Tuesday, 29 March 2016

Social Media as a Marketing Tool

Social media allows smaller sized companies to compete against some of the larger companies and reach more customers. There are plenty of stats that showcase just how powerful social media is for businesses of all sizes. Here are some powerful numbers that make it more than evident that social media is the way to go in 2015:

• 63% of millennials say they stay updated on brands through social networks
• 46% of millennials rely on social media when making purchase online
• 89% of 18-29 year-olds are active on social media
• Marketers will spend $8.3 billion on social media advertising in 2015
• 78% of companies now say they have dedicated social media teams

Despite all of these stats, some businesses still aren’t sold on social media as a marketing tool. In fact, one in three small businesses doesn’t think social media is important for their business. One of the primary reasons for this is simply because they don’t realize all of the benefits it has to offer yet. And this is partially understandable due to the nature of social media. It’s used as a way to build brand awareness, fuel content marketing and other important aspects that aren’t as measurable as what small businesses are used to.


People have grown to hate unsolicited messages from marketers and will only fill out a survey if there’s some type of gift at the end which can taint the data. Social media gives you the opportunity to find out about your customers in a completely non-intrusive way. On top of that, you have the ability to see what your ideal customers are Tweeting about, what they put up on Instagram and other social media activity. All of this information lets you get a deeper look into who your customers are and what they like/dislike. Before social media you’d have to pay thousands of dollars to put together focus groups. But now it’s all at your fingertips.
People aren’t afraid to voice their opinions on social media. That makes it a great place to get honest and raw feedback of what people think about your products or services. You can monitor what’s being said about your business and resolve issues right away. This is a huge advantage.

People don’t only Tweet negative things about companies. Social media has done an amazing job of breaking down the wall that used to exist between businesses and customers. People post Instagram pictures of themselves enjoying their favorite brands, check in on Facebook when they go out to local bars and restaurants and happily show off their brand loyalty.


Traffic is something that all business owners want, but struggle to get organically. While search engine optimization is usually the first thing that comes to mind when it comes to traffic generation, social media can be just as effective. Sharing your blog posts and other content from your website on social media is an easy way to get more visitors. Just be sure that you’re not only Tweeting your own content. Curate content from other sites in your industry, share images and other types of media.

Importance of Fresh Content

Content was initially a simple concept for most online marketers – any content would do so long as it moved their handful of keywords up the search listings. Then, content marketing evolved. The swathe of keywords widened, and content marketers became newly concerned with content discovery on channels such as social and using content to build their brands and connect with their audience. Even if your company sells standard products that everyone uses on a daily basis, you still have to convince people to buy from you rather than the competitor. And if your company offers a product or service that is highly specialized, content presentation will be even more important to convey the various aspects of your business.

Fresh website content lets customers know you are committed to the industry, are an active business, and care about engaging with customers. Keeping the same stale news and copywriting for years generally shows a lack of dedication to the website. This sort of stagnate presentation often extends to a lack of dedication to quality and service in other areas of business, at least in the eyes of customers.


Freshness by Inception Date

A webpage is given a “freshness” score based on its inception date, which decays over time. This freshness score can boost a piece of content for certain search queries, but degrades as the content becomes older.

Document Changes (How Much) Influences Freshness

The age of a webpage or domain isn’t the only freshness factor. Search engines can score regularly updated content for freshness differently from content that doesn’t change. In this case, the amount of change on your webpage plays a role.

The Rate of Document Change (How Often) Impacts Freshness

Content that changes more often is scored differently than content that only changes every few years. In this case, consider the homepage of the New York Times, which updates every day and has a high degree of change.

Freshness Influenced by New Page Creation

Instead of revising individual pages, websites add completely new pages over time. This is the case with most blogs. Websites that add new pages at a higher rate may earn a higher freshness score than sites that add content less frequently.

Changes to Important Content Matter More

Changes made in “important” areas of a document will signal freshness differently than changes made in less important content. Less important content includes navigation, advertisements, and content well below the fold. Important content is generally in the main body text above the fold.

Rate of New Link Growth Signals Freshness

If a webpage sees an increase in its link growth rate, this could indicate a signal of relevance to search engines. For example, if folks start linking to your personal website because you are about to get married, your site could be deemed more relevant and fresh

Links from Fresh Sites Pass Fresh Value

Links from sites that have a high freshness score themselves can raise the freshness score of the sites they link to.

Changes in Anchor Text Signals may Devalue Links

If a website changes dramatically over time, it makes sense that any new anchor text pointing to the page will change as well.

User Behavior Indicates Freshness

What happens when your once wonderful content becomes old and outdated? For example, your website hosts a local bus schedule... for 2009. As content becomes outdated, folks spend less time on your site. They press the back button to Google's results and choose another URL.

Older Documents Still Win Certain Queries

Google understands the newest result isn’t always the best. Consider a search query for “Magna Carta". An older, authoritative result is probably best here. In this case, having a well-aged document may actually help you.

The goal of a search engine is to return the most relevant results to users. For your part, this requires an honest assessment of your own content. What part of your site would benefit most from freshness?

Old content that exists simply to generate page views, but accomplishes little else, does more harm than good for the web. On the other hand, great content that continually answers a user's query may remain fresh forever.

Recent Google Updates

Core Algo Update - January 8, 2016

Google representatives confirmed 'common core ranking algorithm updates' that ran for more than one week. It was also officially confirmed that the update 'It's not Penguin', 'nor Panda', although it could technically be connected to Panda given its recent integration into the core algo.

Panda as part of Core Algo - January 8, 2016

Panda was announced to no longer be a spam filter but one of the ranking signals, part of the core algo. It seems though that Panda scores do not run in real time, but on their own and at different intervals. The precise date when Panda was incorporated is yet to be known.

Unconfirmed update - November 18, 2015

Although numerous ranking fluctuations were reported across the industry, no official confirmation of a Google update was received, other than the usual 'We make 100s of changes every year'.


Mobile Friendly Update - April 21, 2015

As scheduled, Google announced they're starting the global roll out of their mobile-friendly update, affecting only search rankings on mobile devices. The update introduces mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor and applies to individual pages, not entire websites.

Pirate - October 24, 2014

After being criticized for a long time for not doing enough to fight piracy, Google finally announced an update its long neglected filtering system. Near the end of the month torrent tracker websites took a dive in the search results marking the rollout of the Pirate Update.

Penguin 3 - October 18, 2014

Google announced a new Penguin refresh that would be slowly rolling-out over the course of a few weeks and would be impacting less than 1% of English queries.

'In The News' box - October 02, 2014

Google made a change in the display of the News-box results, and later announced they had expanded the news websites links set, including Reddit feeds.

Panda 4.1 - September 23, 2014

Google announced a new Panda update, that would 'slowly rollout' in a two weeks interval. The new update aims to identify low-quality content more precisely and would affect 3 to 5% of queries, depending on location.

Authorship Removed - August 24, 2014

John Mueller of Google Webmaster Tools announced that Google will completely stop showing authorship information in search results - both author photos and bylines.

HTTPS/SSL as Ranking Signal - August 6, 2014

Following several months of testing, Google officially announced their decision to start using HTTPS as a ranking signal. Currently the update would affect less than 1% of queries, but we should expect for HTTPS to gain weight over time and lose its 'very lightweight signal' status.

Pigeon - July 24, 2014

A major local algorithm update was released, aiming to improve local search results. Although the core changes brought by the new algo are 'behind the scenes', Google announced that it 'ties deeper' into their core search algorithm.

Authorship Photo Drop - June 28, 2014

Google announces the drop of profile photo and circle count from authorship in search results, as consequence of their decision to clean up the visual design of search results.

Payday Loan 3.0 - June 12, 2014

Soon after Payday Loan 2.0, Matt Cutts announced the third version of the algorithm, designed to go after different signals. While 2.0 are targeting specific websites, spammy queries are the objective of this new update.

Panda 4.0 - May 19, 2014

Matt Cutts announced the release of a major Panda update, affecting different languages to different degrees. For English-language the amount of affected queries revolving around 7,5%.

Payday Loan 2.0 - May 16, 2014

After days of speculation, Google has confirmed a new update to their Payday Loan Algorithm, unrelated to Panda or Penguin, targeting 'very spammy queries'.



Wednesday, 23 March 2016

The Importance of Using Linkedin

LinkedIn is quite possibly one of the strongest online business tools available today. And so, I am constantly surprised when I find out people aren’t using it or barely using it. Here’s the truth: We live in an online world and if you’re in business you need to be on LinkedIn. That’s all there is to it.

LinkedIn is about networking

When LinkedIn started out, is was essentially an online resume. It was a place for you to advertise your skills and experience to potential hiring managers. Unfortunately, many people still think this is all it is. But I promise you it so much more!

People are looking for you

If you are in any sort of business, people are looking for you. In today’s world, one of the first things people do when starting a business relationship, is to look you up online. LinkedIn profiles rank highly in search results and provide a validated representation of who you are, on your terms. You can ensure that people looking for you will find what you want them to know!


Endorsements and Recommendations

Endorsements are an easy way for others to validate skills that you have listed on your profile. In order to receive these endorsements, you need to fill in the skills section on your profile. Recommendations, on the other hand, are almost priceless. These are personally written referrals from those who actually know you and who are willing to put their name and reputation behind you.

Connect and learn through groups

You are permitted to join up to 50 groups on LinkedIn. If you’re not taking advantage of these, you’re missing out on a ton of information! People upload blogs, articles, comments, questions, and suggestions to LinkedIn groups daily. These are all sources of valuable information and network connections that you should be taking advantage of.

LinkedIn is all about establishing connections. When you connect with other professionals in your field, you’re gaining more knowledge and insight since you’re interacting with colleagues. Have a question? Ask someone on LinkedIn. Want to know about upcoming events in your area? You can find out this information on LinkedIn as well. In other words, your connections on LinkedIn can help accelerate your career.

Promoting Yourself

You can also use LinkedIn as a way to promote yourself professionally. Whether you’re employed, looking for a job, or a business owner, think of your LinkedIn page as a personal website that can be used to share your accomplishments with your connections. After all, you now know what potential connections are out there; a high-profile partner or client could be impressed by your work.

Google Loves LinkedIn

Take a second and Google your name. What was one of the first results? If you have a LinkedIn profile, we’re willing to bet that it was one of the top results. For some reason, Google just loves LinkedIn, which is beneficial for managing search results. In other words, if you applied for a job or met someone at a networking event and they searched for you online, your LinkedIn profile would appear. That’s a major bonus if you’re attempting to expand your network.




Social Media Optimization Strategy

Most marketers are familiar with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on some level. Using the reach of search engines such as Google, Bing or more recently Duck Go to fuel your marketing campaign has been a strategy that’s been successful for years. But as social media has grown to become one of the top platforms to reach consumers, new approaches to digital marketing have started to emerge. One of the top strategies being used by businesses looking to maximize their reach online is Social Media Optimization (SMO).

The lines between social media marketing and search engine marketing are becoming increasingly blurred. In the past, they’ve been looked at as two separate and distinct aspects of marketing. But the reality is that they’re more intertwined than you might think.

While Google hasn’t stated that social media directly influences its search algorithm yet, there’s evidence to suggest that it does. One survey found that 50% of companies that aren’t succeeding with SEO aren’t integrating social media marketing.


A social media strategy should focus on growing your presence, and achieving measurable results. This post outlines how to setup your strategy in seven steps:

1. Ensure Your Social Goals Solve Challenges
2. Extend Efforts throughout Your Organization
3. Focus on Networks That Add Value
4. Create Engaging Content
5. Identify Business Opportunities through Social
6. Engage Instead of Ignore
7. Track, Improve and Market Your Efforts

In order to have a presence on social media, you've got to be on social media. Make sure to log in to each of your social media accounts, daily. Even over the weekends. Some of the best activity we've seen for businesses with a strong social media presence occurs during the weekends.

Making sure your social pages have regular activity is important. Leveraging the massive reach of social media to distribute content is easy and powerful. There are two different types of content you'll post; content you've created and content others have created.

Make it a goal to search out and find 5 new people to connect with, each day, through one of your social media networks. Find people who are interested in topics similar to what products or services you provide. Establish a connection and start a dialogue, ask for their opinions and thoughts on things.

It's great to be active on social media, but it's also a great tool to be able to perform very detailed competitive analysis. Each day you should be checking your competitor's social media pages and taking note of what they're doing. See which posts get the best responses and engagement from their fans. See what new things they're posting about and test similar posts with your audience.


Tips of Search Engine Optimization


Search Engine Optimization is a very hot topic on the World Wide Web. After-all, everybody wants to rank higher and come up on the first page of Google search and get more traffic. Sometimes it is easy to get carried away with SEO though. The best technique is to keep it simple and apply a bit of common sense.

Before you begin, you need to know the following:

• What you’re site is about

• What the purpose is

• How committed you are

Once you’ve settled on those three things, then it’s time to get to work. To optimize your whole site for search engines, you’ll need to follow these basic tips:

Make the website about one thing.

It can be about other stuff, too, but choose one primary topic that is most essential to your message.
This step is important, so you may want to do a little keyword research before choosing a topic.
Mention keywords where they matter most.

Include your “one thing” in the site title, domain name, description, tagline, keywords, blog categories, page titles, and page content.


Link to internal pages on your site.

A lot of content management systems automatically do this, but if yours doesn’t, you’ll want to be intentional about linking to your most important pages directly from your homepage and cross-linking them with each other.

Use a permalink structure that includes keywords.

Some sites have “ugly” permalink structures that use numbers to identify pages.
Don’t do this. It’s bad for SEO and just doesn’t look good.

Use a URL structure that includes text, and make sure you include keywords in your URLs.

Remove anything that slows down your website.

Page load times are important, so get rid of any non-essentials that bog down your website.
These may include music players, large images, flash graphics, and unnecessary plugins.

Use keywords in your images.

Include words that reflect your site topic in the image title, description, and alt attributes.
Also, re-title the file name if it doesn’t reflect your main keywords

Link to other websites with relevant content.

You can do this by including a blogroll, link list, or resources page on your website.
Of course, do it sparingly, as each outbound link is a “vote” for another site. However, if you do it well and people click your links; this tells search engines you are a trusted authority on your particular topic.

Update your website frequently.

Sites with dynamic content often rank higher than those with static content. That’s why blogs and directories (like Wikipedia) do so well on search engines. They are constantly being updated with new content.

Make sure your website is indexed in search engines.

A lot of search engines will automatically find and index your content, but don’t count on it.
You want to be sure engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo are crawling your site, so that people are finding you online.

Have other websites link to you.

This is really, really important, when it comes to SEO. The bummer is that it’s not something you can necessarily control. Other than creating excellent content, the only thing you can do is ask (which occasionally works).

My counsel is to spend the time you would try to convince somebody to link to you on just writing great content. And, start guest posting on other blogs.

Stop changing your domain name.

The age of your URL is a factor in your site’s search ranking, so be patient.
If you’re launching a new blog every six months, you’ll never see your site get the value it deserves.

Write like a human.

None of the above matters if you create content that sounds like a robot wrote it. Write great stuff, follow the steps above, have patience, and you’ll see results.

I realize that many of you have already started blogging, but many of these tips can be applied retroactively. And once if you done this, you can start writing regular content.


Monday, 14 March 2016

PageRank

Seriously, aside from a handful of networks and the random inquiries of some media buyers, when was the last time that you had someone bring up an Alexa ranking in any sort of real meaningful conversation? And sure, some people will argue that Alexa is still relevant and that you should care where your site ranks on something like Compete.com, but at the end of the day, the only thing that really matters are your actual traffic numbers. The thing is that the nature of the Internet has continued to change and evolve, arguably reducing the relevance of these metrics.

For many of us who have been making our living on the Internet for the last several years, Google PageRank was the metric that we wanted to chase. Google says it’s used to describe a page’s importance. Each time that Google went around updating the PR of all the sites on the web, we anxiously refreshed our PageRank toolbars to see if our blogs went up or down.


PageRank, for most intents and purposes, just doesn’t matter all that much anymore and it seems like Google is giving PR progressively less and less weight. A site with a high PR can still easily get outranked in the search engine results page (SERP) by a site with a lower PR. And many sites that haven’t seen any meaningful update in years can still hold very high PR for some inexplicable reason.

Given the rapid rise of social media and its influence on our thinking, Google had to find a way to incorporate these social signals into its algorithm. Now we know that Google looks at signals like the number of retweets, author authority, author quality, etc. (as does Bing). We don't know how Google is integrating these signals into the main Google algorithm but in the same SEOMoz report mentioned above its clear that social signals do influence regular web page rankings. So the fact that Google is now using social signals to rank plain old web pages doesn't mean that they aren't using PageRank as well.

Remember, when building links to your site, PageRank must be a secondary factor to the relevancy and quality of the content. So, if you get the opportunity to earn a link from a PR 2 site with relevant content and a PR 8 site with unrelated content, it is preferable to opt for the first but not the second.

Benefits of Content Marketing

Content is at the heart of today’s marketing strategies as businesses use websites and blogs to demonstrate their own expertise.

If you run any type of professional business today you’ll know that, in terms of marketing, the world has changed dramatically. Tried and tested activities for getting client attention just don’t work like they once did:

• Advertising rarely gets enough response to justify the considerable costs

• Your telemarketing efforts often get stonewalled

• The specialist press you relied on for coverage has shrunk or even disappeared

• The website you invested time and effort in creating doesn’t generate the leads you crave (and it’s really hard to update too)

• Even your trusted network isn’t delivering enough opportunities to keep you going anymore.


High-quality, unduplicated content on a brand’s onsite blog has a significant impact on SEO and search engine ranking for a couple of reasons. First, unique content published regularly with 300-500 words, internal links to other relevant content and naturally placed keywords helps a website rank organically for relevant search terms and keywords. A higher ranking ultimately exposes the brand to more digital consumers searching for content in its industry. Second, consistently publishing great content creates authority and opens up opportunities to build a glowing backlink profile.

Good content creates brand awareness and authority in a saturated market, which then has the potential to generate new leads and increase sales as more consumers become exposed to the brand. Good content is generally less “salesy” than advertorial, so it gives consumers an opportunity to authentically engage with the brand without a blatant sales message disturbing the engagement. Drowning consumers in product-oriented content can have a negative effect on their relationship with the brand, whereas good editorial fosters the relationship as they move from consumer to customer to brand advocate.

Not only is good-quality, original content great for SEO purposes, it’s also a brilliant way to drive traffic to a website and keep consumers on the site for longer. For example, a website with just a homepage and contact page will receive much higher bounce rates, limited page views and very little engagement, whereas a website with an onsite blog packed full of engaging content leaves an impression on the user and encourages them to interact with the site and visit multiple pages.

Content is what ultimately connects you with customers and prospects. It is what builds trust, especially as some data-driven marketing pushes consumers into very personal and customized experiences. All the data — big or small — we use just comes down to creating those precious moments of truth for a customer. And what is it that makes a moment of truth come alive? The content that resonates in that moment, that channel and that stage in the lifecycle.

The key is to be purposeful in your content marketing. It’s so integrated into our marketing processes that we often neglect to optimize or even consider efficiencies or opportunities. Every business is a publisher of some sort, through blogs and social media, email marketing, the website, whitepapers, customer presentation, internal and client training, executive summaries… all of this and more can be a strong foundation for a more purposeful content approach.

Benefits of Wordpress

WordPress is used around the world by people who want to power their website or blog with ease. It’s the world’s most popular CMS too, and with its SEO friendly URL structure, it’s easy to see why it is so popular with web masters and digital marketers.

WordPress is a robust content management system that powers many online businesses. There are a number of distinct advantages to using WordPress like SEO, easier management and many more. We will look into it, in this post but before that here is a myth buster for people who think, WordPress is just a Blogging platform. WordPress, is more than a Blogging platform and you can use it as a Website, social networking site (Buddypress), E-commerce site, Web directory and many more different uses of it.


Benefits of WordPress for your Business Site:

• Rapid development, deployment, updates; get and keep your site going in a fraction of the time/cost of earlier techniques

• Flexible site, page and navigation architecture; easy re-organization and dynamic re-design ‘on the fly’; adapt to changing needs

• Multi-author, multi-editor, etc. log-in accounts permit routine maintenance by non-technical staff and site owners; about as easy as word processing but with far more versatility including video, audio, animation, photography, graphics and other media. Do as much or as little yourself as you like

• Provides a way for staff with complementary skills to maintain different parts of your site – at the same time! Sections and pages of the site can be independently edited by different teams and/or individuals; structure, graphics and text content can all be edited independently, yet default to consistent ‘look and feel’, navigation and other thematic elements

• Content (e.g. serials, tutorials, RSS feeds, news, updates) can be uploaded automatically at regular intervals; allows invisible ‘vacation mode’ for authors who want daily updates while in remote locations without web access

• Portions of the site can be password-protected for limited and/or ecommerce access

• High degree of standards compliance due to XHTML/CSS/PHP database foundation ‘under the hood’; solid architecture minimizes browser compatibility issues and coding errors common with older approaches

• Fast and easy updates to stay current with latest best practices and technology; e.g. 1-click updates for Genesis and WordPress

• Enormous variety of open-source plug-ins and widgets that provide an astonishing depth and breadth of capabilities and enhancements; the capabilities of an environment like WordPress now match (and in most cases exceed) those of the older conventional web design tools and approaches for both blogs AND regular websites

• Anywhere, anytime access for editors, authors and admin staff; from mobile hand-held devices to laptops to desktop machines; anywhere there’s web access, the site can be updated – you can maintain your site and blog remotely!

• Highly customizable using style sheets, graphic and typographic design and other contemporary tools

• SEO-friendly architectures (e.g. StudioPress Genesis) offer excellent search engine, social networking performance, and social media integration

• Ubiquitous availability of popular, open-source WordPress themes and templates (many of them free like WordPress itself), as well as an ever-growing global community of designers, webmasters and CMS-savvy professionals allows easy transfer/migration to different web admin/design/maintenance staff; minimizes risk of obsolescent technology or support

Some of the biggest brands in the world use WordPress and have this way ‘checked ahead for landmines’. In other words, you know that WordPress can be a highly successful platform because it often is. That means you don’t need to worry that your CMS might be too limited, or that it might be bad for SEO – you have proof that it isn’t. Get the design right and the marketing and there’s no reason that you can’t be just as successful as those examples.

Monday, 7 March 2016

Importance of Online Advertisement

Whenever it comes to online advertising, Banner advertisement is always the preferred way to market your brand. What really matter is design of your banner, let me put some points to make you understand the importance of banner advertising.

Advertisement banner plays a major role in brand awareness. Suppose you start a web hosting company or a SEO company, but how people will know about it. There are various ways you can market your company but what really matter is the trust factor. People remember and trust the brand they see everywhere. These days ad retargeting let your target customer sees the ad everywhere they go.

A banner should be tempting enough that user will click on the advertisement. Along with it, make sure that user should understand what they are clicking on. You can see such example on direct advertisement banner at the lower right side of this blog.


While finding an advertisement for your brand or product, try to stick to your niche. For an example if you have a SEO company or web hosting company, a blog on Technology, Blogging or SEO will be the best option, instead of a high traffic blog on dogs and pets.

As explained above, landing pages should be simple and attractive so that user will understand in a glance that what they are looking at. If you are proving them a landing page with lots of unrelated material, despite of huge investment, your conversion will be very less.

The sole purpose of effective online marketing advertisements is to utilize a campaign strategy at the lowest possible cost and risk investment, in order to maximize sales potential and receive a high return on investment.
Online marketing allows for statistics to be measured more easily and at a lower cost. Virtually all elements of an online marketing campaign can be traced and tested in some way, shape or form. Methods in which this can be done include pay per impression (CPM: cost per thousand viewers), pay per click (PPC: a host company is paid every time an advertisement is clicked on), pay per play (PPP: pay per audio advertisement played) or pay per action (PPA: an advertiser pays for a specific action related to an advertisement, such as a form submission or a purchase). Web analytics are also a useful tool in being able to effectively track the exposure, response and overall efficiency of online marketing by collecting, analyzing and reporting back internet data. Here, advertisers can determine the best return on investment (ROI). Tracking and measuring can be done almost instantaneously since online marketing encourages interaction by clicking on the ad and visiting the website, as well as other target actions.

Search engine marketing companies who specialize in helping companies best market their products and services online can successfully place them on the top or first page of major search engines and directories, such as Google, MSN and Yahoo. This will ensure that competitors are kept at bay (at a lower level on a search engine website), with the sole aim of generating quick and efficient sales or services, as well as increasing a profit ratio.

Online marketing is a collaboration of elements that produce a successful web based advertising strategy or campaign. Identifying the tools needed and making the most of them requires an enormous amount of skill, practice and expert thinking minds. The work that is put in ultimately determines the level of success that will be achieved.