you. Since inbound marketing is a relatively new concept, it’s not applied as much as it probably should be. However, there are clear advantage to this new ‘hot’ marketing technique, and I’ve listed a few here:

1) You get warm-to-hot leads coming to your website. Unlike traditional marketing, which could range from advertising on a niche website, to radio-tv spots and billboard/print advertising, search marketing allows you to place yourself in front of people looking for your service. This is something that traditional marketing simply can’t offer, there is no TV channel, or magazine that can be specifically tailored for your exact product. While the traffic numbers might be lower in search marketing, they’re definitely higher converting than any other traditional marketing channel out there.

2) You’re engaging in non-destruptive marketing. Most studies today show that companies are dealing with a lot of backlash from advertising campaigns since the average person is ‘tuning off’ from any sort of promotions and advertising. It’s not really hard to blame anyone, considering the average person gets bombarded hundreds of times a day with advertisements from different brands, products and services. Inbound Marketing, since it’s directed as people already looking for a particular service or product, is considered more ‘natural’, since the user is looking for services voluntarily. Why risk having someone angry at your product every time they’re ‘punished’ on Pandora or Hulu because they’re trying to watch their favorite shows/songs?

3) Inbound marketing provides a much better return-on-investment in the long run. Paying for direct advertisements usually means spending X amount of money for each time you promote your service and product. Each time you spend that money, your ROI is determined by how effective that particular campaign was. Once you stop spending money, the exposure and sales stop. The only way to make more sales or reach more customers is by spending more money. Search marketing works differently. Since the majority of costs in a search marketing campaign is in increasing your rankings in search engines, the longer you optimize the more business you’re likely to achieve. Once you reach the top rankings for your preferred keywords, and traffic begins to come to your business website, your sales will likely increase. By investing enough time and resources into an ongoing inbound marketing campaign, you set your business up to a position where you have lots of people finding you online, interacting with you and purchasing your product. Since search engine marketing fees aren’t on a ‘per-visitor’ or ‘per-impression’ basis, your sales are not directly correlated to the amount of money you invest.

Overall, inbound marketing is the really the way to go for small to medium businesses looking to compete in large markets. Search Marketing allows these smaller businesses to compete against bigger corporations, without having to spend millions of dollars on traditional marketing techniques. By mixing a good search marketing campaign with a strong social media presence, you can increase your sales, build your brand, and create loyal customers without spending an outrageous amount of money in the long run.

Flash Websites (http://www.macromedia.com) were (and still are) a popular choice for website developers due to their ability to provide cool-looking and flashy (hah!) web sites. A flash website can be as interactive as you’d like, allowing you to add animated menus, clever interfaces and videos throughout your site.

However, over the past few years, the use of flash has decreased due to several problems related to performance, difficulty to maintain and update, and Search Engine Optimization issues.

Flash has been around for quite some time, and while it has been implemented by several applications, small and large, its support has dwindled a bit over the years. Flash is harder to work with than general HTML and CSS web authoring, and it also requires users to download plugins to use and use up more memory when navigating the site. As a result, users with slower, less updated computers may have trouble using website in Flash. As a result, media giants such as Apple, have dropped their support for Flash and gone with newer, faster programming languages such as HTML5. As a result, Flash websites are not supported or visible on mobile products such as iPads, iPhones and older mobile devices.

Flash websites are different from traditional websites in that Flash is like one big animation file that runs on your web server. It ‘reacts’ to certain actions done by users and animates accordingly. Therefore, in order to modify any content on a traditional flash website, a developer needs to open up the animation file, and re-arrange/compile the information in order to add new content. This makes it harder for non-developers to add content, which can be a huge program for SEO. Traditional websites based on a Content Management System such as Drupal or WordPress make adding content as easy as possible.

One of the most concerning problems associated with Flash is the fact that search engine spiders have a really hard time navigating the sites. This should be a huge warning sign for anyone wanting to rank high in Google. Since Flash is one big animation file (rather than a collection of web-pages linked together in HTML) Google only sees one big file. While Google’s current algorithm let it ‘peek’ into a flash website and determine what it’s about, it will likely miss a lot of the context of your website and therefore not rank your individual pages accordingly. For example, Google will likely not know that you have a ‘services’ page on your website, and an ‘about’ page, all it sees is one big animation file on your homepage. If Google doesn’t see new content, and can’t read what the content is about, your site will never rank.

Flash is a great tool for interactive websites that require no rankings and is ok with some older computers and mobile products (iPhones, iPads, iPods and older smart phones) not being able to access it. However, for those wanting to get online exposure, which is 99% of businesses out there, it would be best to stick to a traditional HTML/CSS website or look into HTML5 development.

Several years ago when I first stepped into the internet marketing world, SEO started becoming a hot topic and while there were companies and individuals who offered their services, it was nowhere near the number I see now. These days, it seems anyone who picks up and reads a book on SEO immediately thinks they are an expert, which causes a lot of credibility issues and problems for the SEO industry. It’s like saying, “I just changed the oil and oil filter in my car, I’m an auto mechanic now!” Unfortunately, because the internet world is still a mystic unknown environment for the majority of the population, the list of terrible SEOs continue to expand and charge for poor services. Below are just a few of the popular scams and frauds that continue to exist today:

1. ” Front page of Google within 48 hours!” – For business owners unfamiliar with how placements work in Google, the allure of grabbing that front page spot in Google within a short period of time seems appealing, especially when an “expert” is helping them out. The problem with this phrase is that it is vague and doesn’t let the client know that anyone can get to the front page of Google using their pay-per-click Adwords system and bid high enough.

1. “We work directly with Google.” Again, another vague term and should set off some warning bells. Anyone can grab a pay-per-click Adwords account and say they are working with Google since it would technically be true (they pay Google money to display ads). But the phrase is most commonly used by scammers to describe a special bond with them and Google and how they have access to all the secrets. Now wait a minute…Google spends millions and millions of dollars on their search engine…why would they want to risk giving that secret away?

1. “Guaranteed Google front page rankings for # keywords!” – Let’s get one thing straight, nobody can guarantee rankings and guaranteed rankings does not mean anything if you’re not getting any targeted traffic for those ranked keywords. To satisfy their claim, these shady SEO so-called-experts will rank you for your own business name, which is generally easy and usually ranked for in Google, or they rank you for obscure keywords that no one will ever search for. For example, if you owned a flower shop in Austin, TX, they would try to rank you for long terms like “exquisite flower shop in downtown Austin Texas” or “Austin TX Jane Doe’s floral arrangements”.

In general, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. If you come across situations like these in your inbox and don’t know what to believe, contact Motoza support and we’ll help you uncover the truth!