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The web has always been about content, however quality was never a driving requirement for either the content originators or the search engines.

No so anymore.

With all the changes in Google's search algorithm over the past year and the exponential explosion of social content, never before has the need for compelling and relevant content been so important.

This infographic does a good job of describing the 'compelling content' trail.

Being Socially Responsible Is Good for Business...Period.

What do you stand for? From global warming to geriatric policy, everyone has something they care deeply about, and when your business begins to define itself by committing to a cause, everyone benefits. Taking part in the new era of social responsibility helps to humanize your business, and in the process, refine your brand.

With the advent of social marketing, one-directional push marketing has gone the way of the dinosaurs. In order to succeed today, marketing must be conversational, and to be a good conversationalist, you need to have a clearly defined personality for your brand. Not doing so will cost you.  Read more...

LinkedIn is pulling the plug on SlideShare, WordPress & LinkedIn Events starting today. They dropped this news publicly a few days ago, saying it was part of their effort to simplify design...and create new ways to 'connect'.

Please don't tell me LinkedIn wants me to create yet another closed-off-contact-community behind concrete. We can probably still get blog content in by connecting Jetpack in admin. Thanks to Hootesuite, Ping.fm, etc, I've gotten used to communicating indirectly to save time.

However, this move looks an awful lot like it's going to waste my time. Can't Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and Google+ all just get along? What a great resolution that would be! 

Yea, yea, I know, profits, proprietary algorythms and all.

Forget I said anything. Sigh...

--- 
My LinkedIn letter....

Hi Mechele,
 
 
On December 11, 2012, you'll be getting the new LinkedIn profile, which has a simplified design, provides deeper insights, and surfaces new ways to connect and build relationships. You'll also be one of the first to preview a new way to showcase rich content on your profile -- like presentations, videos, documents, and more. 
 
 
Now there are more ways than ever to tell your professional story on LinkedIn, and we're excited for you to try them out. As we roll out these changes, we'll also be streamlining our app offerings, so the following LinkedIn apps will no longer be supported on the homepage or profile as of December 11:
 
 
•SlideShare Presentations
 
•WordPress
 
•LinkedIn Events

Google’s Panda updates are part of the company’s quest to provide quality online content by way of complex (and usually covert) algorithms that rank websites. This is how and why the Panda algorithms have made their impact felt on millions since launching in 2011. These updates utilize more sophisticated and scalable artificial intelligence than ever before.

It started with human quality testers rating thousands of websites by measuring attributes like quality, including design, trustworthiness, speed and whether or not they would return to the website.  Makes sense to me. What's so significant about Panda, (as many SEO marketers have learned the hard way!),  is that Panda affects not just individual site pages, but the entire site or section. The result— an entire site can be penalized for the sins of a few pages. The most egregious offense? over-optimizing. The goal of Panda according to Google, was to clean up the garbage sites that clutter up search engine results and block out sites with meaningful, relevant copy.

Over the past 19 months there been 21 Panda updates (some major, most minor), plus Penguin and EMD (Exact Match Domain). Many continue to rock site owners’ worlds. Google is getting better and better at filtering out sites that try to game the search behemoth.

The key take-away— don’t take your eye off Google for a minute. It’s important to see your site through Google’s all-seeing eyes at all times.

Some simple ways to stay safe

When Panda was initially unleashed (note wordplay on dog picture above—sorry), it led to a surge in traffic and SEO rankings for some, while many more suffered a serious drop in Google rankings. The most significant outcome: a marked increase in the rankings of social media and news sites, and plummeting rankings for many advertisement-stuffed junk sites that previously held first-page rankings. Below are some basic ways to stay safe.

Ensure fresh and quality content

Panda updates filter duplicate and low-quality content, as these are key indicators for junk sites. With this move, website owners are now obliged to remove all pages stuffed with keywords and filler content. Consequently, SEO experts must now not only optimize their sites to the hilt, but must do so naturally. More importantly though, providing new and engaging content is critical. Dynamic content is king.

On-site optimization

There are other factors that now have an increased impact on the “quality” site content, including, spelling, stylistic and grammatical issues. The bar has also been raised on traditional optimization techniques. For example, old standbys like anchor linking (deep linking to other pages within the same site), must now be relevant and each chunk of content must be unique. Gone are the days of randomly linking keywords just because they are keywords.

Engage site visitors

While Google has always shown preference for user-friendly sites that provide real value to visitors, with the Panda update, site that engage visitors by eliciting response (aka. Encouraging engagement) can bump up their rankings. Some simple SEO engagement boosters include allowing visitors to comment on articles, promoting product reviews and using social media tools like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter to maintain a dialog with site visitors.

Constant attention

Many webmasters have reported that the Panda update seems to emphasize penalizing pages with older dates, even though the pages may have high-quality and evergreen content (information that never goes out to date). While industry experts hope that this matter be resolved in future updates, it’s better to update your website pages to prevent any possible date-related penalization by Panda.

Booeutifully effective marketing for the ghoulish crowd. May the witches stir up your business this Halloween! http://www.repaz.com

There’s a great piece in INC about the ever-growing tide of junk content slowly drowning out original, thoughtful and interesting quality content. This junk content is what many low lying digital marketers refer to as ‘SEO fuel’ or simply ‘SEO marketing’.

These are the articles written in 20 minutes or less, press releases that regurgitate the same idea in 25 different ways or the blog posts that repeat a keyword phrase 3 times in a single

stifling sentence ...aka. “For sublime marketing in NJ, get to know a marketing in NJ firm that prides itself on being a premier resource for marketing in NJ.”

Great right? Google brought this on with an algorithm that rewards the most frequently updated content. It has set the standard for other content hubs like Twitter, where you simply disappear if you don't tweet often enough because some software will automatically un-follow you. So people continue to tweet stale content or in most cases retweet. Did you know close to 80% of the content on Twitter are retweets?  It’s like going to a party and the host hands you a martini glass of someone else’s backwash. Eww.

There is some hope, or at least relief for original content writers out there. Google’s multi-part Panda and Penguin updates penalize content “repackagers” and “keyword stutters” that repeat, repeat, repeat. Even Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone are attempting to stem the tide and retain the founding spirit of the perennial micro-blogging site.

They announced recently that they’re "rethinking publishing” and creating an online medium (named Medium) dedicated to the idea that the quality of content matters. "Lots of services have successfully lowered the bar for sharing information, but there's been less progress toward raising the quality of what's produced," Williams writes in his opening Medium post.

Could this be the start of the end for sucky content?

If Google and Twitter can effectively mirror the egalitarian approach of sites like Tumblr and Flipboard that effectively roll up aged media, old and new media, branded media and quality social media, the writers, thinkers and innovators of the web have a shot.

And, we won’t have to click to page 3 of our Google results to finally get some meaningful content besides Wikipedia.

Matawan, NJ– Repaz Marketing is celebrating Valentine’s Day by offering New Jersey businesses 20% savings on all marketing services during the month of February when they devote time, money or supplies to any New Jersey animal shelter or rescue organization.

Repaz is a Monmouth County NJ marketing company specializing in Internet marketing, marketing strategy, reputation management and website design. “Due to the economy there are tens of thousands of loving dogs and cats seeking new homes in NJ,” said Repaz Marketing owner Mechele Shoneman, “what better way to show a little Valentines Day love then giving back to needy pets?”

Businesses can qualify for this deep 20% discount by donating money, goods or time to local shelters like the Associated Humane Society in Tinton Falls or the SPCA in Eatontown. Or, they can contribute the same, plus time walking dogs with local rescue groups like Rescue Ridge in Spring Lake or All Critters Rescue.  “Any human interaction helps shelter animals stay social, and hence, more adoptable. Plus, what could be a better tribute to Valentine’s Day than giving a little puppy love to animals that need it the most” said Mechele. As part of this promotion, Jersey Shore Pet Care also offer a 10% discount on all pet care services to those who give back to homeless cats and dogs during the month of February.

Repaz Marketing loves dogs and makes no secret of it. Every month Repaz devotes ten hours a month to local Monmouth County rescue organizations like Rescue Ridge and Little Silver Animal Hospital Foundation, helping to raise funds, plan events and walk dogs. Additionally, Mechele runs a virtual rescue site, www.largedogs.com, and has 5 rescue dogs of her own— in addition to guinea pigs and hamsters.

“Hopefully,this spirit of giving will strike a chord with business owners in the area that love their dogs and cats and want spread the love— while at the same time helping their business.

The average consumer is assaulted with over 2,400 ads a day via radio, TV, Internet and print media. “You've got to ask yourself— what will it take for my message to break through the noise?"  Repaz has over 20 years expertise in marketing communications, strategy and web development helping clients get found.

Over 1 billion searches are performed daily on Google and many of these are directly attributable to the 63% of a company’s market value that stems from their reputation. Repaz takes a different approach to marketing strategy by focusing on reputation management. The idea is based on the principle that a referral from a trusted source can have more impact than an expensive campaign.

Google indexes more than 20 billion pages of content, and the fastest growing portion is user-generated content, largely fueled by blogs, microblogs, social sites and the syndication apps that drive them. Consumer opinion (also known as crowdsourcing) drives reputation more than ever before and social media is like word of mouth (WOM) on steroids.

“In this age of hyper-connectedness, WOM can do more for sales than traditional marketing tactics,” said Mechele. “However, it needs to be handled very delicately as the tide can turn very quickly; and ’reputation sting’ isn't just a large company problem.  Local businesses run similar risks.”

Some bad reviews on local search sites like MerchantCircle, SuperPages or Kudzu, can quickly turn away prospective clients. Repaz Marketing helps clients stay in control of what people are saying about their businesses with targeted marketing that supports their reputation.

According to Mechele, “Donating time and money to animal rescue groups and shelters is a great way to build your reputation in the community!”

According to Experian Hitwise, Google+ is hot on the trail of Facebook.  Last month was it's best yet and according to an Experian Hitwise analyst's tweet. Google+ is projected to grow to 400 million users by the end of 2012...creeping up on Facebook with 900 million users

The tweet was sent two days ago saying that Google’s social networking site more than doubled its traffic in December 2011.

The Tweet...http://ow.ly/i/oT3R

“Google+ total US visits reach more than 49 million in Dec-11, biggest month to date & up 55% compared to Nov-11 ow.ly/i/oT3R,”

It's rumored that Google+ has over 62 million members.  This is significant since Facebook didn’t pass the 60 million member mark until nearly four years after its debut.

Image courtesy of Experian Hitwise.

With 2011 coming to a close, VentureBeat took a look back over the year, noting the most popular social sites and smartphone devices in the U.S.  While Facebook is growing astronomically fast (try over 695,000 status updates every 60 seconds), Google is still the monster brand with an average 153.4 million people visiting every month.

Facebook gets about 137.6 million visitors per month, beating out beating out Blogger, Twitter, and Google+. It will be interesting to see where Google+ places in this next year.

According to Nielson, "Google was the most-visited U.S. Web brand, while Facebook held its lead among social networks and blogs.  Smartphones were popular in 2011, making up the majority of new phone purchases with Apple as the top smartphone manufacturer and Android as the leading OS."

Alternatively, Experian Hitwise gave Facebook the grand prize, saying it had more U.S. visits than Google.com. However, if you combine visits to all Google properties (not just Google.com),  Google did have an edge over Facebook in 2011.

Sidenote— why is Yahoo still so popular?!  Is my grandmother's Mah Jongg crew that busy searching?

Thanks to Barry Ritholz for this graphic depicting the tidal wave of online activity that happens every 60 seconds. It's mind boggling.  In a single minute there are over 695,000 status updates on Facebook ... 417 million per hour ... over 1 billion per day. With the US population at about 312 million, this means there are more than 688 million Facebook updates per 24 hours than there are US citizens. That's a lot of chatter!

The other infographic shows the number of electronic "transactions" per second. Hold onto your anti-virus software Batman (I recommend ClamWin, free open-source) — over 232 computers get infected by malware.