SEO.com » Blog

Make Your Website Look Official With Its Own Custom Favicon

Shay Wright — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 12:25:42 +0000

Make Your Website Look Official With Its Own Custom Favicon is a post by SEO expert Shay Wright. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

A favicon is the little custom icon that appears in the browser tab just to the left of the page’s title. It is most often just the logo for a website shrunk down to 16 X 16 pixels. Below is an example of a site that has a favicon and one that does not.

When someone bookmarks your site, your favicon will appear with the page title in their list of bookmarks. This is an effective way to stand out and give your website a nice, professional image.

If your website doesn’t have a favicon yet, this simple guide will help you create one and explain how to display it when visitors come to your site. Even if you’re not real tech savvy, creating your own custom favicon is actually much easier than you might think.

Step 1: Create Your Image
If you already have a logo or an image that represents your site, simply open that file with an image editor like Adobe Photoshop or Fireworks. If you don’t already have such an editor on your computer, there are other options available, like pixlr.com, a great online alternative that is free to use.

If there is a lot of extra white space around your logo, be sure to crop it out. If your logo is a little more complex and does not display well as a 16 X 16 image, you may need to simplify it, or even use a different image altogether. However, if you go that route for your favicon, you should still try to incorporate the same primary colors of your website into the new image. While it is acceptable to use a different image, it is recommended that you use your logo if at all possible to help with the company’s branding efforts.

Once you reduce the image size to 16 X 16 pixels, save your file as a .jpg, .png, .gif, .bmp, or .tif.

Step 2: Convert Your Image
You now need to convert your image to a .ico file. There are several online tools that you can use to accomplish this. A good, free icon generator is available at prodraw.net. Simply upload your image, select the icon size, and voila. You can download your brand new .ico file.

Step 3: Upload Your Image
Now that you have your favicon.ico file, you can upload it to the root directory of your site. Do not place it in any folders. The image should be visible when you go to www.yourdomain/favicon.ico after uploading it (of course replacing “yourdomain” with your actual domain name). Do not place the favicon in an image folder such as: www.yourdomain/images/favicon.ico.

Step 4: Add Basic Code
Most modern browsers can detect that your favicon is present in your root directory and display it in the browser tab. While you don’t need to add any code to your pages, you will still want to add include simple code in the section of your HTML to ensure that all browsers display your favicon properly. Below is the code you’ll need to add.

Keep in mind that there will be other elements in the section of your webpage, such as the title tag and meta description, as well as references to any CSS files you have. The above code can be added anywhere between the beginning and ending .

Note: The “vnd.microsoft.icon” MIME type has replaced the older “image/x-icon” type as the official, standardized favicon MIME type for .ico files on the web.

Favicons For Apple Devices

You can also create favicons for Apple iOS devices. You’ll simply need to create 4 different sizes of your icon, and save them as .png files. The default size is 57 X 57 pixels. Apple also recommends that you use 90 degree corners instead of rounded corners when creating these images. After these image files have been created, you’ll just need to add this code within the tag of your HTML.

If a static favicon isn’t quite cool enough for you, here is a great guide on creating animated favicons http://www.wikihow.com/Make-an-Animated-Favicons.

There are several other great online tools as well as different ways to create a custom favicon, and if you have a better method or favorite tool, please share your ideas in the comments below.

Make Your Website Look Official With Its Own Custom Favicon is a post by SEO expert Shay Wright. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

SEO.com Content Collective, June 17

Andy Eliason — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 13:16:34 +0000

SEO.com Content Collective, June 17 is a post by SEO expert Andy Eliason. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

The new SEO.com Content Collective is our way of hacking through the briar patch of useless, irrelevant, and downright questionable information that sprouts up non-stop on the internet and bringing out some of the gems that have real value. It’s a tough job because no matter how many weeds you pull, they just keep coming back. We’ve got a pretty good (metaphorical) machete and a good eye for value, though, which is why we are presenting this new, weekly feature.

For the inaugural post, we’ve asked our directors at SEO.com to share what they’re reading this week.

Tyson Hymas recommends:

Disavowed: Secrets of Google’s Most Mysterious Tool

Think Google’s Disavow Tool is the breath of fresh air you’ve been waiting for? Been hit by some Google penalties and are looking for a magic cure all? That’s what Google gave you this tool for, right? Then why isn’t anything happening?

There’s a lot of conflicting evidence out there regarding this tool and how – or if – it really works. In this article you’ll find 7 great tips for Google reconsideration requests. There’s also a summary of an experiment that suggests some interesting things about when and why Google will process your Disavow.

Brian Jensen recommends:

Keywords Still Matter

Keywords? Who needs keywords? That’s so “pre-content-marketing-era.”

Or not.

The fact is we all still need keywords. Not to cram them into our content in a passive aggressive hope that simple occurrence of these particular words in this particular order will somehow impress the almighty Google… but because we need to know how people search for something and what will resonate with the readers.

Keywords aren’t about creating a formula for success – it’s about understanding the intent and purpose of your readers. It’s about finding a direction for your efforts. This article details a lot of reasons why keywords should be an intrinsic part of your campaign, but suggests that you need to think of them in a new way.

Albert Mitchell recommends:

Dozens Of Top E-Commerce Retailers Find It Pays To Put Customers’ Instagram Photos On Their Sites

Everyone gets excited about an engagement… er, about more engagement with customers. Chances are your customers already have all the tools they need to participate in your next marketing campaign, and they’re willing to go down that aisle if you just open the doors.

Instagram galleries on an ecommerce site are proving to be an effective way to build interest, expand reach, and improve conversion rates. There are tools out there to help you track the engagement and see how well endeavors like this are really working.

TJ Welsh recommends:

Mystery Solved: Why Mobile Safari Searchers Appear To Come “Direct” To Sites Rather Than Via Google

There have been some “goings on” with people using Safari in iOS 6 and searching on Google. It seems that they have been appearing to publishers as if they went directly to their sites instead of being referred there through the search engine. Why is mobile Safari so insistent on acting out when other browsers pass on the necessary information? Check this article out to get some insight.

SEO.com Content Collective, June 17 is a post by SEO expert Andy Eliason. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

How A Site Doubled It’s Repins By Using The Perfect Pin Formula

SEO.com — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 14:48:15 +0000

How A Site Doubled It’s Repins By Using The Perfect Pin Formula is a post by SEO expert SEO.com. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

You put a lot of time and effort into creating good content. It’s hard work. All you want is for your good content to be shared and for it to drive targeted traffic to your site. It’s feels good when your content gets pinned and repinned on Pinterest and shared on the other social networks. What if you could double the number of pins of your content by following a simple formula? Here’s a case study of one company (that we helped) to get way more pins than they normally would have otherwise by following The Perfect Pin Formula. What’s The Perfect Pin Formula?

Last week we posted about The Perfect Pin Formula and how to create images that get pinned thousands of times. It’s a great post. You should go read it right now if you haven’t already. VD + PCC + M = The Perfect Pin Here’s a brief explanation: VD = Visual Dominance: This is all about making your image stand out in the pin feed on Pinterest. Think contrast. Whether by size (height, in this case), color, use of white space, etc. VD is what gets your pin/image noticed among all the other pins. PCC = Purple Cow Content: This part of the of the equation refers to content that is worth pinning and sharing. Your content must be remarkable enough to get pinners to want to pin it. PCC is what gets your pin/image pinned and repinned. M = Mystery: The perfect pin drives traffic back to your site. If you have all of the content in the image itself there will be no reason to click through to your site. The BIGGEST mistake made on Pinterest is giving away TOO much information on your pin/image. M is what gets people to click through to your site. Now let’s see how this formula was tested and used to double the number of repins per pin.

Here’s How We Used The Perfect Pin Formula For This Campaign

Diabetic Connect hired us to help them with a Pinterest campaign. They had a slideshow that they wanted to promote and push on Pinterest. It was a slideshow with 60 low-carb recipes for those with diabetes. We ran a little test with the page at first by using smaller images. These images definitely had PCC and M going for them. They were lacking some in the VD area. Here are the small images we used at first:

Image 1

Image 2

Image 3

Sidenote: When running campaigns we always pin to relevant community boards. We find these community boards by using a tool we created called Board Deck. We pinned these smaller images to several community boards and got decent numbers of repins and were pretty happy. Repin counts depend on the board you’re pinning to, the time of day you are pinning, and the day of the week. With these smaller images we averaged 23 repins per pin. The range of repins was as low as 6 up to as high as 80. But we wanted to see if we could do better. So we created a new image that was a lot taller by adding more pictures of recipes within the image and used some bolder colors in the header to make the image stand out more. This was all an attempt to create visual dominance. Here’s the long/tall image that was used:

Now the image had VD, PCC, and M. With this taller image, the average repins per pin was 48, more than double the average of the smaller images. The range was from 8 to 171! The results from this simple test were staggering. The total pin count with the small images was 4,910 in a week and a half. The total pin count with the long image in a week and a half was 19,560. This shows, that by using VD and PCC in the image we were able to get more pins. There was definitely M with all of these images because you had to click through to the site to see the recipes. How much traffic did it drive? 13,352 visits to the site 264,571 page views If you’d like to read a full case study on this campaign, click here. So, there you have it. The Perfect Pin Formula in action. Now go and implement it in your own images.

This blog post was written by Seth Norwood at Dillymarketing.com.

How A Site Doubled It’s Repins By Using The Perfect Pin Formula is a post by SEO expert SEO.com. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Increase Conversions Through Highly Optimized Landing Pages – Part 1

Shay Wright — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 15:05:00 +0000

Increase Conversions Through Highly Optimized Landing Pages – Part 1 is a post by SEO expert Shay Wright. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Suppose for a minute that you are the proud owner of the most beautiful, awe-inspiring website on the Internet. You win countless best-in-design awards and your inbox is constantly flooded with compliments on your beautiful site. Suppose that this beautiful website of yours also attracts thousands of visitors a day and you rank as one of the most visited sites for your particular industry. Life is good, and you’re on your way to fame and fortune, right? Wrong. Not so fast.

The most beautifully designed website in the world doesn’t necessarily lead to conversions. Sure, a nice appealing design helps a lot towards conversion, but there are actually several key factors that determine just how effective your site, or more specifically, your individual landing pages will be when it comes to converting visitors into customers. Although these key elements aren’t necessarily a secret, most landing pages miss the target and thus miss out on a lot of potential business. Be smarter than your competition. Implement these key elements on your landing pages and watch your conversions soar.

Trust Elements

If you really want your landing pages to convert, you need to gain your visitors’ trust in a matter of seconds. There are a number of ways to do this, but the quickest way to get it done is through prominent visual displays such as the following.

Better Business Bureau logo
Number of registrants
Number of downloads
Testimonials
Anti-spam promise
Security badges
Press mentions
List of current customers

Online users tend to put a lot more trust in things that other people have already given a stamp of approval. So, if you can display a good list of current clients or a large number of current downloads, you’ve already won half the battle in gaining their trust. If you don’t have a lot of trust elements in the beginning, reach out to your sphere of influence and milk them for anything they can provide.

Below are some trust elements that Zappos displays on their site to help build trust and higher conversions.

Call To Action

When someone arrives on your landing page, what do you want them to do? What action do you want them to take next? What is your goal? A good landing page should always include a strong call to action to show visitors what they can do on the site and encourage them to do it. Then you will start to reach more of your own goals.

An example of a good call to action might be: “Get started on Pinterest today by downloading our great 10 Step Guide For Pinterest Marketing!” Calls to action can also be as simple as “try it for free,” “watch our video,” or “download a free trial.”

The call to action needs to stand out on the page. Use a bold color not used elsewhere on the page to draw attention to it. Make it a button or enclose it in a nice colored box that immediately catches the user’s attention. In most cases, you should only have one strong call to action on a landing page. Below is a good example.

A Reward

You can’t expect visitors to follow the call to action and offer up personal information such as their name and email address unless there is something in it for them. People like to be rewarded for their effort, and there are a number of things you can offer in exchange for someone taking a certain action. Below are just a few examples.

Free ebook
Free ecourse
Free webinar
Monthly newsletter
Discounts & coupons
Free trial
Free version with fewer features
Whitepaper
Free initial consultation

Try to offer a reward that will actually help move your visitor closer to converting. For example, offering a free initial consultation will give you the opportunity to establish a personal relationship with your visitor and greatly improve your chances of actually converting him or her into an actual client.

Minimal Fields

A common mistake many websites make is requiring too much information in their lead capture forms. Oftentimes, simply requesting their name and email address (or even just their email address) is sufficient information. Additional information may be needed sometimes, but always try to limit it to only what is really necessary. You don’t want to miss out on good potentials simply because your lead capture form is too long.

A Matching Headline

The headline that appears on your landing page should match the great pitch you used to entice someone to click on your ad to begin with. If you advertise a free Pinterest ebook in your ad but then take the user to a page with a headline about your expert SEO services, it can be confusing and will lead to low conversions. When users click on an ad, they expect to find a headline that matches the topic of the advertisement. Make the relevant headline really stand out on the page to reassure the user that they found the page they wanted.

While the wording in an ad usually needs to be creative and catchy to get people to click on it, the headline doesn’t need the same creativity. You should make your headlines very simple and to the point.

These are some key elements to include on your landing pages to maximize your conversions and help achieve your goals for each page. Stay tuned for Part 2 of “Increase Conversions Through Highly Optimized Landing Pages.”

What Fishing Taught Me About Online Marketing

James Tolboe — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 13:40:05 +0000

What Fishing Taught Me About Online Marketing is a post by SEO expert James Tolboe. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

There I was standing just off the bank of a beautiful little mountain stream tucked away in the bottom of a small quiet canyon. The water was gurgling happily underneath me as I drew back my rod ready to make my perfect cast that was going to land me that little brown trout I could see rising behind the moss covered rock just a few feet away. The sun was shimmering off my line as I drew it back carefully. Focusing as hard as I could, I started my cast it forward when…..nothing. Yep, caught the tree behind me….yes again, get off my back.

Whoever coined the term “Harder than it looks” must have been a fly fisherman.

About that same time it hit me, to be successful on the river or in the internet marketing world not only is it harder than it looks but it also takes the same time, preparation, tools and presentation to gain the traffic or fish we so dearly covet.

The Perfect Fly

There are lots of little things you need to be successful on the river your rod, reel, line etc. Even if you have all that without the right fly the slimy little devils are just going to turn up their ugly noses and laugh as it drifts by. You have to be precise and I really mean precise to make it look so much like that hot fudge sundae they won’t have a choice but to gobble it up. It better be the right pattern, color and size or just like me you get nothing. Isn’t this also true of the content we produce?

We have all written articles that just look like they are God’s personal gift to the net. Amazing, helpful and well articulated material we cast it out there and then….nothing. So what is the next step? Always start by reassessing your target market and what needs they may have, then ask yourself is this something directly relevant to what they would be looking for? As marketers I have found that sometimes we tell our customers what they need, instead of listening and letting them tell us what they really want. No matter how amazing we think an article, video or whatever we are creating is, it simply will not catch on if it is not what our market desires. We need to take the time to do our homework through persona research, competitive analysis and detailed surveys to find the voice, concerns and questions of our market and make sure what we are producing fits their needs and not our egos.

Picture Perfect Presentation

Talk to any accomplished fly fisherman and they will tell you how you present your fly will make all the difference in the world. Without pin point accuracy we have very little chance of getting that fish to slide over and take a look at our bug. Even though we have done our home work and nailed the fly pattern choice down to the last feather. If we are casting it over and over again in nothing but a sloppy heap….nothing. Trust me on this one I have extensive experience.

A good idea would be to take that content and use the latest and greatest hot term and repurpose it! It may not perform the way you would like it to as a traditional guest post but it might be perfectly suited to something like a micropost, a step by step Slideshare or maybe even taking the extra time to put it into video form. By simply changing the outlet you use means that we can totally change the presentation and the perception of the content we have. Now, you have the perfect fly the presentation is flawless but…

Find the Big Fish

No matter what the presentation and what fly (content) we use, if we are not putting it in front of the right eyes we won’t get the results we are working so hard to obtain. Most of us will tell you this might be the most crucial part of the process; to catch the biggest baddest trout in the stream we have to find the perfect place to throw our big juicy fly. But just like in fishing, the trick is knowing exactly what to look for! When fishing we look for places on the river that are more likely to hold fish. This can also be applied online to help tell us where our customer base is spending their time on the web. Here are some things we can look for when we are looking for the right places to post.

Figuring out the domain authority of a website is always a good way to determine the quality of a site. Try a site like Majecticseo.com or Opensiteexplorer.com, run the site your thinking of posting on and they will both give you the pages domain authority out of one hundred. Remember the higher the number the better. Next look for social engagement for example Facebook likes, tweets and my favorite blog comments. These will really help us get a feel of how many eyes are actually on the page, and the comments can also help determine if those people will want to share it through their own personal social networks for even more engagement. Lastly, fresh content will give us an idea how often the page is updated and maintained. If we can find a site with these 3 things and there is a great chance to increase our rankings, traffic, conversions, and more importantly fish!

Timing

Last but not least is our timing. On the river each time of the season dictates what type of fly you use, whether it is a giant hopper in the heat of summer or the smallest of nymphs in early spring. But what does that teach us? Just like on the river timing can be everything. We need to make sure that our content is on topic from what’s going on around us and in the industry. No one wants to read an article or watch a video about something that happened three months ago, I mean how awesome in Gangnam Style right now? Be sure to react quickly and offer a new viewpoint which will attract more readers.

There it is my friends whether its fishing or marketing the same game is being played. It’s up to us to perfect our process and put in the time to catch fish or traffic. Someone tell Google to name their next update Brown Trout so at least maybe then I can tell someone I know how to catch one!

What Fishing Taught Me About Online Marketing is a post by SEO expert James Tolboe. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Search Tools Provided By Google

Jonathan Goudy — Thu, 30 May 2013 13:30:06 +0000

Search Tools Provided By Google is a post by SEO expert Jonathan Goudy. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

The most widely used search engine in the world has search tools that are not well known, and hardly ever used. These search tools can benefit the everyday searcher or the everyday website owner in helping them figure out how Google really sees their site.

Go to Google.com and type anything in the search bar. You’ll see below the search bar, a navigation tab that says “Search Tools.”

Once you click on the search tools tab, 3 new drop downs appear below the navigation tabs.

One tab will show your current location, while the second and third will give you filtering and sorting options by date and content type. Using these advanced search queries, filtering, and sorting selections, will narrow your search down to the perfect result.

Location

Location is by far one of the most important tools to use when you’re a website owner, or a search engine marketer. Location is important because Google has given more weight in past algorithm updates to websites that are near the searchers IP address. Website owners might discover in their analytics, keywords that they know they’re not ranking for. Often this is caused by a website ranking in a few cities that might be by their headquarters or other addresses listed on the site.

When ranking for keywords in only certain locations, it’s vital to check where your domain is registered or where the business locations are on the contact page. By adding cities or pages that go over the locations you serve, there’s a very good chance that you will see organic traffic increase for that keyword.

By not using this tool search engine marketers are making a big mistake. Check to see how your website is ranking in locations all around the world. Notice the next time Google changes their algorithm; your traffic may change dramatically because rankings in different cities went up or down, even though you rank number one at home. Google is recognizing that a local search result has a higher chance of satisfying the appetite of their searcher.

Google’s Reading Level Tool

This might be the most underrated tool Google has built into their engine. If you click on the ‘all results’ drop down menu under search tools, then click on ‘Reading Level’, Google will show you what they think the writing/reading level of each search result is.

In the image above you can see that by typing into the search bar the advanced query tool ‘Site: (than the website)’ you can see how Google views the reading level of the content on your website. In this example you can see that 94% of the pages on Harvard’s website is considered advanced.

This is not an important ranking factor but it will help you understand how Google sees your content.
If your target audience is directed at educators, or professionals that feed off of advanced content, this tool will help you recognize changes needing to be made on your website.

Here are some ideas on how to go from basic or intermediate content to advanced content:

Add more professional jargon.
Use more advanced vocabulary.
Increase the quality of the writing by using more punctuations and better grammar.
Proofread all content before it is published.
Increase the length of the content. Increased length is of higher quality in the eyes of Google.
Reference or cite professional and well branded organizations in the industry.
Keep formatting on pages professional.
Provide relevant content to the topic.
Use videos, or images to explain your words on the page.

Any of the tactics just mentioned will help increase the value of your website as well as the marketing of your website overall.

The Dictionary Tool

By searching for a word, clicking on ‘search tools’ then the ‘all results’ drop down, you’ll see the dictionary tool. If you’re a webmaster you have a great content opportunity here. By having more pages with definitions you will bring in more natural organic search traffic, especially if you follow the guidelines set by seomoz on how to rank with google definitions. With over two trillion searches a year, many of the searches are people looking for the definitions for the words you understand the best.

By using the dictionary tool, Google will show the dictionary html tags for the keyword that is searched.

This tool is perfect when doing research. In the past, to look up a word meant you needed a dictionary or encyclopedia. The miracle of this tool is you can cross reference dictionaries and actually see how each dictionary site interprets the keyword. It might shock you on how many words are defined completely different from dictionary to dictionary. This tool is pretty incredible when you really think about how quick we can find and compare different definitions.

The Time Tool

Fresh cookies taste better than old crusty cookies, however there are people that love those old cookies, and that’s the beauty of the time tool. The time tool is an incredible time machine Google has built to help us go back in time and see the old articles, or the newest articles only that have been crawled and published within the last hour.

The time tool is one way to see when Google indexes your content. If you notice it takes more than 5 days for one of your blog articles to be indexed, you have a problem and you need to start pumping out more content.

Looking at the news the time tool is very helpful. You might see articles from a week ago ranking towards the top, but as you adjust the time tool, the results will change. You often see articles only minutes old giving you fresh great tasting cookies (information). Major news websites are constantly being crawled and within a few minutes of an article being published, Google will have it indexed and ready to go for you. Google knows that people want the freshest news and that’s why they have the time filter.

In Conclusion

Knowing and understanding how to search for information and find information is a great skill. It will benefit you in whatever profession you’re in. Google search tools can help you understand your website or any website. Play around with these tools; become familiar with them, they will make your life easier.

Key points to Remember

If you’re a webmaster, understand the search tools to better understand your website.
Location is a big factor with certain keywords in ranking. Use the location tool to see how your site it performing in other cities.
The reading level tool will show you the reading level of the content on websites.
The dictionary tool is a will help you know the definition of a word.
Adding more definitions on your website can increase organic search traffic.
The Time tool is the perfect content time machine.

Search Tools Provided By Google is a post by SEO expert Jonathan Goudy. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Modern Marketing In The Digital Age

Shay Wright — Fri, 24 May 2013 12:00:05 +0000

Modern Marketing In The Digital Age is a post by SEO expert Shay Wright. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

I recently came across this great infographic created by Salesforce.com entitled “The Modern Marketer”. This graphic shows how the modern marketer has to be multifaceted – half artist and half scientist. Gone are the Mad Men days of marketing where creativity was valued above all else. New technology offers modern marketers not only the ability to create very creative marketing campaigns, but also ones that are data driven with performance tracking and insightful analysis to better understand the target audience and improve conversions.

The role of a modern marketer sounds pretty exciting, right? Well, achieving this balance between artist and scientist is not easy and requires a special skill set not previously seen or required in the marketing field before. It requires marketers to use both the creative and analytical side of their brains. The creative side is responsible for producing all the creative content, visual assets, engaging social media, and great email campaigns while the analytical side has to focus on all the important data, analytics, and overall campaign performance. It is certainly not an easy balance to maintain by any means.

The Modern “SEO” Marketer

This infographic got me thinking about how the role of SEO professionals has also drastically changed as we too have essentially become “modern marketers”. Before Panda and Penguin came along, SEO required much less creativity and true marketing. Apart from some technical on-page optimization, SEO was more about manual link building, and the site with the most links usually won. Sure, there was still some link building strategy involved, but it was also easy to cheat the system. You could buy links, spin articles, and pay to have a service submit to hundreds of directories for you with the click on a mouse.

The mindless link building and low hanging fruit days of SEO are gone and true SEO professionals must now shift into the new role of modern marketers in order to obtain the results that clients expect and deserve. Modern day SEO professionals must have one foot planted in science and the other in art just as depicted in the infographic above, and must use an arsenal of marketing tools and methods such as Google+, Pinterest, conversion optimization, etc. to achieve the best long term results for their clients.

Great News For Some

This is actually exciting news for SEO professionals that love real marketing, strategy, and data analysis, but it is not so exciting for SEO guys that just wanted to build lots of low quality links and manipulate the search engines with the latest short term tactics. Sure, there will still be SEO pros that will find small loopholes to manipulate rankings short term, but those types of strategies will yield fewer and fewer returns as search engines become smarter and more advanced.

Long term SEO success is now centered on creating compelling content the intended target audience likes so much that they can’t help but share it with their social networks as well as take the desired action you had for creating the content to begin with. This is the whole idea behind content marketing, and the SEO’s role is not only to help create this great content, but to get it in front of the right people. Great content is only great if people know about it.

SEO professionals should not focus on building links back to their clients’ sites but instead help facilitate in getting the content in front of the right people through social media and other outlets. This will increase the chances of people linking back to the site naturally simply because the content is that good. People like to look smart and be helpful to their sphere of influence online, and they accomplish this by linking to and sharing great content with those in their social networks.

What are your thoughts on the role of a “modern marketer” today and what changes do you see in SEO in the coming years as it relates to this role?

Modern Marketing In The Digital Age is a post by SEO expert Shay Wright. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

4 Simple Tactics For Increased Exposure On SlideShare

TJ Welsh — Mon, 20 May 2013 12:00:59 +0000

4 Simple Tactics For Increased Exposure On SlideShare is a post by SEO expert TJ Welsh. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

As more marketing moves from off-line to online distribution channels, there are a number of outlets that can help generate traffic to a company’s website and increase brand awareness. In order to get the most benefit from their online efforts, companies need to understand where their customers look for information about their services or products and then provide valuable content on those sites.

By placing content on external sites, companies can reach their target audience and maybe even get their content ranked in search engines for specific keyword phrases. This, in turn, will help increase brand exposure and drive more traffic to the site.

Slideshare is a content site that has a lot of potential to increase exposure and send targeted traffic to a company’s site. Slideshare is a popular platform for uploading and sharing PowerPoint presentations, and you can start building traffic to your site by using these four tactics:

Tip #1- Optimize Each Presentation

When you upload a new presentation to Slideshare you should create a title, description and tag your PPT presentation. Make sure you use keywords in each of these fields. For example:

It is a good idea to “Allow viewers to download file” as well. That way Slideshare can track how many times an individual saves or downloads your presentation.

Tip #2- Use Keywords Throughout the Presentation

Once they’re uploaded, Slideshare creates a transcript of the slides which appears below the presentation. Google and other search engines can crawl and index the transcript and create an association (via co-citations) between certain keywords and your brand. Pratik Dholakiya explained co-citations as:

“Google is placing less emphasis on anchor text (and perhaps links in general), and is leveraging its massive data set to look for statistical correlations that it can use to determine relevance and influence on the web.”

For more information about co-citations, you can check out Pratik’s article on Search Engine Journal.

Tip #3- Promote Your Presentation

After you upload your presentation to Slideshare, spend some time on sites like Quora or LinkedIn Groups to promote your content. Chances are you have answered someone’s questions with the information in your slides, so this is an opportunity to link to your presentation.

EX.

When looking on Quora for the phrase “create images using PowerPoint,” I came across the following opportunity:

This simple question provided great opportunity to build links naturally to the following presentation:

How to Create Killer Pinterest Graphics with PowerPoint from SEO.com

Find relevant places to link to your Slideshare presentation and you will be able to increase the amount of views to your slides. Further, you should also promote your presentation on social sites. Social sharing like Tweets, shares, likes and +1s can also increase the amount of views to your slides.

This will, in turn, increase your chances of being featured on the homepage of Slideshare:

Image source: slideshare.net

Slideshare features 16 presentations on a given day. While two of the featured presentations are paid listings the other 14 are editorial picks, and one of the criteria Slideshare uses to select which content to feature is the highest number of views in a given day.

Promoting your presentation through link building and social promotions can increase the amount of views to your presentation substantially, which in turn increases your chances of showing up in the featured section of the homepage.

Link building, social shares and additional views helped SEO.com increase views to the following presentation:

Tip #4- Begin with the End in Mind

Like any piece of content you produce it should have a purpose. If you define that purpose upfront it will be that much easier to create an effective strategy. Before building out a Slideshare presentation you should have a keyword phrase in mind so you can easily optimize the presentation (that is keyword rich), create value, and promote it through link building and social channels.

By taking advantage of the tips above, you can drive valuable traffic back to your site and possibly even rank your presentation in search engines for key phrases. A well-thought-out SlideShare presentation may be easier to rank rather than your own blog since it gets to use SlideShare’s domain authority. Sometimes, though, there are just certain topics that are best covered with a visual presentation instead of blog post.

I would love to hear how you are using Slideshare for your online marketing efforts.

4 Simple Tactics For Increased Exposure On SlideShare is a post by SEO expert TJ Welsh. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

SEO & PPC: Working Together To Maximize Returns

Shay Wright — Thu, 16 May 2013 12:01:43 +0000

SEO & PPC: Working Together To Maximize Returns is a post by SEO expert Shay Wright. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

SEO & PPC. Friends or foes? And which one really is more effective in an online marketing campaign? The truth is that they are not only friends but “coworkers” as well, and one is not necessarily more effective than the other. They serve different purposes but working together they create a synergy not possible as two independent parts.

PPC is great because you can be up and running in a matter of minutes. SEO, on the other hand, is more of a long term investment that takes some time and patience to finally start paying off. When you do get good organic placement through your SEO efforts though, the return on investment can be quite remarkable. Even when you do achieve top organic rankings, this still doesn’t mean you should just drop your PPC campaign altogether. There are some real advantages to maintaining both a strong PPC and SEO campaign together as outlined below.

1. The Best Keywords

PPC can be a great testing ground for potential keywords to target in your SEO campaign. You can run multiple PPC ads and target several different keyword phrases to see which ones not only drive traffic to your site, but actually convert. With this information, you can then target only the highest converting keywords in your SEO campaign. It takes a lot of time, effort, and money to place a competitive keyword at the top of organic search results, so you want to be sure you’re targeting the best keywords possible before you embark on your SEO campaign or target new keywords in your current SEO campaign.

2. Higher Click Through Rates & Conversions

When sites eventually achieve top organic rankings, there is a tendency for the site owners to cut back on PPC spend because they feel they’ll get the click in the organic results anyways. However, studies show that the sum total is worth more than the individual parts. In other words, the additional benefits of having both PPC and organic placement more than pays for the PPC outlay.

As you can see in the example below, Hotels.com ranks #1 in organic search results for the search term “hotels”, but also pays for the top spot in the paid search results.

When your paid and organic listings show up together on the same search result page, users tend to place more trust in your site, and they will be more inclined to click on your website. And when they do, there is a higher probability that they will actually convert when on your site because you have already gained a slight boost in credibility in their eyes. They already see you as an established presence in that particular market.

3. Build Brand Recognition & Trust

When your site appears in multiple places on a search result page, you will start to build brand recognition and gain consumers’ trust.

4. Drown Out The Competition

As you start to gain a strong presence in both organic and PPC search results, your competition will struggle to get any sizeable share of the pie, and when you eventually dominate both the organic and PPC market, you may very well eventually drown out your major online competitors.

5. More Data to Analyze

If you run organic and PPC campaigns simultaneously, you will have twice the amount of data to analyze, to make educated and insightful changes, and then capitalize on.

6. Repurpose The Best Ad Copy

As you study your PPC campaign, you can determine which ads result in the best click through rate. This will help you in writing the best title tags and meta descriptions for the pages you’re targeting with your SEO campaign. The great thing about PPC ads is that you can figure out pretty quickly what ad copy works best pretty quickly.

Keep in mind that title tags are an important search engine ranking factor, so be sure to keep your key keywords phrases for a page in the title tag. Meta descriptions on the other hand have no real influence on organic rankings, so feel free to change your meta descriptions to whatever ad copy works best.

7. Improve Adwords Quality Score

A page that has been properly optimized for SEO should help improve your Adwords Quality Score for your targeted pages. This will result in better PPC placement for your ads as well as lower cost per click.

8. Maintain Site Traffic

When you launch a new site, it may take a short time for search engines to put their trust back into your new content and site. A PPC campaign can help maintain traffic to your site during this time period and help build legitimacy to your site once again. Increasing PPC spend can also help fill in for lost traffic due to a Google algorithm changes that may cause your organic rankings to drop. There may also be times when the PPC bidding for certain keyword phrases just goes too high, and when this occurs, you can start putting more emphasis on your SEO efforts for these keyword phrases while cutting back on your PPC budget for these phrases.

9. Target Competitor’s Brand Terms

If you were solely running a SEO campaign, it would not make much sense to target a competitor’s brand terms because this would require creating content focused around your competitor’s brand which in turn could benefit your competitor. However, it can make sense to target a competitor’s brand in a PPC campaign.

Just be sure your product or service really is superior to your competitor’s because if a user searched out your competitor specifically, your competitor is likely already one up on you. You’re going to have to convince them that their initial thought was wrong and that you actually have the product or service they really want.

10. Combat Negative PR

Sometimes bad things happen to even good companies. Employees do stupid things. Cars have to be recalled because of bad parts. Machinery goes bad and causes accidents. A good example of this is with the Gulf Oil Spill. During this time, BP bought several PPC ads relating to the term “oil spill” in order to address the public directly instead of relying on the press. The PPC ads help fill in until SEO efforts can place your website in a better organic position, and then together, you can properly address bad press head on.

Conclusion

To run an effective search marketing campaign and truly maximize online exposure and returns, a site should have both a good SEO and PPC campaign in place that work together to benefit the overall marketing campaign. SEO and PPC each serve different purposes, but when used together, they create a synergy that is not possible as two separate units.

What other advantages do you see for having both a SEO and PPC campaign working together?

SEO & PPC: Working Together To Maximize Returns is a post by SEO expert Shay Wright. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Why Your Business Should Be On Foursquare Now!

Darin Berntson — Mon, 06 May 2013 12:03:03 +0000

Why Your Business Should Be On Foursquare Now! is a post by SEO expert Darin Berntson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

This is not your parents Foursquare.

Remember the days playing this in school? Foursquare means business now!

Nor is this another rendition of Kick-The-Can!

This, ladies and gentlemen, is one of my favorite SoLoMo (Social Local Mobile) apps out there, and as a business it should be one of yours too! Let me ask you something…

Do you have a local business that thrives on needing new walk-in customers, and a business that values, more than life itself, repeat customers?

If you answered yes, and you better have, Foursquare is an application that you should deploy and use to help market your business immediately.

I keep hearing from business owners, looking for easy and inexpensive ways to get the word out about their business, and one of my go-to answers is always Foursquare.

They often look at me as if they have no clue as to what I am talking about, so I educate them on the value and opportunity, and in the end many still think it is too much work, or it may not work, or it may not be worth their time. Well, I say (shaking my fists in the air) YES it is!

Now let me ask you Mr. or Mrs. small business owner… How much real money does it cost you to run an ad on TV or radio? How about an ad in a local paper? How much are you spending on other marketing initiatives? Do you know how much Foursquare costs? Here is a hint… it’s FREE! (that’s less than air!)

The Basics of Foursquare:

Foursquare is a mobile (and desktop) application that allows patrons of your business to check-in to your location, and by doing so also alerting friends they are there. Users may also share their check-in to Facebook and Twitter, and they may leave a comment about your business and maybe even upload some photos as well. Social word of mouth does not get any better than this.

There is somewhat of a game element to Foursquare, and it all started out by allowing users to become “Mayor” of a business. I bet many of you:

Did not know you were already on Foursquare (bet if you look will find your business)
Did not know you probably have a Mayor of your establishment (shame, as you should treat your royalty well)
Did not know you are ignoring this valuable platform (it’s OK, that is why I am here to help you)

At the moment, Foursquare has a lot of FREE tools they offer, and all you need to do is claim your spot, and start offering specials.

As I mentioned earlier, you may already be on the platform since Foursquare users create the locations. So get going! Claim and verify your location and you will be off to the races.

This is what the dashboard looks like for SEO.com.

Get a special at Jiffy Lube – Save some money? OK!

While we do value repeat business, we do not have walk-in traffic, so I am usually the mayor (where’s my crown?). But let’s say you are a resturaunt, a dry cleaner or a flower shop… from here, you can create specials such as:

Discounts
Freebies
Loyalty Specials

Where Foursquare has hit he nail on the head is with their search capabilities. Foursquare has one of the most up-to-date local listing directories out there. Some may say it rivals Google. In fact Foursquare’s local listings power many other mobile phone applications such as Path (and many others).

Listings are first created by users. Superusers keep tabs on things like address changes, or if a business has closed, and can suggest changes be made to the listing etc. There are different ways to search:

Best Nearby
Specials
Food
Nightlife
Coffee

But you can search for whatever you want… so let’s look at a couple of searches:

As a pure discovery engine, Foursquare is amazing. One night I may want to try a place friends rave about. And on another night I may want to try something new. Maybe it is a new pizza joint with a check-in deal to make it more enticing. And to you dear business owner, entice myself and others to try your place out and folks like me will spread the good word!

Foursquare is like having in-store Google analytics, but for humans!

Back in your admin area of Foursquare, you get some pretty cool data. You can see all sorts of visitor activity such as:

Check-Ins at your venue
Unique customers
First time customers
Top Visitors
Recent Visitors
People who liked your Venue
And more

Do you get it? This is VERY valuable data! You can use this information to engage with your customers, learn what you do well, see where you can improve etc. But most of all listen, thank, and engage. If you have a great business, word will spread!

As an avid Foursquare user, I am always bummed because I do not see as many local businesses taking advantage of this platform. I am a “check-in-o-holic”, and I am always looking for a good deal, or a reason to try someplace new.

I know I may live in the Internet bubble, but I am not hearing your ads on the radio or TV, nor am I seeing them in the paper. Reach out to me where I am, where many more customers are. Build a legion of raving fans for your business, and watch what can happen. And you can start doing that right now with Foursquare.

Now do not just claim your spot, and set up specials and call it good. Train your staff so they know to expect people coming in. Also, let current customers know you are on Foursquare. Maybe have a POP display at a table. Have staff let them know that if they check-in there is a discount. Get people engaged with your brand!

As with anything, there is no magic bullet. If you build it they will not necessarily come. Take advantage of Foursquare and other tools to help make your company more top of mind when someone says to themselves… “I want to try ___________, where should I go?”

I hope you enjoyed this post and, and I hope you now see why your business should be on Foursquare! Now get out there and start using this awesome platform.

If you have any other questions regarding Foursquare, leave them in the comments below and I will do my best to answer them for you.

You can also hit me up on all the major social networks.

Until next time…

Doc

Why Your Business Should Be On Foursquare Now! is a post by SEO expert Darin Berntson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.