Social media and SEO go hand-in-hand when it comes to building your online brand. The two disciplines are intertwined more than ever and the most successful websites are the ones who have managed to leverage social media for SEO and vice versa. No longer existing in separate silos, the lines between social media marketing and SEO are slowly disappearing.
In order to give your brand the best chance at succeeding in the online world, here are 3 ways you can derive SEO value from your time spent on social networking sites:
Link between profiles
Think of social media marketing like the wheel of a bicycle. Each social profile is one of the spokes and your website is the central hub linking them all together.
You never want the visitor’s journey to end at any given social profile. By interlinking your social profiles with each other, as well as with your website, you are encouraging visitors to extend their interaction with your company and your brand. The longer you can keep them engaged the better chance you have of getting them to convert.
Linking between profiles also gives you the chance to connect with your target audience on more than one platform, increasing the amount of touch points your brand has in their online lives. For instance, if someone connects with you on LinkedIn, why not send them a message inviting them to follow you on Twitter and to Like your Facebook page? You don’t know which one of these social profiles plays the most important role in their online social lives, so by creating a loop between all of your social profiles you are helping ensure your message gets heard at least once.
Keep in mind that the end goal of social media marketing should be getting your social connections over to your site, not driving traffic from your site towards your social profiles. Don’t dedicate prominent real estate on your website to giant “Connect with us on Facebook!” buttons. Your site should focus on converting your visitors, not turning them into fans/friends/followers. Keep the “connect with us” buttons on your site, but don’t let them overshadow the other goals of your site.
Promote your content
Content marketing forms the backbone of your SEO and drives most of your online marketing tactics in general. But creating great content is only half of the battle. It doesn’t matter how unique, informative, inspiring or useful your content is if no one sees it. That’s where social networks become incredibly valuable from a marketing perspective. Social media marketing thrives on fresh content and gives your social connections a reason to interact with your social profiles. It keeps your brand top-of-mind and present in their online social lives.
Every time you (or one of your connections/readers) share a piece of your content on a social network that creates a valuable inbound link for your site. Not just ways to drive traffic, these social signals are being used by the search engines to determine the importance of your content. The more times a piece of content is shared across various social networking sites the more valuable it becomes and the better it will rank in the long run.
You don’t have to publish the whole blog post to your Facebook wall either. A small snippet and image is enough to attract the attention of your network. It’s a teaser to get them interested and give them a reason to head over to your actual blog/site to read your content.
Customize and optimize profiles
Social profiles can rank in the search engines like any other webpage. Make sure you take full advantage of this opportunity and properly optimize your profiles like you would your site. For instance, Facebook allows users to create custom URLs for their pages; this is a great place to target your most relevant keywords. You should also focus on targeting relevant keywords in your biography or info sessions.
Not every profile will allow you to post the same amount of information, so it’s important to ensure consistency across your profiles. Before you start getting really heavily involved in your social media marketing, write a few company biographies of varying length that all focus on the same core message. You want to present a unified brand across all of your social profiles so you don’t accidentally confuse your audience.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Secure Search Service from Google
ON the the 18th Google announced a new feature they are rolling out.
Anyone following search engine news would be perfectly normal to feel a bit of déjà vu since Google’s had secure search options way back in early 2010. The latest announcement that is stirring up responses is the fact that they are now dropping header info that would normally be passed along to the destination site which could then be tracked and analyzed for SEO purposes.
Google has plenty of good reasons to make this move and only a few reasons against it. Here’s a quick breakdown of the pros/cons:
Google has plenty of good reasons to make this move and only a few reasons against it. Here’s a quick breakdown of the pros/cons:
- Most searchers are not logged in and won’t be effected
- Estimates fall between %3-%7 of current search traffic is logged in
- Tracking the “not provided” searches in Google Analytics will show the missing traffic
- Mobile users connecting from public WiFi networks can search securely
- Users of free internet services will have additional privacy
- HTTPS Everywhere is crucial and backed by Google
- Webmaster Central still provides search terms to registered owners
- Mobile searchers tend to be logged in
- Traffic projections for mobile search are growing
- Google has to make the data accessible to it’s paid users
- SSL is now becoming a much larger ranking factor
“When a signed in user visits your site from an organic Google search, all web analytics services, including Google Analytics, will continue to recognize the visit as Google ‘organic’ search, but will no longer report the query terms that the user searched on to reach your site..”Thom Craver, Web and Database specialist for the Saunders College at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) was quoted on Search Engine Watch as noting:
“Keep in mind that the change will affect only a minority of your traffic. You will continue to see aggregate query data with no change, including visits from users who aren’t signed in and visits from Google ‘cpc’.”
“Analytics can already run over https if you tell it to in the JavaScript Code … There’s no reason why Google couldn’t make this work, if the site owners cooperated by offering their entire site via HTTPS.”Personally, as you can tell from my lead-in, I feel like this is much ado about nothing. Unless competing search engines are willing to risk user privacy/safety to cater to SEOs in a short term bid for popularity, this isn’t going to be repealed. I don’t like to see the trend of money = access, but in this case I don’t see much choice and I’ll stand behind Google’s move for now.
Monday, October 17, 2011
How to spot a bad SEO client
How to spot a bad SEO client
Any business is a good business or as long as you get paid those are some rules that we have when it comes to clients specially if you’re a freelance SEO specialist or a newly started company. However not every client can be profitable for you. In some cases it is better for bussines to walk away from a client in order to make more money latter on. A bad client will try to get free work out of you, have you agrovated, and waste your time. In the end you will end up spending more of your time trying to get information from them, waiting to respond to your emails and ect. I have came up with a list of warning signs you can look in your client that can tell you that it maybe batter to move on even if the money are good.
· Ask for you to do a keyword reashearch for free
· Ask you to do a keyword reashearch but then insist on the keywords that they think will represend their business batter.
· Un willing to listen to your advice.
· If you have to go trough a middle man.
· Ask if they have a webdeveloper, wedesigner how will you communicate with them and have a meeting with them to see how SEO friendly they are. If the webdevoper knows how to write a clean code and if they worked with SEO before and if webdesinger is a SEO friendly. If not then you be frusturated trying to convince them to change something but they be relactunt either from luck of knowledge or not wanting to compromise their design.
· If the designer of the website is related to the owner or whoever is going to make decisions. If that person and the designer are family all your suggestions will feel like attacks to them. They might feel that they will have to protect the honor family and will be unwilling implimanting change.
· If they ask your advice and then argue with you about every detail.
· If they treaten you that they leave you cause there are many software options and other places that offer lower rate.
· If the clinet don’t respect you, your time.
· If they want you do something that goes against yoru beliefs or something shady or illegal
· If they realy on SEO/online marketing to bring all their leads.
·
In conclusion meet with the client multiple times and see if you guys click on or not present them with your plan of actions. Ask them as much questions is possible about what they expect from you and how involved they are planing to be in the compain. In the end its your decision does the client fit in with your goals and where you see your bussines going. Is he going to take up to much of your time.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Link Building Strategies That Are Proven To Work
Hello everyone in SEO field we all have our own ways of doing link building. Here are some tips how to save some time and make sure that your links are quality stuff.
Ranker.com
Ranker.com is a content hub where you create a list and rank all the items on it. It's not exactly like Suite101 or Associated Content because all that is expected of you is a title, opening paragraph, and a list of items, give or take a description of each. So, what's the difference in terms of link building? Time. It could take you 15-20 minutes to create a quality post on this site whereas it would take you upwards of 45 minutes on the two examples previously mentioned. You not only get a quality anchor text link at the top of the page right under the title, but you also start building authority in your niche. In reality, it's a win-win.
Empirical Article Linking
Essentially, this technique is article marketing but with a twist. WHAT? I thought you said these were 'unorthodox' linking strategies? Yes, this is one, but hold on before you get skeptical. In a nutshell, this strategy involves interlinking all of your different submitted articles. For example, if I submit an article to The Free Library, instead of using all four backlinks to point back to my site, I might use one or two to point to other articles I've submitted, such as on Ezine Articles or GoArticles. What this does is increase the quality of your links on those sites. Here's the best way to do it - use your best keywords on Ezines & GoArticles, and try and build up 10 links to each article. You'll see some serious results if you do it right.
Dofollow Blog Commenting (the right way)
Skeptics - hold on before you start criticizing again. This tactic involves commenting on blogs that don't have a nofollow attribute on their comment links, so what you get in return for a comment is a quality link (not super high-quality, but it's better than most comment links). First, you need a list to start off (My blog has a list of solely SEO & Internet marketing dofollow blogs). Then once you find a couple high page ranked & high quality blogs, you need the SEO Quake add-on for Mozilla Firefox. Once downloaded, you will be able to sort your search results in Google by different metrics. For this strategy, you will be sorting results based on page rank.
Ranker.com is a content hub where you create a list and rank all the items on it. It's not exactly like Suite101 or Associated Content because all that is expected of you is a title, opening paragraph, and a list of items, give or take a description of each. So, what's the difference in terms of link building? Time. It could take you 15-20 minutes to create a quality post on this site whereas it would take you upwards of 45 minutes on the two examples previously mentioned. You not only get a quality anchor text link at the top of the page right under the title, but you also start building authority in your niche. In reality, it's a win-win.
Empirical Article Linking
Essentially, this technique is article marketing but with a twist. WHAT? I thought you said these were 'unorthodox' linking strategies? Yes, this is one, but hold on before you get skeptical. In a nutshell, this strategy involves interlinking all of your different submitted articles. For example, if I submit an article to The Free Library, instead of using all four backlinks to point back to my site, I might use one or two to point to other articles I've submitted, such as on Ezine Articles or GoArticles. What this does is increase the quality of your links on those sites. Here's the best way to do it - use your best keywords on Ezines & GoArticles, and try and build up 10 links to each article. You'll see some serious results if you do it right.
Dofollow Blog Commenting (the right way)
Skeptics - hold on before you start criticizing again. This tactic involves commenting on blogs that don't have a nofollow attribute on their comment links, so what you get in return for a comment is a quality link (not super high-quality, but it's better than most comment links). First, you need a list to start off (My blog has a list of solely SEO & Internet marketing dofollow blogs). Then once you find a couple high page ranked & high quality blogs, you need the SEO Quake add-on for Mozilla Firefox. Once downloaded, you will be able to sort your search results in Google by different metrics. For this strategy, you will be sorting results based on page rank.
So, here's what you do - type into Google "site:exampleblog.com" (replace 'exampleblog.com' with the blog you want to comment on). Then sort your results by Page Rank. I know it's not a flawless tool, so you will still have to go page by page to find high PR posts, but you get the idea. Now what you have in front of you is gold - a list of high page rank blog posts you can easily comment on & get in on some of that link juice. Obviously, go for the high page ranked posts first, and move your way down. REMEMBER: contribute to the conversation; no one wants just another "great post!" comment, and chances are it won't get approved.
.Edu Blog Commenting
Another form of blog commenting, but this time the strategy will net you a few .edu links. Yes, they will be nofollow links, but they will help build some trust. Here's how to find the blogs to comment on:
Type this into Google: inurl:.edu inurl:comments/feed
What this query will do is get a list of results that have Wordpress on a .edu domain. You will get around 2,000 results, so you'll first have to find which blogs are approving comments on a regular basis, and which ones are higher authority. Since the results you are finding are comment feeds, by clicking on the results and looking for the date of the last accepted comment, you can get a good feel for which ones are currently approving.
Using LinkChecker to Build High-quality Links
This is one of my top link building strategies in my arsenal. Let's just say I've netted a few PR 5 blogroll links over the past couple weeks. Here's how to do it - First download LinkChecker for Mozilla Firefox (another add-on?!). This tool will help you check pages for broken links by right clicking and choosing "Check Page Links". Next, you will have to find medium-sized industry-related blogs that have large blogrolls. The easiest way to do this is to just find one, and then check all the blogs in their blogroll, which leads to more, and so on. Now, I say medium sized for a couple reasons. The first is that large-sized blogs rarely have broken links and probably don't want to link to you for any reason, and the second is that smaller blogs are still good, but medium-sized blogs are obviously more valuable.
So here's what you'll be doing: Find these blogs, check their page links for broken links, and once you find a couple, you're in. Find a contact email, create an email titled "Broken Links" or "Broken Links on Blog", and say something like this:
Hi!
I was on your blog when I came across a few broken links that I thought you should check out. I know you've got a lot on your plate with the blog and all, so I listed them:
* Broken Link
* Broken Link
* Broken Link
Broken links are never a positive sign for a blog, so I hope this helps. Also, do you think you could replace one of the broken links with a link to my blog? It's myblog.com.
Cheers
*Your name*
Bam. Doing this ten times will usually get you 2-3 responses, and usually one or two say yes. Notice that the broken links are usually found in their blogroll (hence finding blogs with large blogrolls), so they're more willing to replace a bad link with a link to you if it's already external.
.Edu Blog Commenting
Another form of blog commenting, but this time the strategy will net you a few .edu links. Yes, they will be nofollow links, but they will help build some trust. Here's how to find the blogs to comment on:
Type this into Google: inurl:.edu inurl:comments/feed
What this query will do is get a list of results that have Wordpress on a .edu domain. You will get around 2,000 results, so you'll first have to find which blogs are approving comments on a regular basis, and which ones are higher authority. Since the results you are finding are comment feeds, by clicking on the results and looking for the date of the last accepted comment, you can get a good feel for which ones are currently approving.
Using LinkChecker to Build High-quality Links
This is one of my top link building strategies in my arsenal. Let's just say I've netted a few PR 5 blogroll links over the past couple weeks. Here's how to do it - First download LinkChecker for Mozilla Firefox (another add-on?!). This tool will help you check pages for broken links by right clicking and choosing "Check Page Links". Next, you will have to find medium-sized industry-related blogs that have large blogrolls. The easiest way to do this is to just find one, and then check all the blogs in their blogroll, which leads to more, and so on. Now, I say medium sized for a couple reasons. The first is that large-sized blogs rarely have broken links and probably don't want to link to you for any reason, and the second is that smaller blogs are still good, but medium-sized blogs are obviously more valuable.
So here's what you'll be doing: Find these blogs, check their page links for broken links, and once you find a couple, you're in. Find a contact email, create an email titled "Broken Links" or "Broken Links on Blog", and say something like this:
Hi!
I was on your blog when I came across a few broken links that I thought you should check out. I know you've got a lot on your plate with the blog and all, so I listed them:
* Broken Link
* Broken Link
* Broken Link
Broken links are never a positive sign for a blog, so I hope this helps. Also, do you think you could replace one of the broken links with a link to my blog? It's myblog.com.
Cheers
*Your name*
Bam. Doing this ten times will usually get you 2-3 responses, and usually one or two say yes. Notice that the broken links are usually found in their blogroll (hence finding blogs with large blogrolls), so they're more willing to replace a bad link with a link to you if it's already external.
Sunday, September 18, 2011
How to Pick an SEO Friendly Designer
A Web designer is one of the persons without whom it is not possible to create a site. However, when SEO is concerned, Web designers can be really painful to deal with. While there are many Web designers, who are SEO-proficient, it is still not an exception to stumble upon design geniuses, who are focused only on the graphic aspect of the site. For them SEO is none of their business and they couldn't care less for something as unimportant as good rankings with search engines. Needless to say, if you hire such a designer, don't expect that your site will rank well with search engines.
If you will do SEO on your own, then you might not care a lot about the SEO skills of your Web designer but still there are design issues as we'll see next, which can affect your rankings very badly. When he or she designs the site against SEO rules, then it is not possible to fix this with SEO tricks.
When we say that you need to hire a SEO-friendly designer, we presume that you are a SEO pro and you know SEO but if you aren't, then have a look at the SEO Tutorial and the SEO Checklist. If you have no idea about SEO, then you will hardly be able to select a SEO-friendly designer because you won't know what to look for.
One of the ultimate tests if a designer is SEO-friendly or not is to look at his or her past sites – are they done professionally, especially in the SEO department. If their past sites don't exhibit blatant SEO mistakes, such as the ones we'll list in a second and they rank well, this is a recommendation that this person is worth hiring. Anyway, after you look at past sites, ask the designer if he or she did the SEO for their past sites because in some cases it might be that the client himself or herself has done a lot to optimize the site and this is why the site ranks well.
Here is a checklist of common web design sins that will make your site a SEO disaster. If you notice any or all of the following in the past sites your would-be designer has created, just move to the next designer. These SEO-unfriendly design elements are absolute sins and unless the client made them do it, no designer who would use the below techniques deserves your attention:
1 Rely heavily on Flash
Many designers still believe that Flash is the next best thing after sliced bread. While Flash can be very artistic and make a site look cool (and load forever in the browser), heavily Flash-ed sites are disaster in terms of SEO. Simple HTML sites rank better with search engines and as we point out in Optimizing Flash Sites, if the use of Flash is a must, then an HTML version of the same page is more than mandatory.
2 No internal links, or very few links
Internal links are backlinks and they are very important. Of course, this doesn't mean that all the text on a page must be hyperlinked to all the other pages on the site but if there are only a couple of internal links a page, this is a missed chance to get backlinks.
3 Images, not text for anchors
This is another frequent mistake many designers make. Anchor text is vital in SEO and when your links lack anchor text, this is bad. It is true that for menu items and other page elements, it is much easier to use an image than text because with text you can never be sure it will display correctly on users' screens, but since this is impacting your site's rankings in a negative way, you should sacrifice beauty for functionality.
4 Messy code and tons of code
If you have no idea about HTML, then it might be impossible for you to judge if a site's code is messy and if the amount of code is excessive but cleanness of code is an important criterion for SEO. When the code is messy, it might not be spiderable at all and this can literally exclude your site from search engines because they won't be able to index it.
5 Excessive use of (SEO non-friendly) JavaScript
Similarly to Flash, search engines don't love JavaScript, especially tons of it. Actually, the worst with JavaScript is that if not coded properly, it is quite possible that because of the use of JavaScript your pages (or parts of them) are not spiderable, which automatically means that they won't be indexed.
6 Overoptimized sites
Overoptimized sites aren't better than under-optimized. In fact, they could be much worse because when you keyword stuff and use other techniques (even when they are not Black Hat SEO) to artificially inflate the rankings of the site, this could get you banned from search engines and this is the worst that can happen to a site.
7 Dynamic and other SEO non-friendly URLs
Well, maybe dynamic URLs is not exactly a design issue but if you are getting a turn-key site - i.e. it is not up to you to upload and configure it and to create the links inside - then dynamic URLs are bad and you have to ask the designer/developer not to use them. You can rewrite dynamic and other SEO non-friendly URLs on your own but actually this means to make dramatic changes to the site and this is hardly the point of hiring a designer.
These points are very important and this is why you need to follow them, when you are choosing a SEO-friendly designer. Some of the items on the list are so bad for SEO (i.e. Flash, JavaScript) that even if the site is a design masterpiece and you promote it heavily, you will still be unable to get decent rankings. SEO-friendliness of design is a necessity, not a whim and you shouldn't settle for a SEO-unfriendly designs – this can be really expensive!
Five SEO Tips You Should Know.
Traditional search engines are the searchable results of automated programs that index the web using multiple “spiders” or “bots”. The web marketer should optimize for these bots by knowing how spiders read a page, index it, and rank it. Marketers should know how to read the SE results and glean optimization ideas from them for basic SEO techniques. Spiders need a path to follow in order to find pages. This is why inbound linking is so crucial to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Search engines, that “sniff out” a site from multiple quality links, will rank that site higher in link relevancy.
Stress link quality not link quantity.
Search engine optimizing no longer means maximizing. In the past, web marketers would create mirror sites on similarly-named domains that all pointed to a system of ad pages. Web marketers would also create a formidable volume of interlinked “doorway pages”, the theory being that this improved their chances of being spidered by the big search engines.
Doorways and mirror sites are no longer in the wise SEO arsenal of basic SEO techniques. Multiple sites with low relevancy linking to a site may give a site a temporary boost, but for long-term results, quality links are necessary for the website to be well-ranked. The marketer will also want to stay away from scripted methods that attempt to masquerade as blogs or similar quality sites to the search engines.
In large part due to all the spamming, Google eventually downgraded the value of link quantity in favor of link quality. For instance, Google places much greater emphasis on “trusted” links or “content-rich sites”. Yahoo.com is a “trusted link“. Modern examples of “content rich links” might include one-way links from blogs, lenses, information hubs, content articles, and similar sites. It is also beneficial to remember, in light of basic SEO techniques, that Twitter is a search engine and will be more and more in play in days to come.
Keywords ARE important in basic SEO techniques.
Gone are the days of keyword stuffing (filling a page or tags with keywords. Keywords are still vital, but they must be placed in the text, and in proper context with relevancy to the site itself. Relative keyword density is now the important factor. There are many excellent keyword search utilities on the web, even a couple of free ones. There are many theories on keyword choice. Some web marketers prefer less-popular, more targeted keywords. Others say it is better to rank #192 on Google for the keywords “free stuff” than #1 for “free eyeglass cases”, for instance.
Domains.
If a domain has been around for more than two years, its “ranking karma” is improved. Domains are a great help with basic SEO techniques. Purchasing domains from the drop list (the list of domains that have expired and are no longer held by the database), with more than two years of history, may be one low-radar way to improve your site’s Google credibility. A domain with keywords that match the site’s is also helpful.
Who is your visitor?
In order to find the right traffic, it is important for the web marketer to know what type of traffic he seeks. Who is your customer? To whom must you market? From which types of sites are they more likely to come? Has the site been listed in high relevancy directories? Can you post your link to forums and blogs that deal with the topic of your site?
The best basic SEO techniques include search engine optimization for the future.
A marketer who builds the best site possible, with regularly updated unique content, and thereby has other sites linking to them, will not have to do a lot of optimizing. The site will optimize itself.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is very important. It can make or break a campaign. All of your web pages should have targeted keywords, but which ones? How do you research and choose the right keyword for your project?
There are specific keyword research tools online that help SEO find the right keywords for their campaigns. There are free and paid tools available.
Below is a short list of the ones I recommend (free and paid).
Free Keyword Research Tools
Paid Keyword Research Tools
Because it’s free, I will use Google keyword tool for this article.
Basic keyword research is fairly simple.
First, you will have to enter a keyword or phrase that best describes your project or web site. For this example, I will use the phrase “Real Estate”.
As you can see, globally, over 30 million searches are made for the phrase “Real Estate” every month. Ranking on the first page of Google for this phrase would be very profitable but to do so will take an extensive amount of money and time.
If you sort the results by global monthly searches, you’ll see that the phrase “real estate in new jersey” has only 246,000 monthly searches. It has significantly less searches than the phrase “real estate” but, selecting a longer tailed keyword like this will be more targeted to your business (if you have a real estate business in New Jersey).
This keyword will take less time and cost less to optimize for because there is less search volume and less competition. You can use even longer tailed keywords like “buy real estate in new jersey” or “new jersey real estate for sale”.
Remember, just because the keyword has less search volume doesn’t mean it will be less profitable.
It is very hard to have a successful search engine optimization campaign without proper keyword research. Your main objective, when selecting a keyword is to get your website to show in the search results for key phrases that will benefit your project or business.
How Do I Find The Right Keywords?
There are specific keyword research tools online that help SEO find the right keywords for their campaigns. There are free and paid tools available.Below is a short list of the ones I recommend (free and paid).
Free Keyword Research Tools
Paid Keyword Research Tools
Market Samurai is a reasonably priced product and most importantly, it is a very powerful tool for researching key words.
A free alternative would be Google keyword tool. It features a high quality, clean and frequently updated keyword database.
Wordtracker is also a good alternative but it is limited to 100 results. If you want to see all the keywords, you will have to pay.
How Do I Choose The Right Keyword?
Because it’s free, I will use Google keyword tool for this article.Basic keyword research is fairly simple.
First, you will have to enter a keyword or phrase that best describes your project or web site. For this example, I will use the phrase “Real Estate”.
Be realistic with keyword selection
If you sort the results by global monthly searches, you’ll see that the phrase “real estate in new jersey” has only 246,000 monthly searches. It has significantly less searches than the phrase “real estate” but, selecting a longer tailed keyword like this will be more targeted to your business (if you have a real estate business in New Jersey).
Remember, just because the keyword has less search volume doesn’t mean it will be less profitable.
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