Why Content Matters for SEO

Any discussion about search engine optimization will bring up the topic of content and how important it is for SEO. Novices think that this just pertains to the content on their website, but in order to execute a really good SEO strategy it’s about publishing content elsewhere on the web as well. An SEO link building strategy without content is severely limited. Sure, you can submit your site to directories and pay for association memberships and sponsorships which may help build links but it won’t get you too far. Creating content such as articles, guides, blog posts, press releases, videos, etc. builds your real estate across the web. The more quality content that you produce, the better the chances are that your content will rank for specific keywords or keywords phrases. It’s not as simple as looking at it as a numbers game, since quality always trumps quantity, but without content online visibility is severely limited. In addition to serving link building purposes, content helps to establish a business as a trusted source of information among target audience members. Potential clients and customers want to get to know you before doing business with you. The content that you produce can help sway their decision. If a target audience member is left to choose between two companies, one that is transparent and produces lots of information, or one that doesn’t- who do you think they would choose?

The search engine ranking algorithms now include social data and links that are Shared, Liked, Re-tweeted, +1’d, etc. are weighed more heavily than links that aren’t. And what is it that people Share, Like, Re-Tweet, and +1? Links to content, whether it be a video or an article or a blog post or any other kind of content. The search engines want to provide users with the best possible results. If a link is being shared again and again in social media, it must provide some kind of benefit.

Good, off-site content is the first step to generating website traffic. Once a visitor lands on the site, it’s the on-site content that takes over the job in getting the visitor to convert. On-site content should be updated frequently since the search engines reward sites that are active and produce relevant, timely, original content. Operating a blog is a great way to ensure that the search engines are coming back frequently to index the content.

Google announced that it is changing the way it categorizes link data in Webmaster Tools.

“As you know, Webmaster Tools lists links pointing to your site in two separate categories: links coming from other sites, and links from within your site,” says Google Webmaster Trends analyst Susan Moskwa. “Today’s update won’t change your total number of links, but will hopefully present your backlinks in a way that more closely aligns with your idea of which links are actually from your site vs. from other sites.”

For one, subdomains are now counted as internal links, which makes a great deal of sense. Here’s a chart showing how links have changed:

“If you own a site that’s on a subdomain (such as googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com) or in a subfolder (www.google.com/support/webmasters/) and don’t own the root domain, you’ll still only see links from URLs starting with that subdomain or subfolder in your internal links, and all others will be categorized as external links,” says Moskwa. “We’ve made a few backend changes so that these numbers should be even more accurate for you.”

She does note that if you own a root domain, your number of external links may appear to go down.

Google Announces Changes to AdSense Publisher Application Process

Google is making some changes to the AdSense publisher application process. Starting today, the company says, it will be adding a new step to the review process and begin sending notifications at “two key points.”

“After a new application is submitted, we’ll begin with preliminary checks on the site and the applicant’s submitted details,” explains product manager Max Cohen. “If the application passes through this first stage, we’ll notify the applicant by email, grant them account access, and provide them with ad code to place on their submitted site. It’s essential at this stage for the applicant to place the ad code on their site, as the review process can’t be completed until the ad code is implemented.”

“However, live ads won’t immediately appear once the ad code has been placed on the submitted site,” he notes. “Since the application hasn’t been fully approved yet, temporary “blank ads” will be shown instead. These blank ads will blend in with the background of the page, so users won’t see them and the user experience won’t be impacted. As a result, there’s nothing to click on and thus revenue can’t yet be generated. If the applicant logs into their AdSense account at this stage of the review process, they’ll see a reminder that their account is still under review.”

After the ad code is added to the submitted site, Cohen says, a final approval decision will be made, and then the applicant will be notified by email. Approved publishers will see live ads automatically appear in the existing ad units. Google is encouraging them to add more units to their submitted site and to other sites they own.

You might want to keep in mind the things Google looks at when determining content quality, however, before you go plastering too many adds all over your sites. Just a tip.

Effective Social Media Marketing Programs

Like it or not, social media is here to stay. Facebook has over 600 million users worldwide; Twitter claims to have over 200 million and LinkedIn hit 100 million users back in March. Long before Facebook and Bing joined forces in May, both Google and Bing were incorporating social signals into their search results. Social profiles can rank in the search engines, increasing your online brand presence; trending topics on Twitter on complied in the RealTime results section of Google, Bing now shows you which of your friends have “liked” a link and more. There is no denying that social media will have a lasting effect on search marketing and SEO.

But just because social media seems to be heralded as the second coming, it is not the end-all-be-all magic bullet to your online marketing needs. A social networking profile is only as good and as useful as you make it to be. Just like SEO, social media marketing is not a set-it-and-forget-it marketing technique. Social media is 24-7, which means you better be an active participant if you want to make any headway. Social networking is all about making connections and establishing relationships. It is not the place to make a sales push. As a critical component of inbound marketing (along with SEO) social media marketing gives you the chance to connect with your consumers on a personal level, monitor your online brand reputation, build your brand presence and more. But you have to be smart about it!

I know that Wikipedia is never supposed to be used as a source, but there is a great list of social networking sites that you should check out. There are hundreds of social networking sites for every kind of niche audience! Which one do you think your consumers use, in addition to the big three?

While these smaller social networking sites may not have the reach or brand recognition of Facebook, that doesn’t mean they don’t have value. Being able to communicate with a very targeted audience is a boon for businesses. The more targeted your audience, the better chance your messaging has of having an impact and prompting action.

If you want to create a social networking profile, make sure you have the time and resources to really use that profile! While you could create the profile just to get the link, there is so much more value in building your online community on that site. The purpose of a social networking site is to network! If you don’t have the time, energy or desire to really make a space for yourself on any given social network, what is the point?

As social media matures, companies are realizing that it takes a lot of time and effort to run a successful social media marketing strategy. It’s not enough to have a profile anymore. Time to start using them or risk getting lost in the shuffle.

How to Optimize an Ecommerce Site

An e commerce site could have thousands upon thousands of pages of products. Just look at the online shopping giant Amazon; they probably have millions of product pages. E commerce sites that only sell one kind of product (cameras, shoes, furniture, etc) might have fewer pages overall, but by no means is it a small amount. On-site optimization is the process of going through you site, page by page, and tweaking each page so it is more search engine friendly. Many e-commerce sites fail to fully optimize their site mostly because of how large they are, but it still has to be done. It takes a lot of time, but it is almost always worth the effort.

Here are 3 ways you can better optimize your ecommerce site:

Create unique product descriptions
One of the biggest problems with many e-commerce sites is duplicate content. You might sell a lot of products that are very similar (or came from the same manufacturer) so the product descriptions are very formulaic and repetitive. For instance, a clothing retailer might describe one pair of pants as “Our boot cut jeans are designed to flatter your curves without losing their shape!” and the second style of pants as “Our wide legged trouser jeans are designed to flatter your curves without losing their shape!” It’s the same content, just the product changed. Each product page (boot cut jeans vs. wide legged trouser jeans) has its own URL; it needs unique content. Search engines are known to penalize sites they find guilty of duplicating content.

Simplify your internal linking structure
Most traffic doesn’t come to an e-commerce site through the homepage; they arrive via one of the product pages. You have to make it easy for them to navigate your site regardless of how they got there. You want to minimize the amount of clicks it takes your visitor to get from one page of your site to another. A drop down menu is a great way to help flatten your site structure. That way, if your visitor wants to jump from jeans to blouses, they don’t have to go all the way back to the homepage to do so.

Another way to simplify your linking structure is to recommend product pages to your visitor based on what product they are currently looking at. They might need a new purse to match the dress they are looking at, or maybe a pair of earrings. For instance, Amazon has a “customers who bought this item also bought” section. It’s a good way to keep visitors clicking through your site and filling up their cart.

Include customer reviews
Another major problem with e-commerce sites is that they don’t have a lot of content to begin with. Other than the product description, what else can you say? You need to give the search engines enough content to read so your site will get pulled to match more searches. One way to do this is to include consumer product reviews on the product page. This gives the search engines more content to read and also creates a 3rd party endorsement for your product. People are very social when it comes to shopping online. They want other people’s opinions before they buy. A real consumer review goes a long way in convincing someone to act.

How to- Get the Most Out of Facebook and Twitter Promotions

Once upon a time, you had to use a phone book to find a business’s contact details. Mercifully, those days are behind us. As social media has worked its way into every aspect of our lives, we as a culture have come to expect that our favorite brands — from “Big Gay Ice Cream” trucks to national airlines and fashion houses — are easily accessible on the most popular social networks.

However, it’s no longer enough to simply interact. Consumers are increasingly hungry for promotions, exclusive discounts and giveaways. In fact, recent data suggests that most people who follow brands on Facebook and Twitter both expect and want to receive coupons from these brands.

According to an Ad Age/Ipsos Observer survey of 1,000 participants regarding digital consumption habits, 65% of consumers want the brands they follow to offer coupons. Compare this figure to the percentage of respondents who said they wanted enhanced customer service (42%) and you begin to get a clearer picture of the landscape.

Certainly the Ad Age numbers indicate that the demand for promotions exists, but how effective are Twitter andFacebook promotions in practice? Do they really increase engagement or sales? While no conclusive studies have been done on this exact topic, substantial anecdotal evidence suggests that they do.

The Role SEO Plays for Your Online Business

When it comes to e-commerce, operating and concentrating on the improvement of the website is more or less meaningless if no one on the internet knows that you exist on cyberspace. This is why promotion and marketing are at the heart of e-commerce.

Even the best brands on the internet cannot perform well if they do not keep up their efforts to promote their websites and the product and services they are offering, apart from the activities related to a business. As the consumers are exploring all the shopping options while sitting at home, this rather invites them to take more liberties with their choice and to explore the options, which perhaps they would not have had they been visiting a store in the local market.

That is very much how convenient life has become for an online consumer, and this convenience has only made the competition even fiercer. Even these top brands employ all the SEO techniques to make their websites rank better in the pages for the search engine results for particular keywords, related to their business. If these SEO tools and techniques do work in their favor, it offers them with an immense competitive advantage. But such a certain advantage can only be attained if businesses take timely measures and consult with top-notch SEO services in how to optimize their websites and content for better search engine result rankings.

A SEO service is a team of experts at optimizing websites and their content for a better reach across the audiences active on the internet. The reason why such a service and the concept of SEO itself work so well is that the potential customers narrow down the search themselves by looking up certain keywords. The search engine mechanism presents all the best related sites as a search result within a couple of seconds. A SEO service can use that very mechanism to optimize your website to get your better ranks and more customers.