Building a brand requires time, dedication and a lot of hard work. Consumers have to trust and be engaged by the company trying to build or maintain its reputation. Ensuring that keywords chosen for a link or campaign are relevant to the business is key, as is ensuring the relevance to any site a link is posted on. Keyword stuffing, the process of loading a page down with links and “relevant” keywords, is not tolerated anymore. Sites that use such tactics face being ignored, down-ranked, or banned, all of which will result in varying levels of traffic loss.

Keyword Relevance

The keywords pointing to a site have to be relevant to the content on both the page the link is placed and to the site linked. Co-occurrence terms are important for the page, too. For instance, in order to rank for a phrase like “laptop battery”, a company might try to get a link that looks as follows:

As a university student, my laptop battery always seemed to be going dead. I hadn’t bought my Dell laptop brand new, but I did make sure to recharge my computer regularly. I ended up purchasing a new battery for my notebook computer in order to keep it running on battery power for more than 30 minutes.

The link relates to the content surrounding it and to the site linked. Further, other related phrases are used throughout, such as a major brand and the terms “recharge”, “computer” and “notebook”.

The Detriments of Keyword Stuffing

Matt Cutts, Google’s SEO guidelines enforcer, urges website owners not to take part in keyword stuffing (source: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/avoid-keyword-stuffing/). Users who attempt to artificially insert keywords into their web pages are severely penalized by Google’s algorithm. Those who try to hide their stuffing from users or present a different web page to users and crawlers are either penalized or, in some cases, removed from search results entirely, effectively cutting them off from the web community.

Content is King

In February 2011, Google unleashed its Panda algorithm update to quash low quality sites. The purpose of Panda is to find sites that don’t offer original, valuable content to readers and then reduce their value in search results (source: http://searchengineland.com/why-google-panda-is-more-a-ranking-factor-than-algorithm-update-82564). The engineers at Google have attempted to make Panda match a human’s reading habits, in order to determine whether certain content is relevant and actually coherent. There are many sites on the web that post long articles which begin normally enough, but, shortly after the fold, devolve into machine-generated nonsense. Panda’s purpose, among others, is to rid results of those poorly constructed pages.

Google’s Panda update changed the way that businesses do SEO and branding. They can’t get away with dropping keywords in places that make no sense or overloading pages with every co-occurrence term possible. Those who do stuff keywords into their pages are quickly hit with penalties, resulting in their site being down-ranked or even removed from search results completely, depending on the severity of the infraction. Content has to be purposeful, valuable, unique and of high quality for Google to allow it to rank well in a search results page.

This guest post was contributed by Joseph Baker.

Joseph Baker’s business experience in management spans more than 15 years. A leader of development and management teams, he also implemented budget reductions professionally and as an independent contractor. Joseph led strategic planning and systems of implementation for nine organizations, public and private, and worked extensively with small businesses.

He holds a Bachelor of Science in Marketing from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, and an MBA from Kellogg School of Management.

WPP subsidiary Millward Brown Optimor released its highly regarded annual brand ranking BrandZ Top 100 (PDF) back in April.  It identifies the world’s most valuable global brands as measured by their dollar value.

Topping the list were Internet giant Google, whose brand was valued at a whopping $100 billion, and rival Microsoft which came in second with a $76.2 billion valuation. The report showed Google’s brand value was up from $86 billion last year (an increase of 16% in value), while Microsoft’s rose only 8% in value over the past year.

Note that this is the value of the brand and not the company, and we mustn’t forget Google tends to put its name in all its products so would conceivably get more exposure as Microsoft, which markets far more brands than just one (Windows, Bing, etc.). Then again, Microsoft has been around a heck of a lot longer than Google, as has Coca-Cola which came in third with a brand valuation of $67.6 billion.

To read the rest of this TechCrunch post, click here.

]]> http://siteboat.com/google-brand-worth-100-billion-these-days/feed/ 0 http://siteboat.com/what-is-a-business-idea-business-development-series-1/ http://siteboat.com/what-is-a-business-idea-business-development-series-1/#comments Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:09:47 +0000 Erdem OZKAN http://siteboat.com/?p=144

As I’m working as a Strategy and Business Development Consultant, i want to share the basics of business development to help you develop your own businesses, with you. I’ll post some ”Business Development Series” topics which are about innovation and entrepreneurship. The first topic is ‘What’a a business …