Thursday, April 25, 2013

Will Lowering Your Bounce Rate Add Spring to Your Site?

It sounds inoffensive, almost cute and fun… but it strikes fear in the hearts of business owners who have invested capital in their websites with the hope of improving sales.
It’s the Bounce Rate. It’s strange. It’s menacing. It’s misunderstood.

Simply stated, the bounce rate is the number of visitors that land on your site and exit from the same page without viewing any content on your site. It is easy to recognize why it would be preferable to keep this number lower, but sometimes an upper bounce rate may not be the “bogeyman” you assume it is. By taking the time to better recognize the nature of the bounce rate, you can make it less of an enemy and more of an informant.

What is an “acceptable” bounce rate?

According to Google, the usual website bounce rate is 40%. While that may sound simple and straightforward, that figure alone is really not a dependable statistic for determining how your website is functioning. Acceptable bounce rates take into reflection a number of variants. These include, but are not limited to:

  • Industry
  • Type of site
  • Type of page
  • Location of page on the site
  • Brand recognition


How high is too high?

Analytics expert advises that a bounce rate of 60% or higher is problematical. Keep in mind; the aforementioned variants come into play again when determining what is too high. It’s rather obvious why a high bounce rate might seem alarming, but consider some ways in which these analytics might be misinterpreted:

• Doug, who owns a landscaping business, reorganized his website so that the greater part of his pertinent information (contact information, hours, services provided, location, etc.) is right there on the landing page. Visitors get the information they necessitate there and as a result have no need to advance further on the site. His bounce rate increased, however he also found that his call volume and paying client base increased. For Doug, the increased bounce rate is not a major concern.

• If the main reason of a landing page is to send visitors to another site (an article, video, etc.), then the bounce rate, which will be very high, is unrelated as leaving the website from that page is what is intended.

How do you decrease “Bad Bounce?”

You’ve gone over the analytics, and you’ve concluded that the high bounce rate is signaling that your website is not doing the job you had intended. What can you do to treat the condition? Here are a few questions you might want to ask for starters.

• Is your website’s text clean and clear? A website needs to be easily understandable, and ones that cause eyestrain can be an instant turnoff to a visitor. Does yours employ fonts that are difficult to read due to size or contrast with the background? Are the colors used pleasing to the eye, or are they too loud and intense, possibly causing some visitors to squint?

• Do all of the landing pages of your website clearly express their purpose? Generally, you put a good deal of care and attention into your home page, but that is not necessarily your landing page! When visitors are directed to your site, they may not be taken to your home page. It is important to discover through which pages people are entering your site and focus on making them clear, attractive, and purposeful. Certainly this is a goal for every page of your site, but begins by focusing on the points of entry.

• Are ads placed in a method that is distracting or obtrusive? Advertising on your site may be a necessity. If it adds confusion or clutter, however, it will habitually result in people immediately navigating away from your business. While it is vital to keep ads prominent, be mindful to place them in areas where they will not cause confusion or result in accidental clicking, such as near menus or “add to cart” buttons. And those pop-up ads? They are akin to having a horsefly buzzing around your page and will have visitors using the back button as a flyswatter. Get rid of them before they eliminate your potential customers.

• Are your pages taking too long to load? Let’s face it, this is the age of instantaneous gratification, and nothing will result in an instant goodbye quite the way a slow-loading webpage will. Work with your website designer to get rid of any unnecessary plug-in or links and to optimize your website’s graphics for eye-catching, interesting pages that will load speedily and keep visitors longer.

These are just a few things to look at when diagnosing a spike in the temperature of your website’s bounce rate. If you’re still not seeing the rate decrease, it’s time to chat with your web designer who can provide a deeper understanding of the analytics and offer the proper remedy that will give your business a bounce … in sales!


3 Tips for Better SEO and Social Media Time Management

Commit to one link a day but don’t waste too much time

Link building is one of the most time-consuming processes when it comes to SEO, mainly if you’ve been at it for a year or two and the link building opportunities aren’t quite as forthcoming as they used to be. It’s so simple to get lost in the hundreds of competitors links you’ve downloaded, looking for that diamond-in-the rough opportunity, that you might spend all day link building and only come up with a handful of quality links. Unless you’ve got the in-house talent where you can allot one person to do nothing but link building all day, chances are you can’t devote 8 hours a day to finding one link. My advice to site owners that get overwhelmed by their link building approach is to aim for at least one link a day (that way it doesn’t get pushed to the reverse burner), but set a time limit. Give yourself an hour or two first things in the morning to hunt for links. If you find one (or five) that’s great and go for it! But if you don’t find anything worthwhile once your time is up then move onto to something else.

Block out time to write.

In my belief, content is the thing that is going to push your SEO to the next level. But so many site owners struggle with finding the moment to write (not to mention coming up with topics) that their content creation efforts often get stuck in the pipeline; a lot of great ideas but nothing in fact gets produced. I find the only way I can make sure my own content marketing campaign happens is I have to block out at least one hour each day for writing—no meetings, no phone calls, no checking emails or social updates—unless the sky falls leave me alone! I may not always walk away at the end of my writing time with a totally finished product but at least I have something to keep the process moving. I also like to use any additional time at the end of my day for writing as well so I can get a little ahead. Even 30-45 minutes is enough to get at least a first draft of a new article or blog ready to go.

Check-in and check-out with social media.

When my phone is buzzing off the hook or I’m getting a dozen emails about comments on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook it’s very tempting to dive headfirst into social media, only to reemerge three hours later having accomplished very little. Instead, I prefer to check-in every few hours with my social accounts and do a variety of actions in bulk. This might not work for every business, especially if you are dealing with a customer service issue, but for the most part your social network is okay with waiting an hour or two to hear from you. If you don’t/can’t reply instantly it’s not the end of the world! Unless your company is large enough to have a full time social media manager, chances are a few employees might have access to a variety of social accounts so if something does need to be addressed right away but you just can’t knob it yourself a trusted employee could at least take the first step.

The thing to remember about SEO and social media time management is that it’s very simple to get lost in the nitty gritty. You could exactly spend hours combing through Google Analytics every day but save your hours for when you really need to look “under the hood.” I have lost whole afternoons looking for one quality link when my time could have been better spent writing fresh content for the company blog, working on a guest blog post (or finding a new opportunity), or even been on a view call with a potential client. And I think we all know how easy it is to get lost in the depths of Facebook when we start clicking around. Set a daily plan for yourself (flexibility is still okay though) and try to reduce how much time one activity takes you every day when possible.


Give Your Facebook Page a Free Facelift

If you’re tired of the same standard Facebook format for all profiles and business pages, Social Fixer is your new best friend.  This innovative browser add-on, previously named Better Facebook, allows business owners to give branding flair and personality to the otherwise bland page structure.  Social Fixer also gives users more flexibility on news feed posts, comments and loads more options.  If your company has a heavy Facebook presence and is looking to inject some creativity into the mix, Social Fixer can give you a serious edge.

Customization Options

Facebook profiles have always allowed limited personalization. Learning from the chaotic, freestyle approach that was part of MySpace’s undoing, Facebook has opted instead to take away the most creative power from its massive user base.  While giving everyone full access to modify their profiles in any fashion is still a recipe for disaster, allowing businesses and individuals to add polished flair and style can only engender more marketer loyalty, especially if it improves customer response.  That’s where Social Fixer comes in.

Currently, Facebook only allows users to update profile and cover photos, control what appears in the news feed (to a certain extent) and of course the usual profile text.  The Facebook Help Center includes details on how to customize a page’s appearance.  But options are vastly limited.

Features Social Fixer allows you to tweak include adding a tabbed news feed, triggering image previews, controlling who sees what and when in your feed, analytics options to view who is accessing which posts, unfriending details and various feed filters.  You can direct specific items to a targeted news feed tab, and create a more stylish theme for your page as well.

How to Setup Your New and Improved Facebook Page

Social Fixer is a browser add-on that works with Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari; all of the major ones, save Internet Explorer.  Once you download the program, here’s how to install the new features to your Facebook page:

• Step 1:  Choose recommend settings, or opt for a more minimalist selection that switches most add-on defaults to “off.”  You can, of course, revert any of these functions later on in the process.

• Step 2:  Select if you want to place applications and game posts in separate tabs on your news feed (default is yes.)  This may not be relevant to a business profile, because owners are likely not playing games with the same account, but this is a fantastic feature to players who do not wish to clutter their feed with in-game achievements and triumphs.  Not everyone wants the world to know they just leveled up in Bingo Bash.

• Step 3:  Customize your chat sidebar. You can replace the existing design with the old pop-up version, opt to show all online friends (or not), and even use a mini chat list that eradicates the thumbnail images.  The latter is perfect for businesses who don’t use the chat feature much and dislike the amount of real estate it normally occupies.

• Step 4:  Select your photo options.  You can choose to disable the light box / theater pop-up view that Facebook currently employs, and revert to a more simplistic single-photo display.  The default is to keep things as they are.

• Step 5:  Decide if you’d like to allow users to see the full-sized versions of your images when they hover over a thumbnail in a post or profile.  Photo previews are marked as “Yes” by default.

• Step 6:  For comment posting, you can decide if you’d like to have the Enter key function as a new line creation or auto-post option. Facebook does the former currently, and it’s a major gripe among users that Social Fixer wisely addresses.

• Step 7:  If you’d like to add a link to Social Fixer’s own news feed to the Facebook panel, it will be a great source of tips and tricks for you in the future.  And it’s a way to show the free tool a little appreciation for the crafty convenience it affords you.

Once you complete the setup wizard, your new Facebook page installs.  You will now see profile tabs and news feed labels that are a bit different than the default views, but they will match your selections during setup.  Notice, too, that your most recent posts will appear at the top of your feed, but a drop down menu option gives you the power to switch back to top stories instead.  If you wish to change the theme and color palate of your page, click the wrench icon for theme options.  Make sure to test new themes on all browsers, however, because not all of them showcase these changes as intended.

More fun features include the power to see sum totals of posts (including duplicates), identify who has unfriended you and when, and see the number of times Older Posts has been selected by your users.  The chat list will now default to showing online friends at the top of the list (instead of the current alphabetical listing.)  The left side of your page will feature navigation panels that showcases content you've ‘liked,’ as well as upcoming relevant events. Again, these options can be customized to lead to other favorite destinations, if desired.

When you’re out of the setup wizard and looking to change any and all options, just click the icon of a wrench, and a window will appear with a myriad of customization selections. For example, you can hide articles and/or videos from your feed, automatically move posts from applications, or change font sizes for posts and comments. Options get even more granular; you can even choose to show actual time stamps for posted content, rather than the default “one day ago” language Facebook currently uses. Marketers will love the ability to filter all posts by user, type of post, and even specific keywords.  This is a chance to really get to know your Facebook fans on a level not previously available.

Potential Drawbacks

Facebook is notorious for frequent updates to their templates and news feed formats, so if you opt to customize your page, you’ll want to test every aspect whenever Facebook makes even the smallest of updates.  Case in point:  Facebook recently added new features to their news feed, which may have caused some issues for Social Fixer users.  It’s nothing a bit of re-customization can’t address, but just be mindful you’ll likely spend a bit more time than usual on your Facebook presence should you choose to use this add-on.  Considering the massive benefits involved in having a page that separates you from the vanilla look and feel of your competitors, however, it will likely be worth the extra time and elbow grease.

Mastering the Art of Local SEO

Local SEO is a daunting and threatening task to tackle for any small business. Google’s algorithms seem all the more mysterious in the local realm, and competition is fierce in almost any market. It used to be that the goal for a local business was to land in the “10-pack”, or the top 10 businesses for a set of local keywords. Google would then show a map charting the location of the top 10 rankings, with succeeding information listings. A few years back, Google changed this to the “7-pack”, thereby limiting top ranking opportunities even more. It goes without saying that your goal as a small business owner is to land in the top 7 for your targeted keywords. So how do you attain this lofty vision? Through the cornerstones of great SEO: Fantastic content, smart citations and link shares, great customer service, and crafty social media. It’s a difficult task for sure, but it’s a mountain you absolutely can overcome.

Tip #1: Write a Fabulous About Me Page

It’s significant to undertake the task of defining yourself out of the gate. A well-written About Me part is not just an asset for your site’s SEO efforts; it can also be the foundation of all additional strategies for your content marketing. Address the needs of your customers, tell the story of your creation (briefly), and don’t be afraid to comprise some random but intriguing truths as well. Play to your strengths and make it crystal clear what you offer, and why you rise above your competition. For other skilled tips on crafting a killer About Me page, see this excellent article from Pro-Blogger.

Tip #2: Choose Keywords Carefully

If your site is already live, you should be testing your top keywords regularly to see A) how you’re ranking and B) how many users are in fact searching with your selected terms. There is no frontier more dynamic than the digital space, so use that to your advantage. This means you can change what’s not working anytime you need to; it also means you need to wait on top of how your site is performing on a weekly, if not daily, basis.

For local SEO, your keywords should trigger the local algorithm. You’ll know this is the case if you see the telltale Google map with the top 7 rankings noted. If your keywords don’t launch the 7-pack, it’s definitely time to make sure your site’s content pages, social media pages, and all linked content reference your targeted keywords and location.

Tip #3: Geographic Know-How

Whenever Google has more than 7 top ranking sites for any search, those closest to the downtown center of their geographic region often take precedence (referred to as the “centroid bias”). It is therefore critical that if you are closer to one city-center over another, that you target searches according. Likewise, if you’re on the outskirts of town, local SEO is going to be more challenging, so you may be wiser in sticking to the exact town(s) you service and not waste efforts on reaching the closest metro.

Tip #4: Be Thorough and Consistent

You almost certainly already have profiles on the major social media outlets, but are you sure that your key NAP data (name, address, and phone number) is reliable on every one? This is a commonly flubbed and serious SEO task. If you choose to spell out avenue, as an example, do so every time you note your address. If your data is not an correct match everywhere on the web, Google may not know to lump all your profiles and content together.

Tip #5: Size up the Competition

If you would like to know what it takes to get top rankings in your demographic, study the business that currently lands at #1. See how they format their NAP data, and uncover what’s working on the relevant website. You can even copy their NAP information, throw quotes around it, and Google it – the results will help point out how many (and which) directories and citations you need to get top billing. As a comparison, do this for one of the lower ranking sites too. This shows you the bare minimum you need to surpass #7. Make sure to do the same search for your own business, so you know accurately where you rank as well.

Tip #6: Citations, Reviews, and Outreach

Once you’re certain your social profiles and site content are complete, keyword-rich, and reliable, it’s time to make your link sharing and testimonials more robust as well. Link sharing requires a balance of like-minded niches that are not hardcore competitors, joint with high Google credibility and user value. You don’t want incoming and outbound links to just any site, of course – these need to be thoughtfully pursued, and regularly checked.

If any of your link partners lapse into spammy habits or generate partnerships with folks with bad habits, your citation score will diminish in the eyes of Google. The same thing goes with customer reviews. You absolutely must do customer outreach and make sure folks are talking about your brand. It’s not the end of the world to have a few bad reviews, as long as they are heavily balanced by positive experiences. If you’re receiving a slew of negative testimonials, you obviously have some core business issues to decide as well. But no reviews at all will hurt you just as much, if not more. Please don’t fake these – if your customers find out, you’ll have to deal with that outrage and lack of credibility, and you may truthfully never get better.

Likewise, make sure you are listed on the big directories, like Google Places and Yelp. Research local directories exact to your area; don’t just hit the obvious big players. This is where it’s significant to intimately know your audience – who they are, where they can find you, and exactly how they are looking for your services. Consider local neighborhood guides and websites, Chamber of Commerce sites, and city guides. Find groups on ‘Meet up that fall into your target niche, and ask if you can sponsor their group. Community outreach, if well-executed, can be a huge boost to customer acquisition and retention.

Local SEO is a dicey and competitive landscape, but quality and consistency are your friends. Be methodical about your changes and improvements, and don’t do them all at once. Make tweaks to your strategy, monitor the results, and then get better upon the areas that most need it. Keep your eyes on the 7-pack prize – it IS attainable. Ask yourself “Why not my company?”, and you, too, might find yourself on top.

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Five Steps to Build Opt-In Circles on Google+

Trying to start cold with people online is not a quick way to get more conversions. It can in fact do more harm than good to start pitching your content to others when they haven’t shown even the least interest in what you’re giving them.

One way to get more promising leads is to generate opt-in circles on Google+. Circles are a great way to make contacts and make stronger relationships with people through social media. Start with opt-in circles and, as your relationship grows, you can establish moving people further into your inner circles where you can have more sales-oriented conversations.

When you have people opt-in for your content, they are more likely to connect with you and share your content within their own network. This is one of the most excellent ways to see your content go viral.



Setting notifications for those who opt-in helps bring more alertness to the content than if it just pops up in someone’s news stream, where it is regularly overlooked. This is a enhanced way to get attention.

Here are five steps for building opt-in notification circles for your Google+ profile or business page:

1. Create New Circles for new engagers — anytime you see new communication from a person on Google+ you can add them to a new circle that you have designated specifically for new engagers. This can be for any level of communication, like giving your posts or page a +1.

You can choose to add people to the same circle or break it down to those who gave you a +1, those who shared content, or those who left comments, etc.

2. Set up notifications — after you have about 50 people in a circle, you can set up notifications for your posts. When you select “notify by e-mail about this post,” a straight message will be sent to each person to let them know about the latest piece of content.

While this is a powerful tool to use, you don’t want to go overboard with it. If you are posting numerous times a day, you don’t want to start pestering people in your circles. Instead, notify only when you have a significant piece of content that you want to call attention to.

3. Share publicly — it is also a good thought to let people in your circles know if you are going to be adding them to other circles that will be shared publicly. Many people will not mind when it happens, but there can be some who do not want to call any notice to what circles they are in, particularly if your products or services are more sensitive in nature.

4. Offer direct notifications — you can ask the people in your circles if they would like to opt-in to notifications for posts. If they do, you will also want to see how repeatedly they would like to get those notifications. This goes back to No. 2 where you don’t want to become a trouble by over-notifying the people in your circles. Find a happy medium for everybody and stick with it.

5. Create notifications circle. Once you identify which people would like to be notified on a regular basis, you can add them to a new circle just for people to send messages to when you post new content. This makes it easy to click and share.

Google+ only allows you to notify up to 100 people. If you have more people to notify, keep those extra people in a separate circle to add in later on. Then, you can look for any people who are in the notifications circle and are not active and swap them with somebody who might be.

Allowing people the choice of whether or not to be notified about your posts helps to generate a stronger bond with them. You don’t want to overwhelm them with content, but you also don’t want to have your content missed by those who will get the majority benefit from it.

Create opt-in circles on Google+ and you will have an easy way to keep up with leads without having to send out cold content.

Do you use circles on Google+ to group prospects? How else can you use circles to discover more promising leads?

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Top 40 SEO Myths You are supposed to be familiar with About – Part 1


 Myth 1: Just the First Rank Matters

Many eBooks and other resources that business owners use will place an significant emphasis on the need to be at the top of search results, whether that be on Google Search, other engines, or even in places like social media. But surveys have shown that people rather often will look at other results and they will scroll down through the page. Being on top of a second page, for example, can be quite useful for traffic. Also, search ranking is only one part of the puzzle. Now Google places other results on the page like social recommendations and local results as well, which means there are a lot of more avenues open to you, and being in first place is no longer as critical as it once was.

Myth 2: You can do SEO with no outside Help

Doing SEO simply means that you go after a set of techniques and procedures to improve the possibility that web users will go to your site. It is true that anyone can learn these techniques, and, if you are a web site owner and you want to do your own SEO, then you can use up the time to learn and apply those techniques. But SEO can be complex and touches many areas such as marketing online, coding, technical aspects and PR skills. Most business owners just do not have everything required to do a great job at SEO, and that is why so many agencies exist that offer help. An IT worker or online marketer is often not enough if you want truly good results.

Myth 3: META Tags are Very significant

It used to be that each page on your site needed Meta tags in order to rank well. Those are small pieces of code that would offer Google a list of keywords and a description. The search engine would use those to find out what your web site was regarding. Now however, those do not have an effect on your ranking at all. Both Google and Bing stopped caring about META tags awhile back. However, Meta tags are not useless. For example, the description tag is the text that frequently appears next to the link that shows up in the search results, so it still serves a useful function.

Myth 4: Keyword-Rich Domain Names are ranked upper

Back in the dotcom days, it used to be that the URL you used was very significant. Google placed a lot of importance on the domain name, and if you might get a name that had your keyword in it, you would gain a big advantage over other sites. This is why a lot of companies in the late 90′s bought domain names for a lot of money. But now, the indexing process only looks at the actual content of your pages, and not the domain name. The domain name is still important, because people still get to see it, but it will not give you a higher rank.

Myth 5: You have to suggest Your Site to Google or Other Search Engines

All search engines used to have URL submission forms where you might send your site to Google and others. In fact, they still do, but that procedure is unnecessary. The crawlers that these engines use now are sophisticated sufficient that any new site will be found in a matter of days, if not hours. The only time you would have to worry about submitting your site is if for some reason it was not indexed repeatedly after a couple of days.

Myth 6: Submitting a Sitemap will Boost Your Rankings

Google offers a webmaster interface and from there, you can submit a sitemap, which is a XML file containing links to each page on your site. Some site owners take the time to submit such a file every time they make a change, but that is not needed. Submitting a sitemap does not modify your rankings. All it does is add pages which may not have been indexed previously. If your site is typical and has links to all your pages, then it is not needed.

Myth 7: SEO has nothing to perform with Social Media

Before the advent of Facebook and Twitter, SEO was the one and only technique to get traffic in an natural way. But now, social media is all over, and the line is quickly blurring between the two. While some marketers still consider SEO and social media to be dissimilar beasts, the truth is that they are very closely linked. For example, Google now places their own social network, Google Plus, into its search results. If you can get enough important people to talk about your product and link to your site, then their recommendations will show up in any Google search result that their friends do. This clearly affects SEO. On the flip side, Facebook has also entered search, by recently introducing their Open Graph engine, which searches based on friends and interests. So the two spheres are closely linked, and they are becoming closer all the time.

Myth 8: Google does not examine CSS Files

The Google bot used to be fairly primitive and only saw text, which is why many people concentrated on the text part of their web site. But now that engine is very sophisticated and reads JavaScript, CSS, and more. The crawler can certainly see whether your site’s presentation is appealing to users or not. For example, if someone searches on a mobile device and you have no mobile layout on your site, you may be missing out.

Myth 9: You need to modernize Your Home Page All the Time

Some people think that by updating their home page content all the time they will rank higher, or by not updating it their ranking will drop. In most cases that are not the case, since if you have a sales page that offers a product, then there would be no motive to update that page unless something about the product changes and Google expects that.

Myth 10: The H1 Header has Greater Value than the Rest of Your Text

The arrangement of your page is seen by Google and other engines, but you have to realize that many sites are structured in a different way. As such, no one specific tag has more worth than another. An H1 tag is simply a header that corresponds to a CSS entry in order for the user to see your page a positive way. It does not make Google rank your page any differently if you use H2 tags in its place, or if your keywords are frequently in the text and not in an exact CSS tag.

Myth 11: Linking to Other Highly Ranked Sites Helps Your Ranking

Some sites try to link to a lot of other high authority sites in order to help their rankings, but that does not help at all. Google uses PageRank to make a decision how your site will rank, and that algorithm is based on how useful your site is to others, and as such it will only look at how many other people link to you. Whether you link back to them is of no significance. Otherwise, any site could rise to the top simply by linking to millions of sites, which is simply not the case.

Myth 12: Using Automated SEO Methods is constantly Spam

Many people use automated SEO methods that do not fall into the spam area. Many companies have very big sites and they use automated scripts to do a lot of the grunt work of SEO. Whether or not a method is spammy is based on what the result is, not on how automated it is.

Myth 13: PageRank is the Only Factor that Matters

The algorithm that Google uses to rank sites is PageRank, which determines how valuable a site is to others. But according to Google, search result rankings are also affected by hundreds of other inputs. Some of these inputs are easy to see, like having your site being recommended by others on Google Plus. This proves that not just PageRank matters. The company is staying tight-lipped on how many inputs there are and how significant each is, but it is clear that there is more going on than just PageRank. With that said however, it is still generally believed that PageRank is the most vital factor, and a PR10 page is always better than a PR3 page.

Myth 14: The Title Tag is hidden from Search Engines

Most of what Google sees on your site is the text that is noticeable to users, such as what appears on the screen and is rendered in a web browser. As such, it would be simple to think that the title is not picked up. However, your title is very significant for SEO, because it is the text that appears on the link people will click on. Not only is Google using it to help your ranking, but people will also see it when they go to click on your site.

Tips to increase your FaceBook Likes


 Be interesting and relevant


- Be honest

- Interact  : Ask questions, for advice, opinions

- Take a stand for/against something. Gives your brand a personality

- Don't just talk about the product

- Facebook ads work if used keeping the above in mind


Monday, April 22, 2013

Useful guidelines on Hiring a Social Media Manager

The addition of a social media manager to your staff can offer consistency to your brand’s presence and free up your time to focus on running the business. This person will be acting as the voice for your company on some very community channels.

Many businesses know the buzz words or the necessary functions of the community manager’s role on social channels but aren't clear on what they really need or what a community manager does beyond tweeting and posting. A community manager’s role is frequently broader than businesses suppose.

A social media community manager’s job is to drive visibility and engagement of a brand through social media channels. They have to be careful to spot their company in the best possible light while being responsive to all kinds of comments and questions, all while projecting an approachable, knowledgeable and genuine brand personality.

Community managers also have to source and generate consistent, reliable streams of content that are applicable to both the business and their audience for all of these channels. The following are a few things to look for when hiring a social media manager for your little business.




1. No knowledge

Since the field is somewhat new, there is no set career path that someone looking to be a social media manager should follow. You may need to do some interrogating to assess a candidate’s real knowledge.

A smart applicant will want to reveal that expertise clearly on a resume. If that experience is missing, tread carefully. While it is possible that a bright person can learn skills quickly on the job, you will most likely be better off teaching a new hire the details of your industry rather than helping him or her learn the social media angle.

2. Lack of perseverance

The responsibilities for maintaining all of a brand's social media channels add up to a heavy load for one person. It’s completely possible that a social media manager can feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of tasks, updates and responses that the job demands.

Someone with just a passing interest in either social media or in your business is less likely to have the drive to stick with a job that requires near-immersion in mutually. Make sure that you have faith in the candidate’s commitment to the work and that he or she is clear about your expectations for what the spot entails.

3. Reporting and analytics

A community manager should have an exceptional handle on engagement and visibility metrics. They need to be able to gauge the effectiveness of both individual pieces of content as well as the program as a whole.

If your community manager has some marketing operations background, they may be skillful at integrating these social-specific metrics with marketing campaigns and programs focused on customer attainment and conversion.

4. Business savvy

Community managers also comprise to have enough business savvy to take advantage of on opportunities as they arise. News stories and memes become old news at an extraordinarily fast rate.

Having excellent relationships with internal business partners is a key. Community managers will field a broad range of questions from best practices, to support, to sales, to PR. They have to know what the right answer is and where to find it speedily.

5. beyond the tweet

Often, a community manager’s role extends far beyond this description. Sometimes this is out of necessity because many companies don’t have social media-specific roles beyond this title.

Other times community managers started off in other specialties. Think about where the community manager will sit in your organization and what other needs you might have.

Even if your association has a social strategist or director, hiring someone who has skills in a mixture of areas makes good sense. Social is cross-functional by nature and intersects with just about every area of the business.

6. Social business integration

Also, if your company doesn't have a digital strategist or a marketing manager who truly understands how to use social for programs and campaigns that drive business, the burden of social business addition might fall to this person as well.

Ideally, social should already be included into all areas of business. But, practically speaking, this level of change management hasn't occurred at most businesses, large or small.

A community manager’s role is to drive visibility and engagement of a brand through social media channels while projecting an approachable and genuine brand personality. Follow these tips to find the social media manager that’s right for your big business.

5 Ways to Use Census Data to get better Local SEO

When SEO goes local, there are a few new rules that savvy webmasters need to follow. The good news is that census data is readily obtainable and can offer a lot of information to customize and tweak SEO. Along with big data that's available for a reasonable fee (or free), it's significant to use the information that's offered to maximize search engine results. Here are 5 easy ways to put census data to work.

local seo tips


1. Pinpoint Neighborhoods

It's not sufficient to know the trends of a certain city. Even if a business owner has been a native of the town for decades, that doesn't mean he knows every nuance of every street. Depending on what the business is targeting (a certain age, gender, ethnic background, etc.), census data can pinpoint exactly where the most complementary communities are living.

2. Provide for Business Intelligence

Business intelligence (BI) is made up of theories, methods, processes, and architectures that turn data into information that can really be used by a business. BI systems are obtainable as software, or a business owner can contract a BI expert to work directly for the company. BI experts can use census data to generate customized SEO tactics and improve rankings.

3. Go Micro-Local

Great things really do come in small packages, including SEO. The definition of "local SEO" is pretty subjective, and there's always the choice of going micro-local with census data. Forget localizing SEO for a certain city; census data allows a business to micro-localize things down to a zip code, neighborhood or even street.

4. Know Who's Looking

If a business tracks IP addresses (as all should), census data allows the business owner to know a lot more than where the person logged in from. The data reveals that the person also likely falls into a number of other categories, each of which can be used to better offer relevant services, products or information.

5. Constantly Updated Information

The great thing about the US census is that it's updated every few years. There's no relying on outdated information and hoping that the data is applicable. For the most part, census data is collected at the exact right time and chances are slim that information will change drastically between the census years. Business owners have peace of mind knowing their localized SEO information is current.

The best thing about census information is that it's free. It's the largest (free) big data accessible to all. Why not use it to make best use of the bottom line?

What are you optimizing your pages for?

SEO, as you know, stands for Search Engine Optimization, and you might rightly wait for that SEO is about optimizing pages to appeal to search engines. And you'd be right. Increasingly, however, I am finding that clients consider so fervently in SEO that they aren't actually optimizing their pages for sales. If you are falling into the trap, you'll likely be apologetic looking so narrowly at SEO.

This was all brought to mind by connections with two different people the last few days who each are worried about the same thing--search traffic dropping to their sites. When I dug into the circumstances further, I found that neither had any idea what kind of sales they were generating from their sites. One, in fact, knew that the page that had newly dropped in search rankings had an exceptionally high bounce rate, so they couldn't have been selling very much.

What are you optimizing your pages for?
Now, for both of these people, the lack of sales was not a crisis, but the drop in search traffic and the drop in search rankings was a crisis. It was tough not to chuckle at how times have changed.

I guess you've been in the search business a long time when you can remember when you had to prove every nickel that would come in because we did this new SEO thing. No one believed it would work and no one wanted to do it.

And look at us now. Now there are people walking around that have such a rabid belief in SEO that they think it is an end in itself--that high rankings or even high traffic is some kind of magical elixir. It's not.

Getting people to the front door of your Web site isn't the end of the game. Unless you are optimizing your pages to really sell things, online or offline, you're not ready for SEO. In fact, if your Web site stinks, you should almost certainly try to have as few people find it as possible. If you don't know why you want people coming to your site, and then figure that out first. Once you know your site can sell stuff, and then it makes sense to use SEO and any other means at your disposal to drive as many people there as possible.

Google Analytics – Now in Real Time

Have you ever sat down for a Google Analytics analysis session and stopped poring over the results for a moment to wonder correctly how many people are looking at your website, right now? I sure have, and just in case you have too, Google Analytics has been making it easier and easier to find out.

The real-time feature was first rolled out in September 2011, and though other analytics providers had already been providing real-time data for years, none did it as well or as inexpensively (that is, for free) as Google. Recently, Google seems to have been paying more attention to real time tools, leading to some updates to real-time reports back in March, and some new widgets for real-time reporting on April 16.

Google Analytics – Now in Real Time


Why should someone Care about Real-Time Analytics?

In years gone by, traffic was slow to come by and booms and busts were longer in duration. Because of the proliferation of social media the idea of “trending topics” makes everything applicable for shorter periods of time, as one trend gives way to the next. Since trends can spread like wildfire for a short period of time and then be immediately doused by the next big thing, it’s significant to know about exciting increases in traffic and engagement as soon as they happen. Knowing about dramatic traffic increases as they are in the method of occurring allows you to better capitalize on them – perhaps by highlighting a piece of content to the main page of your site, or offering a limited time discount to your new visitors.

There are also some exceptionally useful ways to use the new reporting features. If you have implemented tracking code to monitor your advertising initiatives, now you can instantly test to make sure it’s working – meaning you won’t miss out on any important data as you struggle to get it working.

A further way to use the real-time features is to monitor the result of your offline advertising as its happening. If you’ve bought a radio or television ad, you can watch your traffic blow up during the run of the advertisement and for the minutes after. And if you buy a spot in a newspaper or magazine, you can watch the traffic start flowing in as soon as you’re hot offs the press.

Okay, I get it. Now how do I observe how Many People are on My Site?

In Google Analytics, you should see Real-Time as an alternative in the left sidebar under Standard Reports. If you go to the Overview, you will see a summary of what is happening right now on your website – exactly how many lively visitors are browsing, what portion of them are new or returning, the top referring websites and social sites, and what keywords they’re coming in on. There’s also a scrolling timeline of your page views for the past 30 minutes, a list of the most lively pages, and a world map showing the most actively engaged parts of the world.

You can drill down to see locations, traffic sources, popular content, and events in greater detail.

What Other Real-Time Features are obtainable?

In the March update, Google added quite a few new features. The Events section is new, which pulls from the event actions you've defined for your website to show you what is being triggered in real time. Under the Content report, you can now see what type of device is being used to way in your website: desktop, tablet, and mobile. You can now create shortcuts for segments you particularly like – for example if you just want to see your United States visitors in real-time, or your mobile users. In addition, now when you drill down to a more exact segment, there is a checkbox above the scrolling timeline that lets you evaluate it to all traffic.

In the most recent update, Google added the facility to create a real-time widget in the form of a counter, timeline, map, or table. To add a real-time widget to an existing dashboard, navigate to your Dashboards section and choose “+ Add Widget” from the menu at the top. When selecting the widget type, be sure to choose from the four real-time options instead of the usual options.



Saturday, April 20, 2013

5 Basic Tips to get better WordPress for SEO and the User Experience

WordPress is one of the most accepted content management systems available today. In September 2012, it was reported that WordPress powers 1 in 6 websites.

As someone who codes within WordPress on every day basis, it's easy for me to sell WordPress to customers. They are guaranteed that the CMS platform is future proof – at least for the expected future.

However, downloading and installing WordPress isn't sufficient to make the site successful for SEO, security, and presentation. But the following basic tips will develop your WordPress site for SEO and the user knowledge.

Even though most of you reading this post previously have a live WordPress site, this post will begin at the point just after a self-hosted five-minute install.

Eliminate Some WordPress Defaults

The top item to take away from WordPress sites: the “Hello World” post and “Sample Page”. If the site is still in development, then these elements are OK to have for testing layout and typography. Once the site is live to the public, however, make sure you take away them – you can even delete them from the trash to keep your database a little less cluttered.

Tip: You must rely on better content than the default post and page. If you want to have better sample content you can download the WP Example Content plugin by Josh Ferrara and Jonathan Simmons.

In addition, remember to get rid of (or change) the default “Uncategorized” category. If you want to keep it, at least create a new category that you know will develop into the most popular category for you and set it as default. You can do this within the admin area by navigating to Posts -> Categories.

Why this is good for SEO: The sample page and post “Hello World” is less problematic for SEO, but more significant to remove for user experience. However, the default category must be a top focus for SEO. Your post is generally not uncategorized, so make sure that you create significant categories for all your posts.

Set Your Permalinks

The default setting for Permalinks isn't a professional URL structure for SEO. Changing the setting to Post Name (/%postname%/) is generally best practice. Some like to use /%category%/%postname%/ as their setting but can cause a few issues when content for categories aren't optimized (more on that later).

Why this is excellent for SEO: WordPress’ default setting sets all pages to run via URL parameters, which Google advises against.

Add Some Update Services

When new pages and posts are formed it may take some time for that new URL to be indexed by search engines (depending on the site’s crawl rate). To speed this up, WordPress offer the possibility for you to add update services within the General Settings page. Ensure these four are in the list:

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2 
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping 
http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/pingSubmit?bloglink=http%3A%2F%2www.domain.com/
You can see a few more within WordPress.org, and allstuffweb also offer a much longer list.

Why this is fine for SEO: Having your site indexed is fundamentally the most significant thing for you. If a URL isn't indexed it will never be shown in any SERP. Not indexing quickly or often enough means your site might miss some big organic search opportunities, especially if your site relies on current affairs or breaking news.

WordPress Homepage: Blog Posts or a Static Page?

Originally, WordPress was a blogging platform. Although still basically true, now it's more of a content management system (CMS).

Because its conception was for bloggers, the default setting sets the homepage to output your latest posts. If you want to change this to a static page:

Create an empty page for your latest blog posts.
Go to Settings -> Reading settings.
Choose whether you want most recent posts or a static page for Front Page Displays. 
For each article in a feed, show the excerpt.
Ensure “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is unticked.
Note: some themes really use a different method by letting you choose a page template to output blog posts rather than use the default settings. I’m not a fan of this but am somewhat you should be aware of.

Why this is good for SEO: Solving the issues above will help with potential duplicate content and indexation issues.

Customize Media Settings

By default, WordPress provides settings on how to contract with image thumbnails. I’m not a fan of the default settings – I like to set my own dimensions for all three offered image sizes (thumbnail, medium and large) per WordPress install; and more importantly I like my thumbnails not to be cropped exactly to the dimensions. I don’t like this as, more often than not, I want to upload images that preserve their proportion when resized.

To change these settings, simply navigate to Settings -> Media and change the settings to how you like to see your site deal with thumbnails.

Tip: Already have a site set up and you're simply now realizing you can do this? Want to automatically change all previous thumbnails? There is a solution. Once you’ve changed the settings as above, you can download the plugin Regenerate Thumbnails by Viper007Bond that can do this for you.

One more thing I like to do is untick the month/year hierarchy setting. Some larger sites do have a need for this for enhanced organization, but it’s an unessential setting the majority of the time.

Why this is good for SEO: Thumbnails are valuable to display an image smaller than full size, which helps bandwidth and performance. As an example you may want to upload an image that is 2,000 x 2,000 px – this size will only be needed for people who want to download the full size version. Here it would be better to set a large size to say 940 px to make sure that it fits on most screens – then simply call that image in the source rather than the larger version. Note that this is different than adding the full size image and then resizing to 70 percent in image settings (as the original 2,000 px image is still called and loaded).

Use Google Analytics

You should never run a site without some form of tracking. Google Analytics is free and so easy to implement that there’s no excuse not to use it.

Create a new analytics profile, and then install Google Analytics for WordPress by Joost de Valk. This plugin makes it easy for you to connect your profile to WordPress without the need to use copy and paste (and you can also enter the tracking code manually). Once connected, there are numerous settings that you ought to tweak at your discretion.

Additionally, you should ensure that you enable site search in your analytics profile.

Why this is good for SEO: Having analytics on your site can provide so much useful data and help you complete a number of different tasks such as locating 404 pages, studying how long a visitor browses your site for, and how much traffic you receive from search engines. Incorrect implementation of analytics can cause incorrect data to display. The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin makes it easier for you and adds functionality such as tracking users by username, which is useful for ecommerce sites and ignoring administrators who spend a lot of time in the site and cause anomalous data such as extremely high page views.

Summary

By tweaking some default settings, setting permalinks, adding update services, and customizing media settings – plus installing Google Analytics – you will greatly improve your WordPress site for SEO and the user experience.