Internet Marketing Updates - SEO, SMO, Digital Marketing

Some Amazing Ways to Take Advantage of the Google/Twitter Partnership

2017-08-24T05:33:00.001-07:00

Google and Twitter had recently announced a new partnership. This collaboration will provide Google access to tweets that get posted on the social media platform. The allows them the capacity to embed tweets directly into relevant search results. This is certainly great news for an average user. They will see top tweets while performing a search apart from news and links to relevant information that they usually get. Hence, you can get instant access to real-time updates. The world will seem to be more connected with this collaboration.

The recent collaboration of Google and Twitter is mutually beneficial for both companies. This is because Google will gain better user experience and Twitter will enjoy extra visibility from online searchers. Additionally, it is also very beneficial for your organization. Listed below are some strategies you may adopt to benefit from this latest development:

Boost Twitter Profile

This is the most important advantage of this partnership. With this new change, more number of people will see your tweets. Also there are chances that more people come to scope out your Twitter profile for learning more about your business. So if you don't have a Twitter account or the profile looks bad, it is time you get the presence straightened out. Here, you need to add the web address you wish people to follow. Another important thing to do is optimize description of your company and create an impressive profile and background pictures. Focussing on these small details will let you create that much needed first positive impression on potential customers who visit your profile.

Current Events

The next step is to start tweeting about current events. Make sure these are relevant to your industry. Major searches happen in the field of recent happenings. Although tweet arrangement tactics and fundamentals haven’t been revealed yet, it is more likely that tweets relevant to present events make it to the top position of search results pages. Here, you should incorporate appropriate trending hashtags into your systematic social content. Also read news daily to see how your business responds or expands on those events. Including hashtags or keywords relevant to events will help Google can easily make out what you are talking about.

Presently, tweet answers to common issues and queries. Hence, it may not be possible that tweets appear for broad, info-seeking questions. These will cater to niche problems (popular ones). For instance, specific queries such as “how do I bake a cake” may populate tweets with content specifically addressing that query. Since such answers are quite rare. Hence, you will have very less competition as compared to posting about the trending events. So work for answers to common queries in your regular post schedules. It is better to get specific as you can. Including a link to detailed explanation on website will also help you attract that much needed extra traffic.

Emphasise your Content around Niche

This one of the most popular SEO and social tactics being practised for years. However, the latest partnership of Google and Twitter will makes it quite a compulsion. Remember, the bigger your business is, harder it gets to turn up more in searches. So it is better to narrow down your focus to just one or two key areas of expertise. Thereafter, you should optimize the entire content to make it focus on that specific niche. Although you may cut down the visibility in peripheral searches, the relevance for that specific niche will remain unmatched. The action will make your niche tweets the only ones for relevant searches.

Emphasise on Other Social Platforms

The recent Google Twitter collaboration is just the one. However, soon Google is planning to acquire or integrate with other social apps and platforms. Hence, it certainly makes sense for the search engine to develop similar alliances with various other social media organizations in future. So getting involved with those platforms will help you a lot. Do not hesitate to create a presence on the newer platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram. So in future, if Google decides to integrate these into its search results, you will gain significant advantage.

Summary

It is better to adapt to the changes so that you can gain better visibility, new traffic, and a significant influx of new customers.

7 Reasons Why Your Organic Traffic has Dropped! And Yes, It’s Not Google’s Fault!

2017-04-17T00:28:00.001-07:00

With a huge change in the field of SEO landscape in the past few years, the organic traffic of a website may appear and then disappear. This has made many website owners think about reasons for organic traffic to drop? Here are some reasons the organic traffic has dropped:

1. Search Behaviour and Trends Changes

Sometimes, the drop is simply not related to content or external links. It may occur for reasons beyond one's control. Algorithms for Google are constantly changing which invite additional changes in the manner search results are returned to users. However, this is not out of control for the owner of the site completely. Ignorance to the latest trends will have a huge influence on your website’s search visibility.

A decline in traffic and rankings have got declined for your website's key landing pages, refreshing keyword targets will make sure you are up to date with what people are searching for. The Google Trends is definitely a great place to start. It will help you measure targeted sharp decline or gradual fall in key phrases. You may also refer to Search Console Search Analytics data of Google to achieve recent snapshot of things users are currently searching for to find your services and products.

2. Uninformed Changes in Site

Apart from search marketing fundamentals, some developers like to make changes to your website sans giving any prior information to stakeholders and the marketing department. Hence, any drop in organic traffic should be dealt with a super quick catch up with developer or even senior colleagues to determine any dramatic changes that have been made to the site. Thereafter, you may place a request for another crawl of the domain with the help of tools like Screaming Frog to identify pages marked as 'no-index' (stripped off) content. Reviewing of new content is crucial.

3. Indexing Sans Content Pruning

One of the major reasons there's a drop in your organic search traffic is indexing of all pages without pruning content. Google makes dedicated efforts to improve the search algorithm and detecting high quality content. No wonder it has rolled out the Google Panda 4.0 update. It deranks very low quality content and then boosts those of high quality. A website with evergreen content tends to attract organic traffic. However, some pages act as deadwood. So if you are serious about not getting search traffic dropped in the Google Index, include the pages that you are interested in ranking.

Polluting traffic of your website with overloading unnecessary pages makes no sense. Remember that pages having poor quality or obsolete content is of no use. This do not interest the visitors. Hence, these must be pruned to ensure good website health. Poor quality of pages will affect performance of the entire site.

4. Penalties - Manual or Algorithmic

A dramatic drop in organic traffic may be because you have been hit by algorithmic or a manual penalty. When a site is flagged for not adhering to Google's quality norms, a manual penalty is issued. As a result, your rankings will be penalized. It is easier to spot manual penalties. A notification is sent through messages from Google in its Manual Action section of your Google Search Console account.

5. Search Console Manual Actions

As mentioned above, manual penalties are visible in your Google Search Console account. However, this is not the case with algorithmic penalties. These are more common and occur naturally. Google issues an update to their search algorithms and sends penalties wherever applicable. Hence, it can be hard to know if you’ve been hit by an algorithmic penalty. No notifications will be received here as in the case of manual penalties. So if you have noticed a drop in organic traffic, audit your website for harmful backlinks that it has recently acquired. You also need to identify any duplicate or poorly written content. Some of the Crawl tools such as Screaming Frog are quite helpful in pointing out pages on your site with low word counts. The Ahrefs can identify external links (spammy or irrelevant to the content) acquired recently.

6. Redesigning Your Website & Not Doing 301 Redirects to Old Pages

It is possible to lose any traffic to your site when migrating website from one domain to another. And the worst part is that all of your new visitors will be greeted with a 404 page. All organic search traffic you enjoyed will be a memory, especially if you fail to do 301 redirects. However, it is possible to transfer all of the organic search traffic to another domain with only a few lines of code!

301 permanent redirects a visitor (including search engines) to your new website. Everything from direct traffic to authority, age, and reputation of your old website will get transferred to the latest web address.

7. Ignoring Technical SEO

Most individuals get caught up in the practice of churning out fresh content for their websites. However, they simply end up neglecting technical aspects of SEO. There are certain things to look into so that the organic traffic for website doesn't drop. First, you need to check if robots.txt file is blocking some of the pages from being crawled by search bots. Also assess if there are pages on your site marked up with the noindex tag.

Having multiple pages covering similar themes or targeting the same keywords is also a problem. You need to canonicalise these pages appropriately to refer the original page that you wish search engines to return.

Make sure the website is mobile friendly. This is the major ranking signal of Google. Get rid of pages that are slow to load.

Summary

Keeping tabs on the above listed points will help you know about the exact reason behind drop in organic traffic and search engine ranking. Good Luck!

Social Media Resume – Top Ways to Make it Look Awesome & Get Hired!

2017-04-14T22:12:00.001-07:00

With increasing use and popularity of social media among World Wide Web, a remarkable change has been observed in the way organizations companies brand and promote themselves. A dramatic transformation has also been seen in the field of customer service.

Paid social was a huge success in the past. It is still growing. However, organic social media management still holds prime importance. According to studies, it has been revealed that jobs in the field of “social media” has gained immense importance and fame since 2010. Within a short period of time, the requirement and importance almost tripled.

Looking forward to bag a job as a social media manager? Well, this certainly calls for some detailed knowledge and expertise. You should be capable of doing much more than just friending your classmates on Facebook, following celebrities on Instagram and tweeting cute videos.

The key is to create the perfect social media resume. Here are some amazing ways to make your social media resume look impressive enough to get hired:

Communication Skills are Important

Of course, social media is all about establishing communication and making connections. Since a lot of companies use social platforms for branding, customer service, and influencing, it is of prime importance that you are capable of presenting a branded persona to find solutions to problems and communicate for the company. Communication is also very important for being part of a team! Being a social manager means that you will most likely be a member of a marketing team that demands you to effectively communicate what you require from them. You must also be very clear on the way you can help them achieve goals.

Remember that your social media resume must clearly highlight your skills to select a social platform for customer service effectively, especially for certain posts like Facebook for press releases and images of large corporations, Twitter for queries related to customer service, LinkedIn for job openings and conference news.

The best and easiest way to state this on a resume is to place right below “Skills” section. You can mention that you are 'Proficient in Social Media Targeting and Communication' and can 'Engaging customers and target prospects on social platforms'.

Show Off Your Copywriting Skills

Knowledge of grammar and spelling goes a long way in any profession. And if you make a living with it (a social media professional), you better get a strong hold over these! Errors in typing and grammar mistakes are very embarrassing. Grammarly is the best option. It is a free plugin. It spell checks as you go. Additionally, copywriting needs to create some excitement too. Remember, you will have very limited space to communicate an offer. So brush up on your vocabulary. You must also be well prepared to pose yourself as the Hemingway of social media! On your resume, under “Skills” section, mention about your brilliant copywriting and editing skills.

Creativity is Important

Social media will be very boring without the creativity juices that make your posts gain an edge over the crowd. It should also be able to attract a lot of clicks and likes and retweets. So make your resume stand out! Add your creativity in it.

Display Past Successes

This is the best way to make your social media resume stand out. So focus on showcasing your past successes. You may use metrics, graphs, etc. for the same. This will help you show a potential employer what a great social media manager you can be. For instance, your Facebook likes have grown by 300%, the most popular tweet of yours was retweeted around 150 times, and periscope received over 4500 views. The idea is to show you have created and engaged a community successfully on various social platforms. In your resume, you need to show it something like 'Increased social media engagement significantly by increasing Facebook likes 300%.'

Analytical

Once you have identified your success, you already know your way around Twitter Analytics and Facebook Business Manager. So make sure these shows right at the top on your list of skill set. Showing that you can effectively manage social media and how good you are at it will have a positive impact.
If you add tracking from Google Analytics to your links, simply add that to the skill set list. You need to let your future employee know your efficiency at judging the success of your campaigns and the most important metric in this regard. Also mention how did you find it.

Your social media resume should include things such as fluency in Facebook Insights, Google Analytics, Twitter Analytics and experience in identifying trends, analyzing metrics, and optimizing performance.

Social Platforms

A social media manager must gain proficiency in the basics:

- Facebook
- Twitter
- LinkedIn
- Pinterest

However, it is also important to be well versed with HootSuite and IFTTT. A dedicated social media is fully aware of the importance of planning. Without planning, it is not possible to set up posts in real time. Hence, it is very important that a potential employer sees this listed on the resume. This will make him/her feel that you are the real deal. You should also emphasise on various ways of using platforms to strengthen your strategy. For instance, you can include some of the related platforms such as SEMRush or Buzzsumo. Also plan at least 10 posts each week through Buffer and set up 4 applets through IFTTT.

Image Formatting

If you have not been using Canvas, start trying your hand on it. Experienced social media marketers are aware of the importance of posts with images. They know that posts with images perform way better than those without one. Images are a crucial element for driving positive brand sentiment. It also helps with developing a branded persona. You should focus on showing this skill off on your resume! Do not hesitate to showcase the most creative and best-performing posts on resume.

Following the above listed resume guidelines will help you get hired as a social media manager with a reputed firm. All the best!

5 Best Ways Landing Page Optimization Tips to Lower Your CPC

2017-04-10T23:12:00.001-07:00

Have you been looking for a Google AdWords campaign that's high-converting and costs less? This means, you require a very well-structured campaign that targets the right number of keywords and ensure relevance for the searcher. Generating magnetic ads is a must for increasing CTRs. Also bid the right amount so as to increase spending.

To start with, you need to emphasise on landing pages. Remember that relevancy and quality of your landing pages have a direct impact on Quality Score. This also directly affects cost per click (CPC). Hence, optimizing landing pages saves money and improves conversion rates.

Here are 5 amazing ways that help you to lower your CPCs with landing page optimization:

1. Relevance of Landing Page to Search Query

Quality score is of utmost importance for Google AdWords. All accounts with quality scores of 6 or above are granted a 16-50% decrease in CPC. On the other hand, accounts having 4 or lower Quality Score get 25-400% increase in CPC. A significant part of high Quality Score measurement is comprised of the landing pages. As per experts from the field of AdWords, irrelevant landing pages rarely get a quality score higher than 3. Connect landing pages with buying intent of ad groups as well as their respective keywords. Keywords have different intent. According to a theory, keywords are separated into three buckets. This categorization is made as per their intent:

- Informational keywords – These perform searches for answering queries or learn something.
- Commercial investigation keywords - These perform searches for researching about a product or service.
- Transactional keywords – These perform searches for buying a certain thing.

2. Keyword Intent Funnel

Segmenting keywords into the above three intent levels is a common practice while doing keyword research. This helps with creating ads and landing pages perfectly adapted to these intents. It also increases Quality Score (and conversion rate) due to higher relevancy. For instance, when a visitor searches for "top foundation creams to look for 2017", the query intent falls into the commercial investigation. The query will help you create landing pages that successfully features an ebook or a special page dedicated to the best foundation creams to look for 2017. The landing page must emphasise on providing information to visitors, not selling. When this landing page matches the searcher's intent, it benefits from higher relevancy and Quality Score which automatically lowers CPC.

3. Quality Score

A lot of people tend to ignore quality score. Once you have followed and implemented the first tip here, you will be happy to see the side effect. This side effect is pleasant and delivers you exactly what you expected. The higher quality score is the side effect you receive for relevancy. Once you start creating highly targeted ads to a specific keyword, the click through rate (CTR) goes up. With this, the CTR goes up and quality increases. Once the landing page has its quality scores going up, it helps ad rank move up. The CPC lowers.

4. Emphasise on One Thing

Nothing can be worse than expecting a visitor to do all of the guesswork. People do not have time to keep guessing what they have to do with the landing page. They don't want to waste time understanding what a page is about. Also such situations will deter your landing page from making any sales. The best landing pages focus on a single thing - one problem, one solution. These pages also have a unique value proposition and a single goal. So make sure you focus on one thing at a time. You need to focus on one of their problems and then the solution. Let the page discuss how can you help them and what do you have to offer them.

The unique value proposition is equally important. Let your target audience know the 'unique' thing you offer them and why should they spend valuable time visiting your page. If you are serious about making them buy from you, add one CTA. This is an “Add to Cart” button. In case, you want them to mail you, add, “click to mail” button. Similarly, if you wish them to call you, add “click-to-call" button.

5. Click Through Rate

Speed is the best thing about pay-per-click marketing. The results of efforts can be seen very fast. This helps the user determine the best direction to take. Here, it is very important that you create brand new ads to compete against all of your winning ads. In short, do not stop after a CTR of 6 per cent with a single winning ad. You need to make constant efforts to improve it. At last, even if you reach 10/10 quality score, keep making efforts on finding better words to use, using better call to action to implement etc. You can also find out more beneficial offers for visitors. Make sure you keep testing them all.

Understanding Social Meta Tags – Simple Yet Easier Ways to Control the Way Your Content Appears in Social Media Shares

2017-04-05T22:53:00.001-07:00

Ever pasted a link into Twitter or Facebook only to find that the related image has nothing to do with the page content? Did you notice that description of post reads like an SEO Mad Lib? Now you need to wait and contemplate a lot before you actually share it.

Did you know there is a technique marketer can use to control experience produced by content as it shows up on various social networks such as Facebook, Google+, and Twitter. For instance, let's assume someone copies a link to a specific index page of a blog named (Harry Harris) in their Facebook status update:

Harry Harris blog header

The index page for the blog of Harry Harris, podcast host, and author of “XXXXX”: http://harry.blog/

As soon as the URL http://harry.blog/ is pasted into the status update of a Facebook page, the results are a lack-luster piece of content.

The result definitely has a room for improvement in inspiring or even compelling a viewer to click. The problem here is that the following three haven’t been developed in a face to attract a click:

- Image
- Headline
- Description

In fact, it is possible that someone may trash this post instead of sharing it. But the good news is that the title, description and image can be specified by a content publisher. These pop up automatically when a user shares a link on various social networks can all be specified by the content publisher. Professionally optimized social share content looks good. This also increases the chance to attract clicks.

Social share optimization is highly prioritized by experts. Your posts are most likely to click on the post when the image is set to fill the available space. The headline should also include a benefit statement that does not fail to compel a viewer to click.

You need to focus on customizing the headline, description and image of your pages via using social meta tags. Try out the tutorials on the following topics for better results:

- Pro Tips for Crafting Social Meta Tags
- Using WordPress? Social Meta Tags in WordPress Plugins
- Open Graph Tags
- Twitter Card Markup
- Schema for Sharing on LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest

How to Create Social Meta Tags - Pro Tips

One of the major reasons to use social meta tags is to control the manner in which your content is displayed in feeds as compared to allowing Facebook, Twitter and various other social platforms generate the headline, description and image for you.
Here's what you can actually do:

- Adjust or recycle unused title ideas. You can do this via using these as headlines in social media content.
- Test varied versions of an image via using Open Graph tags and Twitter Card tags as the testing ground for social media marketing.
- It is important to tweak images and content based on the network. Display text and images that will appeal to the unique interests of distinct audience of each network.
- Twitter will default to Open Graph tags in a case, no Twitter Card markup is on the page. This helps users achieve more controlled results while including both kinds of social media markup on a page.

Social Meta Tags for WordPress Plugins

If you’re using WordPress, several plugins make it possible to implement social meta tags without ever having to write a single line of code.

Some options include:

- WPSSO for social markup across the major social sites
- JM Twitter Cards for the full range of Twitter Card types
- WordPress SEO by Yoast for Facebook, Open Graph tags and Twitter Cards

WordPress plugins for social meta tags are a fast and easy way to link custom headlines, descriptions and images with WordPress posts. This can also be done in web pages on a page-by-page basis.

Yoast SEO WordPress plugin UI

Facebook Open Graph data input fields in the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin. If you were to click on the Twitter bird tab, you would see the same fields for customizing Twitter Card markup.

If you’re using different software to operate your site, the social markup for Facebook Open Graph, Twitter Cards and the other major social networks is below.

Open Graph Tags

The Open Graph protocol can be referred to as the standard for Facebook for implementing social meta tags. Presently, it has been recognized by all the major social platforms such as Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter. This also means that LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+ will pull the headline, description and image very often as indicated in the Open Graph tags.

The significant Open Graph tags are as mentioned below:

Open Graph tag - Description of tag
og:title - title or alternate title of the page that displays as the headline
og:url – Page URL
og:description – Page description. The Facebook displays 300 characters (at the maximum)
og:image - URL of unique image, recommended dimensions 1200×630 pixels
og:type - article (otherwise defaults to “website”)

In case, you are serious about getting Facebook shares from your web pages formatted with a headline (title), it is crucial that both description and image of your choice look like this:

Make sure the social meta tags look like in the HTML code:

<meta property=”og:title” content=”Title, Inc.” />

<meta property=”og:url” content=”https://www.xxx.com/blog/keyword/” />

<meta property=”og:description” content=”title” />

<meta property=”og:image” content=”https://www.xxxx.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/keyword.jpg” />

<meta property=”og:type” content=”article” />

In order to make sure that Open Graph tags are configured appropriately, you need to use Open Graph Debugger of Facebook. This will let you have a look at an error report and see a preview of how a shared URL will be seen when posted to Facebook.

Expert Tip – Using the Open Graph Debugger really helps when updating OG tags of a page. This will force Facebook to do a fresh scrape of the URL. The process will result in Facebook pulling the new social meta tag data. Otherwise, it may pull from a cache instead of the updated tags.

Twitter Card Markup

Twitter Cards can be used to attach photos or videos to the Tweets. Here, you can also add a few lines of code. There are many different types of Twitter Cards. The most commonly used ones include Summary Cards and Photo Summary Cards:

Listed below are the basic markup tags for Twitter:

• twitter:card - Card type (full list of card types)
• Twitter Card tag - Description of tag
• twitter:title - Title or alternate title of the page viewed as the headline
• twitter:description - Brief description in less than 200 characters
• twitter:url - URL of page
• twitter:image - URL of unique image (the recommended minimum dimensions measure 440×220 pixels)

Good Twitter Card social meta tags will appear as the following mentioned below:

<meta name=”twitter:card” content=”summary_large_image” />
<meta name=”twitter:title” content=” keyword@xyz” />

<meta name=”twitter:url” content=”https://www.xxx.com/blog/seo-checklist/” />

<meta name=”twitter:description” content=”Heading of your choice.” />
<meta name=”twitter:image” content=”https://www.xyz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/image.jpg” />

If you wish to see how your page look like when pasted into a tweet, simply input a URL into the Twitter Card validator. This will help you to see a preview and make sure you have properly configured your Twitter Card social markup.

A Tip from Expert:

When updating a Twitter Card tags of a page, it is advisable to use the Twitter Card validator. This will force Twitter fresh scrape URL resulting Twitter to pull the new social meta tag data. In case you fail to use validator, it might pull from a cache instead of the updated tags.

Using Schema

It is important to use the Schema for sharing on Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Open Graph tags are read by LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter. For social markup, many of the social networks recognize and support Open Graph as a default standard. However, schema markup has come up with a new solution for Google+, Pinterest and LinkedIn.

The use of schema markup for customizing title, description and image related to Google+ or Pinterest will make social meta tags appear as the following:

<html itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/Article”>

<meta itemprop=”name” content=”Blog Post Title”>

<meta itemprop=”description” content=”This a description of blog post”>

<meta itemprop=”image” content=”http://www.domain.com/image.jpg”>

Hence, this schema markup will go into the HTML code associated with your post right before the closing head tag, </head>.

It is easy to validate 'schema markup' via using the Google Structured Data Testing Tool. There are several tutorials available online by experts on using the schema and structured markup for improving the display of your content. You may go through these tutorials to be able to get the best out of social meta tags.

The best thing to do is consider social media content as a tool for social advertising. When it comes to establishing your success in the present age dynamic digital landscape, strategic social markup is the best option. It helps with enhanced distribution.

If you are serious about maximizing your social distribution, make sure you focus on controlling the way content is displayed in feeds than allowing popular social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, etc. to pull content from the page for you. You can easily create messages about your blog post via optimizing the meta tags that control social media content. These messages will be targeted towards the distinct audiences on each social network.

Both page title tags and meta description tags facilitate boosting organic search engine rankings. Similarly, social meta tags are crucial elements in HTML that boost social exposure. These also help with the following:

- Boost social media traffic
- Increase click-through rates

A Guide to SEO for E-commerce Websites

2017-04-03T01:17:00.002-07:00

Organic traffic is very crucial in the world of online business and eCommerce. However, it is getting tougher to rank higher these days. A huge variety of eCommerce platforms are out there and anyone can start a copy-cat store! SEO for e-commerce site will help. Here's how you go about it:

Focus on URL Structure

Page URL should have a profitable structure. The best strategy to follow for URL structures is:

'KISS' = Keep It Simple Store-Owner

The structure needs to be very simple, highly relevant and understandable by humans as well as search engines. Remember that a number of things may go wrong with this URL structure. One cannot get an idea about a product just by looking at the URL. Now this can be very confusing for humans. If it does not contain relevant keywords for search engines, things are bound to get tougher.

The idea is to place keywords you want search engines to pick up on, right after your domain. This helps search engines understand what the page is all about. Once your product shows up in search results, Google will bold the keywords in the URL Hence, searchers know precisely what to expect when they click on your link.

Trust Breadcrumbs

These are navigational links that appear near the top of a page. Breadcrumbs help customers figure out where they are in your store. You are actually strengthening your SEO strategy by enabling them. These links build internal links to other pages on your website which further define your link architecture.

Boost Relevancy with Title Tags

This enhances relevancy to humans and search engines. A title tag is a brief description of product page content. Main keywords need to appear at the start of the tag. This the acceptable title tag formula:

'Primary Keyword | Secondary Keyword | Brand Name'

You can add brand name to secondary keywords if applicable. This will add uniqueness to each product page title tag. It solves the problem of having multiple products of the same type. You can add unique words describing your product to each product title tag. Also try considering other words that customers may search for.

Optimize Product Page

Focus on optimizing titles for product page. The title should be very descriptive and well optimized for search engines. Make the product / service obvious to anyone who sees it. Also try including keywords in H1, H2 and H3 tags. Although termed as weaker signals, these do count. Use of header tags in page content breaks it up and simplifies reading.

Description of Product

The product description is usually underestimated. This is a sales pitch and the best way to give your store an edge over copycats. Understand that there are too many eCommerce stores having product descriptions written by manufacturers. Using manufacturer written product description can play negative in most situations. For instance, descriptions get distributed to all of the other online stores selling similar products. This makes search engines see multiple websites with similar content. Duplicate content will invite penalty by Google. Also manufacturer descriptions are written in a fashion to sell the product. These simply describe the product specs and are extremely boring to read. Search engines likes unique and interesting content. Make it descriptive enough to help your customers while making a decision on a product. Lastly, use 'rel=canonical' tag to convey Google that a specific content is not duplicated.

Product Reviews

According to studies, it is revealed that over 70 per cent of individuals look forward to online reviews prior to making a purchase. In fact, they base maximum part of their decision on reviews. So if your eCommerce store does not have product reviews, just add them. Your target audience is hungry for product reviews. Additionally, search engines love product reviews!

Product reviews help your site get updated with fresh and unique content. It is free user-generated content and makes for a very affordable way of adding new content to product pages. These are also very effective in optimizing your product page for long tail keywords. Remember that customers leaving reviews may use similar keywords consumers are searching for! This will work for your advantage.

You can optimize reviews for product page SEO. Reviews add micro-data to a page. Micro-data gets displayed as a line of text under each search result. This ensures more context to your content. It helps customers decide if they should click on the result.

Social Media Buttons

Distracting customers from buying a product is the worst thing yoou can do to your site. So make your customer first buy a product and share it later. Social shares send signals to search engines about the popularity of the products. Each share is like upvote and an indication that your product is interesting enough for people to refer to their friends. Lastly, each share may bring back additional traffic to your site!

Product Images

Product images can help improve conversion rates for your online store to a significant amount. However, you need to optimize these well for search engines. So start off via using descriptive image file names and Alt tags. Make sure these incorporate important keywords. The alt text is alternative text used by browsers when they cannot render the image. A keyword-rich description is helpful for both search engines and humans. The image file sizes shouldn't be large enough to take a long time to load. This slows down page speed and make your customers drop off. The search engines will ultimately lower your ranking.

Product Videos

Did you know a video enhances understanding of your product among consumers? Also these videos drive viewers to actually try out / buy the product! Product videos make for an amazing tool for conversion rates. Also, these help you create a unique place in search results. No wonder millions of users flock to YouTube to know about a product, its uses and other demonstration related queries.

Uploading product videos to YouTube will work! Make sure titles, tags and descriptions are well optimized for your keywords while uploading. This is important to make your videos searchable on YouTube. When optimized well, these may even show up on a Google search!

Once your product is up on YouTube, imply embed it on your site. Also allow others to embed it. The more number of people embeds your video, more it will get ranked higher in Google.

Summary

Well, you won’t start ranking on the front page of Google, immediately. The process takes time. However, once you are successful in integrating SEO into your website smartly, your store will start emerging higher for some specific keywords. This will also help you beat your competitors. Good Luck!

Top Reasons To Optimize Your Website For Voice Search

2017-03-29T03:00:00.001-07:00

Each one of us have fantasised a technology that promises solutions to queries sans any delay. The wish is not far fetched; at least not in this era where Google, Bing and Amazon Echo have already set into the path of fulfilling it for their dedicated users. Voice and conversational search is the most sought after technology, these days.

Change is the buzz word. Each one of us would love to embrace a change that promises to make our lives easier. No wonder interactive search queries are more in demand than the old text queries. These promises to save users a lot of time. As per a research, it has been revealed that 55 percent of adults and 41 percent of adults use voice search every day. This is because people like the idea of getting direct answers as compared to links. Hence, the voice search SEO strategy is the most sought after. It ensures a bright future for businesses online.

Voice Search

With improvement in technology, voice chat has been recognised highly reliable. In the past few years, word error rate was around 20 per cent. However, speech recognition, word error rate is very low (8%).

Smart Search

Did you know only a few people type the way they speak? In most cases, people use short hand kind of language while typing. However, voice search comprises of full question. No wonder some of the programs such as Siri, Cortana, and Google Now have become very popular. These have got better and more refined with time. Studies have revealed a sharp increase in the use of these programs.

Conversational Voice Search

Google can answer queries without any hassles. For instance, a query - “Where is the Qutub Minar”. Now if you ask “Show me pictures ” google understands the actual reference of Qutub Minar.

Location Based Queries

This is a major benefit. For instance, you are based in Noida and search for “Restaurants”, google knows your location and will return queries based on your location. So expect a list of the best Restaurants in Delhi.

Algorithm

Google is blessed with a machine learning based algorithm. This is smart and can easily learn about the individual. It is capable of directly handling transactions related queries such as “Buy a pair of lenses”. So it will remember your power and instantly takes you to the catalog of products displaying lenses suitable for your eyes.

SEO Impact

Voice Search definitely has a tremendous impact on Search Engines. Most organizations are focusing on long tail keywords than the shorter ones. The content gets more specific and user-centric. Understanding people typing a query and their needs will help businesses a lot.

Long Tail Keywords

Focus on long tail keywords makes the voice search more specific to a specific topic which the user would want to find answers to. This saves their time in searching or going through content on a very vast topic.

Schema Markup

Search engine usually looks for query context in general searches. Context refers to the previous question. It may even refer to any individual or location. The HTML add-on facilitates search engines understand the content, context easily, and help you rank well in normal searches. This will also make you more relevant in specific queries made through voice search.

Metadata Optimization

Metadata of a website is usually stored on robot.txt and sitmap.xml files. Proper focus on the sitemap and robot file will make these easily readable and visible to search engines.

Innovative Things Explored by SEM Marketers These Days

2017-03-27T04:15:00.001-07:00

SEM is an acronym for Search Engine Marketing. This kind of internet marketing facilitates promotion of websites via enhancing visibility on search engine pages through paid advertising. Present age SEM marketers are focused on support from SEOs/content writers for integrating search engine optimization. They modify or rewrite content and overall architecture of site while aiming at achieving higher ranking in search engine results pages.

Recent advancements in SEO technology have inspired SEOs to make dedicated attempts towards the following:

- Curate link profiles
- Kneading appropriate keywords into title tags
- Creating a sitemap ideal for crawlers

Some SEM marketers are pioneering the sites that may dominate the search engine results and others are busy exploring new revolutionary developments in this field:

Implementation of Schema Markup

These days, budding SEO innovators are up-to-date with the latest SEM trends. In fact, they are leaving no stone unturned to help website of clients ranked number one on Google search engine rankings. The schema markup is certainly the next wave of search innovation. This makes search listings more visible and boosts click through rate. Google tries to refine search results on a regular basis for the wellbeing of the end user.

Markup Schema along with dynamic 'Knowledge Graph application', is presently known to be a sweet spot for SEO application. As per a recent research, it was revealed that around 36 per cent of Google’s search results include a minimum of one snippet with information derived from Schema.org. Interestingly, other search engines also like schema markup boost website rankings in the market. Unfortunately, for some reasons, they were unable to make optimum use of Mark-up schema.

Communication

The present age of digital revolution SEO experts is focussing on smart usage of digital marketing strategies and tools. They are also concerned about the overall impact of SEO. SEM marketers are playing major role in offering advice to content marketing team on implementation of content marketing keyword. They help content marketing team understand the guest posting opportunities that are legal. SEM marketers assess choices to determine which specific one will benefit link profile.

Regular Update on Latest Trends and Algorithm

When it comes to beating the best SEM marketers online space, an SEM should hold in-depth awareness of the big industry and regular changes in the algorithm. Getting updated about the digital marketing trends regularly will help you enjoy a better position and also make predictions on future trends. Skilled and well informed SEM and SEO can help a business taste the fruit of success.

Remember that Google Algorithms keep varying. Most SEM newbies are aggressive with their lookout on digging new tricks and methods to drive more traffic towards websites and sell products and services. These days, there is much more to search as compared to simply search. The reason is that search engines usually touch several other areas depending on product/service. So if you are serious about staying in line with various SEO developments, stay abreast with the latest trends and advancements in the digital world.

Focus on Branding

In recent years, marketers are seen linking SEO and Purchase Relations in their business. This association ensures brilliant returns to their business. Branded search results of any company hold a very high value of intuitive search. Hence, it is possible to expand brand footprint for a professional in case, he/she is capable of pursuing content marketing (guest posting). The present age of neck to neck competition makes SEO an impossible task to undertake without including the PR element. This is especially true entrepreneurs, leaders, and niche experts. Optimization of web presence largely depends on the public stature of the person. No wonder both SEO and PR is considered as one crucial element of digital marketing.

Sum Up

There are a number of things SEM have been experimenting in the digital world to drive traffic to their websites. They also follow these rules to make client’s website rank on the top of Google rankings.

Hiring the Best SEO Company in India - 6 Perks You can Enjoy

2017-03-24T05:44:00.001-07:00

Looking forward to make your business a sure shot success? If a dynamic online presence for your site is your dream, simply focus on hiring the best SEO company in India. This will also help you with increasing your ROI (Return on Investment).

Listed below are some of the best advantages of hiring a reputed SEO company:

Experience and Skill

Search engine optimization may seem to be very easy, but it takes real practice and knowledge to employ the best. Trial and errors are also needed to become highly proficient in the domain. Hence it is no surprise that it could take a couple of months or even years to gain the experience and a rank of being an expert to undertake and accomplish a successful SEO campaign. Choosing experts for the job, will benefit your website to a great extent.

Attract More Customers

This is the prime reason for hiring skilled specialists holding years of experience for your SEO campaign. The process will increase your clientele base. It is definitely worth investing in SEO services. All businesses having an SEO optimized website have attracted more customers than those that are not using such services. With effective SEO, you can expect your website to grow faster. So focus on hiring an advanced and highly reliable SEO services from top organizations in India.

Additional Support

Looking forward to add more support to your SEO campaign? Professional and experienced SEO service providers are capable of offering it to you than other online advertising options. Specialists working for a top SEO company in India are capable of handling social media marketing campaigns. They can also do email marketing, pay-per-click advertisements, and YouTube marketing all at a time. You can also benefit from the latest responsive or a mobile friendly website. Another brilliant service offered include online reputation services. So if you are seeking an all-in-one online marketing package, simply hire the best SEO service.

Tools and Resources

More number of high quality websites are being indexed by leading search engines. Hence, there is often fighting for the top of the results page. Since Google frequently changes their algorithm, it is crucial to stay updated on these changes. Experienced and expert SEO professionals will spend time to get acquainted with advanced tools and resources. This enables them to run a successful SEO campaign for customers. It can be really tricky to run a successful campaign without these tools and resource. Experts are always ready with these resources.

No Shortcuts

Experienced and professional SEO services do not believe in taking any shortcuts. However, this is not the case with unprofessional and novice service providers who mainly run scam campaigns to attain the top of the search engine rankings. Google and other search engines are smart enough to notice the errors as Black Hat SEO techniques committed by these providers and ban their sites. This means if you give back links to your website that direct users to the wrong places, your website may be penalized for it. Luckily, the best SEO company in India are equipped with the best tools and knowledge to prevent any such things. There will be no problem with your website.

Investment

Many times, people are in doubt about investing huge amount of money in employing SEO services for business. However, a professional SEO campaign such as Get Top Rank is a solid investment that will provide you with brilliant returns in the long run. The only thing you should be concerned about is reaching out to the best company.

Consider these six crucial reasons will help you decide on whether or not to hire an SEO company in India.

Top 15 Predictions for Digital Marketing in 2017 – The Trends to Expect!

2017-03-17T22:25:00.000-07:00

Worldwide adoption and prominence of digital marketing has increased through the years. The marketing concept has helped consumers have the world at their fingertips. It successfully created a global marketplace where businesses (big and small) compete on the same platform!

So what's in store for the year 2017? Well, the year promises a wonderful year from the digital marketing perspective. Here are top predictions for the year:

1. Cross-Device Marketing

People these days are using multiple devices. They have at least two digital devices (laptop, smartphone, tablet). So marketing across channels and devices is the new trend and a standard that has been set. So businesses need to be where the customers are. Marketing endeavors require being coordinated. This will allow for a consistent feel across multiple devices possessing varying resolutions and screen sizes. Mobile optimization of a business website is a first must-have. The email settings should be established for both desktop and mobile readers. All of your marketing campaigns need to be optimized for desktop and mobile. Keep a clear count of ROI per campaign, per device. This will keep you informed about your success rate and the places where your audience is most responsive.

2. Influencer Marketing

This concept is all set to explode this year. Social proof of brands and products is important for consumers. So when a favorite celebrity or blogger promotes a product, they are more inclined to trust that endorsement as compared to any email campaign or plain advertisement coming directly from the brand.

3. Mobile First

Mobile is the trend of 2017. From your business website to email campaigns, everything needs to be formatted for mobile. Optimize for mobile before the desktop. Remember all of your potential clients are viewing websites, reading email, and perusing social media on their mobile devices.

4. Personalization

Increased personalization is a trend that's going to explode in 2017. Personal touch and recognition is highly valued by customers. Regardless of their position in the customer lifecycle, the kind of customization goes demands marketing efforts to addressing several things, including consumer behaviors, device preferences, spending habits, time zones, and languages. So it is time to embrace points of differentiation of target audience and categorize your customers accordingly.

5. Rise of Small Business

Expect a rise in small businesses tapping into Twitter’s Dashboard app, Facebook Insights, and Instagram analytics. They will use these platforms to meet customers’ needs. The platforms are easy to understand and ensure easier access to relevant insights. This means one doesn't need to be a data wizard to make sense of the information. All you need to do is invest in understand these metrics and watch your business thank you!

6. Shrinking Organic Listing

This will come as a shock to the SEO world! Organic listings will shrink as PPC and Local Paid Inclusion takes hold. It is true that Google will turn into a pay-to-play space with top few organic rankings getting continual search traffic (mainly for information-centric websites).

7. Mobile Domination

As already discussed, mobile will dominate the traffic on the web.

8. Voice Search

This is going to exceed half of all searches. Now you will see the concept of keywords flipping as people speak more than typing.

9. AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

They are here finally! Although new, they will make a decent place in the field of digital marketing.

10. Growth of PPC

This is going to experience exponential growth. The first screen will entirely be dedicated to paid ads! After all, how do you think Google makes money? Organic listings are certainly the answer!

11. Shopping on Instagram

Instagram will be adored by Shopaholics. The storefronts and affiliate programs will experience massive growth. The Instagram shopping field will thrive.

12. Overflow of Social Media Ads

Yes, the overflow on social media will continue to grow! Although an inappropriate channel for ads, ads are doing really well!

13. Change of Virtual Room Behavior

There will be a significant modification in behavior around virtual social rooms. All social media users and platforms will innovate and adopt new means of social engagement. This will be preferred against the customary approach of meeting people in person. Virtual reality (VR) chat rooms will turn into a brand new social experience.

14. Content will Remain the King

Of course, this will continue to remain the significant SEO focus. This is what's going to drive most projects round the year. The quality of the content will be judged critically. Hence, content for content’s sake will not prevail!

15. Advent of New Tools

This will facilitate content marketers produce targeted, high-quality content at the publishing stage. Content writers will demand more data. They will become more technically expert, bold and prefer easy-to-use tools that provide traffic and competitor SEO stats.

19 Amazing Web Design Tips You Just Can’t Miss

2017-02-26T22:26:00.000-08:00

If it is about the success of online business, web design has a major part to play. It can make or break the fate of your business! For instance, if your website takes too long to load, it will destroy your business. Also, if the visitor fails to understand the purpose of your website, there's no point in continuing with it. As an entrepreneur, you would want to make your visitors stay on the website longer. This is important to persuade them to invest in your services and products.

The valuable tips given below will improve your web design and help your business rank higher on search engines. Most importantly, your target audience will love you:

1. Emphasise on Logo Design

Good design demands special skills. When you design a logo in a simple yet smart fashion, it makes your brand stand out and more recognizable. Focus on making it unique and eye catching. This makes any logo a sure shot success. Experts believe in checking out a variety of logos others have employed since the company was founded. A design having a unique tinge of artistry is a good choice. Also use high resolution images for a logo. You should feature it at the upper left corner of the page for better viewing. A logo should be efficiently linked to the Homepage so that visitors find it easier to navigate.

2. Well Organized Layout

Focus on creating a visually attractive web design. The layout should be very clean, and free of clutter. Designers usually focus more on making a web design attractive. So they insert images with pictures, graphs, and many other things. Streamlining pages and boosting its informative factor is more important, brief and to the point. Also content should be restricted to only 6 lines. The idea is to allow visitors know what the website is all about, at a single glance! Excess information will only clutter vision.

3. Insert Intuitive Navigation

The navigation is confusing for most website visitors. Most confusing of all are the primary and secondary navigation options. Remember that visitors are impatient. They won’t waste time trying to figure out what is on the website. They will simply leave anything that confuses them. Hence, avoid placing links to less important pages. The best idea is to opt for intuitive navigation. Detract links from the home / landing page. Also place less important links and information pieces at the bottom end of the page. Keep these in the footer section. This will make it easier for the visitor. Also the layout will look more organized.

4. The White Space

Also referred to as the breathing room for the visitors, many designers are seen ignoring the importance of white space. You need to create space between paragraphs and images. This will allow visitors, some space to breathe and absorb all that website has to offer. This also improves user experience and even increase the return from the website.

5. Strategic Use of Fonts and Color

Strategic use of fonts and colors is important for a website. The colour code should cater to the taste of the targeted audience. So customize the color of the background and fonts in a way to attract targeted clients. A white colored background using light pastel shades is very effective in displaying elegance and sophistication. On the other hand, use vivid colors for targeting kids. The fonts used should be easily read across all devices and browsers.

6. Responsive Web Design

Smartphones are on the rise. So it is time you enhance user experience. Create a responsive web design and increase your fan following.

7. Professional Photography

Visitors are smart enough to make out an edited picture taken from the web. This will not leave a good impact on your brand image. So it is better to invest in professional photography. You will get eye-catching pictures that instantly catch attention in developing an emotional connection between the audience and content.

8. NO Flash

It is time you bid adieu to Flash. Go for options that are web and user friendly as compared Flash. “HTML5” has recently gained a lot of preference on the web with search engine friendly text. It also functions on all popular mobile operating devices without any plugin. Flash does not support any such thing. Hence, it is time you drop Flash and search for other better options.

9. Don't Ignore Buttons

Visitors will immediately reject unsightly and unimpressive buttons for 'submit' or 'send'. So make sure the form submission buttons are very appealing enough and inspire visitors to “click”. The designer needs to be very creative. So allow submit button change color, gradient, font treatment, etc. The button should be very attractive.

10. Eliminate Sidebars

Studies have revealed that sidebars when eliminated from the company blog, resulted in increase of the number of clicks to over 35 per cent. The process encourages readers being more attentive to the article. Also the call for action from the visitors’ end increases. So get rid of the sidebars NOW!

11. NO Slideshow

Slideshow was an early introduction on the website. This was used to provide information at the first page of the website. But this didn't click well as visitors are impatient and do not want to waste time staying on the first page for a long time. So the idea is to keep messages brief, attractive and simple. You can create an image along with a message.

12. Faster Coding

CodeKit is the best option for browser reloading. This helps you to see any browser changes instantly. There's no need for refreshing. It works like a steroid for web developers. Once integrated with design, it lifts a lot of pressure off the web designer. Use of a good coding technique will let designs come out beautifully. Also, its website appeal increases manifold.

13. Layout Planning

Most part of web design success depends on planning. So make sure the website layout is planned strategically. Since no two businesses / brands are the same, it's crucial to create a design that's unique and distinctive. It should be visibly different from all others, even if the niche industry and target audience is the same. The idea is to keep the essence of design same with a distinctive outlook.

14. FitVids Plugins

These days, incorporating a video to websites is a trend. This makes a web page look and feel very innovative. It also enhances its informative value. You can use lightweight, user friendly jQuery plugin, that helps videos get some fluidity. This boosts its responsive capacity. The FitVids plugin supports various video vendors such as Vimeo, YouTube, Blip.tv among many others.

15. Photoshop Creates Magic

If you wish to have a wonderful web design, be descriptive when naming Photoshop layers. According to expert Rhys Little, one should be as descriptive as possible when naming layers of Photoshop. It does not take much time naming layers in a way others can understand. This is very useful for saving time and efforts for designer later. He also recommends adding some extra layers in Photoshop designs. This helps with reducing confusion. Photoshop modifies images and comes packed with some amazing tools for developing attractive graphical layouts from scratch. If you do this well, the results are outstanding.

16. Pinterest is a Good Idea

Once a website is designed for business, it is natural for the owner to keep integrating it with new ideas and valuable information. It is important to collect information and store it safely for future reference. Pinterest is a great platform used to create mood boards for layout, colors, images, and other material the designers find useful for future reference. Since other designers also create and share mood boards, these can be further used as a valuable support source.

17. Do Not Highlight Social Media Icons

Integrating your website with good design will attract your target audience towards it. However, wrong placement of social media icons will force them to leave. So strictly avoid placing social media icons anywhere near the header. Bury these in the footer. No website sends people to the website. It is always the other way round. Social media sends people to the website.

18. Content is Above the Fold

Studies have revealed that the majority of the people spends time focusing above the fold on web pages. This means they are more interested in what shows up on screen without scrolling down. Unfortunately, most designers tend to put everything in the header section and this makes things look clumsy. You can improve this via the modifying height of the header as per the requirement. Also keep sign-up button at a higher level on the page. This is important for grabbing visitor’s attention. Remember that “call-to-action” is one of the priorities of any website.

18. Keep Limited Number of Pages

If you are serious about making your website interesting, trim down its page count. It will also help with a simpler and easier navigation. Including too many menu items will make things confusing. Visitors will make visitors overwhelmed by choices. When you restrict the number of pages, it makes the website more attractive and friendlier to visitors.

19. Necessary Elements

This is a common tips web designers are asked to follow. However, there are times when the focus of the website is unclear. Most unnecessary elements tend to clutter and confuse. So it is important that you use the 80-20 rule which work towards trimming down the various elements of the website to the essentials. This strategy has helped a lot of business giants help increase sales on their website.

Remember that design should focus more on performance than how things look or feel like. It makes your web design an online success.

6 Instagram Marketing Predictions for 2017 – Straight From the Pros

2017-02-26T03:30:00.000-08:00

You love Instagram! This social media platform has won millions of hearts across the globe since its release in 2010. And it has never failed to mesmerise its audience with new exciting features. The rapid introduction of the latest features in the year 2016 suggests marketers can look forward to more changes in 2017. So if you have been wondering what changes in marketing scenario on Instagram in 2017, here are some powerful marketing predictions by experts:

1. Improved Analytics Data and User Experience

At present, more than 48 percent of brands have already made their way on Instagram. It is also estimated that this number will get a significant increase to 70 per cent in 2017. This is certainly the must-have app for businesses. Instagram is vigorously focused on improving its ads and analytics. As the prediction goes, in 2017 mobile ad revenues of Instagram will reach $2.81 billion! Now the question is how will they do it? Users will be offered improved analytics tools and focus will be shifted to creating a user friendly experience for all business owners (irrespective of analytics experience).

At present, business owners possess access to analytics that assess the following:

- Impressions
- Reach
- Engagement
- Audience

2. Overtakes Market Share for Snapchat

Well, this is the trend most pros have noticed over the past several months. And this continues through 2017. Instagram will definitely take over more market share from Snapchat. Snapchat Stories allowed the audience to get inside look at your life and business. Now Instagram has come out with InstaStories. One can perform multiple things on a single platform.

There's a huge difference between the two platforms. Apart from the ability to do multiple things on a single platform, the connection features make all the difference! With Snapchat, it is not easy to connect with others. On the other hand, Instagram lets you connect with Facebook friends and followers easily.

Using Instagram will pay if you start using InstaStories to share behind-the-scenes stuff. The audience will love it as the process adds value to their day. Also, you can give them what they wish to know. A great way to establish meaningful connections with your followers!

3. Better Business

Mark Zuckerberg definitely wants to crush Snapchat. All video options and Story flow on Instagram will experience a makeover. The focus will also be on developing better business tools to help sellers make a flourishing marketplace on the platform.

4. Sales Prospects with Shoppable Product Tags

Instagram will become a shopping haven for end users. It will make for an amazing source of cash flow for marketers. Lately, the social media platform has been tested shoppable product tags that ensure immediate information on a specific product to viewers sans leaving the platform. In case, the viewer decides to buy, he or she will click a 'Shop Now' button to directly visit the landing page to place an order.

The 'shoppable product tags' will facilitate the entire process for Instagram users to buy products. These tags will help users to purchase products in a hassle free fashion. Earlier marketers could use just one link in the bio. The new shopping option will certainly emerge as a game-changer!

5. Brilliant Opportunities Marketers

The platform grows up and the algorithm will continue to be more important. The paid advertising will also continue to increase and put a great impact on businesses. Live video in Stories will be a huge hit and push Instagram towards building a billion users in the near future. Instagram will embrace marketers and best marketing strategies in 2017. Business profiles will benefit from easier access and features. Newer and better ways will allow shopping from within the app. Businesses should get smarter and more strategic in order to benefit from these newer features.

6. Attention From Marketers

Did you know Instagram has moved on? Yes, your favourite social media platform is now much more than simply sharing your most happening snap to a full-fledged visual storytelling platform. The whole thing has got a lot more gripping and challenging! So share your live videos and amazing Instagram Stories instantly. These are more authentic and appeal to the audience better. The spontaneity of these videos makes them more interesting. Nothing can help you establish a more intimate and engaging conversation as this.

Marketers will gain a lot by playing this amazing Instagram game. Plan visual stories that can come in the form of repeating Boomerangs (loop). Don't leave any chance for posting short videos on Instagram. One of the best ways is to use a number of fun tools such candy cane writing tool. These look really great and catch attention as they pop up. Marketers can share a lot of compelling and interesting Instagram stories throughout the day. Many successful Instagrammers have also been highlighting launches and special sessions of Q&As with Instagram Live disappearing videos.

Predictions at a Glance:

- Live video of Instagram will be savable for 24 hours.
- Instagram Stories will be integrated with more attractive filter options. Users can expect a wider rollout for clickable links and integration with Boomerang and Hyperlapse.
- Saving drafts will have more options including the ability to store drafts in organized subfolders. This is certainly a bonus for business owners.
- The best one is 'Reply' feature that gets a makeover and gets tucked under the original comment.
- Likes for comments.
- Shoppable tags will roll out to a wid range of users.

8 Dynamic Strategies for Promoting Your YouTube Videos

2017-02-23T02:17:00.001-08:00

So you have a YouTube channel and videos that display your products and services in the best light. Now what? It is now time to promote these videos as well. Here are 8 best strategies that help you make videos viral online:

1. Get Listed

You must get your videos and YouTube Channel page listed with the major search engines. So be prepared to list them on Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Later on, integrate SEO strategies to ensure better listing placements.

2. Start Promotion Activity

Start off with promoting your videos to your friends, relatives, colleagues and neighbours. Also promote these to your existing happy clients. You should ask them to watch your video (s) and share them with their online / offline friends.

3. Use SEO to Promote YouTube Videos

Don't you wish your videos and channel pop up first when target audience search for content? Most people have the best video content, but doesn’t really show up in the first few results on Google / YouTube search. This is not good because the video will not get any views from search engines.

If you have a video that displays your products and services and want it to be the first in the list, make it visible and relevant to search engines. You can do this by placing appropriate keywords in the right places.

4. Cross-promote Teasers and Videos

Whether you have just created your YouTube account, thinking of uploading videos, or just started adding initial content to your channel, make sure you get into action early on building the excitement. Your target audience should get the news about your new venture in an exciting way.

5. Video Thumbnails

Make sure the YouTube thumbnails are less than 2 MB in size. Also take care that the resolution is 1280 x 720. Although smaller in size, video thumbnails are arguably one of the biggest things to focus on especially to promote videos successfully across different social media platforms.

Try imagining that the YouTube thumbnail is your business card for the page. It will show up on the homepage, to target audience when they search for a specific video, and once a video is shared.

It is possible to create custom and actionable YouTube thumbnail via using Canva to drive more traffic to a website. You need to upload specific dimensions. The rest of the design will be taken care of by Canva. All you need to do is click on homepage tab - “use custom dimensions” tab.

Use very simple, crystal clear text describing a video when creating a thumbnail. Also integrate logo in one of the bottom corners. Brighter colours are the best choice for thumbnails. For a positive impact, follow consistency with your brand. It is better to stick with the same font type, color scheme, and/or general layout. This will make videos noticeable as your brand.

6. Analytics are Important

For a new YouTube channel or one that hasn’t been active since long, the analytics may go inaccurate. So keep tabs on Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics, or kind of social platform that you are active on.

You should know what day(s) of the week and time are your fans most active. Also know the type of content that get the most traction. For successful promotion of the YouTube channel, it is important that you know your analytics well.

7. Keywords and Phrases for Videos

It is crucial to know that Google and YouTube have complex algorithms. So when it comes to selecting search results, they can be tough. Don't worry. You don’t need to get deep into the algorithm concept. Simply knowing that appropriately placed keywords and increased views boost relevance of videos in searches is enough.

So start making efforts towards boosting your placement on Google searches. Prepare a list of phrases and keywords to use. Know what phrases your target audience will use to find you. Some of the most common searches include, “How to _____” and “What is a _____?” So including these into your video phrases and keywords will really help.
For instance, a beauty vlogger can use keywords for a skin whitening tutorial such as “How to get fair skin,” “skin whitening,” “clear skin,” and, “brighten skin.” Make sure you fit these words and phrases naturally into your title. Also include in the description of your video. Keep keyword density on the lower side. It should look natural.

Allow primary keyword or phrase to appear in your title. Also write a long description that gives you ample opportunity to naturally fit primary and secondary keywords and phrases into the text. Make use of the video tag box to add relevant keywords.

8. Hire a Professional

If budget allows, hire a reputed YouTube video marketing company. The team of experts will allow you to plan and implement a highly effective online promotional campaign for your YouTube videos.

10 Amazing Ways to Use Tumblr for Business

2017-02-21T23:32:00.003-08:00

Presently, Tumblr is one of the most widely used social platforms across the globe. Although there are several success stories related to this network, Tumblr could never reach to the top of the radar of several brands existing in the industry.

A lot of people are not aware of the artistic side of Tumblr is artistic. It is a little different from conventional blogging platforms such as WordPress as it comprises of a very strong social component. In fact, most experts celebrate Tumblr for its blogging platform.

Now the question is how to use Tumblr for business. Here are some amazing ways you can use this platform to ensure business success:

Allows People Search for your Business

Tumblr is different from other social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. One of the best things about Tumblr is that it employs Search Engine Optimization. Well, that literally means that Google indexes the platform. It offers some amazing plug-ins to share content on other social media websites. It saves you time and efforts to do the work twice. So in case, you have a website, Tumblr will be of great help in driving extra traffic to your primary website landing page.

1. Creates Amazing Blogs

When it comes to ensuring a human face to your organization, the Tumblr helps you to create some amazing blogs. Here, most part of the blogs are crafted by people for people. So it is a good idea to showcase your brand on Tumblr. You can follow other Tumblr blogs and business blogs. Re-blogging relevant posts will help you show your efforts to keep yourself updated on the latest industry news. This is extremely important.

2. Engage Readers and Bloggers

Always comment on posts made by people about your products. You should also respond to comments on your page. You should engage the community in a friendly and positive way. This helps earn trust of your trust of your readers.

3. Varied Media on Tumblr

You can make your blog way more interesting by adding images, website links, videos, texts and other ways to engage individuals on the platform. These make for amazing tools to make your blog highly enjoyable. Another idea is to add sharing buttons for Facebook and Twitter. This allows people repost freely across several platforms.

4. Relevant Content

Although a number of media tools are available these days, simply generating traffic without an aim won't give any benefits. You should focus on adding more targeted traffic by using relative content that enhances readers’ focus. Post high quality images of your product. This will prompt people to repost and share with friends. Over 80 per cent of all Tumblr posts are pictures, GIFs, or images of other formats. Hence, it is crucial to make sure you use these to boost reblogging.

5. 100% Free

Interestingly, Tumblr will not make you pay to show your blog to people. Facebook does that! So Tumblr comes as a 100% free platform where you don't require spending a penny. Businesses need to pay for additional features and increased publicity. Why not use Tumblr which is free? Towards the end everything depends on the way your blog looks and how appealing it is for readers.

6. Google Analytics Helps Track Progress

It is easier to connect your blog to Google Analytics. The process helps you to track the popularity of your account and profile including other statistics. This facilitates you to boost your marketing efforts. In short, you know better what works best you and what goes waste.

7. Interactions Develops Interest

Tumblr is all about interaction. So the more discussions you decide on having, the better it gets. Your business will get benefitted a lot from it. The social networking platform allows organizations interact smoothly. You don't have to follow any rules or regulations for business correspondence. All you need to do is link your Tumblr page to the main website for business communications and get going.

8. Tags for Online Marketing

Tumblr has an amazing tagging system. It is a one-of-a-kind that allows users to start typing the name of a company to get relevant tags instantly. It may be quite tricky to use tags with other social media sites. Also not many users will approve of it or understand the whole purpose. Tumblr tags are used extensively to discover content.

9. Increase Traffic Flow with Do-Follow Links

Tumblr will help you get unlimited links to attract traffic to your business website. The backlinks allows to boost traffic to landing pages. It also helps you to boost sales. Your website will rank higher in Google search. Use of relevant keywords and phrases in Tumblr content is important. Do-Follow blog posts and help readers develop an interest in visiting specific pages for discounts and other benefits.

10. Boost Branding Efforts

Tumblr comes equipped with the best of tools to serve as an excellent platform for promoting your brand. The platform is taking off really well. So if you do not join the trend, you will waste the opportunity it offers. Do not wait any more and extend your reach with Tumblr. There are over hundreds of millions of unique users joining the platform regularly. Focus on posting very high-quality content. This will let you gain a strong online presence.

14 Powerful Ways to Improve Your Facebook Ads

2017-02-20T04:10:00.002-08:00

It may be a challenge to increase conversion rates of Facebook ad sans increasing ad spend especially if you do not hold specialization in the process. However, there several tweaks that will get you good results when you dedicate time and energy into testing different versions.

Listed below are some interesting ways to improve Facebook Ads:

1. Target Similar Brand Followers

There's nothing better than narrowing your target audience for getting higher quality ad results on social media. It is easier to target followers of specific brands on Facebook. This helps when selling products and services to the same customer base and other well-known businesses. It is also a good option when you wish to target customer base of other non-competing brands in niche segments. Use of this makes for a simple solution, especially when other details of the target audience, such as age, job titles, likes, etc, are not available. You can make separate campaigns for each brand you wish to target. This helps you create a more personal creating an engaging message.

2. Attractive Images

Here, it is not important to use pictures of your business, services / products. You can use something relevant if possible, that catches attention of target audience and make them read your ad. Since the image should not contain more than 20 per cent words, its serves as a source for grabbing attention. Once you are successful in doing this, you have already covered half of the path towards the final destination.

3. Use Cover Photo

It is important to engage your fans and boost likes and reach. This is possible by starting contests relevant to cover page. For instance a lot of companies have been seen asking their fans send in pictures enjoying their products. They also announce 'fan of the week' for their cover. Fans find it exciting and engage more with their brand. They will also keep in touch with the page to check if they had won the weekly contest. Cover page definitely makes for free marketing space. It helps engaging fans and promote new products simultaneously.

4. Integrate video

Did you know video promises one of the highest engagement metrics on Facebook? Yes, it holds the highest out of all media options including photos or text used for advertising. It always helps the transitioning advertising process to video from static image or text with a link. It boosts engagement metrics as the audience is likely to spend more time engaging with a brand through gripping videos.

5. Custom Audience Helps

Try uploading a "custom audience". It is a CSV file of your customer list or database. Once you display ads to a customized list of audience instead 'everyone', you actually target people who know you. Also, these are people who have an affinity for your brand. This process is known to increase the rate of conversion among those who are on your list. Customizing your audience will also help you retain existing customers. As a rule, it costs up to seven times as much to win a new customer than retaining the existing ones. So it is always better to use Facebook ad campaigns to retain customers you have. Try using 'Custom Audience' feature for the same.

6. Collaborate

Advertising collaboration piece with others in complimentary industries help. The combined efforts will help you keep from making clients feel you're pushing something. The idea is to make the process feel organic. Integrate high quality video rigs. Let each entity show they are an invaluable part of the project.

7. Shareable Content

Advertising product or service directly can be avoided if you run ads and promote interactive content your users would like to share. The whole idea is to identify content your target audience engages with. Also make use of paid campaigns for promoting content and ensure optimal performance.

8. Retarget Visitors

You may consider using services such as 'AdRoll'. This will help you to build Remarketing lists and run website activity based ad. When it comes to expense and performance, this process is extremely effective, especially when launching a new product or offering an existing one holding relevance to a specific visitor. For instance, one of your clients launches a new graphic. Then he uses Facebook Remarketing for reaching previous web visitors and generate new sales online. This way, you can target or exclude customers who purchased and offer appropriate incentive to purchase. The process will become a part of all of your product launches and new sale.

9. Test Images

Things may get tough if you go not post several images both in vertical and horizontal layouts. You need to get very creative with imagery. Also, there is no need to make perfect sense with the imagery. You may try out Flickr or Freeimages.com. These places will offer you free photos that you can use. So you can focus on downloading 10 of them first and then make 10 ad variations. The results will amaze you.

10. Test Versions

It is crucial that you test as many versions of your ad as possible with varied pictures, headlines, and text. Most marketers prefer setting a small budget aside to make out which ad performs best. Thereafter, the rest of the budget is spent on that specific ad.

11. Refine your Target

It is crucial that you target ad for a group of people as specific as possible. This is how you are going to make things effective. Casting huge network doesn't make sense. Getting specific with ad content will ensure success for your campaigns.

12. Relate

I can't tell you how many business Facebook pages I've come across that is simply promotion after promotion of their business (some done more cleverer than others). You must first relate to your users. Show them that you care are about what they care about. Challenge yourself to do nothing but communicate and relate for 30 days without plugging your businesses even once. It may seem counterproductive, but spend your advertising dollars on these posts that are relationship focused rather than on posts that are sales focused and I guarantee, if you're genuine, you'll see much better engagement and feel great about your new relationships as a bonus!

13. Make Segments and Optimize Using Multivariate Testing

A lot of people may not know about this, but the ad buying interface of Facebook is quite powerful. It facilitates sophisticated targeting. Most importantly, it allows for experimentation and deep segmentation. Experts suggest the use of experimental design for developing ad experiments that can also be optimized in real time. Different variables need to be tested against multiple pre-defined customer segments. Try using different campaigns and ad-sets each time you test variation. This allows isolation of variance normalized across all. When you do experimentation across multiple segments you get to know what drives performance across the audience and what actually works for subsets.

14. Message and Destination – Match the Two

It works to create several advertising campaigns and landing pages together. Test messaging that attracts attention of your target audience and then converts them on the landing page. Focus on developing multiple landing pages using 'Optimizely'. Thereafter, come up with multiple ad campaigns on Facebook. It is important that you mix and match ads and variations of landing page variations with winning lower CPA (cost per acquisition). It is possible that an ad gets a decent click through, but people don't buy. This is not a good thing. So you should refrain from relying solely on good CPC for actionable and affordable business results.

Best Marketing Tips for Using Google Plus For Business - Take Your Business to the Top

2017-02-17T05:14:00.002-08:00

Google Plus marketing is one of the best options for business options these days. Unfortunately, most people are not really aware of this. Yes, according to studies, Google+ enjoys over 150 million active users on a monthly basis. Interestingly, 50 per cent of its users sign on almost every day! That's incredible!

Marketing on Google+ is an amazing idea. There are a number of benefits G+ promises over other social networks. For instance, its influence on SEO is one of the major advantages. You can also go for some of the incredible tools that cannot be found in other places such as Google Plus Ripples, Google Hangouts etc.

Use of Google Plus for online business makes for one of the most powerful ways to reach out new audience. You can easily boost your SEO and sales. Here are some of the best marketing tips to take you to the top:

Personalize for Business

First and foremost, you need to personalize Google Plus for your brand. As soon as your page gets personalized, you will be all set for marketing your product. Personalizing profile is crucial! The 'About Us' page should stand out, reflect personality of business in the best possible way, and direct page viewers to relevant pages.

This is possible if you describe your business clearly. Include references or write description to show what your business is all about. Thereafter, you can hyperlink text as a call to action for visitors to click through to your website.

Next, you need to claim a Google Plus Page Custom URL. This option is added by Google to supply your Google Plus page with a custom, personalized URL. The process helps with branding your page via making URL company related as compared to a random string of numbers.

Relevant Community on Google

It is very important to build a community around page to ensure effective. Apart from having a community, you should also focus on having a community relevant to your niche. There are some amazing great ways to build up the Google Plus Community.

First, you need to search through Google+ and see if anyone is mentioning your business. The process is easier for establishing page as people have tagged you in the post. For others Google Plus search bar is the best place to start. You can find people individuals who have mentioned your company name without having tagged you in the post.

You can use 'Google Ripples' and know who shares your content. Content sharing does not necessarily mean credit to the content, your services or products. In fact, the content may be getting shared abruptly and for no reason at all. Thankfully, with Ripples by Google Plus, it is easier to locate and trace these shares. It also helps in finding all kinds of people who have actually shared your content. It also works as a competitor research tool. Simply have a look at who shares posts of your competitor and who you would like to connect with.

Regular posts to Build Audience and Promote Your Page

While building up community, you can post consistently to your page. In case, people add you to their circles, you need to provide them with quality content. Automation tools such HootSuite will help with consistent flow of content. Make sure you interact with those who shares your content. You may either leave a comment or give it a +1 to show your appreciation. Using hash tags is one of the best ways to increase interaction with your posts. Hashtags categorize your posts and allow anyone to discover what you write while searching for that hashtag. Google automatically gives one or two hashtags to posts. However, you should focus on adding as many as you wish to on your own.

Another good way is to make use of custom formatting options. Google Plus facilitates you to customize appearance of text which means you can easily bold, italicize, or strike through text in your posts. This way, you can get your message across clearer or even draw attention to certain parts of your post.

Google Hangouts

These are a free video chat that provides you with the ability to host a chat with around 10 participants. It also opens up limitless possibilities. This means you can easily host webinars, add question answer sessions, provide customer support, live stream chats to YouTube and much more.

Local Google Plus for Local Businesses

Google Plus has come up with a powerful amazing feature for local businesses. It promises to help them in various ways. The feature is quite similar to having a local business page on Facebook which allows for setting location, business type, and a lot more. Clients can easily leave ratings and reviews seen by other people visiting your page. The reviews act as social proof. Here, the reviews are displayed to people with reviewers in their circles. In short, they can have a close look at reviews written by people they know.

Make sure you inspire fans to review your business. One good way is to incentivize the whole thing for them. Offer something exciting in exchange for a review.

Boost your business in the search results within Google Plus and Google itself. Users can easily search on Google Local by location for desired business. Simply ensure that your location is placed in correctly, including the following to boost business in local results:

- Contact info
- Keywords

Google reviews can be seen in the regular search result. Thereafter, you can have a look at business information taken from its G+ page inside the box on the side. The box provides relevant info, directions, and also includes some call to actions, such as asking for a review and follow on Google+.

Another good way to boost business is via setting up a Google Local page correctly and optimizing it with keywords.

Final Words

Google+ is surely one of the best things with a lot to offer your business through its unique features enabling you to establish a strong connect with the audience and through its significance for Search Engine Optimization.

Following the above listed tips will help you to get the best of the benefits of Google Plus for business success!

Be Aware and Beware: Your Competitors Can Hurt Your Rankings

2017-02-14T05:39:00.001-08:00

Most people believe that finding a great SEO campaign that does its job well is not all that you need. In fact, it is only a small part of your ranking battle. Once your website gets hosted and established, its time to think about competitors seriously. They can simply swoop in and disturb all of the hard work you had put in. Although unfair and unethical, it does happen. Each website owner should be aware of these things and know how to stop it too!

Various types of competitors can hurt your rankings. Some may be ethical and other unethical. However, the key to online business success is to know how to handle this well. Here's what you need to do in this respect:

Out Rank

If a competitor has a better marketing campaign and rankings than you do, they will certainly out rank you. It is a two-way competition. Just as you pushed others down to climb up the ranking ladder, your competitors will do the same to push their business forward. You need to continue with good marketing and ethical SEO tactics. This will help you outrank your competitors.

Understand that not everyone can hold the number one position. It is better to aim for top five. This increases your odds to get to the top and marketing gets simpler. Also, there are dim chances of being pushed out by a competitor while staying aggressive and updated with your marketing campaign.

Link Building is Important

Link ONLY to reputable sites while undergoing a link building campaign. It is also important to check back on the websites to ensure these are worthy of your link. In case, a website loses authority via using bad SEO tactics (linking to poor quality sites / creating spam to increase traffic), everyone linked pays the price and suffer from lower rankings.

Competitors tend to follow the strategy to lower the ranking system and bring down competitors. They may have your link backs placed on non-desirable sites. So keep constant tabs on your link backs. Also use disavow tool from Google to remove links. Always be vigilant while monitoring your website. Contact website owner and ask to have the link removed.

Review Sites

These are the best options to build your brand. These help in driving traffic to your website and establish authority on a specific industry. However, these may even destroy your reputation. Your competitors may be writing these reviews.

In case, an actual consumer writes a negative review, comment on the review and visually display your plan to rectify the situation. For competitor review, speak to the review site directly, and ask them to take down the reviews. Also try to respond to each review personally. Review all the top review sites regularly.

Find Bad Links

Trust the backlink monitoring tool for locating bad links. It will display all of your backlinks. These can be sorted by backlinks passing PageRank - ones having no SEO value (nofollow) absolutely and those that get completely ignored by Google. Pay attention to those Google acknowledges and ones that link back to you.

You can check backlinks profile manually. Also sort these by anchor texts and check the ones that look suspicious. Make sure you sort links by social shares. This helps with locating bad links. Remember that 95 per cent of bad links have 0 social shares.

Common Bad Links

Here are some of the common bad links to spot:

- Auto approved comments from un-moderated sites
- Links from pages with less or no content
- Link directories
- Social bookmarking websites
- Websites offering duplicated content
- Links from irrelevant websites

Check Anchor Text

Since many of the backlinks come from images or hidden from users, these may really tough to spot. You can find these by checking the anchor text used on that specific link. The location of the link will be highlighted once the anchor text is copied and pasted into your browser. To find hard to locate links, simply view the page source.

Tag bad links you see and eliminate after checking them.

Get Rid of Bad Links

It is easy. You simply need to get in touch with the webmaster and ask them to remove the bad links. In most cases, webmasters do not have any problems (especially if you are polite). They will remove it without bothering you much. However, if they do not do so, there are other ways you can get rid of these.

There are webmasters who will simply ignore your request. So instead of wasting time returning your request. Remember that the longer bad links are associated with your website, the longer rankings suffer. Also, if a webmaster wants to respond to your request, he/she will do it within 48 hours. In case, you don't get any response within this period, proceed to the next step and get the links removed.

Contact the hosting company and place a request to remove your link. Let them know that a specific site they host has been spamming your website.

Disavow

Using the Google disavow tool can be helpful. It is an effective and easy to use that comes absolutely free of cost. You can go through the tutorials on 'how to use the tool' offered by Google. Although it may take longer, the tool is quite effective. When no one is ready to adhere to your instructions / rules and you simply cannot remove links removed using normal communications, the tool is just the right and best way to get what you want (without any foreign assistance).

Easy Yet Brilliant Steps to Improve Your B2B Leads Through PPC

2017-02-11T00:19:00.001-08:00

There are a number of ways to produce leads for B2B company. PPC is certainly at the top of the list, especially when you expect instant results. However, PPC is not easy to manage. In fact, the project can get very expensive if you don’t know what you are doing.

According to experts, PPC management is a skill set. It takes time for a person to learn and develop a strategy that produces results without getting expensive. So are you ready to follow the process? You can read and watch all the tutorials, but there will be one definite, you will experience trial and error going through this. Yet, this will surely be worth your while because not only will you learn a lot, you will learn strategies that will work well for you and your business.

Mastering the skill of PPC management will let you produce revenue at higher volume as compared to other techniques. Also other techniques tend to eat up your resources. Enhancing B2B leads through PPC will help increase your ROI while reducing wastage of resources dramatically. While using this technique, you don’t require spreading resources out.

Here are some important steps you can take to boost your B2B leads using PPC:

Know Your Clients

It is important that a business knows their audience (B2C or B2B). There are several ways in which you can improve B2B leads. Several features can help you with your PPC campaigns. However, first, you must know your target customers. Here, it is crucial to develop buyer personas and proper messaging.

A Buyer Persona will allow you to paint a portrait of your ideal customer. The info gathered can be used to target audience, making sure that you are not wasting resources. It also makes sure that the right people see your ads. So no more wasting time and effort on showing ads to people who are not interested.

The next step is to determine the keywords used by your target audience to search for your product or service. You will get insights on websites they frequently visit. It helps with Display campaigns and AdWord Search campaigns.

Articulate Your Offer

This is crucial for B2B sales. When it comes to providing solutions for clients, most B2B organizations have absolutely no problems. Spreading awareness is really important as most customers aren about the benefits of your products or services. They might now know how they will use those in their own't actually aware of benefits of products / services sold by businesses. Under such situations, the customers may not be able to engage immediately as they don’t know what to do about your services and products. For instance, if you offer weight loss and health guidance, you should help the market understand the benefits of engaging with products or services. Invest ample time organizing webinars, various videos, customer testimonials, and even blog posts. While busy with PPC ads, don’t ignore content marketing campaigns that help educate your niche audience.

Create Customized Landing Pages - The moment a visitor gets to one of your landing pages, you have already paid for the click. So it indicates that so called strategies for reducing the number of poor quality leads such as addition form fields, validating email address for business are actually misguided. Your main focus should be on maximizing conversion rates of landing pages. This can be done via optimizing the following elements:

Tailor Landing Pages to Ad Groups - Tailor your landing pages as per the needs and challenges of your ad groups.

Result Driving Offers – It is crucial to test multiple offers to see the one that gets you the most traction.
Test – A/B test your landing pages. This helps determine variants that driving maximum conversions, consumers, opportunities, and ROI. Make sure you always do A/B test for a single element at a time to isolate the overall impact of that specific element on performance. Additionally, focus on testing just two page variants of the page at a time. The most crucial elements to run tests on are above the fold. These include:

Headline – You can test varied versions of the main selling point, offer / benefit.
Call-to-Action (CTA) – The key is to try out a variety of CTA copy, colors, sizes and placements.
Background / Hero Shot - Test a variety of images or videos for hero shot or background.
Form - Test varied lengths and placements for lead generation form. You can also display your form as a pop up, or bottom of your page.

Adjustments to Mobile Performance

Once you have implemented device tracking, you can easily determine the devices that drive opportunities. In case, you feel mobile leads aren't getting converted into opportunities, simply stop running your campaigns on mobile devices. You can also reduce bids. This helps devices receive the bulk of your traffic.

Develop Ad Schedule

In case, you are running ads 24/7, simply set up an ad schedule for your campaigns. It is possible to add days of the week or break down your schedule. All you need to do is add hourly segments for each day of the week. Thereafter, you can track performance for each hour and day that you define.

After combining opportunity data and ad schedule, it is possible to determine days or hours that produce maximum opportunities. This will help you adjust bids for each segment. It also stops running your campaign for the specific segments.

Make sure you have a close look at the data from time to time. In case, you fail to generate opportunities on weekends / weeknights, stop running campaigns during those times. Thereafter, you can move your budget for regular business hours.

9 Best Ways to Optimize Your Images For an SEO Boost

2017-02-09T05:16:00.001-08:00

Do you run an online store? If yes, then image optimization is an art that you want to master. Right from attracting target audience to perusing Google images for minimizing website load time, image optimization makes for a crucial part of developing a successful eCommerce website.

Many times, you must have noticed that your product pictures never show up while doing a Google image search. Have you been wondering if adding "Alt Tags" to images will do good for your website?
JPEG, GIF and PNG - What difference does it make?

Here, you will get to know about the 9 best ways to optimize your images to boost SEO:

1. Name Your Images

Make sure you do it descriptively. Also use simple plain English while doing so. Do not get into the habit of keeping the default file name given by your camera. Use of acceptable keywords will help your webpage rank well on search engines. Effective image optimization demands highly descriptive, keyword-rich file names. Search engines will crawl the text on your webpage. They will also search for keywords within image file names.

2. Optimize Alt Tags Wisely

Alt tags are a great text alternative to images, especially when a browser is unable to render them. In cases, where image is rendered, hovering over it with mouse pointer will let you see the alt tag text developed for that image. This depends on your browser settings. The alt attribute adds SEO value to the website. Better rankings for a website can be achieved by adding appropriate alt tags to the images and associating keywords with images. Use of alt tags is the best way for eCommerce products show up in Google image and web search. For image optimization, fill out each alt tag for each product image on your website.

Make sure you follow simple rules for alt tags:

- Describe images in plain English.
- Selling products with model number or serial numbers? Use these in your alt tag too.
- Strictly avoid keyword stuffing in your alt tags.
- Do not use alt tags for decorative images. You may be penalized by search engines for over-optimization.

Carry out a sanity check on your website on a regular basis. You must take a close look at the source of your web pages. Assess properly to see if your alt tags are filled out.

3. Create a Strategy for Image Dimensions and Product Angles

Displaying multiple angles of a product is a trend that has caught up really well these days. The best way you can capitalize on these pictures is to fill out alt tags. Simply create unique alt tags for each product shot. Add descriptions to base alt tag. This will help potential searchers land on your website. Google will reward you with searchers.

Avoid placing the largest image on your webpage as it lengthens the page load time owing to the larger file size related to the large image. The idea is to shrink the dimensions using source code. Give an option to view larger image in a pop-up or let it displayed on a separate webpage.

4. Reduce the Image File Size

Making your target audience wait for 3 seconds for a website load is ok. 5 seconds is too much! It is a sin! As per a research report published by Amazon, the company lost around $1.6 billion in a year if their pages slow down by 1 second. It is important to understand that Google uses page load time as a crucial factor in their ranking algorithm. So if your images take a lot of time to load, you are actually bidding adieu to your customers.

The best thing to do here is to decrease the image file size on your webpage. "Save for Web" command in Adobe Photoshop is a good way to do that. Ecommerce images should be kept under 70kb. Adjust the image to the lowest file size acceptable when using the command.

Use some of the other online tools if you do not have Photoshop. image editing. Some of the best image editing tools include PicMonkey, Pixlr, and FotoFlexer.

5. The Best Image File Type to Use

Three most common file types used to post images include:

- JPEG
- GIF
- PNG

JPEG (or .jpg) images are the old file type. These have turned into standard image of the World Wide Web. These images can be compressed significantly, resulting in high quality images with small file sizes.

GIFs (.gif) are lower quality images. These are used for more simple images. For instance, webmasters use these as icons and decorative images. The format supports animation and using these for plain and simple images on a webpage is a great option. However, for complex images and pictures, GIFs do not make for an attractive option.

PNG images are gaining popularity faster as an alternative to GIFs. The format supports a wide range of colors as compared to GIFs. The best part is that these do not degrade over time with re-saves. The file sizes may be larger as compared to JPEG images.

Be cautious while using PNG-24 image which is over three times larger in file size than the PNG-8 version.

Here are some tips to follow when choosing file formats:

- JPEGs make for the best option for most ecommerce sites. These are high on quality and the smaller file size.
- Strictly avoid using GIFs for large product images. The size is very large and cannot be reduced. Use of GIFs for thumbnails and decorative images is good.
- PNGs are a good alternative for both JPEGs and GIFS. PNG-8 is better than PNG-24 when using pictures for a product. PNGs are great as simple decorative images owing to their extremely small file size.

Use of an image editing software will let you save images to any of the file types discussed above.

6. Learn To Handle Thumbnails

Most ecommerce sites use thumbnail images. These provide an excellent way to scan category pages fast sans taking up too much space. Although thumbnails are great, you need to be careful. These can affect page loading times negatively. You may lose customers when they hold up category pages from loading. So you need to reduce the size of thumbnail file sizes as far as possible. Also vary the alt tag text. Duplicate text use bigger versions of the same image. Create the different alt text. Lastly, Allow thumbnail to be indexed instead of the large image.

7. Decorative Images – Beware!!

Most websites have an assortment of decorative images. These may include buttons, background images, and borders. An image that's irrelevant or unrelated to product / service is tagged as 'decorative'.

Decorative images tend to add aesthetic appeal to a webpage. However, these usually lead to huge combined file size. Also it slows down the load times. Hence, you need to take a closer look at decorative images to stop them from impairing your website's capacity to convert visitors into customers.

The first thing to do is assess the file sizes of decorative images on web pages. Thereafter, you must make use of a template that reduces file sizes for website pages. Some of the best ways you can reduce file sizes of decorative images include:

- Convert borders or simple patterns into PNG-8 or GIFs.
- Use CSS for creating colored areas instead of using images.
- Large wallpaper-style background image should be reduced in size as far as possible sans ruining the quality of the image. Try cutting out the middle of the background image. Try converting it to a flat color or transparent. This is one of the best ways to reduce file size to a significant amount.

8. Be Cautious While Using Content Delivery Networks

Content delivery networks (CDNs) are now categorised as the most profitable place to host images and other media files. These help increase load times for your page and help fix bandwidth issues. The only drawback is backlinks. Backlinks are critical for SEO. The more you have, the better your website performs in the search engines.

Placing images on content delivery network will remove the images from your domain and placing it on a content delivery network domain. This means when someone links to your images, they link to the content delivery network website. In short, you must keep yourself from the temptation to follow anything just because it is "trendy". Assessors if it is the best move for your business before joining the bandwagon.

A CDN makes for a great choice if your website does a lot of business each month as it fixes bandwidth issues. For a website that gets "thousands" of visitors a day, simply continue with present hosting situation as it will easily handle the load.

Getting professional help will strategize your move in a way that's best for your business.

9. Test Images

The ultimate aim of image optimization is to help boost your bottom line. Once you have focussed on reducing size of files and getting search engines index these, it is time for testing images and see what precisely converts into more business.

You should test number of product images per page. Many non-hosted ecommerce sites face problems with loading time, the main thing to focus on is to reduce the number of images on a single page. This helps boost click-through rates and sales. However, in some cases, supplying a lot of images per page may actually boost user experience and result in more sales. The best way to find out what works is to test.

You can test angles preferred by your target audience. Providing views your clients wish to see will ultimately increase overall loyalty. Try surveying customers about their preferences while viewing product shots.

Also test the number of product listings you need to have on category pages. This will help you see what works best for your target audience and their shopping experience.

Value of Money – A Facet of Service Web Design Freelancers Should Focus On

2017-02-08T04:42:00.002-08:00

So you are a freelancer and satisfied with your work? This situation seems like as if you have a perfect professional life. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. A lot of freelance web designer feels that they have reached a plateau. There are times when they like to take up more challenging tasks. Another important thing is to work with clients who will pay more and appreciate the efforts made. Every hardworking freelance wants to work with clients who realize and respect the concept of value for money.

This is precisely where you start off with your journey from a freelancer to entrepreneur. The transition takes time, but you need to keep making efforts. It involves taking on more work, additional projects and learning simple yet effective ways to market yourself. These small steps will lead you to establishing your own business.

Being a theme pre-built websites user will help. It helps you know the overall cost of your work. You also know that using the right tools in the appropriate manner will help you save time and deliver excellent results.

Passion is Power

Passion is what can take you to the path of success. It should be topped smartly with business thinking.
Since the concept - 'value for money' is powerful, a freelancer must understand it well prior to applying it. Start off by having a close look at your work process. Make sure you realize the value against time, energy, and creativity (know the amount of time spent for each). Start by showing clients why your work and efforts were worth more than what they pay.

Value of Tools

Know the overall value of tools. Start by having a look at a WordPress theme of your choice. Try assessing if it is functioning the way it should. Is it really helping you provide value for money for clients. Are you travelling that extra mile and spending extra time installing themes? Have you thought of setting up new options? Customizing layouts are another thing you should focus on.

Assess the Theme

Prior to using a theme or a prebuilt website, assess it on all aspects of functions. It should be customizable, easy to use, and should not demand any complex coding. You should be well aware of the features that help you most in your work. Do you think the tool provides an effective way for spending resources?

Pick Wisely

Pick a pre-built theme wisely. Look for one that offers professional-level designs, matches your client’s niche, and customizable. Know the amount of time you will save. The best thing to do is show your clients editable layouts. It saves time.

Three Basic Elements

For delivering superior services, you need the following the three basic elements:

- Skill
- Experience
- Communication Skill

If you aren't getting enough requests for additional work from previous clients or they aren't referring you to others, there are areas you need to look for improvement.

Work Smarter

This is important whether you are a freelancer or not. Working harder may get you results, but working smart will attract success. Keep your eyes and ears open. The moment you see an area that requires improvement, start working on it. Also, research areas that demand help. You need to learn and explore more about the latest design trends, standards, rules, and much more. Listen to your clients well and adhere to their instructions keeping in mind the value for money concept.

Develop Yourself

Once you are capable of producing more value for yourself, you actually work towards offering benefits to all. Invest your time and money wisely. So start assessing your investments individually, especially in terms of value for money. Towards the end of the month, you will get an idea of things that work well and the spots you require working on to improve. It is all about paying attention. When you pay attention, you facilitate the process of transition from freelancer to entrepreneur. This way, you become your own marketing resource.

Enjoy Your Job

Avoid doing a job just because you have to do it. Taking up a project and accomplishing it successfully is important. However, you should pay attention to small yet consistent improvements on a personal level. Remember, you have multiple skills and talents. Each of these can work for a resource that helps you supply value for money. All you need to do is understand these resources better and the best way to put these into use.

Take-away Ideas

It is crucial that you use value for money as criteria for a test to see the way your work impacts others. This will help you assess relationship with clients in a different light. Also the tools you use should be analyzed well to know if they are providing ample value for money. One of the best examples of such tools is 'Be Theme'. It offers over 220+ pre-built websites to users. When used wisely in conjunction with your niche skills and talents, you can make a huge success out of each project. Studies have revealed that over 50,000 designers love it.

In a Nutshell

It is important that you set a goal towards being a dynamic human resource that clients would look forward to for 'real' value. The mission is definitely achievable with dedicated efforts and using tools.

Good Luck!

Costliest Mistakes Businesses Make On Social Media

2017-02-07T03:13:00.004-08:00

Social media have been labelled and proven as a powerful tool. However, the power comes with a huge baggage of responsibility. Most of the time businesses simply fail to understand the damage social media mistakes can do. Also the long-term damage and issues can disturb growth.

Thankfully, these costly mistakes businesses are preventable! Try doing good things as positive exposure is helpful to your brand.

Here are some ways you can avoid making costly mistakes:

Irrelevant Posts

Stories about companies making social media faux pas and then deleting posts or tweets is common. They even end up making an apology to make things look fine later. Strictly avoid posting anything that will label you or the post as insensitive, irrelevant, or inappropriate. Try establishing a detailed posting policy. Here, you need to make sure the tweet or post is reviewed smartly before it can be published.

The Attack Mode

Social media (talk of Twitter) are loaded with trolls. The mere basis of their existence is to bring people down. It is upsetting to watch the trolls disturbing your social media campaigns. Trolling is actually a rare problem. The best way to handle it is to ignore it. It goes away once you ignore it. Trolls simply want your attention. Rage is what energizes them. Strictly avoid responding. Show you aren't reading and bothered!

Not Recognizing your Target Audience

Most business owners believe that creating profiles, developing content and following a some account is all they need to do. However, your job doesn't stop here. If you are serious about enjoying immense success with social media, simply narrow your focus. Make double sure you’re reaching out to the right audience.

A successful social media strategy will start with a detailed understanding of your target audience. This should follow with gaining information on where audience shops, what they do in spare time, their political beliefs, their aspiration and other details. In short, knowing who your audience is will help you engage the audience in meaningful ways.

Paid Likes and Followers

Most people have a tough time getting a social media presence off the ground. Gathering a few hundred followers may take a few months. Most of the time, you will feel as if the progress is moving at a snail’s pace. And this is where a big mistake of paying for followers is made. A lot of business owners consider it as a good deal. They believe that simply spending a few dollars will work.

However, experts in this field strictly warn against taking any such step. This is because likes and follows you purchase aren't real people! These are neither potential leads nor customers. Do not expect them to share or link your content. These social media accounts are robots doing the same thing for everyone around!

One of the biggest dangers of buying likes and followers is that you will spend precious time speaking to the fake or irrelevant audience. None of your advertising or marketing efforts will work here. So it is always better to employ dedicated efforts and exercise patience creating and employing business strategies with social media.

Social Media

It is important to understand that social media can either be an asset or a hindrance. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses tend to launch social strategies without gaining an insight of what precisely successful social media marketing looks like. This often results in costly errors which may damage the reputation of the brand in the long run.

Avoiding the above listed mistakes, you won't fall for traps. Also for a healthy, effective long-term social strategy, it is important that you become familiar with the intricacies of each platform used. Also, never cease learning.

8 Powerful Ways to Increase Your Reputation Online

2017-02-06T02:13:00.000-08:00

Online ratings and reviews possess ample potential to influence decision of your present and future clients. Boosting, protecting, and promoting the online reputation of a company needs to be an integral part of its day to day operations.

Negative reviews for your products, services or website tends to deter buyers. So if you have even one negative review, do something about it. This may affect your potential sales. Listed below are some powerful actions to improve your online reputation:

1. Encourage Happy Customers

Encourage your happy and satisfied clients to post their positive experience. Your customers advocating your services are a plus point. It will influence others to buy from you. In case, your customers don't feel motivated to post their experience about your business, offer an incentive. Remember that a discount or coupon may prove very helpful for your business. These may be awarded to you customers for posting genuine positive reviews.

2. Remove Obstacles

Remove all obstacles that interrupt the process of writing a review. You need to make it really easy for your happy customer to write reviews. Here, you must focus on implementing a proactive, automated process by using online reputation management software. It helps making process of reviewing business easy.

3. Use of Appropriate Tools

Apart from the encouragement of positive posts, you need to make other dedicated efforts to improve your online reputation. One of the effective ways to go about this is the use of professional tools such as Profile Defenders. It is a reputed online reputation management company that removes or deletes defamatory content fully. It also removes bad web pages online. The best part is that they even use themselves as an example of a client they have helped. Use of online tools is quite helpful in improving reputation of your company online as they reach to the route cause of the problem.

4. Associations

Getting positive reviews is easy if your customers like you. So make sure each time you get a positive comment, respond with a "thank you." Take the name of your customer too, if mentioned. Keeping a close track of your customers throughout the sales process is crucial. Continue with these efforts even after they turn into your clients.

5. Handling Negative Reviews

It is important that you properly address a negative review. This should be done in a way that promotes trust amongst consumers. Speak to the customer and try to solve the issue as soon as possible. Also give an answer to the review online apologising for the experience and promising to resolve the issue.

6. Do Not Delay

Timing plays a crucial role in tackling online comments or complaints. So if you see someone has written something about your business, service, product, or employees, respond immediately. Failing to respond will give a 'you don’t care' impression. So if you come across a compliment, acknowledge it by saying thank you and make it as personalized as possible. For a complaint or negative review, apologize. Also offer a solution and if necessary, offer to take the matter seriously by having a conversation offline. You must take care of things before they go out of hand.

7. Stay Positive

The way you respond to a complaint or negative review on your site makes a lot of difference. It can even break how your business is perceived. Most consumers would stop doing business with a brand after a negative interaction. Studies have also revealed that customers increase their spending and regular visits following a positive experience. So make sure you focus on customer satisfaction and keep responses of your customers as positive as possible.

8. Keep a Track of Posts

You should be aware of the posts being made about your organization. This is important as it will let you intercept and even exterminate them way before they emerge as a big issue. Most of the time posts going viral are a result of the initial poster gaining followers from other viewers sharing similar views. The entire thing will lead to a snowball effect. You must focus on getting to the route of the source. This helps with sharing your thoughts in a good way and disperse the issue.

17 Effective Ways to Use Pinterest for Photography Business

2017-02-03T04:01:00.002-08:00

Pinterest is definitely one good way to market your photography business online effectively. It allows simplified client interactions, ensure greater value to clients, and even keep your inspirations and masterpieces organized.

Professional photographers usually share their work on various social media websites such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Google+. However, many underestimate the importance of using Pinterest. Photographers using this dynamic image-based platform to market photography and build a brand are benefitted.

Pinning photos, infographics, and videos to digital boards helps photographers gain greater exposure. They are also benefited by attracting more website traffic, blog traffic, and potential new clients.

New to Pinterest? Listed below are some tips to market your photography business the best using Pinterest:

1. Create a Business Account

A Pinterest business account will allow you to track your most popular boards and pins. This is important to make your business move ahead and inspire you to take apt steps towards the same.

2. Add Pinterest Browser Button to Your Browser

It is important to add Pinterest browser button to make it easier for you to pin photos to a variety of Pinterest boards. You can add it to your Pinterest browser button to your favorite browser or download the Pinterest app for mobile devices.

3. Create Pinterest Board

Once a business account is created and browser button is added on Pinterest, it is time to create a board that displays your masterpieces. Make sure you sift through your portfolio thoroughly and choose your best images. After selection, simply pin them to the board. It is important to link directly from an individual page or blog post. Avoid doing it from your general website or blog.

4. Additional Boards

If you deal with diverse types of photograph, it is beneficial to create several Pinterest boards. This will you to showcase your work. For example, you can create separate boards for an infant photoshoot, toddler photo shoot, maternity shoot and couple shoot.

5. Give Description

Optimize pins via using the following as per requirement:

- Keywords
- Links
- Categories
- Hashtags
You should also mention your name, location, and type(s) of photography you specialize in. Copyright symbol, date and year of shoot, etc. may also be mentioned.

6. Watermark

You should watermark photographs to ensure apt protection. It also makes it easier for pinner to search your business using the Pinterest search bar in case, your link doesn't work.

7. Storyboard

Pinning a single photograph at a time on Pinterest may not be a good idea. Place, a collection of images which makes for a storyboard. Upload it to your website or blog and pin it to one of Pinterest boards. It helps potential clients have a quick glance at multiple photos and get a nice feel for your work style.

8. Testimonial Board

If you have client testimonials on business websites, share them on Pinterest? This increases your credibility among followers.

9. Board for Present Clients

It is important that you have a separate board for your current clients. They may need your help while looking for something new and unique to wear for their new photo session. So you can create a new “What to Wear”, “The Accessories” and “Make up Guide” boards. Try creating inspiration boards if you deal with different categories of the shoot. For instance, you can create boards for your current clients under engagement shoot ideas, reception decorations, wedding venues, etc.

10. Follow Other Users

Following other Pinterest users will help you build up a substantial following. The best way is to start by following friends on Facebook. You simply need to use the “Find Friends” tab on the left side of Pinterest. You may even invite your Facebook friends to become Pinterest followers or users.

11. Encourage Pinning

Install Pinterest buttons on your website or blog. Also try adding a “Pin It” mouseover button to blog.

12. Appreciate

Take some time and thank those who have pinned your images or followed you on Pinterest. Offering exclusive incentives or promotions for clients who follow you on Pinterest is also a great idea.

13. Join Group Boards

It helps joining different groups or community boards with multiple contributors. You can increase your exposure on Pinterest. Try asking fellow photographers about the group boards they are a part of. Request invitations to those community boards.

14. Get More Exposure

Pinterest makes online photography business marketing quick and absolutely hassle free. Simply download a “Pin It” widget and it fits into all of your social media websites, websites and blogs. It will help display your work on pin boards. Users with a massive following will be highly benefited as they can see the work going viral in minutes!

15. Pin Description

It is crucial to be very selective while choosing pin descriptions. Pleasing Google can be difficult. So make sure the keywords are chosen wisely! Always use a link to your website in description. This will help drive your referral links up which ultimately driving your SEO up. Strictly avoid flooding your description with repeated keywords.

16. Contests and Promotions

Oganize a Pinterest contest where you would put out a call to action to your fans. You may ask them to create a Pinboard and pin your images, ideas, etc. for photo shoot. Let them post a link to their Pinboard on your Facebook wall. You may even develop a promotion plan for special discount or freebie by using a pin on your Pinboard.

17. Maintain Interest Among your Clients

Keep asking your customers and fans to pin your images. Updating Pinterest boards and linking to them on your blog or Facebook page will retain interest of your clients and fans. They will be active on your site.

So using Pinterest to promote photography business is a no brainer. Yes, it is hassle free, free of cost, and super fun! All you need to do is allow your creative mind to come up with some unique, exciting ideas to market using Pinterest! Happy Pinning!