Tag Archives: article
July 4th a top search topic, Google’s latest doodle invokes Woody Guthrie
According to Google Trends, “July 4th” was a popular search topic in the United States on Wednesday, as Americans turned to the web to find information on the holiday and events in their areas. Moreover, as it often does, Google featured a redesigned homepage, with a doodle inspired by Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.” For marketers, certain events can be tied into website content to give an interesting twist to the usual content marketing material. Finding a tie-in between an industry and a major holiday can help drive website traffic and give readers an interesting take on a holiday or other event. Updates to Google’s search algorithm, including Penguin and its freshness factor, make it especially important, however, that SEO content is timely and relevant to a certain industry. With Penguin’s focus on webspam and freshness rewarding the most recent high-quality content, any articles or blog posts that are irrelevant to a user arriving at a site could negatively impact the value of the article. Marketers looking for inspiration for this type of content can learn from three campaigns Brafton recently highlighted. Focusing on July 4th content helped Macy’s, Family Video and Guitar Center drive site traffic and turn the popularity of the holiday into conversions. Continue reading
Google updates search, urges marketers ‘to focus on creating high-quality site’
Google announced a new search algorithm targeting webspam is now live. Marketers have been waiting for an update since last month, when Brafton featured a comment from Google’s Matt Cutts that essentially warned marketers that SEO was headed for a major shift. Websites focused more on gaming Google’s algorithms to gain search visibility without providing users a high-quality experience were the likely target of the update, but no one knew when it would come. Google provided the answer on Tuesday, announcing its new algorithm that fights webspam. Cutts explicitly mentioned keyword stuffing and link schemes as two types of webspam techniques the algorithm will target. Google predicts about 3.1 percent of English search queries will be affected, and it referenced Panda’s impact on 12 percent of queries as context. In Google’s Webmaster Central blog, Cutts highlighted content from a website that offered a keyword-dense article, but the key terms used had little relevance to the overall content. Continue reading
