Finding the Right Social Media Outlet for Your Business

As social media continues to change and grow, businesses need to consider how powerful social media marketing can be to their forms of communication. Since there are billions of people who use social media, connecting those users to your business offers limitless possibilities.
It’s more important than ever to establish social media strategies. Large and small businesses alike can take advantage of social media, but it’s important to be smart and innovative with it.

Being Smart With Social Media
Remember that once you create social media accounts, you don’t stop there. You’ll fail if you don’t use the social media in engaging ways. Your users can’t be the only ones interacting – you have to be an active user, too.
Don’t flip flop from one social media outlet to another. It’ll be more influential if you build a strong presence on a couple than if you try to take them all on haphazardly.
When it comes to social media marketing, engaging with followers and making them feel like you’re connecting on their level will make a big difference.
You don’t want to be pushing your products onto them without being relatable.
Of course, every form of social media is different. Whether you’re using Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or LinkedIn, the users and what they expect will vary. The type of information the social media outlets share will also be different.
It’s important to consider the strengths and weaknesses of each social media outlet.

Facebook
Facebook has a couple important features to be aware of:

• Users will have to ‘Like’ your page if you want them to see your updates.
• Most users are informal – so you can use Facebook to make them feel closer to your business (like revealing behind-the-scenes photos, offering creative promotions or creating fun events they can participate in).
• Your posts/updates can be relatively long and detailed (if you want).
• It’s easy to personally interact with users by commenting and keeping up with conversations.
• Compared to other social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook offers more options for privacy, but users may not be as open to following people they don’t know.

You’ll also find that most users are more fascinated with posts that have interesting photos, and these posts are the ones that typically generate more clicks.

Twitter
Most people that use Twitter are just as informal as Facebook users, if not more. Although users are limited to a certain number of characters – so your posts will be much shorter than Facebook – video and images are common parts of Twitter.
Users on Twitter are typically open to connecting with individuals and companies they don’t know. So it’s a great platform to post interesting content and to present offers, promotions and contests.
Twitter also makes it easy for your company to tweet about events, news and pretty much whatever is happening now.
It’s important to remember to make your tweets simple, but urgent. Urging users to “click here” can also attract a large number of clicks.
Twitter is geared towards the entertainment world, so users are almost always up to date with any sort of news or media.

Pinterest
Many articles like this one about “The Pinterest Effect” report that the majority of Pinterest users are female.
Some of the most popular themes on Pinterest include:

• Food and Cooking
• Weddings
• Fashion/Style
• Home Décor
• DIY Crafts
• Art and Photography

Photos are the main component of Pinterest, so it’s a social media outlet that’s ideal for businesses who sell anything visually appealing.
Because users have to click on photos to pin them to their boards, it’s a great way to target traffic to your site. Just remember the characteristics of the users and the themes listed above, because those will be the visitors you attract.
Pinterest is a way for businesses to showcase their work and develop a digital brand, especially if you’re selling products from the categories Pinterest users love.
Pinterest is also one of the only social media outlets that has a large number of users purchasing items through it. It’s responsible for creating more traffic to websites and blogs than Facebook, Twitter and YouTube!

LinkedIn
LinkedIn is an outlet that appeals to users with business mindsets. Users typically create accounts so they can network with other individuals in their field, as well as stay up to date on industry trends.
Most interactions between users are more formal than Twitter and Facebook, and users are less likely to be connected with people they don’t know.
However, this would be an ideal outlet for businesses looking to network and engage with their industry.
LinkedIn makes it easy to develop your niche, build relationships and contacts with a solid network and examine research opportunities.

Affordable SEO Services India
Examining Further…
This article goes into more depth about other social media outlets and what they mean for your business.
Since each social networking outlet offers something different, it can be difficult to determine where you should start when developing your marketing strategy.
Planning your campaigns, thinking about which site to start with and deciding where you want to direct traffic are all important questions.
The solution you’ll come up with will be unique to your business. No matter what you are trying to sell, a strong social media marketing strategy can help you connect with more individuals, establish a loyal customer base and draw in more business.
resource:http://www.sitepronews.com/2013/06/27/finding-the-right-social-media-outlet-for-your-business/

4 Google Trust Factors That Can Provide Negative Signals About Your Website

When Google first came out with its Panda algorithm, Amit Singhal (Google’s Chief Engineer, who designed it) provided a list of potential factors that Google looks at to determine the trustworthiness of any website. This was more than two years ago, but many of the sites I review today still show signs of “untrustworthiness” in Google’s eyes. To top it off, Google has clamped down even harder on its Panda and Penguin algorithms during the past 2 years.
This means that it’s more important than ever to review your websites for the first 17 SEO killer attributes that I’ve previously written about, but also to look at that last one, #18 (trustworthiness), which we don’t hear so much about.
While just about anything you do with your site that makes it seem spammy (such as keyword stuffing, for example) would also make it seem less trustworthy, Google now looks beyond just the obvious. Because many of them are somewhat redundant, I’ve distilled Mr. Singhal’s trust questions down to 4 main factors:

1. Expertness
2. Comprehensiveness
3. Redundancy
4. Lack of Proofreading

Below is more information on each these factors as well as the questions Google wants you to ask yourself about your site, how your site might be sending a negative signal with respect to each factor, how you can fix your site, and some key information you can learn from each of them.

Google Trust Factor #1: Expertness

What Google asks: Is this content written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it shallower in nature? Similarly, is the site a recognized authority on its topic? In addition, does it contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?

How your site might be sending a negative signal: You’d be surprised how many websites I see with blogs that have no byline attached to their posts. They’re usually posted by some default “admin” or maybe a first name only, with no bio at the beginning or end of the article, or any sort of link to a bio page.

The fix: Whether or not you write your own blog posts, you need to associate a name with them. If you’re a small company, you’ll often want to use the CEO, owner, or president’s name. It’s also fine to have multiple authors if you’re a larger company. But you will need to establish the credibility of each of them. Of course, beyond just having a byline and bio, you should also mark up your code with the rel=”author” markup.

Key takeaway: Anyone can write or say anything on the Internet, but that doesn’t make it true. By having a name, face, and bio associated with your content, you’re standing by it and its factualness (and vice versa). Therefore, it makes sense for Google to use this as part of their algorithm for SEO Services.

Google Trust Factor #2: Comprehensiveness

What Google asks: Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend? Does the content provide complete or comprehensive description of the topic? Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?

How your site might be sending a negative signal: It’s not surprising that most of the blogs I saw that weren’t associating any name with their posts were also not very comprehensive. In fact, they often didn’t appear to be written for real people at all. They seemed to exist only because someone (probably some “SEO”) told the site owner they needed a blog for SEO purposes. And of course most of the posts were useless drivel only there to link to other parts of the website via keyworded anchor text. Which of course misses the whole point of having a blog in the first place.

The fix: Remember why blogs exist. The idea of a blog (and content marketing in general) is to add value to your site. It enables you to go above and beyond talking about the products or services you offer. In short, it’s a way to demonstrate your (or your company’s) expertise. Write about what you know and know well.

Key takeaway: Forget about SEO when you’re trying to decide what to put in your blog and instead think about hot topics in your industry — not so you can rank for those keywords, but so you can provide your own unique perspective. This in turn will be exactly the sort of content Google is looking for — that is, content that people bookmark and share.

Google Trust Factor #3: Redundancy for the Sake of Keywords

What Google asks: Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations? Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
How your site might be sending a negative signal: This is such an old-school SEO technique that apparently worked for so long that some website owners are loath to give it up. I mean, why have one page on any given topic and be relevant for one or two keyword phrases when you can have 10 or more and corner the market on all the relevant phrases? At least that’s how the thinking went. And to a certain extent it did work well in Google before Panda. But when you’ve lost a huge percentage of your organic traffic, you can’t keep clinging to the spammy practices of yore.

The fix: Find all the pages of your website hat focus on the same or very similar topics and combine them into just one. (If they’re different enough you may be able to keep a few, but be completely honest with yourself here!) It’s especially necessary to remove those pages that are basically just “madlib spam.” After you’ve got them combined, be sure to 301-redirect all the old URLs to the one new and improved page’s URL.

Key takeaway: The good news is that the newer Google algorithms understand synonyms and the overall meaning of words and phrases.
This means it is no longer necessary to have all the keywords you’d like to be found for on the page itself. Sure, you want to use lots of variations within the page content, but don’t worry if you miss some. If you have a great site that others like to recommend to their audiences, your pages will show up in the search results when relevant.

Google Trust Factor #4: Lack of Proofreading
What Google asks: Does this article have spelling, grammar, stylistic, or factual errors? How much quality control is done on content? Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
How your site might be sending a negative signal: This trust factor goes beyond merely having typos on your website. While it should be an obvious bad signal, you’d be surprised how many sites I’ve reviewed have content that doesn’t even make sense! It’s as if the people writing the content were only concerned with using keywords, rather than making sense. (What a shocker!) I’ve also seen content that has been pasted onto sites from elsewhere that didn’t even have proper formatting such as paragraph spacing, or had weird characters that show up in the process.
The fix: Pay attention, for goodness’ sake! Don’t use automated programs to pull content from elsewhere unless you’re prepared to carefully review it and fix all errors. Write for your target audience, not the search engines. (Where have you heard that before?) And treat your website like a precious child. Love it, nurture it, pay attention to it, and take care of it in all aspects!
Key takeaway: If even you can’t read your content to make sure that it looks okay and makes some semblance of sense, why would anyone else? And consequently, why would Google want to showcase it?
While Google certainly looks at other trust factors, these 4 are the main troublemakers for most of the websites I’ve reviewed. (Along with the usual technical issues and spammy link building techniques, of course.) What others have you seen with your own sites or those of your clients? Let me know in the comments!
resource:http://www.sitepronews.com/2013/06/24/4-google-trust-factors-that-can-provide-negative-signals-about-your-website/

Google Tops in Mobile Ad Profits

SEO Firm
Google really is king of the mountain when it comes to mobile ad revenues.
The search engine firm is predicted to sell more mobile ads in 2013 than all of its chief rivals put together, according to a report released today by research firm eMarketer.
That is nothing new for Google, however. The company earned more than half of the $8.8 billion advertisers worldwide spent on mobile Internet ads last year.
Google made $4.61 billion in mobile Internet ad revenues in 2012, more than tripling its earnings in 2011. eMarketer predicts this year’s mobile revenues will be up an additional 92.1 percent to $8.85 billion.
Facebook may not be in Google’s league yet, but the social network is no slouch when it comes to making money via Internet advertising.
“After making nearly half a billion dollars worldwide on mobile ads last year, Facebook—which had no mobile revenue in 2011—is expected to increase mobile revenues by more than 333 percent to just over $2 billion in 2013, and account for a 12.9 percent share of the global net mobile advertising market,” the report reads.
Twitter, meanwhile, will likely see its slice of the global mobile ad spending  pie grow this year to about two percent of the total, eMarketer said. In the U.S., Twitter will do especially well with a 3.6 percent share.
“Combined, three companies—Google, Facebook and Twitter—account for a consolidating share of mobile advertising revenues worldwide, as other players, such as YP, Pandora, Apple and Millennial Media, see their shares decrease, despite maintaining relatively strong businesses growing at rapid rates,” the report reads.



Resource:http://www.sitepronews.com/2013/06/14/google-tops-in-mobile-ad-profits/

Google Announces End for Chrome Frame

SEO Services Company India
Google is retiring Chrome Frame, its secure Internet Explorer plug-in, as of January 2014.
Chrome Frame was introduced in 2009 to bring a “modern engine to old versions of Internet Explorer — to allow developers to bring better experiences to more users, even those who were unable to move to a more capable browser,” Google Chrome engineer Robert Shield said in a blog post.
Now that most people are using modern browsers, Google has decided Chrome Frame has out-lived its usefulness.
Google is requesting all developers with apps that steer users to Chrome Frame, encourage visitors to upgrade to a modern browser.
Chrome Frame may be going the way of the dodo bird, but Chrome for businesses is still going strong and Shield suggests companies who were using Chrome Frame switch to Chrome for Business.
Google recently updated the features in its Chrome for Business management console, allowing companies to install and manage Chrome for their employees. According to Shield, Chrome for Business combined with Legacy Browser Support allows users to switch seamlessly between Chrome and another browser.
“It’s unusual to build something and hope it eventually makes itself obsolete, but in this case we see the retirement of Chrome Frame as evidence of just how far the Web has come,” he said.



Resource: http://www.sitepronews.com/2013/06/14/google-announces-end-for-chrome-frame/

3 Reasons Why SEO and PPC Are a Match Made in Heaven

You may be investing quite a bit of effort into your online presence, and a majority of that effort may be organic SEO. And when done the right way, this is great for your brand. But did you know that organic SEO and PPC can work together to provide even stronger results?
Search marketing is about the relationship between things — disciplines, strategies, tactics, search engines, websites, people — and there are many ways these relationships affect one another. When working together, these things create stronger results than if they were used alone.
So we’re going to look at three ways SEO and PPC work together to create a mutually beneficial relationship for a website. We’ll explore:

• How to use data you’ve compiled from your organic search campaigns to help your PPC.
• How pay-per-click campaigns can benefit your SEO efforts, and vice versa.


• How PPC can boost usability on your site for visitors who are looking for your products and services.
• Ways to measure the two together, and a powerful example of how the organic side can affect the paid side.

1. You Can Use Organic Data in Your PPC Campaigns

When clients come to Group Twenty Seven looking to explore new paid search campaigns, and they already have a fair amount of data in Google Analytics, we always explore the organic side when selecting keywords to target.
What we do is analyze all the keywords that drove conversions and sales, and start thinking about how we would group them within our AdWords campaigns (assuming you’ve got your e-commerce reporting set up already).
So, for example, say you have a keyword phrase that is producing conversions organically, and that term is “dog beds.” And as a pet store business, you have multiple lines of dog beds.
We’d then look at creating a PPC campaign around dog beds, with ad groups such as soft dog beds, extra-large dog beds, small dog beds, brand-name dog beds, and so on.
Organic e-commerce data can also help you find potential combinations of branded keywords that you may not have thought of to add to your new pay-per-click campaign. So don’t forget about those.

2. Your Organic SEO Can Benefit From Your PPC, and Vice Versa

PPC is a nice complement to your search engine optimization because you can use it to quickly determine which keywords drive traffic and conversions, and then build those keywords into your organic SEO efforts.
Building on the PPC-SEO relationship, good PPC landing pages always contain the information the keyword is promising when a user clicks on an ad. This is why your on-page optimization is important when you’re running both organic SEO and PPC campaigns together.
Make sure that you optimize the landing page that you’re driving users to. This includes ensuring that the page not only has relevant products and information for that keyword, but also that the Meta information and content is optimized with the keyword.
This can help your overall Quality Score in PPC, and Quality Score is an important clue to how targeted and relevant your PPC campaigns are. You may also find a boost in your organic conversions after you start weaving those conversion-focused keywords onto your pages.
For more on Quality Score and how that plays into PPC, check out this post.

3. PPC Campaigns Can Help Boost the Usability of Your Site

PPC campaigns often reveal ways to group products together in a manner that people are searching for. You can use data from PPC campaigns to look at a website with a critical eye and ask, “Which pages best fulfill the promise of this ad and this ad group?”
If no pages on your site support the products you’re grouping together in your AdWords campaigns (for example, you’re just landing users on your home page), create a new landing page with those products grouped together so you can send your customers to the most relevant results.
This also builds on the Quality Score idea I mentioned in the last section.

Relationship Analysis: How to Know if SEO and PPC Are Working Together

Multichannel attribution is one way to know how well all your marketing channels work together on the bottom line. The “multi-channel funnel” report in Google Analytics can be very informative.
resource:http://www.sitepronews.com/2013/06/14/3-reasons-why-seo-and-ppc-are-a-match-made-in-heaven/

Essential LinkedIn Tips for Business Professionals

Earlier this month, social media giant LinkedIn celebrated its 10th anniversary. With more than 225 million members in 200 countries, they have plenty of reasons to celebrate. In many ways, LinkedIn is arguably the most important social media platform for businesses – yes, even more so than Twitter and Facebook.
Why? Dollars and sense. The average household income per LinkedIn user is $109,000, which dramatically trumps similar stats on all other major social media sites. LinkedIn means business. And your business should have a serious presence if success is on the menu.
Reid Hoffman, creator of LinkedIn, wrote this on their blog to celebrate the milestone: “Our vision at LinkedIn is to create economic opportunity for every professional in the world.”
With ten years of an immensely enviable track record, Hoffman and his team are well on their way. As the biggest business networking site in the world, the tone and attitude on LinkedIn is far more polished and intelligent than their competitors. People are more business-minded when they interact, and even the status updates reflect this focus. This means any self-respecting business has to have a best-foot-forward presence on LinkedIn, and we’ve got just the tips to help you maximize the opportunity.

The Top Corporate LinkedIn Sites

In late 2012, LinkedIn named the 12 best LinkedIn company pages for the year. Before you polish up your company’s LinkedIn profile, it’s first wise to dissect what the big dogs are doing right.
According to LinkedIn, the following companies have profiles worth emulating:

• Adobe
• Aurecon
• CNBC
• HireVue
• HubSpot
• Insead
• The IT Media Group
• Magna Powertrain
• Pacific Dental Services
• Tata Consultancy Services
• The Walt Disney Company
• Xactly Corporation

As you peruse these pages, you’ll notice a few things they do better than the rest:

1) 100% complete, current, and well-written profiles – Even a small amount of outdated content on a business profile looks unprofessional and is a major turnoff. These companies all ensure content is compelling, well-crafted, and featuring up-to-the-minute accurate data. Furthermore, overused words like “innovative” and “dynamic” are rarely seen on these profiles. They insert their own branding personality without sounding generic.

2) Frequent, smart, and compelling status updates – CNBC is especially adept at crafting eye-catching status updates that are appropriate for the LinkedIn community. Many businesses use tools like HootSuite to consolidate their status updates across all social media platforms, but this can be a grave mistake. Each site has a vastly different audience, and should be treated as such. Those who paste more frivolous and silly updates to LinkedIn are often not taken seriously. It’s not that every status update on the site needs to be polished and dry, but certainly professional and on-point, with or without a sense of humor. Too many sound generic, and writing all things for all people ends up turning off most of them.

3) Loads of current job listings and information about employees – The Walt Disney Company is aces at using LinkedIn as a hiring mecca, with highlighted career opportunities and a really enticing feel to their content. LinkedIn can be the single best source for finding reliable and talented employees, but keep in mind how competitive the landscape is for top candidates. You therefore need to work hard to entice these folks to choose you over the other companies, and your profile can go a long way to communicating your unique offerings.

4) Well optimized content for search – Great profiles use plenty of industry standard keywords and are therefore prominent in relevant search results. Make sure your profile reads and flows well, and is loaded with commonly used terms in your industry, so when people are looking for your services, you rank high on the results. All of LinkedIn’s top choices here do this well.

Essential LinkedIn Profile Elements for Every Business

Now that you’ve gotten an eyeful from the experts, here are some additional tips to keep in mind as you complete your top-notch LinkedIn profile:

1) Showcase the most important details front and center – Your company’s core strengths and competencies should be clearly articulated and displayed above the fold. Name who you are, what you offer, and speak directly to your ideal client, right out of the gate. Make sure to include easy to locate contact information too.

2) Share timely industry-relevant information – In an effort to add value to your visitors, and take away from the narcissistic feel a typical profile can evoke, showcase links to headlines in your industry. This improves your engagement factor, and if you solicit feedback as well, can deepen your brand’s value and emotional connection to your customers. The best way to execute this is through status updates, but you can include major, more evergreen pieces in your profile too.

3) Recommend, and be recommended – The recommendations section of LinkedIn is one of their more powerful features. The more testimonials you showcase from past clients and customers, the more credible and reliable you appear. That said, to receive these in the most gracious manner, you should be writing loads of recommendations for others too; as long as they are sincere. Don’t just mass mail folks requesting a recommendation, write one for them first and they will be more inclined to return the favor with a glowing endorsement.

4) Create and join appropriate groups – There a hundreds of LinkedIn groups for just about any industry, and they provide a valuable and educational means of networking with folks in your niche. If you don’t see a group for your specific specialty, create your own; it’s straightforward and free. Groups allow you to customize frequency of correspondence, and provide things like job opportunities, industry news, and thoughtful questions and comments from your peers.

5) Add advanced applications – LinkedIn has plenty of valuable applications to add to your profile, too. These apps do everything from help keep you more organized, integrate with social media channels and calendars, and assist in getting your message out to even more eager readers. To see which apps might be relevant for you, visit the applications section and have fun experimenting with the various options.
Celebrate LinkedIn’s first decade by making your profile work even harder for your business. With just a little time and expertise, you can learn to master LinkedIn’s incredibly valuable demographic, and use the site as the powerhouse marketing tool that it really easy.
resource:http://www.sitepronews.com/2013/06/07/essential-linkedin-tips-for-business-professionals/

Google AdWords Now With Images: Image Ad Extensions

SEO Services
Google announced they are testing a new ad extension to allow advertisers within the AdWords product to add images to their text ads.
This should not surprise anyone anymore. The search engine that prided themselves over never having image ads or banner ads in their search results, keeps stepping closer and closer to that.
Of course, Google has had product ads with image products in the search results for a long time, even dating back to 2008. But now, any ad has the ability of showing images above the ad.
Here is a picture of how it may look:




Google's product manager, Awaneesh Verma, said:

Today we're announcing the beta launch of image extensions, which will allow you to add new visual elements to your search ads.
As the web evolves, Google users expect richer and more diverse content. More than one in six searches on Google today provide results with visual content. Image extensions will show in some cases when we determine that a search is likely for visual content.

Image ads are only currently available for English ads, but available globally. To sign up to participate in this test, use this form.
Forum discussion at Google+.
resource:http://www.seroundtable.com/google-adwords-image-extensions-16888.html

Yahoo Search Redesign Live

 

Yahoo announced they launched a new design for their Yahoo Search search results page.
The new design promises an improvement, by:

• Improving the load time of the results
• Moving the search results higher up on the page
• Adding the new navigation bar at the top of the page
• Having a more consistent look with the Yahoo homepage

Yahoo also promises to roll out the top bar you see on the home page and on the search results page throughout more and more Yahoo properties going forward. Now you can search keyword for SEO purpose in very fast and easy way.

Here is a video of the new look:


Seems like webmasters are happy with the change.
resource:http://www.seroundtable.com/yahoo-search-redesign-16889.html