SEO is Back with a Vengeance!

SEO is back with a vengeance! We are seeing some amazing results on page one and page 2 with brand new websites and blog content.

Then I went back to older sites to see how they are doing and they also are showing up on page one.

Google made what most would think is an insignificant change not in their algorithm ( although Google is always updating their algorithm) but rather in the application of serving up the algorithm.

This little seemingly insignificant shift appears to be favoring those of us who are not huge brand names.

Before Google invented their zoo of animals, panda, penguin, pigeon- most of us were rocking it with our SEO. Then with the zoo animals being set loose to wreak their havoc a lot of people lost their income, their leads and their positions almost overnight. The winners through the zoo rotation were the big name brands.

The little guy, small business owners, real estate agents, dentists and marketers took a huge hit because even the past head huncho over at Google said they needed to clean up the ‘cesspool’ on the internet and favor the big brands.

Over time the shift tended back again toward quality content and long form content. Then a very interesting shift happened that many people would not notice.

When I started the building the latest 3 websites for clients- we noticed there was a shift back to good content and keywords, so much so, that well, you will need to get on this Free webinar where I will show you what I am talking about and also tell you what we believe may be the reason we are getting these sudden boosts of page one rankings!

I ran a few tests on some brand new niche websites I am building for our real estate company and it held true again.

If you are in real estate- how would you like to rank ahead of Zillow?

If you are a dentist, how would you like to rank ahead of the big directories?

While Google favors big brands, I will show you what we see is happening where the small time brands are able to position themselves out in front!!!

I can’t wait to share what we are finding with you!!!

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Don’t forget to register for the Free webinar right now, then add to your calendar so you don’t forget!

Here it the link to get registered:

https://katerinagasset.com/webinar-seo-is-back/

 

Fast Track SEO Free Training Video is Live Now!

Fast Track SEO Free Training Video #1  is Live Now!

Here you go! There will be a total of 3 free video trainings before we launch the course. Make sure you get in on all 3 of them.

Here is the link to the first of your free trainings in our pre-launch of #FastTrackSEO:

https://goo.gl/cEhBjq

You don’t want to miss this free training.  This free training will no longer be available after May 25th so hurry and go watch it now!

This free training for the pre-launch of Fast Track SEO is on: Take your listings back.

How do you rank on page one when the ZTR’s control the top spots?

Check out more in the free training video!

You must be in control of your listings. You are the listing agent and not only do you have a responsibility to your sellers to market their listings but you also have a responsibility to your own business to market your listings in order to not just sell them but also to get more listings and position yourself as the leader and top producer in your market.

The fastest way to gain some authority on Google is to apply best SEO practices to each of your listing addresses.

Check it all out here: https://goo.gl/cEhBjq

See you at the top!

 

My Top Prediction for SEO in 2015

My Top Prediction for SEO in 2015 

With all the talk, double-talk, assumptions and guessing about what is what with SEO these days there are a few things you can count on no matter what happens with Google and other search engines. 

You will not go wrong by drilling down into your niche, flying under the radar of the big 4.

Choose terms that their SEO departments are not going after. These big guys spend over a $100,000 a day for PPC and they want the biggest bang for their buck so they are not going to piddle around with terms that you can still make good contacts, closings and income from. 

My top prediction for SEO moving forward is about branding. 

I believe that just as I stated about 9 years ago that it was time to start building your own personal brand on the internet because Google is all about brand. 

They have a patent for their Panda algorithm that specifically discusses the importance of ranking search results. 

Then add on to that the fact that Eric Schmidt (when he was CEO of Google) stated that the internet is a cesspool and that brands would be who cleans it up. 

Think about why the big 4 were able to capture so many top spots on Google page one for the very terms that real estate agents for years before the arrival of those “brands” were dominating by themselves. The problem was agents were driving their sites with IDX and home search results trying to be the search engine for the home buyers in anonymity which came back to bite them because that is absence of brand.

Moving forward into 2015 there are ways in which you can beat the big 4 in organic search using SEO and I predict that this will by establishing the following brands: 

1. Your name or your name + real estate agent as a brand ( if you have a famous actor’s name)

2. Your company name ( if you are the broker/ owner) as a brand

3. Your niche keyword terms as a brand

There was such a misconception in the SEO world about brands for years before Panda and Penguin, etc. The focus was on generic keywords and not brands.  For years, that thinking was put into practice. I have always stated from the beginning of learning SEO that creating your brands online was going to be the way that you can set yourself apart from your competitors.

Those who followed this advice weathered the storm of Panda and Penguin and of the big 4 dominance on the SERPS.

If you are not one of those, it is not too late to start establishing yourself as a brand on the internet in 2015.

We started really working to dominate our company brand on the internet about 6 months ago. Before that for years we had some competing real estate companies who share the same name as our company: International Properties and Investments LLC.  One of those companies had almost the entire page of page one on google serps packed in for them. 

Today I looked to see how we are doing and to my pleasant surprise, in Google incognito window and logged out of Google, we have ALL 10 spaces on page one with our company name and platforms that have our company profiles.

• Our point 2 agent website is #1 with our Google local page attached,
• #2 is the brand new EMD (Exact Match Domain) site that I am in the process of creating which will become our branded main company website,
• #3 is a Yelp review about our brand, company name,
• #4 is our facebook business page for our company,
• #5 is our ActiveRain profile,
• #6 and #7 is our market leader website,
• #8 is our Google plus business page,
• #9 is our Pinterest business company name page and
• #10 is a YouTube playlist named for our company brand on my personal YouTube channel. 

Get your Free SEO Field Guide – containing your checklists of onpage and offpage SEO tasks, click here.

We can teach you how to do this yourself in our SEO courses or you can order done for you packages which include our virtual assistants to help you with your marketing. 

Sending Your Own Kisses in Seconds! Coolest Tech Discovery of the Week!

Sending Your Own Kisses! Coolest Tech Discovery of the Week! 

Google works on art projects around the world and has labs that use their creativity to come up with new ways to use the internet and to communicate. They also work with different brands to create combined projects like this burberry kiss project. 

I just tried it out by sending Nestor a Happy Father’s day kiss and card- you can send images or text along with your kiss. But what is really fun about this project is that it is animated. 

The entire process is interactive. You first say you want to send a kiss. Then you take a photo of your own lips in the shape of a kiss right from your computer. Then you choose your lipstick color if you are a girl. If you are a guy you send your regular skin color lips. I guess if you want to send lipstick colored lips you can:). 

Then you create your message, you add the email address you want to send your kiss to. The envelope gets sealed with your original authentic kiss. 

You then can watch the kiss traveling the world to its’ destination on the 3D website. It is fun, the song is great and it is quite a joy to watch. You also see other people’s kisses floating to their destinations. 

On this map you can actually see all the kisses being sent around the world in realtime! http://kisses.burberry.com/map/

All kisses are private unless you choose to share. You can share them on google plus of course! 

Try it out now at: kisses.burberry.com

Burberry Kisses is the latest campaign in our Art, Copy & Code project, an ongoing series of brand partnershipsto re-imagine how brands tell stories in a connected world. With this project, we’ve tried to create a beautiful experience that comes to life across all screens, and helps connect you to the people who are important to you, wherever they are. For more details on the campaign, see our agency blog or visit our website.

Google Did Not Turn Over Your Access Of Your Information to the United States Government

Google’s CEO- Larry Page and David Drummond the Chief Legal Officer at Google came out with their official statement regarding the latest requests by the United States Government and the rumors of PRISM. 

The rumor is that Google gave the U.S. Government access to their servers through a secret program run by the National Security Agency called PRISM. 

Google’s official position is that they have NOT joined any secret program and have not joined any government program of any country that would give those governments secret access to their servers. Google is not giving anyone information about their users’ internet activity. 

Google is very adamant about making sure that EACH and EVERY request by any government fulfills the law in which that request is based. Google has a full legal team that reviews every single request by any government that requires them to turn over information. If the request does not fall within the law- it is not granted. 

Verizon received an order to turn over millions of user records and data by the U.S. government. This of course, creates a lot of other press articles about other companies, Google included. 

Google stands by their position that there needs to be transparency in any requests made for their users’ internet activity or records of any kind. That is why they have their Transparency Report page.  Google is the first company to create such a page. 

You can see by this chart that there is a continuous increase of requests for information about our internet activity which is very worrisome as to the errosion of personal liberties and the danger of subverting the freedom of expression. 

“But the level of secrecy around the current legal procedures undermines the freedoms we all cherish.” Larry Page

Google Is Unleashing Penguin 2.0 Soon

Google is Unleashing Penguin 2.0 Soon

The buzz all around the SEO forums and google webmasters forums is all about the anticipation of Google’s actual announcement that they are rolling out a new update to their penguin update. It has been nearly a year since the last update to the algorithms so this has been expected.   

Most of the time Google just makes updates and does not really announce that it is going to take place. However, this is supposed to be a big algorithm update, so big that Matt Cutts said you can you look at Penguin as 1.0 and the new update as Penguin 2.0. 

There has been some movement in the SERPS already since the announcement so most people who are keeping an eye on their SEO are noticing the shifts. 

Google did talk about a few things they wanted to work on in this update. It all remains to be seen for the most part. 

What we do know is that Google has made a HUGE shift towards brands. That is why they took out patents related to detecting brands. The bad part for the real estate agent is that that means the big 4 took over most of the top spots you used to dominate for in the SERPS. 

For hyper-local content this is not what the consumer, the searcher normally wants. When a searcher is looking deep for information on the hyper local level they are not interested in clicking on zillow or trulia. Those sites don’t get to the real nitty and the gritty about lifestyle in specific neighborhoods and certainly don’t have a voice that the searcher can relate to. 

Google says they are trying to work in this update to be able to discover sites that are not as authoritative as far as pagerank goes but that are more what the searcher is looking for making the smaller site the authoritative voice for that brand. The brand equals the keywords. The keywords when used correctly signal to Google that they are that brand. 

We hope to see some shift back to real estate agent and broker websites for the content that the searcher is looking for. 

But we saw something very unnerving in several areas this past week where most SEO folks believe the algo shift and update have already started to take place: 

1. We ranked for a keyword phrase for over 4 years now, totally dominate page one for this keyword holding 8 out of 10 spots. Two competitors each have one spot on this SERP. Suddenly, lo and behold, this past Monday- guess who showed up on page one? Yep, zillow. And they were given a spot without the keyword being in their title. The phrase match was not even in the description or the title tag. Google could only pull up a word here and there throughout a page that somehow they considered authoritative enough to rank on page one. This goes to our original theory that the fear is to make the big brands even stronger rather than the small companies have a shot at page one on the SERPS. 

2. The next concerning SERP situation was Debbie Gartner’s keywords that she uses. She owns a flooring store. She sells hardwood floors and carpet, etc. She has ranked for a cherry wood flooring for a long time. She dominates the SERPS for this keyword. Suddenly there was zillow when you do a search for looking for hardwood cherry flooring in her town which is in New York. Zillow was given a spot on page one of the serps for a listing of a home in Boca Raton Florida with hardwood flooring. Now, the obvious search is that someone is looking to remodel their home in New York and wants to put hardwood floors in their house so they do a search for hardwood flooring in their town so that they can find a store that sells the wood flooring and get the prices, etc. So either Google is too stupid in their algorithm to be able to figure that one out or they are so far bent in preferring the big brands over anyone including Debbie Gartner who sells flooring. And the listing from zillow was not optimized either for the keyword phrase! 

3. The worst part came when Debbie posted about the flooring keyword on her google plus page. Google now assigns hashtags to your posts. You have the option to delete the hashtags that google puts there but most people don’t know that. What really bothered me is that Google put the hashtag of zillow on Debbie’s posting. Now, even if the algorithm could see that there was discussion about zillow why did Google choose that hashtag instead of the main topic hashtag which was hardwood flooring. 

I am hoping that I am wrong, very wrong. I am hoping this new shift is back to the good quality content websites that agents and brokers have worked hard to offer good content to consumers serious about moving, selling and buying homes and properties in their respective areas.

But I am not holding my breath in light of what we have encountered over this past week. 

Google Street Views Around The World

Google street views around the world is a really interesting and beneficial feature. We own property right near the Baltic Sea in Latvia. We wanted to get a different 3D style view of the property and the surrounding land and homes. I have photos that we have had taken of the property and where it is in relation to the waterfront. It is considered waterfront property in Latvia because you can not build directly on the water any more. So there is a short path to the beach from our property. 

We discovered that Google street cars have been down our road!  We were able to place our little person marker, step down on the street and walk up to our property and all around the surrounding streets in a very clear and consise way. I was very impressed. Here we are in Florida virtually walking our beach front property in Jurmala Latvia!!! 

The clarity is amazing! The only thing missing is the smell of the pine trees and the sound of the sea. I am sure that is all coming along one of these days too! 

 

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Google Updates for Google Reviews

Google Updates for Google Reviews

If you know brick and mortar businesses who are using Google Local ( places pages) please pass this on to them. If you are an agent who asks your buyers and sellers for testimonials, here are the new current updates from Google: 

 

1. You can no longer use your comment box in your place of business for Google reviews. This means that you can not take those comment cards and type them into your Google Places page reviews section. 

 

 

2. Customers must have a Gmail account and be a bonifide G+ user to help keep their reviews from being flagged by the spam filters. 

 

 

3. You can not use your iPad at your business to log your customers into Google Reviews and ask them to leave you a review. Google will not allow reviews from your IP address. 

 

 

4. You can not in ANY way, shape or form incentivize your customers to leave you a Google Review. That means no offering of gift cards, Starbucks coffee, etc. 

 

 

5. You are allowed to email your customers after they have left your place of business to encourage them to leave you a Google Review. 

 

 

For the small mom and pop shops, doctors offices and for REALTORS® this creates too many hoops for your customers to jump through just to leave you a review. Most people don’t hang around their computers all day every day and know the workings of Google and other platforms. 

 

 

Here in South Florida, we have a lot of over 65+ residents who still use AOL for their email! They have never heard of Yelp and don’t have G+ accounts. Our chiropractor was going to get an iPad to get the reviews right in his office which was a great idea but now he can not do that. Google keeps changing the rules. 

 

 

It is one thing to be in the business of ad revenue that Google is in. They get to make their own rules. They are about profits. I have no issue with that. But when consumers take to the internet to search for a doctor or hair salon or a REALTOR® the reviews are important. I understand Google is saying this is the way they are dealing with fake reviews and spam but real people in the real world just don’t take the time to jump through dozens of hoops to say something good about someone, but they will do that in order to say something bad about someone! 

 

 

Maybe you could add to your Google Places page: “To see our client testimonials please visit our website”. And then post all your testimonials on your testimonial page on your website. Link to that page often throughout all your blogs and websites.  

authored by Katerina Gasset