Tuesday, 14 June 2016

Reputation Management Basics

Reputation Management shows businesses what people are saying about them, improves their visibility in local search and provides progress reports to prove your agency’s worth.

It is entirely possible to make these negative search results disappear. It's not an act of magic, but a tried and true technique that has helped thousands of businesses clear up their reputations online, correct inaccuracies and project a positive image of them. We're skilled at removing attacks, rumors, distortions and inappropriate slanders against companies online.

A review or website that says something negative about your business or personal life can cause serious damage. Online, your reputation is everything! Trust, credibility, and the value you offer - these things are essential on the World Wide Web. One negative review or website can destroy the trust you've spent years building and drive away thousands of potential customers. It can even cost you a future job. Any smart individual will Google you or your company before engaging in any business with you.

Anybody can speak negatively about an individual or business. Unfortunately in today's world, you are who Google says you are. What makes it even worse is you cannot stop anybody from Goggling your name BUT WE CAN CONTROL THE RESULTS THEY SEE.


• Google your company's name and see what shows up. "If there are any sites that are negative or that you don't control, try to push them down in the search results with your own profiles on social media sites,
• Several experts suggested using Google Chrome's Incognito mode to search for your company or brand names. Incognito strips out some, though not all, of the personalized search results Google serves to recognized users and presents a more generic view that's closer to what others might see.

• Look at the first three pages of your search results, not just the first page, because a negative piece of content on page 3 can eventually make its way to page 1.

• Create a spreadsheet that contains all of the search results from the first three pages of your search. Indicate which results are positive, negative or neutral, as well as which ones you control or influence and the ones you don't. This establishes a baseline for your online reputation that you can later use to assess your reputation enhancement efforts. Take screen shots of each Google search results page at the beginning and periodically repeat the exercise.

• Immediately respond to unhappy customers on social media and directory sites such as Yelp. Showing compassion and owning up to any mistakes you make goes a long way toward repairing the damage and proves to anyone viewing the conversation that you take customer service seriously.

• If someone mentions something positive about you on a site such as Yelp, reward him or her with a coupon, freebie or a simple thank you.

• Optimize brand video with your company name on YouTube, which is widely considered to be the second largest search engine. "In some cases, Google ranks YouTube videos higher than actual websites,"

Search Engine Optimization Basics

Google returns more than 240 Million search results in the US every day. If you are trying to connect with your audience, optimizing your ranking in search results is an important component of your marketing and promotion plan. SEO techniques will help you structure your content so that the content is easy to find when someone searches for what you have to offer.

Successful SEO depends on your ability to intelligently apply the principles of good structured information design. SEO isn’t something you do to search engines; SEO is what you do to your content so that the content is accessible and useful for real users.

SEO is only useful if you have good content. SEO does not put lipstick on a pig. Delivering good original content from trusted sources is the work of search engine companies like Google and Yahoo! Search engines do not serve their clients by delivering mediocre or misleading content. If you do not have good content, no amount of SEO work will build long-term value.

Below is a broad four-step process for a strategy for search engine optimization.


Target Market Business Analysis

Website analysis. Analysis of Meta sets/keywords, visible text and code to determine how well you're positioned for search engines. For example, how much code do you have on a page compared to text?
Competitive analysis. Examination of content keywords and present engine rankings of competitive websites to determine an effective engine positioning strategy. Pick the top five results in the Google listing results to begin this process.

Initial keyword nomination. Development of a prioritized list of targeted search terms related to your customer base and market segment. Begin with this: What would you type into a search engine to find your business website or page?

Keyword Research and Development

Keyword analysis. From nomination, further identify a targeted list of keywords and phrases. Review competitive lists and other pertinent industry sources. Use your preliminary list to determine an indicative number of recent search engine queries and how many websites are competing for each keyword.

Baseline ranking assessment. You need to understand where you are now in order to accurately assess your future rankings. Keep a simple Excel sheet to start the process. Check weekly to begin.

Goals and Objectives. Clearly define your objectives in advance so you can truly measure your ROI from any programs you implement. Start simple, but don’t skip this step. Example: You may decide to increase website traffic from a current baseline of 100 visitors a day to 200 visitors over the next 30 days.

Content Optimization and Submission

Create page titles. Keyword-based titles help establish page theme and direction for your keywords.
Create Meta tags. Meta description tags can influence click-through but aren't directly used for rankings. (Google doesn't use the keywords tag anymore.)

Place strategic search phrases on pages. Integrate selected keywords into your website source code and existing content on designated pages. Make sure to apply a suggested guideline of one to three keywords/phrases per content page and add more pages to complete the list. Ensure that related words are used as a natural inclusion of your keywords. It helps the search engines quickly determine what the page is about.
Develop new sitemaps for Google and Bing. Make it easier for search engines to index your website. Create both XML and HTML versions. An HTML version is the first step. XML sitemaps can easily be submitted via Google and Bing webmaster tools.

Submit website to directories (limited use). Professional search marketers don’t submit the URL to the major search engines, but it’s possible to do so. A better and faster way is to get links back to your site naturally. Links get your site indexed by the search engines.

Continuous Testing and Measuring

Test and measure. Analyze search engine rankings and web traffic to determine the effectiveness of the programs you’ve implemented, including assessment of individual keyword performance. Test the results of changes, and keep changes tracked in an Excel spreadsheet, or whatever you're comfortable with.

Maintenance. Ongoing addition and modification of keywords and website content are necessary to continually improve search engine rankings so growth doesn’t stall or decline from neglect. You also want to review your link strategy and ensure that your inbound and outbound links are relevant to your business.

Wednesday, 8 June 2016

Ethical SEO in This Year

The Internet is a huge factor in how marketing is performed nowadays, and keeping up with the latest SEO trends is important to keeping your marketing edge. This is because traditional push marketing is being replaced by more cost-effective inbound marketing strategies like search engine optimization (SEO), that drives targeted audiences to you as opposed to out bound marketing where you are marketing to the masses and hoping you reach the right people.

Content is King. Google’s latest search engine algorithms focuses more and more on content, which means there is less focus on keyword saturation and more focus on whether or not the content is actually relevant to the keywords. You should continue to generate high-quality content that uses appropriate, relevant keywords and synonyms for those keywords, but focus more on the content than the words themselves.

Social Signals Will Be Even More Important. Changes within the search engine algorithms have not just placed greater importance on the content, but they’ve also begun to rely more upon social signals to elevate results up the ladder in search ranking importance. Eventually, we expect to see content and social signals integrated, with content of higher quality getting more social shares and thus rising higher in the search engine results.


Online Security Will Become More Important in Rankings. If your website deals with online payments and sensitive customer information, you need to make sure you are using proper security measures to safeguard that information. For example, using security certificates and https instead of http will help your website grow in search engine rankings in 2015. If you want to confirm the security of your website, check out WordPress Support.

Mobile-Friendly SEO will grow. The mobile user experience is rumored to be another important ranking factor in Google’s search engine algorithm, since the mobile Internet has surpassed the desktop Internet and will continue to grow in 20125. Estimates say that in 2015, there will be as many as 50 billion local searches using mobile devices—wouldn’t you want to be found in those searches?

Increased focus on conversations instead of keywords. Semantic search became a big deal in 2013, with Google’s Hummingbird update. Search engines are now using context, meaning, and intent of the words in a search query, instead of just focusing on matching up keywords. This means long-tail, or more “conversational,” keyword phrases will grow in importance for SEO, and you should begin to tailor some of your SEO efforts towards engaging in a conversation with search engine users.

Link Building Will Focus on Brand Mentions. In 2015, proper link building will continue to be important. What’s changed, though, is how the search engines will interpret those backlinks coming to and from a website. The content will get more of the focus, so you need to think about relevance and social popularity. Brand mentions, relevant information the source website is discussing about your brand or website, might not require a hyperlink but will still factor into SEO.

There Will Be More Visual-Based SEO. High quality, original content featuring visual media elements like graphics, images, and video are becoming high performing assets for the top-ranked web pages in 2014, and this is expected to continue throughout 2015. Rich text with visual elements gets priority in SERPs over web pages with just text, and video marketing on YouTube can generate a huge amount of link and social sharing traffic for your site.

Say So Long to Keyword Rankings, and Hello to Return on Investment. The primary focus in 2015 will switch from keyword rankings to more important elements that would impact your ROI. If your top-ranked web page doesn’t generate conversions and sales, that top ranking doesn’t matter. You will need to apply new SEO strategies that focus beyond link building and keywords, and account for how your content engages with your audience and convinces them to convert into leads or sales.


Content is King in SEO

Once upon a time, if you wanted to use SEO to increase your rankings, you simply crammed your website as full of keywords as possible. Some less scrupulous web designers crammed their sites full of popular, but irrelevant, keywords. Of course, that only worked for websites who only wanted to display ads and were not concerned with getting visitors to come back.

Today, SEO isn't just for con men anymore. Respectable businesses are learning how to optimize their websites so they can be found by people who are searching for the products and services they want to sell. This means, of course, that they don't just want visitors to drop by once. They hope to keep them coming back. This is why content is so important.

Webmasters and SEO experts have a saying: “Content is King.” It's very true. A website's content, even more so than its products, is what attracts visitors. If you can't write good content yourself, TechKnowSys can help you by providing an author who can write SEO-optimized for your industry.

Quality means that the content should be well written and be free from those embarrassing typos that make visitors wonder if your website really knows what it's talking about. For our purposes, however, it also means that content should be rich in keywords, informative and interesting, so that the visitor feels they've learned something. Such is the power of Quality content.



How often should you add new content to your site? This is where experts differ. Some say once a week is often enough. Others say twice a day, at least. It depends on the nature of the site, of course; a website's commercial blog should be updated once - or even twice - per day. Static content, however, can be added once or twice a week. Try to space it out. Going for weeks without adding anything then suddenly adding ten different articles isn't going to get you anywhere.

Quantity, on the other hand, means that your website should be updated regularly with new content added. A visitor may return to an informational article once, or even two or three times, but if your website's content never changes, eventually, there will be no reason for him to return.


It's the creation and publication of original content -- including blog posts, case studies, white papers, videos and photos -- for the purpose of generating leads, enhancing a brand's visibility, and putting the company's subject matter expertise on display. HiveFire's researchers found that an impressive 82 percent of B2B marketers now employ content marketing as a strategy in their marketing programs. Coming in at a distant second place is search engine marketing at 70 percent, followed by events at 68 percent, public relations at 64 percent and print/TV/radio advertising at 32 percent.

Best Practices for Structuring Urls

Whenever possible, use a single domain & subdomain

It's hard to argue this given the preponderance of evidence and examples of folks moving their content from a subdomain to subfolder and seeing improved results (or, worse, moving content to a subdomain and losing traffic). Whatever heuristics the engines use to judge whether content should inherit the ranking ability of its parent domain seem to have trouble consistently passing to subdomains.

The more readable by human beings, the better
                                        
It should come as no surprise that the easier a URL is to read for humans, the better it is for search engines. Accessibility has always been a part of SEO, but never more so than today, when engines can leverage advanced user and usage data signals to determine what people are engaging with vs. not.

Keywords in URLs: still a good thing

It's still the case that using the keywords you're targeting for rankings in your URLs is a solid idea. This is true for several reasons.


Multiple URLs serving the same content? Canonicalize 'em!

If you have two URLs that serve very similar content, consider canonicalizing them, using either a 301 redirect (if there's no real reason to maintain the duplicate) or a rel=canonical.

Shorter > longer

Shorter URLs are, generally speaking, preferable. You don't need to take this to the extreme, and if your URL is already less than 50-60 characters, don't worry about it at all. But if you have URLs pushing 100+ characters, there's probably an opportunity to rewrite them and gain value.

Match URLs to titles most of the time (when it makes sense)

This doesn't mean that if the title of your piece is "My Favorite 7 Bottles of Islay Whisky (and how one of them cost me my entire Lego collection)" that your URL has to be a perfect match.

Including stop words isn't necessary

If your title/headline includes stop words (and, or, but, of, the, a, etc.), it's not critical to put them in the URL. You don't have to leave them out, either, but it can sometimes help to make a URL shorter and more readable in some sharing contexts. Use your best judgment on whether to include or not based on the readability vs. length.

Limit redirection hops to two or fewer

If a user or crawler requests URL A, which redirects to URL B. That's cool. It's even OK if URL B then redirects to URL C (not great—it would be more ideal to point URL A directly to URL C, but not terrible). However, if the URL redirect string continues past two hops, you could get into trouble.

Hyphens and underscores are preferred word separators

Notably missing (for the first time in my many years updating this piece) is my recommendation to avoid underscores as word separators in URLs. In the last few years, the search engines have successfully overcome their previous challenges with this issue and now treat underscores and hyphens similarly.

Keyword stuffing and repetition are pointless and make your site look spammy

Check out the search result listing below, and you'll see a whole lot of "canoe puppies" in the URL. That's probably not ideal, and it could drive some searchers to bias against wanting to click.

Tuesday, 31 May 2016

Pay Per Click Advertising vs. Organic SEO

Pay per Click (PPC) advertising is a paid online advertising model, such as Google Adwords. Pay per Click results typically appear as "sponsored links" above or beside the normal (aka Organic) Search Engine results.
Organic search engine results are the natural, unpaid search engine results that are determined by the Search Engine. These are generally varied and contain a lengthier (though not always clear) description of the web page they are presenting.

While both Organic and PPC results are displayed on the same page, there are numerous differences between them:

Pay Per Click results can start showing up immediately as compared to organic search results which may take several weeks to appear. With PPC you are paying for your ads to be displayed when certain key phrases or keywords are entered in a search.

With Organic results you do not necessarily have to do anything to acquire an Organic Search Engine position.  Providing your site is submitted to the Search Engine or alternatively your site has other sites linked to it, the Search Engines will crawl your website, "index" your pages and rank them based on how their "algorithms" assess the relevance of your pages content to the key words or phrases being searched. However, to achieve higher results in particular "key phrase" searches, many businesses are Search Engine Optimizing their websites.


Advantages and Disadvantages:

Organic Search Engine Optimization

Organic search engine rankings, even when paying a professional to SEO your pages, are more cost effective compared to a PPC campaign. According to a study conducted in 2012: 70% of the time search engine visitors click on organic search engine rankings while 30% click on the PPC results.

With organic SEO, there is no guarantee of a specific result. You are competing for position in the search engines and regardless how well each page is optimized there are other influences on how pages are ranked which may be beyond your control (things such as how many important sites link to yours and how much traffic your site gets also influence organic search results). If you are guaranteed highly specific results (i.e. "We'll get you the top spot on Google") by an Internet Marketing company, be wary.

Also the constantly changing search engine algorithms means the process needs to be reassessed periodically as you may have a great ranking one month but drop down a bit the next.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

The major advantages of a PPC campaign are that you can get immediate results and greater control of your listings (your budget is the only limit!). Bidding on Google AdWords and Yahoo Overture starts from $0.10 per click which implies a very cost effective method of acquiring customers.  The hidden drawback here however is that for competitive keywords and phrases the bidding can quickly soar to a very unattractive $15 per click!  Achieving top positions for competitive keywords can quickly blow your budget.

The optimal scenario for any website owner is to achieve top Organic Search Engine rankings for all the keywords and phrases that are important to your business - this would deliver a steady stream of qualified traffic to your website every hour and cost you nothing.  However, getting that position for anything other than niche markets and to maintain the position will require special services to optimize your website such as Search Engine Optimization. As a long-term strategy this is the way to go.

For those website owners who compete for highly competitive key phrases the top position in the Organic results is only achievable for one web site and PPC advertising is a powerful tool to reach the same audience.  PPC also allows you to run advertising campaigns in the short term (such as a sale) that would be pointless to optimize for organically.

Benefits of Responsive Web Design

Responsive web design is a hot topic nowadays and every company regardless the size and industry is working on their responsive design strategy. Responsive design gives companies opportunity to increase their sales and come closer to their users without significant investments, why, what, how?

Responsive design is the process of optimizing the layout in a way that all the important information is presented in an optimal viewing way; ease of reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling in any kind of device or screen size. In other words, it ensures that the website is effective and easy to use on any device. This eliminates the need for a different design and development phase for each new gadget on the market.

BENEFITS OF RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN

COST EFFECTIVE

Responsive website design can drastically cut down on development time and cost. Rather than spending the time and resources building a separate mobile website in addition to your traditional desktop website, the responsive design approach enables you to optimize your business for all the devices with a single website. One website costs less than two, and the savings can be substantial.


ENSURES A QUALITY USER EXPERIENCE

Browsing a responsive site with a mobile device you don’t have to waste time with zooming, shrinking, and pinching your screen. The site automatically adjusts to your screen size. The simplified reading and navigation drastically improves the usability of your site. For example, According to Google’s Think Insights on Mobile, there is a 61% chance that users abandon sites that are difficult to use, this means that if they quit you site them will go to your competitor’s site and you may lose the client. Your website is a marketing tool and it’s crucial to optimize it. By providing a quality user experience on all devices, you’re on the right track to keep your visitors satisfied and coming back for more.

HIGHER RANKINGS IN GOOGLE SEARCH

In April, 2015 Google officially claimed that responsive design will affect search rankings on mobile devices. Why it is important for Google? Because google’s mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”Aug 20, 2015 and this is exactly what responsive design offers: clean and user-friendly layout.

EFFICIENCY

It reduces operational efforts by improving efficiency. One update to the website cascades across all device types, rather than updating separate desktop and mobile websites. If you have multiple versions of your website that you’re tracking in Google analytics think of all the time and money you can save by condensing it all into one report.

ON-THE-GO ACESS

With smartphone sales on the rise, people want to be able to visit your website and find what they need easily and fast while they’re “on-the-go” and enjoy this experience rather than freaking out from poor navigation experience.

INCREASES SALES AND CONVERSION RATE

Responsive design removes some of the barriers that having multiple sites can present, i.e. in functionality, performance and consistent look and feel. Having a website that looks clean, modern, sleek, and easy to ready creates customer satisfaction and builds trust and trust builds revenue. Your responsive website makes it easier for users to Shop Online. If you’re selling anything on your website, a responsive design makes it super easy and enjoyable for users to browse and shop.

TIME-TO MARKET

Critical benefit of adopting a responsive design is that it takes less time than creating an additional stand-alone mobile site. Nowadays you need to adapt to the changing trends fast.