Penguin is Google’s algorithm that targets toxic links. This action can result in a rank demotion or a manual penalty if the links are toxic enough.

You may wonder about the toxic links. These are the links that are against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Whether you acquire these links without knowing their impact, or someone places your website URL in shady websites in a deliberate negative SEO attempt to bring you down, you have got a problem do deal with.

That’s where you have got to work on link mediation to help your website recover from a Penguin penalty.

A Penguin penalty is easy to diagnose. This algorithmic drop results in an instant drop in traffic. Another reason for the instant drop in traffic is that you have removed a page. You will have to be sure about the reason for the drop in the traffic.

Is it an algorithmic devaluation or a manual penalty?

Here is a set of actions that you can perform on Google Analytics to know whether you are experiencing an algorithmic devaluation or manual link penalty.

Click on acquisition > All Traffic > Channels.

Then, click on Organic Search.

Click on Landing Page as the primary dimension.

It will give you a landing page as the specific driver on your site. Using this approach, you can figure what page has lost traffic. You can take steps to correct the problem.

What to do when you have been hit by a manual penalty?

To check whether you have been hit by a manual penalty you are going to have to open Google Search Console. You will see a notification there. This notification will explain manual actions taken against your site.

The good thing is Google Search Console provides instructions regarding what to do if you have been hit by a manual penalty. Work with the spam team on removing problematic links.

If there is a decent quantity of links that your website has, you may have to work a bit extensively to remove links before you can get back into Google’s good books.

The thing is, a manual penalty can be significantly troublesome. The best way is to avoid having one. You are going to have to follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines anyway, so it’s better to follow them to avoid a penalty rather than having to work the recovery.

Now, what may come as a surprise is that a search result can have the suggestions which do not have the most reviews. And that’s where you can presume that the Yelp’s algorithm actually pays attention to a number of other factors besides just the reviews. And that’s where you may realize that you definitely need to optimize your Yelp’s listing to make it more prominent over this bigger platform.

It may be worth noting that Yelp doesn’t provide information, on frequent basis, about the steps that businesses may consider in order to improve ranking of their listings. Nonetheless, there are the basic things that can be done in this regard to meet the objectives.

Filling out all of your information

It’s a no brainer that complete information about your business is going to convince the potential customers about considering your service. And from the perspective of optimization, a complete Yelp listing is definitely going to win the platform’s trust. The simple fact to keep in mind in this regard is that your listing will look complete as compared to the ones with incomplete business details.

Adding photos

A page simply appears fancy when there are photos in it. Thus, it is an ultimate requirement to add as many photos as required to explain the product or service nicely. This would include the photos that you are uploading as well as the photos which your reviewers are uploading.

Respond to reviews

As a general rule of thumb, your page will remain in the high ranks if it receives fresh content every now and then. Your Yelp listing is going to receive the reviews. In this scenario, you are going to have to respond to the review that you receive. This will not only keep the page updated with fresh content but it is also a nice way to engage with your customers. Satisfaction of your existing customer will reflect through the reviews; and it will help you get new customers.

Optimize for keywords

You will want your listing to be available against certain keywords. And according to the best SEO standards, you will have to make sure that your listing is optimized for humans, not bots.

When it comes to keyword optimization, it is important to pay attention to the content as well. Tags related to the pages are important but if a specific volume of keywords is not present in the content, all search algorithms are going to consider such content irrelevant.

Pay attention to the categories

If there isa category available that can accurately represent the type of your business, there is no point in choosing the round-about categories. It means that you are going to have to be careful while selecting the category for your business while creating a listing.

For starters, people seem to be paying more attention to the use of tools and data in order to do the audit. They don’t seem to be focusing on getting a sense about the needs and goals of the website. As a matter of fact, understanding the requirements and objectives is needed long before you ask about the use of tools and data.

And then, there is “cookie-cutter SEO” which also includes audits. Depending on the budget, goals and limitations, SEO audit can be vary. For instance, a stand-alone technical audit is going to be more comprehensive as compared to the one which is conducted as part of an ongoing program. You also have to take needs and limitations into considerations.

Understanding the business

There can be different requirements of the people coming and asking for the technical audits of their websites. These requirements are first based on the type of business they are running or the situation that has led them coming to you and asking for the technical audit. The purpose here can include anything from improving the site’s performance to fixing any issue to risk assessment.

After determining the purpose comes the onboarding phase. This phase includes the following procedures:

• Asking right questions
• Getting past data from SEO and developers’ teams
• Getting to know about the business model

The initial onboarding process can never be ignored here. You need to get the answers of following questions in this regard.

• Did they read a blog post?
• Are they coming to you with specific concerns?
• Are they coming to you after having an advice from someone?
• What is the end result they want from the audit?

In other words, you need to know about the factor that motivated them to have a website audit. This way, you will not only be able to manage their expectations but you will also be able ensure the provision of actionable reports to them.

At this point, you need to know about your main point of contact. There are certain possibilities such as:

• A team leader
• Marketing director
• Business owner (in case it is a small business)
• SEO agency
• Web design firm

Depth of the audit

You need to determine the type of audit that you need to perform. There are two types of audits that you can do here.

The first type of audit is the limited site audit. This approach works well for the people with limited budgets. This process is based on a top-down analysis which tends to identify the elements which need to be analyzed in depth. Surely you are not going to do this further analysis because you job is to identify the elements.

The second type of audit is the comprehensive site audit. This audit involves a deep dive into the entire list of elements which need to be analyzed during an audit. Obviously this audit is going to be costlier because of the level of efforts and expertise required in the task.

Reporting and deliverables

After you have worked on the audit, you need to determine what should be in the report. A few things that you will need to consider in this regard are as under.

• Make sure that the report is functional
• You need to know who is doing implementation based on the report you have submitted
• You have to see if it is a first time or a quarterly review
• You need to know if there is more than one team working on the report

Make sure that you are delivering manageable reports which include proper information about the elements with problems. You need to suggest practical solutions to the problems. And for best results, you need to meet with the contact and the teams which are going to be assigned the task of working on your recommendations.

The first reason is that podcasts can persuade people to search for a person or brand. This branded search can be quite beneficial for the website being searched. And so, Google tends to improve the ranking of that site based on this organic search activity.

Another reason is that podcasts are now available outside the major platforms such as iTunes and Stitcher.

Whether you are having a podcast or you are a guest in one, you can use your presence in that audio in favor of your organic search ranking by earning some valuable links.

Hosting your own podcast

If you want to build a loyal audience, you can host a podcast. Moreover, it can be an effective way to develop relationships with the people in your industry.

In this article, we are not going to talk about how to start a podcast. Our main focus is to talk about the ways to earn links through podcast. For this purpose, you have to do the research about the topic people would want to listen to.And that could mean no branding at all in the first few podcasts.

If you think that you are going to do great by yourself, you can go with a monologue format in the podcast. Otherwise, interviewing others is a practically beneficial way to earn a name.

No matter what format you are going with, you have to make sure that you are going with the original and valuable content. In case you are interviewing others, you can ask them to share the link of those podcasts in their websites and social circles.

Be a guest in other podcasts

You can be a guest in other podcasts to earn online reputation for your brand. And it can be a great way to earn links. This is due to the fact that your hosts are going to share your website link in their podcasts.

The main focus of podcasters is to have knowledgeable guests in their podcasts. So if you think that you have a particular skill set, unique knowledge, or an interesting opinion, you can consider showing your availability as a guest in podcasts. In this scenario, you have to make sure that you are pitching your story in such a manner that your hosts will care what you are saying.

In this scenario, it is nothing less than a challenge for the marketers to make sure that their videos do not get lost in the millions of videos uploaded every day.There are certain tools and methods that can help your videos stand out.

Keyword Tool

It is the initial requirement to make sure that your videos are watched by right audiences.  And so, you have to invest your time in finding out what your audience likes to search. You will be able to know about the search phrases which your audience uses to search for the content.

Keyword Tool can be quite helpful here. It can help you find the keywords from YouTube autocomplete database. You have to enter a keyword and it will show you several suggestions related to that keyword.

Camtasia

You may sometimes need to include screen recordings in your videos. You are going to need to do it when you are creating how-to’s, demos, or tutorial videos. If you are using a smartphone or camera to record what is happening on your screen, it will look unprofessional.

You can do screen recordings with the help of a tool known as Camtasia which also allows you to record your mouse movements and keystrokes.

You can edit your recordings later to add effects, notes and several annotations.

Canva

The first thing that appears along with the title of the video is video’s thumbnail. In most of the times, people look at the thumbnail to decide whether or not they need to see the video. Therefore, it is very important to create professional, high quality and relevant thumbnails for the videos to attract viewers.

And easy to use and efficient design tool that you can use to create high quality thumbnails is Canva. Except for a few features which you are going to have to pay for, Canva is mostly free.

TubeBuddy

When you own a channel, you have to make sure that you have a nice system in place to view the user comments and reply to them as soon as you can. This way, you can increase engagement with your audience.

However, viewing and replying to them manually is going to be very difficult due to obvious reasons. so you can take help from a tool known as TubeBuddy. It is basically an extension that allows you to manage your YouTube channel without having to switch between the tabs.

We all know that Google has been paying lot of attention on the user experience. And the bigger part of this user experience is based on videos and images. If you are getting this point, it will not be difficult for you to understand that it is the need of the hour to modify your approach in order to present your website’s information to Google and other major search engines.

Now, you may wonder how you can use images to building links. Well, there are some ways you can do it. It is basically about the types of content that you can use to building links. A quick run-down of the key types of visual content may be useful here.

Infographics

The infographics have become so popular that they sometime seem to be overused; and this is what many people think. But the matter of fact is that eye-catching infographics can be quite helpful to prompt the users understand your point. And that is the very reason that they never stop helping publishers in building links.

Appropriate use of logo

While you may be thinking how a brand logo can be useful for the users. But the matter of fact is that it is a visual content;and also that a professionally developed logo can build a nicer image of your brand.

The logo of your website is going to be a representation when you are contributing as a guest blogger in other websites. You can associate this logo with a link back to your website’s main page.

Product photos or a brand photo-shoot

If you are an e-commerce business, you can use the product images for link building. Make sure that you are using high quality images only. Moreover, you are going to have to optimize each of your images for SEO.

If you do not have products to take the photos of, you can consider having a brand photo-shoot. For this purpose, you can get services of a professional photographer. The brand photo-shoot can include the photos of you working on your computer or sitting on the office desk.

Statistical charts, graphs and maps

Depending on your business, you can take help from data visualization, charts, graphs and maps to build links. For this purpose, you are going to have to a little research to pull the statistics about your business and the products and services that you are selling. Make sure that the information you are using for the development of graphs and other visualizations is easy to understand.

In other words, you can consider SEM as a category of marketing through search engine. PPC and SEO are the parts of hierarchy beneath the SEM main category. And this definition makes sense.

Although the above statements about SEM make sense, SEM seemed to fit in the paid search sphere more than SEO; and it continues to do so. In this scenario, it may be worth describing the difference between PPC, SEO and SEM.

Difference between SEM and PPC

The simple thing that you are going to have to keep in mind here is that PPC is SEM. In other words, PPC is same as SEM or at least a major part of it.And SEO is none of those things.

This is mainly due to the evolution of potentially confusing acronyms as well the need to put a major emphasis on the importance of paid search. Whatever the reason is, the end result that we have got is that two cost driven marketing terms have now started to mean the same thing.

Sadly, if you are the one enthusiastic enough to get a sense based on the literal meanings, these two terms are going to confuse you further. Now, there is no doubt about what PPC means. It may be called CPC, paid search, or search ads. It is clear that it is referring to the paid search marketing through the search engines such as Google and Bing.

Difference between SEO and PPC

We all know SEO is search engine optimization. But if you look at the words in a literal perspective, you are going to see that these words do not make sense. I mean, how can you optimize an entire search engine? No, you are not going to do that. Search engine optimization is the set of strategies and tactics that help us in optimizing content and websites for search engines. The purpose is to make sure that they are better able to address the masses.

As mentioned above, PPC marketing is the same as or a bigger part of SEM. The factors that make both of these similar are mentioned below.

• Both are paid
• Both need budget allocation
• Both help search engines and other major marketing platforms earn a lot of money.

If you look at the basic definition of SEM, you will find it saying, “a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) primarily through paid advertising.”

From this definition, you may call SEO and SEM the same; but they are actually not.

SEO and SEM are not the same

The reason for this is mentioned above. With PPC being the same as a bigger part of the SEM, there is not much room left for the SEO to be a part of this scheme. Both PPC and SEM are paid initiatives. It means that they have everything to do with the advertisers who are ready to spend money. On the other hand, the concept of SEO is entirely different even though it tends to do the same thing which the PPC and SEM pull off.

However, there are many advertisers who remain hesitant about using this opportunity for the marketing of their businesses. They mainly worry about getting nothing after investing a lot of money. And the matter of fact is that they are rightly worried so. If a video ad is not properly worked on, it is destined to fail.

Every business is different. And so, the marketing approach for each of the businesses needs to be a different one in order to appropriately meet the business marketing needs. But there are some basic things which you can keep in mind while creating the video ads.

Personalization

It is normal for the people to think about video ads working on the same pattern as that of TV ads. But the matter of fact is that both are quite different. TV ads are broadly targeted ads and they do not care much about the user demographics. As a matter of fact, TV ads need to be inclusive of many things so that a wide range of people with different interests are targeted in one ad.

On the other hand, a video ad can be more granular than you think. You can choose your audience based on location, age, gender and many other factors.It means that you can personalize video ads in the way you want. And you should do this personalization.

Make it relevant

Another major problem with the TV ad is that it interrupts the viewer. When you are watching your favorite show in the TV, you will not want a TV ad to interrupt you from watching that show. In case of video advertisement, you can make the ad relevant to the video content. This way, the ad will not be felt like an interruption. As a matter of fact, it may serve like a value-add.

Capture attention immediately

With the video ads, you will not have to stick with the practice of slowly building the climax. You can actually grab the attention quite immediately. One of its reasons is mentioned in the personalization part. Moreover, you can adopt a storytelling approach to make the video ad something your viewers would want to stick to.

Another reason you need to focus on capturing attention is that there are many content choices available to the viewers. If you are making old-fashioned TV-styled ads, the viewers will not stick you your content for more than a few seconds. So, you need to grab attention from very start of the video.

Collaborate with the creators

This is one of the most effective tricks of creating videos ads. You can collaborate with content creators across different video sharing platforms and ask them to promote your products. They have a fan base which can turn out to be your target audience in the future.

First, get some keywords to figure out the demographics. Keyword research should be targeted to relevant services and products, which is something already known. Once you have a solid list, select the five that best represent the brand and the demographics associated with this.  From there, you can figure out the audience and who you’re marketing to. Once you have that, you can look for ways to link these in order to target them.

Next, identify who is visiting the site.  This is kind of like painting the target around where the arrow is, but you should understand who is coming to the site to figure out the right audience. You can consult google analytics, and from there, once you enable the demographics and interest reports, you’ll be able to find the correct information that you need of your audiences.

You can also check to see what other brands and competitors are doing. You can look at the demographics and the psychographics, and collect as much information as possible. Quantcast is a good one since it will help you analyze everything that you need to see from your site, and really get a feel for what you’re looking at.

Social insights is another one.  For example, if you do use facebook, you’ve already got that put in. you can look at that and see the audience information, and a good idea of what you’re looking at.  You can what people are looking at when they look at your social media pages.

Then you have surveys, and you can send these out to the current email list.  You can also do this after a customer checks out, and the surveys can be short, and get to the point, and you can literally ask basic demographic questions, overall interests and other needs and such. From there, you can cater to the site, and from there, build it around the major needs of your customers.

Finally, try identifying questions. when google shows answers in the SERPs you want common user questions that are there too.  For example, answer the public, BuzzSumo, and the like can help with figuring out all of this, and you can from there, get an answer about the public that visits the sites.

With the right information, you can create the best SEO campaigns possible, and from here, put together a lot of better options for your business. With the right tools and tricks, you too can get a lot of great results from this, and in turn, create great campaigns.

Well, it depends on who you talk to. Some have a contentious attitude towards this, and that’s because it may not even add value to the site.  Some old SEO advice that you write content for may not be generated for users, but instead link building and the search engine.  You shouldn’t build your links because you think they’ll bring a value, but you want to build these links to drive the targeted traffic.

You should look at some of the link building practices that look spammy, and how the rise of “arbitrary metrics” have blurred the link between what works, and what doesn’t.  You should also look at the fact that lots of times, internal linking is limited, and you should be investing in the content, rather than the link building.  The argument of that it doesn’t work is usually focused on building a better user experience, and be obsessive about the matching user intent, and the ultimate goal of that is genuinely to provide a result that’s good, and you should always, no matter what, aspire to be the authority in the field, and it’s better to earn than to build.

But, some people like to have links to build and distinguish the high-quality content in these competition niches.  The problem is that a lot of it isn’t seen, and if you don’t reach out directly or socialize, you’re missing out on linking.  You should look at how you secure these, and you can figure out, via networking, how you can build links into content that you already have, and how you can prevent people from missing out on your links.

Building links are something that, if you do choose to use this type of means to generate support, should be done in a way that is organic. Don’t’ try to farm links from anyone and everyone. Instead, you should make sure that the links you’re building are real, authentic, and actually generate a good result form this.

So are they bad? Not necessarily. Lots of people do believe that they are doing the right thing with linking, but if you’re creating spammy content and bad links, you’re pretty much shooting yourself in the foot, so always make sure that if you do choose to link, you do it in a way that not only benefits you but the other users of the site too.