Branding and Ranking: New Changes in Search Engine Algorithms

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If you look at the websites that survived Penguin 2.0 and have maintained or improved their rankings, you’ll find that these are sites that have a holistic brand. While it is true that thoughtful, instructive, honest and relevant link building tactics can still ensure good rankings, businesses cannot afford to ignore the newer, potentially significant SEO trend – branding. Branding is emerging as a crucial ranking factor because Google search now gives more importance to authenticity. Google wants to provide the best search experience for its users and focuses on rewarding authentic sites. The search engine is relentlessly rooting out websites that are over optimized but have no real value. In its search for genuine brands, Google attaches importance to genuine popularity, and therefore social signals, Google+, authorship tags etc. assume immense significance when it comes to SEO. The latest Hummingbird algorithm also plays a critical role in triggering the importance of this SEO trend. This algorithm sorts through millions of web pages and returns the best answers to the conversational queries. The search engine provides the results as if you are engaging in a conversation with it (for example, ‘which is the best advertising company in California?’ instead of ‘best advertising company California’) and picking up on the context of searches. As a result, the search results are more likely to rank for strings of words (long-tail keywords) rather than simple keywords. To earn a higher ranking under Hummingbird, it is imperative for online businesses to provide what their customers are actually looking for, and for which a strong branding strategy is necessary.

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How Can You Build a Strong Online Brand?

Strong branding does not mean striving to earn online brand recognition equal to that of industry giants such as Apple, Microsoft and Zappos et al. It means building a strong brand in relation to the other sites in your niche over specific SERP territory or simply having a web brand for your local market. Building a strong online brand involves doing the same things that help you to enhance your brand awareness offline (such as publishing printed ads in magazines or newspapers) on your online platform as well. Following are some effective branding tips for your online business.

Create Useful Website Content

Make sure that your website content is relevant to the questions that the consumers might have. Think beyond providing product features

and

focus

on

creating

content

that

reflects

how

consumers can use your products in their day-to-day life (for example, helpful tips, how-to guides). Adding a blog to your site that is updated frequently would be very effective. Not only should you provide useful content, but also make it easily accessible for consumers. Your website design should facilitate easy search for the visitors and reflect the captivating character of your brand.

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Use Rich Snippets

Suppose you have provided specific information in your site, say some events. You can use rich snippets to make Google understand that and place them on search results.

This will give detailed information for users with specific queries and enhance your brand reputation. Choose any markup format from Microdata (use simple attributes in HTML tags), Microformat (use the class attribute in HTML tags) and RDFa (uses simple attributes in XHTML tags), markup your content (you can use Structured Data Markup Helper to add microdata) and test the markup (you can use Structured Data Testing Tool)

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Distribute Content Externally

Continuous distribution of

content such as press releases,

PDFs, articles, presentations, whitepapers, newsletters and rich media content such as infographics, videos, and podcasts can increase

brand

mentions

and

brand

queries.

The

more

frequently this varied content is verified as quality and relevant to your target market, the crawlers will be able to authenticate your brand better. Backlinks generated from this content will have more authority and it will boost your SEO efforts in the wake of Penguin 2.0.

Google+ Authorship

Google Authorship allows the authors to claim their content and enables the search engine to provide more content written by the same author. This feature helps to enhance your brand credibility. As this feature is tied to your Google + account, you can also improve your brand reach by adding more people to your account.

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Social Media Signals

With an effective social media marketing strategy, you can enhance your brand reputation to a greater extent. You can use social networking sites as a channel for customer support and build trust among your customers, obtain positive reviews and attract more brand advocates.

It

is also possible to increase your brand awareness and reach by commenting on other posts, sharing your content - creative elements and rich media, and communicating with experts in your niche and customers. When the number of followers grew for Cadbury’s Google Plus page, the brand’s page landed on ‘Hot on Google+,’ a section which shows selected content deemed as exemplary and interesting. This further increased the number of their followers to 1.2 million. Certain sites (Facebook, Google Plus, Pinterest and others) provide business pages (screenshot for Google+ Business page given below) exclusively for marketing purposes. These pages offer several opportunities to increase brand reputation.

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Rich

media