Bing Images vs Google Images - Which Is Better?

Google is acknowledged as the leading search engine that has outranked its main competitors Yahoo and Bing. To maintain its lead, Google always tries to revamp its search results with the aim of simplifying search to its users and the search engine giant has been successful at every step. However, now Bing which is a product of Microsoft, has recently posted a blog on its official site claiming that its revamped image search is better than Google. According to Microsoft's Meenaz Merchant, Senior Program Manager at Bing, "every day Bing receives millions of searches from across the Web, and nearly 10 percent of those searches are for images. With 40 percent of search results including some kind of visual component, we know that people are more likely to click on a web page that includes images or videos".

Professionals in the search engine optimization industry have long known the benefits of using image search engines such as Google and Bing image search to attract traffic to target websites. Many SEO experts recommend that marketers and advertisers can use Bing's revamped image search for implementing online marketing campaigns. In that blog post, Merchant explained in detail about the various techniques involved in revamping Bing's image search to beat Google.

• Entity Understanding - According to Merchant, Bing focuses on delivering results based on a user's real intention of what he is looking for. For example, when you search for the image of Brad Pitt in Google, you will get images of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie together as a couple mostly. But in Bing you will get mostly Brad Pitt's images thus interpreting the entity in a different way.


• Computer Vision Technologies - Bing utilizes computer vision technologies such as deep learning. Bing can interpret high dimensional data from the real scenario to understand the image better so that the user is provided with more accurate results.


• Image Quality - Bing says that its algorithm chooses high quality images so that users don't have to click through multiple web pages to get top quality images. 


• Identifying Copy Cats - Bing says that its revamped image search can identify exact duplicate and near duplicate images, which are filtered out of their search results.

You can go through Bing's official blog post for more information about this search engine's revamped image search. If you want to utilize image search to attract targeted traffic to your site, professional assistance is available from a reliable SEO company that is up to date with recent SEO developments and can offer customized solutions according to your specific needs.

Article Source:  Bing Claims its Image Search is Superior to that of Google

Social Media Marketing to Improve your Sales

The online business arena is one that has to withstand tough competition. The extent of the success of your business largely depends on the kind of website you have. Your website is the threshold to your business and showcases the services or products you offer. So it is important to make your website visible to targeted customers that are searching for your products or services using online search engines. Search engine optimization services are designed to enhance the visibility of your website. These professional SEO services help place your website in the initial ranking position in all major search engines, help promote your products and services to a wider audience and can make your online business a big success.

For medium and small scale enterprises, social media marketing is one of the best Internet marketing tools for gaining good exposure. It benefits businesses by boosting their sales and revenue.

In the current scenario, more and more people are making use of the Internet to find product details or purchase the ones they want. The World Wide Web helps businesses to reach the maximum number of customers.

Various platforms are being used by companies for interacting with customers and improving brand awareness. Social media marketing via social media platforms is a successful online marketing technique that can ensure excellent business exposure, constructive interaction with customers and building of a strong bond between clients and businesses. Social media websites such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Google Plus and LinkedIn help businesses market their products and enhance their brand. These websites help in creating business related fan pages, building communities and groups irrespective of the company's products and services. This helps in improving the company’s sales and revenue considerably.

Benefits Offered by Social Media for Your Business

• Worldwide sharing of your company's products
• Helps in knowing public opinion about your business
• Best platform to communicate with your patrons and clients
• Helps in increasing brand awareness
• Useful for receiving feedback about your services and products
• Useful for connecting with various business clients
• Best platform for sharing your company's information such as new product launches, promos and other events
• Direct connectivity with customers
• Provides opportunities for new business exposure

Outsourced Social Media Marketing Services - Points in Favor

Saves Time

Surveys show that 43 percent of the small business houses spend around six hours a week surfing the social media websites. You need to devote more time to your website and enhance its presence on social platforms. It may be a bit difficult with your busy schedules and lack of personnel handling the task. In such cases, outsourcing your social media marketing needs will enable you to reap rich dividends via social media marketing without having to lose focus on other business aspects.

Access to Specialized Expertise

Implementation of the right strategies for promoting your business on social media can be done with the assistance of SEO companies specializing in social media optimization. The professionals in such firms are knowledgeable about the type of social media platforms suiting your business profile, type of content you should be sharing and how often you should post the content. Outsourcing your social media activities can prove to be an effective way for achieving business success via social media.

Gain Fresh Perspective

Social media optimization experts stay constantly updated on the latest social media trends. They also interact with people having different perspectives on social media marketing.  This helps them in coming up with creative ways for promoting your business and making your company stand apart from your competitors.

When provided by a reliable SEO company, social media marketing services can surely improve your sales and add value to your brand.

How to Increase Blog Traffic - 8 Ways

The main reason why people visit a blog is to locate the information they lack. Self-serving posts are not going to benefit you in the long run. As long as the content is not genuine, no one is going to get benefited from your post. Here are eight ways in which you can create appealing blog content and get more people to read it.

1. Create Attractive and Compelling Posts
   
   When you write a blog post, ensure that the information provided is genuine and that you have presented it in a unique way. Embed interesting videos into your posts, which will enhance the integrity of your content as people get to see what is mentioned on the post. Also, create infographics and add them into your blog. As images attract people more than plain text, you can get more readers by including infographics. Moreover, it can easily convey the concepts and ideas explained in the posts to the reader so that they can imbibe them quickly. If you add the infographics in a blog post, readers can easily understand the update.


2. Give More Focus to Blog Tutorials
   
   Of course, fresh content can drive traffic to your blog. But if you post boring subjects every week, they are not going to attract the readers. People always need solid information that can help them in their daily life. The best option is to create a series of unique and relevant blog tutorials. Suppose you own a technical blog. Even though people would be eager to know about the latest technological developments, they would be more interested to know how they can use them in their life. Posts like how to root a Smartphone, how to install some software in a laptop, and such other useful content can drive the attention of more tech savvy people. 
     
3. Use Social Media Accounts for Blog Promotion
   
   Like any other product, your blog posts also need promotion. The best way to promote your blog posts is through social media accounts as it connects to a large circle of people. To promote your content, just sign into your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or any other social media account and post the link to your blog posts there. You can post the link to the blog post on your Facebook account.
   
   Your friends and followers will see this link and are likely to share it. If they share the links, their friends and followers can view this link. In this way, the link will be circulated among a large number of people and drive more traffic to your blog post. 


4. Prompt Readers to Share Blog Posts
   
   You can encourage your readers to share your blog posts and thereby attract their acquaintances to your content. Set up call to actions at the end of the blog posts to prompt the readers to share the links to your post. For example, you can leave a comment section at the end of the post.
   
   Once your readers post the comments, their friends and followers can view the comment along with the link to your blog post.
   
   You can place social share buttons with the blog posts. When the readers click on any of these buttons, they can share the link to the blog posts on corresponding social media accounts.


5. Place Useful Resources in Your Blog
   
   By providing useful resources into your blog, you can convert your blog visitors into readers. You can share free downloadable eBook, podcast, whitepaper, market report and more.
   
   Another good option is to share links to resources in other sites. When you share resources with readers, they will join your mailing list so that they can share the link to your posts with others.


6. Maintain a Positive Attitude towards Readers
   
   You should remain pleasant and approachable to your readers so that you can easily connect with them and establish long-term relationships. Better interaction with readers can help to make your blogs interesting. If you maintain a positive attitude, readers will associate with you and recommend your blog to their acquaintances.


7. Optimize Blog Posts for Search Engines
   
   Majority of people find links to the blogs that interest them through popular search engines including Google, Bing and Yahoo. So you need to also optimize the blog posts for search engines to increase the blog traffic. Learn how the latest search engine algorithms rank blogs and optimize your content accordingly. For example, in the case of Google's latest Penguin update, you need to avoid irrelevant inbound links, link spamming and article spinning to gain better ranking for your blog.


8. Write Outstanding Guest Posts for Other Blogs
   
   You can build a relationship with a new group of readers by writing outstanding guest posts in other blogs. When you write more and more posts, you will have more influence among those readers. Once you gain large readerships there, you can easily encourage them to read the posts in your blog. In this way, you can drive more traffic to your blog.

You can get the required support from a professional SEO company if you want to implement these strategies. They can provide you with reliable blog marketing and SEO services according to your requirements and budget.

Optimizing Your Long Tail Content Strategy

The old trend of long tail SEO is no longer a popular strategy. This earlier technique that focused mainly on traffic had little, if no consideration of user experience. The steps followed were: searching for as many long-tail keywords as possible, generating a landing page for each one of them, placing keywords in title and header tag, writing content stuffed with keywords and focusing only on conversions. For example, preparing a list covering every possible long-tail keyword related to a search phrase 'SEO company' such as 'Best SEO companies', 'Great SEO companies', 'Top 10 SEO' companies and more and using them here and there in your content is an outdated strategy for long tail SEO, though many are still following this.

The focus in 2013 and beyond is primarily on authoritative information. The simple reason is that search engines, particularly Google, now offer users sites that provide authoritative information rather than the sites that facilitate only easy conversion and with practically no informative value.

If you have a growing business, and want to optimize your content for long tail keywords, then here are some innovative strategies you could follow.

Getting the Most Out of Your Team

The first step would be to call your team together and talk about the pages or content that you want to create. Discuss various aspects of the content based on your experience and get suggestions from your team. Your in-house team will have excellent domain expertise and can easily come up with the right and most effective ideas.

For example, if your business targets local market, then you should make your content attractive to local customers. You can discuss with your team about the latest trends in local search, how to implement them in your content and other related things.

Understand Your User Requirements

Once you have formed a clear idea about the content requirements, find out the actual needs of users. Think about what users expect to find when arriving at your page or content. You can interview past users, conduct a poll for prospective customers or do online research to get the desired information. While mapping out content that addresses more number of users, you can find out which long-tail keywords will work best for you. For example, if you own a juice business, you can find out the products that are most popular among users by means of interviews and polls. If most of them prefer grapes juice, you can make use of the long-tail keyword 'best grapes juice company'.

You should not only search for what people expect from your product or service, but also check for the things that people want and you do not offer. Based on this information, you can create a more comprehensive solutions guide for users rather than highlight only those you offer directly. This will help to find out long-tail keywords that may not relate to your business.

Conduct Competitive Research

Checking the strategies of competitor sites will help you to set up a baseline, if you are new to the business. For example, if you have created a page for your jewelry business for the first time, you can search other sites to find how they have placed the content which describes the qualities of their products and used the long-tail keywords. However, it is not a good strategy to copy their approach. Use their approach as a baseline and develop your own ideas. Look at the sites of authoritative competitors. Those sites will help you for more than a baseline. By checking what they do differently, you can develop fresh, creative ideas easily.

Quantitative Research Based on Informative Value

It is a good idea to research into keyword volumes so that you can prioritize the most important ones. But, it does not mean that you should consider the volume before user experience. If a keyword is searched for around 500 times and it does not add any value to your visitor, then you can't reap any benefits by exploiting that keyword. Hence, give prime importance to the informative value of the content and then consider keyword volume.

Generate Sample Design and Get Feedback

Create sample designs and get feedbacks through different mockup services including UserTesting.com, Mechanical Turk and others. Revive the pages/content according to the feedbacks.

Check for Page Relevancy

You should check whether the page or content that you created is relevant to your website or to the Web. The page or content should be of real value if it is to be relevant. This can be checked at any stage of the page creation process.

Each of these strategies will work best only if there is a dedicated team to implement them. The best approach would be to get support from a professional search engine optimization services company that provides reliable keyword research services.

Importance of HTTP Status Codes in SEO

HTTP status code refers to three-digit numbers which are returned by the servers and tell us the status of the sites. A professional SEO company will know when to use the right code for its clients.

Numbers and Their Meanings

The first digit of every three-digit code starts with one of the numbers from 1 to 5. There are the following status codes from 100 through 500:

Codes in the 100s are informational and indicate that the request was received and the process continues. Codes in the 200s indicate the reception of the request and its successful processing. The 300s indicate the reception of a request but the need to carry out another step for the request to be completed. The 400s symbolize client error in that the request was made but the page has lost its validity.  The 500s indicate server error - there was a valid request from the client but server could not complete it. 

 
Codes 200 and 301

Code 200 symbolizes successful request and is correct for most of the scenarios. The 301 code indicates "moved permanently". The resource has been given a new URL that is permanent. Future references must utilize one of the URLs that were returned. The 301 redirect must be used any time a URL must be redirected to a different URL. 

Code 302

The 302 code indicates that the server is responding to request with a different location page. However the requestor keeps using the original address for future requests. Code 302 is not favorable since the search engine crawlers will consider the redirect as a temporary arrangement and not provide the page with the link juice power of 301 redirects.  

Codes 404 and 200

The code 404 indicates "file not found". The server could not match the request URL. There isn't any indication of the status of the condition, whether it is permanent or temporary. This occurs when the server is unable to find a page request that is matching. Webmasters often display Text 404 Error when the response code is 200. This gives search engine crawlers the indication that the page has correctly rendered. Sometimes the webpage is indexed wrongly. 

Codes 410 and 404

The 410 code indicates that the page is gone and is not available any longer at the server and also that there is no known forwarding address. This is roughly a permanent situation. Clients who are able to edit the link need to delete any reference to the request URL following the approval of the user. If the server cannot determine the resource, the 404 status code must be used.

Code 503

The status code 503 indicates the failure of the server to grant the requested URL due to the maintenance or temporary overloading of the server. 503 must be used in the event of a temporary outage. It gives the warning to the search engines that the site is only temporary down.  

Tips for Remembering

Basically here are a few tips that you absolutely need to remember - 301 redirects must be used instead of 302 redirects when redirecting URLs. Web pages returning 404 for long periods of time and having valuable links should be redirected to other pages with the 301 code.   When visitors request pages returning a 404 response code you must have customized 404 pages with navigational options. 

An established search engine optimization company offering professional SEO services will have a clear idea about the relevant codes to help its clients attain the maximum benefit without suffering any downtime in traffic and rankings.

How Advanced SEO Services can Improve Search Engine Visibility?

Advanced SEO Services to improve search engine visibility can be availed of from professional SEO companies. These services can help boost your online presence on an international scale and also within specific geographical areas. Search engine optimization can make your site an effective system to generate sales leads for your company.

Common SEO strategies that would be adopted by an SEO firm include:

• Keyword research and analysis
• Article submission
• Press Release Submission
• Link building
• SEO copywriting and rewriting
• On page optimization
• Off page optimization
• Ongoing monitoring
• Ranking reports
• Optimization of internal navigation
• Modification of site code
• Promoting the website and company by writing for SEO forums

When looking for a professional SEO service provider, look for the one that performs only ethical SEO techniques. If any company promises you instant results, drop it immediately. They might be adopting black hat SEO strategies such as cloaking, keyword stuffing, doorway pages, and invisible text.

Importance of SEO Content Writing

One of the important advanced SEO services offered by any SEO firm is SEO content writing which includes web pages, articles and blogs. The key to successful SEO copywriting is to satisfy both the readers and the search engine spiders. That means creating content which holds on attention and is interesting, free of grammatical errors and with appropriate marketing jargon and "calls to action" wherever necessary. The content should be in accordance with the latest search engine algorithms.

Advanced SEO services to improve search engine visibility can be customized to suit individual requirements and budgets. These affordable SEO services are also available for different industries – medicine, healthcare, art, fashion, immigration, ecommerce, and so on.

Affordable SEO Services to Boost Your Online Presence

Choose Carefully

To benefit from affordable SEO services that would help to enhance your online presence, you must exercise wisdom and discretion in your choice of SEO company. There are many SEO companies that charge less and provide poor quality solutions. Although, the fact is that search engine optimization is an expensive task and affordable doesn't essentially have to mean incredibly low or just low prices. You should consider the reputation of the company, services offered, and then balance these against the service cost.

Devise Custom Solution for Greater Success

Affordable SEO services are available for customers from different industries - healthcare, finance, business, medicine, music, art, fashion, photography, immigration, and so on. If provided by a really good SEO firm, these services would not only follow a global format. For a particular website to improve its brand image and get maximum targeted traffic, a custom solution has to be devised. For example, the design of an e-commerce website would include such features as shopping cart, merchant account, and payment gateway.

Improvement in online visibility would bring in valuable sales, leads and return on Investment. Some of the ways by which affordable SEO services help to achieve this is given below:

• Determination of keywords which probably website visitors would use to search and find you.
• Studying the competitors including the inclusion of keywords in their web content.
• Natural, ethical incorporation of keywords into grammatically correct web content, title and meta tags.
• Article, blog and directory submission for added number of inbound links.
• SEO friendly website design.

Driving Consistent Growth

Affordable SEO services should not stop with helping to boost your online business presence, and achieving associated benefits. It is a fact that 7 million web pages are being added every day. Thus, it is quite possible that your page would be pushed off from its front pages ranking and replaced by another website. The results have to be maintained consistently which can only be achieved through ongoing efforts.

The Key Benefits of SEO and Internet Marketing Services

Internet plays a significant role in today’s business field. Businesses with a good online presence can quickly increase their profitability. Effective SEO and internet marketing services can help business to easily improve its online reputation.

Effective SEO Services to Improve Website Visibility

To attain more website traffic, businesses should ideally be listed in the top 10 positions of search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, Hotbot, Infoseek. To keep you ahead in the online business, experts providing SEO marketing services are highly skilled in the latest search engine optimization techniques, current web standards and practices. With their knowledge in search engine algorithms and code optimizations, they help your websites gain top rankings in search engines. Internet marketing services help to:

• Attract more website visitors
• Improve visibility
• Increase sales and conversions
• Reduce your promotional expenses

Benefits of Internet Marketing Services

Internet marketing is one of the best means of distributing marketing messages about your services, products and businesses, online. They develop appropriate marketing plans and provide the finest Internet marketing services to meet the marketing needs and demands of your business. With their offline promotion, co-branding, email campaigns and concept creations, they help web pages gain more popularity on the web. Services offered as part of Internet marketing include:

• Directory submission
• Optimization of existing sites
• Keyword and data mining
• Branding
• Web designing
• Content development
• On-Page optimization
• Link building
• Blogging
• Pay per click advertising

Create an Online Presence for Business

Whatever are your website optimization projects, effective SEO and Internet marketing services help you find new markets and achieve a strong online presence easily. This helps build worldwide brand exposure.

Ethical SEO Strategies to Promote Your Business Website

The most important SEO strategy is to rank higher in major search engines, that too in an organic and natural way. This helps your business websites to achieve greater increase in traffic and conversions. Robots, spiders and web crawlers are sent by search engines to crawl and index the webpage content. Let's look at the various steps that will help build up your web pages for optimal indexing. The purpose behind SEO is not to confuse or trick the search engines, but to provide them with lots of clues related to your web page. Given below are some ethical SEO strategies to promote your business website.

Use Keyword-rich Title

Include those keywords which you feel people might be using and will use to find you. Write the descriptive title using 5 - 8 words. Move away from using filler words like "and", "the". Place title at the top of the web page between <head></head> tags in the format <title>Ethical SEO Strategies to Promote Your Business Website</title>. Plan to use some descriptive keywords along with your company name on the home page. Apart from the company's name, words which are likely to be searched by the people should also be used. Remember, this title identifies you on the search engines.

Write a META Description Tag

A short description below your hyperlinked title is given in the search engine result pages. This is a short description, describing the whole content of the page, so include key phrases and main keywords in the description. META description tag should be placed at the top of the web page between the <head></head> tags.

Include Your Keywords in the Header Tags

Keywords appearing in the page headlines are considered by the search engines. Hence ensure that you use desired phrases and keywords in header tags H1 and H2. Make use of H1, H2 and H3 tags, for providing hints to search engines regarding the headlines,

Place Your Keywords in the First Para of Your Body Text

Search engines expect to find your important keywords in the first paragraph of your content. This paragraph includes the introduction of the whole content of the page. Remember to use keywords in a natural way and not artificially. You should ensure that there is no overstuffing of keywords and the right keyword density is maintained.

Create a Search Engine Friendly Navigation

Users may find the navigation menus created using Java Script and Flash appealing, but search engines do not read it. Java Script and Flash navigation menus should be substituted by HTML links at the end of the page for making them readable for search engine robots. Ensure that a chain of hyperlinks should be include that will lead the search engine spiders from your home page to every inner page of your website while indexing.

Create a Sitemap

In case your site consists of a large number of pages, creating a sitemap facilitates easy navigation of your site and availability of all the pages on your site.

Get benefit from the above SEO strategies and increase website traffic by outsourcing the SEO tasks to an organic SEO service provider. Such an SEO company has right skills and abilities to discover the right SEO strategy for higher search engine ranking.

Google+ Marketing Tips and Strategies

Social media is becoming a huge platform for strategic business promotion and a number of businesses are successfully making use of popular social media sites. Apart from standard platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, Google Plus is raising as a great platform for marketing. Google Plus has features specially cut out to suit businesses. One of them is the facility to join as a brand.

Mentioned below are 6 tips you could consider when opting for Google Plus marketing.

• Use Circles and Hangouts – Google+ marketing offers a way of creating groups where members get to learn more about your business. In case if you have created a presence on Facebook, your friends can be imported to Google Plus Circles. Hangouts bear similarities with Tweet Chats but in a video format. But the video discussions are limited to 15 people in most of the cases.
• Customize your Google Plus URL – You can directly create your unique URL using the name of your business through Google. Google plus service can be used for creating a customized URL for your account. This helps in building your online brand presence.
• Get the Most Out of Google Plus Events - Announcements can be made by making use of the events function. Dates of your upcoming store promotions and sales, Tweet Chats and Google Hangouts can be posted. Options are there for making your event public and including additional information about the places of tickets availability for the event. Use of Gmail can integrate well with the calendar function.
• Setting Up Google Authorship – Setting up of Google Authorship apart from being simple can also increase brand awareness and improve SEO. This can be done by including a link to your Google Plus profile on each of your blog posts, and also include a link on your profile to your blog posts.
• Participate in Other Google Plus Hangouts - Participating in other Google Plus Hangouts, especially of those who have participated in your Hangouts, is a wise choice. It is the best way to express your interest in them just as they have expressed interest in you.
• Be Patient - Even though Google Plus marketing is viable, it does not match up to the popularity of Twitter or Facebook since yet. However, it is best that you are not over concerned about your Google Plus viewer ship, but wait for your popularity to build up. You should always be reliable in your efforts by posting high quality, relevant and interesting content on a regular basis. This will ultimately lead to considerable increase in your popularity.

Enhance your social media presence irrespective of the platform you use. Whether Facebook, Google Plus or Twitter marketing, you should always focus on posting relevant and engaging content. Also, it should be interactive to your users. Contests, posting polls, giveaways and voting are some of the ways of gaining a strong following. Significant relationships with your customers can be attained by tailoring each post to individual social media websites.

SEO Tips to Get Targeted Traffic

Developing SEO strategies which can drive immense traffic to your site especially visitors later converting into customers is not an easy job. However, the best way to earn from your website is to generate potential traffic or visitors intending to avail of your services or products.

Hastening the process of having your site noticed can be done in many ways. Here are some of the methods to generate specific online visitors within a short period.

Post Blogs To Target Long Tail Keywords

Blogs are one of the useful tools available in business to drive traffic to your site. So if you don’t have a blog section on your site, include it now.Use long-tail keywords in your blog posts’ titles (e.g. How to learn SEO) to generate traffic and enhance the performance of your site. The strategy helps take your blog posts on top of SERPs through off-page optimization and link building.

As blog posts rank on their own based on topical relevance seen by search engines, your pages will be ranked on top page of SERPs due to advantage of low competition keywords. This will result in more organic traffic to your site.

Target 3-5 Keywords For Each Page 

It is a smart move to create pages or blog posts with intention of ranking for more than 2 keywords as it allow your site to draw more traffic to your site. With your site having 15 blog posts or pages monthly with each page targeting 3 different keywords will amount to 45 keywords helping in constant flow of traffic within a month.

Do this simple strategy. Combine your targeted keywords on post’s title, page, on the body copy or URL. The given below keywords, which can be used within the content body, can be targeted (Top 10 advanced on-page SEO strategies):

• Advanced on-page SEO strategies
• On-page SEO strategies
• On-page SEO
• Advanced SEO
• Advanced SEO strategies
• Advanced on-page SEO
• On-page optimization strategies
• On-page SEO techniques

Do Follow Blog Commenting

One of the most effective ways to promote your site and improve your keywords’ search rankings is to comment on same theme blogs allowing do-follow attributed links. This method allow you to acquire relevant backlinks and build possible relationships with other bloggers. The technique has the advantages of taking your campaign a long way. Networking is extremely beneficial when it comes to guest blogging, sponsored reviews and in-content links. Make sure that comments are left on the blogs with the anchor texts and keywords as the rankings can be improved to a great extent.

Guest Blog Posting

This method of link building is very advantageous as it helps to improve SERP rankings, acquire links of high quality and also helps to drive relevant traffic. While writing guest blogs, you should choose such topics that are strictly related to the keywords that are aimed at. The link that is built through the author bio will help in getting higher scores. However, this depends on the targeted traffic and the relevance.

Forum Participation

This is definitely a great way for starting any campaign if one wants to participate in high traffic forum sites and high PR sites. Establishing a knowledgeable and expert image through this channel is very beneficial.  When one is genuinely active in the community, targeted visitors can be brought.

Article Submission

This is a very good method that has been successfully used for many years now. Highly relevant links as well as consistent traffic can be generated. The rankings on search engines can be boosted. Solid links can be built if the article is an informative and solid one. When such an article is submitted to trusted directories, one can attract valuable targeted visitor traffic.

The best way to generate highly targeted traffic or visitors to your site is to hire quality SEO services offered by a professional SEO company. Such companies have right skills and abilities to discover the right SEO strategy for higher search engine ranking. 

Reliable SEO Company for Your Business

Search engine optimization (SEO) is important for the promotion of online businesses. It is effective and affordable compared to other marketing  techniques. It is a fantastic way to build a global audience. Websites optimization is done by utilizing the latest techniques so that great online visibility, extensive customer base and top search engine ranking can be achieved. An established SEO company would provide customized and affordable SEO services to increase the ranking of their businesses websites on major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing and others.

Range of Services Offered By Professional SEO Companies
 

• Keyword research and selection - Reasearch end identify the right keywords for your business. Then, these keywords are strategically used in the content developed for promoting the business. When someone searches for products/services using these keywords, the website is listed on the top pages of search engines.
• SEO copywriting - SEO copywriting services include creating relevant, informative and keyword-rich content that attracts search engines as well as the readers.
• Website design - An experienced service provider would provide a web design that is well-organized and can bring excellent ROI.
• Social media optimization - Optimizing your website for various social media sites is a sure way of gaining great exposure and developing your brand. Professional SEO services make the best use of social media platforms to enhance their client websites and expand their reach.
• Link building services - When there are incoming links, the natural placement of the website on the search engine is determined. When proper back links are built, higher search engine rankings are achieved and more targeted traffic is attracted.

What Benefits You Gain by Outsourcing to a Professional SEO Company?

It is important to plan the right SEO strategy for your business website. However, this task can prove a daunting one if you attempt to do it yourself. As the algorithms of Google are being constantly changing, professional help is required for maintaining high rankings. This is why the help of professional companies is required for many businesses. An established company has a good team of experts who implement proven strategies that help in maintaining the search engine rankings. Both off-page and on-page factors are taken into account when optimizing the website. These SEO experts stay constantly updated with the latest develop
ments in the web marketing field.

What Can Be Expected From a Right SEO Company?

• Use of Ethical techniques - The right SEO company would only use white hat and legal techniques for promoting the website.
• Customized solutions - A professional SEO company would develop the right strategy as per the business for achieving the desired business goals.
• Expert team - The business would have a project manager and an exclusive team for implementing the online marketing campaign.
• Constant monitoring - The performance of the site would be tracked constantly and reports would be provided regularly to keep you informed about the progress.

SEO Services to Improve Web Traffic

Professional SEO services are an effective tool for improving the volume and traffic of your website website. In fact, one of the ways to find whether any marketing strategy has been a success or not, is to see if sales and traffic have perked up, or remained the same. Properly implemented search engine optimization strategies can also improve how a brand is viewed by internet users.

Hire a Professional SEO Company

Coming up with a good SEO strategy and successfully implementing it is not that easy. Years of experience might be required. As such, if you’re new to SEO, it is advisable to approach internet marketing or professional SEO company to help you achieve your online marketing goals. Such a company would research your business, the market you’re aiming, what the competitors are doing, and the up to date search engine algorithms. If you have a website which is not doing too well, they would analyze it to identify and correct the problems. All this would be done to catch the eye of the search engine spiders, to ensure that they give you a worthwhile SERP (search engine results page) ranking.

SEO - A Good Investment

Here are some of the features of professional SEO services which can bring you good investment returns.

• Ethical SEO tactics
• Attractive and SEO friendly website design
• Targeted and properly tagged web content with no spelling or grammar errors.
• Maintenance of proper keyword frequency
• Only acceptable placement of keywords
• SEO press releases
• Blog and article marketing
• Link building, including backlinks

These services would help, whatever be your business sphere – finance, art, e-commerce, religion, healthcare, immigration, technology, or music.

To sum up, professional SEO services, if ethical and performed in the right manner, can greatly improve the volume and traffic of your website.

SEO Services to Get More Visitors

Professional SEO services offered by a reliable SEO company can help you get more visitors through higher search engine rankings. Search engine optimization, an internet marketing technique will help increase the quality or volume of website traffic coming from search engines through organic or algorithmic search results. Optimization ensures that web pages can be read by the search engines, and gives more importance to key topics related to the content. Advanced SEO would include extensive research into the elements of site structure and page design.

Higher Search Engine Ranking to Achieve Good Online Visibility

If a particular company wishes to get good online visibility, its website should be at any of the initial pages of the search engines, if not the first page. This is because most people look at the first few pages, when doing a search on a particular word or phrase. Google, Yahoo, MSN and Bing are some of the major search engines.

Professional SEO services include:

• Keyword research
• SEO copywriting
• Development of credible, original SEO content with compelling calls to action
• Meta tagging of web pages
• Optimized mapping of the website's URL construction
• User-friendly SEO web design
• Skill in particular geographies and markets
• Link building
• Viral marketing
• Submission to top directories and search engines
• Social media optimization
• Social bookmarking
• Social media listening
• Web analytics

A professional search engine optimization company may also offer content rewriting and reworking, and website revamping and maintenance services.

Choose a SEO Firm that Follows Ethical Methodologies

A truly professional SEO company follows only ethical methodologies, as opposed to black hat techniques. It is always better to get results gradually through acceptable methods, rather than to get quick results, through illegitimate methods that could cause your website to be banned.

If your goal is to get more visitors through higher search engine rankings, look for a reputable search engine optimization provider.

Source: SEO Services: Get More Visitors through Higher Search Engine Rankings

Social Media Impacts on Business

Social media has forever changed the way we interact wit the world. Your presence on social media networks can have a significant impact on your search engine result page ranking. That's why businesses need a well-planned social media marketing strategy.

The Importance of Social Media Presence for Your Business

Social media has improved the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) strategies for businesses. Social media optimization can increase SERPs of your website, improve brand awareness, and generate leads. Membership in social media sites helps you interact directly with their customers, collect feedbacks, reviews and comments (positive or negative) and modify or change their strategies accordingly. Here are some of the main reasons why business chose social media as part of their marketing strategy.

• As of end-2012, there were about 2.4 billion internet users worldwide and the number is increasing
• Over one billion people are sharing their ideas, views and experiences through interactive websites
• About 69 percent of US mobile users access the internet on their phones daily.

Advantages You Can Obtain From a Professional SEO Company

The best way to leverage your presence on social networking sites is to outsource your social media optimization tasks to a professional SEO company. A competent service provider can build your online social presence and enhance your marketing benefits using the following strategies:

• Keyword research
• Content development
• Article and blog submission
• Twitter marketing and Facebook marketing
• Link building on social media sites
• Viral video marketing
• Social bookmarking
• Forum submission, and more   

The skillful use of these strategies would help create a buzz on these interactive sites and get connected to your targeted clientele and business associates. Share your high value content and engage with them. This would work wonders to make your presence felt.

Social media can also help you build your brand. The service provider would build your profile taking care to create your profile name and description to clearly project your brand and link them to your site. Your content would be constantly updated.

Every page of your website would be provided with buttons that make it easy to share your content. This would help visitors share what they like on high-value networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest. It’s important to choose the most effective social media platform for your brand - the one that your followers use the most.

With more people surfing the web via smartphones and tablets, your service provider can also provide you with social media marketing mobile SEO strategy. The impact of social media on marketing will continue to grow in importance and only an experienced search engine optimization company can help you meet your business promotion goals.

Human Involvement in Link Building

Its very difficult to get a link from DMOZ (open directory project or simply web directory that organizes websites) because each link is approved by human editor before it is listed. Human involvement in link building is an organic SEO technique and will definitely result in the generation of valuable content for users. Conversely, unethical approaches will focus on questionable strategies that may prove costly in the long run. It is not enough that you "get" links; you must "earn" them. Human involvement or research involving human participants is essential for successful link building.

Understand Your Niche

While building links for your site, the first thing you need to do is understand your niche that is understand your industry and the challenges you will have to face. If you have no idea about your competitors, the best bloggers in the relevant field, the issues related to implementing your business goals and other details regarding your niche, you can’t understand the real purpose of links that you are building for your site. Backlink research, advanced link building tools or search operator strings are not going to work for you unless you have a clear idea about the real purpose of link building. The human brain is the perfect tool available to analyze the latest developments in the relevant industry and interpret how they are going to affect your site.

Popular Research Techniques

The second and the most important phase of the link building process is to identify the sites to which you want to link. Here are the most popular research techniques you can use for this task.

• Simple Search - This technique is nothing but putting basic search strings or complex ones on search engines (Google, Yahoo or Bing) and finding the niche sites.
• Link Building Tools - You can use link building tools like Ontolo to discover suitable sites automatically. Tools like Google News and Reddit can gather articles/posts from different sites and show up in a common space. You can try out every imaginable keyword with these tools and pick up good sites.
• Browse Various Industry Sites - Rather than using google, you can browse various industry sites. Check their blogs and also the websites to which they are linked. This is somewhat similar to basic research and can bring you a variety of results.  
• Competitor Research - Checking the backlinks of your competitor sites will help you understand the different ways in which link building is done for your business niche. This will help you to develop a better strategy for finding suitable sites.
• Utilizing Social Media Outlets - Search through different social networking sites and gather information of good sites. For example, you can search hashtags, search profiles and tweets through your Twitter account and generate enormous number of results. 
• Networking - Communicate with different people who have experience in your industry. This can bring you better results. If you build relationships with these people and expand your network, you can gather more relevant results.

The human element is essential for executing most of these techniques successfully. Undoubtedly, only the human brain can analyze and understand the content in the competitor site more clearly than any other research tool. Besides the information you gather can be processed only by the human brain. A dedicated researcher who knows what to do with the sites that you find through these techniques is very important for successful link building.

Determine Website Quality

Assume that the link building tool you select is not a good one. You would end up linking with a site that does not exist or is corrupted with some viruses. Link building will be effective only if you choose reputable sites. So, what makes a reputable site? There are several factors that determine the quality of websites such as domain authority (how well a website performs in search engine ranking), fresh, updated content written by real people, good advertisements, large number of audience and much more. Only the human brain is capable of determining all these factors accurately. Moreover, communicating with blog owners and webmasters can help you to understand whether the link resource is good for your site. You can also analyze the requirements of their audience and find some new link prospects.

Pick Up Quality Links from the Huge Numbers

If you think you can drive more traffic to your site by building a large number of links, you are mistaken. Only quality links (links that are relevant to your content) can bring better, consistent traffic. If you distribute links indiscriminately in your content, it will lead to link spamming which can invite penalty (negative ranking) from search engines, particularly Google. A good researcher is required to track search rankings, efficiency standards, time and link building goals while building links and ensure the quality of links. Even though there are research tools available for this purpose, all of them require a human brain to analyze data and results. Only the human brain can communicate effectively with raw data, hyperlinks and complex search operators and pick up quality links from the huge numbers available.

A professional SEO company can help you with effective link building strategies for your website. With a reliable firm, you can obtain tangible benefits with the support of experienced SEO specialists rather than rely on automated solutions that may or may not bring the desired results. 

2013 Social Media Marketing Trends

The success of social media marketing lies in the right mix of profitable strategies. The wrong combination will reduce the traffic from targeted customers rather than attracting them. If you develop your social media strategies such as social media optimization on the basis of current trends, you can increase profits and can use social media sites effectively for marketing. Here are the trends highlighted in an article published by Forbes based on the 2013 Social Media Marketing Industry Report.

Decline in Usage of Social Bookmarking Sites

According to the research reports, the use of social bookmarking sites has declined from 26% to 10%. This considerable drop of usage clearly indicates the fall of bookmarking sites. Even though the sites including Twitter, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Pinterest are still popular among marketers, majority of sites (e.g. DIGG, Friendfeed) are almost dying. Therefore, it is not a good practice to trust a bookmarking site blindly for marketing purposes in the current scenario. Instead, check for the sites that are most popular and perform the bookmarking very carefully.

End of Daily Deal Sites

Daily deal features or simply daily offerings of deals are considered as a powerful way to attract a large number of targeted customers at a time. The research report says that around 80% of marketers are not interested in using the most popular daily deal sites including Groupon or Living Social for their campaigns in the near future.

Now people concentrate more on the considerable amount of returns that they receive from their purchases over time. Hence, it is advisable to use social media sites for long term marketing goals rather than daily goals.

Top Sites for Social Media Campaigns

Marketers who use social media for marketing will obviously perform social media campaigns (using social media sites for promotion) for their products or services to attract targeted customers. The campaigns will be successful only if the relevant social media site is popular among the customers.

The research report indicates that marketers who spend more than 40 hours a week for social media marketing carry out their campaigns more intensely through Google Plus, You Tube, Pinterest and Instagram compared to those who spend six hours or less a week on social media marketing. Also, around 92% of marketers who have five or more years of experience prefer LinkedIn than 70% of marketers having less than five years of experience. Forum marketing has also decreased to 16% this year from 24% in 2011.  

Around 67% of marketers are planning to increase campaigns through Twitter even though it is a slight decrease from 69% last year. Young marketers, more than older ones prefer photo sharing sites including Instagram for launching campaigns.

Here is the picture which shows almost 14 social media platforms and the percentage of marketers that prefer them. The results shows around 62% chose blogging as most suitable platform to master, which is the highest one followed by Google + (61%) and Facebook (59%).

Trends in B2C and B2B Marketing

Business to Consumer (B2C) Marketers uses Facebook at a higher rate of 67% than other platforms. In the case of Business to Business (B2B) marketers, both Facebook and LinkedIn have equal majority of 29% each. Given below is the pie chart showing usage statistics for each platform with regard to B2C and B2B marketers.

From this chart, we can understand that B2B marketers use a more diverse array of platforms compared to B2C marketers. Both of them do not completely utilize blogging and have minimal You Tube usage.

If you are a B2B or B2C marketer, try to encourage blogs as they are regarded as the most popular social media platform. YouTube being the second largest search engine, you can enjoy the benefits it offers by posting low-cost videos. Orabrush (B2C Company) and Blentec (B2B Company) have become strong brands by making use of low cost YouTube videos.

As B2B marketers increasingly use LinkedIn, they have an opportunity to utilize SlideShare (owned by LinkedIn). This social media entity can be used for generating leads for B2B organizations.

Fewer Online Check-ins

As per the research reports, there is a decrease in the usage of geo-location services including Foursquare from 17% to 11%. These services allow check-in to your locations automatically online. The decline in these kinds of services indicates that people are now more worried about privacy and safety. Marketers can undertake this situation by introducing contests and rewards. This will encourage people to check-in more.

If you are still following the old strategy for social media marketing, then it is the time to develop new strategies based on all these current trends. It is better to hand over this deadly task to a professional SEO company that offers reliable social media marketing and search engine optimization services rather than trying to implement the strategies on your own.

Why Business Needs Local SEO?

For the past few months, I was struggling to get my restaurant business in Denver, Colorado on the initial pages of Google Places, Yahoo Local and Bing. I finally found a solution to all my difficulties - Local SEO. I contacted a professional SEO company offering local SEO services. After evaluating my business and its visibility issues, the SEO team offered me with an SEO package that included a wide range of strategies designed to enhance the search engine page ranking of my website and drive more traffic and sales. Let's look at how these strategies worked to promote my business.

Local Business Listing Sites: Local SEO makes use of local business listing sites (e.g. Yellow Pages, Yahoo, Google, Bing etc) that target geo targeted terms, for optimizing local search results. The SEO Company provided strategies that helped increase the ranking of my local business listing on these sites. Now, when someone searches for Denver-specific data relating to my business, the information on my business that is stored on all these sites appears as a top search result.

With improved online visibility, I found that more local customers have started to visit my website, which is working to promote my brand. My SEO service provider took care to choose only local listing sites authorized by Google for promoting my small business.

Back linking:  Local SEO services include building inbound links to a business website. In keeping with Google's latest Penguin update, my SEO service provider took care to build backlinks to my website from reliable websites with content relevant to my business. I understood that relevancy was important because the search engines identify keywords on the basis of the backlinks. Another significant factor is link speed or the speed at which backlinks are created. The SEO team built backlinks slowly and systematically, as any unnatural speed could make Google look at my links as spam. In addition, they also employed tactics such as social bookmarking, article and forum submissions and other off-page activities. Keyword variations, branded text, and other strategies were adopted to improve results.

Social Media Promotion: They also used effective social media optimization strategies to drive target audience to my website. They built my business profile on popular social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and more and created posts in them which helped draw local customers to my website. They spread the posts via 'Share' or 'Like' buttons. As search engines, particularly Google, show search results from social media sites (Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter, and more) these profiles are also helping to drive more organic traffic to my site. The SEO team also promoted my business by creating videos and images of my restaurant and sharing them through YouTube and Pinterest.

Social media marketing involves the maximum utilization of marketing potential with the features (paid advertising facility, contests, business pages in the case of Google+, and more) in social media sites. In my experience, focusing on a particular social media site for marketing purposes (Facebook Marketing, Twitter Marketing) is the best way to promote your business online.

Online Advertising

Pay per Click advertising (paying money to search engines to display your website on top search results) is observed as a powerful way to promote business online due to easy implementation, high ROI and better traceability. The SEO team provided my business with PPC advertising services, also known as geo-targeted PPC. The advertising was focused on the Denver area, which resulted in more local customers visiting my website. Both open-ended keywords and focused keywords were used in my geo-targeted PPC.

The local SEO services provided by the SEO Company help to attract more local customers to my website and helped in the online promotion of my restaurant - something which I definitely couldn’t have achieved on my own.

SEO Strategies after Penguin 2.0

Now that Penguin 2.0 has been rolled out, online marketers are ardently analyzing its impact on search engine optimization (SEO) tactics. Penguin 2.0 features a new generation of algorithms, goes much deeper than former updates and impacts even smaller areas quite significantly. The main aim of this update is to penalize spam websites and ensure that only high value websites achieve top search results rankings. Penguin 2.0 has affected around 2.3% of English US search results.

Matt Cutts states four main issues that Penguin 2.0 will tackle:

Content

Like former algorithmic updates, Penguin 2.0 highlights the significance of quality content. Matt Cutts says that if you have high quality content, then no need to worry about the different changes that the new algorithm has made. Ensuring you have original, informative website content, articles, blogs, product descriptions and press releases are necessary to enhance your SERP. So what this update prompts is the growth of a content strategy for both on-site and off-site optimization.

Industry Authority

The new update has the ability to detect authority in the particular area. So if you are a physician with authority in your space, your website would rank higher in search engines. Google’s search engine algorithms will help your website if it provides visitors with information on their issues, attracts links from other authoritative sites or publishers, gets a lot of attention on social networking sites like Google Plus, and has a decent way of converting traffic to sales. Normally spammy sites will be automatically demoted.

• Author Rank - Google created Author Rank to identify and trace the identity of genuine authors across the web. What you need to do is set up a Google+ account and have authorship markup implemented. Participation in Google+ allows Google to evaluate and rank you based on the content you are sharing, your audience size and quality, the number of +1s, and so on.
• Rich Snippets - Snippets help users to identify whether the search result from a particular website is appropriate to their search. Your Google ranking depends on rich snippets in its search results. Gain more authority with an author rich snippet that allows your name and picture to come up along in search results related to your content. 

Consider these factors seriously while optimizing your content for Penguin 2.0.

Advertorials

Google has imposed stronger measures to deal with advertorials that violate its quality guidelines. Penguin 2.0 will target any site that pays for coverage or advertisements. These advertorials will not flow PageRank. This simply means that you cannot improve your ranking by purchasing authority. This could seem a threat to link building for search engine optimization. But, the fact is that the new algorithmic update supports natural link building.

Link Profile

Clean up your link profile if you don’t want to be hit by Penguin 2.0.

• Link Value - Links from bad neighborhoods that use unethical techniques can affect your website’s ranking. Reliable guest blogging ensures that the links are acquired from reputable sites. Publishing original content with your link in it is a high value backlink.
• Link Velocity - Penguin 2.0 penalizes link spammers. Keep an eye on the rate at which your website acquires links.
• Link Relevancy - Building links from sites that are not related to your industry will affect your rankings in a Penguin 2.0 environment.

Build the Right SEO Strategy

Google is also planning a variety of additional quality signals for sites that close to border zone of being affected by the Panda algorithm. This is expected to soften the effects for sites with some quality that were previously affected, says Cutts.

Penguin 2.0 update has given a new meaning to search engine optimization though Cutts has made it clear that the new algorithmic change targets web spam, and not SEO. However, the right search engine optimization strategy can help your website. Consult a professional SEO company providing affordable SEO packages that can boost your natural search engine ranking in the face of these changing algorithms.

Google Plus Marketing Strategies

Google Plus is better known to be a corporate account providing the facility to share company information among a wide circle and encourage followers. It allows business owners to connect their businesses with customers and attract more traffic to their websites, which will finally lead to more conversions.

The whole process of utilizing Google+ facilities to increase the traffic to a business website is termed as Google Plus Marketing. The most popular strategy to enhance Google Plus Marketing is to link your website with Google + page, either by generating a relevant Google + profile or mentioning about the website in the post. Other than that, there are quite a lot of strategies that encourage successful social media marketing with Google Plus. Let’s look at the best ones among them.

Widen your Circles and Use Google Plus Ripples

Arrange your Google + connections into various groups using ‘Circles’ feature so that you can share posts with specific groups from which you can receive maximum traffic. You can sort connections into Circles of family, friends, social media, news and much more. Ripples is a Google Plus feature which can show up the entire circles of shares with a openly shared post and help you connect with the most important influencers in your business field.

Submit Posts Consistently and Optimize for SEO

Post relevant content consistently to increase the PageRank for your posts. Higher PageRank will drive more traffic to Google+ posts and then to your blog or website. Write original content and use the right keywords throughout your posts for gaining a better place in search results. Add suitable images to your post for increasing the reliability of the content. Approach a professional SEO company and employ search engine optimization on your entire content to make it more competent.

Promote Interactive Google + Posts

An interactive Google+ post will have the facilities of call-to-action button and deep linking. Call-to-action button helps customers to take relevant action based on the product or service described in the post. For example, if you add the call-to-action label ‘Buy’, then it will allow the customers to explore the ways to buy the product. Obviously, it will drive attention of more customers to your post and finally to your business website. Deep linking can direct the clicks received for interactive posts to Google + app installed in mobile devices so that it can drive traffic from mobile users too. Interactive posts also include ‘Share’ button for sharing the posts among circles.

Use Google + Huddle and Hangouts

If you have added your clientele into your Google + circles, you can communicate with them more effectively using Huddle and Hangouts. Customer feedback is also an important factor in any business. Huddle provides group chat facility by which you can keep in touch with your customers and access their feedback. Hangouts provide you with video conferencing and group conversation facility which is an effective communication tool for social media marketing.

Adding +1 Button to Your Websites

If you add Google’s +1 Button to your business websites, it will give you a chance to recommend the content in those sites to friends and followers in your Google + account. Log into your Google Plus account and you click the ‘g+1’ button, now  you can see a window with a text field to enter the e-mail address or Google Circles or Groups and ‘Share’ button. You can add the circles by clicking on the desired group. Like this, your business website can draw audience attention towards the website.

Create a Business Page on Google +

Google + Business Page is the latest feature released by Google + only for entrepreneurs. If you already have a Google + account, you can create a business page after choosing relevant items from five categories such as Local Business or Place, Product or Brand, Company, Institution or Organization, Arts, Entertainment or Sports and Others. Once you fill in this crucial information, you can customize the page by adding photo and tagline.

Google business page can give your business an identity and the details you have entered earlier will help your page come up in top search results during location specific search, product specific search and more. This will drive traffic to your page and slowly to your business website. Other from that, it contains the facilities such as Ripples, Hangouts and +1 Button which open new possibilities of social media marketing.