Google Social Search launched October last year and since then has been a useful tool for me, both personally and professionally as part of the social media strategy of some clients.
Nowadays, with much attention going to social media marketing it is important for SEO companies to offer related services. Google Social Search is one of the ways you can help in your client's audience analysis and targeting. With social search you can get information on the existing network (customers) of your client. You will be able to find out what really interests these people with their public content (from tweets to blog posts) as well as get leads from the name of the friends in their social circle.
If you haven't been using social search make sure you update your Google profile (and your clients' as well) and activate the social search feature. Things you will see as part ...
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It’s my first post of the year and new year resolutions still occupy my mind, hence, a post on recommended SEO new years resolutions.
One of the things I like about SEO is that just like life there’s always room for improvement. Change is the constant thing and there’ll always be something to tweak. This year here are some of the things you can include in your SEO resolution list, but before that remember that each resolution must be actionable, measurable and attainable.
Suggested SEO goals for the year:
Focus on analysis – Get stats and study analyze them. Get to REALLY know what works and what doesn’t. If you haven’t been using a stats tracker then you resolution can be something as simple as finally installing one!
Focus on on-page SEO – Before you even write down your on-page SEO goals you will need to evaluate your site for needed improvements. Some ...
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We all know that getting people to visit and keeping the attention are two different things. Most often the bigger problem is not the amount of traffic we get to our site but the high bounce rate. After all with high bounce rates the very purpose for doing SEO is defeated. In the long run I would settle for a little less traffic with higher retention rates because that means that your SEO efforts are not going to waste.
So why do people really leave your site? What can you do to lower your bounce rate?
The top reason for immediately leaving a site is lack of relevance of a site’s content in the search user’s eyes. This can simply be because the user entered a very vague/generic term and you rank really well for some generic keywords. Or it can be because you knowingly opt to squeeze your way into ranking ...
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Newsflash. This year, like the years before, you should be targeting moms if you want get a chunk of the actual consumer spending - whether online or offline.
The reason for this is that according to Advertising Age, a consulting group, “moms control $4.3 trillion of the $5.9 trillion U.S. consumer spending total, or 73% of household spend[ing].” Ruth Nightengale of Searchviews then expounded on what this means for internet marketers, including search and social media marketers, since moms are very much active in the internet.
According to Ms Nightengale this means that search marketers should learn target moms by paying attention to long tail search terms. She then discusses the various search habits of moms (read her article for the full discussion) including not going beyond the landing page (so make sure your landing pages have the info they need!) and not looking below the top results on the ...
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Here were are at Part 3 of the linking tips series from Rick Dejarnette. This is also happens to be the last three tips and after this we’ll be moving on. As in many cases though these tips are just as useful as the first tips, as they say: “last but not the least.” Here goes…
1. Have at least one internal link to every page – This makes sense not only SEO-wise but navigation-wise. It is important to have all your pages linked to by at least one other page from the same site so that the search engine bots has a way to map out the entire site once they’re on your website crawling. Sure bots can discover a page without an inbound internal link some other way (i.e. if you submit that link or there’s an external link pointing to it) but the chances will not only ...
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It’s almost been a month and we’re finally on the 2nd part of the “Optimizing your URL and links” series of tips from Rick Dejarnette of Webmaster Central. If you didn’t click on the link I provided last time and read Mr. Dejarnette’s post then you will still find my summary pretty useful. If you’ve read it: consider this as your refresher course.
Here are the next three tips from Rick Dejarnette:
1. Use title attribute in anchor tags for internal links – As a rule it is best to use the title attribute for ALL links, whether external or internal, however using it for internal links is emphasized in SEO because you want to help search engines assess the relevance of each page relative to each other.
2. Minimize the number of parameters in dynamic URLs – Dynamic URLs are often associated with duplicate content because of the way affiliate ...
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If you want to really do Search Engine Optimization one of the things you should never ever forget to optimize are your website’s URL as well as the links within each page. Here are some tips from Rick Dejarnette of Bing Webmaster Center that should help you optimize your URLs and links.
1. Canonicalize your URL – Use the canonical tag to let search engines know which version of the URL, for pages with multiple URLs, they should consider to be the authoritative or original URL. Here’s how to use the canonical tag:
2. Choose absolute links over relative links – Rick Dejarnette tells us that the use of an entire URL (absolute link) as opposed to a file address will reinforce the canonicalization as well as focus the link juice to your preferred URL.
3. Use proper URL syntax in the anchor tag – According to Mr. Dejarnette ...
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What’s more important – internal or external links?
Both kinds of links are very important but when it comes to SEO external links carry more weight. The reason for this is that, as we know, one of the factors that search engines look at to determine a page’s rank is popularity. The number of external links is indicative of the popularity of a page, which is why search engines give this type of links more weight. However, always remember that when it comes to external links it is not just the number that matters but the relevance of the link to your page’s content as well as the authority of the page that point to you.
Just because external links carry more weight it doesn’t mean that you should neglect internal links. You need to pay attention to internal links for SEO purposes since they still do carry some weight and search ...
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According to Bing Webmaster Center’s Rick DeJarnette some of the most common errors that can tank a site include:
An invalid mark-up code – To make sure that your mark-up code is valid use a validator such as the W3C Markup Validation Service. Of course when validating you should know which errors to look out for by asking the following questions:
* Does your file contain a document type declaration (DTD) statement?
* Are all of your tags closed properly?
* Are your tags written in lower case letters?
* Are all of the tag attribute values, even numerals, as in , enclosed in quotes?
* Are the tag attributes used in your code valid?
* Are you using deprecated tags?
...
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When it comes to SEO we already know the usual factors that search engines use to rank pages. However, what happens many times is that the emphasis is placed on some relatively unimportant factors while too little attention is given to the more important factors, which results in ineffective SEO.
To make sure we devote the right amount of effort on the right factors what is needed is the knowledge of the order of importance of each factor. An illustration I find to be very useful is Virginia Nussey’s SEO Hierarchy of Needs (shown above). As you can see broke the factors down into 5 categories: Analytics and Web Intelligence, Keywords and Content, Site Architecture and On-Page Elements, Usability and Web Design, and Link Development.
According to Nussey , analytics implementation and analysis was not included ...
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