Google Penguin Update Will Affect Many SEO Companies, Marketing Expert Fiona Lewis Believes

It is true that many (and major) SEO companies have grown complacent during the last years and that they have been optimizing for search engines in ways that are not very Googthodox.

However, this month a new announcement came from Google and the phrase which is now terrifying the World Wide Web is ‘you don’t want the next Penguin update’, uttered by Matt Cutts, Google specialist in SEO issues.

While nobody knows what he really means, Fiona Lewis and many other internet marketing experts are already wondering about the future of SEO companies who have been cheating their ways into good rankings.

The update has already received several nicknames such as ‘Googageddon’ or ‘carnage’, but the latter seems to resonate the most with people. When asked about her opinion on this denomination, Ms Lewis answered, “It will be carnage for many companies and business owners. I feel sorry especially for the businesses that pay good money to slack SEO companies who didn't see this coming.”

According to Ms Lewis, SEO companies have about three months to get things straight with their practices before their clients will start noticing problems. Fiona Lewis puts the blame on the SEOers who have been lazily crawling their clients’ websites to the top: “The worst part is that they have been doing bad practise for so long and were lazy, and business owners trust the SEO companies are doing the right thing.”

What seems to be the end of many SEO companies, will be, however, a good thing for those using Google as their search engine. It is predicted that Google will show random or unexpected results which will not affect the everyday user, but it will affect a website’s ranking.

In a nutshell, while internet users will not suffer from this update, it is the SEO companies and their clients who will have to deal with the consequences.

Ms Lewis highlights the importance of having a “real business, with real influence, that interacts with its clients – real people – and is active online.

I admit that at sometimes this new approach to SEO can be a bit frustrating and I am sure that many internet marketers will pass through some hard times switching to these new methods. I’m already doing everything Google wants, but that doesn’t mean that I can pull my hair down and relax. SEO will never be about laziness and relaxation.”

Five Favorite Social Media Marketing Tools

 

5 Relatively unknown Social Media Sites to increase social reach:

 

1. Sprout Social - Social Media Management

 

Sprout Social is a low-cost tool for social media mangement.

I have reviewed quite a number of social media management tools during my tenure as a Practical EcommerceI contributing editor, many of which offer highly useful features. Though none of them handle every task equally well, for my own purposes Sprout Social has become the "goto" application.

It's a low-cost tool - subscriptions start at $9.00 per month - that enables me to manage most of the social networks in which I actively participate. Not only that, it serves as a social listening tool, facilitates scheduled content publishing, keeps track of new fans and followers, and provides real-time reporting of my social network engagement activity. There is a mobile version, too, so I am not confined to a desktop or laptop when doing so.

2. Bottlenose - Social Listening

Bottlenose makes sense of social media conversations and trends.
I've always said "listening is the new marketing," and where social media is concerned, truer words were never spoken.

A recent find is Bottlenose, which is a social listening platform that tracks in real-time what's happening around the web on topics of interest to me. In fact, Bottlenose refers to itself as the "Now Engine." Though its interface is reminiscent of Tweetdeck or Hootsuite, Bottlenose was built for the express purpose of making sense of all of the conversations you and I follow, and the trends they relate to.

3. Wordpress - Business Blogging

Of all the blogging software platforms I've ever used - a list that includes Typepad, Blogger, Posterous, Tumblr - I continue to come back to Wordpress. No other platform offers the same degree of rich functionality, extensibility, and design flexibility. And while it's not the easiest platform to use, for long form blogging Wordpress can't be beat!

4. RebelMouse - Content Curation

RebelMouse is a content curation platform.

A prevailing trend in social media is content curation, which is the filtering of content based on topical categories, industries and tags.

A new curation platform, and one that I've really come to favor, is RebelMouse. Its ability to automatically capture, display and organize content from my Facebook and Twitter accounts have made it my "social front page." I can also edit content, highlight particular entries, and even move them around the page with drag-and-drop ease.

Due to its visually-oriented, Pinterest-like interface, it's also a tool that merchant's could easily use to aggregate and filter content from their e-commerce sites.

5. Jing - Screenshots and Screencasts

In addition to my own blogging and social media engagement activities, writing "how-to" articles for Practical Ecommerce often requires that I grab screenshots from sites I review. Of all the tools created for that purpose, no other accomplishes the task as easily as Jing.

Screenshots can be "marked up" with text boxes, arrows, highlights, or captions, and users can automatically store screenshots and screencasts at Screencast.com, a free file storage service.
Those are the five social media marketing tools I can't live without. What's yours? Feel free to comment.