Linux Ransomware targeting Servers and Threatening Webmasters to Pay

Since past few years, Ransomware has emerged as one of the catastrophic malware programs that lets hacker encrypts all the contents of a victim's hard drive or/and server and demands ransom (typically to be paid in Bitcoin) in exchange for a key to decrypt it.

Until now cyber criminals were targeting computers, smartphones and tablets, but now it appears they are creating ransomware that makes the same impact but for Web Sites – specifically holding files, pages and images of the target website for Ransom.

Dubbed Linux.Encoder.1 by Russian antivirus firm Dr.Web, the new strain of ransomware targets Linux-powered websites and servers by encrypting MySQL, Apache, and home/root folders associated with the target site and asking for 1 Bitcoin (~ $300) to decrypt the files.

The ransomware threat is delivered to the target website through known vulnerabilities in website plugins or third-party software.

Once infected, the Linux.Encoder.1 malware encrypts all files in the Home directories on the system as well as Backup directories and the System Folders associated with Web site files, pages, images, code libraries and scripts.

Ransomware Uses AES Encryption

According to the security researchers, the ransomware in question needs root privileges to work. Additionally, when it launches, the malware starts downloading:

• The Ransom Message containing the demands of fraudsters
• A file containing the public RSA key

After that, the Ransomware starts as a daemon and deletes all of the original files. The RSA key is then used to store AES keys that are used by the ransomware to encrypt the local files on the infected computer.
The ransomware also adds the .encrypt extension to each file it encrypts and writes a ransom text message in every folder.

Targeting Linux-Powered Websites and Servers

The malware specifically encrypts files in folders that are typically found in Linux Web server setups, including directories like home, root, MySQL, Apache, and any directory that includes terms such as git, svn, webapp, www, public_html, or backup.

Moreover, the ransomware looks for files that have extensions specific to Web development environments including .js, .css, .properties, .xml, .ruby, .php, .html, .gz, and .asp, as well as other file extensions like .rar, .7z, .xls, .pdf, .doc, .avi, .mov, .png, and .jpg.

Once the victim pays the ransom amount, the system receives a signal to pass over the directories again to decrypt the files.

Until security researchers create a decryption program, they recommend webmasters to backup all important data and keep all their files in place in case they are targeted.


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Google: Penguin Update

What Is The Google Penguin Update?

Google launched the Penguin Update in April 2012 to better catch sites deemed to be spamming its search results, in particular those doing so by buying links or obtaining them through link networks designed primarily to boost Google rankings. When a new Penguin Update is released, sites that have taken action to remove bad links (such as through the Google disavow links tool or to remove spam may regain rankings. New sites not previously caught might get trapped by Penguin. “False positives,” sites that were caught by mistake, may escape.

Google Penguin Update: Recovery Tips & Advice

Article by Arine Solutions

Do you really need an SSL for your ecommerce website?

It is critical era in which we are more concerned about the security of websites. Any website be it a simple web page or a complex web application are equally vulnerable to security threats. Virus, Trojan, adware, spyware, malware, hackers and the list continue. Especially those websites which involved in online payment option (online shopping, online banking, trading, online retailing, NGOs in short all websites coming in the category of ecommerce) are at a higher risk. As the final motto of any intruder or hacker would be gaining money directly or indirectly.

Well, long story short, yes you need to secure your E-Commerce website with SSL certificate. SSL ensures the encryption of the connection as well as the data transmitted between the source and destination and vice versa.

What are the factors that make it compulsory to use SSL in ecommerce website? Lets us see a few factors which lead to the enforcement of the usage of SSL.

Credit/Debit Card Acceptance:
Are you an online shopping/banking/trading website whether an established or a newbie? If yes, then you definitely will be accepting payment through credit/debit card. And also you realize that credit/debit card information provided by any customer is the most sensitive data to be protected. Threats like Identity theft, phishing and malware attack are more likely to create chaos on your website if you are not SSL protected.

Also if you are storing credit/debit card details in your database then obviously you are going to retrieve the data or process the data in any other way offline through POS machine or if you directly charge on your dealer account’s website, then you should be SSL protected.

Login Form:
Login form will carry all the specifics of the customer from his name, address, phone number, workplace to his bank account number. If all this data is transmitted from one source to another in a plain text form then it is but natural that any attacker would easily access that information and hence will misuse it. SSL here enforces the strong encryption of the data being transmitted at the same time it establishes a secured connection between the two end points. There are possibly two ways of securing the login form:

To secure the login page with the SSL certificate separately.
And another way is to make the login form your website’s home page and securing it with SSL.

Development issues:
Yes, it is possible that there might be some issues in development side. However, it is not wise to blame your developer as he would never have done it intentionally. Many a times organizations have their whole website or a part of website built up offshore, developer may download a source code from already compromised websites, SQL injections if not closed the database connection are some of the common loopholes that lead to security breaches.

One should always prefer coding of the website inside the company itself, purchase a code signing SSL certificate to ensure the integrity as well as authenticity of the code, never ever download code from an unsecured website, always close the SQL database connection. Install Standard or EV SSL certificate which comes along with enhanced security tools like anti malware scan and phishing scan.

From above factors it must be clear that how important SSL certificate is to secure your website as well as your reputation.

SSL everywhere
Now, there are many web host providers that provide SSL certificates to be used up in a share. But the shared SSL does not appeal the visitor that much as private SSL certificate separately does. Also, it may not display the organization name as well as the website’s name and also it may show a warning message. People feel uncomfortable to filling their personal information with shared SSL warning massage.

I would like to recommend go with standard SSL certificate which is issued on fully qualified domain name and will not shows any warning massage. Using trusted brand SSL certificate is more prefer for securing personal information and transaction for ecommerce business.

If you are a newbie and a low budget website owner then there is piece of cake for you too. You can redirect the customers to the trusted third party payment processor like PayPal. But here also the need of SSL appears as PayPal allows you to accept credit card information on your website and obviously you are going to store it.

Well, the above feature cannot be counted as an alternative for using SSL as it is just securing your website’s payment procedure still your login form and other codes of your website needs to be secured. And for that you need SSL certificate.

For those websites who are using third party payment processors Standard SSL certificate is the best match.

While for those who are dealing with each and everything of ecommerce from scrap on their websites itself, an EV SSL certificate is a must.

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New Arine Solutions CRM at Just Rs.1500/Month/User or 16000/Year/User

We are pleased to inform that we are launching our all in one to keep Your Clientele Data, Your Contacts, Your Leads to be saved at one place with added service like Invoicing, Creating Purchase Order, Check Your Mails, etc. All at one place with new CRM of Arine Solutions.

Have a Look Of our CRM Demo by clicking at below mentioned link

Arine Solutions CRM 
User Name - demo
Password - demo123

Use It.! Explore It.! Try It.! Buy It.!

For More details Log on to http://www.arinesolutions.com/

‘Disavow Links’ Data Not A Google Ranking Signal…Yet

Google is not using data from its Disavow Links tool to hurt sites that are being disavowed in search results. That is according to Google’s John Mueller.

The topic came up in the Google Webmaster Central product forum (via Search Engine Roundtable). One webmaster started the thread, saying that they received an email from a site with the subject line of “Link Removal Request” which said:

Dear Web master,

We recently received a notice from Google stating that they have levied a penalty on our website as they “detected unnatural links” redirecting to our website.

The only way we can remove this penalty and help Google reconsider putting our website back in their index is by removing these links and we need your help for the same. We request you to consider this request on high priority.

Following are the details of the links:
they have given me list of Links of my website with majority comments links .

We would like to bring your notice that failure to remove these links would require us to file a “Disavow Links” report with Google. Once we submit this report to Google, they may “flag” your site as”spammy” or otherwise if anything is not in compliance with their guidelines. The last thing we want is to have another web master go through this grief!

Your cooperation in this process would be deeply appreciated. We kindly request you to send us an acknowledgement of this mail along with a confirmation that these links have been removed.
Thanks a lot for your help.

If you want to reach out to us mail us on ‘webmaster’s copany email id’

Regards,
name of person
website name

So no, Google will not “flag your site as spammy” if it’s disavowed.

Mueller says flat out, “They are wrong. Having URLs from your website submitted in their disavow file will not cause any problems for your website. One might assume that they are just trying to pressure you. If the comment links they pointed to you are comment-spam that was left by them (or by someone working in their name) on your website, perhaps they are willing to help cover the work involved in cleaning their spam up?”

Maybe they are “pressuring the webmaster,” but still, Google has actually hinted in the past that data from the tool could become a ranking signal.

In a discussion with Google’s head of web spam Matt Cutts back in 2012, Danny Sullivan asked if “someone decides to disavow links from good sites in perhaps an attempt to send signals to Google these are bad,” if Google is mining the data to better understand what the bad sites are.

Cutts responded (emphasis mine), “Right now, we’re using this data in the normal straightforward way, e.g. for reconsideration requests. We haven’t decided whether we’ll look at this data more broadly. Even if we did, we have plenty of other ways of determining bad sites, and we have plenty of other ways of assessing that sites are actually good.”

Like I said at the time, Google does have over 200 signals, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for the data to play some role in the algorithm, even if it’s not the weightiest signal. I don’t know how we’ll ever know if Google does decide to start using it. It’s not like Google is listing its algorithm changes every month or anything.

Cutts added in that conversation, “If a webmaster wants to shoot themselves in the foot and disavow high-quality links, that’s sort of like an IQ test and indicates that we wouldn’t want to give that webmaster’s disavowed links much weight anyway. It’s certainly not a scalable way to hurt another site, since you’d have to build a good site, then build up good links, then disavow those good links. Blackhats are normally lazy and don’t even get to the ‘build a good site’ stage.”

It does sound like a pretty dumb strategy, and probably not the most effective way to hurt another site. On the other hand, people do dumb stuff all the time.

But in a more natural sense, mightn’t this data say something about a site? If a lot of people are disavowing links from the same sites, doesn’t that say something?

But if it were to become a signal it could be misleading at times when Google’s unnatural link warnings have so many people scrambling to get all kinds of links (including legitimate ones) removed. It certainly shouldn’t carry too much weight if it ever does make it into the algorithm.

SEO analyst Jennifer Slegg said it well: “People who have been affected with bad links will very likely take a very heavy-handed approach to the links they disavow in their panic of seeing their traffic drop off a cliff. There is no doubt that some of those good links that are actually helping the site will end up in the list along with poor quality ones because the webmaster is either unclear about whether a link is a bad influence, or just think the starting fresh approach is the best one to go with.”

In the comments section of the Search Engine Roundtable post, Durant Imboden makes an interesting point: “Isn’t it possible that an unusually high number of disavowals might trigger a manual review of the frequently-disavowed site? In such a case, the disavow tool itself wouldn’t trigger a penalty or other ‘problems for your website,’ but the resulting review might (depending on what was found).”

Either way, don’t worry about the tool sending any signals about your site for the time being.

In related news, Cutts spoke about the tool at SMX West last week, where he said that if you’re aware of bad links to your site, you should probably go ahead and disavow them anyway, even if you’re not already penalized. He added on Twitter (when Rae Hoffman tweeted about it), that if it’s one or two links, it may not be a big deal, but the closer it gets to “lots,” the more worthwhile it may be.

Something to think about.


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Brand Management - Meaning and Important Concepts

Brand management begins with having a thorough knowledge of the term “brand”. It includes developing a promise, making that promise and maintaining it. It means defining the brand, positioning the brand, and delivering the brand. Brand management is nothing but an art of creating and sustaining the brand. Branding makes customers committed to your business. A strong brand differentiates your products from the competitors. It gives a quality image to your business.

Brand management includes managing the tangible and intangible characteristics of brand. In case of product brands, the tangibles include the product itself, price, packaging, etc. While in case of service brands, the tangibles include the customers’ experience. The intangibles include emotional connections with the product / service.
Branding is assembling of various marketing mix medium into a whole so as to give you an identity. It is nothing but capturing your customers mind with your brand name. It gives an image of an experienced, huge and reliable business.
It is all about capturing the niche market for your product / service and about creating a confidence in the current and prospective customers’ minds that you are the unique solution to their problem.
The aim of branding is to convey brand message vividly, create customer loyalty, persuade the buyer for the product, and establish an emotional connectivity with the customers. Branding forms customer perceptions about the product. It should raise customer expectations about the product. The primary aim of branding is to create differentiation.
Strong brands reduce customers’ perceived monetary, social and safety risks in buying goods/services. The customers can better imagine the intangible goods with the help of brand name. Strong brand organizations have a high market share. The brand should be given good support so that it can sustain itself in long run. It is essential to manage all brands and build brand equity over a period of time. Here comes importance and usefulness of brand management. Brand management helps in building a corporate image. A brand manager has to oversee overall brand performance. A successful brand can only be created if the brand management system is competent.

Following are the important concepts of brand management:

• Definition of Brand
• Brand Name
• Brand Attributes
• Brand Positioning
• Brand Identity
• Sources of Brand Identity
• Brand Image
• Brand Identity vs Brand Image
• Brand Personality
• Brand Awareness
• Brand Loyalty
• Brand Association
• Building a Brand
• Brand Equity
• Brand Equity & Customer Equity
• Brand Extension
• Co-branding

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Arine Solutions : Why Reputation Management Should Be Your Top Marketing Priority?

You’ve spent years building your business. You’ve invested time, sweat, and tears. You’ve missed dance recitals and soccer games as you’ve toiled to create it. You finally feel as though you can relax… until the day when the phone calls stop, the new customers vanish, and you can’t understand why.
You’re still providing excellent service and your existing customers love you, but your business is struggling. Finally, you learn from an existing customer that your company has some very negative reviews posted online. It dawns on you that your online reputation is presenting a twisted perception of reality that is really killing your business.
Sound like the plot of a B-movie drama? Unfortunately, it’s true for hundreds, if not thousands, of businesses across the country.

Local Business Reviews = Reputation

What people say about your company online has become the single most important reflection of your company’s quality, reliability, and skill. It doesn’t matter if you’re a dentist, a plastic surgeon, a carpet cleaner, or a painter. In Nielsen’s most recent Global Trust in Advertising study, 70% of global consumers indicated they trust online reviews from strangers when making purchasing decisions.

Improving Your Reputation is Your #1 Marketing Priority

Your number one marketing priority should be developing a 5-star online reputation. Why? All your other marketing efforts, whether they be online such as SEO, social media, PPC, or offline such as direct mail, magazines, radio, or TV, will ultimately lead the consumer to learn more about you online. There, your less than sterling or non-existent reputation drives them away.
Most business owners fail to realize is that what consumers want is information that will help them feel confident they’re making the best, most well-reasoned purchase. Today, quite a bit of that confidence comes in the form of online reviews reflecting others’ experiences.

The 3Rs and 2Qs of Local Reviews and Reputation

When it comes to taking an active role in developing, building, and protecting your online reputation, you need to keep five points in mind:

1. Range – While it might seem as though getting a few positive reviews on Google+ or Yelp is all that’s needed, we advocate a wide-ranging approach to online review management. Just visit this Facebook page, We Hate Yelp, or read this thread on Google, and you’ll understand why. Your business is too important to you and your loved ones to let its success be dictated by one or two companies with no vested interest.
2. Real – Make sure real client reviews are getting posted. It’s tempting to game the system and pen some glowing reviews, however, it’s not only unethical, you’ll undoubtedly get caught, and that can have some unintended consequences. Encourage your customers to be as specific as possible. A hallmark of fake reviews is vagueness.
3. Recent – It appears that more recent reviews weigh more heavily by the search engines in terms of ranking. For this reason alone, creating a steady stream of new, positive reviews makes sense. Additionally, the fact that more recent reviews pack more powerful social proof with potential customers than older reviews, and you simply must put systems in place to continually gather reviews.
4. Quantity – Ask yourself: If one dentist has 25 reviews with a 4-star average and the next best has one 5-star review, who are you going to call? Reliability is proven with consistency, particularly where reviews are concerned.
5. Quality – This one is pretty obvious: The higher your reviews, the better your status will be – within reason. A business with nothing but 5-star ratings can look suspicious but, in general, the more favorable your reviews, the better.

Make Reviews Part of a Comprehensive Reputation Marketing Strategy

While review and reputation building arguably may be the single most important online marketing tactic for local businesses in 2013 and beyond, the most successful businesses won’t stop there. Since reviews are most prominently displayed in conjunction with the hyper-local maps of search engines, they don’t generate many leads outside this area.
For the vast majority of businesses serving multiple cities from a single location, reviews should be just one building block in a larger reputation marketing strategy. That strategy should employ SEO to ensure the company’s website ranks near the top in all the cities they serve for their most important buying phrases. The good news is there’s a positive, synergistic relationship between a strong review presence, well-optimized local pages, and an authoritative website.
With the dominance mobile devices display in local purchasing, companies should make sure their websites not only rank highly, but are also mobile-friendly with click-to-call, click-to-map, and other navigable engagement features. You want to remove as much friction as possible between your customer’s need and his ability to contact you.

One Hidden – but Powerful – Benefit of Positive Reviews

Clearly, your business needs to put a review-gathering, reputation marketing culture, and process in place. The investment you make will return outsized profits from the new customers you’ll attract. But there is one other “hidden” benefit that an outstanding online reputation will bring: pricing power.
For years, nearly every business has struggled to defend its price in a world of “me too” competitors. Imagine how easy it will be to respond to “Why should I pay more for your service?” when you can simply reply, “Have you taken a look online to see what our customers say?”
Companies need to leverage the power a 5-star reputation brings. You’ve worked hard to establish your business and sacrificed plenty along the way. Are you willing to let that hard work get flushed down the drain because of a single disgruntled customer or competitor?
Develop a system to ensure your biggest fans are louder than your biggest enemies; the payoff is worth it.

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Why online reputation management is important?

Learn about protecting your company’s reputation with online reputation management tactics.

By Arine Solutions

When it comes to building positive awareness about a brand, it takes a lot of time and effort to build and maintain a company’s online reputation. Just like in the physical world, a reputation is all a business really has.

But what is an online reputation? Furthermore, why is online reputation management important?
Wikipedia.com defines reputation management as “the process of tracking an entity's actions and other entities' opinions about those actions; reporting on those actions and opinions; and reacting to that report creating a feedback loop…..”

When theses actions and opinions are expressed in an environment such as the internet, where content can be posted anonymously to a large audience, the results can really hurt ones online reputation.
Nowadays, when people use the internet, whether it is informational or transactional in nature, they use one of the major search engines: Google, Yahoo, or MSN. They rely on the content they find as the most relevant content the internet has to offer. More specifically, they rely on the content they find on the first page of that search engine.

Online reputation management is essential nowadays. More and more companies are participating in online marketing strategies in the hopes of protecting their company reputation from negative bloggers, ranking postings, and even defamatory content submitted anonymously from business competitors. Data from a recent survey of 300 consumers from the Society of New Communications Research stated that “74% (of consumers) choose companies/brands based on others’ customer care experiences shared online.” This statistical data supports what many individuals and companies had to find out the hard way, for most people, the information they read online directly correlates with the opinions they form (and often the purchases they make).

Defamatory content can, if properly optimized, make its way to the top of the search engine results and ruin its subject, be that a Fortune 500 company or a single person. Search engines rank by relevancy and not by quality. Therefore, lies and misinformation can be spread just as easily as honest concern or complaint.

This is why online reputation management is important. It serves as a defense to negative and defamatory content against your company. In the past few years a number of companies have been built with the sole purpose of online reputation management.  The general idea of which is to control what the potential customers see.

There are many SEO marketing strategies that suggest how you can manage your online reputation by filling up the front page of the search results with fresh content, moving all the negative content to other pages. Some of these online reputation management tactics are: creating your own website (or multiple sites), blogging, press releases, creating a squidoo lens, submitting videos to youtube.com, and creating social network profiles such as facebook.com, myspace.com, linkedin.com , and zoominfo.com that can show up in the search results. Then you must engage in a link building strategy to assure these sites will rank well on the search engines to move the negative feedback to other result pages. These blogs, social profiles and articles provide new, and hopefully more accurate, accounts of a story than previously reported. This content, along with the SEO marketing strategies discussed, can help shape public opinion through the internet and assist in protecting your company’s reputation.
An example of this would be a consumer complaining on numerous websites about a bad experience with a product. Let’s say you are a medium sized company that sells children’s toys, and a consumer bought a toy for their kid’s birthday present, and the toy broke after only being used once.  If that consumer decides to express their concern online, and write negative reviews about your toys on numerous sites, you company could be negatively affected.  But, if that company was actively protecting their company reputation by engaging in online reputation management, they could provide fresh content to the search engines with positive customer reviews, information about the company, and why people should purchase toys from your company. Providing this alternate viewpoint would help the company’s image.

Why is online Reputation management important? It provides marketing stability, protects against unchecked defamation, and most importantly, allows a company to “put its best face forward” in the online world.


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Why And How to Make Google Plus Your #1 Traffic Source

2014 has begun and many of you might have considered moving your blog to the next level as your New Year resolution. I hope that you will succeed in fulfilling your resolution but you have to struggle for it. Moving your blog to the next level is not only about content, you need readers to reach success.

Social Media and Search Engine Optimization are at top of the list for driving readers to a blog. For Search Engines you have to do the same routine stuff and if any algorithm change occurs then you have to protect your blog from the things that are included in the algorithm update. But for Social Media every social networking site requires a different strategy, there are many social networking strategist who are developing strategies for achieving the best from social media. Before 2013, Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin were at top in bringing readers to a website but at the end of 2013 Google Plus clearly swept the rankings and stood at 1st (at least for me).

Why to Make Google+ Your #1 Traffic Source?

Smartest People in Smart Communities

• What I have found in Google Plus?

I have found a huge number of like-minded people.

• How I reached to those people?

I reached those people through communities.

Remember, not every community have smart members, you need to search for smart communities in order to find like-minded people, these people not only read your content, they also leave their views on your write-up which may help you to improve your knowledge about the topic.

Referral Benefits

A site’s traffic can be divided in to referral, organic and direct traffic. Nowadays every blogger I see want traffic from Google, very few bloggers are driving traffic from Social Media. It’s really easy to drive traffic from Social Media, what you need is a Strategy. Google Plus can be your #1 source of Referral traffic. Many of the professional bloggers are targeting it with different strategies, even they are sharing strategies with their readers, that’s what I’m going to do in this articles.

Road to Better Search Engine Rankings

Everybody knows that Google now considers social signals for ranking websites and if the social shares are from Google+ then it is even much better. Many people still think that social signals doesn’t affect search engine ranking, indeed they are wrong. I observe my articles from the date I publish them till the date they get good social shares and comments and every time I conclude my observation with better search engine rankings. Few days back, I found a status update on my news feed by Nirmala Santhakumar of MyMagicFundas, you really need to see this to understand the importance of social shares.

How to Make Google Plus Your #1 Traffic Source?

Share Quality Content Not Only Yours:

Many bloggers and networking freaks think that the only way to drive traffic from social networking sites is to share too many links as fast as they can, but this is totally a misconception among folks. To build a trust-worthy relationship with your connections you should share stuff which deserves their clicks. Try to make them click your stuff every time they see a post by you, your aim should be quality not quantity.

A description works best:

I was not aware of this thing but it matters a lot. I got to know this when I joined communities, many big communities require description is posts. A description should contain points which are mentioned in the article. You can even ask questions in description to increase engagement.

Enable Google+ Sharing:

The most efficient way to drive traffic from social networking sites is to enable social sharing. The user count of Google+ is increasing and most of your visitors might have an account on Google+ or at least few of them. Provide them ease by enabling sharing buttons and they will share your stuff without any hesitation.

Conclusion:

I hope that this article will help you to increase Google+ traffic of your site, I would love to hear how was your previous year with Google+ and what are your plans for Google+ this year.

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Arine Solutions - SEO in 2014: How to Prepare for Google's 2014 Algorithm Updates

It has been an incredibly eventful year in terms of updates from Google. Major 2013 changes included further releases of Penguin and Panda, Hummingbird taking flight, and the shift away from providing keyword data thanks to encrypted search.
Many have gone so far as to ask whether SEO as a profession is dead: for one interesting perspective, see my recent Forbes interview with Sam Roberts of VUDU Marketing. My own take is less alarmist: Google has taken major spam-fighting steps that have shifted the playing field for SEO professionals and anyone trying to get their site on the map in the year ahead.
At the same time, the need for an online presence has never been stronger, while the landscape has never been more competitive. The potential to make a real ROI impact with your company's online marketing initiative is greater than ever. But defaulting to so-called "gray hat" tactics no longer works. Instead, SEO professionals need to step up and embrace a more robust vision of our area of expertise.
You might call it a move from tactician to strategist: the best and most successful players in our space will work to anticipate Google's next moves and respond to them with laser focus. In a sense, the infinite digital game of chess that is SEO will continue, but the rules of the game have become more complex.
Through a mix of what I'm observing and reading and what I'm seeing working out in the field today for my clients, here are some suggestions for companies and SEO professionals that are thinking ahead to 2014 for their digital strategies.

Everything You Learned in 2013 is Still Relevant, Just Amplified

When you look closely at the targets of the 2013 updates (ie, websites that cheat their way to the top of the rankings or provide no value to visitors), I anticipate seeing these carried forward throughout 2014. We can continue to expect micro adjustments to Panda and Penguin that continue to target both link quality and content quality.
Smart marketers will benefit from keeping a close eye on their link profiles, and performing periodic audits to identify and remove inbound links built unnaturally. High quality content investments will remain critical.
A solid SEO performance in 2014 is going to be built on a foundation of really understanding what happened in 2013, and what these changes mean both strategically and tactically for SEO. SEO really has changed in critical ways.

Content Marketing is Bigger than Ever

Content marketing will move from buzzword to mature marketing movement in 2014. From an SEO perspective, Google will be looking at companies that have robust content marketing efforts as a sign that they're the kind of business Google wants to support.

Think of all the advantages of a good content strategy:

• Regular, helpful content targeted at your audience.
• Social signals from regular sharing and engagement.
• Freshness or signs that your site is alive and growing.
• Increasing authority connected to your body of work.

Sound familiar? It's the very approach to SEO that all of Google's recent updates have been designed to shape.
What changes you need to make in 2014 depends largely on where your company stands now in relation to an active content marketing strategy. Companies with existing content strategies will need to assess the role of mobile, specifically.
If you've just begun to move in the direction of content marketing, it's time to really commit and diversify. If you haven't started yet, it's time to take the plunge.

Social Media Plays an Increasingly Visible Role

Social media has been a major player in the digital marketing landscape for the last few years. First we saw the rise of mega platforms like Facebook and Twitter. In the last couple of years, visual content from networks like Pinterest, Instagram, and various micro-video services haa swept through.
Today, diversification is a major trend: depending on who you're targeting, it's no longer enough to be active on a single network. In fact, The Content Marketing Institute recently released a study that the most successful B2B marketers are active on an average of seven networks. Companies and SEO professionals will need to be asking the following questions in the year ahead:

• Are we taking our social media seriously? Are we employing the pillars of strong profiles, good content, reciprocity, and engagement?
• Is easy social sharing enabled for all of our content?
• Does our content strategy include a dissemination phase that includes maximizing its potential for distribution through social networks?
• Are we active on the social networks that matter in our industry?
• Are we active on the social networks that matter to our customers?
• Are we active on the social networks that matter to the search engines? (See below for more thoughts on making that strategic investment).
• Does our social media marketing strategy stimulate the level of social signals required to achieve our goals?

Google's updates are likely to increasingly rely on social signals as active human curation of good content.

Invest in Google+

In addition to strengthening your overall social media marketing position, it's going to be absolutely critical that you are investing in your Google+ presence.
Moz's most recent study of ranking factors confirms that Google+ is playing an increasingly significant role in a solid SEO ranking. The immediate areas to focus on include:

• Establishing Google Authorship of your content, and tying it to your Google+ account. Authorship, which brings your body of content together, will play an important role in the SERPs as well as strengthening your Author Rank.
• Those +1's add up. It isn't clear exactly how much Google +1's directly contribute, but it's fair to say that it's a major factor in the "social signals" component of Google's algorithm. I expect this to increase in the year ahead.

Hummingbird Was Just the Tip of the Mobile Iceberg

2014 will be the year of mobile SEO. Hummingbird was just the very small visible tip of a very large iceberg as Google struggles to respond to the rapidly shifting landscape where half of all Americans own smartphones and at least one-third own tablets. Those statistics will probably shift upward, maybe dramatically, after the 2013 holiday season.
As a result, your site's mobile performance matters to your SEO rankings. Properties that you're trying to rank need to be designed first for mobile and then scaled up for the big screen. If you don't have a mobile-optimized website, this needs to be your top priority in terms of SEO and design investments for 2014.
Some underlying changes that happened with Hummingbird, including the increasing importance of both semantic search and Knowledge Graph, will continue to grow in influence. Practically speaking, this is to help prepare the search engine for the rise of voice search associated with mobile. But it also has direct implications (which we're still learning about) for broader SEO. This is one area that you should pay close attention to, from how you structure your content to what content you choose to put out.

The Long Versus Short Debate

Which is better, long content or short content? The answer depends on who is creating the content, who is reading it, what it's about, in what context it's being consumed, and how you define "better."
For the purposes of this argument, which form of content will help you best prepare to rank well in 2014? Frustratingly for some, the answer is more "both/and" than "or."
Vocus recently cited a study that showed that the top 10 results for a specific keyword search tended to be more than 2,000 words in length. The validity of that study has been debated, but it's probably fair to say that length is a proxy for depth of expertise and value delivered to the reader.
Google values both expertise and value. As a result, we've seen a trend where the "minimum desirable length" for text-based content has shifted from something in the range of 550 words to articles in the range of 1000-plus words.
Yet we're also confronted with the reality of the mobile device: if I'm reading about something I'm only moderately interested in, there's a high probability that I won't want to scroll through 2,000 words on my iPhone. That leaves content marketers faced with the challenge of producing mobile-friendly content, which tends to be (in a sweeping generality) much, much shorter.
Proposed solutions have run the gamut from content mixes to site architectures that allow you to point readers to specific versions of content based on their devices. This is great for the user experience, but where it all comes out on the SEO algorithm front remains to be seen. For now, I'll just acknowledge that it's an area of concern that will continue to evolve and that it's something you should keep your eye on.

Advertising and PPC has a Shifted Relationship with SEO

Since Google made the decision to encrypt the vast majority of its searches, our ability to access keyword data for research purposes has been restricted. However, there's a loophole. Keyword data is still available for advertisers using PPC on Google's platform.
More SEO budgets may be driven toward PPC simply because access to the data may otherwise be restricted. It's also possible that we'll see the release of a premium Google product to give us access to that data through another channel from Google in the year ahead.

Guest Blogging Remains One of the Most Effective Tactics, With a Caveat

Guest blogging has exploded in the past year, and it's going to remain one of the most effective means of building quality inbound links, traffic, and branding exposure in 2014. However, it's absolutely critical that you're creating high quality content, and using extremely stringent criteria when selecting your target sites.
In other words, you need to apply the same high ethos approach to guest blogging that you do to the rest of your SEO efforts. If you dip a toe into spammy waters where guest blogging is essentially scattershot article marketing with a 2014 update, you're likely to be penalized in a future Penguin update.

Conclusion

This has been a year of significant change in the SEO industry. Even contemplating strategies for 2014 can feel staggering.
The good news is that looking back, it's easy to see which direction the trends are heading in terms of the years ahead. Staying the course on solid white hat tactics and paying attention to a few priority areas that are shifting rapidly should give you the insights needed to improve your organic search visibility in 2014 and beyond.
What trends do you anticipate seeing from Google in the year ahead? How are you preparing?


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Arine Solutions - How Algorithm Updates Shape the Role of an SEO

It isn’t difficult to look back at recent algorithm updates from Google and evaluate how each one has altered the role of an SEO. In the simplest sense, Panda forced us to become better writers and researchers. Penguin made us change the way we build links. Most recently, although it was less of an algorithm update and more of an infrastructure change to Google’s core algorithm, Hummingbird asked us to consider conversational search queries in the content we produce.
Regardless of how small an algorithm update may be, the development and growth of an SEO’s responsibilities can be traced back through the history of updates. The fact that SEO is so dependent on updates creates quite a bit of uncertainty in the industry. But hey, as SEOs we know that the only thing that stays the same is that everything changes!

The only certainty is that things will be different tomorrow.
Saying an SEOs role has changed in the last five to 10 years is an understatement. SEOs are tasked with more each year and the definition of SEO has broadened significantly. It’s become nearly impossible to be a one-man (or woman) show. It requires a team with a number of different skills to perform quality SEO today.

How SEO has Changed

There used to be a time when SEO was strictly about getting traffic to a website. It didn’t matter how it was done as long as it was accomplished.

That was a long time ago.

Today the role of an SEO is much more than attracting visitors. It’s about conversions. It’s about building a brand, having a social media presence, and producing unique, high quality content better than anyone else in your industry.

Why is this happening? It’s simple – Google wants it. Aside from making money, Google wants it’s users to find the best search results possible. How do you weed out the good sites from the bad sites? Make it tough for the bad sites to compete. Google is accomplishing this through their algorithm updates.

In a post by Search Engine Journal’s very own John Rampton, he interviewed Kris Jones of Internet Marketing Ninjas and asked him about the evolution of SEO. Jones said, “SEO is now at a transition point where it’s not only about the traffic you’re getting to your site, but how your overall online visibility” is being managed.

He’s absolutely right and he reiterates the broadness that now encompasses SEO when he uses “online visibility” to describe SEO. Online visibility represents a number of today’s SEO elements, including brand building, reputation management, quality content production, social media promotion, and so much more.

This is well beyond the scope of early SEO that included keyword research, generic, keyword-stuffed content production, site accessibility, and link building.

Staying Proactive Against Algorithms

The difference between great SEOs and ordinary SEOs is that the great ones have a sense of what the future holds. They’re able to look into their crystal ball and plan for potential algorithms that may lie ahead. What’s their secret? It’s experience. There is a good chance that at one time or another they were penalized for their SEO practices and have a full understanding of the power of Google.

Here are a few things you can do to stay proactive:

• Don’t have a one-dimensional backlink profile. An example would be a site that has predominantly built links through guest posting. While guest posting is a great way to link build, your backlink profile is supposed to look natural. Having a site with backlinks primarily coming from one source is an obvious sign to Google that you’re trying to manipulate rankings. Instead make an effort to switch up your link building strategy. For every guest post you write, try to get a couple of directory links and a few blog comments as well. Some consider directory links and blog commenting outdated link building tactics but they’re still beneficial as long as they’re relevant links on quality sites. Choose carefully where you build these links and if you’re going to leave a comment make sure you are contributing to the discussion.
• It’s always a good time to clean up your backlink profile. If you really want to be proactive with link building, don’t wait for the next update to get rid of bad links. We all have a few links we’re not proud of and it’s best to remove them now before it’s too late. Do you best to have these links removed by contacting webmasters and if that doesn’t work then use Google’s disavow tool. However Google stresses to use this tool after all other attempts have failed.
• Diversify your anchor texts. This shouldn’t be breaking news to anyone but if you haven’t already made an effort to vary your anchor texts when link building then there is no better time to start than today. This goes back to building a natural backlink profile. A site that has the majority of its links coming from one or two anchor texts is another sign to Google that your links are unnatural.
• Be relevant in everything you do. The importance of relevancy for Google isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Whether you’re producing content or building links, staying relevant to your niche is vital to maintaining ranks and satisfying Google.

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Read more at http://www.searchenginejournal.com/algorithm-updates-shape-role-seo/85731/#Y5mt5TVOWQQldt6L.99

Arine Solutions - Importance of Digital Marketing

There’s no denying it, the world is rapidly shifting from analogue to digital. People are consuming more and more digital content on a daily basis – on mobile phones, laptops, desktop computers at work, and more – and companies that have not yet recognised this in their marketing strategies need to adapt fast.
Why is digital marketing so important? Because it is not only a rapidly growing force in the current marketing playing field, it is set to be the future of marketing, and it seems likely that digital media will soon replace more traditional forms altogether.
While older generations will no doubt lament the demise of paper-based newspapers, books, communication methods and traditional TV and radio broadcasts, those who have grown up with the internet and mobile phones as a God-given right are already embracing the brave new world of digital consumption.
The facts are that digital methods of communication and marketing are faster, more versatile, practical and streamlined, so it is perhaps unsurprising that once the technology became available we began quickly moving into the digital age. The good news is that digital offers just as much potential to marketers as it does to consumers.
Before we look at the benefits of digital marketing, let’s take a quick snapshot of some of the key forms of it at present:

• Websites and SEO content
• Blogs
• Internet banner ads
• Online video content
• Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
• Email marketing
• Social media marketing (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.)
• Mobile marketing (SMS, MMS, etc.)
• This is far from an exhaustive list, and new forms of digital marketing, such as augmented reality, are arriving all the time.

So, why digital marketing?

First of all, digital marketing is infinitely more affordable than traditional offline marketing methods. An email or social media campaign, for example, can transmit a marketing message to consumers for the merest fraction of the cost of a TV ad or print campaign, and potentially reach a wider audience.
But one of the main benefits of conducting your marketing digitally is the ease with which results can be tracked and monitored. Rather than conducting expensive customer research, you can quickly view customer response rates and measure the success of your marketing campaign in real-time, enabling you to plan more effectively for the next one.
Perhaps the strongest case for incorporating a digital element into your marketing is that digital media forms are quickly overtaking traditional forms of information consumption. According to the Office for National Statistics, over 82% of UK adults went online in the first three months of this year: that's over 40 million individuals.
The bottom line is, the digital age is here, and those businesses that fail to adapt to the new marketing climate are at great risk of going extinct sooner rather than later.


For more details visit our website http://www.arinesolutions.com
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Arine Solutions - Why Digital Marketing is important

While older generations will no doubt lament the demise of paper-based newspapers, books, communication methods and traditional TV and radio broadcasts, those who have grown up with the internet and mobile phones as a God-given right are already embracing the brave new world of digital consumption.
There’s no denying it, the world is rapidly shifting from analogue to digital. People are consuming more and more digital content on a daily basis – on mobile phones, laptops, desktop computers at work, and more – and companies that have not yet recognised this in their marketing strategies need to adapt fast.

So, What is Digital Marketing?
Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.
In simplistic terms, digital marketing is the promotion of products or brands via one or more forms of electronic media. Digital marketing differs from traditional marketing in that it involves the use of channels and methods that enable an organization to analyze marketing campaigns and understand what is working and what isn’t – typically in real time. Digital marketers monitor things like what is being viewed, how often and for how long, sales conversions, what content works and doesn’t work, etc. While the Internet is, perhaps, the channel most closely associated with digital marketing, others include wireless text messaging, mobile instant messaging, mobile apps, podcasts, electronic billboards, digital television and radio channels, etc.

Why is digital marketing so important?
Because it is not only a rapidly growing force in the current marketing playing field, it is set to be the future of marketing, and it seems likely that digital media will soon replace more traditional forms altogether.
Digital marketing is infinitely more affordable than traditional offline marketing methods. An email or social media campaign, for example, can transmit a marketing message to consumers for the merest fraction of the cost of a TV ad or print campaign, and potentially reach a wider audience.
But one of the main benefits of conducting your marketing digitally is the ease with which results can be tracked and monitored. Rather than conducting expensive customer research, you can quickly view customer response rates and measure the success of your marketing campaign in real-time, enabling you to plan more effectively for the next one.
The facts are that digital methods of communication and marketing are faster, more versatile, practical and streamlined, so it is perhaps unsurprising that once the technology became available we began quickly moving into the digital age. The good news is that digital offers just as much potential to marketers as it does to consumers.
The bottom line is, the digital age is here, and those businesses that fail to adapt to the new marketing climate are at great risk of going extinct sooner rather than later.


For more details visit our website http://www.arinesolutions.com
Our facebook Page : https://www.facebook.com/ArineSolutions
Our LinkedIn Page : http://www.linkedin.com/company/arine-solutions
Our Twitter Page : https://twitter.com/ArineSolutions
Our Google+ Page : https://plus.google.com/+Arinesolutions

Arine Solutions - 3 Proven Strategies To Help Your E-Commerce Sales

With e-commerce sales on the rise, more and more companies are relying on web space to competitively sell their products and services. As consumers become more comfortable shopping online, it is becoming much more difficult for businesses to compete for online sales. Furthermore, with all the latest Panda and Penguin changes, it has become very confusing and increasingly frustrating to figure out which channels to invest in for producing the greatest ROI. In such volatility and uncertainty, how do e-commerce websites compete for consumers and grow their revenue? Here are  proven strategies that will help you to increase your e-commerce sales.

1) Measure Everything
From email marketing to an Google Google Adwords campaign, it’s important to track every lead. For example, let’s say that you are sending a promotional email to your audience. In this case, it’s relatively easy to measure campaign performance by using URL shorteners such as Google’s URL shortener. It’s extremely important to take your time and properly tag each and every link. It’s not enough to know which email campaign produced the most results. You need to know how many people clicked on a link, how much revenue is generated from customers clicking on that link, how many total transactions have been generated as a result of individuals clicking on that link, and the average value and e-commerce conversion rate. Each and every piece of the marketing campaign should be very carefully and meticulously tracked. As a result of this effort, it will be possible to take the most successful pieces of the advertising campaigns and combine them together to produce a much more powerful lead generation campaign that yields more ROI. Every time you enact a marketing initiative, ask yourself: How can I measure and track it?

2) Rely on Multiple Sources of Leads
With all the algorithmic changes such as Panda and Penguin, it has become increasingly difficult to compete for organic space. Relying on a single source of leads, such as the organic section of the search engine, can put your business efforts in very dangerous territory. Algorithmic changes will continue to occur; therefore diversifying your lead generation efforts will give you balance and more certainty.
There are many ways to drive qualified traffic to your e-commerce website. Some good choices are: email marketing, Facebook Facebook Ads, Google Adwords, LinkedIn LinkedIn Ads, StumbleUpon’s Paid Discovery, Reddit’s Ads, Google Merchant, Yahoo Yahoo Ads, etc. In the effort to diversify and increase leads, it is necessary to continuously search for more ways to promote your products or services. First, test your advertising efforts on a small scale, and if it works, than continue scaling it. Every e-commerce business is different and will respond differently to each advertising effort. Try not to invest too much time reading and researching various studies. You will need to try something for yourself to see what works. Each business is unique. Other studies or results might not correlate to your own business.
I’ve tried hundreds of ways to generate leads, and after all this time, I still don’t understand why some lead generation efforts outperformed others. Furthermore, it is not beneficial for me to spend a lot of time figuring out why some people buy and some people don’t. What makes my efforts successful is trying things on a small scale and scaling up successful ones and scaling back unsuccessful ones. I would also recommend that you don’t completely give up on unsuccessful campaigns. Consumer sentiment changes over time, so repeating an unsuccessful campaign in a different time frame could bring tremendous results. The most important thing to remember is to constantly search for new ways to generate sales and always test to see what works.

3) Use the 80/20 Principle to Your Advantage
In e-commerce, the 80/20 principle is extremely useful–especially in determining the success of each individual lead generation initiative. I always like to do more of things that work and less of things that aren’t working. It only makes sense to concentrate one’s energy on successful outcomes, rather than shooting in the dark hoping to produce a positive ROI. The 80/20 principle works extremely well when applied to e-commerce KPIs such as: Product Revenue broken down by specific Product/SKU, E-commerce Conversion Rate broken down by each Source/Medium, Revenue broken down to specific day and time of the week, and Bounce Rate on each particular Landing page. The 80/20 principle is also extremely useful when looking at products sold. A lot of times, 20% of products result in roughly 80% of profit. Therefore, why not cross-sell the most popular products on relevant product pages? Why not move these products toward the top of category pages? Or, why not include these top sellers on a home page?
When it comes to specific times of the day and day of the week KPIs, you may see that a Google Adwords campaign generates the most sales on weekdays between 12:00 pm and 11:30 pm. Why not take 80% of the budget and apply it towards that particular time frame? However, before spending cost of the budget on a whole campaign, it is very important to understand that each campaign should be designed with a micro focus in mind. The more specific a campaign is, the easier it is to measure and scale.
When it comes to e-commerce success, you will need to measure each campaign all the way down to tracking each and every individual link, rely on multiple lead generation sources, and apply the 80/20 principle while analyzing some of the e-commerce KPIs. All of this can significantly help you increase e-commerce sales.

For more details visit our website http://www.arinesolutions.com
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Read More : http://www.forbes.com/sites/groupthink/2013/07/30/3-proven-strategies-to-help-your-e-commerce-sales