Factors That Changed Internet Marketing in 2012

We have seen noteworthy changes and incitements in internet marketing in this year so far. Recently, twitter introduces 'negative keyword targeting' to make ads more relevant. Amazon introduced ‘Amazon Pages’ for businesses to promote their brands and ‘Amazon Posts’ for social media marketing. The SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) became the largest protest in the internet’s history.

Social networking websites and search engines also made alterations that changed the whole scenario of digital marketing. Here are four of them which played a crucial role in online marketing industry:

Google+ Gained The Grip

Google Places merged with Google+ and became Google+ Local, which changed the approach to local SEO. Now users see personalized results on Google based on social data from Google+. Google plus Local has aimed to make reviews, recommendations and opinions, which helps in showing targeted results to user.

Panda Update

Google launched a number of Panda updates throughout the year. Most importantly, these updates marked down those websites which held low quality content, ad-heavy pages. This change encouraged websites to deliver high quality content.

Google Launched Knowledge Graph

Google launched ‘Knowledge Graph’ to offer additional search results to help users find the right thing faster and receive a bigger summary that is relevant to the search topic. The idea behind Knowledge Graph is to help people do less time searching and more time discovering.

Author Rich Snippets

This factor has given the opportunity to online marketers to build their author rank by linking their Google+ profile page to the content they write by using “rel=author”. By utilizing rich snippets users can show up their photo in the search results along with their content, which builds author authority.