SlideShare’s fusion with LinkedIn sheds a glaring light on what all too many marketers have overlooked: SlideShare is an incredible marketing tool. Yes, I said incredible, because when merging the benefits of SEO potential, social integration, lead generation, referral traffic, shared content, and an outlet to become an online authority, SlideShare’s moment in the spotlight is long overdue. Nevertheless, instead of dwelling on all of the missed opportunities that exist in marketers’ lack of SlideShare attention, let’s focus on how to turn the tides.

If your company has yet to take advantage of SlideShare, for whatever reason, I would bet good money that you’ll be running to the site after reading this article. Repurposing successful content for SlideShare presentations creates an opportunity to reach new markets, enthuse current markets, and engender a brand new sales tool. Ultimately, there are two underlying themes that flow through each and every aspect inherent in SlideShare and LinkedIn: simplicity and effectiveness. We’ll try to divulge the benefits in the most simple, effective manner possible.

Search and Social Advantage
While SlideShare won’t account for a central portion of your SEO mix, it will certainly give your company’s intellectual property a search results advantage. Google and other search engines actually crawl and index SlideShare’s “notes” text. As such, presentation descriptions can and should be optimized with keywords. SlideShare’s web authority helps to push relevant, optimized presentations to the top of search results pages. And with SlideShare’s inbound link potential, expect even more link juice attributed to LinkedIn’s role in the platform.

In addition to an SEO advantage, SlideShare and LinkedIn present a phenomenal social integration feature. Using a plug-in that existed prior to the acquisition, LinkedIn’s features create an easy method of uploading and sharing SlideShare content. Building upon this community of professionals in both SlideShare and LinkedIn will propel support, and in turn, increase overall membership and use.

The Ultimate Lead Generator
It is no secret that SlideShare is an incredible lead generator. Adding LinkedIn to the mix enhances the lead generation potential greatly. As users download presentations directly from their LinkedIn accounts, they are identifying themselves, and thus, solidifying a spot on your lead list. Adding referral traffic to the table makes the price to lead ratio exceptional. Using the analytics tools available combined with SlideShare’s enterprise software integration capability makes this the most valuable social tool for sales and business development.

LinkedIn’s Place in the Puzzle
From an immediate standpoint, LinkedIn has an opportunity to help SlideShare finally get the recognition it deserves, putting the company in a favorable position to fully infiltrate the market. While many questions still exist, one thing is for certain: the alliance between these professional organizations gives limitless potential to businesses, especially in the B2B space. Will LinkedIn business profiles now have an app to market and host SlideShare presentations? How much progression will SlideShare leads see in terms of quality? How will presentation sharing and collaboration be affected? While the answers have yet to come, these two unobtrusive giants are clearly in store for a bright future.

SlideShare and LinkedIn put the power in the marketer’s hands. Crafting a space for authority building, a place for bloggers to share content, and a safety net for your presentations/sales tool to exist in a cloud is remarkable. At the end of the day, what marketer doesn’t want simple and effective? LinkedIn and SlideShare have caught on; it’s about time for the rest of the world to join.

Shopify is hosted e-commerce platform that is used widely by thousands of retailers online. We are told that there are over 25,000 websites built on the Shopify platform, at the rate of 100 new shops a day!  Shopify is an ecommerce solutions made by designers, for designers. Because of this Shopify got the bad rap that it wasn’t an SEO friendly platform when it first came out and for a number of years after. While that used to be the case, they have taken great strides to find a balance between being highly customizable yet not overly complicated from an SEO standpoint. The result has been  a blend of robust features yet ease of use. But as simple as Shopify has tried to make it, it still takes work to get your SEO efforts on Shopify just right, and above that to go beyond just the basics, to actually making your Shopify website a leader that brings in the bacon for years to come.

So like most people, you have setup a Shopify e-commerce website and are  waiting on the customers to come flying in. While that would be truly awesome, reality dictates that more is needed to help customers find your amazing products online. As you probably know, Google can play a large role in getting potential customers to your e-commerce website by sending search traffic related to your products to your site. Google does a pretty good job without any extra help in finding your content and making it findable, but it takes a bit more work to outpace your competition in the search results. We work with Shopify clients every day and decided that it would be useful to those who aren’t our clients to have an in depth guidebook on all things Shopify + SEO. This guidebook is a work in progress and will be regularly updated with more tips to succeeding using Shopify.

Table of Contents:

Shopify SEO Basics
Shopify SEO Features
Planning for SEO in Advance
Google Webmaster Tools & Shopify
Google Analytics & Shopify
Migrating a Website to Shopify
Advanced SEO in Shopify
Helping Your Shopify Products Be Found

 

Shopify SEO Basics

If you are new to SEO and need a crash course to get you up to speed with some of the techniques and suggestions in this guide then head over to SEOmoz and have a look at the Beginners Guide to SEO that they have created. That will get you ready to have an SEO throwdown on your website to teach it who is boss.

SEO is a learned practice. It takes a while to understand the big picture of how what you do on and off your site can dramatically improve how well your business fairs online. One of the most important things to remember when embarking on this journey is to never give up! Nothing good happens fast and the same is true of SEO on an e-commerce website. Just like the tortoise and the hare, Slow and steady wins the race. It helps to immerse yourself in the goings on of the SEO and internet marketing world by following some popular bloggers and resources. Below is a short list that can really provide you with valuable advice and motivation:

• SEOmoz Blog
• CPC Strategy’s Blog
• Search Engine Land
• Shopify’s Blog
• Google – Inside Search
• New Epic Media’s Blog

back to top

Shopify SEO Features

Doing SEO on the Shopify platform is not much different than on any other platform. For what we call the on-page SEO you just need to know what to put in the proper places in the code of your page. Thankfully, Shopify has made this easy by providing a place in the backend to enter this information. Here is a list of features that Shopify has built in to help your on-page SEO.

• Editable title tags on all pages/products
• Editable URL’s on all pages/products

• Editable ALT attribute on most images

• Editable home page meta description

• Built in .xml sitemap

back to top

Planning for SEO in Advance

One of the most common mistakes website owners make is spending a lot of time working with a designer while building out the look and feel of their new e-commerce website, but not giving any thought to SEO during this process. The result, a great looking site that will get little traffic. Yes, you could spend thousands of dollars on Google Adwords or other paid search options to drive traffic to your site. But unless you have deep pockets that will put you out of business before you get started. The other option is this; think longterm and really provide something useful to your potential customers by means of a great set of products, awesome customer service, meaningful content on your site, and an attention to common SEO techniques and your site will prosper.

“If you build it, they won’t come”, “If you build it, own it, love it, and always make it better – THEN they will come”!

So what are some important things to keep in mind when building a website on the Shopify platform?

Site Structure

Yes, this can be a complicated subject, but lets break it down and make it easy. Site structure/architecture can be likend to an architect planning to build a home. When you walk up a flight of stairs to get to the floor above, you are really glad that somebody planned for that staircase to actually attach to the floor above keeping you from falling flat on your face. Likewise, when you as a user visit a well planned and structured website, you are glad that you can get where you need to and find all the relevant information fast without getting frustrated and leaving the site, the equivalent of the website owners online business falling flat on its face due to poor planning.

Here in this picture is a pictorial representation of a good site structure for a Shopify e-commerce website:

A pyramid structure for a website allows the most possible link juice to get to all the website's pages with the fewest number of links.

Category & Product Pages

The top ball would be your homepage, the next three down your category pages, and the smaller ones below them would be the subcategory pages and finally the bottom row would be product pages. The important part of understanding this is that you can then can create URL’s (or have your web developer who is building out your Shopify site do it) that clearly indicate this simple yet powerful architecture to the user and search engines. For example:

Site Architecture URL’s

Category	Sub-Category	Product Pages
http://www.mystore.com/software/	http://www.mystore.com/software/adobe/	http://www.mystore.com/software/adobe/acrobat-pro/
http://www.mystore.com/electronics/	http://www.mystore.com/electronics/mp3-player/	http://www.mystore.com/electronics/mp3-player/ipod-nano/
http://www.mystore.com/computers/	http://www.mystore.com/computers/apple/	http://www.mystore.com/computers/apple/macbook-pro/

 

Using a structure like this is powerful for a few reasons:

1. It allows your site visitors find what they are looking for with a limited amount of clicking on the site.
2. It allows the power of other sites linking to your homepage to pass smoothly throughout the rest of your sites categories and pages, thus improving their power to rank.

One example of a Shopify sites URL structure that is excellent can be found on the AngryBirds.com website. Do you see how they have setup their site structure from looking at their URL’s below? Not only can visitors quickly determine where they are on the website by looking at the URL bar, but each time the Angry Birds homepage gets a backlink from another website, that link juice can flow like electricity or water flows through wires and pipes to all the category pages, sub category pages, and product pages instead of flowing into a lop-sided website structure that keeps the linkjuice in a bottleneck and prevents the other awesome product pages from ranking in the search engines.

Understanding site structure BEFORE building or designing your Shopify website is imperative, and it is always wise to get an SEO consultant that you trust involved before and during the buildout phase to make sure to get it right.

Plan to Write Unique Product Descriptions

If your website is going to be selling products from a manufacturer or other provide, chances are you are planning on just copying and pasting the product description from the manufacturers website onto yours. Bad idea… Here is why. All of your competitors selling the same products from the manufacturer are doing the same thing on their e-commerce websites. Therefore you are all competing for the same keywords with the same copy. Also, when was the last time that you were moved to buy a product from the boring and dry description on a manufacturers website. Your description is unique not only because it isn’t a copy of everyone else’s, it is unique in that it has your company’s flair for selling the product behind it. It has your Unique selling proposition in it. It has the power to motivate someone who sees your site in the search results decide to click your product page to see more. Then its power continues as it sells your product to the user using the power of persuasion.

It may take quite a bit of extra time to write unique product descriptions for all of your products, especially if you have hundreds or thousands of them, but it is worth it. Start slowly and like we talked about at the beginning, never give up!

The Benefits of Planning for SEO in Advance

The chart below shows the untold benefits of building in SEO from the start. It may be more expensive, time consuming, and technical but your competitors are doing it. Their efforts if they started sooner than you may already be paying off in the form of great rankings and even greater traffic to the site. How can you catch them without a strategy and hard core plan? Once you put that effort forth to build with SEO in mind and keep that momentum you too will break-even in that you will be making more money from your e-commerce website than you have put in. Then you begin the exciting road to a large return on investment for thinking longterm.

Chart showing the value of SEO over the longterm

back to top

Sitemaps & Shopify

Shopify comes with XML sitemap functionality built in. A sitemap is a webpage that lists all of the various pages on your website in one easy to format that the search engines can use as a starting point when their web crawlers visit your Shopify site. Basically it is a cookie jar for the hungry Googlebot crawler who wants to find as many pages of content on the web as possible.

According to the Shopify knowledgebase, “All Shopify stores automatically generate a sitemap.xml file that contains all your products, pages, collections, and blog posts. The sitemap file is located at http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml. Because this sitemap file is referenced from your store’s robots.txt file, you do not need to manually submit it to Google and other search engines.” You will need access to your XML sitemap when you begin to submit your website to Google’s Webmaster Tools.

There is another type of sitemap called an HTML sitemap that helps both your users and the search engines find what they want on your site. Often times you will see websites with a link to this type of sitemap in the footer of their website. It provides a list of all the pages on the site in an easy to read format for users to quickly find the page they are looking for. It also has some search engine value as well. In Shopify you will have to create this file manually as a page on your site. You can use a tool like XML-Sitemaps.com to assist you with this, but you will have to place the resulting HTML code on your site manually.

After the sitemap creation is complete, look for the link that says, “Download HTML Sitemap”. Not the .XML one since Shopify creates that for you automatically

back to top

Google Webmaster Tools & Shopify

Google Webmaster tools and for that matter even Bing Webmaster tools are important dashboards that the search engines provide to monitor the health and various search data for your site. It is also used to communicate site changes, submit sitemaps, and remove or add URL’s from or to your site.  Think of it as an answer to this question, “How Does Google view my site”? As an e-commerce site that depends on the search engines to send traffic to your site and thus money, you should be interested in how your site is viewed and provide as much info as possible to the engines to make it easier for them to index, crawl, and serve your pages in their results. The first thing you need to do to be able to access Google Webmaster Tools for your Shopify website is to verify that you own the site.

Verify Your Shopify Site on Google Webmaster Tools:

• Head over to Google’s Webmaster Tools and login with your google account or create a new one. You should use the same account as your Google Merchant account if you plan on advertising on Google Product Search.
• Find the “Add a Site” button and click it. 
• You will then be prompted to verify that you own the site and given two options, “recommended method” and “alternate methods”. Due to some restrictions that Shopify has you will need to use the “alternate methods” option to verify the site.

• Choose the “add a meta tag to your site’s home page” option, then copy the code provided so that we can add it into Shopify.
• Next, login to your Shopify backend and click on “Themes -> Template Editor” to access the code behind your Shopify theme.

• Next, paste the code that Google Webmaster Tools provided you into the theme.liquid file in the editor. You want to place is in the <head> section before the closing </head> tag as shown in the image below.

• Once the code has been entered into Shopify, go back to your Google Webmaster Tools account and click “Verify Site”  

If all goes well you will get a confirmation message letting you  know that the site has been verified and you are good to go.

FYI – If your Shopify storefront is password protected you will be unable to verify the site in Google Webmaster Tools.

Add a Shopify Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools: 

• To add your Shopify sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools look for “Optimization -> Sitemaps” in the sidebar.

• Next, find the “Add/Test Sitemap” button and click it 
• Now enter your Shopify sitemap.xml file  into the box. Remember the URL will be like this: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml where “www.example.com” is your website or shopify url.
• Lastly, verify that there are no errors with your sitemap and you are done.

Other Important Google Webmaster Tools Features: 

As a Shopify site owner who is interested in his bottom line, there are a few other valuable resources inside of your Google Webmaster Tools account.

• Health -> Crawl Errors: This section will show you any errors that are found by missing pages or other server related issues. Since Shopify’s servers are loked after by professionals you shouldn’t see too many problems in the server related section, but you will find any 404 error page messages here. It is important to look here for 404 errors every couple weeks and correct the issues. More about that in the Advanced SEO section of the guidebook.
• Optimization -> HTML Improvements: This area will provide you with some simple areas for improvement with your title tags and meta descriptions.
• Messages: Here you will find any messages Google sends to you about your website. Since these are often very important and need to be acted upon immediately, it is a good idea to have these forward to your email. You can select that option by clicking this link after your logged in: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/preferences.

back to top

Google Analytics & Shopify

It is vital as a website owner that you are able to track everything that visitors do on your website. What products are the most important to the majority of your users? Where is the traffic on your website coming from (Google, social media, comparison shopping engines, or directly from people typing your domain in their browser)? How much revenue are you making from each traffic source? What mobile device are people using when they visit your site? These are questions you should be asking yourself and the answers lie in Google Analytics. Yes, you could use any analytics tracking platform, but Google Analytics can provide Shopify users with a free and robust way to get rich details about their sites demographic.

There are two primary methods of setting up Google Analytics on a website. One is regular tracking. The other is e-commerce tracking. Since Shopify is an e-commerce hosting platform, we want the second one. By enabling e-commerce tracking on your site you will be able to associate revenue amounts with each visit in Google Analytics. This is very important and will benefit you greatly over the lifetime of your shop. Lets get started setting this up. Don’t worry, Shopify makes it easy.

•  Head over to Google Analytics and create a new Google account or login with an existing one (it is two separate accounts we are setting up, one for Google itself like Gmail and the next is for Google Analytics).
• In Analytics “create a new account” and fill in the appropriate information, agree to the terms and conditions and allow it to complete and send you to the “tracking code page”.
• Copy the User Account code at the top of the page to your clipboard. The number shown in the image below:

• Then login to your Shopify backend and look for “Preferences -> General Settings” in the admin dashboard on the top right as shown below.

• Next scroll down on this page until you get to the Google Analytics box near the bottom and paste your User Account (UA) number into the box and hit save.

• The last step now that you have added the proper code to shopify is to make sure Google Analytics has e-commerce tracking turned on. This is simple to do and can be found by going to your Google Analytics account you created, clicking on the top right “Admin” button, click on the “profile settings” tab, then look for the dropdown under “E-Commerce Settings” and say yes.

Making this important addition to your website will allow you to get an amazing amount of data back on who purchased what and for how much. If you end up running any sort of Google Adwords campaign you can integrate the Google Analytics and Google Adwords accounts together and that revenue data becomes even more valuable since you can see how much you made in sales vs how much you spent in ad spend. Below is a great example of the kinds of data you get from Google Analytics when you turn on e-commerce tracking.

back to top

Migrating a Website to Shopify

Migrating a website from one platform/host to another can be one of the most nerve wracking events in the life of your online business. There are myriad’s of hidden dangers that are never fully anticipated until it is too late and something goes wrong. Since this guide focuses mainly on SEO we will try to look at a site migration from that standpoint and only focus on the dangers from a search engine perspective. Here are some very important things to do before moving your website to Shopify:

• Make sure to have a list of all the current live pages of your website and their exact URL (this is case sensitive since a URL with capitalization and one without are treated as two separate URL’s by search engines).
• You can use a tool like Screaming Frog SEO Spider to crawl your old site before you migrate and get a URL list to work from. The free version will crawl up to 500 pages of a site.
• The preferred method to get this list would be to already have access to Google Webmaster Tools on your old site and go into the “Traffic -> Links to Your Site -> Your Most Linked Content -> More” page and export the .csv that Google provides of the majority of your content sorted by which pages have the most links. That will come in handy when we have to handle the 301 redirects so we don’t lose search rankings during the migration.
• Gather a list of all of the logins for your payment gateway, shipping carrier, 3rd party plugins you may use like live chat, review providers, etc.
• Make sure you have working access to your domain registrar like Godaddy, Namecheap, Network Solutions, or whomever you use so you will be able to point your domain to Shopify when the site is ready to go live. For more on this you can check out Shopify’s DNS wiki.

Senario

Once you have your list of URL’s ready here comes the tedious work. Before we get into the how to, lets learn why what I am about to tell you is so important, and often neglected. Lets say your old site had 200 pages. Maybe 20 of these were really authoritative, useful pages to users, and had links from other sites pointed at them. Lets say that next to your homepage, the page found at URL: http://www.mystore.com/products/2879387/id2567 was your second most powerful page on the old website. On the new website you really want that URL to look better and make more sense to search engines and users so you have planned in advance to change that to: http://www.mystore.com/software/. If you don’t let the search engines know that you have renamed/moved that old page to the new one then they will simply get a 404 error each time they crawl the links on the web that point to that page and you will get no link juice passed to that new page. Years of good, natural backlinks could all be rendered useless in a site migration and your rankings can plummet! We don’t want that to happen, so here is how you fix that issue:

• From your list of URL’s from Webmaster tools or Screaming Frog, start with the most valuable pages/URL’s from the old site  and determine what the new URL is that most closely represents the content the old URL had.
• Next, open your Shopify backend and go to the “Navigation” tab.

• Look at the very bottom of the page for the section called “URL Redirects“. This is where you will enter the old URL on top and the New URL on the bottom. Once you save this your old page from the past site will now redirect to the new page you entered. This is called a 301 redirect and for the search engines, it tells them to pass most of the link juice from the old page to the new page.

• You will need to do this manually for each and every URL you wish to redirect. This is a tedious and painstaking process but it is vital to the health and future progress of your new Shopify website. If there are any URL’s that don’t really have a good corresponding page on the new site you can simple 301 redirect them to the homepage by entering a “/” (without quotes) into the new path box in Shopify.
• If your new site on Shopify is already live you should be able to test the 301 redirects to make sure they are working properly. Simply enter the old URL in your browser and hit enter and you should automatically be redirected like magic to the new URL you put in. If you are still setting up your Shopify store but haven’t pointed the domain to Shopify yet (you are still using the https://shopname.myshopify.com/ URL), the 301 redirects won’t work until you actually make the site live by pointing your domain to Shopify.

Anytime you change the URL structure of a site, you can expect to lose rankings in Google for a period of time. Usually this is 2 weeks or less, but can be up to 2 months! There are some methods to help get your site crawled faster that have to do with submitting old sitemaps to Google to get them to crawl the old pages and see the 301 redirects faster or using the Fetch as Googlebot feature in Google Webmaster Tools, but you may want to leave those to a professional to be safe.

If you want to be 100% sure that your pages are being 301 redirected properly you can use a tool like GSite Crawler to show you the http response code that is being returned.

back to top

Advanced SEO in Shopify

Coming Soon
back to top

Helping Your Shopify Products Be Found

Coming Soon
back to top

Did you find this guide helpful? Was there something missing that you would like us to add? Let us know in the comments! If you are still trying to decide whether to go with Shopify for your e-commerce store, we hope this guide helped you.

To get access to a free 30 Day Trial of Shopify click here

 

Google updates have a crafty way of reinforcing that our SEO efforts matter. More importantly, that our effort has a direct impact on the success of our clients. So for those who found themselves amongst the March of the Penguins, panicking after the update, let’s take a look at a least-resistant path to recovery. Keep in mind, however, that the first step to SEO recovery is admitting that you have a problem. If your site was damaged due to the Penguin Update then you do, in fact, have an SEO problem. Let’s solve it.

Over-Optimization: Google’s update has definitely penalized the over-optimizers out there. More specifically, link over-optimization. Google is now looking at natural links on a page; the algorithm will recognize and penalize unnatural link structure. Say goodbye to paid links. If you were penalized, it is likely that your site has quite a few unnatural, irrelevant links that do not align with your product, service, or niche.

Anchor Text: Old SEO “best practices” placed quite a heavy emphasis on anchor text. We were all under the impression that anchor text had to include the exact keywords we were trying to rank for. While this is still a factor, the significance of anchor text has moderated. Due to Google’s ability to discover content relevancy, anchor text is less critical to ranking factors. My advice would be to diversify anchor text, don’t forget keywords, but go easy.

White Hats: I get it, the whole “white hat” thing is getting old. But when the next update hits and “SEO professionals” are scrambling to “fix” their clients’ websites, we’ll be writing another one of these articles. Proper SEO tactics are algorithm-change-resistant.

It’s short and sweet, but that pretty much sums it up. Move away from the philosophy of “produce as much content and get as many links as possible”. In fact, I’d like to change the age-old saying “content is king” to “quality content is king”, which is certainly more precise. Google’s algorithm is really smart, and it’s only getting smarter. While it isn’t smart enough to decipher what content is the “best”, it most certainly can measure and monitor popularity. Quality content becomes popular; it is as simple as that.

When all is said and done, we don’t just have “Penguin Potential”; we have the potential to manage any kind of jungle creature that Google throws our way. Why? Our white hats keep us safe in the wild.

The new Facebook timeline implores the need to re-strategize a social media marketing plan, in a good way. In fact, this change has tremendous potential to impact business presence online. More than ever before, Facebook has become a truly powerful business tool. Brands who have taken advantage of these changes have seen a vast increase in user engagement, as well as interaction. Nevertheless, social media is still met with much aversion from business leaders who simply cannot wrap their heads around a value in Facebook, or any social platforms for that matter.

For marketers to appreciate this social value, they must force themselves to move past metrics. Numbers cannot possibly reflect the branding, elevated customer service, and impression worth that Facebook has to offer. Still not convinced? Just one week after the timeline change, over 8 million brands had restructured their designs to reflect the Facebook update.

So, can a pretty cover photo really have any type of value to an organization? Yes, yes, and yes! Optimizing this space on a Brand Page has enormous usefulness. In fact, in a recent webcam eye-tracking study, it was revealed that users not only spend the majority of their time looking at a Brand Pages’ cover photo, they commonly look no further. With only seconds to capture a prospect’s attention, the cover photo must be a high resolution, attention-grabbing image that motivates them to scroll down.

Have you optimized your Facebook Brand Page? New Epic Media to the rescue! Call us today to learn more about building your brand with a social media upgrade.

In my opinion, this cute little Penguin Update shines a bright spotlight on the significance of using organic strategies to achieve SEO objectives. Hearing “over-optimization penalty” in the buzz preceding this update steered quite a commotion. To clarify, the Penguin Update is targeted at webspam, and therefore, white hat SEO methods should not be affected.

So, in the spirit of Friday and the fact that penguins are really cute, we have decided to draw parallels between the Penguin Update and actual penguins (seriously). Enjoy!

1. Penguins waddle, which makes them move slowly. Much like the slow waddle of a penguin, Google’s algorithm takes some time to come into full effect. The Penguin Update is fully live, so the changes will continue to roll out over the next few days.

2. Penguins lost their ability to fly millions of years ago, but they adapted by becoming proficient swimmers. Similarly, in the beginning of SEO, keyword stuffing and spammy tactics were all some of us knew. As time went on, we have all adapted to the current best practices of SEO. The most important thing to keep in mind is that white hat SEO is immune to algorithm changes.

3. Penguins are reportedly very social, forming colonies that can number in upwards of a million birds over thousands of years nesting in the same region. Comparably, as the lifeline of a website extends, proper SEO methods will augment each other and form a powerful influence in search rankings.

4. Unlike the majority of animal species in the world, penguins have a lack of fear of humans. How are we going to twist this into an SEO lesson? It’s pretty simple, SEO best practices all point to relationship building. Whether it’s guest posting, link building, content generation, etc., relationships spawn a foundation for future SEO wins for any company.

5. Finally, we look to the penguin’s appearance to round out our parallels. A penguin has a black back and white front. Let’s concentrate on the white front, or belly, that the penguins wear as they waddle about. Moving forward, white hat practices will become the norm. The SEO game keeps changing, but the changes take place in an unchanged direction. Google is persistently moving towards rewarding white hat tactics and punishing black hat spam. The penguins had it right all along to turn their backs to black hat practices.

Hopefully, this SEO/penguin analogy helped to not only point out the importance of honest SEO, but also to ease your minds about yet another update. We guarantee there will be many more Google algorithm updates in our future, the key is to focus your efforts on good SEO and continue optimizing sites to withstand any algorithm modification.

Google’s algorithm change will continue, but the thinking behind the changes are constant. The most valuable aspects of search marketing are unchanged. When your site shows up on a SERP, it better be relevant to the query. Is the content fresh? Is it pertinent? Does it answer the question the user was asking? Does the content help likeminded individuals in similar industries? Do the internal links make sense for the page that they are on and its subject matter? These questions are not new. So as your fears escalate with each and every algorithm adjustment, try to rein yourself in. Get back to the basics: create an amazing user experience, avoid spam-laden tactics, and continue to create real, tangible value within your site.

What Really Matters
Here’s a novel idea: instead of focusing our efforts and attention to reflect Google’s algorithm changes, let’s switch gears towards rank vs. click-through-rate. What’s more important to you? I would hope that anyone with business sense has “CTR” flashing across his or her mind in big, bold font. That’s a good thing, because click-through-rate is paramount to rankings. If your target audience is seeing you on the SERP and they aren’t clicking, what’s the point? When all is said and done, we all care most about conversions, especially our clients and our sales teams. Conversion goals circle back to the Google’s purpose since day one: create an amazing user experience. If you’re winning with Google, chances are you’ll be winning with your clients as well.

Pulling the Wool Over Google’s Eyes
Yes, these days, Google has eyes. Eyes that understand, recognize, and punish spam, black hat practices, keyword stuffing, etc. On its course to becoming a full-on human, Google has grown into a beast-like machine that crawls websites with a fine-tooth comb. Treat your websites and content efforts to reflect this. Be organic, natural, and honest, and I promise Google will recognize this and the benefits will be reaped on the SERP. When all is said and done, fresh content, relevant keywords, and meaningful content will create a phenomenal user experience, and that will triumph any changes in the algorithm.

Nevertheless, if you’re reading this article on the edge of your computer chair, maybe you should run through your site to confirm the legitimacy of your SEO practices. In fact, our pal Rand Fishkin addresses some of the most glaring issues in his Whiteboard Friday video, “6 Changes Every SEO Should Make BEFORE the Over-Optimization Penalty Hits”. Take a few minutes to hear Rand’s suggestions and make sure that you are prepared for the over-optimization penalty.

In the spirit of persistently building a great user experience for our clients’ sites, and our own sites, bring it on, Google!

The Increasing Value of UGC
User-generated content is the backbone of social media. Whether they admit it or not, people have an emotional connection to the pictures they post, the statuses they write, and the comments they compose. Nevertheless, the commotion following Facebook’s acquirement of Instagram was, in fact, reasonable. Why would Facebook spend so much money to buy a photo sharing company that has a filter option? Facebook allows you to post and share photos. And even worse, why spend so much on a company with essentially no business model? Well, where Instagram lacks in business model, they make up for in proven concept. This goes back to the golden UGC, Instagram has proven value in the ability to engage consumers while they create content. Content creation is the key to engaging users, but there has to be more, right? Zuckerberg can’t justify this purchase with a photo filter, which leads us to our next support theory: strategic partnerships.

The Instagram Team
There is something to be said about a team of less than 10 people having such an enormous impact on our social media world. Instagram adds massive value to Facebook and in ways that only those business savvy individuals recognize. Facebook must leverage Instagram’s level of expertise. They must capitalize on their successes and mitigate past failures. Even further, let’s take a look at the glaring historical support for this acquisition: does anyone remember that little $1.65 billion deal in October 2006? We do, Google purchased YouTube and the world went wild. It was an “inevitable end” to the most popular video service in the world. Did Google start throwing its logo around YouTube? No, and Facebook will follow suit. Separately, yet in tandem, these two companies will grow tremendously

A Better Mobile Web
Complaints about Facebook’s mobile app have been incessant. It seems as though no matter how many times the company updates the app, people prefer to access Facebook from their mobile web. So, how can Instagram help to make Facebook’s app better? Maybe it can’t, but we may be witnessing the groundwork for something much bigger: a web-based universal app capacity. The ability to run an app in your phone’s browser would alleviate the need for an Apple App Store completely. Rumored to be a component of the deal, we look forward to see what is in store for Instagram and Facebook’s web-based app future.

Unanswered Questions
Hundreds of questions are still buzzing around the blogosphere in regard to Facebook’s intent. Are they finally ready to monetize? Does this paint a picture for future plans? How will Instagram’s inclusion affect Facebook’s path to a revenue source? While these questions remain one-sided, maybe our attention should shift back to the basics. Zuckerberg’s original vision was the following: “Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Has he succeeded? Most certainly. While we may be alone out on this limb, perpetual support in Zuckerberg’s plan feels natural. Only time will validate this as a smart social move for Facebook.

Business owners, both large and small, have a multitude of difficult decisions to make, especially in their company’s infancy. Some degree of marketing is generally itemized on the first few lines of these leader’s to-do lists. Many find themselves asking the coveted question, “how do I build a stellar website and then produce substantial traffic?” Soon following this internal question, three letters magically appear in the minds of corporate executives and business owners across the world: S, E, and O.

Search engine optimization professionals will vouch for me when I say that the majority of our clientele walk through our doors saying, “I need SEO, I don’t know what it is, but I know I need it”. So, what’s the point of hiring an entire marketing agency to handle this mysterious “SEO” that good old John can handle in his garage? After all, “SEO specialists” are really just a bunch of computer nerds obsessed with technology and analytics. I might as well hire a one-man show to perform my company’s SEO, right? Well, that depends largely on your company’s long-term and short-term objectives. However, when taking a “big picture” look at the true differences between these alternatives, the value in a marketing agency becomes abundantly clear.

At New Epic Media, we have had the opportunity to see great successes and failures in both scenarios, which begs the question, “why would I hire an entire marketing agency to do something that I know a guy in a garage can do for a fraction of the cost?” Read on, friends.

The Power of a Team
Advance apologies for the “fluffy” nature of this argument, but the truth is that there is something very special that goes on within a typical boutique agency. Akin to a family atmosphere, each member of the team shares a few critical traits that have a direct impact on their client’s bottom line. This atmosphere lends itself to personal empowerment illustrated in the staff’s ability to see their individual work make a real difference. The boutique agency celebrates victories small and large, encouraged by a true “team” environment. Will the SEO guy in his garage pat himself on the back when your rankings improve? Possibly. But I would bet a lot of money that the staff member who made a difference in your account will not only be encouraged to outshine his previous results, but his fellow team members will be inspired to follow suit.

The Power of a Holistic Approach
Inbound marketing has recently hit a serious stride in the digital buzz world. And while this is now the trendy terminology, the basics behind the principles of inbound marketing remain consistent: provide real value. Marketing agencies live and die by the “holistic approach” to marketing. Branding a company without this holistic approach reminds me of a treadmill, because outsourcing bits and pieces to different agencies to save money will have your company running in place. Forward motion comes with a full-circle method. SEO must coordinate with web content, web design, social media, email campaigns, video marketing, and the list goes on. Successful SEO is not just link building or on-page optimization. SEO success is achieved when a company can optimize on every level, expressing a cohesive message that forces resonation with your target market.

The Power of Resources
You ran the numbers, shuffled things around, and can still only budget for SEO John in his garage. Can he do the job? Quite possibly, but let’s take into account a few scenarios. John’s computer breaks down; John just landed a new and exciting client; John woke up this morning and decided to become an astronaut. While some of these situations are more probable than others, the point is this: a single person running your SEO will never compete with an entire agency, ever. There is an unspoken comfort in knowing that your money is being spent on people who use the latest technology, attend seminars, and motivate each other internally. As a business owner, at the end of the day, you want to know that your business is utilizing a technology that your competitor is unaware of, marketing with new practices learned in a national seminar, and that an entire team of people are working to achieve your overarching business goals.

John cannot do what a successful marketing agency can. John is not your business solution. New Epic Media is a team full of creative thinkers all working to achieve parallel results for our clients. I think it’s about time to close that garage door and give us a call.

According to a study by Forrester Research, in 2013, U.S. expenditure is forecasted to look like $2.76 billion spent on social and $1.88 billion spent on email. The naïve marketer looks at social media as the new method of communication. They see an increase social media spending and a decrease in email marketing expenditure. To them, change is imminent. The savvy marketer, however, looks at social media as only a piece of their puzzle. To them, evolution is looming. They understand that social media must promote email campaigns and visa versa. They understand that their email list contains qualified leads and that engagement within social media should fuel their email campaigns, not replace them.

At the end of the day, the one marketing constant is the ability to communicate. While communication “best practices” will continue to change, it is imperative to remember that perfected communication involves the ability to progress current initiatives while taking advantage of the latest trends. In email marketing, the race against time lies in two factors: your database and your content.

As time goes on, your email database becomes less and less meaningful. Email addresses change, subscribers unsubscribe, and the rest of them forgot why they signed up to get emails in the first place. So, how do we overcome these obstacles? Back to today’s theme, we evolve. The savvy marketer knows it is their responsibility to create email campaigns that overcome the race against time. Social media and blog content are two tools to this triumph. It may seem like the marketing world has beaten every dead horse in the country, but quality, fresh content is not just the next “big thing”, it’s the next, the first, and the last “big thing”. Not to say that another “best practice” is likely to emerge tomorrow, but throughout this marketing evolution, the communication constant has always been harnessed by content.

Good content leads to more good content. A well-written blog nurtures a subscription to an email list. A hysterical tweet turns into link sharing. A controversial Facebook posts garners an increase in comments. This may seem like trivial activity that will lead to little, if any, qualified leads. When I get an email from Business Insider, I don’t question it’s content. I follow their blog, I frequent their social accounts, and I am genuinely interested in what they have to say. While this is an established company, it doesn’t change the fact that all of the above tactics were utilized to reach this success. Throughout the communication evolution, marketers must always understand that each piece has to build upon each other in creating a comprehensive strategy. So, go ahead and hold off on attending that email marketing funeral because, if anything, these next “big things” have increased its lifespan.

We are in the midst of the Information Age and our brains have been flooded. Breaking free from typical content is fundamental to a successful content marketing strategy. Reiterating marketing norms is commonplace; this is perceived value. Forward-thinking, worthwhile content is rare; this is actual value. That variance in content nature poses a serious question: as a business, exactly where does this content value reside? I can imagine that the top 5 content writers in the country would give 5 different answers. So, what’s the takeaway? In my eyes, it is simple. Victorious content marketing occurs when all of the stars align. Formulate a strategy and let your content be your guide.

Aversion to actual value in content writing can be quickly purged with some facts and figures:

• In 2011, $16.6 billion were spent on custom video, electronic, and other forms of content. Your competition has realized content’s value. Catch up in 2012 with rich, forward-thinking content that actually means something.

• Custom content for email campaigns is up to 71%. Reaching your target audience is not enough. Customers want something in return for the time they spend reading your email, give them a valuable piece of information. Wow them and ensure that next email gets opened.

• Over the next 12 months, over 60% of businesses plan to increase content marketing spending. This is no coincidence; content marketing has proven to retain business through an elevated level of engagement with your brand.

• After reading content on a business’s website, 60% of consumers feel more positively about the brand. In fact, 70% of consumers typically get to know a brand by reading their articles.

Clearly, actual value exists in content marketing. And while statistics and percentages ease marketer’s minds, they fail to represent the imperative added value that subsists. This added value lies in the creation of both external relationships and internal identity. Content gives your clients a reason to visit your Facebook page, frequent your blog, and follow your Twitter account. Truly “good” content will catch the attention of even the busiest of consumers. Building relationships through content is essential to formulating a successful marketing strategy.

Finally, content marketing paves the way for brand identity. Whether you realize it or not, a business conveys a very specific personality through Facebook posts, blogs, email campaigns, Tweets, etc. These humanistic qualities are what leverage a brand’s ability to connect with their audience. Regardless of the medium, content marketing is the future and the future is now.

New Epic Media is an Internet marketing agency full of content marketing superstars. Call us today and learn how to align your stars for business success!