Penguin 2.0 will be similar to the original Penguin update but has a few added elements. Let’s take a close listen to what Matt Cutts has to say and then we’ll discuss the action steps you should take.

What To Expect from Penguin 2.0

Penguin 2.0 is targeting low quality and black hat link building efforts. Just as the original Penguin update focused on penalizing websites with volumes of low quality links in proportion to the number of high quality inbound links; Penguin 2.0 will do a more accurate job of penalizing websites who have cheated their way to the top of search engines.

Here’s a list of what Penguin 2.0 is looking for:

• Paid Links (Advertorials violating Google’s guidelines)
• Links from low quality websites
• Irrelevant Links (Un-Natural)
• Over Optimized Anchor Text
• Keyword Stuffing
• Hacked Websites

Here’s what type of websites may be penalized:

• Sites which have received a boost in ranking from purchasing paid links
• Sites that have a high ratio of inbound blogroll links compared to other inbound links
• Sites that are ranking for keywords outside their industry (if you were lucky enough to have your website ranking for a random keyword phrase… this may be corrected)
• Hacked sites

How to Survive a Bigger, Tougher, and Meaner Penguin

Google wants the formula for online success to always remain consistent for your brand. The ultimate goal is to have those websites that provide the most value to the user to have the most online exposure.

Thus, if your website provides extraordinary value to the user then your website should be rewarded with higher relevant keyword rankings. However, as competition in every online industry grows, the task for Google to find the best websites in each industry becomes more difficult. Enter social signals.

The easiest way for Google to determine if your website is valuable to users is by looking closely at your social signals. Social media and SEO are influencing each other more each day. If your website has a great deal of traffic, return visitors, a low bounce rate, Facebook likes, shares, and recommendations, and a fair amount of Google plus shares…. then it is easy for search engine robots to determine your website provides a great user experience. The end result should then be higher rankings. Lets dig in further and examine how to go about building a great user experience.

Action Steps To Scare Off Penguin 2.0

1). Provide Value To Your Visitors - Build your website, write page content, and compose blog posts with your visitor in mind. Give them the information that they want and readers will come back, share your content, stay on your website longer, and possibly buy your services. An engaged and happy website visitor shows in analytics that Google can see. When Google sees happy website visitors they determine your website is of high quality and reward you with higher rankings and higher page rank.

2). Lower Your Bounce Rate – Your bounce rate is the first indicator of what people think of your website. If your bounce rate is high it can mean two things. One, that you are running an ad campaign with keywords and copy that don’t accurately relate to your website. Or two, that your website is lacking visually or contextually what organic visitors are hoping to see.

The most effective way to lower your bounce rate is to use an A/B conversion software to help you determine the best combination of text and images to convey a first impression that visitors hope to see. Try Crazy Egg.

3). Provide Social Sharing Opportunities – Even if your company does not have a very proactive social media marketing strategy you should still offer those socially savvy website visitors an easy way to share your content. Add Facebook, Google Plus, Yelp, and Twitter buttons at the very least to your homepage. The social shares will follow in time as your business continues to provide valuable content.

Bonus Social Proof Tip: Until your website garters many social shares, use social buttons that don’t display the number of shares. Avoid negative social proof at the start and then leverage social proof when you have the swagg to do so.

4). Keep Your Website Safe From Hackers-

2013 is quickly becoming the year of the hack. And Penguin 2.0 is on the hunt for injured prey. If your website is hacked or contains malware you can expect to lose rankings and website traffic. Keep you website safe by updating your password to contain symbols, upper and lower case letters, numbers, and multiple words that in no way, shape, or form could relate to your brand, business name, birthday, or service. Hackers and software are quick to try the top thousand combinations of your business password to get into your site. 

5). Use Google Markup Language to Help Google I.D. Your Industry – Google’s highlighter tool makes it simple for webmasters to add html markup to their website in order to help Google bots id their industry, products, or events. No coding skills necessary. Just the knowledge and application of the tool itself is all that is needed. This is the easiest way besides using a sitemap to help Google index and understand the pages and content on your website.

6). Build Quality Links- Ultimately Penguin 2.0 is looking to penalize sites with low quality inbound links. So build high quality links instead. Begin by guest blogging on relative and authoritative sites in your industry. Guest blogging is the best SEO tactic of 2013.

So there you have it. The ultimate defense to Penguin 2.0. What concerns or questions do you have about Google’s next big update?

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So here are the ten tips and online tools to help keep you focused and productive as an SEO or internet marketing professional. 

1. Stay Focused
Stayfocusd is a browser extension that allows you to create a blacklist of websites you know that slows your productivity and sets an amount of time you can spend on them each weekday. It also includes sites you visit from your blacklist and can suggest sites you might want to add to your blacklist based on behavior.

2. Quick Login for Google Accounts
Do you have multiple logins for personal and professional Google Accounts? Then the Quick Login for Google Accounts extension is right for you! Using the quick login allows you to quickly switch between up to 10 Google accounts and the best part is, you don’t have to remember all your passwords for the differing accounts!  

3. WriteMonkey
WriteMonkey is a word processor that can help with longer consultancy documents or blog posts. It boils the writing process down and enables you to get through the writing stage of producing a document much faster.

 4. Leverage Pocket
Pocket is a useful tool that allows you to easily store interesting articles, videos, or snippets of text in a virtual portfolio to review at a better time. Now you can go back and read that recommended blog post you found in your morning email on how to beat”Google’s Penguin update” while you are waiting for a burrito on your lunch break. Oh yes, Pocket has an app so that any content saved via your computer, ipad, or phone is immediately synced. 

 5. Use A Timer
Timer is a good tool to help build your attention span and is another Google chrome app available for free. If you really struggle to concentrate on a piece of work, start off by trying to focus on it for just 10 minutes of your time then build that time up and up.

6. Hear the Music, but Don’t Listen to It
It gets awfully boring when all you hear is silence for too long. At Dinomite SEO we allow all our team members to play music while they work. What we’ve found is that some people work better and faster when they have music playing while others enjoy complete silence. Try adding some music to your workday and you may notice you feel more productive.

7. Use SaneBox For Email Organization
How you go about organizing and responding to emails is actually very important to your productivity. We use SaneBox to filter out emails by their level of importance so that our inbox is automatically organized for us. Emails from our clients stay in our inbox while emails from subscription sites are neatly organized into a separate folder while “follow up emails” have yet another folder. It is really our favorite tool of the bunch.

8. Sleep Like A Baby
Easier said than done but we all can agree; one of the greatest boosts to productivity is getting more sleep. How can you get more sleep? For starters don’t drink coffee after noon. Caffeine can stay in your system up to 8 hours. Next, don’t eat dessert or candy after dinner. Skipping dessert may not be fun but feeling tired and unproductive is worse. Plus skipping dessert is only going to benefit your health otherwise. Last tip: try meditating before you go to bed. Thinking positive thoughts helps to relax your mind.

9. Want It Bad Enough
Ultimately, if you feel you are being unproductive, take a step back and question your underlying thoughts about your job. Do you love your work? If not then evaluate whether you have the opportunity to switch your career or the company you’re working for. It’s much better to evaluate your options while you have them before your boss questions the output and quality of your work later on. Don’t wait to have a Jerry Maguire moment folks. It doesn’t always turn out pretty.

10. Work Your Ass Off Before Lunch

Somewhere I read that 75% of employee work is completed in the first four hours of their work day. Thinking about it, this makes sense. During a lunch break people often socialize, relax, maybe they take a nap, run errands, and often times they overeat. Most of these activities do not inspire a strong post lunch work ethic. Additionally as the day grows later and people grow tired they begin to slack.

Our advice is to push your lunch break back to 1 or 2 pm if possible and survive by eating smaller snacks until then. This will help you get more done while you are still in your best working mindset which is earlier in the day.

For more easy SEO tips check out Dinomite SEO

Whether your field of expertise or interest is in Internet Marketing, Web Design and Development or SEO, it’s always nice to have a few tricks up your sleeve for your clients or friends. If you’re involved in editing or administering a website of any kind, there’s a chance you’ll have to perform some general Web Design related tasks, and what follows are some great (FREE) online resources and tools to streamline and optimize those tasks.

1) Dynamic Drive’s Favicon Generator -

One great, easy way to give a professional feel to any website is by including a Favicon. In case you’re not familiar, a website’s Favicon is the small image or icon that shows up next to the website’s name in the web browser’s tab or URL bar. Favicons usually come in .ICO file format. The best way to create a Favicon is to design an “iconic” representation of your site or logo in your favorite image editor, being sure to make the dimensions of that icon 16 pixels by 16 pixels. You can save that icon as a .PNG, .JPG or .GIF to start with. Once you visit Dynamic Drive’s Favicon Generator, you can upload your icon in any of the above image formats, and the Favicon Generator will allow you to download that icon in the proper .ICO format. Simply upload your new .ICO file to the root directory of your website and your new Favicon should install automatically! 

2) CSS Checkbox -

If you spend a lot of time writing CSS code, especially in relation to creating and styling form elements such as checkboxes, radio button and input fields, you’ll love this next free web designer resource. Designers looking for nice looking form elements and code, in particular free Checkbox CSS code, can check out CSS Checkbox for a variety of CSS and Image based checkbox styles that are available for free download.

CSS Checkbox sports a relatively large Checkbox code package that is open source, and hosts a CSS Checkbox generator that creates custom Checkbox CSS for specific situations. Whether you’re designing Opt-In forms for Newsletters or Checkout Forms for Ecommerce applications, having nice looking checkboxes from CSS Checkbox goes a long way. These CSS Checkboxes are “class”-based, which means that even if you run a site built on WordPress or Magento, you can retroactively install these beautiful checkbox styles. They even take requests for new checkbox styles, so if you have an idea of your own you can go share it with CSS Checkbox, and if you’re lucky they’ll post the CSS Checkbox style you’ve always dreamed of to their site.

3) CSS 3 Gen -

This site is a really wonderful resource for generating specific CSS styles for your HTML elements. CSS3Gen gives you an incredibly simple interface for creating cross-browser CSS3 styles for some of the more impressive CSS properties included within the CSS3 specification. By using sliders and editing simple configuration values, CSS3Gen can generate CSS code for the CSS box-shadow property, the CSS text-shadow property and the CSS gradient property, all of which are revolutionary when it comes to web design in the sense that prior to CSS3, these effects were achievable only through the use of images. CSS3Gen also provides some awesome tools to create CSS buttons for your menus and forms, as well as a generator for the CSS border-radius property — the CSS property that miraculously allows you to add rounded corners to your HTML elements.

4) Font Squirrel -

If you spend any time on a computer at all, chances are you are at least partially obsessed with fonts that are NOT Times, Helvetica or Arial. If that’s the case, you’ll absolutely love Font Squirrel. This Website offers “handpicked, free fonts”, which are great if you’re working on a personal project or designing something professional on a budget.

In addition to offering a really fabulous directory of sleek and impressive typefaces, Font Squirrel also offers a CSS @font-face Generator tool. This tool basically allows you to upload a font or typeface of your choice, and will subsequently use that typeface to generate a CSS @font-face kit that you can download free of charge. The @font-face kit will provide you several different file formats for your font (this allows for Cross-browser custom font implementation through CSS), a CSS file with example @font-face syntax (the CSS code that allows you to embed custom fonts in a website), and a demo HTML file so you can see your custom fonts in action. A quick word of advice–if you want to give your website or web project a little professional flare, take full advantage of this free tool and Font Squirrel’s incredible font database.

Did you learn something fun or interesting in this post? If so then please share the love and share the wisdom!

photo credit: luxuryluke via photopin cc

For more easy SEO tips check out Dinomite SEO

We’ve all heard it before and we know it well by now- blogging should be at the hub of your inbound marketing strategy. The benefits of blogging are numerous and for the sake of originality we will not cover and recite all of the reasons why. Instead we would like to discuss the best 5 ways to gain readership with any one blog post. In the end, it all boils down to content. If you understand the content that people like to read than automatically your blog posts will be more successful in terms of gaining readership, keeping readership, inspiring social media buzz, and persuading action. So here are the best 5 writing topics that will attract readers to your blog.

Check out how to generate business leads with a blog comment!

Here are the top 5 blogging topics to gain readership:

1). Lists. Lists are a great way to categorize and condense otherwise lengthy and/or complex information. It is also a clean and pleasant presentation of information that people would not be intimidated by. Lists enable readers to quickly process information and it also helps readers remember the information.

2). Reviews. Nowadays, consumers are more interested in online reviews than any other time. It has been proven that people trust the reviews and opinions of their friends and family more so than advertisements. If you write a comprehensive review of a product, service, or otherwise strategy – the people will come to hear what you have to say.

3). Tips. The Internet is the number one source for information for just about everybody. People search online by typing questions directly into Google and often times search for the “best tips” on how to do something. If you can provide answers to solve problems then again, the people will come to you.

4). Current Event/News. People want to be informed but often times they don’t want to be the individual responsible for digesting current news. They want to know that the San Diego Chargers traded a defensive player but they also want an insightful analysis of what the implications of this news might be. Will this trade make the Chargers better or worse defensively? If you can summarize a current event or any type of current news and then break down the implications of this news- you’ll find yourself building an online readership quickly.

5). How To’s. People not only want information but they want to learn new things. By presenting your readers with a “how to”, you’ll help them solve a problem while simultaneously proving yourself to be an expert within your industry. It’s a win-win type of deal here. 

Boom, there they are, the top 5 blogging topics that will increase readership and engagement for your blog. Now how easy is it to choose a topic to blog about? 

For more easy SEO tips check out Dinomite SEO

    Implementing an SEO strategy in this digital, computer age is crucial for your business to grow. Everyone is now online and it is important to not only have a website, but an optimized one. An optimized website is easy to find online and benefits fro more web traffic which can translate into more business for your organization.

    Optimized websites are indexed by search engines and show up higher in search results for certain search queries. The first step in optimizing your website is to do some keyword research using tools such as Google’s Keyword Tool. Focus on keywords that have low competition, yet have high search volume. After you identify your keywords, strategically place them in different sections of your website. These sections include the title tag, meta description, headers, within the content itself, and within alt tags.

Title Tags

    Title tags indicate the name or title of your page that search engines look at when displaying search results for a search query. Let’s say your company does water damage restoration and your keywords include, “home water restoration” and “San Diego water damage”, then the title tags should include your company’s name and some, if not all of those keywords. The title tag appears either on the top bar of a window that appears in a web browser or on the tab at the top of the browser window.  Include your keywords here as you want to make sure your page appears in the search results for your keywords.

Meta Description

    The meta description is the brief couple sentences that appear under your page’s title that describe what your page is all about. When your page appears in a search result, a brief paragraph, usually consisting of a couple sentences, will show up under your page’s title.  The meta description helps the person conducting the search to get an idea of what your site is about so he or she can see if they want to proceed onto your site. Again, make sure your select keywords are included, that your description is clear, concise and accurately portrays your company. Again, your home water damage restoration company’s description should include, “home water restoration” and “San Diego water damage”.

Headings and Link-Rich Content

    Once visitors click through to your site, make sure your page headings are rich with your selected keywords. Make sure to also have your keywords sprinkled around in the content of each page of your site. The content of your pages also offer great opportunities to create both internal and external links that search engines will take into account in ranking your website in search results. Don’t go overboard with putting in too many links or keywords in your pages’ content. With too many links and keywords, your site will look bad and can incur penalties by Google. Have each page header and title tag different for each page of your site as each page will inevitably be on a slightly different topic.

Alt Tags

    Many professional websites have images and/or videos to accompany the text. You should not have a website that is all text unless it is a blog. Text only websites are boring for a site visitor and therefore scare many viewers away. It also isn’t good for SEO as you lose another opportunity for search engines, and, therefore people to find your site. Search engines and consumers also attribute all text sites to advertisements and spam.

    All your images and videos should have a title and an alt tag-even the ones that aren’t on your website. Alt tags briefly, but clearly tell the viewer what the image or video is about if their computer for some reason can display the image or video. The viewer will still be able to get an idea of what the picture or video is showing though they cannot see it.  Search engines also crawl, search and rank images and videos as well as text, so that is why it is important to label and tag even your videos and images. Your alt tags need to be clear, concise and as descriptive of the image/video as possible. For your water damage restoration site, you may have pictures of your work vehicles or employees working in a home. Be concise, yet descriptive and include your keywords: home water restoration and San Diego water damage.

By utilizing all these techniques, one can diversify and therefore increase their website’s chances of being found on search engines and in search results. Being ranked high in search results lead to more visitors to your site and therefore more profit for your business.

About The Author: Sarah Snider is an intern here at Dinomite SEO and a student at UCSD. She has a minor in public relations and great experience with press release composition and SEO copywriting.

For more easy SEO tips check out Dinomite SEO

Early this December, 2012; Google made waves in the internet marketing world by introducing their newest webmaster tool, data highlighter. The Google Data Highlighter Tool will remind you of a simple website building interface such as Wix and can be referred to as a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) platform in terms of its simplicity.

The highlighter tool will be used for webmasters to literally “highlight” content on a website in order to mark it as structured data for Google to index in search results. Think Google should know that your local business is hosting an event next month? Then use this tool to highlight this event on your website and Google will show this “extra information” in search results. (Here’s what’s going on in San Diego this week. Search term: San Diego events)

“Extra information” that you want displayed in search results next to your website listing is known as rich snippets. And in the past in order to have any rich snippets displayed from your website would require the editing of HTML code on numerous pages of your website. (Nobody wants to edit HTML code) But now with the Google highlighter tool you no longer need to edit any code what so ever. Instead you just click, highlight, and tag content on your website and Google does the rest.

Check out this tutorial video of the Google highlighter tool to see what we’re talking about.

As the video explains not only is the highlighter tool super easy to use but Google believes that if you highlight 5-10 pages of your website accurately and have similar content structuring on other pages of your website, that the highlighter tool will be able to automatically index the rest of your website for other “rich snippets”. So if you have many calendar events on different pages of your site then you only have to highlight a few before Google finishes highlighting the rest automatically. Unbelievable right?

Now for all you old school rich snippet experts who have been practicing the art form for many a day and would like to break out your digital highlighter this instant and start marking up product pages, authors, events, music, people, and places all over your website in some sort of frenzy….. let it be known that currently the Google highlighter tool is only available in English and can only help webmasters highlight relevant calendar events. So you’ll have to take a deep breathe and wait patiently for Google to roll out this feature to all rich snippet categories. But you better believe the game is on once Google does. Race you to it?

For now highlighting calender events on your website is a good place for anyone and everyone to start in order to understand the tool better: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

SEO Takaway: The Google highlighter tool really suggests to webmasters the need for consistency throughout website design. The simplicity of this tool should stress the creation of “rich snippet” content such as events, individual product pages, places, authors, and such.

First time you heard about this tool? Respect your elders then and share this amazing content by using a social button below! What goes around, goes around.

For more easy SEO tips check out Dinomite SEO

Some time ago Google gave website owners the ability to designate links on their website as DoFollow or NoFollow. DoFollow links tell Google and other search engines that they should follow the direction of the link and index the relationship between both websites for consideration in rankings. NoFollow links tell Google to ignore the link completely therefore not rewarding the linked-to website with a boost in ranking.

The designation of DoFollow and NoFollow links provides website owners with the ability to link to other websites freely without the worry of passing away too much ranking authority. NoFollow links have also helped to combat spamming techniques when it comes to blog commenting. (We are all familiar with the old school SEO strategy of leaving a blog comment for the mere opportunity to link back to your website rather than for genuine interest of conversation.) The majority of website owners now enable a NoFollow html relevance tag for the purpose of deterring BS blog comments.

So the question for SEO’s becomes, “How do I know which blogs, social bookmarking sites, article submissions sites, and other websites use DoFollow links- so that Google will reward my efforts for building a link back to my site?“

A FireFox Plugin that Distinguishes DoFollow from NoFollow Links

There are a few different ways to determine whether a website grants DoFollow or NoFollow links.

1). Ask the website owner

2). Search through the website code for relevance tags

3). Use a Firefox plugin/ applications

For starters you can always ask the website owner if they grant DoFollow or NoFollow links. Sometimes the website admin doesn’t always know the answer to this, is unreachable for questioning, or doesn’t provide you a truthful answer. So then there is option two. You can visit a website and then search the site for the relevance HTMl tag that designates whether a link is DoFollow or NoFollow. An example of what a line of code might look like for a NoFollow link would be:

<a href=”http://www.bostonwaterdamagesupport.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Boston Water damage</a>

Where as a similar DoFollow link would not have the relevance tag = nofollow and would look like.

<a href= “http://www.bostonwaterdamagesupport.com/”>Water damage Boston</a>

The problem with looking through code is that you are literally looking at code which not many people like to do and which is also time consuming not to mention also hurts your eyes. This brings us to option three. Use a Firefox plugin which highlights DoFollow links in purple font and NoFollow links in pink font. Using this Firefox plugin you can visit any site and quickly determine which type of links it uses and whether it is worth your time as an SEO to go ahead and build a link back to your target site.

Download the plugin here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nodofollow/ but not before you leave us a comment down below.

What do you think of the plugin? Will it become a part of your SEO toolbox?

For more easy SEO tips check out Dinomite SEO

If You Don’t Finish First, You Finish Last

Ricky Bobby from Talladega nights always says, “If you don’t finish first, you finish last.” While many of us thought he was referring to professional race car driving what we have learned at Dinomite is that he was actually referring to organic listing placement. It turns out that the top organic listing receives 53% of all page clicks while the second place organic listing receives only 15%. The third place link gets 9%, the fourth place sees 6% percent, and the fifth place link is only clicked on just 4% of the time.

But lets go back to that difference between first and second. The first place listing receives an incredible 53% of all clicks while the second listing only sees 15%. That is a gigantic difference that in a short period of time can separate two competing businesses by thousands if not millions of dollars resulting from inbound leads and increased brand exposure depending upon the industry. Multiply this difference by six months or even a few years and the what you’ll find is that businesses with a top organic listing compared to their second place competitor will be the Michael Jordan of their industry while the second place business will have to settle as the Karl Malone. Although both Jordan and Malone are household names, I don’t think Nike or Hanes ever signed Malone to an endorsement contract and I don’t believe you’ll ever see somebody wearing Karl Malone sneakers.

For more easy SEO tips check out Dinomite SEO

How to Surf The Internet For Fun and Still Generate Business Leads

There is a way to surf the internet and simultaneously generate more leads for your business. The strategy looks something like this:

1. Comment on every article that you read. It doesn’t matter if you agree or disagree with the content of the article. Just comment to begin with. By doing so you are leaving a footprint in the digital landscape for which people can trace back to you.
2. Do not use your name but rather your email. When you are commenting on a blog post and are forced to fill out a form with your information prior to commenting, do not use your name in the name field. Instead use your best email address. The reason being that your answer in the name field of the form normally shows up with your comment. So if you use your email address and leave a smart comment then other readers might see it and decide to email you for business.

*Always use your email in the “name field” of a commenting form so that your email address and not your name shows up with your comment. Now other readers can email you should they desire.

* Now look at Cathy’s comment down below. She filled out the “name field” of the form with her first name which appears above her comment. The problem is that we have no way to contact her should we want to unless we want to spend our precious time looking for her on Facebook.

That’s no too hard to do is it? Now that you know how to generate business leads with a blog comment it is time for you to drop a comment on this post. Increase your digital footprint and let us know if you are familiar with any other great strategies for generating leads online?

For more easy SEO tips check out Dinomite SEO

Millions of websites crashed this morning (September 10th, 2012) as the result of a mastermind hacking group referred to as Anonymous. One Anonymous member is taking credit for bringing down GoDaddy’s servers. The individual tweeted that this was not a group effort but rather the result of his own efforts on behalf of the Anonymous group. Check out these screenshots of social media conversations covering the event.

How to Protect Your Business Website

In 2012 the only way to truly protect your business website is to frequently download and store backup files of your website content on a hard drive and on your personal computer. The truth is that the cloud is not 100% safe and never will be.

To safeguard your business website and any and all important online information we recommend you download and keep a backup file of all this information. Keep a backup file on your personal computer as well as on an additional hard drive or disc.

Best Security WordPress Plugin

At Dinomite SEO we recommend that all WordPress website owners use the Backup Buddy premium wordpress plugin to protect and save the entire content of their business website in a secure manner. Backup Buddy is our choice for safeguarding our website and does two things for you. One on a daily basis it will store your website files in the cloud on a different server from your host. And two, it allows for an easy and quick download of your files to store as a hard copy outside of your computer.

Click here to check out Backup Buddy!

What are you doing to protect your business from potentially losing its number one digital asset?

For more easy SEO tips check out Dinomite SEO