Showing posts with label search engine optimization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label search engine optimization. Show all posts

Wednesday, 19 March 2014

YouTube Marketing - Promote Your Brand to the Next Level

Online video is virtually dominating the internet, and businesses are striving to keep abreast with this trend and promote their brand. YouTube is a great platform that businesses can effectively utilize to promote their messages. It is important to be aware that most people visit YouTube for the primary purpose of entertainment and therefore businesses must create and publish YouTube videos that are entertaining enough.

Video marketing has been adopted by many famous brands such as Sony Mobile and Jamie Oliver's Food Tube, which are taking advantage of YouTube's mammoth audience base to engage with their potential customers. Compared to other traditional search engine optimization strategies, videos in your SEO plan can maximize your outreach and attract more number of customers. Let us consider how YouTube fits into an effective search engine optimization plan.

YouTube Marketing for Business Success

Video SEO based on YouTube analytics essentials, can play a solid role in deciding the success of your marketing strategy. According to this report that quotes Chris Clarke, chief creative officer at DigitasLBi, the agency that produces YouTube content for Sony Mobile, YouTube remains the biggest and best video site on the web. However, brands aren’t leveraging YouTube talent in the best way. Brands need to provide content that operates in the ways YouTube and its communities operate. Only then can they make the best of YouTube marketing.

Though challenging, businesses can choose from the many promotion options available on this popular video channel. Pre-roll ads that run before videos and are skippable can be created. This is an economical option since the advertiser needs to pay only when someone watches the ad for at least 30 seconds. There is also the option of buying ads that appear at the bottom of the screen during video or buying display advertising on the site.


Here are some reasons why you need to consider YouTube marketing.
  • Absolutely free and easy to upload your video in YouTube and share it with others.
  • No need to spend on web servers to store your video, as it is possible to host it directly through YouTube.
  • YouTube easily accelerates the broadcast of the video and helps to reach out to a massive crowd.

Find the Perfect YouTube Tool

YouTube provides powerful tools which you can use to create excellent content, share content, build a strong fan base and effectively market your brand.
  • YouTube Capture: This enables you to create movies on the go, capturing every moment. You can record as many clips as you want and any number of clips can be stitched together. Moreover, you can trim and reorganize the clips conveniently from your phone and even add a soundtrack that you prefer either from your own music library or from Capture's audio library. Upload your video to YouTube and simultaneously post to all of your social networks.
  • YouTube Video Editor: This is another valuable YouTube tool that can be used to enhance your uploaded videos in your web browser. You can combine videos, add music and text effects, trim and rotate clips, insert transitions and stabilize clips. You can auto-fix and fine-tune the colour and lighting using a panel of controls and soothe the shakiness of the video. Options are available to alter the speed of the play. You can specify half speed or quarter speed and include smooth slow motion effects. The face blurring property of the tool identifies and removes the anonymity problem of actors. You can also add your favourite music from the approved tracks available in the library.
  • YouTube Captions: With this tool, you can add, edit or remove captions and create automatic captions.
  • YouTube Analytics: This tool allows you to monitor your videos/channel with up-to-date metrics and reports. Data is available for Views, Traffic sources, and Demographics. This tool can be accessed through youtube.com/analytics.
  • Audio Library: This enables you to download background music for your videos. It is absolutely free as well.
To gain ultimate success in your business, you need to have a clear-cut understanding about video marketing tactics and trends. YouTube is a prevailing platform to optimize your video content. Make the best use of the built-in tools available in the website to enhance your visual content and gain maximum visibility for your brand.

Take some time to learn about the use of videos in SEO, and how YouTube can help in promoting your brand and improving your reputation. A professional SEO company can guide you in this regard, while providing video SEO services customized to your particular requirements.

Thursday, 6 March 2014

Paying Attention to Three Elements - Content, the Links and the Social Signals - Is Crucial for Success in SEO

Google's web spam hunting algorithms, Penguin 2.0 and Penguin 2.1, have literally changed the face of SEO. If you really want your business to be easily found online and not lose out to competition, you should stop using old-school search engine optimization strategies such as article spinning (replacing the words in any existing article with other words manually or using software and posting as your own article), link spamming (building as much as links without checking relevancy) and keyword stuffing (using number of keywords unnaturally for boosting up rankings). Instead, the way things are at present, you should focus on three things - creating great content, credible links and social signals. Let’s take a close look at each of these critical factors.

Great Content

Unless you create fresh, compelling content and organize your site well, no one is going to visit your website, regardless of your optimization efforts. So, what makes great content? Pay attention to the following five key aspects:
  • Keyword Research - You can optimize your business website only if you know how your targeted visitors search for your products and services. Proper keyword research is important to find the right keywords for optimizing your content. The right strategy - prepare a list of possible keywords or phrases that might be used for searches, analyze the search volume of each term and check which ones have low competition but are still relevant to your customers.
  • Organize the Keywords - Once you have a list of relevant and less competitive keywords, organize them by mapping them to major sections on your site. Suppose you are a plastic surgeon in Manhattan, New York. Your business site will have several pages that talk about the services offered at Manhattan and New York. The best keywords for those sections are 'plastic surgery New York' or 'plastic surgery services Manhattan'. Here, knowing what sections of your site to target for the specific keywords in your list is very important.
  • Optimizing Content - While optimizing your content with relevant keywords, make sure that you are using the right keywords naturally. Do not overuse keywords for the sake of getting higher ranking. Include your primary keyword in the title and Meta tags.
  • Better User Experience - Your site should load quickly when clicked and visitors should be able to take action easily and quickly. In other words, user experience counts for better click-through-rates. Ensure that your site is easily navigable for visitors. To improve user experience, check the bounce rate (the rate at which visitors leave your site after viewing just one page) on Google Analytics. If the bounce rate is high, it may because you have not optimized those pages so they correlate better with the search terms or because of complicated design. Don’t hesitate to seek professional website design services if necessary.
  • Efficient Web Design - Make sure that your site design is clean (not spammy) and well-organized. Design the site for optimal conversion rates. If you have a site with obsolete design and want to build an authority site, consider upgrading rather than developing a new site.
  • Frequently Updated Blog - Google ensures better ranking for sites with fresh, up-to-date information. Blog posts are among the pages that search engines crawl and index the most. So regularly updating the blog on your site can improve search ranking.

Credible Links

Earlier, search engines would consider your content more valuable if it received more inbound links. Inbound links can still build trust and authority, make your page rank higher and drive more traffic, but they must be high quality links from a site which is reputable and relevant to your industry. Quality link building is possible in the following ways:
  • Guest Blogging - Find an appropriate blog and send a pitch to the blog owner with an offer to write a post for their audience. Once you build trust with this audience, you can make them visit your site too and build organic links. However, make sure that you are choose reputable blogs relevant to your industry and content.
  • Press Release Submission - Create a newsworthy press release, optimize it smartly and submit it to an effective press release distribution service to build more organic links and improve your brand reputation. Google’s recently published link schemes say that using forced optimized anchor text in press releases will result in a drop in search engine ranking. The best optimization strategies are to link call-to-actions instead of keywords, minimize the use of keywords, and add Google Authorship and no-follow all links. You can distribute social media press releases - multimedia, bookmarks, blog posts, images, embeddable components, RSS feeds and much more - for a broader audience and receive lots of organic links.
  • Spice Up Your Content - Instead of writing new content each time, you can re-package your existing content across various platforms and mediums. For example, you can add images to your White Paper and distribute it as a video through You Tube or Vimeo.
  • Utilize Real-World Connections - Engaging in various real-world activities such as sponsoring local events, speaking at conferences, or becoming a member of a professional associations will give you the chance to list yourself on their websites with your company description and website link.
  • High-Quality Directories - Do not list your site in every directory you find. Look for the directories where it will be useful to list your sites such as local directories which help to rank for location specific keywords, professional directories that focus on your industry, and established directories that focus on your area of expertise.

Social Signals

Social networking activities can really improve your online brand reputation as they have a direct impact on search engine rankings today. Whatever you share on social networking sites will go viral in a shorter time. Still, the quantity and quality of social mentions matter to search engines. You can generate quality social signals in the following ways:
  • Engagement on Social Networking Sites - Create an authoritative and appealing profile (you can create business pages) on social networking sites and engage actively by sharing content, thanking people for shares and retweets and joining discussions. Spend few minutes regularly for this.
  • Brand Your Social Presence - You should make a strong social presence by staying active on social networking sites and also build your brand in three ways - brand your profile name and descriptions and link to your website, ensure that your profile layouts and design stay similar to your website, and share professional content constantly in your brand's name.


  • Easy to Share Content - Make sure that your content can be shared across various social networking sites. Place social share buttons in your content (as given below) for that.
  • Choose an Effective Platform - Rather than being present at every social networking site you know, consider the social behavior of your target customers and select effective platforms accordingly. This will increase your social signals. However, having a presence on Google+ is very important today as the posts published on that platform are crawled and indexed very quickly and can pass on link equity.

These elements are the bedrock of a successful SEO campaign. Rather than stumbling at tedious optimization task, get support from a professional SEO company that offers comprehensive, affordable SEO packages.

Saturday, 1 March 2014

Matt Cutts Speaks Out at Pubcon 2013 Moonshot, Core Search quality Changes and the Future

At Pubcon 2013 at Las Vegas Matt Cutts talked about the track Google has been taking to improve user experience.

“Moonshot” Changes

The search engine giant has made some, what he termed, “moonshot” changes that deal with the following: 
  • The Knowledge Graph has enabled Google to comprehend entities in the World Wide Web rather than only searches. It has helped make the search engine more knowledgeable and smart and identify things rather than “strings”, according to Cutts.
  • The Knowledge Graph has proved pivotal in the Hummingbird algorithm overhaul recently launched by Google. In relation to this, Google is working on improving its conversational search and voice search capabilities. Cutts highlighted Google’s efforts towards understanding the relationship existing between words in search queries. 
  • This is particularly relevant with voice search. When users make a query and get results and then make another one in relation to the earlier query but without expressly identifying it likewise, Google can figure it out and provide appropriate results. For example, if a user asks, “What are the Pyramids” and performs a search and then asks “How old are they” Google’s deep learning can identify that this query is connected to the previous one.


Points on Core Search Quality Changes

Cutts then moved to the major quality changes at the core of the Google search engine’s functioning.
  • “Hummingbird” is the topic looming here. Hummingbird has been launched with the aim of improving natural language translation. It helps Google identify the most relevant and important words in a search query and develop a concept based on which it provides the results. This is basically intelligent scoring, and Hummingbird has already been felt on 90% of the queries. Most users have not suspected any changes though they are beginning to receive more relevant results.  
  • Cutts also talked about softening or reducing the effects of its Panda update which would enable some of the affected sites to be brought back. 
  • With smartphone ranking, Cutts revealed that Google would not display a Flash site to users who do not have Flash in their smartphone. 
  • Cutts also said that webmasters can continue to deepen the content they have on a topic which would help increase their authoritativeness on the respective subject.
Observations on the Future

Looking toward the future, Cutts revealed that the only aim of Google is to provide information and to increase its capability of being able to provide answers for specific queries. He also acknowledged the growing importance of mobile devices and the fact that 40% of all YouTube videos are played in mobile devices.

Matt Cutts also said that getting social signals are symbols of authority in the long term and indicate that you are worth listening to. It is exactly what the search engines will think as well. 

These are vital points that an experienced and professional SEO company will be noting to prepare its clients accordingly. An efficient search engine optimization firm will prepare in advance for changes such as these so that its clients can continue to perform effectively in the search rankings. 

Thursday, 20 February 2014

Why is a Professional SEO Service Important for the Success of a Business?

Having an attractive website is not enough for achieving success in online business. The website should be visible to your target audience. Improved visibility means improving your site's ranking in search engines. When your site appears on the top of web search results, this will drive more traffic to your site and help you achieve more conversions. And search engine optimization (SEO) is what helps you get there! Everybody who's in any kind of business knows all this. What they really need to know is why professional SEO service is important for the success of a business. Here, the key word is 'professional'.

You can have an in-house team to manage your SEO. But the field is really quite challenging and there are many things you have to know to achieve your online visibility goals. Choosing a professional SEO company would offer many advantages as compared to services offered by amateurs. Here are the top benefits that a reliable service provider would offer:


SEO knowledge and expertise:- Professional SEO companies have a team of dedicated team of SEO experts with comprehensive knowledge of current search engine optimization strategies. They can leverage SEO best practices. These experts would have in-depth knowledge of online marketing, different types of business models, the psychology of web users, the specific target market, the social media scenario, web design and development, web analytics, viral marketing, web content, products and much more. As strategies differ with the nature of businesses, they would perform an analysis of your site using the right tools and develop the specific SEO tactics it needs to succeed. With a reliable firm, you get a team of SEO talents under one roof such as web designers to design your website, content writers to create quality content, an online marketing team to handle search engine marketing (SEM) and PPC ad campaigns. Professional SEO has a three tier approach - technical to study the structure of your site and how well search engines crawl it, on-page optimization, and off-page optimization. Only a combination of these three elements can spell online success.

SEO professionals keep track of with Google's constantly changing algorithm and how they would affect your search results. Google's aim is to weed out low-quality websites that do not provide users with useful information. Understanding how Google evaluates a website and ultimately determines which sites to show for which search queries is not easy, but less challenging with a professional SEO team working for you. They would know how to modify your SEO strategy to deal with these changes.

Customized services:- Every business has different requirements. With a professional service provider, you can get customized SEO strategies designed specifically to attract your target audience. SEO can target different types of search such as local search, image search, video search, news search and industry-specific vertical search. Local SEO is important if you want your business to be seen in a particular geographical area. For instance, if you are a plastic surgeon in New York, higher visibility in search for plastic surgeons in that area would be a great advantage.

Moreover, a strategy that works for a plastic surgery website may not necessarily work for an online shopping website. Take web design, an important aspect in SEO. The plastic surgeon's site may need patient education videos and road map showing the direction to reach the surgical suite. An ecommerce website, on the other hand, would need product search options, shopping carts and secure online payment options. An experienced SEO company analyzes each client's requirements and provides it with a personalized strategy.

Faster results:- A professional SEO company can develop effective strategies to generate faster results. Regular monitoring and updating is carried out to evaluate your website’s performance, traffic, back links and rankings. SEO strategies that are used to improve rankings have to be analyzed to know which ones are effective and which ones would require a few adjustments, testing and changes.

Time to focus on your core business:- Hiring a professional service provider is productive. It will help you focus better on your core business activities rather than worrying about how well your business is doing online. Your professional SEO company will take care of this.

Finding the right SEO Company can be a challenge. Cost should not be the only factor when you are looking for an SEO partner, though many professional companies do provide affordable packages to suit all kinds of budgets. Look for an experienced service provider that can communicate well, understand your goals and provide you with an organic SEO services to gain more search engine traffic.

Monday, 27 January 2014

What You Need to Know When Hiring an SEO Company in 2014

The face of search engine optimization is fluid with Google and other major search engines continuing to make major changes to search engine ranking factors. Choosing the right SEO company in 2014 can make a big difference to your online visibility and success.  The challenge lies sifting through the many providers out there, all of whom make promises to provide you with top search ranking using a slew of SEO strategies. However, not all SEO companies can implement the right tactics to provide your business with real value in a scenario of algorithmic and other changes. As Google says, "Deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision that can potentially improve your site and save time, but you can also risk damage to your site and reputation".

Things to Watch out For

SEO Company 2014

  • Companies that guarantee high ranking overnight
  • Spammy emails
  • Beware of a company that is secretive
  • Watch out for 'Cheap'
  • Part-time SEOs

Points to Help You Make the Right Decision

The most important criterion is that you should be aware about what Search engine optimization is and what you are trying to accomplish. Always get recommendations and suggestions from experienced business associates or from search engine optimization savvy people you trust. Browse online for search engine optimization firms and make a shortlist of a few SEO companies. Contact or visit these companies and see how they respond for your queries and doubts. Get an idea about the services they offer which is easy if a free trial is offered. Ask about strategies and prices. Keep the following factors in mind while choosing your SEO service provider in 2014:

  • Long term or short term SEO
  • Check for references and reviews
  • Look for ethical strategies
  • A company that works as part of your business

Search engine optimization is a slow and steady process. A good search engine optimization firm is the one that provides you with ongoing reports about their activities and contacts you regularly to give suggestions on how you can tweak your website to spike visitor interest and traffic for higher conversions and sales.

Tuesday, 21 January 2014

Quick Tips for SEO Success in 2014

Future of SEO - An Overview

Every online entrepreneur desires to expand the business and attain great success in future years to stay ahead in the market. Search engine optimization or SEO is significant with regard to enhancing website visibility and appeal. It is important therefore to analyze and learn more about the SEO success factors in 2014.

Best Practices in SEO


SEO includes a series of processes that are designed to enhance the visibility of a webpage or website in major search engine results. Pages that are viewed frequently and have the most number of relevant keywords are listed on the top. Unique set of strategies are available for on-page and off-page SEO.

  • As a marketer, you should be aware of the search trend in 2013
  • Know about the future of SEO
  • Make your mindset active

To gain success in the social media marketing scenario, you need to have an active mindset to think about social, mobile, and local aspects. You need to research hard on the common industry norms and adopt quick changes to be in the forefront. Constantly share the link of your website and update the contents with relevant keywords to engage the visitors. Even if new technologies are implemented, the content of your webpage remain to be the most significant feature that decide page ranking.

To sum up, search engine optimization (SEO) is a major factor that decides the success of an online business. Make sure that you structure the future activities based on SEO success factors in 2014.  You should also be familiar with relevant topics such as structured data, semantic search algorithms, and webpage ranking to be in the business.

Facebook Marketing - A Widely Accepted Internet Marketing Strategy

Internet marketing took a new turn with the entry of social networking site Facebook which now has over a billion active users. It is now the most sought marketing platforms by all kinds of businesses. According to marketing experts, Facebook marketing owes it popularity to its simplicity and ability to reach out to a wide audience. Facebook provides businesses with the opportunity to create brand awareness among the millions of registered users and to target users who can become their potential customers.

Growing Popularity of Facebook Marketing

Facebook Marketing

Facebook offers several marketing tools for businesses.
  • Facebook fan page can attract more clicks
  • Facebook Likes
  • Facebook Ads
  • Effective content posting platform
  • Word-of-mouth is effective on Facebook
  • Facebook Apps
Get Professional Help to Achieve Your Social Media Marketing Goals

To make the most of your social media campaign, partner with a professional SEO company that offers Facebook marketing services. A reliable company’s expert team can provide your business with affordable and effective ad strategies and customized pages to enhance your ‘likes’, brand awareness and sales.

Monday, 13 January 2014

Advantages of Mobile Website Optimization

Most people now use their mobile phones to browse online. Users can now get connected to the Web from wherever they are and whenever they want with just a few clicks. With the growing popularity of mobile devices, businesses are looking to provide users with an optimal browsing experience on their smart phones and tablets. Having a mobile optimized site means smartphone users are automatically redirected to a URL that is a separate version of your site that has been designed to display well on smart phones. Only sites that are mobile-optimized will display on Google search results on a mobile device.

Mobile SEO


8 Benefits of Mobile Website Optimization
 

Research suggests that about 25 - 30% web traffic comes from mobile devices. As per recent studies, mobile users are 51% more likely to get engaged with an online business if it has a mobile website. Here are the main advantages of mobile search engine optimization

  • Improved User Experience - A professional SEO company can create a mobile website design which offers the best experience for users and satisfaction with quick accessibility. It is important for companies to develop strategies which shape mobile user experience in terms of functionality, content and marketing, context, design and user input. A mobile website specifically designed hand-held devices enhances user experience, there by building a positive impression about the business.

  • Builds Brand Identity - A mobile SEO website platform helps your organization to stand out and build an individual identity. A fully optimized mobile website shows that the company is up-to-date with the latest technologies in the market.

  • Increased Download Speed - It is important to create mobile websites in accordance to the specific mobile standards and optimum loading speed. This results in less waiting time and more browsing options for users. 

  • Responsive Website Design - There are many different types of smartphones. Leading SEO companies can provide responsive website design to allow your website to automatically change to fit the device it is displayed on.

  • Portability and Connectivity - Mobile website optimization helps a user to access a company website from anywhere at any time. Hence, a constant connectivity provides a new opportunity to reach the target audiences at any time. 

  • Higher Search Engine Performance - Mobile SEO services can help a website to gain higher rankings in mobile search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing and many more.

  • Better User Engagement - As part of mobile website optimization, users can easily get engaged with mobile-related specifications such as mobile couponing, click-to-call, social media sharing, mapping and more. In case of a small local business, users can very easily locate its website by using location-aware technology. This technology connects users to the website provided they are within the direct geographic location.

  • Competitive Advantage - It is very important to create a unique mobile website design to stand out different among other competitors. A proper mobile website design should be able to capture the immediate attention of smartphone users and encourage them to stay longer on the site.

Google recognizes smartphone users as an important and expanding segment of Internet users, and wants them to "experience the full richness of the web". Accordingly, Google recently published their recommendations and common configuration errors on smartphone optimized websites so that businesses can avoid them. Relying on a professional mobile SEO service provider can ensure compatibility and a great user browsing experience.

Article  Source - http://exploreb2b.com/articles/advantages-of-mobile-website-optimization

Making Use of the Right SEO Techniques

From small local companies to multinational corporations, every business needs search engine optimization (SEO) to be found online. Moreover, it's important that businesses make use of the right SEO techniques if they want targeted visitors to find them. If you are just starting up, one of the first things you should think about is your audience. You should then devise a customized online marketing strategy based on keywords specific to your niche to get higher search engine rankings and draw the targeted traffic to your site.

SEO Techniques


SEO Techniques to Enhance Your Online Reputation


Professional SEO companies provide a slew of techniques to help their clients get found by people and search engines. Partnering with a reliable SEO company is the ideal option as it would provide you with the services of a team of SEO specialists. Search engines like Google are constantly changing algorithms which mean that a technique that works at one time could become obsolete soon. You would end up getting penalized and lose your search ranking if you don't follow search engine guidelines while implementing your campaign. Here are some important SEO techniques you should know about:

  • Identifying keywords that can attract traffic
  • Good, frequently updated content
  • Legitimate link building strategy
  • Be active on social media

Affordable SEO Solutions are Available

An established SEO company can provide you with affordable SEO packages to choose from. In fact, they will perform an SEO analysis on your site and recommend the package that will best suit your needs. These budget-friendly SEO services would include ethical on-page and off-page strategies to enhance your online visibility and attract the right traffic for higher conversions and sales.

Monday, 6 January 2014

SEO to Target an International Audience

To attract customers in a particular area or territory, you would normally create content specific to that territory and implement search engine optimization strategies to attract local traffic and induce more conversions. However, if you are targeting customers at a global scale, you would need to use other optimization tactics, especially with regard to the way you structure your URL and your domain name. Here are some important tips offered by SEO experts to target a country:

SEO Tips
  • Top Level Domains - Top level domain or TLD is nothing but an extension of your registered domain name. For example, the registered name of the popular search engine Google is google.com where its TLD is ".com". TLD is used by most organizations to attract international traffic. When you target a specific region or country, you use that country's TLD or ccTLD such as .us for the US and .uk for UK. A full list of TLDs is available at the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority website. 

  • Using Subdomains - When you are performing SEO to attract a global traffic, you can use subdomains (such as usa.yourdomain.com). Some years ago, Google started to treat search results from all subdomains as part of the root domain instead of treating them as if they were from separate domains. Subdomains are beneficial when your website is hosted in separate locations and in separate languages. If not, use subdirectories.

  • Subdirectories - You can use domain directories or subdirectories instead of using different domains per country, for instance, xyz.com/in for India and abc.com/cn for China. This is a useful strategy for small businesses that do not have a big website and many inbound links. Domain directories provide such companies with a larger link profile for their root domain while distinguishing between locations and languages.

If your business needs to reach out to an international audience, find a professional SEO company offering advanced SEO services.  This would help ensure effective techniques and strategies for long-term benefits in leading search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing, and greater visibility before a global audience.

Monday, 30 December 2013

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".

Google Image Search

Bing Image Search

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 SourceBing Claims its Image Search is Superior to that of Google

Wednesday, 25 December 2013

Social Media Marketing to Improve your Sales

Social Media Marketing
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.

Monday, 16 December 2013

How to Increase Blog Traffic - 8 Ways

Blogging Tips
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.

Monday, 9 December 2013

Optimizing Your Long Tail Content Strategy

Long Tail SEO
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.

Monday, 2 December 2013

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.


HTTP Status Codes

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.

Tuesday, 19 November 2013

Affordable SEO Services to Boost Your Online Presence

Choose Carefully

Affordable SEO ServicesTo 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.

Tuesday, 12 November 2013

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.


Wednesday, 6 November 2013

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

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

META 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 in Headers

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

Keywords In First Paragraph of Content

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

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

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.

Friday, 25 October 2013

SEO Tips to Get Targeted Traffic

SEO StrategyDeveloping 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. 

Friday, 11 October 2013

Reliable SEO Company for Your Business

Professional SEO Company
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.