• The Yelper used inappropriate language.
• The Yelper’s profile is incomplete; e.g., missing a profile picture, bio, or contact and verification information.
• Yelp has determined that the review is biased. Something in the algorithm has triggered a red flag that tells Yelp that the Yelper is a competitor, disgruntled employee, family member, or friend.
• The Yelper has very few or zero previous reviews.

If you look at the reviews that are stuck in the black hole, you’ll likely notice a couple of things in common:

• Each of these people have left zero to two reviews previous to writing a review for you. Although I bet you really appreciate their thoughtful, five-star review, Yelp doesn’t care. They see it as a red flag. Yelp is concerned that this person signed up just to write you a review, perhaps because you paid them. Yelp can’t prove this, so it’s only course of action is to not display the review.
• Most of the Yelpers don’t have a profile picture. And if you dig a bit deeper and actually click through to their individual profile pages, you’ll notice that they have very little information filled out.

It’s almost as if they created a Yelp profile just to write a review for you business. Actually, they probably did. Again, while you might appreciate it, it’s not good enough for Yelp. Yelp wants engaged, active users.

How to unlock hidden reviews on Yelp

Unlocking hidden reviews on Yelp requires a basic understanding of Yelp’s algorithm. You will need to reach out to your previous reviewers and let them know that they need increase their engagement and fill out the rest of the profile information in order for their wonderful review to get unstuck from the hidden area.
Yelp wants to see several things from a Yelp user before it publishes their review and it has a lot to do with engagement.

• Fill in your profile completely. A complete profile including a clear profile picture, full bio with links to your website, your likes and dislikes, and your location.
• Make some friends on Yelp. You can sync your Facebook profile to identify any of your Facebook friends that might also be on Yelp.
• Check-in to some of your favorite businesses. Download the app and click “Check-in” next time your there. It takes less than 5 seconds.
• Upload a photo or two of your most recent dining experience. Take a picture of the food or the exterior or interior of the business.
• Comment on other Yelper’s reviews. Did you see something you liked? A funny review or one that particularly insightful or well-written? Let them know.
• Write some reviews. This is by far the largest factor. A Yelper needs reviews in order to seem credible and unbiased. Yelp wants to know that they user didn’t sign up just to write one glowing review or one very negative review. And this understandable. This is how Yelp is able to effectively manage the millions of reviews it receives each day.

Message your reviewers that are stuck in this black hole with the helpful information above. Let them know how much you appreciate their wonderful review and that you’d love for it appear in the regular section, but in order to do that, they will need to increase their engagement a bit on Yelp and fill out their profile.

How to rank higher on Yelp

Yelp can be a major source of phone calls and page view traffic and consequently revenue for your business. But in order to start increasing that traffic, you need to rank highly on Yelp. Yelp has about 150 million unique monthly visitors. That’s a lot of people looking for businesses to shop at. Cleary you should be on Yelp. But just “claiming your business” is not enough.
Your Yelp page needs to be optimized so you attract the right customers. Let’s look at some of the things that you can control on your free Yelp page.

• Business name. It should be your “Doing Business As” business name–not your legal name.
• Business categories. You’re allowed three. Chose those that best fit your business.
• Profile picture. Chose a picture that looks great as a thumbnail. Most likely, this will be your logo.
• Business Photos. Add photos of your most popular dishes and a great shot of the exterior of your business. Surprisingly, this is what customers find most helpful. Often, they’re looking for business while driving or walking down the street and need help knowing what it looks like. A clear, front on shot of your facade will quickly become one of your most helpful images. Also consider photographing your staff and including them in your photo gallery.
• Business information. Fill out your profile information with some well-written and helpful content about your business, when you founded it, and who founded it. Be sure to include your SEO keywords in this section because it will help Yelp determine how to rank you when customers are searching for those keywords on Yelp. SEO hint: Google also pulls from this content!

Business Yelp pages consistently rank on the first page of Google often in the first position. If you’re Yelp page is optimized using the above strategies, you’ll likely see your business’s Yelp page on the first page of Google It’s one of the excellent benefits of optimizing your Yelp page.

The post Why do some Yelp reviews not show up first appeared on Quantum SEO Labs.

Make Your Customers Feel Important

Everyone wants to get their 15 minutes of fame. It’s one of those things that we all dream of even if we won’t admit it to everyone else. So why not do your part for your customers by letting them appear in your material? Just include them in your advertising and let the people that love you the most show their love.
You can use quotes from your customers or even have them do a video testimonial which can be published on your website or elsewhere. Do make sure that you get permission to use their images though and make it clear that you will be using the material without paying anything other than the chance to be seen publicly.

Send Random Discounts and Congratulations

I mentioned this in the past but it’s worth bringing up again. First of all, consider just sending out a random coupon which grants people a percentage off from their future purchase. This kind of thing both stimulates some sales from your customers and makes them feel like they’re actually important to you rather than simply another number.

You can also send out some random congratulations cards to your customers. This is a technique I picked up years ago and I love it. In essence, you just send our random personalized cards to your clients or even to their e-mail addresses and wish them congratulations in as generic a way as possible. They’ll be wondering how you knew about whatever good news just came their way, be it in business or in their personal lives.
Of course, this should be done sparingly as you do run the risk of timing it wrong if you happen to send out congratulations when something bad just happened to them but you can always smooth that over. If they call and say that something bad just happened and you’re wondering why you’re congratulating them, you can always say that you’re sorry for whatever it was that happened but the congratulations are because they just won a discount coupon for being a loyal customer.

Do the Knickknack Thing

You know how pretty much everyone seems to give out some kind of knickknack, be it a pen or a tote bag? There’s a reason for that – it works and it works really well. People tend to like these things and they’ll remember you for giving them something of value. The more unique and useful the item is, the more likely you are to actually get some benefit from it.
Actually, I recently ran across a really cool article where there were some pretty unique looking business cards. Some of them were kind of silly, like a card that turns into a pico-size shipping box, however there were others that were incredibly clever, like the cheese grater card. I also recall seeing a card for a funeral home which had the Lord’s Prayer on it. A tad macabre I suppose but it was also clever.

Listen to What Your Customers Have to Say

I’ve mentioned this in the past as well and even though I have, it’s vitally important to mention it again and again and again. Probably the single most important thing that you can do in order to ensure that your customers will keep coming back for more of whatever it is that you have to offer is to offer real customer service.
This means that if they have a problem with your product, you don’t just ignore what they tell you. You actually take the time to pay attention and listen to what they have to say so that you can get them whatever they need. In other words, listen to your customers and show them that their opinions matter. In a world dominated by impersonal voice mail and call centers in third world countries, nothing works better.
By the way, if you do take the time to add a feature that a customer of yours requested, why not actually mention them in your advertising? Say that this idea was submitted by such and such customer and maybe even offer them a free upgrade as a thank you for the winning suggestion. This will encourage other customers to share their ideas and will make people feel as if your company is one of the few that actually cares about customers and doesn’t just take them for granted.

Offer Loyalty Services

I had a really sweet offer made to me a while back by PayPal where they gave me priority service and a expedited customer service, getting me straight to their most senior agents if I ever had a problem. The reason was that I’d done a certain amount of business with them within the course of a year and this made me qualify for a premier program.
You can adopt something similar in your own efforts by simply making your most loyal customers into VIPs. Give them early access to the latest software that your company puts out or let them know that if they ever need help, they have a personal account representative to talk to. In other words, make them feel like they’re more than just another number and they’ll love you for it.

Speaking of Customer Service…

I cannot stress this enough. One of the best ways to keep customers loyal to you is to have great customer service which is available and which follows through for them. Sure you could hire some call center in Bangladesh to handle all of your phone calls and give them a canned script to read whenever a customer calls with a complaint. However, the companies that really succeed actually take the time to offer customers personal service.
Empower whomever it is that you have working your help desk to help customers and not be obnoxious to them. I remember one person in particular whom I used to be a big fan of. The guy sent me a special offer on a product which was supposed to be for a limited time only. Then after the time expired, virtually the same product appeared on the page for a cheaper price. I complained and got a nasty response from the customer service person there.
In the end, it turned out that they guy just completely misunderstood and did half-heartedly apologize, telling me how they sometimes “fire” customers for being difficult. However, this should have come from the owner of the company and should have included more than a half-baked apology to me. I have never even bothered to open another e-mail from this guy since then.
Shoddy customer service is more likely than anything else to make your customers run away in droves so don’t skimp on this. Do it right.

Make Yourself Unique

Finally, if you are truly intent on holding onto your customers, you need to offer them a really good reason to stick with you as opposed to the competition. This should include great customer service and personalized efforts on their behalf however, there should also be that one thing that you offer which the competition doesn’t have to offer.

You need to put your unique fingerprint on anything you create.

What that one thing would be is something that you have to figure out for yourself of course. However, ultimately, if you can find a way to make your own offerings unique and desirable, you are more likely to hold onto your customers rather than constantly needing to develop new ones. Be it different features or a different structure for upgrades or anything else, that one thing that makes your company unique needs to be your signature offering, the reason why people will stay with you.
Oh and as I’ve said in this space many times in the past, whatever you do, don’t try to compete exclusively on price. You will lose every time because your price inevitably be beat. There has to be something else that you can offer which is unique if you want to succeed. Here’s to your success!

The post 7 Methods to Keep Existing Customers Happy first appeared on Quantum SEO Labs.

Every Stock Photo

I admit that I’ve mentioned this a couple of times in the past but it’s worth mentioning again here because it is by far one of the most useful sites that most people still seem never to have heard of. Every Stock Photo is a great website to have at your disposal. It is a meta search service which literally lets you find material from more than a dozen other sites which offer stock photos.
They have something like 30,000,000 photos available. I do find that the search options tend to be a bit wonky and of course like most sites that offer free photos, they are extremely top heavy with scenery and have a lot less content useful for stock work. You also need to register with the individual sites they link to in order to actually download the content but ultimately, it’s still a great website to use.

Down for Me or For Everyone

Every now and then, I come across a website which I need to use and I find that it’s down. The question of course, is it just not working for me for some reason or is it not working for anyone at all anywhere? A quick visit to this website will allow you to check whether or not the site in question happens to be down for or just not functioning correctly on your website.

Coursera

Ever wanted to learn how to do basic PHP coding? Want to learn what it takes to build a website? Or maybe you have more advanced desires. While you won’t get an official certification or degree, you can definitely learn everything you want to know about almost any subject under the sun on Coursera. This website lists courses from some of the top universities on the planet, all in English and all for free.

Of course it’s not just about Internet Marketing or coding. There are courses on all kinds of things such as history, sociology and everything in between. Most of the courses are the same courses that people pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for at the best universities around. You get the same lectures and the same exam materials as well as a full curriculum. The only thing you don’t get is to ask questions from the professor and you don’t get to receive a grade at the end.

Hubspot Blog Topic Generator

I am really loving this service. I know that I’ve been blocked in the past and needed to find some kind of an idea for the blogs I run. I often look to see what other people in the field are doing however, with this service, I don’t have to. Give the folks at Hubspot three very general topics (nouns actually) that your blog is about and they’ll generate five ideas for you to write about right now.

I gave the service a spin with some very basic topics such as SEO, Internet Marketing and Make Money Online. While the results are not awe inspiring, it does make it easier to come up with some good ideas if you’re feeling blocked.

Portent’s Content Idea Generator

While the Hubspot service does tend to make for some useful if slightly generic content ideas, Portent’s Content Idea Generator makes for truly irreverent titles. I punched in Internet Marketing and well, you can see below what it came up with for me. Is it useful? That’s a definite maybe. I mean every now and again, I do like to be whimsical so I suppose this could do the job but ultimately, the previous site is a better choice.

Hemingway

I’ve got to say that I am seriously loving the Hemingway web app. This thing is a great service where you basically paste in content that you’ve written and it will tell you what you need to know about. For example, the paragraph on Every Stock Photo was rated as being written on an 11^th grade level.

They also suggest that one of the sentences I wrote was difficult to read but I tend to disagree. Either way, this is a great service for anyone trying to ensure that they get their writing right and make it look the way it needs to look.

On Page Optimization Tool

This tool is great for those who need to ensure that their writing is optimized for search engines. It will check a variety of different factors and tell you whether or not what you wrote fits the bill. Of course, you still need to ensure that whatever you wrote also makes sense for human beings since the content needs to be useful to your customers too.

After the Deadline

This service works similarly to the way that Hemingway works in that it will check your spelling and grammar and the like. However, I personally didn’t find it nearly as useful, both because it only work with Chrome (I’m a Firefox man myself) and because it doesn’t seem to offer the same kind of easy to understand format that Hemingway offers. However, it is a very useful tool to know about all the same.

Readability Test Tool

Yet another service to check whether or not your content is well written, this service is also not my favorite of the three. Unlike Hemingway, it gives you a lot more raw data to work with, providing a number of different scores and breaking it all down for you. However, what I don’t happen to like very much is the fact that it seems that’s all it does. Hemingway is much more natural in offering me clear and concise information about my writing.

Tweriod

When tweeting, you need to know how to come up with something pithy to say in just 140 characters. However, that’s not the only thing that you need to know how to do. You also need to know when to send out your tweets in order to ensure that they’ll get the maximum exposure. Tweriod is designed to provide you with that kind of information so that you’ll be able to get the maximum benefit from your tweets.

10 Minute Mail

This is pretty much exactly what it sounds like – an e-mail address that is good for just 10 minutes. This is the perfect e-mail address if you wanted to sign up for some kind of website which you don’t want to give out your real e-mail address to. Of course, it’s also possible that the website in question will know which domains are used there and block you so your mileage may vary.

WhatTheFont

Ever see a website which looks really cool and which has a great looking font but which you couldn’t quite place? I know I’ve occasionally seen fonts used on other sites that I wanted to use for my own stuff but I had no way to match them. Now I can – WhatTheFont will tell you exactly which font was used for pretty much any image that you upload to it. Note that you need to click the link for WhatTheFont at the link above. For whatever odd reason, a direct link doesn’t work correctly.

Online Etymology Dictionary

Not the most useful website for those doing Internet Marketing or SEO but I’m including it here because I can see it potentially being something that will help you out sometime. Basically, you put in a word and it will tell you the etymology of the word in question. I can see it being useful for someone doing some writing work but again, not a super useful site but still pretty interesting overall.

Check what it came up with for Lilliputian for example. Note that you do need to spell the word correctly for the site to work. It doesn’t do automatic spell check.

FlipText

This could be useful for designing websites at least on occasion or maybe it could at least be mildly interesting. The site will flip text for you and allow you to copy it out and paste it into your website. It seems the text complies with ASCII characters so it will work right out of the box and can then be set up with whatever font you like. ˙ʇxǝʇ pǝddıןɟ ǝɯos ɟo ǝןdɯɐxǝ uɐ sı sıɥʇ.

Word Frequency Counter

Another useful if very simple tool. This one will count how many times a particular word appears in the text that you paste into it. Useful but frankly, I can just easily do a count using Microsoft Word and the find feature. That said, if you need it  for SEO purposes, this is a nice little tool to know about.

Strip Creator

I have to admit that this one is good but it does require you to come up with some creative story ideas of your own. In essence, Strip creator allows you to create a customized comic strip. You can choose from a limited number of artist’s work if you need to use the strip outside of the site (which I assume you would need to do if you want it for IM). Check the FAQ for details on that.

The creation of the strip is pretty simple but of course, you need to be creative about what you write. I admit that my efforts below were not exactly the best but it works to at least show you how the thing works.

Account Killer

I just really liked this service because it can be useful for pretty much anyone. It doesn’t really do a whole lot for SEO and IM people though I can see it being useful if you need to delete an account and start over. Basically, it allows you to completely delete pretty much any kind of social media account that you’ve ever created.

Date Duration

This one is great if you’re trying to create a sale on your website and you want to specify how many days are left before the sale happens. It basically lets you plug in two different dates and find out how much time there is between the two of them.

CScore

This is a nice little website which can offer you some insight into your Facebook page and how popular it actually is. I tested several different Facebook pages on the site to see what it would come up with and found it a little odd. One page I own which is not terribly popular got a rating of 5 but Amazon’s page had a rating of just 41. Kind of odd I thought…

Screenr

No need to pay for expensive software to create your screenshots and video presentations. Screenr does the whole job for free and it works straight from the web. This site is really awesome and it will help you to build videos that you can incorporate onto your own website. It’s really a great service and the best part is that it’s completely and totally free. There is however a paid version of the same website available with additional features.

What about You?

So, what are some of your favorite hidden websites? Share them with us in the comments section below. I’d love to know what they are why they’re sites that you think should be included in this list. If anyone gives me some good ideas, I’ll be happy to add them into my original list as it appears above so don’t be shy. Tell us all what you like and what you want to see put out there.

The post 20 Incredibly Useful Websites You Didn’t Know Existed first appeared on Quantum SEO Labs.

Being a Clone

There’s an old saying – imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Now while it’s true that you can learn a great deal from some of the great websites out there such as Amazon.com or Fiverr, it’s important to also do something to make your own website into something which looks unique and which has something to offer other than just a copy of the big boys.
So why exactly is this a problem though? After all, if it’s good enough for someone like Amazon or eBay or Fiverr then surely it must work and that means that if I copy them, I’ll be able to make lots of money too, right? In fact, there are companies that use exactly this idea. I can’t tell you how many clones of Fiverr I’ve seen for example.

These guys literally copies Fiverr word for word and have the exact same design, often with the same colors and the same design. Sometimes, they’ll change it up only in the amount of money they charge – some are $10, some $20. Of course, there are the Fiverr clones which simply work exactly the same way, right down to charging five bucks for a gig.
The problem of course is that everyone knows who Fiverr is. They know that Fiverr is likely to have the services that they need because well, it’s Fiverr. So why the heck are they going to look at your me too website and try to find a gig with the handful of people desperate enough to advertise on your much less trafficked site?
Moreover, Fiverr has built up their business over time to the point where they know that they can count on a certain number of people simply typing in their domain name and going to look for what they need without the need to do SEO or other kinds of advertising. In short, you are not Fiverr and you likely don’t have the budget to create a clone which gets as popular as they are.
Instead, consider creating your own unique draw for your website and allow people to see that you have something unique to offer. It may be as simple as offering different pricing structures (i.e. $10, $20, etc.) though that’s been done to death as well. Instead, maybe consider doing something where you vet people who want to advertise on your site and you guarantee that the people doing the work know what they’re doing and won’t screw up.
I know that I’d gladly pay extra for that kind of a service, especially if I was given some kind of a guarantee that there will be someone to intervene if there’s a problem later on. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve bought a gig on Fiverr only to be disappointed with the results.
Mind you, I know that when people earn just $4 for a gig they can’t spend much time doing it but even so, I’d rather pay extra and know that I’m getting what I need rather than pay a cheap price and find that it’s a crap shoot. Worse, when I find someone good, inevitably they’re going to leave Fiverr pretty soon because they can make more elsewhere.

Confusing the Heck Out of Your Visitors

Okay, now that I just got through telling you about how you shouldn’t just imitate the greats, I’m going to reverse myself and tell you that in some cases, you should imitate them. At least insofar as how to design a website which is easy to use.
If you think that having about a million different ads everywhere and having all kinds of different forms of navigation is a good thing because it makes your site unique, you are sorely mistaken. I wrote about this once before when I mentioned The Jerusalem Post as a prime example of a website with terrible design and navigation, mostly because it has so many different ads, not to mention an obnoxious auto-refresh feature.

Of course, they aren’t the only ones engaged in poor design. Unfortunately, there are lots of well meaning webmasters who never seem to have figured out that they need to keep things clean and simple. You want a website which is easy and intuitive to navigate. That means the cutesy menus which seem to pop up out of nowhere are not the kind of thing you want to use.
Basically, a drop down menu like most websites use today is a good thing and something that will keep your visitors happy and content as they visit your site and make purchases from it. In other words, follow the KISS principle – Keep It Simple Stupid. If you do that, you won’t drive your customers crazy and they’ll agree to stick around longer.

Refusing to Accept PayPal Payments

Listen, I know that PayPal is nothing great. I wrote a while back about why PayPal was nothing to write home about and I know that there are a number of Internet marketers who have had all manner of trouble with taking PayPal payments. I’ve heard all the horror stories about accounts being frozen for months with hundreds of thousands of dollars in them and about the byzantine way that PayPal sometimes treats people.
I have only one thing to say: get over it and find a way to accept PayPal anyway. If you can’t accept it yourself because of a problem you had with them in the past, use one of the many payment processor services such as Plimus which do accept them. Bottom line is that you will ultimately find that you are able to get that many more customers if you accept PayPal in one way or another.

Of course, it also helps if you have some other alternative service which you can use to accept credit cards because not everyone can or wants to use PayPal to make their payments. Bottom line, offer PayPal and offer some kind of alternative as well because your customers will not be happy if you don’t have both options available.

Crazy Forms

This is something else I’ve written about in the past but it’s worth mentioning again. Make your forms standardized and easy to use. Please. Your customers will thank you for it. People get annoyed as heck when forms aren’t designed to be easy to use. This includes building forms which are intuitive to fill in and which aren’t hard to read.
I’ve also seen an awful lot of different forms which are designed to reset themselves if you make a wrong move. I cannot tell you how incredibly annoying that is! If you create a form which forces people to start over again if they make a mistake, I can guarantee that an awful lot of your customers will disappear.

Also, don’t make people crazy about passwords. On the one hand, you do want to ensure that your customers pick passwords which are protected and which cannot easily be broken. On the other hand, if all they’re doing is registering for your blog in order to leave a comment, they don’t need to pick a 25 character random password in order to sign up. Simple, basic passwords will do for such things.
Oh and again, if someone picks a password which your system doesn’t like, let them know automatically rather than making them hit submit and then wonder why they’re back at the basic form. Never mind the insane forms which actually have people filling everything out over again when they pick a bad password.
One more thought regarding forms. I know that a lot of you now employ captchas to try to cut down on the robots which seem to proliferate throughout the web. Of course, you probably also know that captchas are now pretty easy to get around using any number of different services which are designed to automatically get past them.
However, one of the worst ideas that you could possibly engage in is to make people crazy filling out the whole form over again because they didn’t fill in the captcha correctly. Oh and offer an option to have the captcha read out to people and to have another one randomly generated too. Some of them are hard even for human beings to read, never mind computers.

Bottom Line

As I’ve said in the past, you simply need to put yourself into your customer’s shoes if you want to ensure that they’ll be kept happy and coming back for more of whatever it is that you have for sale. People will appreciate it and they’ll keep coming back for more.

The post 4 Mistakes You Are Making Which Cost You Customers first appeared on Quantum SEO Labs.

‘How Vulnerable Are You?

There is good news and bad news in this case. The good news is that negative SEO is still really hard to pull off and 99% of websites will not be affected by this kind of thing. I mean seriously, the number of bad links that need to be created in order to counteract good quality links that you have on your website is staggering in its numbers.
Of course, with a sophisticated tool such as Scrapebox or XRummer, it is possible to do exactly that and to create havoc for a website if you are determined enough and if the webmaster is not on his or her toes about keeping the problems at bay.
The other thing to consider is that it’s crazy easy to hire someone to do negative SEO for you. There are plenty of people on Fiverr for example who will happily build hundreds of thousands of poor quality links to a website that you want to target. Whether these guys are actually effective at getting sites kicked out of the rankings is questionable but the fact is that there’s no reason why any of us should take chances.

Other Sneaky Tricks

Of course, in addition to the most obvious forms of negative SEO, including things like Google Bowling and hacking/DDOS attacks, there are more devious methods of destroying your site which you need to watch out for.
One, which someone attempted to do with a site I link to from my personal finance site is to create a kind of phishing e-mail. Phishing as you likely know is where someone will try to pretend to be from a reputable site and try to get you to click a link and hope that you’ll reveal your password. These kinds of attacks often target things like your bank account or PayPal accounts.
However, one method which someone tried with me was a reverse of this where they pretended to be from a website I happen to have a link to. The e-mail purportedly was from the site own and demanded that I remove the link to their site. A telltale sign though was that the e-mail came from a generic Gmail account rather than an e-mail address associated with the actual site. Of course, many site owners won’t notice and will happily remove a link, which may hurt your SEO in the long run.
Fortunately for the site owner in question, I know enough about SEO to have ignored the request. At the time, I just figured that if the guy was that desperate not to have a link from my site (which is quite reputable and has a decent page rank) that he could use Google Disavow. It only occurred to me later to go back and glance at the e-mail to realize that this was an effort at negative SEO.
Of course again, this kind of attack (and by the way, if they really wanted to mess with you, they could spoof an e-mail and make it appear it came from your site though that’s more work than just using a generic Gmail account) is not terribly common. It requires a significant amount of time and effort to make it happen so you are unlikely to be targeted.
Other methods include creating fake accounts on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter and then using them for spam and or copying content off of your site and making it widely available everywhere online (this is a problem because it dilutes your brand and Google’s bots may not rank your original post as highly if it’s too widely distributed).

When You Should Be Worried

Okay, before I get to how to protect yourself (and some of my suggestions are useful even if you don’t fall into this category), let’s look at who is likely to be a prime target:

1. Sites in very competitive industries – if you run a site for example in the cutthroat gambling industry, you may be vulnerable.
2. Sites which are the tops in their relatively competitive niche – for example, if you ran the top site in the SEO niche, you’d need to be concerned.
3. Sites which take a political stance – Finally, sites which take a political stance, for example for or against gay marriage, for or against Israel, for or against gun control, for or against abortion – well you get the idea. These kinds of sites are unfortunately magnets for the people with too much time on their hands and too much hatred in their hearts.

What You Can Do to Protect Yourself

Get Alerts from Google – The first thing you should do (and this is something everyone ought to be doing regardless of whether or not you are worried about being attacked) is to set up Google Webmaster Alerts.
Since Google’s web spider is regularly sent out to index the Internet, it will know fairly quickly if there is a problem with your site. Google can tell you for example if your site is down or if it detects any kind of hacking effort on the site. Once you have your website set up with Google webmaster tools (and if you haven’t done it yet, you should), it’s a simple matter to just put in your e-mail address and get alerts from them whenever there’s a problem.
Set a Real Password and Change the Default Admin – If you use WordPress or Drupal as the vast majority of websites do, be sure to change the name of the admin user to something unique. Don’t just leave it as “admin.” This makes it harder for hackers to break in. Also, use a real password. Trust me, the word password or 1234 is never a good idea.
Ideally, your password should be a mix of numbers and characters, including upper and lower case characters and it should be completely random like this: uhh89Yg7ggGYGHJISA8g87$%*$. Of course, that’s really hard to remember so the next best thing is to use a passphrase: ForExampleThisisAGoodPassphrase987. The preceding is at least long and uses a mix of upper and lower case as well as numbers. It’s not perfect but much better than your kid’s name or “Password.”
Check Your Backlinks—I know it’s not free like the old Yahoo service was but the best choice for checking up on your backlinks is still OpenSiteExplorer from the people at Moz.Com. You can get three free basic reports a day so for many people, that’s all you’ll need. However, if you need more than that, be sure pony up for the extended version of the service.
Watch Social Media—This is a good idea even if you aren’t worried about your site getting hacked or being the victim of some negative SEO efforts. The fact is that your customers are going to mention you on social media all the time and the more often you take the time to respond to them and actually try to find out what’s bothering them, the more likely you are to keep them as customers.
A good tool to use for this Mention.net. These guys will actually let you know whenever your company name gets mentioned somewhere in open social media (obviously if someone mentions you on their Facebook wall and it’s set to private, this won’t pick it up but anything they allow to be public will be mentioned).

They offer a very basic free service or you can pay for advanced service which will monitor more than one keyword or brand name as well as provide you with more lists of mentions per month (the basic service offers just 100 mentions each month).
Make Sure You Site is Loading Fast—Another indicator that there may be a problem (either because of hacking or because of a myriad other factors is that your site may be loading rather slowly. You can easily monitor this by checking out Pingdom.com. Again, this is not a free service but the cost is fairly minimal and it can provide you with peace of mind to know your site is moving smoothly.

Use a Pro for Your SEO Efforts—Look, I know it’s tempting to pay some guy on Fiverr five bucks and have them blast thousands of links for you. The fact is that there’s a reason they charge just five bucks though. The links are junk and are worth even less than what you paid for it. Given that Google is once again counting junk links against you, don’t sabotage yourself. Make sure the SEO service you use is run by people who know what they’re doing.
Use the Disavow Tool – Finally, Google did create the disavow tool for a reason. They want you to be able to dump bad links and not have them count against you. So after monitoring your links, if you consistently see say some kind of a porn site creating links to your site, make sure to tell Google that these are not your own links.

Oh and don’t be afraid to contact webmasters of offending sites and ask them to remove the link to your website from their pages. Just make sure that you use an e-mail from your own domain as opposed to a generic Gmail account.

Bottom Line

Look, in most cases, this is simply a matter of using some good common sense to make sure that your business is protected. As I said from the beginning, the actual odds of being targeted successfully are pretty small. Most hackers aren’t going after a little website with a relatively small amount of traffic anyway. However, if you are worried, the tools exist to help you to protect yourself from negative SEO.

The post The Dangers of Negative SEO and How You Can Protect Yourself first appeared on Quantum SEO Labs.

1.     Figure Out Who the Competition Is

Before you can even think about trying to attract the competition’s social media followers, there’s a very basic thing that you need to do – find out who your competition actually is. Now I know you probably have a vague idea of some of the big guys in your business but it’s also worth spending some time to do research and find out if there’s anyone else that you’re not familiar with.
Start by doing a search for your primary keywords on Google and noting the top businesses in the industry. Of course, this is just the first step. Once you’ve found the companies in question, you then need to do a little checking to see what their positions are on the various social networks including Google +, Facebook and Twitter.
You will need to cross reference the various websites with their social media profiles. So for example, if I were to do a search on Google for “buy dog food,” I’d get the following results (well, yours may differ slightly as Google tends to personalize results depending on where you are and what your previous searches have been):

Now, I’d take these results and start searching out their social media presence. For example, Chewy.com, the very first suggestion on my list has an extremely active Facebook presence with 247,000+ followers:

By comparison, Mercola, which runs Healthy Pets doesn’t seem to have any Facebook presence, at least none that I could find. On their home page, it appears that they’ve gotten a relatively modest number of likes, 1,688 for the page we found in our initial search. Thus this is likely not a good candidate for stealing social media followers from.

2.     Check Their Facebook Pages

Now of course, even once we have actually found out whether or not a particular company has a strong social media presence, the next thing to do is to check how active their followers actually are. It’s entirely possible that they have a lot of robots following their tweets on Twitter and likely them on Facebook because at one point or another, someone was trying to grow them in any way they could.
One of the best ways to check them out is with a tool called Fanpage Karma. Basically, this site will let you enter any Facebook page and find out just how active it has actually been in the past few months. As we can see, even though Chewy appears to have a pretty active Facebook page with over 247,000 followers, it’s actually got a pretty modest Karma rating of just 2.2.

They also have just .6 posts per day which means the page is active but not super hopping with raving fans who constantly drop by and visit the place. Out of 247,000 fans, they rank just 9,600 talking about them in the recent past…
Overall, I’d say that Chewy is a mixed bag. In a business area like buying pet food, it’s likely worth trying to poach some of their followers anyway but it’s not like it’s going to be the very best choice available from a Facebook perspective.

3.     Check Out Twitter Next

The next step is to check out the Twitter feed of the company in question and to see just how active that happens to be. Generally, if you found that the Facebook page was active, they’ll also have a pretty active Twitter account. However, it’s not always a given that this will be the case so do check both of them.
In the case of Chewy.com for example, their Twitter following is much, much smaller than the following they have on Facebook with just 2,836 followers (and they are following over 1,900 people which means they’re still working actively to build their following):

Now while we can get some basic information by simply checking the Twitter feed, which is public, a better way to check out the competition is to go granular and get to all the nitty gritty details of exactly what it is that the company has going on. One of the best ways to do this is to check the site in question on a website called Twitonomy.
The basic service will provide you with a listing of all the recent tweets and other relevant information about the competition. As you can see, they provided me some basic information on Chewy.com:

However, if you want to get much more information, including who their most influential followers are (i.e. the people you want to try to grab for your own list) as well as their most retweeted tweets (i.e. this will show you what your potential customers are most interested in reading about), you need to go for the premium service. This information can be invaluable though as it can help guide you on whom you should target.
Either way, we’re ready to start looking at Google + and Pinterest. Then, we’ll look into how to grab some of these people for your own network.

4.     Check On Google+

The next step is to check on the Google+ page of your competitors. When we look at Chewy.com’s Google+ page, we don’t get a whole lot of information. All we can see here is the number of views:

Interesting but not super useful. All we know about them so far is that they’ve managed to garner nearly 60,000 views at one time or another since their page was launched on G+. However, I did find a different service which provides much more details analytics of Google+ pages. Simply Measured can tell us much more about the competition’s social media efforts:

It looks like over the past few weeks, Chewy.com made a few reasonable efforts at engagement but then ignored their page completely, without a single hit going up. This tells us that their G+ followers may be looking for someone else to follow in addition to them in order to get more information about pet food (of course, it could also mean that pet food doesn’t really get people excited but that’s another story).

5.     Check on Pinterest

Finally, let’s take a look at how the competition is doing over on Pinterest. On Pinterest, Chewy.com seems to be doing quite well. That’s to be expected though given that they do sell pet food and Pinterest is the sort of social network which lends itself to that kind of sharing (after all, half the Internet seems to be memes with dogs and cats these days).

They have a respectable number of followers and they seem to be doing pretty well. However, if you’d like to know more about how they’re doing, you can use a free service at a company called Tailwinds which does some additional analyzing for you. It’s really intended to help with your own Pinterest page, but I found that it does provide some good analytics for any page and as I said, it’s free:

6.     Grab Your Competitor’s Facebook Followers

Okay, enough research. Time for action. The first thing you need to do is go back to our results which we found in step 2 on Facebook. You’ll want to hunt down the most active Facebook users of your competitor’s page. Thanks to the analytics we received from FanPage Karma, we can actually find out who the most influential people are as well as those who use the page the most.
Armed with this information, it’s time to start going after them. Click on their public profiles and see what other pages they follow. Be sure to try to be as helpful as possible whenever these people post questions. The more often they see you elsewhere, the more likely they are to check you out and want to know what it is that you have to offer.
The key here as with anything involving social media is that you want to ensure that you don’t come off sounding like a corporate hack who is just interested in making another sale to them. Instead, you want to be yourself (obviously use your personal account, not a corporate account) and simply answer questions as a fellow human being.
Ultimately, you’ll find that the people you help on Facebook are more likely to check you out and offer to friend you as well as like your page and follow whatever it is that you post there. The best part of course is that you are sharing a follower rather than actually taking away from someone else (of course, your goal is to get them to shift some of their purchases to you but that’s another story entirely).

7.     Go After the Twitter Fan Base

Okay, now that you’ve gone and grabbed some followers on Facebook, it’s time to do the same thing on Twitter. Fortunately, grabbing those Twitter followers is just as easy as grabbing the Facebook followers. As I’ve said on numerous occasions, the key to making it big on the social networks is to be friendly and a real person who is really helpful.
Using the information we identified in step 3, we can see who the biggest influencers are who follow the competition’s Twitter feed. These people are also likely to be posting a whole bunch of questions on Twitter – questions which anyone can answer. So jump in and start being helpful. Be sure to come off sounding genuine though or you’ll blow it.
Another thing you may want to do is to selectively follow the same people that follow your competition. Even today, when you follow someone on Twitter, they’ll often follow you back, allowing you to build your Twitter base.
Finally, look into following some of the hashtags that your competition is using to attract their own followers. These things likely work because if they didn’t, the competition wouldn’t be using them. You can both post your own comments using those same hashtags and you can follow the trends with them in order to answer questions and gain followers organically.

8.     Get the Google+ People On Board

The first thing you need to do in order to grab some of the competition’s followers is to install a plugin for Chrome or Firefox (sorry, it’s not available for IE or Opera) called CircleCount. This plugin will allow you to immediately check out who the most influential G+ people are who shared a post on their own circles.
Go back to your competitor’s Google+ page and start using the same service to find out about the posts that they wrote which got shared. You can use it by clicking “see ripples for this post.”
You’ll instantly know whom you should be targeting with the same kind of personal service that we offered in Twitter and Facebook. The same kind of personal answering of questions and attention to your customer’s needs is the kind of thing that will get you noticed by them and get them to follow you here as well.

9.     Don’t Forget Pinterest

Pinterest is a bit different than the other social networks because it tends to be less about asking questions and more about sharing images. However that doesn’t mean that you can’t steal some of your competitor’s Pinterest followers as well. The first thing to do is to start following the feeds of people who follow your competitors. Just as with Twitter, it’s quite common for people to follow you back.
Now however, what you want to do is to create more of the same of the kinds of stuff that the competition uses for their own feeds. So for example, with Chewy.com, that would mean adding in many more animal memes with witty captions which the same people are likely to be interested in.

10.Sell Stuff to Your New Customers

Finally, while it’s all well and good to be grabbing some customers from the competition, it’s also important to actually do something with your newfound followers on the social networks. This means that you need to start selling them your own products. Do this casually and slowly rather than engaging in a hard sell.
Be sure to have a link to your own website where your products are sold available on your own Twitter/Facebook/G+/Pinterest pages so that people will know where to find you and consider as well occasionally offering a discount coupon to the people who are following you. This will allow you to gain some new customers who wouldn’t have otherwise considered you or likely even known about you since they first found you via the social networks.

Bonus – Other Ideas

Okay, so there you have the 10 steps to success in finding new customers for your business using the social networks. However, there are a few other ways to grab new customers including new followers on the social networks:
Network – The fact is that a guy who sells dog food in Portland, OR is unlikely to be the competition for you if your pet food store is located in Boston, MA. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t share valuable insights with each other. So network with owners of similar and ancillary businesses. Even those who are direct competition may well be willing to network with you because they sometime have too many customers to handle.

Do a JV

Consider a joint venture with your competition and especially with ancillary companies as well if you would like to ensure that you are getting the maximum number of new followers and as a consequence, customers. This works especially well when you work with people who are ancillary rather than direct competition for you.

Guest Blog

Finally, consider some guest blogging opportunities, including the opportunity to share some guest materials on the competition’s Facebook page. Often, they’ll welcome you with open arms and this can in turn lead to additional followers for your own social media campaign. Of course, you do need to ensure that your guest blog is actually a very high quality piece of writing which will attract more people to you as well…

The post 10 Steps to Steal the Competition’s Social Media Followers first appeared on Quantum SEO Labs.

Tell the World

Are you familiar with the new Discover Card commercials where they have people who play customer service agents on the Discover card line? They have conversations with an alter ego of themselves and the tagline is, “Discover – we treat you, like you’d treat you.” In other words, Discover card, which obviously is not as popular as Visa/MC or even American Express is showing off their customer service instead.
Of course, that’s just one way of showing off how good your customer service is. Many companies actually get ratings for their customer service from independent third party organizations which take polls to find out who the most respected companies in a given field are. So, take the time to share with the world how great your customer service is.

If your company offers personalized service, don’t be bashful about it – trade on that and tell people that’s why they should choose you. Of course, then it does mean that you need to follow through on that..

Use Video

Video has become incredibly popular today and there’s a good reason for that – we live in the age of the soundbite. People tend to think in short bursts of information rather than in longer form and as such, video is all the rage. In fact, YouTube is the second most popular search engine after parent Google’s own search engine.
Why not put the concept to good use and respond to customer queries by creating videos which they can use to see answers to the questions they have about your product? By offering this kind of a creative approach to answering customer questions, you are in effect pandering to what they want. Plus, it builds up a stable of videos which can then be shared on YouTube to further expose your company and make your customer service work for you.

Ditch the Form Letter

Don’t you just hate when you get some kind of a stale form letter from a company that you wrote to with a question? Wouldn’t it be nice to get something personal from them, even if it’s just one or two lines which tell you that they actually appreciated what you had to say? Well guess what? Your customers feel the same way that you do.
Take the time to write back to customers individually, even if it’s just to tell them thank you for writing to you and to point them to the FAQ where their answer is posted. Yes, it take a tad longer to actually respond as a real human being but it will make a world of difference in getting your customers to recommend you to their friends and family.

Don’t Be Too Proud to Answer Phones

We mostly deal with small businesses here at Quantum SEO Labs. However, even smaller businesses end up needing to hire support staff before long. However, if you really want to impress your customers and make them happy, don’t be too proud to answer the phone yourself instead of fobbing it off onto some poorly paid worker in a third world country. It will make a big difference, even if you only participate occasionally.

The post 4 Secrets of Great Customer Service first appeared on Quantum SEO Labs.

You are losing customers and SEO juice on a regular basis. This is true unless you’ve optimized your site so that it works as fast as it possibly can. I’ve written about this in the past but it’s worth revisiting this today because the technology has changed in the past few years. Not to mention that there is infinitely more competition now than even just two years ago so your site needs every advantage that it can get.
For those of you new to the world of SEO and Internet marketing, there are two excellent reasons that you need to make your website work as quickly as it possibly can. First and foremost, there’s a question of SEO. Google’s bots will not stay on your site if it loads slowly. They’ll simply move on and not bother indexing you. Or at best, they’ll come back later and flag your site as a slow loader.
In addition, you are likely to lose customers if your site doesn’t load quickly and efficiently. The fact is that with so much competition out there today, your customers have 20 different choices of where to get similar products or materials and if you keep them waiting, even for just an extra 5-10 seconds, they’re likely to look elsewhere.
So, here are eleven modern ways to ensure that your website loads quickly and gets you the maximum SEO and customer appreciation:

Flash

This is getting to be less and less of a problem as more and more websites have phased out their use of Flash and in fact, Adobe is no longer pushing it as HTML5 has started to take over the web. However, that having been said, if your site does use any Flash, be sure to use it sparingly as these things do tend to increase the load time for websites.

Here’s a great example of a flash site in overdrive. Check it out here.

As a side note, the old flash only websites of a few years back were always a bad idea because they got zero SEO juice since they were not capable of being read by the search spiders. In addition, there was the issue that cutesy animations quickly grew annoying for people to sit through. Fortunately, this is an all but dead phenomenon so it’s no longer the issue it once was.

Use a Good Back End

There was once a time when you would have wanted to use a custom built back end for your website (i.e. the system that actually delivers your content, also known as a CMS or Content Management System). These days however, it makes much more sense to just use something off the shelf (that is, unless you have a site like Amazon.com, in which case you likely do need to use a custom system).
The best and easiest choice for this is, in my humble opinion, WordPress. While you can certainly get an expert to help you run a site with WordPress, the nice thing about it is that the back end is simple enough for you to do the management of the whole website yourself. No need to hire anyone to take care of it unless you don’t have the time to do so.
In addition, WordPress has an endless array of plugins and add-ons which can be used to extend it for almost any kind of website imaginable. This makes it an ideal option for all of your content management needs regardless of what you are doing.
That said, if you do want other options, Drupal is also quite robust and is less blog oriented than WordPress is (though as I said, WordPress can be configured for lots of other kinds of systems).
The catch with both of these is to limit your use of plugins and add-ons though as that can easily make your site take longer to load. Speaking of which:

Limit the Plugins and Add-Ons

There are tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of different plugins available for WordPress and Drupal. They both have extremely robust ecosystems. That having been said, these things do add to the load time of your website and so they should be kept to a minimum as much as possible.
Mind you, that’s not to say that you have to choose to do without lots of cool features. Many WordPress themes for example include a great many add-on features built right into the theme, minimizing your need to use lots of extra plugins. The nice thing is that if the theme is well coded then it will not take nearly as long to load up your website as it otherwise would have.

Drupal similarly has plenty of great themes with built in features. Again, this is all a matter of how the theme is programmed. The best of them will include extra features while making your site load just as fast as it would have with fewer features.
That having been said, there’s nothing wrong with a handful of plugins and add-ons. For example, I cannot imagine effectively managing a blog without having a spam filter for the comments (I like Akismet personally but there are free options available as well).

Get a Good Web Host

I have bad news for everyone who has one of those so called unlimited service packages from the major web hosting companies. They’re not unlimited and they may actually hold back your business. The fact is that nobody could possibly offer a true unmetered web site. I mean if they could, you could literally create a site the size of Amazon.com then pay ten bucks a month to host the thing.
In reality, when your site starts to get too big or pull too much traffic, your host will shut it down and tell you to upgrade to either a virtual private server or a dedicated server. When you do that, you find out that you actually pay a set fee for storage and bandwidth. The difference of course is that these dedicated servers of VPS arrangements are designed for real businesses, not the average joe with dreams of making it big online.
So why does this matter to you though? What if you’re just starting out and you don’t yet need to have a ton of bandwidth or storage for your website? Maybe you can get away with one of those shared “unlimited” packages. Well, yes and no. To understand why this may be an issue, you need to understand how these things work.
In order to offer you an “unlimited” package, web hosts will cram as many websites as they are able to cram into a single server (ultimately, every website simply exists on a physical hard drive inside of a computer somewhere on the planet). This means that there may be hundreds or even thousands of sites on the same server that your site is on.
Most of the time, this doesn’t matter because most sites get very little traffic. However, the more sites there are on that single computer, the slower it’s going to be about serving up your website to your customers. Effectively this means that those unlimited deals are not so great after all because they could cost you money in the form of lost customers and or SEO.
Instead, look for a web host which guarantees that they put a specific limit on the number of sites that a given server actually has on it. This will help you to ensure that your website loads smoothly, even from the proverbial shared server. Hint: this means looking at some of the smaller guys, who specialize in providing boutique service to clients who understand the difference between a junky server and a real web server.

Don’t Have Too Many Sites Making DNS Lookups

If you’ve ever seen some websites which have lots and lots of advertising (a prime example of this is the Jerusalem Post from Israel – the site is ridiculously saturated with ads), you’ll notice that the site is endlessly loading up. That’s in part because the sites are dependent on lots of other websites to pull content from. However, it’s also because of numerous DNS lookups.

DNS (Domain Name Server) is the system used to translate pretty web addresses (i.e. quantumseolabs.com) into the IP addresses that the Internet actually uses when it is looking up a website. The problem is that every time a website needs to find a new IP number, it needs to take the time to go and look it up. This slows down the whole system and makes your load time take that much longer.
Of course, it’s not just about advertising. Embedded videos from YouTube and third party image hosts can also slow down your site even if you don’t have a ton of ads (which by the way is a huge turn off to most visitors to your site). So try your best to keep the extras to a minimum while still keeping your site going strong.

Get a Great PHP Accelator

The fact is that this is kind of an obscure thing but important. Most web hosts include a PHP accelerator with their websites as a matter of course. However, there are some that don’t and that’s important to know about. Since most popular websites make use of the PHO programming language, you want to ensure that you have an accelerator to make things run as quickly as possible.
By the way, in case you weren’t aware, WordPress and Drupal are both written using PHP and as such it’s important to have this kind of feature built into any website you have built using those platforms. The best way to make sure is to check with your web host and or the webmaster of your site to make sure that this is in place.

If your site uses a different system (Java for example), you can safely ignore this since there is no such thing as a Java accelerator.

Watch Out for Broken Links

You may think that broken links are merely an annoyance as opposed to something that can slow down your website’s loading time. However, that’s not the case. Every time the browser (or the web spider) loads a page, it also does something called an HTTP request to find out about any links on the page. This can slow things down tremendously if there are too  many links regardless.
However, even when there aren’t that many links, the broken links are simply a waste of time which you can ill afford if you are determined to keep your customers happy and to please the Google gods. In addition, broken links indicate to the Google spider that your site is not being maintained and tell your customers that you are unprofessional.
It’s easy enough to use a broken link checker on your site and to go in and manually fix any problems that arise from this so be sure to do so from time to time.

Cut the Size of Your Images

If you ever visit a site like PhotoExpress to get images for your website (many of the images there are free but you need to find them using a different service such as EveryStockPhoto), you’ll find that the images that you download tend to be massive. That’s because they need to be able to accommodate any kind of usage, including being used for high quality magazines and brochures.
However, the fact remains that you don’t need such a massive image on your website. In fact, very often, when you do load such a big image, the site’s backend (i.e. WordPress or Drupal) will lower the total size of the image that’s displayed. However, what it won’t do is lower the overall resolution. In essence, it just puts up a really high quality version of the picture which can be clicked for a full size render.
The problem of course is that those huge images tend to take forever to load up and can make your website seem to drag on forever in its load time. I personally like to use Snagit Editor to quickly load an image and resize it before I put it on the web. However, you can use virtually any photo editing product, even Windows Paint to do something similar so that you don’t waste valuable bandwidth needlessly loading a massive image.

Use a CDN

I’ve mentioned this in the past and it’s still very worthwhile to mention it again. There are a number of Content Delivery Networks available for your website. In some cases, they may even be included for free with your web hosting package. In all cases, you want to ensure that you use one because they will improve the load time of your site dramatically.
The way these services work is that they keep a copy of your website cached on local servers throughout the world. This allows your customers to get the content faster than if it had to bounce all over the Internet from the one server that your site is originally located on. After all, distance does still make a difference.

The one I like to use is CloudFlare. It’s included for free with my web hosting service. However, there are any number of other similar services which can do the job for you as well as they can.

Have a Mobile Ready Version of Your Site

This probably won’t have any effect on your SEO however, if you don’t have a mobile ready version of your website, you may lose some customers. The reason is simple – while most modern mobile browsers are perfectly capable of loading the full version of a website, regardless of what the size is, it will not be optimized for reading on the small screen and it will load that much slower over a slow cellular network.
Thus it’s worth your while to ensure that the theme you use has a mobile option built into it or alternatively that you use a plugin which includes a mobile ready version. One word of caution though: if you use a mobile ready WordPress theme, check whether or not it includes your advertising. Often, they will simply strip away any advertising and that’s not good if you rely on advertising for revenue. The ideal mobile option will include an option to get mobile ready ads inserted into the site.

Don’t Overdo It with Sharing

Finally, while it’s very important to include social media buttons, it’s also possible to get too carried away and cause your site to slow down as a result. The fact is that there are now tens of thousands of different social media networks out there but there are no more than a handful of them which you seriously need to have sharing buttons for.

If in doubt, just go with the big four – Facebook, Twitter, Google + and LinkedIn. There are of course others worth noting such as Delicious and Stumble Upon but again, the more of these icons you add in, the slower your website will ultimately load, costing you both customers and SEO juice.

The post 11 Ways to Speed up Your Website first appeared on Quantum SEO Labs.

I’ve been writing for this blog for around 3-4 years now. Through a move, several relationships, three hospitalizations and more, I’ve stuck around, writing the material here at Quantum SEO Labs for you, our loyal customers and readers week after week, month after month, year after year. And you know what? It’s hard work. Very hard work.

However, it is also rewarding when I see the comments from many of our readers on what they’ve learned from using the information I share here. So today, I thought I’d share something just a little bit different. Instead of telling you about some new SEO technique or some new sales technique, I thought I’d tell you a bit about what I do best – blogging.

In essence, there are certain rules I’ve picked up along the way in doing this thing on a regular basis which will help you to improve your blogging practices at your own company (and by the way, if you happen to need professional blogging services for your company, drop me a line. I’m available to take on one or two new projects right now).

So, here are seven mistakes many people make when blogging for their businesses. How many of these are you guilty of?

Being Impersonal

Why is it I wonder that so many corporate bloggers think that they’re not allowed to express their own personalities when they write for the company blog? I mean seriously – are you an automaton who can’t have his or her own style of writing? While guidelines are certainly fine, a good corporate blog can and should take on the personality of the people who write for it.

You can even have several different people writing for the corporate blog and all of them can have their own personalities when they write for the blog. People will keep coming back looking for their favorite columnist on your company’s blog and possibly also checking out what other people have said since they like this one person who is on your staff.

Mind you, it is possible to create content which conforms to an impersonal corporate identity. In fact, if you hire the average person calling themselves a “writer” for hire, that’s exactly what you’ll get.

Prior to becoming a professional freelance writer, I was a teacher of English Language Arts. I put my kids through their paces writing all kinds of different kinds of content and as a result, I realized that something one of my teachers said to me when I was in high school is very true – good writing has a distinctive flavor to it. Poor quality writing is bland and seems like everyone else’s writing.

Good writing is actually recognizable without ever needing to see who wrote it. Check the writing from your favorite newspaper columnist some time and you can see that they have a distinctive style which you’d recognize even if you didn’t see their name on the byline (i.e. if they’d written that day’s editorial). So get personal and just make sure that you stay on message. Ultimately, your customers will thank you for it.

Being a Used Car Salesman

Nothing against used car salespeople mind you. Everyone’s got to make a living and they happen to be quite good at what they do. However, such people do have a particular reputation which is often well deserved. They’re always in selling mode, trying to show you the positives of something they have on offer and explain away anything that doesn’t seem too exciting.

Too often, when people write for a corporate blog, they assume that it’s supposed to be about selling the products that the company has for sale. They are both right and wrong when they make this assumption. You are right that a corporate blog exists in order to increase sales. It’s not meant to be an altruistic enterprise. However, you are wrong that you need to engage in a hard sales pitch in order to make a successful corporate blog.

The best corporate blogs talk about new features in the products that the company has to offer and  offer useful tips to the people visiting them.

For example by and large, I avoid heavy sales pitches for our products here at Quantum SEO Labs. This isn’t because Yasir doesn’t want to sell you his SEO services; far from it.

However, we believe that if we are going to provide customers with a feeling that we can provide value, we need to do so by providing you with quality content which demonstrates our knowledge of SEO and online marketing rather than by simply telling you how great we are at doing it.

So think about what your customers would actually want to know when they visit your website and then offer them content which is actually worth something rather than content which simply makes a hard sales pitch to them, ala a used car salesman.

Making Boring Headlines

I’ve been working in the world of SEO for a very long time now and I’ve seen pretty much every theory there is about headlines. There are those who don’t care at all about the headlines and those who insist that the headline needs to be descriptive and provide your keyword for the search engine spiders to pick up on.

The truth lays somewhere in the middle though. First of all, as I’ve written in this space in the past, your headlines matter a very, very great deal. They are the first things that your customers will see when they approach your blog and they need to grab the attention of your customers in order to keep them interested in what you have to say.

All of that having been said of course, SEO is a concern and should be a concern for anyone who is engaged in business blogging. Thus you need to ensure that while you have seductive headlines, you also include something which will be picked up by the search engines.

A classic example of this problem is something suggested to me years ago as a good title for an article about anger: All the Rage. It’s catchy and it grabs attention. However, it’s also a problem because there’s no keyword there. A better title which is still seductive might be “I’m So Angry I Could Scream!”

This is a classic example of a great headline.

Mind you, thanks to Google’s new system, you don’t need to have an exact match keyword anymore (and frankly I’m not sure that you ever did have to) so don’t worry about matching for example “Hotels in New York” when writing about that subject. It’s enough to include something like accommodations or the like and Google will still register it.

On the flip side of things, we also need to make a headline seductive enough to grab people’s attention and get them to want to actually read what the article is about. Take a look at the headline I created above and indeed most of the headlines here at Quantum SEO Labs blog and you’ll see what I mean. I try to be creative about making it sound interesting while at the same time still being descriptive and using at least some keywords.

Failing to Grab Attention Right Away

Typically, you have around 1-2 seconds to grab people’s attention and get them to open up an article on your blog. That’s why the opening headline needs to be so seductive. It should speak to the person’s problems and at the same time pique their interest. However, once you’ve gotten your reader to look, there’s another problem: keep them going.

The fact is that you typically have around 5-10 seconds to grab a persons’ attention and get them to keep reading beyond the first paragraph of your content. Thus having an opening paragraph which is actually interesting and which grabs attention is almost as important as having an opening headline which grabs attention and which makes people stand up and take notice of the article you are pushing.

The best way to grab people’s attention with your opening headline is by making them empathize with you. Point out somehow that you understand their own pain and that you share a similar set of problems which they can relate to. This will inevitably lead them to want to know more. Of course, if you are a good writer (see above) then you are likely to be doing this anyway. If you’re not, you may want to hire someone else to write your blog for you.

Failure to Be Consistent

I admit it – I’m terrible at consistency. I often forget to post or I get busy with other things in life and don’t get around to doing what needs to be done on schedule. However, when it comes to business blogging, being consistent with your posts is essential. If you don’t consistently provide fresh content, not only will you be punished by the Google gods but you will also find that your regulars start to disappear.

The best way to handle this is to simply ensure that you create a batch of content to post at regular intervals when you have time to do it. I realize that’s not perfect advice and life does get in the way of things (I’m right now dealing with a nightmare of a contractor who ripped me off for around $7,000, completely destroyed what he was paid to build and then disappeared so I know life gets in the way at times).

If you find that you couldn’t be consistent however, just go back to your regular schedule and don’t start off offering long apologies for why you didn’t post in a while. At most, a sentence or two is all that you need to include and often, buried somewhere in the middle, not necessarily right at the beginning of the article.

Failing to Maintain an E-mail List

Visitors to your business blog are a precious commodity. Why one earth would you not want to get every benefit you can get from the people dropping by? This is really simple too – buy yourself a mailing list subscription from one of the very many services that offer it (I did a review a while back which is still useful for this) and then offer up some kind of reward for people who sign up.

For example, here at Quantum SEO Labs, we offer a book packed with useful information which can help you to do a more effective job on SEO.  It’s not a book filled with lots of fluff and junk. I know because I helped to write the book and it really is valuable.

Of course, if you don’t want to write a book of your own or you simply don’t have the skill to do it, you do have other options. One option of course is again, to hire a professional to do the job for you.

Another option is to purchase some PLR content. You can either buy a read made book and then create a custom cover and title for it or simply create a book by editing together different articles which can be useful for your  customers.

The only thing to be aware of when doing this is that you need to ensure that you are not giving away junk. Give away a book which has real value and real quality (the kind that you yourself would want) and you will find that people are more willing to sign up for your list.

Not bothering to Inspire

Finally, if you really want to keep your customers coming back to your blog for more content all the time then you need to give them some kind of a reason to do so. Give your customers hope that they’ll get some real benefit from what they’re seeing in your blog and they’ll want to keep coming back for more every time that you post.

In other words, don’t just end but end on a positive note and give your customers the feeling that they are special and that they can succeed, just as I know that you, dear reader are indeed special and can succeed in building a better business blog.  

The post The Seven Deadly Sins of Business Blogging first appeared on Quantum SEO Labs.

EDU and GOV Links

I know it may seem pretty impossible to land these kinds of links and that’s why they’re in such high demand from SEO companies. They do in fact still carry a lot more link juice than ordinary links from other websites do. However, in spite of what you may think, it’s really not that difficult to land such links.
Consider for example government blogs, many of which allow you to comment and leave behind a link back to your website. Of course, you do need to write intelligent comments rather than the usual spam junk so the completely automated solutions probably won’t work. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t get quality .GOV links.
.EDU links can often be had by visiting wiki pages on education sites, including those of elementary, junior high and high schools. You will again need to post something intelligent and useful if you want your link to stick but it’s not difficult or impossible to build these links. It just takes a real commitment to do the work instead of hitting a button and expecting junk links to get you everything you want.

Contests

Contests are still good sources of natural links. Not only do you have a legitimate reason to post links everywhere to your contest but you also have the added benefit of being able to use your contest to attract plenty of natural links. Contests are after all a classic form of link bait.

The key is to get the initial advertising right and to ensure that you give your customers a real reason to share a link (i.e. they get an extra entry into the contest every time a friend signs up for the contest. Some places even offer freebies to those who sign up a certain number of friends to the contest in addition to the additional entry).

Create a Scholarship

This doesn’t have to be a terribly expensive proposition. Your scholarship could be just a few hundred dollars. However, even a scholarship of a few hundred dollars can potentially attract hundreds or even thousands of quality links off of education websites where people go to search for money to pay for college.
Of course, the bigger your scholarship, the more natural links you’ll get f or it but also remember that you need to administer the scholarship so either make it into a random contest or be prepared to read lots of long essays about some kid’s aspirations for the future and why they are so deserving of the scholarship that you have on offer.

Student Information and Moving Sites

Speaking of college students, another great source of quality links (if it fits somehow within your niche) is to include a useful article on a site devoted to helping college students and those moving to a new home with their moves. In a great many cases, your business can fit this niche by the way (I mean after all, your local college student may well need a dentist, an insurance agent, a plumber, etc).
Be creative about this and again, offer some quality content which will remain sticky year after year and you’ll find plenty of great natural links coming in. You should also consider looking for sections of university websites which cater specifically to various minorities.
For example, if you offer handicapped access to your bricks and mortar business, make sure to target sites which provide that information. If you want to be gay friendly, that’s another great source of quality links. The boundaries are really just the limits of your imagination as there are such a wide variety of different kinds of minorities that your business could potentially cater to.

Job Boards

Even if all you need is someone on a very part time basis, job boards can be a great source of potential links because people are always searching them and you often need not pay anything to post a link there (job seekers often pay for  access). Look especially for university job boards as these provide the added benefit of providing you with an EDU link as well as a job board link.

Non Profit Organizations

Do you give money to the local church or maybe to the Girl Scouts? If you don’t, you should consider doing so. Not only can you get a tax write off for whatever it is that you contribute to these organizations but they will often put you down on their websites as someone who sponsors their activities.
These kinds of links represent not only an excellent opportunity to get some good link juice out of the kind folks at Google but also a great PR option, to make your company look like the kind of place where people care about the community. Over all, these kinds of links can be a win-win for your company and should definitely be considered.

Sponsor Something

Yeah I know – Google doesn’t like when you outright buy links on websites and those who get caught doing it risk being delisted or at best being sent to the bottom of the rankings, never to be heard from ever again. However, what I’m talking about here is not sponsoring links in the sense of outright paying for them. Instead, you sponsor various events.
Here’s a good example: Visit your local university and get a list of all the clubs that exist on campus. Find clubs which have even a peripheral relationship to your company and then look into sponsoring an event for them. They’ll put a link onto their website acknowledging your company as the one who sponsored them and you can even take a tax deduction for your trouble.
Of course, it doesn’t stop there. Your local city hall likely has hundreds of events happening throughout the year and they’re always going to be looking for corporate sponsors willing to help foot the bill for whatever it is that they’re doing for the citizens of the city. Added bonus – you get your name onto the advertising for the event and potentially increase your exposure in the community.

Conferences are another excellent opportunity to grab some sponsorship links because they can be related directly to whatever it is that your company does. You don’t even need to be a major sponsor in order to rank on the website of the conference. Often, simply having an exhibit booth at the conference is all that’s needed.

Podcasts and Videos

Finally, podcasts and videos remain a very popular method for drawing plenty of good quality links, even in 2014. These kinds of content are always going to be popular and have the added benefit of allowing you to showcase your knowledge of your specific industry. You don’t even need to create your own though – often, it’s simply a matter of finding someone else creating such content and offering to pay them in exchange for calling you their sponsor.

The post 11 Link Building Tactics for 2014 first appeared on Quantum SEO Labs.