Saturday, March 7, 2015

How SEO and Social Media Can Work Together

SEO and Social Media

Social has a significant influence on SEO, despite industry gurus suggesting otherwise. 
Last year, Matt Cutts said in a YouTube video that Google didn't count social media metrics such as likes or shares when ranking search results. But fast-forward 12 months and the landscape has changed, with social influencing all areas of search engine optimization, be it on the Web, mobile, or local. While Google doesn't factor likes and retweets into its algorithm, it does use social to gauge what's popular.
seo and social media marketing services

Two key drivers that have impacted this change are "convergence" and "empowerment," according to Jason Dailey, head of search at MediaVest. Convergence refers to the different channels coming together, whether it's local, SEO, paid search, social, or video, whereas empowerment is all about consumers. 
"There are a lot of areas that are converging and these are becoming gray territories in terms of where one ends and the next begins," says Dailey. "Consumers are also becoming more empowered than ever to control the media that they receive and interact with brands. That's really [where] social plays a key role." 


From a technical perspective, Dailey continues, a search engine cares about four things: quality (the actually experience a user has, the content, and the appearance), trust (whether a site is authoritative and useful), popularity (whether a site is the one that people want to go to), and canniness (whether the content is fresh, current and relevant).
"Google says that social is not a signal in terms of search engine results. [But] what we do know is that really good content that people like to share has all of these four things," notes Dailey.
"If you focus on making good content, it will attract lots of engagement. That is what will get more and more people to click and soon enough, it will become more relevant to the search engine."
Antonio Casanova, director of SEO at Starcom, agrees that creating quality content on social is important, as it can help boost a business's local SEO performance. He adds that local search ranking closely relates to the number and quality of citations and mentions that a local business has. Those citations and mentions could happen on social media platforms, blogs, or different sites.
And that's not all. Local social profiles such as Google+ Local, Yelp, and Foursquare also add to a business' local ranking if they contain a number of quality reviews.  
seo and social media marketing guide

"It's important to have an active social media and customer relationship management (CRM) strategy that can help drive the mentions of your business, reviews of your profile, and links to the local profile. That can definitely help you improve your local search results," notes Casanova. 
In order to leverage social media for SEO purposes, Casanova recommends that marketers use a "two-way street communication" approach. "One way" is by using keyword insights that detect what people are searching for and how they are searching for stuff on Google.

"You can use that to inform your social and content strategy. You may find a topic that is popular, and you may have a social strategy that is based on the content developing around that topic," Casanova explains. "You can also do this the other way around. You can use social listening to mine the insights, to see what people are talking about on a social network, and use that to inform your keyword SEO content and CRM strategy."

For mobile SEO specifically, having an active and optimized social media presence that includes Google+ and Twitter can help a business with visibility in search results, he continues. "That's because more often than not, social networks are making their way into Google search results. Now that Google and Twitter have reached their recent deal that allows tweets to show up in search results, I think we're going to see it a whole lot more," Casanova notes.

MediaVest's Dailey adds a concluding piece of advice for mobile SEO: a business should make sure that it has updated name, address, and phone number information. "The worst experience a consumer could have is to find your site, call the number, and find it not active," he says. "Or they get a wrong time. They go to a store, thinking it's open, but find it actually closed. So managing that name, address, and phone number information both on the site [and] through a directory is very important."

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

3 Myths Of Mobile Marketing Success

SEO Mobile Marketing Success

In the last few years, mobile has evolved into a global force of nature. According to a report prepared by Mary Meeker of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, mobile device shipments are dramatically outpacing desktops and televisions by four to five times. A study from Cisco points out a similar trend — that in 2014, average smartphone usage grew by 45 percent.
3 Myths Of Mobile Marketing Success
For marketers, mobile was the next frontier yesterday, but even the most innovative companies are struggling to get started — the biggest challenge being that companies aren’t sure how to build high-converting mobile campaigns. What’s holding them back are the following three mobile marketing myths.

1. Mobile Is an Extension of Desktop

The problem is that many marketers think a mobile marketing plan is as simple as a responsive site. Desktop strategies, however, won’t necessarily translate into a mobile campaign — that’s because user experiences are fundamentally different on desktop and mobile.
On the computer, digital audiences are typically stationary and can very easily scroll and type with their trackpads and keyboards. On mobile, interactions are a series of quick swipes and taps — not to mention, digital audiences are often on-the-go and in highly distracting environments. As usability researcher and vice president of product at Hint Health puts it in a recent article for The Content Strategist, "Mobile experiences are often a series of micro interactions – quick tasks that the user performs, often in a highly distracting, public environment using a very small screen. A good mobile experience keeps important tasks quick, obvious, interruptible, and performable with a limited about of input."


Desktop audiences will have much more space, maneuverability, and flexibility to learn. Mobile campaigns, on the other hand, must deliver information fast.

2. Mobile Conversions Are Challenging to Measure

Campaign attribution is challenging on almost any device — but mobile often introduces an even bigger "black box" in that conversions often start online and end offline with a phone call or in-store purchase. As one example, 70 percent of people have called a business after conducting a mobile search. Marketers, who are often bound to aggressive growth quotas, may feel hesitant to take a "leap of faith" in launching campaigns that are seemingly impossible to measure.
By following this mindset, marketers risk overlooking a crucial part of their mobile conversion funnels. When on their lunch breaks or riding in a car as passengers, mobile audiences don’t want to spend time completing lengthy forms on tiny smartphones. When seeking information quickly, they’d much rather pick up the phone and call.
These conversion events are measurable through call tracking and intelligence technology. Call tracking enables marketers to see the online and mobile interactions that are prompting people to pick up the phone, while NLP can tell marketers exactly what's happening during the conversation.

3. It's All About the Immediate Sale

what is mobile marketing and how does it work
Marketers have a tendency to measure success by measuring direct sales. The reality, however, is that paths to conversion are often complex and span a series of steps. Especially on mobile, audiences may want to do a bit of research before committing to becoming paid customers.
Marketers should also pay attention to the nuances in key performance indicators (KPIs) between desktop and mobile. On desktop, for instance, high average times on site may represent engagement. On mobile, however, that same metric may represent confusion — an inability for audiences to find the information that they need quickly. In some mobile contexts, bounce rates may be less relevant than they are with desktop campaigns.
On mobile, marketers should pay particular attention to conversion metrics that signify purchase intent. Pay attention to whether audiences are looking up directions to a store, researching product inventory, or making calls. Mobile campaigns will often drive conversions through other channels. That’s why marketers should look beyond whether audiences are making calls. It’s equally, if not more, important to understand what’s happening on that call and tying end conversion data from online interactions back to ROI reporting.
When choosing KPIs, marketers should focus on their mobile audience’s unique story. According to one study from Google and Nielsen, three out of four mobile searches trigger follow-up actions. After conducting a mobile search, 51 percent visit a store, 19 percent call a business, 19 percent continue their research, and 22 percent visit the retailer’s website.

Final Thoughts

Mobile is a blank slate, and the best way to navigate this extremely promising marketing opportunity is to think about what audiences need most. Don’t be afraid to try something new and most importantly, don’t let myths get in the way.

Sunday, March 1, 2015

8 SEO On-Page SEO Hacking Techniques You Want To Rank

On-Page SEO Hacking Techniques

After over a decade of doling out penalties, Google has caused the rise and demise of manipulative SEO methods. Many professionals have nearly forgotten the broad space for manipulation enabled by on-page SEO, and are acting on a very basic level, be it as a result of added caution or perhaps habit.
On-Page SEO Hacking TechniquesNo, this isn't another article about title optimization, keyword optimization, and the importance of tags. Below, I intend to present a list of problems and solutions that will help you improve search engine rankings using on-page elements from less talked about, yet still significant, angles.
To draw a parallel, envision your site as a brick and mortar store. Your off-page SEO would be equivalent to reputation management and PR efforts, while on-page is more about what your store contains: the shelves, the cash register, etc. Each element varies in importance, but all are crucial to the store’s success.
Often, business owners insist on getting quotes for off-page work only, usually content-based, without performing any on-page changes. They may feel extremely confident in their conviction that they’ve done all that could be, but the reality is often very different. A quick analysis typically yields unprofessional and/or non-SEO compatible coding and insertion, which can damage rankings. Advanced implementation of on-page SEO techniques strengthens the site and can have a quick, almost immediate effect on rankings, unlike off-page efforts which usually take longer to bear fruit and are conditioned upon many factors we cannot control.
After nearly 10 years of experience in the field, I’ve stumbled across a lot of strange situations and interesting facts. In this article I’ll round up a few key tips for effective on-page optimization. As you might deduce from the title, this piece is intended for somewhat experienced SEO professionals, so I’ve made certain assumptions about base knowledge and technical ability. If anything is unclear, feel free to ask me questions in the comments section.
Techniques You Want To Rank
The following list of on-page methods is ordered randomly, and not according to significance. Take a deep breath, and let’s dive in.
1. Internal Link Structure Doesn’t Tell a Story
2. Confusing Root Folder
3. Duplicate Content Right Under your Nose
4. Site Loading Speed
5. Full Transparency and Disclosure of Malicious Features
6. Broken Links and Lost URL Recycling
7. Correcting Mistakes and Removing Superfluous Code
8. Latent Semantic Index and Necessary Keywords


The Takeaway

The above tips should get you well on your way to optimizing your site’s on-page aspects, after taking care of basic on-page factors you should all be relatively familiar with. However, note that no site is ever ‘finished’ – maintenance should be ongoing and frequent. Through experience, we should strive to prioritize the on-page tasks and focus on those that yield the best results. Good luck, and get to work!
Got more expert tips? Sound off in the comments!

Friday, February 27, 2015

A Guide To SEO Timeline for Development Projects

SEO for Development Projects

If you’ve ever worked on a development project from start to finish, and you don’t operate on a fully integrated design, development, and digital marketing team, then you may be familiar with the struggle of prioritizing which SEO steps should be taken when. Full disclosure, this list does not detail how to complete each step in this process. Instead use this as a guide to keep the SEO arm of development on track so that nothing gets left behind because it was forgotten or *cringe* "we don’t have time for that."
SEO Timeline for Development Projects

Pre-Development

Before development begins you should start discussions about site architecture, technical SEO, such as the need for HTTPS, and defining project goals. Your initial work should lay out like this.
  • If you’re redeveloping your site, crawl the old site and complete a site performance analysis. This provides a baseline that you can compare to after the new site launches.
  • Talk to the content team (your designers, copywriters, and site owners) about a new site structure. SEO fundamentals are dictated by your content decisions, so you need to get everyone on the same page about what pages are staying, going, or being added to the site. Users persona development can help your team understand how each piece of the site is meant to serve its users.
  • Your site structure should help you build a sitemap that the meets your content goals and establishes a strong user flow. Just be aware that you’ll likely revise the sitemap more than once during the development process, and that’s OK.
  • Once you have an understanding of the new content direction, determine if you’ll be sticking with the current keyword strategy or revising it to connect with different site users or goals. If you need a keyword strategy overhaul, you’ll want to carve out time for this during the development process.
  • Determine any gaps in knowledge among your team as it pertains to technical SEO – if your team is creating a custom CMS, make sure URLs don’t cause duplicate content, or ensure the right canonicals are in place so you don’t get dinged. If your team is using WordPress to build the site, make sure they know which plugins are needed to manage on-page SEO like title tags and meta descriptions. I’d also recommend creating a list of redirects you think you’ll need during this stage of the process. It may feel too early, but thinking ahead is the best way to ensure nothing is forgotten when it’s time to launch. Use a tool like Screaming Frog to make this process easier.

During Development

During development, spend time with your team to understand what challenges they may be facing or what project roadmap changes may occur during the process. You want to ensure there aren’t any surprises in terms of change of project scope or priorities that impact where you need to focus your efforts during development.


For example, maybe your time is best spent ensuring the technical setup goes as planned. Alternatively, you may need to focus your time on a post-launch content strategy if organic traffic is the primary means of attracting conversion-ready visitors to the site.
  • Revisit your keyword analysis. If you need to come up with a new strategy, now is the time to do it and ensure your thoughts are integrated into any existing or new content that is created. Spoiler alert: I bet you’ll realize you need a page you didn’t think you’d need before when you complete this step.
  • Create a post-launch strategy. Understand the site goals and needs after it goes to market. Determine the plan for driving traffic and conversions during the first several months after launch. If you’re launching to a new domain or you’re concerned about initial traffic dips after a launch, consider paid media to keep traffic flowing.
  • You may also want to make sure technical SEO requirements are in place so you catch anything that should be changed well before the launch.
  • Measurement is a key component of any Web project, but it’s often the last thing developers are concerned with – so it’s up to you to ensure your developers are building the site to be thoroughly measured. If you can identify analytics data such as scroll depth or CTA clicks to track post-launch and you can set up tracking code with Google Tag Manager ahead of time, do it.
    SEO Project Launch
  • Be your own data Quality Assurance. If you notice that a sign-up form is being coded as a single-page experience when you know that you’ll need to track users who may fall out of the funnel, suggest splitting the process into multiple steps. You can set up tracking later, or you can speak up early before you become a roadblock for the rest of your team.

Project Launch

When it’s time to launch the project, hopefully you’re able to relax a bit by using this time to double check things, rather than looking at things for the first time.
  • Review that technical SEO checklist again.
  • Set up tracking for buttons, scroll depth, or goals if you weren’t able to do so before the site launch.
  • Crawl your site to check for 404s or any faulty redirects and fix the issues you find as soon as possible.

Post Launch

We’re never really "done" when it comes to digital marketing or SEO. After a project launches it’s time to verify whether or not your assumptions or new strategies work and make adjustments accordingly.
  • Monitor your data and compare it to your baseline metrics. This information should help you determine how you can improve the user experience and positively impact conversions.
  • Implement your post-launch strategy, whether than means building up site content through blog posts, launching paid media campaigns to draw traffic, or building out a marketing automation strategy. Every step of the way, make sure you’re using a variety of tools to gain user and data-driven feedback to improve your campaigns. Tools like UserTesting.com, HotJar (Note: this is still in Beta), and Google Analytics can help you gain this information.

Summary

Thinking ahead during the development process and staying connected with the rest of your team is always the best advice when it comes to making sure none of a website’s SEO needs fall through the cracks. What are your struggles or tried and true steps when it comes to ensuring SEO is smoothly integrated into development?

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Penguin, Panda – What is the Next? 10 Major Predictions

Predictions on Penguin, Panda

Twitter has been alight for previous times few several weeks with information that the newest Penguin criteria upgrade is almost prepared for activity.

For those still affected by the preliminary "shock and awe" methods applied by Look for engines some 12 several weeks ago, "official news" that a renew is on its way is fantastic information indeed, given plenty of interval of time between reruns.

We know that the deliver is about to cruise again thanks to the welcome information from On the internet search motor professional Grettle Illyes that disavow data files are now no more being prepared for this next upgrade. It’s near.

The query is, however, what will this upgrade carry to the celebration and how can web page owners prepare?

Penguin 3.0

Clearly no formal assistance has, or ever will be, given here but what we certainly do have is both information from previous times operates and also, seriously, from the modification of "sister" algorithmic upgrade Panda to help us comprehend where Penguin is going.

Panda Lessons

As we know, and can see from the visual below, Panda first released in Feb 2011 as a confusing, issue-ridden but incredibly influential upgrade which mixed out worldwide within six several weeks.

The information systems part for a narrow centered mainly on on-page aspects, however, was much more uncomplicated, as it didn’t include applying the whole weblink graph and understanding ever nuance. That intended the edition strategy grabbed speed quickly and, as skilled information professionals do, they started a sequence of more compact up-dates followed by research, edition, and modifications.

To time frame there have been at least 30 of those we know of in a interval comprising just more than three-and-a-half decades. If ever there was evidence of Google’s technique, it is there for all to see. We know then that the same is organized for Penguin, the task has basically been the actual quantity of information that has needed to be prepared to be able to get it "right" with the link-quality-based upgrade.

While Panda calculated, amongst other aspects, the rule platform of a web page and its material, Penguin has had to map, determine, and evaluate the whole weblink graph and to do that google needed help. And you thought it, that help came from web page owners and from those affected from the first five versions of the "penalty." The perform with disavow permitted looking group to make use of a large variety of other "experts" to deliver through an incredible variety of illustrations of "poor-quality" hyperlinks.

That human-sorted information set will certainly now type the reasons for the next update; a much more brilliant versioning depending on real "big data" understanding of what describes a excellent hyperlinks from a bad one. Or, more accurately, a value-adding weblink from a useless one developed to control PageRank only.

So, if we know they have used some fairly intelligent gamification methods to collect key information and help "process" the weblink graph already, what can we anticipate from an upgrade that has been a whole season in the making? Here are some predictions:

Penguin Predictions

1. Understanding Communities and Bloodlines

A key part of the next versions of Penguin will certainly be its capability to comprehend the "provenance" of any weblink value that a web page "earns" from any weblink positioning on it.

Rather than getting a weblink on experience value, it is crucial for the narrow to truly comprehend how that web page has got its own value in the first position.

It’s like understanding the record of a car you are purchasing. If it’s losing plenty of support record postage stamps and there are then also suspicious maintenance done on the body-work, you would be right to query whether it really is the audio automobile the supplier says it is.

Links are the same and in my perspective a lot of the delay has been due to Look for engines searching into the weblink graph in a way that allows an criteria to evaluate not just the value of the weblink on experience value but by looking at that site’s "history."

If you look at the weblink graph, it is created up of a sequence of "nodes" that, when extended out, look a little like this:

In almost all conditions you can track weblink value right returning to "neighborhoods" of distributed "equity" and by doing this it is possible to perform out where the "good" and "bad" ones are. Of course, like in the actual world, you get excellent and bad individuals in excellent and bad neighborhoods and determining that stage of perfection out will be part of the continuous edition procedure that we will certainly see in the arriving several weeks and decades.

The key, of course, will be getting in with the right, virtuous, audience and keeping away from those websites that have tried to activity their own value.

2. Getting More Specific

Another factor that Panda has trained us is that Look for engines prefers to begin with whole-of-site effects, understand from the information, and then use that reviews to make more focused effect.

We will see this in Penguin with websites hit at classification or web page stage in contrast to arbitrarily or across the panel. This will make verifying weblink information at that stage more essential.

3. Operating More Consistently With Smaller Impact

As with Panda, we will now see a more frequent renew, as the hard work is over. This should mean that those awaiting restoration should see caused by their perform much quicker, in either route.

And along with a shift toward page-level effect in contrast to site-wide, this should mean Penguin becomes less of a business-destroyer and more a "clip-behind-the-ear" eventually.

4. Less About "Anchors," More About Importance and Trust

Initially the algorithmic upgrade focused very much on apparent alerts such as anchor-text neglect, but as the information perform gets wiser we will see weblink relevance and hat above mentioned provenance, or believe in, come more into perform. This will, of course, carry more difficulties to those trying still to outsmart the program, as formerly "hidden" weblink systems and sector power designed from very highly effective, but unrelated or artificial, websites will be more quickly identified.

We know also that Look for engines has a new certain for Panda that also looks at anchor-text use in the perspective of keeping track of incoming weblink anchor-text as part of the on web page computation for material. That generally indicates that even webpages that are very organic "on page" may still be punished for junk if they then have a lot of actual coordinate anchor-text off web page. Another purpose to stay away from that tactic!

5. Exclusive Connecting Websites and Natural Balance

Unique IP or sector weblink depend has always been essential, but it will take on another sizing with upcoming versions of Penguin. Getting that organic stability between enough and too many for your market will be more essential. Unnatural will keep out and dark flagged, creating an understanding of opponent stability very essential. What is appropriate in one market will be very artificial in another and a wiser Penguin will quickly smell that out.

6. Hilltop

Google has lengthy organised its Hilltop certain and it would make sensible feeling for Penguin to use factor of it to comprehend believe in and relevance. For those that do not know it, the certain looks at "Expert" and "Authority" webpages, interpreting the former as a web page that hyperlinks out to plenty of other appropriate webpages to add value to an article/page, while the power is the web page connected out to.

The really useful hyperlinks are therefore those that come from professional webpages and making plenty of these is the way to position well and prevent Penguin. The only way to do that, of course, is to discuss awesome material, becoming a believed innovator and power in your area.

7. Strong Link Ratio

The quantity of hyperlinks that go into further webpages will also be considered as part of that shift to more accurate statistic. Excellent websites generate deep hyperlinks, but where there seems to be too many to a professional web page may induce Penguin problems. The more secure technique would appear to be domain-level hyperlinks and hyperlinks from professional records into believed management webpages, which will most probably be discovered on your weblog site, or within a material or sources area.

8. Do Follow/No Follow/Mentions/Shares

This may be a little bit more of a expand, and could type part of Panda in contrast to Penguin, but the connection between the variety of hyperlinks you have and the quantity your product is "talked about" on the internet is a very sensible way to confirm weblink power. It’s something I have published about formerly and creates overall feeling as a feeling examine for understanding if a weblink information is actual.

Google speaks a lot about "brand building" and one of the best methods to evaluate product is to do so via "listening" through either public or Web refers to and feeling. Tools to discover these aspects are simple enough to develop and so the might of technological innovation skills at looking organization would have no issue doing that at range.

9. Visitors Data – From Link Sources?

Finally there is the part around utilization information. We have certainly seen symptoms and symptoms of that sneaking in on the Panda part as Look for engines looks to comprehend not just what a web page, or web page, might "look" like to a spider or headless web browser. Looking at, or calculating, the quantity of "traffic" from certain hyperlinks is within their achieve through statistics and would be another way of verifying weblink top quality and relevance. After all, who mouse clicks a non-relevant link?

10. Amount of "Suspect Links Allowed

I wrote a publish on here a season ago analyzing some of the information the group at Zazzle Press had produced from latest web page restoration tasks. It indicated toward a decreasing portion of permitted "suspect" or spam hyperlinks in a information. The graph below reveals how that developed and we’ll be examining again publish Penguin 3.0 to see how far that has been taken.

What to Do Next

The upcoming is unclear and the forecasts above are clearly just that. One factor we do know, however, is that Penguin will get wiser and, having had a whole season to perform on it, the next edition will be much more accurate at doing its job: eliminating unrelated linking actions.

The broader task for those hit, of course, is identifying Panda effect from Penguin and as the two approach together, and as Penguin is mixed into the primary criteria just as Panda has been, it will be more and more hard to discover the right "fix."

For those being affected by it this simple Look for engines Charge deceive piece is developed to help.



Source  -  http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2375404/Penguin-What-Happens-Next-10-Data-Led-Predictions

 

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