SEO, PPC, Internet Marketing Company

Hacking the Google Display Network for Insanely Low CPC

2015-03-27T02:16:00.002-07:00

The Google Display Network is massive; across this network of millions of websites, apps, and videos, you can reach 93 percent of all Internet users. In years past, though, it was considered a lower-quality way to advertise than search.

That's not at all true. The GDN has way more ad inventory, lower CPCs, and is often the better choice for some advertisers. The key is in knowing how to make the most of Google Display, to lower your CPCs, increase conversion, and improve your ROI.

If you've read anything I've written here ever, you probably know I'm a big fan of Quality Score (QS) in AdWords.

GDN uses Quality Score to help determine your placements and costs, but they're pretty quiet about it – in fact, Google tries to downplay its importance. Yet we've found in our analysis of thousands of AdWords accounts that higher QS typically means lower CPCs. The key to those higher Quality Scores is higher click-through rates (CTRs).

So how do you achieve insanely low costs per click on the Google Display Network? Use these five GDN hacks, which are all geared to improving CTR and driving higher QS.

1. Get to Know Display Ad Builder

Sure, you can use vibrant, eye-catching images on the Google Display Network, yet 67.5 percent of the ads there are actually just text ads. Yawn.

Those text ads, by the way, get far fewer clicks than image ads (0.23 percent vs. 0.31 percent, based on internal research).

Using Display Ad Builder, you can actually get Google to pull images from your website and do about 80 percent of the work of creating ads with your colors and branding.

2. Exclude Mobile Apps

In-app activity accounts for a sizable chunk of the average mobile user's time spent on their device. Mobile is great – yet not all mobile activity is great for your GDN campaigns. In fact, unless you're targeting app users, you may want to exclude them altogether.

Google places your display ads on relevant sites and while there are definitely a lot of places advertisers want to be in mobile, inside games apps probably isn't one of them. Have you ever tried to close an in-app ad and accidentally clicked on it? If the app isn't geared toward your target audience, there's no reason for you to be there paying for clicks that have more chance of being unintentional or otherwise useless than not.

3. Use Google Web Designer for HTML5 Ads

Google rebuilt its Web Designer last year, adding a ton of new features including improved integration with other Google products. The greatest part is the interactive, animated HTML5 ad builder.

Check it out:

Animated HTML 5 ads will draw in more attention and clicks vs. static image ads alone.

4. Target In-Market Audiences & Specific Demographics

In-market audiences and demographics targeting are two powerful options for reaching your target audience on the GDN.

In-market audiences are people whose search and/or browsing history shows they may be in the market for a type of product or service. Someone who has been searching for "flowers" and visiting flower retailer sites could be identified as in-market for Mother's Day gifts, for example. In-market targeting also works well for products/services with longer buying cycles.

Demographics targeting can actually be layered with other targeting options to further narrow your audience, so these aren't mutually exclusive. Further improve your CTRs and reach the most relevant people possible by using gender, age, and parental status information to segment your audience.

5. Tap Into the Power of Remarketing

Remarketing ads are one of the most effective ways to improve your relevance and Quality Score and therefore lower your CPCs. Visitors to your website are tagged so you can get in front of them with ads as they move around the Web, browsing sites, watching videos, checking their email, and more.

Pauline Jakober shared some good tips recently on optimizing your remarketing campaigns.

Focus on Improving CTR and Quality Score for Big Wins on the Google Display Network

In a nutshell, a key success factor in Google Display Network advertising is to get a high Quality Score (essentially, a high click-through rate). You don't want to pursue a low CTR strategy here; sure, you’ll pay for fewer clicks, but the ones you do get will cost way more!

My own research shows that on average, every increase/decrease of 0.1 percent in CTR results in an approximate 20 percent increase or decrease in CPC. See my previous SEW column, "Google Reveals 4 Things You Need to Know About Quality Score," to learn more about the QS calculation.

Keep those objectives in mind as you're creating and optimizing campaigns.

Are you using the Google Display Network? Share your best tips for other readers in the comments!

source: http://goo.gl/ciN4Lv

How to get Premium Adsense account easily

2013-11-28T22:07:00.002-08:00

I am back with another post about the Google Adsense earning. In my last blogs for Top highest Google Adsense earners in the world, I have detailed the estimated earning from their Adsense account. As I said earlier , Google Adsense is their primary source of income and most of these ProBlogger and Webmasters are Premium Adsense Publisher.
Premium Adsense account is a platform that can help you make money using your website and Blog with some more added advantages and features than a normal Google Adsense account. Now the question is why “Adsense Premium”. What are its benefits? Who can be a Premium Adsense Publisher? How to be a Premium Adsense account Publisher? Today I am going to explain on how to get Premium Adsense account and what the advantage and features of Premium Adsense account Publisher.
What are the benefits and features of Premium Adsense Publisher account?
There are several advantages of having a premium Adsense publisher account. It’s a dream come true for all the normal Google Adsense account holders. These features will not only help to increase your Google Adsense earning but also help in many other ways. This also creates a faith among the users for your website, since it’s not a normal to get approved for Premium Adsense account by Google. You can enjoy the below listed advantages for Premium Adsense publisher.

1.Negotiate the percentage share from the earning. For example, you can ask for 75-80% of the Cost per click value.

2.Use more than 3 Adsense ads in a single page: For normal Adsense publisher, maximum 3 ads are allowed on a page. Even if you try to place more, it won’t work. But for Premium Adsense account publisher, you can place more than 3 ads. This really helps to improve your CTR. Higher CTR means higher earning.

3.Customize Adsense ads in any way you like as suitable to your page: A normal Adsense users has to use the standard format of ads available. While a Premium Adsense account Publisher has the added advantage of designing their own Adsense ad format with custom font sizes, styles, color schemes, custom dimension that mix with your exiting site.

4.Remove the “Ads by Google” label: Premium Adsense Publisher has the option to remove the logo for Ads by Google label from the ad block. This is very useful feature, since it helps to make your ads look like a part of the website only. This helps to increase the CTR by another 200-300%. In the below image you can see how the ad block is adjusted so that it becomes a part of the post.

5. Adsense for Adult/Casino/Gambling pages: Normal Adsense publisher are not allowed to use Adsense code on pages targeting Adults, Casino and Gambling related topics. But with Premium Adsense Account, you have these ads displaying on pages with similar topics.

6.Special Adsense Account manager: Premium Adsense account Publisher gets a separate personnel account manager who helps in optimizing your site, ads placement for better performance, thus helps in maximizing your earning with Adsense.

7.Better Reporting and Security from banning of Adsense account: Premium Adsense Account Publisher always has the option for repeated email warning before they receive the best ever shocking news from Google about Adsense account disability. Also they the better reporting about your earning and better analytic for improvising your earning in much better way.

resource: http://digital.hothungama.com/get-premium-adsense-account-easily-premium-adsense-publisher/

Facebook Removing Ads from Pages By Pace Lattin

2013-07-09T23:09:00.002-07:00

Most recent news from Performance Marketing Insider is titled, “Facebook Removing Ads from Pages”
Performance Marketing Insider posted, “In order to pacify some of the more brand-conscious advertisers out there, Facebook has decided to start reviewing pages with questionable content and removing ads from those pages. This is generally content that more conservative folks could consider offensive, such as adult conversations, violent content, semi-sexual photos or sex-toy pages.
Facebook had reported been talking about making their rules a bit stricter and removing those pages, but in their statement, made it clear that they were wanting to preserve the freedom of sharing information.
This comes after an issue last month when several advertisers pulled out of advertising from Facebook when pages that condoned violence against women were reported in the news.
As the advertisers pointed out, they didnt want to see their brand associated with that content. In response Facebook added new rules banning overtly violent pages that promoted violence against women and allowed for a new way of reporting this content…”
resource:http://blog.es-solution.com/facebook-removing-ads-from-pages-by-pace-lattin/

Five Ways to Promote Your Business on Instagram

2013-06-25T07:02:00.003-07:00

If you’ve ever used Instagram, you know it’s really hard to take a bad picture with the photo app. The filters and tools on Instagram, coupled with other enhancement apps available, can make even the most mundane subject matter seem more intriguing, artful, interesting and thought-provoking. Instagram photos get noticed, which is what makes Instagram such a great tool for marketing your brand or business.
Using Instagram to build your business doesn’t take a lot of time, but it does require a bit of finesse along with a basic understanding of how the social media platform works. Here are five ways you can use Instagram in your business.

Get creative
Whether you’re offering goods, providing a service, or promoting an organization or event, your business can be well represented with photography.
If you owned a bakery, say, or a tattoo parlor, you’d of course want to Instagram your handiwork: all the gorgeous cakes and body art you create. You also, however, would want to document what’s going on at your business — customers, employees, funny moments, even the neighborhood where your business is located. You can share interesting things you come across that relate to your business — a photo of a new cake or tattoo idea or something that inspires you in nature or while traveling, for example. You’d use Instagram tools such as location pages so users can see who else is visiting your business, and you might even have a photo contest with the winner receiving one of your baked or inked creations.
Look around. Whether you’re an accountant, a zookeeper, or something in between, you can portray your business through photos.

Everybody loves a winner
And everybody loves to win. Instagram suggests contests as a great way for businesses to get traction on the site. Rather than just asking users to repost a photo you’ve already taken, you should encourage fans and customers to take their own photos reflecting your business in some way, and use a hashtag to curate them all and pick a winner.

Even a behemoth company such as General Electric (@generalelectric) is getting in on the Instagram act by providing followers with photos taken in research labs and factories. GE sponsored an Instagram contest that asked users to take photos inspired by the way GE works and post them to Instagram and tag them #GEinspiredME. They received more than 4,000 submissions and the winner won a trip to the U.K. to photograph a GE jet engine plant in Wales.

Be engaging — and engaged
You want to stay present in your customers’ minds. Aside from taking engaging photos, the best way to do this is by posting often. When your followers check in on their Instagram feed, they can see your business and remember it by the interesting photos you post.

Along with posting photos, be an active participant. Be sure to monitor comments and weed out any derogatory or spammy ones. While you can’t always answer every single comment, be sure to engage with followers from time-to-time. Use hashtags and encourage your followers to do so as well.

Launching pad
Some businesses have actually been launched from users’ Instagram accounts, including Gabe Willis of STRGHT skateboards (@strght). He used Instagram to document the making of his own skateboard, and users were intrigued and began asking if they could buy his skateboards. He began filling his orders through Instagram and has now expanded his business. STRGHT has now come full circle, as those who have purchased skateboards are now sharing their own photos featuring them on Instagram.

Encourage interaction
Tiffany & Co. (@tiffanyandco) asked its audience to share their love stories on Instagram with photos using the hashtag #truelovepictures. The company also provided romantic phrases to shape participants’ offerings and users had a chance to have their digital submissions made into postcards and mailed to anyone they wanted by the company.
Tiffany & Co. linked the Instagram campaign to a website, What Makes Love True, which has other interactive features including love stories, lists of romantic movies and songs, romance tips, and a map where users can pin a heart to their own special romantic places. Adding an Instagram element to the campaign gives users an immersive, interactive experience.

Quick tips to get the most out of Instagram for online business

Create a location page for your business on Instagram. You’ll be able to see who posts photos from your location.
Create a photo map to add another layer to your business branding. Show where your business is having an impact or another aspect of your business that could be illustrated by a map.
Visit the Instagram for Business blog. It’s full of tips and ideas along with inspiration from other businesses.
Instagram suggests setting up a private account and following your business account so you can learn the nuances of how users are experiencing your content.

You can find big companies and organizations such as Nike, Ralph Lauren, Target, Southwest Airlines and Major League Baseball on Instagram, but you’ll also find entrepreneurs of all sorts on it as well. Whether you make something, do something or have something to say, Instagram can help you get your point across to your audience.
Resource:http://www.sitepronews.com/2013/06/25/five-ways-to-promote-your-business-on-instagram/

Google Pushed Out The Major Penguin Update (v2.0 #4)

2013-05-24T00:34:00.002-07:00

As I reported last night at Search Engine Land, Penguin 2.0 / 4 is now live - this is the next generation Penguin update. As Google's Matt Cutts added, this impacts 2.3% of English queries and also impacts other languages but the percentage depends on the level of spam in those languages.
Matt officially announced it while on This Week In Google see towards the very end of episode 199.
Matt said on his blog:

We started rolling out the next generation of the Penguin webspam algorithm this afternoon (May 22, 2013), and the rollout is now complete. About 2.3% of English-US queries are affected to the degree that a regular user might notice. The change has also finished rolling out for other languages world-wide. The scope of Penguin varies by language, e.g. languages with more webspam will see more impact.This is the fourth Penguin-related launch Google has done, but because this is an updated algorithm (not just a data refresh), we’ve been referring to this change as Penguin 2.0 internally.

As you know, we've been expecting this for some time, since its been over 6 months since the previous Penguin data refresh. Again, this is not just a refresh, but an algorithmic update.
Here are the previous updates:

Penguin 1 on April 24, 2012
Penguin 2 on May 24, 2012
Penguin 3 on October 5, 2012

There are lots of people complaining about ranking declines and some about boosts. It is too early to tell and I do expect to post a poll next week asking you if you were impacted or not.
I deeply hope you only were positively impacted by this update.
Forum discussion at Google+, Cre8asite Forums, WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums, Black Hat World and Google Webmaster Help.

Update: Matt Cutts tweeted that you can submit feedback to Google via this form about spammy sites this update missed.
resource:http://www.seroundtable.com/google-penguin-four-live-16830.html

Take 10 min: Six Quick Tips for Writing SEO-Friendly Content

2013-05-23T22:49:00.001-07:00

Writing for SEO means more than just stuffing your copy with the right keywords. Anyone can do that—and immediately lose readers in the less than 33 seconds of attention they're willing to give your site. Effective SEO copywriting, by contrast, is the art of creating fresh, engaging copy that just happens to have the right keywords in the best places to attract more visitors to your site.

In just 10 minutes, learn how to write keyword-rich copy that helps visitors find your website in the search engines, but is never boring or forced. You'll also discover how to effectively use those keywords in headers, tags, and links. Plus, if you're an SEO copywriting newbie, you'll get a few tips on how to get started optimizing your website.

Read more: http://www.marketingprofs.com/marketing/online-seminars/450#ixzz2UBbte79Y

Google+ Comments Can Now Be Linked to Blogger

2013-04-19T22:26:00.002-07:00

Google is giving Blogger a boost by enabling users to bring Google+ comments to their blogs.
Once the feature is enabled in the Blogger Dashboard, Google+ comments made about a particular blog post hosted by Blogger will automatically flank that blog, making it easy for the blog owner to keep track of discussions and comments specific posts are stimulating.
“Reading and responding to comments can be one of the most rewarding aspects of blogging,” writes Google+ principal engineer Yonatan Zunger in a blog post. “Not only do they help you connect with your readers, they can also inspire later blog entries. The challenge, oftentimes, is following all the conversations around your content—on Google+, for instance, as well as on your website. So we’re making things a lot simpler.”
Bloggers will also be able to see activity from direct visitors as well as from people talking about their content on Google+ simply by browsing their blog’s comment threads.
If a public Google+ discussion about a specific post is sparked, for example, those comments and replies will also appear on users’ Blogger blogs, effectively allowing them to connect with more of their readers, all in one place.
Readers would also be given the option to comment about a blog post publicly, or privately to their circles on Google+. When browsing blog comments, they will be given the option to view all of them, only the top comments, or only those from people in their circles, depending on their preference.
“In all cases, you and your readers will only see the comments you have permission to see,” Zunger writes. “Giving people these kinds of controls not only encourages more meaningful sharing — it can lead to more blog traffic.”
To enable the Google+ Comments feature, users must visit the Google+ tab of their Blogger Dashboard and check ‘Use Google+ Comments.’
Bloggers can also visit any post on the Official Google Blog or on Blogger Buzz to see the Google+ Comments feature “in action.”

Google image

resource:http://www.sitepronews.com/2013/04/19/google-comments-can-now-be-linked-to-blogger/

How to Estimate the Break-Even Point of Paid Search

2013-03-25T03:46:00.001-07:00

PPC Management

What is CPC?

A few months ago I wrote about the death of paid search and had to sustain the backlash of the paid search community through 38 comments and multiple “hate tweets.” I actually enjoyed the discussions and learned quite a lot from some of them.
The question that kept bugging me was if there’s a correlation between a price of a product or service and their CPC? Do keywords associated with high-priced products cost more?

Image Credit: Wikipedia

In the core of this question is the theory of economic equilibrium. Simply, in perfect market conditions, the price of products will be set at a level where supply and demand are equal and with no change in supply or demand, the price will stay the same.
The reason why this theory is important for understanding the relationship between product price and CPC is that if information was completely available to all parties in the market (a required assumption in this theory) then knowing the average cost-per-click (CPC) will allow companies to evaluate the effectiveness of paid search. In turn, companies will decide whether they want to invest in paid search, which will shift the demand curve, creating a new equilibrium price.
For example, if average CPC is low enough to allow positive ROI, more companies will participate in paid search campaigns, increasing the demand and consequently driving the average CPC up. When the price reaches a point of negative ROI, companies will stop their campaigns, decreasing demand and lowering the average CPC.
These shifts will occur until CPC will stabilize where both suppliers (Google) and buyers (advertisers) are satisfied with the return on paid search. That price point will be the point of break-even, where the investment in paid search (CPC) will match the return (sales at a certain price).
But why finding the equilibrium price of a channel is important or even interesting? Well, finding that price, and knowing the rest of the conversion rates of your funnel, will help you evaluate the potential effectiveness of a channel before you even spend a dollar on testing it.
Furthermore, knowing the equilibrium price can, theoretically, help you find arbitrages, places where the market is not at equilibrium and the price is lower than what it should (and will) be. Those arbitrages are opportunities to exploit imperfect market conditions to your benefit until supply and demand return to equilibrium and the price stabilizes again.

Researching the Equilibrium Price of Paid Search

In order to find the equilibrium price of paid search, I needed to find the break-even point.
To simplify, I assumed no overhead costs (no contractors, fixed costs, software costs, etc.) in my calculations, just pure CPC compared to revenue. I wanted to find out if it's possible to predict the effectiveness of paid search as a channel based on a company’s price point. The math is simple:

$X * W% * L% * V% ≥ $CPC

Price of product or service = X
Close won rate (%) = W
Conversion rate from lead to opportunity (%) = L
Conversion rate from visitor to lead (%) = V
Cost Per Click = CPC

As long as the left side of the formula is equal or bigger than the right side, paid search is favorable. It seemed like I had a good start.
Using this formula, I can tell for any given price point what is the maximum CPC that I can afford before I start losing money on this channel. But putting together the formula is the easy part, finding the values for the variables needed to solve it, is the challenge.
So I embarked on a quick research to find the following variables:

Close won rate (%) = W
Conversion rate from lead to opportunity (%) = L
Conversion rate from visitor to lead (%) = V
Cost Per Click = CPC

One of the challenges with finding these variables is that they are extremely specific to industries. It’s hard to come up with a real average for these data points since the variation among the industries is so big.
Furthermore, when you look at individual companies, even within the same industry and market, you will find great variation that will prevent you from coming up with real averages (or at least statistically significant ones).
The solution is to look at optimal rates and not averages. Since my task was to find the price point in which paid search breaks even, I assumed that the entire funnel is optimized and the company achieved optimal results (within reason).
(Note: these figures relate to B2B organizations. With B2C, the funnel, conversion rates and overall marketing-sales process are different.)

Close Won Rate

This rate tends to vary the most because it’s based on the organization definition of an opportunity but it’s also extremely dependent on price.
I found several resources I could reference, but the one I liked the most came from CSO insights. In their annual industry benchmark report they asked companies “What percentage of your forecasted opportunities result in the following: No Decision, Loses, Wins.” The average for Wins was 38.8 percent. So I used 40 percent.

Leads to Opportunities

In SiriusDecision’s new Demand Waterfall model there are several stages for leads including Automation Qualified Leads (AQLs), Teleprospecting Leads (TQLs) and Sales Accepted Leads (SAL’s). For simplicity purposes and to make my model easier to calculate, I treat all leads as one bucket; a lead is anyone who submitted a form on a paid search landing page.
In most B2B funnels, this will be considered as an “Inquiry” or a “Known Name” therefore the conversion rate from that initial form submission to an opportunity, even if optimal, will still be relatively low.
I used Marketo’s benchmark numbers from their Marketing Automation ROI Calculator to calculate the optimal conversion rate from Lead to Opportunity and came up with 5 percent. To make paid search even more favorable, I used 10 percent.

Visits to Leads

The conversion rates of visits to leads vary greatly based on the source. Since we’re focusing on paid search, I was looking for data specific to paid search for B2B companies. I found three sources.

Optify’s B2B Marketing Benchmark Report. This report had paid search at a median of 1.96 percent, but the 75th percentile showed a 3.58 percent conversion rate.
AdWords Analysis (WordStreem Study) published by Jack Loehner. This study (no longer available on their website due to a change in Google's API terms and conditions), looked at conversion rates for the top 10 industries, showed an average of 5.63 percent across all industries with the best performing industry (Internet & Telecom) at 6.27 percent.
MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report – PPC Edition. This report showed a median of 3.5 percent and an average (albeit huge variation) of 8.4 percent.

To make paid search favorable, I use the highest of the rates and rounded it up. I used 10 percent.

Results

I found that using these conversion rates, to break even CPC needs to be .4 percent of the price of the product.

CPC = $X * 0.004

WordStream’s study also showed the average CPC per industry for the top 10 industries. I used those averages and the formula above to provide the price point for each industry at which paid search breaks even.

Use these break-even prices to determine if paid search is right for you. Remember though, that these break-even prices were calculated based on optimal B2B conversion rates. If your conversion rates are different (and they probably are), use them to evaluate paid search before jumping into it.

What About the Equilibrium Price?

Since the market conditions are far from being perfect, and at the heart of the imperfect market condition is the unavailability of information, it’s almost impossible to come up with the equilibrium price of paid search. CPC rates continue to fluctuate so keep an eye on your own break-even point and make sure you make the most out of each campaign.
resource:http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2255282/How-to-Estimate-the-Break-Even-Point-of-Paid-Search

How does the Google Panda Update Affect your Linkbuilding?

2013-03-02T05:13:00.003-08:00

Well now that we know that the Google Panda update is no joke in the way it has affected high page rank websites and big brands, we need to be more cautious about how it can affect us. The question we need to ask ourselves now is how this new Panda algorithm will affect our Link Building.

Links will never be the same
Google’s Panda algorithm has uncovered shady link building methods such as JCPenney, Overstock.com, Forbes and more. It has also penalized low quality sites as well as spammy/scraper sites in their recent update. What does this mean for SEO specialists and linkbuilders?
Don’t stick to what Google deems as ‘low quality’ sites. Meaning now that they have penalized wisegeek, ezinearticles, mahalo, etcetera – don’t work yourself up anymore in trying to acquire links from those websites. For example, if you were someone who liked to go with article submission through ezinearticles for links back to your site, you have to think twice now that it has significantly dropped in ranking due to its reputation with Google as a low quality site.
Watch out for sites that are peppered with Google adsense, text links, or other advertising gimmicks.They are not really something that neither Google nor people would call ‘quality sites’. Get away from them.
Sites with little or no moderation are to be avoided as well. Especially if you can see your comment link approved immediately after you post it. Those sites are most probably the home of lots of outbound links and spam. You don’t want your link to be found anywhere near there.
How should you do your linkbuilding with the Panda update?
Well, there’s only one real authentic way to build links – create good, quality content that people love and will link to. Write your heart out. Be interested in people and in giving people the things they are interested in. Create videos that will get viral and create buzz. Linkbaiting is a great way to go and chances are, Google ain’t gonna penalize your unique content because of its value and authenticity.
resource:http://seo-hacker.com/google-panda-update-affect-linkbuilding/

How to Use Blogs for Search Engine Optimization and Backlink Building

2012-12-31T23:22:00.001-08:00

It's no secret that blogging can boost your search engine rankings and drive traffic to your website. Blogs promote the exchange of ideas in a format that the Internet users have fully endorsed. When search engine spiders find an active blog, they tend to crawl it more frequently and more often. Incorporating a blog into your website will help you get quality backlinks and improve your credibility.
Many business owners are not aware of what the search engine optimization benefits of blogging are. A recent study conducted on a group of SEO practitioners has shown that over 87 percent of those who have used blogging for SEO have obtained measurable results. Backlinks were cited as the most important SEO benefit from blogging. Starting a blog can also help you establish authority in the marketplace, interact with your customers, and promote your products more effectively.
Most blogging platforms offer uncomplicated URL structure, making it easy for search engines to find and crawl your content. An active blog creates the kinds of signals from other websites that search engine spiders tend to reward in the rankings. A blog that is updated frequently attracts both human visitors and search engines.
The better you write, the more people will link back to your site. In addition, there are many plugins and widgets that make it easy to share your articles and posts, thus encouraging links. You can also use blogging to constantly add fresh, relevant articles to your website. No one can give an exact answer on how often you should blog. Most experts say that whether you update your blog once a day or once a week, it really doesn't matter, just as long as it is relevant and consistent.
Not many webmasters and business owners who start blogs have the patience to create quality content. If you want people to find your blog and click back to your pages, you need to write compelling posts and use relevant keywords. No matter how many SEO techniques you use, there simply is no substitute for creating quality content.
Conduct backlink analysis on competing blogs and take the time to look at articles that already rank well in search results. While the main objective of a blog should be to get your message out, don't forget to do proper research and optimize your content for search engines. Get listed on other people's blogrolls and include your blog URL in profiles on social media sites.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7005198

Relationship Building Through Social Media

2012-12-31T23:21:00.002-08:00

Relationships are at the heart of social media success for your business. Your online strategy must include the concept in some form and you should keep track of how much return on investment those relationships are bringing to your business.
To some people, establishing relationships with others may not be an easy thing to do. It is extremely important to understand, if you are going to get anywhere with increasing your business’ revenue, you need to establish solid, substantial, mutually-beneficial relationships. There are several principles you should follow so you can enrich your business relationships.
Authenticity
As you are probably aware, authenticity will never be overrated. People know when you are being authentic and they know when you are not being authentic. Authenticity is spoken about a great deal – many people are using it as the latest buzz term when speaking about social media marketing. If you are truly authentic, you will see positive results and people will respond to what you are offering.
If you are authentic, that means you also are transparent. If you are transparent, you won’t withhold negative feedback you might receive about your business. In fact, you should bear in mind you stand to learn a great deal from whatever negative feedback you receive. People will respect you a great deal if you can take negative feedback, learn from the situation and improve upon what you are offering based on that feedback. In every business, there will be some negative feedback. It is not about the presence of the information; it is about what you do with it and how you learn from it.
Build Trust With Others
When it comes to doing business online, you need to establish relationships with others and you need to build trust on both sides. If people don’t trust you, they won’t interact with you and they won’t buy anything from you. Not only do you want to build relationships that are solid and will stand the test of time, you also want to turn your business connections into loyal clients. This takes time.
Loyal clients are not built in a day. If you manage to acquire loyal clients, another benefit is they will most likely tell their friends and colleagues about you and your business.
A great deal of your business’ success will come from word-of-mouth and that sort of loyalty will go a very long way. If you are going to succeed at developing that sort of relationship with your clients, you must be sure to communicate clearly at all times and always be sincere and transparent.
Be Good to Your People
Because the success of social media depends on relationships succeeding, you need all of the advocates who you can get a hold of. People who are willing to share your information are very powerful people for your business. You should do everything possible to make sure they continue to be advocates.
Behave Humanly
You should always treat other people the way you would like to be treated. Always recognize and acknowledge the value that other people with whom you interact professionally have for you. There are so many different ways in which you can deepen your relationship with other people. For example, if you have attended an event with one of the people with whom you share a professional connection, it is a good idea to follow up with that person after the event. You shouldn’t wait for the other person to initiate a meeting. You already have common ground – all you need to do is expand upon it. You have a wealth of connections. You just need to tap into it and start connecting.
Conclusion
Relationships are at the heart of social media – that’s why it works. The more solid relationships you are able to build and the more loyal clients you acquire, the better it will be for your business. When it comes to someone needing what you are offering, you want to be in the forefront of his or her mind. You want to position yourself as a subject matter expert and the way to do that is by developing as many top-quality relationships as possible. You want the relationships you have to be substantial. Just because they are established online doesn’t mean they aren’t significant. It is important to give the proper attention to your relationships and devote as much time as you need to make them stronger and stronger.
Resource:http://www.seo-news.com/relationship-building-through-social-media/

SEO Simplified – What You Need to Know

2012-12-31T04:34:00.004-08:00

When you first hear about SEO, taking in all the information can be quite overwhelming, especially when it seems much of the advice you are given is contradictory.
I am going to simplify the SEO process by giving you a rundown from beginning to end – that way, in the future, you will know when you are being given good or bad advice.

To be able to understand how SEO works and how to go about it you need two things.
• Common sense – never do what an SEO expert recommends without asking why they are doing it. Question their actions and come up with your own reasoning.
• Knowledge of what a search engine is and how it works.
Understanding what a search engine is and what it’s primary objective is…
In the beginning, the Internet was rather small – it contained maybe 1,000 or 2,000 websites.
There was no such thing as a search engine, and you would most likely find out about a website through word-of-mouth.
However, as the Internet grew, there was soon a demand for some kind of directory – kind of like a yellow pages for all the websites on the Internet. This would make it easier to find information you were interested in.
If you wanted to find plumbers, you’d go to the plumbers section and hopefully find some plumbers websites.
This was a good solution for a while, but a directory is only as good as the quality and quantity of the websites it has. As the Internet grew even bigger it was very difficult for the people running the directories to continually add and categorize each website.
What was really needed was an automated solution – some kind of robot that could do the job of human editors but a million times faster, it would have to find websites and sort thousands of them into categories everyday.
The search engine was born!
But let’s take a minute or two to think about that. A human can sort websites into categories pretty easily. A human just looks at a websites, reads a few paragraphs and knows instantly what the website is about.
But how about a machine? How can a computer, with no brain, work out what a website is about?
A computer may not be able to use intuition, but what it can do is count.
Let’s take this article you are reading now as an example. Using your intuition, under which category should it be slated:
• Home and Garden
• Kitchens
• SEO

Straight away, you said: “It’s SEO.”
Let’s look at how counting can bring the same conclusion. If you count how many times the word “SEO” appears on this page, you’ll find there are 14 occurrences, quite a lot in relation to all the other words that appear.
So just by counting, a computer can come up with a conclusion similar to that of a human.
All was good in search engine land. You could head over to a search engine; type in “dog” and it would give you a list of all the sites related to dogs.
But there was a problem; the listings weren’t always that useful. You would get a list of all the websites to do with “dog”, but they weren’t in any particular order, so you might have to scroll right to the 1,000th website before you found a website that had the information you needed.

So, how could this problem be solved?
The immediate solution is human intervention – to have a human revaluate the listings and put the better websites near the top of the listings. The trouble was, by this time, there were literally billions of websites and sorting them by hand would be an almost impossible task.
So we really needed the task to be automated, but how? How can a computer possibly work out which websites are better than others? How can a computer even develop an opinion?
This was a major headache until 1996 when Larry Page and Sergey Brin came up with an ingenious method.
They hypothesized that websites that had lots of other websites linking to them were probably the more useful resources.
Think about it, if you made a website would you link to any old website?
It’s not likely. But I bet you would definitely link to a really good website that would be beneficial to your visitors.
So, it becomes a counting game again. A search engine just counts how many websites are linking to another to determine where to rank it.
You now can see what the true purpose of a search engine is. To serve up listings that are helpful to the searcher – this is how Google intended it to be, and very importantly, this is how they want it to remain.
The other thing you should now understand is that a search engine is essentially a machine, it has no intuition – the best it can do is count. It outputs results that are dependent on what it counts.
The near downfall of search engines
Google was the first search engine to count the number of links and it has worked extremely well. The better websites usually appeared at the top.
As such, Google became the most popular search engine.
But Google’s success brought with it another problem. Because, so many people use Google, there is a great desire for website owners to be at the top of the listings. A top listing for an e-commerce store means loads of visitors, loads of sales and loads of money.
Soon SEO firms started popping up offering website owners a chance to get to the top of the search results.
But how could anyone offer this?
It was simple, they took advantage of the fact that search engines count. If you want to get top ranking for the keyword “dog” you would just repeat the word dog all over your website and create lots of false websites linking back to your website.
From Google’s point of view, this was terrible because it worked. It meant that search results could be manipulated and could end up ruining the quality of the listings. It meant that useless websites could be at the top quite easily.
Google had to find a way to stop it, before all search results became useless. It had to make changes to its algorithms so it could detect when results were being manipulated.
What they used were indictors of manipulation. Here’s just a few.
• If a websites suddenly gets a lot of links in a short space of time, this indicates some sort of manipulation, because it’s very difficult to get that many links so quickly.
• If a website gets links from lots of unrelated sites, this could indicate manipulation. Why would a chess website link to a custard website? It looks suspicious.
• Does a website contain a word too many times in proportion to other words? If there is a saturation of one word, this could look like someone has tried to manipulate results.
Google has lots of detection methods and when too many “manipulation flags” are scored, a website is punished with either a -30 in ranks, a -350 in ranks, a -950 in ranks or a permanent delisting.
So what is the job of an SEO expert now?
The same as it always was, to manipulate results for their clients.
A good SEO firm is always up-to-date on which methods work best.
Google obviously doesn’t disclose how they rank sites, otherwise everyone could manipulate results again.
But an SEO performs experiments, analyses results and comes up with conclusions as to how Google works.
So what do you need to know?
Essentially your SEO expert is your guide – he or she can show you how to improve your site so that it is worthy of links. He or she can also use manipulation tactics and try to do it under Google’s radar.
What you need to decide is how much risk you are willing to take. Every technique needs to be questioned. You need to ask if there is a good chance, a technique will pass through Google’s detection system or if it is likely to be detected by Google, which, in turn, will punish your website.
If you want to do things the safe way, you have two options:
Create a website that is very useful, one that is better than those offered by others in your field, then tell people about it and get many natural links from people who are linking to you for your content.
Or, use AdWords and pay Google to list your adverts alongside their regular listing.
Above all, use your common sense. Google is clever. If a technique is easy for a human to detect, then perhaps Google could find a way to detect it too. This does not mean you should disregard most manipulation techniques; they will almost certainly be required to get top ranks. What it does mean is that you must stay informed and always ask why an SEO expert has suggested a method before moving ahead with it, ask him or her if he/she has had any previous experience with a method and what he/she thinks the risk factor is.
Read More:http://www.seo-news.com

Four Essential SEO Factors to Optimize Your Website for Search Engines

2012-11-15T02:26:00.001-08:00

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a vital part of website design and marketing. A properly optimized website will allow web crawlers to properly index your website for search engines (such as Google, Yahoo!, Ask, and Bing) so that your site appears prominently in the search engine results pages, or SERPs. Four of the primary areas of consideration for SEO are:
1. The Appearance and Usability of Your Website for Visitors
Search engines can track how many visitors your site has, how long they stay on your site before clicking elsewhere, and how often they return. All of these play a role in how well your website performs in search results.
Considering this, it is essential that your site be optimized not only for search engine web crawlers but also for human visitors. If your visitors find that your site is easy to navigate, contains useful content, and can provide value on an ongoing basis, that will be reflected positively in the SERPs.
This also means that you must keep your site active. If a search engine discovers that your website is neglected for long periods of time and grows stale – especially in comparison to other sites offering similar content – visitors will stop returning and your site will sink in the SERPs. Regularly updating your site with new content, on the other hand, can enable your site to ascend the rankings.
2. The Quality of the Content Contained on Your Website
More and more, search engines are attempting to direct searchers to websites that contain quality content. Providing good content optimized with the keywords and phrases that searchers might use can boost your site’s performance in the SERPs and draw more visitors. If your site is filled with advertising or riddled with spelling or grammatical errors, however, it will negatively impact your site’s performance.
The uniqueness of your content is also an important factor. This is true now more than ever, and continues to grow in importance with every update to search engine search results ranking algorithms. If your site is found to contain duplicate, near-duplicate, or spun content when compared to other websites, it will lessen your site’s value, at least in the judgment of the dominant search engines. Whether you create your own original content or hire others to do it for you, it is a SEO necessity that your site be unique.
Additionally, considering the problem of content scrapers (which will steal your content to use it on other sites), it is recommended that you regularly post new content. You should also take precautions to limit those who might steal your content. For example, you can limit the amount of content contained in your RSS feed. You can also file a DMCA complaint whenever you discover a content thief.
3. The Traffic Your Website Attracts and Maintains
A well optimized website will entice visitors to revisit your site periodically. This can be a signal to search engines that your site has been deemed useful by its users. If these users add links to your site from their own websites, that will also add weight to your site’s importance.
You can increase your website’s traffic and the number of links to it in a variety of ways:
• First, you can include your URL in any comments you make on blogs. If the blog applies a “no follow” tag to its comments, however, it will not be counted as a link to your site.
• Second, you can submit articles as an “expert” to be posted on another reputable website. Typically, sites will permit you to include a short bio containing a link to your site.
• Third, you can submit your URL for inclusion in relevant online directories.
Beware, however, of unethical link exchanges or purchases, as these will harm your ranking, possibly even resulting in a ban from selected search engines.
4. The Technical Elements of Your Website
In contrast to the early days of SEO, search engines today want to see sites that are designed more for the user than for web crawlers. Thus, the usability and quality of your site are of primary importance. There are, however, some SEO elements that remain a bit more technical. While these elements do contain value for visitors, they are generally intended more for the benefit of web crawlers. These elements include:
• An XML Sitemap and robots.txt file. These can each assist web crawlers as they index your site.
• Page titles containing keywords. These are the titles that are inserted into the HTML code and appear in the bar or tab at the top of your Internet browser.
• Effective text formatting that incorporates heading tags. The formatting you use, which can also enhance your user’s experience, can emphasize your keywords to search engines.
• Alternate descriptions for images and videos. Though many users will never even notice your alternate descriptions contained within your HTML code, they can reap rewards in terms of SEO.
• URLs containing recognizable and relevant words for searchers. Using real words rather than codes or non-descriptive terms will make your URLs more memorable and can also be another way to incorporate keywords.
• A custom 404 “page not found” error page. This will show that you are concerned about your visitors experience with your website. The 404 page should be consistent with the rest of your site and can provide a link to your root page, an HTML Sitemap, and other important sections of your site.
Invest the time and effort to apply SEO to your website. It can make the difference between your site’s success and failure. Though there are no guarantees, an optimized site has the potential to climb the SERPs and achieve a prominent position at or near the top. This greater visibility typically translates into a greater number of visitors, which in turn enables you to market your product, promote your message, and share your opinions more effectively.
resource:http://www.seo-news.com/four-essential-seo-factors-to-optimize-your-website-for-search-engines/

Welcome to 404 Error Pages,See error details

2012-11-15T01:09:00.001-08:00

Overview

The Error 404 "Page not found" is the error page displayed whenever someone asks for a page that’s simply not available on your site. The reason for this is that there may be a link on your site that was wrong or the page might have been recently removed from the site. As there is no web page to display, the web server sends a page that simply says "404 Page not found".
The 404 error message is an HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) standard status code. This "Not Found" response code indicates that although the client could communicate to the server, the server could not find what was requested or it was configured not to fulfill the request.
The 404 "Not Found" error is not the same as the "Server Not Found" error which you see whenever a connection to the destination server could not be established at all.
The default 404 error page as shown on Internet Explorer is given below.

HTTP Status Code

Whenever you visit a web page, your computer will request data from a server through HTTP. Even before the requested page is displayed in your browser, the web server will send the HTTP header that has the status code. The status code provides information about the status of the request. A normal web page gets the status code as 200. But we do not see this as the server proceeds to send the contents of the page. It’s only when there is an error, we see the status code 404 Not Found.

Origin of Status Codes

As a part of the HTTP 0.9 specifications, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) established HTTP status codes in 1992. Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the web and the first web browser in 1990, defined the status codes.

List of Status Codes

A brief overview of HTTP status codes is given below.

Code	Meaning	Description
100	Continue	Confirms the client about the arrival of the first part of the request and informs to continue with the rest of the request or ignore if the request has been fulfilled
101	Switching Protocols	Informs the client about the server switching the protocols to that specified in the Upgrade message header field during the current connection.
200	OK	Standard response for successful requests
201	Created	Request fulfilled and new resource created
202	Accepted	Request accepted, but not yet processed
203	Non-Authoritative Information	Returned meta information was not the definitive set from the origin server.
204	No Content	Request succeeded without requiring the return of an entity-body
205	Reset Content	Request succeeded but require resetting of the document view that caused the request
206	Partial Content	Partial GET request was successful
300	Multiple Choices	Requested resource has multiple choices at different locations.
301	Moved Permanently	Resource permanently moved to a different URL.
302	Found	Requested resource was found under a different URL but the client should continue to use the original URL.
303	See Other	Requested response is at a different URL and can be accessed only through a GET command.
304	Not Modified	Resource not modified since the last request.
305	Use Proxy	Requested resource should be accessed through the proxy specified in the location field.
306	No Longer Used	Reserved for future use
307	Temporary Redirect	Resource has been moved temporarily to a different URL.
400	Bad Request	Syntax of the request not understood by the server.
401	Not Authorized	Request requires user authentication
402	Payment Required	Reserved for future use.
403	Forbidden	Server refuses to fulfill the request.
404	Not Found	Document or file requested by the client was not found.
405	Method Not Allowed	Method specified in the Request-Line was not allowed for the specified resource.
406	Not Acceptable	Resource requested generates response entities that has content characteristics not specified in the accept headers.
407	Proxy Authentication Required	Request requires the authentication with the proxy.
408	Request Timeout	Client fails to send a request in the time allowed by the server.
409	Conflict	Request was unsuccessful due to a conflict in the state of the resource.
410	Gone	Resource requested is no longer available with no forwarding address
411	Length Required	Server doesn’t accept the request without a valid Content-Length header field.
412	Precondition Failed	Precondition specified in the Request-Header field returns false.
413	Request Entity Too Large	Request unsuccessful as the request entity is larger than that allowed by the server
414	Request URL Too Long	Request unsuccessful as the URL specified is longer than the one, the server is willing to process.
415	Unsupported Media Type	Request unsuccessful as the entity of the request is in a format not supported by the requested resource
416	Requested Range Not Satisfiable	Request included a Range request-header field without any range-specifier value
417	Expectation Failed	Expectation given in the Expect request-header was not fulfilled by the server.
422	Unprocessable Entity	Request well-formed but unable to process because of semantic errors
423	Locked	Resource accessed was locked
424	Failed Dependency	Request failed because of the failure of a previous request
426	Upgrade Required	Client should switch to Transport Layer Security
500	Internal Server Error	Request unsuccessful because of an unexpected condition encountered by the server.
501	Not Implemented	Request unsuccessful as the server could not support the functionality needed to fulfill the request.
502	Bad Gateway	Server received an invalid response from the upstream server while trying to fulfill the request.
503	Service Unavailable	Request unsuccessful to the server being down or overloaded.
504	Gateway Timeout	Upstream server failed to send a request in the time allowed by the server.
505	HTTP Version Not Supported	Server does not support the HTTP version specified in the request.

Google Panda Update vs. Google Penguin Updates

2012-11-01T05:52:00.001-07:00

The SEO community has been a buzz this past week with the latest update from Google, named Penguin. Penguin came down the pipeline last week, right on the tail of the latest Panda update. Since most of the big updates in the past year have been focused on Panda, many site owners are left wondering what the real differences between Panda and Penguin are. Here is a breakdown:

Google Panda Update Overview:

According to Google’s official blog post when Panda launched,
This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.
Basically, Panda updates are designed to target pages that aren’t necessarily spam but aren’t great quality. This was the first ever penalty that went after “thin content,” and the sites that were hit hardest by the first Panda update were content farms (hence why it was originally called the Farmer update), where users could publish dozens of low-quality, keyword stuffed articles that offered little to no real value for the reader. Many publishers would submit the same article to a bunch of these content farms just to get extra links.

Panda is a site wide penalty, which means that if “enough” (no specific number) pages of your site were flagged for having thin content, your entire site could be penalized. Panda was also intended to stop scrappers (sites that would republish other company’s content) from outranking the original author’s content.
Here is a breakdown of all the Panda updates and their release dates. If your site’s traffic took a major hit around one of these times there is a good chance it was flagged by Panda
1. Panda 1.0 (aka the Farmer Update) on February 24^th 2011
2. Panda 2.0 on April 11th 2011. (Panda impacts all English speaking countries)
3. Panda 2.1 on May 9th 2011 or so
4. Panda 2.2 on June 18th 2011 or so.
5. Panda 2.3 on around July 22nd 2011.
6. Panda 2.4 in August 2011(Panda goes international)
7. Panda 2.5 on September 28^th 2011
8. Panda 2.5.1 on October 9^{th 2011}
9. Panda 2.5.2 on October 13^{th 2011}10. Panda 2.5.3 on October 19/20th 2011
11. Panda 3.1 on November 18^{th 2011}12. Panda 3.2 on about January 15th 2012
13. Panda 3.3 on about February 26th 2012
14. Panda 3.4 on March 23rd 2012
15. Panda 3.5 on April 19th 2012
Search Engine Land recently created this great Google Panda update infographic to help walk site owners through the many versions of the Google Panda updates.
Many site owners complained that even after they made changes to their sites in order to be more “Panda friendly,” their sites didn’t automatically recover. Panda updates do not happen at regular intervals, and Google doesn’t re-index every site each time, so some site owners were forced to deal with low traffic for several months until Google got around to re-crawling their website and taking note of any positive changes.

Google Penguin Update Overview:

The Google Penguin Update launched on April 24. According to the Google blog, Penguin is an “important algorithm change targeted at webspam. The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines.” Google mentions that typical black hat SEO tactics like keyword stuffing (long considered webspam) would get a site in trouble, but less obvious tactics (link incorporating irrelevant outgoing links into a page of content) would also cause Penguin to flag your site. Says Google,
Sites affected by this change might not be easily recognizable as spamming without deep analysis or expertise, but the common thread is that these sites are doing much more than white hat SEO; we believe they are engaging in webspam tactics to manipulate search engine rankings.
Site owners should be sure to check their Google Webmaster accounts for any messages from Google warning about your past spam activity and a potential penalty. Google says that Penguin has impacted about 3.1% of queries (compared to Panda 1.0’s 12%). If you saw major traffic losses between April 24th and April 25th, chances are Penguin is the culprit, even though Panda 3.5 came out around the same time.
Unfortunately, Google has yet to outline exactly what signals Penguin is picking up on, so many site owners that were negatively impacted are in the dark as to where they want wrong with their onsite SEO. Many in the SEO community have speculated that some contributing factors to Penguin might be things like:
1. Aggressive exact-match anchor text
2. Overuse of exact-match domains
3. Low-quality article marketing & blog spam
4. Keyword stuffing in internal/outbound links
It’s important to remember that Panda is an algorithm update, not a manual penalty. A reconsideration request to Google won’t make much a difference–you’ll have to repair your site and wait for a refresh before your site will recover. As always do not panic if you are seeing a down turn in traffic, in the past when there is a major Google update like this things often rebound. If you do think you have some sort of SEO penalty as a result of either the Google Panda or Google Penguin updates, please contact your SEO service provider to help or start trouble shooting.
resource: http://www.brickmarketing.com/blog/panda-penguin-updates.htm

Google Local Listings with Zagat Rating in Google Plus

2012-09-24T22:34:00.001-07:00

Google made some changes to Local Business Listings from May 30th 2012 onwards.

What are the changes?

Google Local Business Listings has a new look i.e Local listings are integrated in Google Plus.
Each local business listing rating system has been improved using “Zagat Rating” system.

What is Zagat Rating?

Zagat Rating system will have 30 point scale. Mostly this system used for hotels where customers will rate food, décor and service. It seems that Google has applied the same rating system to all of the local business listings in Google Places. However Google is displaying only the total score instead of individual Zagat Score of each service. Refer following screenshot for a better idea.

Following is the example of a restaurant along with Zagat Rating Scrores:

Difference between Old & New Local Listings:

Recourse:http://www.seodailyupdates.com/2012/06/google-local-listings-with-zagat-rating.html

Another Panda Update 3.92 - 0.7% Effects

2012-09-24T22:29:00.000-07:00

Google Panda - a word which most of SEO's are afraid about. It's always good to know that "Panda and penguin updates are making the web better". Most of the websites will effect by these algorithm changes due to low quality content as well as spamy back links.

Here is the update on twitter regarding Google Panda 3.92 update by a Googler: http://goo.gl/ByvVf

As per the above tweet only 0.7% of the Google search results will be effected. We (SEO's & website owners) might not worry more about this query if you have good quality content on your website. Google has made 20 panda updates till now by targeting poor content.

Do you love Google Panda & Penguin Updates?

Google Rich Snippets Tool with Fresh Look

2012-09-24T22:23:00.000-07:00

Google Rich Snippets Tool will help to you know that "how your website will be displayed in search results". Mostly SEO's who are familiar with Micro data will use this tool to test their RDF implementation across the website. Google has improved the UI of this tool with fresh and clean look.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

We recommend to use Micro Data for your website at all possible areas which will in result helps Google to understand better about your website. E-commerce portals, Reviews websites, Business Listing directories should definitely have Micro Data for better results. Bloggers also should use author Micro Data for better visibility.

Linking Policy

2012-08-29T06:52:00.000-07:00

SEO Theory links out to other Websites on an occasional basis. We do NOT solicit or accept link requests. The majority of the sites we link to are either well-established SEO blogs, science Websites, or brand-value Websites that illustrate points we make. On some occasions we may link to less well-known sites if we feel they have published useful, informative articles or other content that illustrates the principles we discuss.

Many of the links we include in our content are discovered from a select list of “daily must-read” sites, from news sources, and/or from referral data we see in our analytics. We may also use occasional discovery queries to find new and interesting content to share with our visitors.

We do not link to content that:

Sell, promote, or discuss illegal products and services.
Appear to have been created for the purpose of driving traffic to affiliate or advertising links.
Engage in, promote, or tolerate hateful, spiteful, abusive discussion.
Promote, advocate, explain, sell, or otherwise publicize inappropriate Web marketing practices.
Contain, promote, or offer sexually explicit content, products, or services.
Is a PageRank trap (pages that are orphaned or which cannot be reached from the front page of the Website).
Solicits, promotes, or advocates participation in link reciprocation, link buying and selling, or other linking schemes.

All links embedded in our comments are given the “rel=’nofollow’” attribute. We may, at our discretion, remove links in either comments or user profiles if we feel they point to inappropriate content. You agree, by leaving a comment on SEO Theory, to accept these limitations.

SEO Theory has a limited guest post program. Only editorially selected guest bloggers may publish articles on our blog. Guest writers are selected by invitation only and all requests to be admitted to the program are ignored.

Guest articles are expected to be related to search engine optimization. They must be informative and they should be well-written and designed to be interesting and helpful.

DISCLAIMER: Links are not endorsements. Unless otherwise noted in the immediately adjacent text or anchor text, any links you find on SEO Theory that point to other Websites do not in and of themselves constitute endorsements or convey in any sense recommendations or approval for goods and/or services provided on other Websites.

resource:http://www.seo-theory.com/linking-policy/

Google concerned about dwindling number of women at higher positions

2012-08-24T06:47:00.001-07:00

At Google, data is king. Now the company is using data to figure out if it can anoint a few queens.

The company hopes its famous algorithms can solve one of the most vexing problems facing Silicon Valley: how to recruit and retain more women. Google has generally been considered a place where women have thrived, but it wants to figure out how to compete even more vigorously for the relatively few women working in technology.

Executives had been concerned that too many women dropped out in the interviewing process or were not promoted at the same rate as men, so they created algorithms to pinpoint exactly when the company loses women and to figure out how to keep them. Simple steps like making sure prospective hires meet other women during their interviews and extending maternity leaves seem to be producing results - at least among the rank and file.

At the same time, though, senior women at the company are losing ground. Since Larry Page became chief executive and reorganized Google last year, women have been pushed out of his inner circle and passed over for promotions. They include Marissa Mayer, who left last month to run Yahoo after being sidelined at Google.

"There was a point at Google when the cadre of women leadership was pretty strong," said a former Google executive who would only speak anonymously to preserve business relationships. "That has changed."

The valley's longtime image as unwelcoming for women became a new topic of conversation recently whenEllen Pao, a junior partner in the venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, filed a sexual discrimination suit against her employer. And it persists even though more women than ever are leading or in top positions at technology companies - including Yahoo, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Xerox and Facebook.

Mayer, 37, was the first woman to be an engineer at Google and ran its most profitable business, search, for years. But in 2010, she was given a new assignment that many at Google considered a demotion, and then Page removed her from his committee of close advisers.

That committee shrank from about 15 people, four of whom were women, under Eric E. Schmidt, Google's previous chief executive, to 11 with just one woman, under Page.

Also removed from the L Team, for Larry Page, were Rachel Whetstone, who oversees communications, and Shona Brown, who oversaw business operations and now leads Google.org, the company's philanthropic arm, a lower-profile job. Only one woman remains - Susan Wojcicki, who oversees advertising. Several men were also removed in the shuffle.

Of the seven people Page appointed to lead product areas when he reorganized the company last year, just one, Wojcicki, was a woman.

People familiar with Page's management style and the company's reorganization said gender played no role in his decisions.

"Larry focused on certain products, and the people who happened to lead those products and became his direct reports were men," said Laszlo Bock, who oversees people operations at Google.

Many senior women remain at Google, including the director of marketing, Lorraine Twohill, and the leader of the Washington office, Susan Molinari. Google has three women on its 10-member board - Diane B. Greene, Ann Mather and Shirley M. Tilghman, all outside directors. Also, one man, Jonathan Rosenberg, former director of product management, resigned around the time of the reorganization.

"Being here so long, it has been a very supportive place for women," said Wojcicki, who is the sister-in-law of Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder. "The founders understood it was something that was good to build into the culture early on."

Some women in less prominent positions at the company agree.

"On the ground, I think that the sentiment is still that it's a very welcoming place for women," said a woman who works for Google who spoke on condition of anonymity because employees are not supposed to talk to reporters without permission. "Things haven't really changed at the lower levels of the company."

But others say the dearth of women at the top of Google reflects what is, overall, a male-driven engineering culture. Page values product people like himself over business people, they say, and at Google, like many tech companies, product engineers tend to be men.

"Part of the issue is who Larry wants around him, and those are the guys he's most comfortable with because he knows their whole engineering and computer science background," said a former longtime senior Google employee.

Another former Google executive said, "I don't think there's a gender bias per se, but I think the c-suite at Google is going to belong to product owners, not business people. People witness it as a demotion of women. I don't view it as that. I view it as a demotion of business."

Even so, filling Page's inner circle with men could have consequences for Google.

"Having women leaders is not just a question of equity or somehow ticking the box," said Sylvia Ann Hewlett, who studies gender diversity and business at Columbia University and is president of the Center for Talent Innovation. "Particularly at technology companies, it really does contribute to innovation and a company's ability to exploit new markets."

Google is hardly alone in its struggle to attract, retain and promote technical women. The number of women working in professional computing jobs dropped 8 percent to 25 percent between 2000 and 2011 while the number of men climbed 16 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

More than half of women in technology leave their employers midcareer, but half stay in technical jobs in the public sector or at startups, indicating that there is something about big companies that pushes them out, said Catherine Ashcraft, senior research scientist at the National Center for Women and Information Technology.

Google's founders hired Wojcicki, Mayer and Jen Fitzpatrick, now an engineering vice president, early; they believed they would have more luck luring technical women once several already worked there, Wojcicki said. She was pregnant when she started, so the founders promised her subsidized child care.

That continues to be a benefit at Google, as are other family-friendly perks like a $500 stipend for takeout meals after a baby is born, paid leave of up to five months for new mothers and seven weeks for new fathers, and conveniences like dry cleaners on Google's campus so people can complete errands during the workday.

Meanwhile, there is the very Google-y approach of gathering data on precisely when the company loses women, then digging deeper to figure out what is happening and to try to fix it.

The results, Bock said, have been noticeable. One-third of Google's 34,300 employees are women. He would not say what percentage of technical employees are women, but he said it was better than the national average of about 25 percent.

Google's data-filled spreadsheets, for example, showed that some women who applied for jobs did not make it past the phone interview. The reason was that the women did not flaunt their achievements, so interviewers judged them unaccomplished. Google now asks interviewers to report candidates' answers in more detail. Google also found that women who turned down job offers had interviewed only with men. Now, a woman interviewing at Google will meet other women during the hiring process.

A result: More women are being hired.

Once hired, technical women were not being promoted at the same rate as men. At Google, employees nominate themselves for promotions, but the data revealed that women were less likely to do so. So senior women at Google now host workshops to encourage women to nominate themselves, and they are promoted proportionally to men, Bock said.

Another time Google was losing women was after they had babies. The attrition rate for postpartum women was twice that for other employees. In response, Google lengthened maternity leave to five months from three and changed it from partial pay to full pay. Attrition decreased by 50 percent.
resource:http://www.techgig.com/tech-news/editors-pick/Google-concerned-about-dwindling-number-of-women-at-higher-positions-14514

Using Web Analytics to Save Money in Business!

2012-07-24T23:56:00.001-07:00

Web Analytics tools are a very powerful tool if you would realize their potential. And these days, there is no dearth of such tools. With new and revamped versions and use of the latest mapping technologies, the kind of charts and information these tools provide can be used greatly to your advantage.

Any good analytics tool offers a lot of information on demographics, keyword related searches, landing pages and more importantly exit pages. All of these cues can be used to your advantage. For example, an analysis of exit pages can be used to design new buttons which prompt a user to action and lands him on a, say, checkout page or on a page with a lot of options to club products and earn discounts or to a free video tutorial to learn about a product or even a testimonial page! Similarly, demographics can be used to concentrate ad campaigns to specific regions (too obvious). Traffic Sources can be analyzed to better understand how users are finding your site and then maybe using sponsored ads at some of these sources. Then again, the Mobile Visitor trending can help you realize whether or not you should spend money to build a special mobile version for your kind of website. Or you could simply go to your Analytics dashboard, see the overall Pageviews for the month, the bounce rate and Time Spent and then logout, like I promptly do. But then, even this can provide you with valuable information!

Now, I suck badly at analyzing charts and honestly I am too lazy to look at a chart and draw conclusions. But very recently, a simple observation saved me a lot of money. In fact, it helped me made some! I never cared to see this previously, but the charts I get to see from my analytics report for my business website can display daywise as well as hourwise. This (eureka) discovery actually brought a pattern right in front of my eyes. There was a specific time of the day (on 3 particular days of the week) I was getting the maximum pageviews. It was not always true, but there was definitely a pattern.

Now my ad campaign does not run daily (still short on budget). So, I decided to concentrate the ads around this time of the day. Obviously, the campaign gets exhausted soon because the searches are maximum (as the report suggested) at this time. But, the chances of conversion are greatly increased. This did bring me an increase too, although I am too lazy to analyze if it was an increase of 10% in the conversions or 43%. Maybe, some other time.

So my advice is that if you are running an online business, the first thing you need to do today is add some analytical intelligence to the website's pages so that you get your hands on some real Visitor Trending information. Once you have that, keep aside a day every week to analyze how your website traffic is behaving. Take my word, the discoveries you will make will be worth every minute of your precious time.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6831082

You Are Better at Search Than Google

2012-07-24T23:53:00.002-07:00

There is no denying that Google is clever. Just type in anything you like and within fractions of a second this search engine will find you almost everything there is to know about the topic and tell you where it is. Google even tells you which items are most likely to be the very thing you are looking for.

Yet in spite of this exceedingly fast ability to pin-point what you want, compared with your own brain, Google is rather dumb. Indeed, according to Google itself, only two out of every three searches result in a click being made on the results page, which suggests that what Google thinks people want, isn't always the case. On top of this, significant numbers of people who have clicked on a link, return to Google within a minute or two in order to search again using similar words, once again indicating that Google's results are not always "spot-on". Equally, part of the problem is the way we search - using poor phrases and assuming Google knows what's in our mind.

When you use advanced search methods on Google and carefully consider your search terms, then the search engine is pretty good at finding things. But ultimately, every search page you get is really saying "here are some ideas which I think you might be looking for. I'm not really sure, but it's my best guess based on what you told me".

Compare that with the human brain. Imagine you have lost your keys. You know they are somewhere in your dining room, but you don't know where. You look around and find them after a scan of the scene in front of you. Effectively you are doing the same job as Google - locating information based on sketchy requirements. You are not sure exactly where you should be looking and if they are not your keys you are not really aware of what they look like, yet you can find them.

If I were to show you a photograph of a countryside scene and asked you to find the rabbit in the picture, you would locate it quickly. Even though you may have never seen that image before, you know a rabbit when you see one. Like finding the keys in the dining room, there is no error. Once you find what you are looking for, you've got it. You are not like Google, saying "here are the first ten items I think it might be". You don't rank your results; you are right first time.

Neuroscientists have long debated exactly how our brains can do this. After all, you need to use your visual system, but also your decision making systems and long-term memory. When you look for something, several different parts of the brain are involved. Now, new research shows that this activity is co-ordinated literally from the top of your head in a specialised part of the brain, the dorso-frontal parietal network. Basically this is your Google algorithm.

But you are better than Google because your brain ensures you find what you are looking for exactly and rapidly.

For business owners this has important implications for their websites. When someone lands on your site they know what they are looking for. So, their dorso-frontal parietal network kicks into action to locate it. If it can't be seen, then the individual heads elsewhere to look. Just like looking for lost keys in the dining room, if they can't be seen on the table, then attention is focused elsewhere in the room.

This means if your visitor cannot see what they are looking for straight away, they'll depart your site and visit another one. Your visitors will assume it is not there, if the item they are looking for cannot be seen quickly. This means your web pages need to be completely obvious. And that means the right keywords in headlines, the right pictures and the right actionable elements. It means you have to focus precisely on what your visitors are looking for on each page because they will spot it is missing if you haven' t included it.

Google might get visitors to your page, but their brain will decide in fractions of a second if your page is right for them or not. Provide exactly what they want and they will see it faster than Google lets them know your page existed.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7192052

How to Use Blogs for Search Engine Optimization and Backlink Building

2012-04-19T05:57:00.003-07:00

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7005198

Focus On Quality In Your Backlinking Strategy

2012-04-06T06:18:00.003-07:00

Online marketers don't need thousands of backlinks to achieve higher rankings in the search engines; what a marketer needs is a backlinking strategy that values quality over quantity. Of course, the more links you get, the better, but they should be quality links.

Backlinks are very important to your search engine rankings and every Internet Marketer should include an ongoing program of building links back to their websites. Some website owners try to take short cuts by purchasing backlinks or signing up for services that promise a multitude of links in a short period of time, but these tactics are not always effective for the purpose. Quality is always better than quantity.

Whatever your method is for getting backlinks, you need to make sure it is serving your purpose and helping you, not hurting you, in the search engine rankings...

If your backlinking strategy is going to be effective, you must get your links on sites that are similar to yours. In other words, websites that sell products and services very much like what you sell.

One hint is to look for websites with your keyword phrase in the domain name or in the page title.

When selecting appropriate sites, always aim for quality. One indicator to look for is Google PageRank; the higher, the better, and if it is higher than yours, even better yet. However, take note that PageRank is not always accurate. When in doubt, consider the quality and value of the site being looked at.

Whenever you can swing it, backlinks from authority sites - sites recognized and respected as leaders in the industry - are always the best. Linking goes both ways and that is another reason to choose sites similar to yours; so you have a better chance of having your link request accepted.

The links you get placed on other sites should be set up with anchor text using your keywords. For example, if your keyword phrase is "home business opportunities" then that should be the anchor text for your link.

It makes sense, then, that the page on your site that you are linking to should be optimized for the keyword phrase being used in the backlink. That is the main reason for getting a backlink, if your purpose is to improve your search engine rankings.

The techniques used to get backlinks, and the places on the Internet where backlinks are possible, are various. Article Marketing is a common method, as is guest blogging. Direct link exchanges are possible, but it is recommended to build the link into the content of the website, using your keywords as anchor text. Some Internet Marketers develop a backlink-building program around blog commenting. Again, choose quality blogs similar to your own website and check to see if they are "do-follow" blogs.

Using a good backlinking strategy that focuses on quality over quantity is very important to an online business. It takes time and dedicated effort, but that is the mark of a professional. If you are not already recognized as an authority in your niche, you now have one more piece to the puzzle.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6973784

What Is a Keyword And Why Do I Need to Know?

2012-03-30T04:13:00.002-07:00

What is a keyword? What is keyword analysis and research and why is it important? Well, it really isn't -- unless you are marketing online. Whether you manage a site targeted to a specific market, or are casting a net for a wider customer base, keyword research, marketing, and understanding how they fit together could be crucial to the success of your business. Used properly, they are inexpensive tools to drive what could well be massive amounts of traffic (read potential customers) to your site.

We are not going to discuss how search engines work, Boolean searching, or other more detailed topics involved here today. They are much longer articles and the process can get complicated if you decide to delve into the area in great detail. However, there are a few key concepts you do need to understand and one of the beauties of this is that you really don't have to grasp the entire picture immediately to see some effective results. Here is a brief outline:

First, you need to find keywords or phrases. Second, you want to get listed on the first page of Google to be found easily and quickly.

To stat with, a keyword is simply any word on any page anywhere on the internet. The more specific you are in your search for that word or phrase, the more relevancy the returned searches will have for your search purposes. For instance, if you are looking to start your own business from home and are looking for information on that topic, typing in the words "home business" will return many, many, many pages of sites that have "home business" in their title. Perhaps you want to use something like "best ways to make money in 2012", or "legitimate home based businesses"," home based businesses for consultants," or "tax deductions for home based businesses", and so forth. Be specific about what you want to find unless you want to receive a LOT of general information on a topic.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT TO YOU AS A WEBSITE OWNER OR ENTREPRENEUR IS BECAUSE YOU NEED TO NOW REVERSE YOUR THINKING AND FIGURE OUT WHAT KEYWORDS OR PHRASE SOMEONE WOULD USE IF THEY WANTED TO FIND THE EXACT INFORMATION THAT YOU HAVE ON YOUR WEBSITE. The people searching for the information you want to provide may have never heard of you, and you want to be able to introduce yourself in a way that will make them happy, recurring, customers.The keyword, or usually keyword phrase, is how you begin to do that.

So first find keywords or phrases. Then, get listed on the first page of Google to be found easily and quickly.

To find the correct keywords or phrases you need to use a program that will search the entire web and analyze the search results of a keyword phrase you determine. A good program will show you to how analyze both the traffic and the competition numbers for those particular keywords so that you know how many hits those keywords receive and how competitive they are. The competition numbers tell you how many established webpages have the exact keyword phrases in their website title. The higher the number, the more competitive it is, and the harder it is to be highly placed on Google. The ideal ratio is a high traffic number coupled with a low competition number. More importantly, the program tells you what people would REALLY use to find you, not what you THINK they might use. In addition, they would suggest other related phrases that might be helpful. The programs are usually fairly inexpensive but well worth the money.

The next step would be to write short articles using those keyword phrases and get them published in an internet setting such as EzineArticles (where this article is found). EzineArticles requires high writing standards before publication. Google recognizes that and usually accepts their articles a bit more easily. If you don't care to compose the articles yourself, not to worry. They can be outsourced, usually very inexpensively.

If you have done the first two correctly, you will be one of the FIRST listings on Google when people use the keyword phrases that you have written about! Think about how many pages you look at when you get a search returned to you through Google. If you realize that most people stop after the first one or two, it is easy to understand why a first page Google listing is important and so much more effective for you and your business!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6957281