Prepare and Update Your SEO for 2014

Captivate with Content
From an SEO perspective, search engines like Google  will continue to provide users with the most relevant data. Since users are searching with more semantic queries, as content marketers and business owners, we must focus on quality over quantity.

Proper Promotion 
When it comes to marketing your content, keep in mind that it is usually twice as difficult to market your content than it was to write it.  A great article is nothing when it is not reaching its intended readers, so take some time to find the appropriate channels.

Give Social Media Some Love
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 have swept through.

 Build Links
The concept of link building is where SEO becomes very murky because most search engines have penalized many sites in the past for obtaining links from shady sources.  In 2013, Google updated their algorithm to lower the rank of sites that utilized black hat SEO techniques like “link farms” or “link circles” and will continue to penalize websites that link to sites that aren’t industry relevant or significant in any way.

INCREASE MOBILE SALES WITH FACEBOOK SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Facebook marketing takes on a variety of different styles depending on the business client. Whether you are a small business, large company, blogger, author or musician, Facebook marketing can be defined by your goals such as increasingtraffic or mobile sales. When strategies target mobile users, they have to consider the way that a person is accessing content and how they will interact with the page. The marketing strategies that you use to gain more mobile sales will also be an extension of your business’ homepage. There are three things to target with Facebook social media marketing. These include:

• Facebook Likes or Fans
• Engagement with Mobile Consumers
• Mobile Sales Targeting

Increase Facebook Mobile Followers

One of the ways that companies integrate Facebook followers with their mobile marketing strategy is to email target audiences with the news of a new Facebook page. Your Facebook page should already be optimized for mobile browsing. You can create a landing page to welcome visitors and even include an email subscriber signup. It’s best if you offer something in return for someone liking or signing up such as discounts or free t-shirts. You may also want to host contests and drive social media through your Facebook by holding mobile-centric contests. For example, you can integrate with an Instagram contest showing off one of your company’s latest products. The winner gets a grab bag of goodies. These contests, free gifts and landing pages ultimately lead more people to want to like your page on Facebook.

Tools like Heyo make it easy to create mobile-friendly Facebook contests. This software reroutes the URL automatically for mobile users so they always go to your mobile contest page.

Stay Engaged with Facebook Community

There are a variety of ways to stay engaged with your mobile community. You can run polls using the Facebook “Question” feature or you can also use third party survey tools. You may want to include other social media sites with your Facebook business page such as Twitter or Pinterest. There are also mobile tools from Hootsuite that you can use to respond to comments as quickly as possible on Facebook to stay updated and engaged with your followers. In addition, you should always add visual media to your Facebook such as images, slide shows, presentations and YouTube videos.

When you start to engage with your community, you should also track your ROI. There are tools like LogMyCalls to measure mobile marketing. This tool allows you to track every call that has been generated by mobile advertising and helps you to measure the return on investment.

The other thing a business must understand is how the public views your Facebook page on their mobile phones. In “Public” view, Facebook offers a summary that doesn’t show your entire timeline. Mobile viewers will be able to see your profile photo, cover image and a pinned post. You can use pinned post to ensure that mobile viewers see the most important content of the day. After your pinned post, mobile viewers see recommendations and check-ins. You should have recommendations set to visible in order to encourage more likes and followers. Photos taken at your company are shown next. These aren’t necessarily photos that you upload. Lastly, they will see your posts.

Mobile Sales Targeting

Since the mobile view of your Facebook page is rather condensed, you should set it up in a way that is inviting and original yet also drives sales. This means that your latest contest, promotion or product is included in your pinned post. You should also have a link to your online store embedded in your page profile and in most of your Facebook posts. You can also list your products for sale on Facebook or provide links to where people can find your products on iTunes, Amazon or Kindle.

One of the greatest things that you can do for your online store is to purchaseFacebook mobile advertising. These are targeted ads that will draw in sales every day to your store. Facebook has recently bolstered new efforts to improve mobile marketing on the social network.

As with anything mobile, it has to be convenient and clearly portrayed as authentic to the user. People want to like your content, but not if you spam them or fill your page with advertisements. By providing contests, promotions, gifts, helpful information and visual media, you offer a trustworthy relationship with mobile consumers.

Why Instagram is Still Relevant for SEO

Search engine optimization is the process of formatting document markup and content so that it is more readily understandable for the search engine. SEO also aims to help improve document ranking for a set of keywords that may appear on that document. Ultimately everyone would like to rank at the top of the search results and SEO is a legitimate approach to making this happen. However, is Instagram also a legitimate approach? Is it still relevant for SEO?

With the prolific use of these social networking sites, I think it’s safe to say that they can be relevant on how one use them in SEO. Search engines have been using social networking signals as a weight to indicate trustworthiness and relevance. However, in reality, these signals are not really a strong factor in ranking websites or any page for that matter. Google+ is still considered to be the only one which has a “direct” impact on Google’s search engine rankings; although Facebook and Twitter can be a great way to get your content or page to be indexed. 

Image Optimization 

However, it doesn’t end there. Sharing your photos are not enough. You should take advantage of hashtags. Promote pictures with hashtags coupled with the specified hashtag of your business or company. Hashtags create more exposure for your brand. They likewise make it simpler for people to locate your products. Most significant, hashtags can help you increase the quantity of your followers. Also, making use of keywords to name photos and write captions can, together with hashtags, make photos more searchable; and eventually, these will also show up on search engine result pages, which is always a benefit. Leveraging Instagram photos for image optimization can be yet another way to help with organic listing.

Instagram might not be as huge as Facebook and Twitter – at least not just yet. However, businesses are beginning to see this opportunity as they are now including this photo sharing social networking service in their search engine marketing campaigns. In the coming years, you can’t doubt that Instagram is still relevant for SEO.

How to optimize blogger post titles!!

How to optimize blogger post titles!!

Step 1.
                  Log in to your Blogger Dashboard and go to Template > Edit HTML

 

Step 2.  

                  Check the "Expand Widget Templates" checkbox

 

Step 3. 

                  Find (CTRL + F) this code:

 

Step 4.

                     Replace the code above with this one:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> |<data:blog.title/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title> </b:if>

Step 5.  

       

                      Click Save Template and you are done. 

Google's Matt Cutts Calls Out Nailing Another Link Network

The rumors floating around the SEO industry right now is that Google has crushed yet another link network. SAPE links, a link network I honestly never heard of, was the target this time. Any of those using SAPE links were supposedly penalized and downgraded in their rankings over the past 24 hours or so.

We have dozens of threads about downgrades of Google rankings but the black hat SEO forums all seem to point at SAPE Links as the cause.

Black Hat World and Black Hat Group both seem convinced the reason for the downgrade in rankings in Google yesterday was due to having links from SAPE links.

However, others are not sure if it is specific to SAPE or some other link network.

There is clearly something going on, it doesn't seem to be an algorithmic update but it does seem to be a targeted penalty attacking specific link networks and the sites/webmasters that use them.

Here is a list of threads that are complaining about ranking declines at Google Webmaster Help.

A tweet from about a month ago from Google's Matt Cutts kind of supports this. SAPE Links is a Russian link network:

TLA's home page PageRank is still a 6 but the link sellers may have taken a hit?

Are you a TLA link seller? Did you notice a hit? Are you a TLA link buyer? Did you notice a hit?

Forum discussion continued at BlackHatWorld, WebmasterWorld and Twitter.

Basic SEO Techniques

Optimize your Title Tag
Every page on your website should have its own unique title tag. the length of the title tag is no more than 70 characters (including spaces).Be both intriguing and informative enough to prompt search engine users to click through to your page (as title tags are typically used in the snipped displayed in the natural search results).

Create compelling meta descriptions
Along with your title tags, the section of every page on your website should contain a customized meta description.These short page summaries should not be more than 150-160 characters long and should include at least one mention of your page’s target keyword phrase.

Utilize keyword-rich headings
When it comes to your pages body text, one of the best things you can do to improve your overall SEO value is to include <h2> and heading tags containing your target keyword phrases in your content.

Add ALT tags to your images
The content found in the ALT tag field is also important when it comes to SEO.Use your ALT tags to clearly and accurately describe your website’s images, working in keyword phrases as they occur naturally.

Create a sitemap
One of the best things you can do to help the spiders index your website is to create a sitemap – a page listing links to all the other pages on your site. There are plenty of different automated tools that can generate these important pages for you, though you can always create a sitemap by hand if your site is small.

Build internal links between pages
Another way to help the search engine spiders to catalogue all of your site’s pages is to create internal links that connect your different pieces of content.

Update your site regularly
You will want to implement is to update your site periodically. Because the search engines’ top priority is serving up the results that will best meet their users’ needs, they prefer to share websites that contain the latest, most up-to-date information. In addition, the more content you post to your site, the more keywords your website will include – increasing your odds of generating search engine traffic.

Social Media Growth Forecast: Google+ to overtake Facebook?

Social networks, and in particular the user signals that flow from these platforms into the net, play an increasingly important role in the overall perception. Shares, Likes, Comments, Plus Ones, Tweets and Pins coming from anywhere, promoting recommendations, URLs, images, and content through the Internet – all of which are closely linked to personal user information from the Social Graph. Social is just important for Search – and we now have more than 20 trillion global social signals in this large and continuously growing database.

Comparing Social Signals from Google+ and Facebook

We recently carried out an analysis taking social signals from Facebook and Google+ and placing them under the microscope. The basic message: Google+ is growing like crazy, but is in absolute terms still worlds behind Facebook. The fact that Google+ percentage grew much stronger than initially proposed is especially surprising. However, the activity of users on the Google network is much more behind. The social platform of founder Mark Zuckerberg grew more moderately, but is already incredibly large. Concerning both absolute numbers of social signals and the activity of users, Facebook is seemingly indisputably ahead.
The first analysis on Facebook and Google+ has been revised and repeated. In the center of the investigation, the shares as signals from both networks were now measured exclusively. Based on these values, we have calculated the percentage growth of Google+ and Facebook starting from January 2012 to the current period of April 2013. The graph below represents figures for the United States:

Again Google’s network shows a strong percentage of growth – especially the striking increase from February to April. With Facebook however, the curve only rises very slowly. If you look at the absolute numbers to the right you can see why this is.

In the month of April 2013, the absolute number of Shares for Facebook was fifteen times greater than that of Google PlusOnes. The Google network is growing at the stage of small to small which therefore is fast. Facebook is growing from its extremely large base to something larger, and is therefore slower.
The remarkable thing is that Facebook is still growing. And that’s why the blue giant appears to be unquestionably ahead of the market.

How can Google+ overtake Facebook?

With the support of new services like Google Glasses and the mandatory creation of a Google+ account as part of Android Activation for smartphones, the rise of Google+ accounts will only continue to increase as new services become automatically linked to profiles. Not long ago, Google announced that its Android operating system has over 900 million activations. A large part of it is directly connected to a service and Google+ profile. Last year alone, this meant a growth of over 100% on the basis of 400 million about a year ago.This interested us and we wanted to know precisely when this would happen. Therefore, we have developed a small growth forecast.

When will Google+ be bigger than Facebook?

First, I want to emphasize that the following calculation – in stark contrast to our other publications – is rather a small glimpse of what the future might be, not a scientific claim. There are many factors that can change how the networks evolve.
Ultimately, growth rates are constantly changing – which in itself is always the variable ratio of the calculation basis related (condition: before and after), i.e. the increasing network size as absolute value, and the growth rate as a percentage size.
Now let’s take a look at the numbers. The basis for the calculation are the percentage growth rates of the two networks of the last 6 months, referring to the rise of social signals or, more precisely, only the shares.
Over this period, Facebook saw a monthly average growth of almost 10 percent, while Google+’s average grew by almost 19 percent per month (again, we refer to U.S. figures). These values form the basis for our forecast. So if this should remain so, we see the development of the two networks for the coming years is as follows:

One thing that is clear in this chart is the incredibly rapid growth of Google+. With a constant percentage growth, Google+ will overtake Facebook in less than 3 years in February 2016.