Recent Topics in SEO and What They Mean

Running a site and promoting it to try and keep it relevant and at the top of the SERPs is a lot of work and something that can take you a lot of time. If you are going to make sure that your sites get attention and if you want to profit from them, then you need to not only make sure you have a great site design, but also keep updating it and doing the marketing and promotion to get it seen. And what makes marketing and SEO particularly tricky is the fact that it's such a broad and complicated topic that is constantly changing. What was true in the world of SEO a few months ago isn't necessarily true now, and it takes a good marketing agency to help you keep on top.

However even if you do use a market agency like Webfirm, it's still important to make sure that you have some idea about how SEO works and what they're talking about when they explain their strategy for your site. Here are a few of the recent big topics in SEO that everyone are talking about and what they mean for your site.

Social Search: Social search is the integration of social networking into search. Generally when a marketing agency like Webfirm talks about social search they mean the use of Google Plus. Here Google are using their +1 buttons in order to make the SERPs more relevant to the person searching, and understanding and utilizing this will be very important going into the future.

Semantic Search: Semantic search refers to Google's moves to make its search more intuitive and smarter. Here they basically mean that when you search something, Google will no longer just look for an exact keyword match in the content, but will instead try to understand what it is you are looking for and bring you relevant results that don't exactly fit your search term. In other words it's trying to second guess what the users mean and for content writers and webmasters this means it's important to start using synonyms and not to so heavily force the same keywords into content.

Panda and Penguin: These two terms refer to big algorithm changes that have altered the way that Google now operates. In short this now means that Google is much more sensitive to when it thinks it's being spammed and will quickly penalize those sites it believes are doing so. For webmasters and any internet marketing company this means using a higher quality of links rather than volume.

Negative SEO: As Google is now more sensitive to spam, this means that spam can now be used aggressively by competition as a way to hurt a website's ranking. In other words if a site is fighting you for the top spot on a competitive keyphrase, then it might now build lots of links pointing to your site that are low quality and irrelevant to make Google think you are trying to play the system. It's important to protect yourself against negative SEO and to keep an eye out for any influx of links.

For more on what these terms mean speak to your marketing agency. Click here to visit a site where you can get lots more information.