Showing posts with label Social media marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Social media marketing. Show all posts

Google Maps Revamps Quality Guidelines For Local Pages

What has changed with the new Google local page quality guidelines?


"Google Maps has updated their local pages quality guidelines last night. Jade Wang from the Google team posted the news in the Google Forums saying:
We’ve updated and clarified our quality guidelines for local pages. Please read the new version here, and, as always, feel free to contact our support team with any specific questions about your account."

There are a couple local SEO experts that have dug through the old guidelines to compare it to the new guidelines. I saved a screen shot of the old guidelines, which you can see over here.
Seo Experts in Mumbai - Vivek More

Mike Blumenthal documented the “obvious changes” including:
  1. Descriptors of any sort are NOT allowed
  2. Categories should be the more specific category and NOT the overarching, general category
  3. Increased name and category consistency amongst multi location chains
  4. Two or more brands at the same location must pick one name
  5. If Different departments are to have their own page they must have unique categories
  6. Practitioner’s pages, in multi location practices should have their name only and not the name of the practice
  7. Solo Practitioners only can use the format of Practice: Practitioner
  8. Virtual Offices are NOT allowed unless staffed.

Google Maps local have always been somewhat of the “wild west” of the search space. So many are asking, despite these guidelines, will Google actually have the man power and resources to actually enforce these rules?

Article Source: seoloversitescollection

7 Tips for Better Social Media Time Management

One of the biggest complaints I hear from business owners is that they struggle with social media time management. Managing your social media marketing looks overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. Use these tips to keep your time spent on social media under control.

1. Before you launch any kind of marketing campaign, figure out your goal for it. Do you want to increase your visibility? Have people contact you for a consultation? Position yourself as an expert? Decide what you want out of the campaign then tailor your actions to achieve that goal.

2. Know where your people are. Spend your time on the networking sites that your audience is using. It’s tempting to assume that they are on Facebook because everyone is on Facebook, but that may not be the case for your ideal clients. Some business owners find Twitter to be a better fit for their audiences. Your audience may be on LinkedIn. It may take some time up front to find out where your clients are, but it’s worth the effort.

3. Don’t try to be on every network out there. Pick social media networks to fit your goal. Quora, for example, will showcase expertise while LinkedIn presents you as a buttoned-up professional. Pinterest is a good choice if there is a visual component to your work. Focus your time on one or two networks. Remember that you can’t be everywhere at once.

4. Schedule updates in advance whenever possible. Use a tool like Buffer or Hootsuite to schedule your Tweets or status updates. Facebook also allows you to schedule updates in advance. You can post multiple times a day, but you only have to login once a day to look for replies or comments.

5. Create an editorial calendar. Invest the time once a quarter to plan your social media activities. Choose a topic for the month or week and base your activities around that topic. Planning ahead will ensure that your social media time is focused strategically on meeting your goals. This is especially important if you are using content marketing (which you should be doing as an important part of your online marketing strategy and SEO). It will also help you to avoid having to figure out each day what you will post on your Facebook page or what you will tweet about.

6. Set a time limit. It’s amazing how time can disappear when you’re on social media… you may log into your Facebook account with the intent of updating your business Facebook page only to find, 20 minutes later, that you still haven’t done so. If you find yourself getting sucked into social media, reading every tweet and following every link, you may find it helpful to set a limit on your social media time. Decide how much time you have and focus on activities that bring you closer to your goal. Just because you are logged in to a networking site, it doesn’t mean you are doing things to bring you closer to your goals.

7. Use alerts, lists and other tools to stay in the loop. Set up a Google alert so you know when someone talks about you, your business, or a topic of interest to you. (Google alerts is a service that allows you to identify a search query and then receive an email that notifies you when new content is published online about that term.) Twitter allows you to create lists so you can see what the people you are most interested in are saying. Use the interests option on Facebook to watch people and pages that are important to you.

Social media doesn’t have to be draining. Set a goal for your marketing efforts and make sure your activities are targeted toward that goal. Use the tools available to you to optimize the time you spend, and limit your time when necessary.


Article source: Ccmarketingonline

Author: Carolina 


SEO Experts in Mumbai - Vickeemore

Looking Ahead to the SEO Challenges of 2014 


2013 has been a tumultuous year for content marketers and SEO whizzes. The expansion of Penguin and Panda coupled with the launch of Hummingbird has shaken up much of the conventional wisdom regarding SEO marketing and shattered many of the shortcuts and tricks used in years past. With 2014 right around the corner, take a moment to assess the previous year’s efforts and reflect on what changes may still be in the works:

Mobile Technology vs. Massive Content

Google’s constant SEO updates do more than toy with SEO marketers. Ultimately, Google wants to provide the best return link for a user’s question. This goal means that more detailed data reaches the upper echelons of search engine returns. A study done by QuickSprout founder Neil Patel found that copy that ran around 2,000 words consistently landed on the first page of search results and, anecdotally, longer copy generated better leads and more response.

In many ways, the emerging importance of mobile content runs contrary to quality, in-depth content production. Mobile users need short, snappy content that can easily be navigated on a small screen. While full blown recreation of content into smaller bites for mobile users seems time consuming and like unnecessary work, bridging the gap between emerging technology and full screen marketing is a challenge marketers will face in the coming year. SEO marketers in 2014 will need to balance the importance of in-depth content with the short attention span and small screen size of mobile users.





Embrace Google+


While Google has chosen not to disclose the exact system for ranking webpages, the importance of Google+ and Google Authorship became ever more obvious in 2013. The unique URL provided to content published on Google+ creates more backlinks to work with, and the respectability of Google Authorship increases the amount of clicks produced from a search.

Climb of Visual Media

The way Internet users are gathering and sharing information has shifted slightly in the past few years. No longer is straight content enough; instead, sites like Pinterest and Instagram deal in visual content. While this, at first, seems outside the realm of content production, marketers need to continue developing links between content and pictorials.

Topic over Keyword

Hummingbird’s release also coincided with Google’s switch to a 100 percent secure search. SEO marketers who hadn’t responded to the increasing return of “keywords (not provided)” seemed blind-sided as a longer start date was expected. Still, the launch of Hummingbird fully switched all successful SEO marketers into thinking about organic keywords and informative topics rather than trying to punch a keyword into an article 20 times.

In this new year, this switch will only become more prevalent and important. No longer will information-scarce but keyword-rich content be highly regarded. Instead, marketers will need to provide quality content that fully explores the topic without a focus on a specific word.

Guest Blogging Still Rules

Guest blogging has grown from a sometimes hobby of niche blogs to a verified SEO marketing strategy. Despite the time and effort it takes to form relationships and seek out willing participants, guest blogging will continue to grow in 2014. The importance of links for rankings and the positive results seen from expanding an audience makes guest blogging the most straightforward route to search engine success.

While the catch up game has been extensive in 2013, SEO marketers in 2014 can at least rest assured that all search engine updates are moving in a specific, easily defined direction. While past years have required marketers to relearn the game, 2014 should be a year of gentle transitions to get content more in line with the ultimate goal of providing quality information to specific user questions.


Article from: sitepronews

SEO Tips and Best Practices to Generate External Awareness

 
1. Identify Your Core Keyword Phrases

Start by identifying your top 10-15 keywords by thinking about the phrases you wish you would show up for when people look for your company. Think beyond your company name to specific products and services prospective clients might be trying to find. You can use tools like Google Free Keywords and Hubspot to help you brainstorm ideas.
For example, we specialize in event and trade show registration, but people who don’t know us would not know to search for “Expo Logic”. Instead, we identified opportunities to rank for services and products people are searching for like “trade show registration” and “lead retrieval scanner.” Focusing on service and product specific phrases has provided a significant jump in our keyword rankings, with 24 of our main keywords ranked in the top three, and 42 ranked in the top 10.

2. Create Compelling Content

To get the most from your SEO strategy, it’s important to know the difference between paid and organic results. Paid ads are a good tactic for a time sensitive campaign when you want to create quick awareness. New product launches, holiday promotions and specials work well with paid placement. For the long haul, it’s best to focus on organic results.
The most effective way to improve your organic SEO is to create compelling content around the keywords you identified in step one. Publish regular blog posts on your site, keep your social media profiles updated with relevant information that leads back to your site, and develop fresh site content focused on your target phrases.

From our organic SEO efforts, we’ve doubled our Twitter followers and steadily increased the number of site visitors each month.


Best-Seo-experts-mumbai-india-vickeemore

 3. Stay Organized

The best way to stay on top of your different SEO efforts is to create an editorial calendar for your content.

Look for topic ideas by monitoring news about your industry through Google alerts.  Subscribe to your competitor’s RSS feeds to stay on top of trending topics.  Ask your sales team the top questions they hear from prospective clients and plan to answer them in your blog.  Schedule your content out about a month in advance.

4. Monitor Your Rankings

Lastly, make sure you have a good stats system set up to monitor your SEO success. A tool like Google Analytics or Hubspot can help you review keyword rankings, site traffic, social media leads and other important measures to see what SEO efforts are generating the most awareness.

Article Source: By Jeff Cooper, an EO Philadelphia member and president and CEO of Expo Logic


Dynamic URLs vs. Static URLs







The Issue at Hand

Websites that utilize databases which can insert content into a webpage by way of a dynamic script like PHP or JavaScript are increasingly popular. This type of site is considered dynamic. Many websites choose dynamic content over static content. This is because if a website has thousands of products or pages, writing or updating each static by hand is a monumental task.

There are two types of URLs: dynamic and static. A dynamic URL is a page address that results from the search of a database-driven web site or the URL of a web site that runs a script. In contrast to static URLs, in which the contents of the web page stay the same unless the changes are hard-coded into the HTML, dynamic URLs are generated from specific queries to a site's database. The dynamic page is basically only a template in which to display the results of the database query. Instead of changing information in the HTML code, the data is changed in the database.

But there is a risk when using dynamic URLs: search engines don't like them. For those at most risk of losing search engine positioning due to dynamic URLs are e-commerce stores, forums, sites utilizing content management systems and blogs like Mambo or WordPress, or any other database-driven website. Many times the URL that is generated for the content in a dynamic site looks something like this:

http://www.somesites.com/forums/thread.php?threadid=12345&sort=date

A static URL on the other hand, is a URL that doesn't change, and doesn't have variable strings. It looks like this:

http://www.somesites.com/forums/the-challenges-of-dynamic-urls.htm

Static URLs are typically ranked better in search engine results pages, and they are indexed more quickly than dynamic URLs, if dynamic URLs get indexed at all. Static URLs are also easier for the end-user to view and understand what the page is about. If a user sees a URL in a search engine query that matches the title and description, they are more likely to click on that URL than one that doesn't make sense to them.

A search engine wants to only list pages its index that are unique. Search engines decide to combat this issue by cutting off the URLs after a specific number of variable strings (e.g.: ? & =).

For example, let's look at three URLs:

http://www.somesites.com/forums/thread.php?threadid=12345&sort=date

http://www.somesites.com/forums/thread.php?threadid=67890&sort=date

http://www.somesites.com/forums/thread.php?threadid=13579&sort=date

All three of these URLs point to three different pages. But if the search engine purges the information after the first offending character, the question mark (?), now all three pages look the same:

http://www.somesites.com/forums/thread.php

http://www.somesites.com/forums/thread.php

http://www.somesites.com/forums/thread.php

Now, you don't have unique pages, and consequently, the duplicate URLs won't be indexed.

Another issue is that dynamic pages generally do not have any keywords in the URL. It is very important to have keyword rich URLs. Highly relevant keywords should appear in the domain name or the page URL. This became clear in a recent study on how the top three search engines, Google, Yahoo, and MSN, rank websites.

The study involved taking hundreds of highly competitive keyword queries, like travel, cars, and computer software, and comparing factors involving the top ten results. The statistics show that of those top ten, Google has 40-50% of those with the keyword either in the URL or the domain; Yahoo shows 60%; and MSN has an astonishing 85%! What that means is that to these search engines, having your keywords in your URL or domain name could mean the difference between a top ten ranking, and a ranking far down in the results pages.

The Solution

So what can you do about this difficult problem? You certainly don't want to have to go back and recode every single dynamic URL into a static URL. This would be too much work for any website owner.

If you are hosted on a Linux server, then you will want to make the most of the Apache Mod Rewrite Rule, which is gives you the ability to inconspicuously redirect one URL to another, without the user's (or a search engine's) knowledge. You will need to have this module installed in Apache; for more information, you can view the documentation for this module here. This module saves you from having to rewrite your static URLs manually.

How does this module work? When a request comes in to a server for the new static URL, the Apache module redirects the URL internally to the old, dynamic URL, while still looking like the new static URL. The web server compares the URL requested by the client with the search pattern in the individual rules.

For example, when someone requests this URL:

http://www.somesites.com/forums/the-challenges-of-dynamic-urls.html

The server looks for and compares this static-looking URL to what information is listed in the .htaccess file, such as:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule thread-threadid-(.*)\.htm$ thread.php?threadid=$1

It then converts the static URL to the old dynamic URL that looks like this, with no one the wiser:

http://www.somesites.com/forums/thread.php?threadid=12345


You now have a URL that only will rank better in the search engines, but your end-users can definitely understand by glancing at the URL what the page will be about, while allowing Apache's Mod Rewrite Rule to handle to conversion for you, and still keeping the dynamic URL.

If you are not particularly technical, you may not wish to attempt to figure out the complex Mod Rewrite code and how to use it, or you simply may not have the time to embark upon a new learning curve. Therefore, it would be extremely beneficial to have something to do it for you. This URL Rewriting Tool can definitely help you. What this tool does is implement the Mod Rewrite Rule in your .htaccess file to secretly convert a URL to another, such as with dynamic and static ones.

With the URL Rewriting Tool, you can opt to rewrite single pages or entire directories. Simply enter the URL into the box, press submit, and copy and paste the generated code into your .htaccess file on the root of your website. You must remember to place any additional rewrite commands in your .htaccess file for each dynamic URL you want Apache to rewrite. Now, you can give out the static URL links on your website without having to alter all of your dynamic URLs manually because you are letting the Mod Rewrite Rule do the conversion for you, without JavaScript, cloaking, or any sneaky tactics.

Another thing you must remember to do is to change all of your links in your website to the static URLs in order to avoid penalties by search engines due to having duplicate URLs. You could even add your dynamic URLs to your Robots Exclusion Standard File (robots.txt) to keep the search engines from spidering the duplicate URLs. Regardless of your methods, after using the URL Rewrite Tool, you should ideally have no links pointing to any of your old dynamic URLs.

You have multiple reasons to utilize static URLs in your website whenever possible. When it's not possible, and you need to keep your database-driven content as those old dynamic URLs, you can still give end-users and search engine a static URL to navigate, and all the while, they are still your dynamic URLs in disguise. When a search engine engineer was asked if this method was considered "cloaking", he responded that it indeed was not, and that in fact, search engines prefer you do it this way. The URL Rewrite Tool not only saves you time and energy by helping you use static URLs by converting them transparently to your dynamic URLs, but it will also save your rankings in the search engines.
SEO Experts Mumbai, India, Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization - Vivek More


SEO and Comment Spam: A Cautionary Tale


If you’re SEO and social media strategies run afoul of best-practices, you might have a bigger problem than diminished Google rankings: Your brand's reputation might take a very public hit. That's what happened after Adam Singer received this comment at his Future Buzz blog:


"Small businesses should focus more on the quality of their marketing campaigns because consumers are, indeed, conducting more research now than ever before. [Company] has tools that can help you monitor your results and offers insight on your campaign success! Here is a link to some of the [products] from [company]." [Editor's note: We've redacted the company and product names; Singer did not.]


Singer wasn't pleased. "It is inappropriate of you to leave a comment like this when the discussion section is respected by everyone else who contribute thoughtful, valuable comments and not simply try to push their wares," he noted. "You are trying to take but not give."


He approved the comment to make his point, and—hoping to begin a positive conversation—sent a snarky-but-friendly tweet to the offending company. "Thanks … for link spamming my blog comments. You'll provide a great example of what not to do for readers tomorrow."


The company's social media manager sent Singer a conciliatory email about "working to find the right balance between authentic social media engagement and SEO best practices."


It soon became clear, however, that the company was using a "shady" SEO vendor that operated independently of its in-house social media team. "Their separate digital teams clearly have no idea what anyone is doing," says Singer. "Except the Web, of course, sees it all."


The Po!nt: Engage with caution. No matter who makes your SEO decisions, or why they're made, social media

SOcial Media Experts mumbai, SMO King India, SEO Experts, SMM Expert

6 Beginner SMO Tips for Social Media Marketers

However, I want to shift our focus to the more conventional social media networks such as Digg, Sphinn and StumbleUpon by exploring 6 solid tips to help you rake in the benefits of Social Media.

We have never really looked into SMO, except perhaps the general post that was including the in “Blog Optimization Series“, so this shall be a first in-depth post for Blogussion

Let’s get straight into :)

1. Build a network.

I’ve explored this tip in the Blog Optimization Series, but it’s a major part of making it big on social media networks. Social Media Networks are exactly as their name suggests; it’s about being SOCIAL. Which means, in order to even make your presence felt by others – you need to add an avatar (not necessarily a picture of yourself, but something memorable.), make connections with fellow Diggers or Stumblers and invite them to join your network. This one tip alone will influence the lion’s share of your success.

2. Write a List-Post.

Social Media-activists absolutely love list-posts! Just like this one. Darren Rowse from ProBlogger also covered this quite some time back, but what he said still applies today – strong as ever. It’s not only Social Media networks that love list posts, but almost anywhere in general. Just take a look at our “Popular Posts” on to the right; majority are list posts. In fact our most popular post is a list on the best lists on the blogosphere! Just goes to prove a point…

3. Write something controversial.

Just like list-posts; Diggers, Stumblers and others alike love reading about something that cause a bit of a commotion. My post on “Did Google’s FeedBurner Crash and Burn?” is probably our most controversial post on Blogussion. Being controversial, it’s something Alex and I have subconsciously avoided given our status (especially our age) in this blogosphere, but if you can pull it off correctly – there are plenty of rewards to be reaped!

4. Adjust to the readers’ needs.

Reaching your targeted audience is the key, but before you do – you must adapt to their needs. I’ve realized that writing my blog-posts here at Blogussion don’t get noticed on networks such as Digg or Sphinn because of perhaps the type or style of writing that I use. This doesn’t worry me for Blogussion, but in my experimental blogs – I’ve found that short and concise posts + image-dominant posts are the most successful on these networks.

PS: This is a debatable pointer because altering your writing techniques can bring blow a a major blow to your blog. Your readers will definitely re-act to it, so keep in mind that your current readers are your first priority.

5. Titles, Titles, everything is in the Titles!

Users on such networks such as Digg, Stumble, Sphinn and many others don’t really spend time reading every single submission. So, it’s in your best interest to convince them that your news article is worth their precious time. The only weapon you have to achieve this is to create an appealing title. It’s the first thing they see, and perhaps the last thing they see from you. Make it catchy, make it interesting – just get them to click it!

6. You must give, to receive.

Don’t expect to do all of the above and make it to the front-pages. It’s not enough because these networks are a two-way relationship. Get out there and get active! Start digging or stumbling your friend’s stories that genuinely interest you (and perhaps articles of people you don’t know either, they all count). The more you get involved in that social network’s community; the more likely you are to achieve your goals.

Social Media Optimization (or SMO) has been an area that I have been looking to explore for quite some time now. We’ve discussed about Twitter recently; both the negative side of Twitter and also 7 ways you can effectively market it.