Panda Recovery Tip -- Boosting Your Branding

One of the most recent changes to the Google Panda algorithm seems to be a big shift in favor of brand websites. Places like Youtube and Amazon has seen some big boosts in search rankings and traffic levels. So what makes a brand a brand anyway? A brand is something that people recognize by name and trust. But how do you measure that? Have you ever thought about how Google tries to measure that and what you can do to increase your branding in the eyes of Google. One of the easiest ways to measure branding is to measure how much direct traffic a website gets. When you think about it, that's a great and easy way to measure how well known and trusted a site is. When a site gets a lot of direct traffic, people who type in the website directly or else navigate to it from their bookmarks tab, you can know that the site must be relatively well known and trusted.

This creates a really interesting situation. If getting direct traffic can increase your authority and value in the eyes of Google, it reopens the door to old school forms of advertising. In the first days of the internet, before people were really using search engines, people still had websites. But they would make fliers, get ads in the paper, pass out business cards, and put a sticker of their website on the back of their car in order to get traffic to their site. Direct traffic was really all their was and people needed to use old school methods of advertising in order to get people to visit their site.

Because of this, I'm seriously taking a look at these forms of advertising to my main sites. Though I don't think I'll ever be the kind of person that goes around putting fliers on people's cars or giving out business cards to everyone I meet, I wouldn't be opposed to a good quality radio ad or ad in the newspaper. With the advent of search engine optimization, these forms of advertising have heavily dwindled, but with Google's apparent distaste for sites that get all of their traffic from search engines, getting a nice trickle of direct traffic from an outside advertising source might be a sure fire way of recovering from a panda penalty. I'm not sure if it would work, but it's fun to speculate.

This form of advertising will be especially effective for sites that have a local emphasis. If you have a business that could especially benefit from local traffic, then you really ought to consider starting up some kind of old school advertising campaign. I'm sure that if you get creative, you'll find some form of advertising that will mesh well with your type of business. And I bet for the next couple of months, while this form of advertising is still widely unused, you can find killer deals.

Videos are becoming extremely popular these days. Youtube has been a huge winner throughout all the different Panda updates and videos are a good way of boosting your branding. If your videos are good quality and get internal traffic from places like Youtube or wherever they're hosted, you can get a lot of direct traffic from your videos by saying a tagline at the end of each video, something like: "Visit www.mysite.com for more" (I'm sure yours will be more clever). That way, after watching the video, the user will have to type in your website in order to navigate there, and in the eyes of Google, your branding will increase. Google doesn't know where the traffic is coming from, and in their eyes, more direct searches means your site is getting more well known.