The algorithm will detect how much content is contained within the top portion of webpage. It will not be looking for a select number of ads; it will be looking to see how ads are displayed and if they affect content. Here’s what Matt Cutts over at Google had to say:

“It’s not a numbers game. Google hasn’t written their algorithm to punish sites with, say, 20 ads above the fold, as opposed to the site owner who only has 19 showing. No, from the Cutts/Google perspective, the algorithm alteration inspects pages to see how the space, especially above the fold, is being used.

In fact, Google isn’t concerned about the number of ads at all. Instead, they just don’t want these ads — however many are appearing above the fold — taking up too much space.”

A site displaying too many ads above the fold will probably start to see drop in their search traffic. As far as details on what to avoid, we don’t really have any particulars as of yet, but a number of large sites have seen drops in traffic as a result. Here are some of the sites mentioned: (provided by SearchMetrics)

• yahoo.com
• facebook.com
• twitter.com
• imdb.com
• amazon.com

Here is the rest of the list:

These don’t seem like ad excessive sites to a lot of people, but nonetheless, they have been claimed to be hit by this latest algorithm change (at least according to SearchMetrics). Some sites that didn’t see drops in traffic but did after Panda where Article directories like Ezine Articles and Article Base; which is curious because they both use a fair ammount of Adsense on their pages. Some people have mentioned that excessive use of AdSense is getting dinged the hardest but in the case of these Article directories who both use Adsense, they haven’t seen a drop in traffic; at least not a sever drop. Using AdSense in small doses probably won’t affect your search results – as it is a Google product after all – but using multiple instances and taking up valuable real estate on a page might hurt you.

As always, Google is a little cryptic with what exactly is being looked at here, but they always are. As always, the best method is trial error. If you’ve seen a drop in traffic, try placing your ads on a different section of your website. If you don’t have ads at all; you probably don’t need to worry.

Whether your business has just started or you’ve been around for decades, you know the importance of having a website in order to attract new clients. But in today’s competitive online business climate, a website is no longer enough. Online marketing today requires investing both and time and financial investments into creating a brand identity that is easily accessible and well known to potential customers.

With the widespread use of smartphones and tablets, consumers are relying on technology more and more to make their everyday decisions. Whether it’s finding somewhere to shop or eat or looking for a place to golf, consumers are turning to the internet to make quick decisions. But how do you appeal to these consumers, how can they find your business instead of one of your competitors?

This is where the Orange County SEO Experts at Omikron Media can help you. We know the local economy; we know where your customers are and what they are looking for. Depending on the size and reach of your business, using a local seo expert might be the best choice for you. If you own a storefront and want to increase foot traffic from online sources it’s a good idea to hire someone who knows how to reach them and who your competition is. That’s not to say that an orange county seo expert could only help you with local business, we’ve helped plenty of our clients obtain international sales for their businesses simply using search engine optimization techniques.

Don’t get stuck promoting your business in the failed methods of the past. Print and local ads will only get you so far; not to mention they are incredibly inexpensive. We’ve talked to lots of local businesses who put ads in OC Weekly or the local newspaper and didn’t even get a single customer as a result. That’s right, not even 1! For the same price as one OC Weekly ad, you could get months of solid search engine optimization work from the orange county seo experts at Omikron Media. Not only is it affordable, it works! We’ve had clients literally turn their business around in a matter of weeks after using our services. We’ve had them gain more customers than they have ever seen simply by knowing where and how to market online.

Online marketing is the best place to start for a business; whether you’re based online or in a storefront, it’s the quickest, cheapest, and easiest way to reach new potential clients. Just think of this, millions of people watch TV in this country every day, but even more use Google every day. And unlike TV, they aren’t looking for your products, when it comes to online marketing; you bring the products to the customers. If they are looking for what you sell, they need to find you.

So don’t delay any longer. If your business is struggling with your online marketing, or if you don’t have any online marketing, give us a call today at (949) 328-4736. Omikron Media are truly the orange county seo experts.

If you’ve been marketing for a while then you know that before the panda hit, article directories just dominated Google results. For pretty much any keyword you could take an articlebase or ezinearticle link and jump it into the top 10 results in a day or two. It was a great way to test out a new potential niche, drive a lot of traffic to your website, and even put affiliate links directly into your articles and make some money with next to no work involved. Yes, these were the glory days for marketing, but all good things with Google seem to come to an end sooner or later.

So if you can’t rely on article directories to get your easy traffic, are they still worth using? Definitely. I’ve read post after post on the Warrior Forums and other places where marketers are advising people not to use article directories anymore because they aren’t selling. But the truth is, unless you are using article directories specifically for affiliate links, they are still very useful.

What’s great is that most article directories will let you publish your blog posts from your website so you don’t even need to write completely unique content to use them.

Article Directories Build Great Backlinks

I don’t care what anyone tells you, article directories (specifically ezinearticles and articlebase) are awesome sources for high quality backlinks. They are both PR6 websites, and any link on a PR6 site – even low down the chain – is pretty valuable. In my Google Webmaster account when I look up the highest quality backlinks to any of my sites, both these article directories consistently show up in the top domains linking to me.

You Can Customize Your Anchor Text

The other great part about using article directories to build backlinks is the ability to specify your anchor text. Both Ezinearticles and Articlebase allow you to put links directly in your copy and specify the anchor text. And to top it off, the links in the copy are all dofollow – which makes them worth something.

It’s Easy to Get Syndicated

When building backlinks to a website, it’s always best to get a wide variety of links coming in from multiple different domains. When you post articles, other people have the ability to syndicate – or repost them – on their site as long as they retain the backlinks and give credit to the author.

Every time I post an article on articlebase or ezinearticles I always get at least 1 repost within a month of it being published. If the blog posts on your website don’t already get reposted by other sites, this is a great way to start syndicating right away.

While auto-blogging is not really useful post-panda, the ability for people to syndicate your articles and have your links stay in the copy is a great way to build a wide variety of links. These articles act as a way to build a variety of backlinks on auto-pilot.

You Can Build Status and Name Recognition

The more articles you write for these sites, the more they will feature your work as an author. Specifically with EzineArticles, if you get to diamond level membership they will repost your articles constantly, feature your profile on the homepage, and make your articles more attractive to syndicators.

Half the battle of building a successful business online is being regarded as a guru in your niche. Having a high profile account on these article directories is an easy way to demonstrate your guru status. People want to listen to and buy from people who are successful in their field and a high status profile is a good way to promote yourself as an expert.

You Can Still Get Visitors from Article Directories

Even though they are delivering the same amount of traffic they once did, article directories can still direct traffic to your sites. Especially if you have a high profile account, you can still get a decent amount or traffic from article directories to your site.

For some of my sites, I see around 200-500 hits a month from EzineArticles and Articlebase. These accounts have dozens of articles and are high profile accounts but they do deliver traffic. Even if your website has about a 1% conversion rate this would still be about 2-5 sales a month, and depending on the product, it’s worth the extra effort to post your articles on there.

(Photo Courtesy of Flickr User: Dekuwa)

Samsung Galaxy SII

When it comes to the numbers, the Samsung Galaxy SII sits right at the top end of what is available on a smartphone camera. The rear-facing camera can shoot at 1080p with upwards of 30 frames per second. While these specs are impressive in and of themselves, it is the ease of use that really makes this phone stand apart. The Droid Gingerbread operating system’s default camera app has customizable button layouts that allow photographers to make changes on the go. The impressive processor results in no lag when taking high-def footage or uploading it through a high speed internet connection. The 32GB of upgradeable storage is an added bonus.

(Photo Courtesy of Flickr User: Sigalakos)

iPhone 4

The iPhone 4 has become one of the most popular smartphones to have ever hit the market, and its video camera may have helped it along. The iPhone shoots HD videos as 720p and 30 frames per second. One of the key features of this smartphone is the manual focus. A tap of the screen will re-focus the video to where the photographer would like. The iPhone also comes standard with a wide array of fun extras such as geotagging and VGA-quality video even on the front-facing camera. The memory is identical to that of the Samsung with 16GB standard, upgradeable to 32GB with an optional flash drive.

(Photo Courtesy of Flickr User: clintonjeff)

HTC Desire HD

HTC has been making a name for themselves over the last two years, and the Desire HD has come to be one of their flagship smartphones. The video camera also produces HD video at 720p and 30 frames per second, but it truly shines when it comes to the sound. An impressive noise cancellation system allows this smartphone to pick up crisp noises to go along with the high-def video. It also is one of the few phones that can run Flash within the browser. This means that along with the 3G wireless internet, videos can be uploaded to nearly any website imaginable in a matter of seconds.

This is a guest article by Ruben Corbo, a writer for the website Broadband Expert where you can find high speed internet service providers in your area and compare prices on different deals for your wireless internet necessities.

So what is a new or struggling business supposed to do to get more clients coming through the door? That’s where the beauty of online marketing comes in. It’s the fastest growing way to attract new business: It’s relatively inexpensive – especially when compared to print and direct mailing, it’s a method of advertising that has longevity – which is definitely not available through print or direct mail, and it’s effective. Billions of people use the internet every day. Millions of people in the US are searching for products, places to eat, or places to shop every single minute. Your niche is out there, it’s just a matter of finding them.

If you’re a large company, then you can probably afford to target very highly coveted keywords. You can afford to an army of marketers to strategize and implement a highly complex online marketing strategy. But what about small and medium sized businesses? How are they supposed to compete against their larger or even local competitors? This is the reason we call ourselves an orange county seo company, we service orange county – not exclusively – but we specialize in marketing in Southern California.

But what would be the benefits of using a local seo expert as opposed to farming it out to an seo reseller from India or another state? If you’re a larger business with national and even global outreach, you probably won’t need to worry as much about local competition but if you’re a small or medium sized business that services a particular area of a state or country, it’s imperative that you look local before going national or even state-wide. You need to ask yourself where your business is, is it down the street, or is across the county?

Let’s say you’re a small restaurant that services a 10 mile radius. You’re customers are extremely local and there are plenty of ways to reach them. If you have a good location you can count on immediate foot traffic, if you have a good reputation you can expect word of mouth business, but if you’re a new restaurant, you need to reach as many customers as possible and quickly. Right away you would need to know the following things: is there a market online for my products? How many customers can I attract by marketing online? Who are my competitors? Are they marketing online already? How can I beat them?

Now a seo reseller from out the country would know nothing about your local market. How would they? They aren’t even in the same county! But would someone from out of state know how you can attract the local market? Not always. If you live around Southern California and you called Omikron Media – the Orange County SEO Company – you would be able to find the answers to all your questions as soon as you started talking to us. We would be able to tell you: if online marketing is right for your business, who your competitors are, how we could beat them, and a timeline till you start to see results. And the best part is it’s completely affordable for all sized businesses. Sometimes you only need a month of two of service, other times you might need a constant work being done, but no matter what sized business, we scale our prices and projects to fit your needs. Every client is unique to us, we care about their success and results and will work tirelessly to get them where they need to be.

Can you start to see the benefits of working with someone local? They know your market better than anyone else you would talk to. But beyond going local, what else should you look for when choosing an orange county seo expert?

The most important thing when it comes to SEO – beyond even going local – is to look for quality and results above all. You don’t want to get stuck with a third-rate contractor who won’t deliver the results they promise. You could waste tons of time and money picking the wrong person for the job. But how can you tell quality? Well that’s easy; just ask to see some of their past or current clients. Ask them how they like the services, and see if they are worth your return on investment. At Omikron Media, we make sure that all of our clients are happy with their results. We care about each client and make sure that we put 100% into every project that comes across our desks.

What you don’t want to do is talk to someone you find off Craigslist or hire your neighbors kid – sure they might give you some results – but they will not be able to guarantee the same level of success or reliability that someone like an orange county seo company can offer. You might be stuck at the bottom of Google for good if they don’t know what they’re doing. It’s a long standing rule that SEO is a dangerous game, in the wrong hands it can do more harm than good.

When it comes to orange county internet marketing there is no company better than the people are Omikron Media. They are experts when it comes to the local economy and they will definitely delivery the business you are looking for. Are you ready to take your business to the next level? Are you ready to start seeing new customers from an untapped source? Then call the people are Omikron Media – The Orange County SEO Company today.

Not only do you have to reach these people, you have to make sure your giving your company or business a good name in the process. Even local results in Google are adding reviews from local pages, Yelp, or other review sites right in the local results – they are there and people will read them. These are things you should keep in mind when marketing your business online, not only do you need to reach your ideal customers, but you need to make them feel confident in your services. This is where something like an orange county seo expert can help you.

You need someone who not only knows your local market place, you need someone who knows your specific market. Who are your competitors? And how can you beat them to the punch? This is where something like a local seo expert is absolutely ideal. At Omikron Media, we know the local orange county seo market place; and we know your market. We can show you who your competition is, how they are generating business online, and most importantly, how you can beat them.

SEO is a dangerous game really. Google, Bing, and other search providers tolerate search engine optimization, but they don’t particularly like it much. They set out rules and regulations and you must follow them to gain long-term results that will stick. There are two worlds when it comes to seo, there are white hate seo techniques and there are black hat seo techniques. White hate refers to marketers that follow the rules and regulations set out by Google, and black hat refers to those who don’t; or you might commonly know them as spammers. While the black hat techniques might deliver quick results, they will never last. Consistently time and time again Google and major search engines update their logarithms to remove black hat sites.

You need someone who is can deliver results for your business that aren’t risky or can be penalized, you need someone who is both reliable and knows what they are doing. Search Engine Optimization can actually hurt your site if it’s not performed properly. Again, this is where Omikron Media: orange county seo company can help your business succeed. We use only white hat techniques and are dedicated to giving our clients the best results for their dollar. Don’t get caught hiring a local seo expert that will harm your business more than help it.

If you’re serious about taking the next step with your business and bringing it online, and you live or work in Southern California, you should pick up the phone and call the orange county seo experts at Omikron Media. We are affordable, deliver results, and best of all, are really friendly guys who are easy to work with. So give us a call today and talk to the orange county seo company you can trust.

There are two worlds when it comes to search engine optimization; there is both black hat and white hat. White hat refers to techniques which are deemed appropriate under the guidelines set forth by search engines. These methods are safe and won’t harm your website. Black hat refers to techniques that are contrary to search engine rules – in other words: spam. You need to be sure when selecting a company to work with, you don’t pick one that uses black hat techniques to get your site good rankings. Sure it works fast and sure you might see some great early returns, but in the end black hats always lose; Google, Bing, and Yahoo will always find their methods of manipulation and correct them. You could end up losing your search results and even face the possibility to be de-indexed in major search engines; a devastating outcome for any sized business.

Omikron Media is an orange county seo firm that believes in using white hat techniques to provide our clients with incredible search results that bring business; not just visitors to your website. Another aspect of choosing the right seo firm is the type of traffic they can deliver to you. SEO is not just something you flip a switch for; you need time to research and plan a course of action. You need someone who knows your local marketplace and can show you how to dominate the competition. A lot of marketers can bring you visitors, but you need the right visitors to increase your business and get the most out of online marketing; you want to attract your dream customer right? Well, let someone with the experience and know-how show you how to attract them; find the orange county seo company that’s right for you.

With the widespread use of things like smart phones, tablets, and laptops, people are using technology to make every day decisions. They are becoming more and more reliant on these devices for everything they do, whether it’s eating dinner or finding a place to buy fishing supplies, someone is online looking for what you sell all the time, you just need a way to reach them. When it comes to orange county seo and finding the right seo firm, you need to look no further than the people at Omikron Media. We know orange county, we live and work here, and we have helped many local businesses achieve online success like they never dreamed was possible. Whether it’s expanding their businesses or selling out of their current inventory, we have helped people achieve their business dreams through well researched and executed marketing plans. So check out our site and see if we are the right orange county seo firm for you.

Now before you start going crazy about how Google+ is so much more than a glorified “like” system and that is supposed to be the new Facebook, I’m not referring to these features. I’m referring to the fact that Google has specifically stated that these results and opinions might – and most likely will – have an impact on their actual search results. My critique is on this angle, not the content it provides in its pseudo-wannabe-Facebook-anti-wall system. This is purely aimed at search results and their ability to be manipulated.

Look at YouTube, the site has quality content, but more often than not, top videos for any search query are not the best quality or most relevant, they are just the most heavily promoted. When you search for any given topic on YouTube – especially trending topics – you are bound to get mislabeled and poorly made advertisement videos, stolen videos with affiliate links, and videos with the most “views” or “likes”. The truth is you can spend $5 to promote a video by hiring outsourcers to watch and rate it with their YouTube accounts. How do I know this? I’ve done it, but for free.

When Michael Brea, an actor from the series Ugly Betty killed his mother with a sword on November 23, 2010 the news story was trending like crazy. I had seen a technique on how to get a video to the top of YouTube when a trending topic began so I decided to try it out. I simply turned on the news, took out my video camera, and filmed the TV. I then uploaded the story, used some simple manipulation, and received 15,000 views in the first day. It cost me $0. The video now has nearly 27,000 views and shows up nearly at the top when you search for Michael Brea on YouTube. Want proof? Michael Brea kills mom with sword. I’ve since sold off that account – but the hits keep coming.

So what’s my point? Well if Google+ works anything like YouTube it will be easily manipulated and simply gamed by marketers and advertisers. No trending topic is safe and no organic search using Google+ can be trusted; it’s just a terrible system that has not been refined enough to warrant utilizing it for search purposes. When it comes to Facebook the same thing rings true. I don’t get updates from friends, they are all updates from pages I never signed up for, or put a “like” on their fan page, but thankfully no more Farmville or mafia war updates. But the truth is, Facebook is now dominated by advertisements – and I didn’t even sign up for them! These posts have the most “likes” and comments, and thus shoot to the top of your update list. Marketers can also pay outsourcers, just like YouTube, to like and comment on their posts and therefore push them up in your update list – Facebook has gotten so out of control you can literally just pay for friends now!

This system has failed. It is merely a way of getting more advertisements into your social media. It seems like a great idea, and sometimes on Facebook and YouTube it works, but more often than not, it’s merely a gamed and flawed results system; it’s is too easily manipulated to be trusted. When Google performed their Panda update they effectively killed content farms and article directories because they were providing bad results and people were complaining. How long before your entire search results are merely paid Google+ manipulations and people start complaining about it? Just look at the SEO game before Panda came out, it was a joke, I could write an article and have it pop to the top 5 results for a competitive keyword in 72 hours.

While this won’t be the utter disaster that Google Wave was, it will ultimately fail to produce the results Google wants. In the rush to make everything social-media-ized companies like Google and Facebook keep forgetting their reason to exist. When it comes to Facebook, people were seeking refuge from MySpace and their relentless advertising – only to be inundated with ads on Facebook; it makes you wonder if eventually we will have to switch to a new social media platform. All people want from Google is the best results possible for a given keyword, they don’t want ads, they don’t care about if someone “plused” a page; they want results. With this approach Google is getting further and further away from what made them so popular in the first place – great search results. If the technology and know-how was these to make this ranking system successful, then I’m all for it, but at this point the technology and ability to improve results is not there.

The Google panda update did ding a lot of sites, but the main focus of the update seemed to be getting rid of content farms. If you’re not familiar with a content farm, it’s basically a constant stream of posts and articles (either unique or copied) that simply exist to put more content on a webpage in hopes of focusing keywords and attracting backlinks from pingbacks and re-posts. You could have a team of outsourcers that could write literally hundreds of subpar articles and publish them to improve their search engine optimization efforts. And it worked; at least for a while.

Some big name businesses were even caught up in the content farm scheme – look what happened with J.C. Penney. In one simple update, Google took away what had worked and worked surprisingly well for months. During this time content was king – the more you had the better – it didn’t matter where it came from or how well it was written; content was content.

Now the question is, did content farming work for everyone? Not really. Like it still does now, Google relies very heavily – even though they vehemently deny it – on its own metric of pagerank or PR and the age of the domain. Older sites were able to (and still can) post hundreds of links to their sites a week without taking any ding in search results. This is something a new domain couldn’t and still can’t do; or they’ll be destined for the sandbox (although it’s not really as bad as it sounds).

So what did Google do? They decided that instead of changing the rules for older sites vs. newer sites, they would change how they read and grade content; which makes for a more even playing field in the long run. The person with the better content gets the recognition; sites that are merely copying and pasting are regarded as junk; but authority sites and older domains still have the advantage – they just need to provide some decent content for a change.

Now there was an unfortunate side effect of the Google panda update, article sites were hit, and hit hard. Specifically Ezine Articles and Articlebase, which saw their search rankings take a huge smack from the Panda. Google’s new algorithm regarded these sites as content farms. But anybody who writes articles understands that these sites are no content farms. These sites have teams of people who read, edit, and approve articles for these sites; there is no duplicate content and the quality is high. So why the hit?

Well, even though these sites were not (and still aren’t) content farms, they did leverage an incredible amount of power from being such prominent domains. At the peak of search engine optimization before the Google Panda update, I could pick a keyword (almost any keyword you could imagine) write a properly optimized article, post it on a high profile article site, and get it on the 1st page of Google within 3 days. No joke. It took barely any effort to get these high in the SERPS – these sites had become so powerful, they completely dominated the search results. It was rare to find a niche keyword where an article directory or eHow page wasn’t in the top 10.

So was the panda hit on these sources deserved? Yes and No. Yes because it was too easy to get high rankings and results from articles alone, and No because some of the articles were legitimately written and probably deserved the rankings they had achieved.

Even though article directories might have taken an unfair hit, one thing is for sure, eHow deserved it’s slap. eHow was, and still is a content farm. Most of their articles are simply junk pieces, written quickly and without much care, and are loaded, absolutely filled to the brim, with ads. Yet after the Panda dust settled, I still find eHow results in the top 10 for nearly 50% of the keywords I’m researching. Why is that? Has eHow found a way to game the Panda system or has their content gotten better. Something tells me it’s not the latter.

The truth is, after the initial hit and much of the dust settled, most of my sites are doing way better than they ever were before the Google Panda update. Some of them have improved way better than I expected, but that really doesn’t come as a surprise to me. What Google panda did was get rid of the junk in their SERPS and reward those with good link structure and content.

Anyone with good search engine optimization knows the basics of on page and off page seo and the importance that content and solid back links bring. Not paying for links, not spamming, not content farming, these were all things people knew they shouldn’t be doing, but they did anyway, and why? Because for a while it worked. But like every Google update before it, Panda was there to close the exploits, ding the black hats, and reward the white hats.

Every day I have people ask me, “what is SEO?”. SEO stands for search engine optimization, which basically means, driving traffic to your website through search engines. Search Engine Optimization has become just as mandatory and important as building and designing a good website; it’s no longer optional, it’s a must. Many of you might remember the saying from the movie Field of Dreams “If you build it they will come”. Well, when it comes to the website and online marketing business, I like to tell people, “If you just build it, nobody will come.”

People are using their PCs, laptops, and mobile devices more and more and relying on them constantly for information about nearly anything they are going to do or buy. Just having a website will not draw these people to your company; they will not find you. Sure there are companies out there that claim you can build your own website with them and get great Google results and Search Engine Optimization; to be blunt, that’s a lie. In order to reach these people you need to have a solid and well planned SEO strategy, you need to have seo experts working for you and showing you how to get results, and more important, how to analyze and optimize those results to translate into sales.

So now that you know what SEO is and why you need it, you’re probably wondering, “what exactly does SEO do?”. The first process we undergo in our orange county seo services is to look for your audience. Every business and every ad needs their audience and the same applies for marketing online. Only with online marketing, your audience is referred to as niche marketing or keywords. These keywords and niches are the bread and butter for your marketing campaign, they lay the groundwork for your campaigns.

The next step for the orange county seo consultant is how to attract your audience to your website. And this is where the real work for an seo campaign starts. There are two types of search engine optimization: on page seo and off page seo. Each one is important, but they must be combined in order to be effective. On Page optimization refers to techniques which are applied on the page – or on your website. This includes things such as optimizing content to reflect your chosen keywords, optimizing page load speed, structure, optimizing images, and much more. It’s basically everything you can do on your own website to improve your chances of being found. Off page seo refers to techniques that are applied off your website. These include but are not limited to: link building, article writing, social media presence, press releases, brand management, and much much more. By combining these techniques you will be creating an seo campaign targeted at your orange county seo audience.

Search Engine Optimization Orange County is what the people at Omikron Media specialize in. Every local market is different and if your company is trying to reach a local audience, it’s best not to go through a seo reseller from India or a foreign country, it’s best to rely on a local seo expert.

Whether its orange county web design or seo orange county, if you live around here and need internet marketing assistance, you’ve come to the right place. Our team has decades of experience in building websites and marketing campaigns that sell. We know the local market and know how to optimize your business for it. Don’t get caught using a cut rate contractor or someone new to the world of online marketing; you need experience and expertise. Your orange county seo expert can be found right here, at Omikron Media LLC.