Google AdWords Tips for local business

Google Adwords can be a great advertising channel to boost your online sales. Purchasing ads through Google is a viable option to get your website to the top of Google search results by successfully bidding on keywords. Let us quickly take a look at some effective tips on how to efficiently use Google Adwords for your local business to generate more leads and improve your online sales.

Track your conversions

As Return On Investment (ROI) is going to be at the top of your list, you need to ensure that you keep track of what is giving you the highest conversion in your website. Although monitoring the click-through rates in your website is an important step, you need to realize that it’s just the tip of the iceberg. If you are going to monitor only the click-through rates, then it means you’re not utilizing your resources properly. Use Google Adwords to monitor all the e-commerce transactions in your website. Take a detailed look at which area of service or keyword combination is getting converted more and is giving you a higher ROI. For best results, you may also track the non-monetary elements such as downloads, enquiry forms, newsletter signups etc. Identifying and focusing more on the profitable areas is the key to a successful online marketing campaign.  

Manage your ads and bids

Develop ad groups for multiple keyword variations relevant to your services and manage the ads and bids accordingly. One great way to use Google Adwords effectively is to distinguish between the research group and the sales group. That is, a visitor who lands up on your product information page should be treated differently from a person who visits your sales page. For instance, someone who is has done an online research for “treadmill stores in Chicago” is more likely to purchase your product than someone who looks for “best treadmills”. So, you need to vary your bidding strategy according to your target consumer.

Attractive ads

The design of your ad can make a huge difference to your Adwords campaign. Catchy words or images will not only grab the eyeballs of prospects but also get you a high CTR ranking thereby boosting your ad’s quality score, minimizing your cost-per-click (CPC), and guaranteeing your ads a higher placement in the Google search results. This, in turn, results in a high ROI for your website.

Ad Extensions

Ad extensions can support your existing ads for improved results. It is for this reason that most e-commerce sites use product extensions for their ads. The ad extensions will display titles, images, snippets, and prices of your products. It’s worth incorporating seller ratings, call extensions and sitelinks for your ads. Typically, seller ratings work wonders when your ads get a higher rating. The sitelinks can be useful to display additional links pertaining to your area of service and the call extensions are meant for call-to-action purposes. 

Custom Landing Pages

Most website owners make the mistake of directing all their ad links to their home page. This is one thing you need to avoid. Instead, have some of your ad links pointing to your landing page and some of them pointing to the other important pages in your website. It is worth designing an optimization strategy wherein you have specific keywords and anchor texts pointing to your landing page. But ensure that the backlinks are more relevant to their target URLs.

Michael Rae, a freelance writer for www.firsthomealarm.com - offers full home security to help protect your family, assets from burglary and other crimes. adt securitysystems

Social Media Etiquette: 5 Tips to Behave Online

Proper etiquette does not end with real-world interactions alone. With the rapid growth of the internet and popularity of social networking sites, good manners stretch out to virtual world interactions as well.

While most of us understand and comply to the commandments of social media etiquette, some others still prove that they have yet to learn what behavior is acceptable and what is not.

The following tips are common sense, social media practices every netizen should abide.

Think before you click.

Before hitting the post, tweet, share, or send button, ask yourself these questions: Does it have spelling or grammar errors? Is it appropriate? Will it offend anyone? Will I feel alright with anyone seeing this? Will anyone else care? Once you hit that button, make sure you’ve thought it over more than once. Editing published posts or retrieving sent mails lessen your credibility.

Reply accordingly.

When someone comments on your post, reply accordingly - especially if it’s a question. Don’t leave your friends and other readers hanging with a question. If someone comments positively, show appreciation by replying or liking. If you don’t respond or provide feedback, most likely they won’t bother reading your posts anymore and completely ignore you.

Don’t make social media sites a complaint forum.

Venting out is a perfectly normal thing to do. But bombarding negativity by complaining about your work and your personal life now and then is not. Constant complaining will make your friends and followers stay away from you. Furthermore, ranting about your work might put you into big trouble. If you need to vent something, play safe and do it somewhere private.

Keep private matters private.

Yes, social networking sites are communication tools that can spread news fast like fire. But if you need to inform a close relative or friend about bad news, don’t announce it in public. If you need to deliver sensitive issues such as death in the family, loss of job, never post it on his or her wall. Instead, send a personal message or call.

Don’t spam.

I mean to say don’t overshare, post chain status updates, comment on every post, retweet every tweet. Do you think your friends enjoy seeing your name pop out in their newsfeed every five minutes? Constant bombardment is really annoying because it prevents your friends from seeing or responding to other people’s statuses.

For me, the tips mentioned earlier are five of the most important social media practices every netizen should follow. But these are only a few, do you have anything to add?

Share them here.

About the author: Melissa Page is a passionate writer and social media contributor who works with My Life, a site that helps you manage all your social network updates and emails in one dashboard. When she’s not busy writing, she plays bowling with her friends.

Latest Digital Marketing Trends for Small Business

Traditional link exchange concept is no longer exists. Social media activity, local SEO or promotion, introducing mobile websites and maintaining blogs are getting high value. PPT, infographic, video and image sharing are also included in recent digital marketing trends. I'll discuss later on PowerPoint presentation, infographic, video and image sharing. Before that watch this video on four most important part of digital marketing. (content source: wikipedia.org)

How Webmasters Can Collaborate Effectively with Everyone in Their Company

As a webmaster, you will be bombarded with requests and demands - especially as your business becomes more and more popular. The natural thing is to feel overwhelmed, but the smart thing to do is to collaborate with everyone in the company in order to ensure that you manage an exceptional website.

Collaboration has actually taken a center stage in the last couple of years in the business world. Collaboration will help you get more work done in the shortest time frame; and your workers will not get overworked in the process.

Social Media Collaboration

Social media collaboration offers an ideal solution for such situations. It will help improve the whole communication process and save tons of work. A lot of companies are quickly realizing that allowing more efficient information exchange makes employees work faster because they would have few interruptions and fewer emails to read, write/type up, and send.

Social Networking vs. Social Collaboration

It is important to understand that social networking is totally different from what is known as social collaboration. Social networking is a process that involves an individual choosing whom they wished to communicate with, and what information comes into their feed. Whereas social collaboration is about a group of people; a group sends messages to another and receives information as well. Everyone in the group sees exactly what is being shared, so the information is out in the open.

Setting Up A Group

A lot of businesses that have invested heavily in social collaboration allow employees to create their very own groups and talk about issues and a variety subjects that pertain to the company. You can get really good results if the management gets involved in setting up a group for separate tasks/projects. One of the great things about this social collaboration effort is that it maintains all the openness that is needed for the free information exchange.

Setting up a group will provide a very specific platform in order to discuss the company's topic concerns; task/project specifics and techniques. The advantages of making use of such a platform is that everyone from the leader of the task to the least contributor is squarely engaged, and they get feedback that will be valuable in helping them execute project tasks effectively. This is certainly way more effective than sending out emails - which can be very annoying to write.

Several studies have been carried out and are still being carried out regarding social media's effectiveness in the business world.

By collaborating with everyone in your company using social media, you will be able to get work done within the shortest possible time and no one will have an excuse of not being in the know - the documents are open for all to see and comment on.

In conclusion, as a webmaster, you can use social media in order to create a well-planned group that will fit in your company's general business strategy - this way, managing and completing tasks can be done effectively. For those webmasters who have not tried it yet; this instant will be good time to start with a variety of collaboration tools.

Erik Gaandt is a freelance tech writer and SEO enthusiast. He enjoys sharing his insights on various blogs. More than 90% of webmasters read reviews when deciding on webhost. WhoIsHostingThis.com is home to hundreds of reviews on the most popular webhosts such as iPage.com.

How to make your articles reader friendly in SEO

SEO is one of the most important tasks that you need to work on, in order to up the ranking of your website. This helps you to bring on the required amount of traffic to your website, thereby improving the amount you can get as return from your business. So, you will have to work on improving your content so that it attracts more number of people to your website. In fact, content is considered to be the king in Search Engine Optimization or SEO.

Making articles reader friendly

In order to carve out the articles which are user friendly, it would be important for you to:

Considering the article – It is important for you to consider the whole of the article starting from the topic to the style of writing, the theme and the words you are going to use. These contribute a lot towards how the article s going to look, and if it is going to be of any interest for your readers.

Considering the title – It is important for you to consider providing a good title, so that it says all about the content of the article. Yet, it will have to be a unique one and even small at the same time. This may help you in actuating the interests of the people, all the more. Use some unique symbols and some numbers in order to get more people to read your article. The “how to”, “Tips” and all, help a lot in bringing on more interests of the people.

Considering the keywords – The keywords is one of the most important part of your articles. So, you will have to use the keywords wisely enough, before actually using any particular one. It would be better for you to make sure that you have had done enough research on the keywords, which can help you with bringing more traffic to your website. Another thing that you will have to keep in mind, with regards to the usage of the keywords is that, you should not over-stuff the articles with keywords.

Considering the introduction and conclusion – It is important for you to consider creating a really interesting introduction to your articles. These will have to be the relative precursor to the body of the article, and this can help you with inducing more interest into the minds of the readers. As for the conclusion, that will have to sum up the whole idea of the article.

So, all of these together can help you in making your article a good one and also a user friendly one. If you can add a description or summary to your article, this may help you to gain more interests of the people. This in the long run, is going to help you with earning more revenues from your business. 

SEO – 5 Upcoming trends

Given the upcoming global trends, it’s no surprise that each and every sphere has taken on a new look and form. Similarly, the world of marketing has had to adopt itself even further with the year 2012 coming to an end and the year 2013 setting in. SEOhappens to be one such part of internet marketing world that isn't as simple as it used to be initially. It’s not child’s play and the scenario for search engine marketing is changing day by day. You need some real expertise and innovative strategies to actually achieve better rankings in the search world. Moreover, it does take time as well as patience to build up the right SEO.

The new trends in the world of SEO

The earlier days no longer exist and it’s a new phase in the world of SEO. Find out the latest trends that’ll help you update your search engine to ensure your website’s high ranking in the searches.

1. The mobile search device: It’s now about searching directly. The upcoming changes show that people are now keener on finding direct answers in the search options. This is also being done through different devices including voice search devices like your phone. People are also resorting to social media networks or simply tapping searches into the phone. Digital market isn’t restricted to the computer or tablet anymore. Take note of the fact that mobile search is here to stay and will figure as the biggest search medium.

2. Quality over quantity: It’s true that in the bygone days of search engine rankings, most search engines have at some point or the other made use of the quantity of the pages. In other words, this means that the quality of the website has been judged by the yardstick of quantity at some point of time or the other. However, the picture has changed of late. Now, it’s no longer about quantity, but more about quality. The quality and freshness of the content will generate higher search engine rankings.

3. The social media factor: It’s more about social media optimizers, rather than search engine optimization. There’s a much broader focus on the on-page factors. However, the picture is such now that it means the off-site marketing with the social media integration happens to be its focus.

4. More personalized searches: Most search engines are holding the keys to great social networks. Hence, there’s expected a lot of undercover changes in the search engine rankings. This’ll come about with a lot of personalized searches. Thus, relying on the old style of keyword usage and optimization won’t really help anymore. You’ve got to reinvent yourself with the changing times. Sitting back won’t help.

5. The domain authority: Remember, the trump card still remains the good old classic domain authority when it comes to SEO. Don’t forget that the link graph still remains the most reliable set of ranking signals.

Acquaint yourself with the upcoming SEO trends and ensure you website’s high rankings by developing your SEO techniques accordingly.

Comprehensive Guide: Digital Marketing for Small Businesses

Most businesses have started using digital marketing techniques to promote their businesses. The giants needn't make themselves known because they’re already known by people. It’s the small and medium scale businesses who are trying different ways to get recognized. It is not an easy task to compete with these giants in the marketplace. However, they need to do something to get the attention of consumers to convert them into customers. There are several ways followed by small businesses to market their products and digital marketing is the latest trend catching on among them.

People have access to digital devices and they are not available anywhere, but online. It puts a pressure on small businesses to go online too and reach out to potential customers. With the stiff competition prevalent in the market, it is not enough for any business to just stop with creating a website. Should they try every means within their reach? Maybe yes or maybe not. However, there are certain things that every business should do to make their digital marketing successful. Read on to learn if your business follows the effective ways of digital marketing.

Go Social

It is necessary for every business to go social. Create a Facebook page for your business and enter all social networks that your customers are a part of. If you are going to launch a product or if you find that your product can attract a new group of people, enter those areas where the potential customers of the new product are. You have to be where they are, in order to reach out to them easily. Moreover, when they find you online, they will respond sooner than otherwise. By making yourself available on social networks, you are bonding with your customers and finding new ones.

Act Local

As yours is a small business, you need to focus more on the local customers than the ones residing far away from your business. Of course, you can concentrate on getting more customers from different locations, but your business will catch on well among local folks. Therefore, enroll in all kinds of online directories to promote yourselves. Those approaching online directories for information will be finding a solution for their needs. Therefore, online directories give you good chances of attracting customers.

Make Mobile Website

Lately, many people use mobile devices to access websites. Therefore, if you already have a website to be accessed on PCs, it’s time you design a website which can be accessed comfortably on mobile devices. It might cost you a lot, but it is a wise investment to make because the basic aim of your business is to find as many customers as possible. If you haven’t yet created a website for your business, you can consider making a responsive website which can be accessed both on PCs and mobile devices comfortably.

Interact Often

It is important that you interact with your customers. You can enroll in forums and strike up conversation with more people on forums. There are plenty of forums available online. Choose your niche and enroll yourself in at least 3 forums. Comment regularly and offer to help if you find someone looking for a service or a product that you sell. When you share your knowledge with them, you can build trust and lead them to your website. This way, you will be able to build a portfolio of loyal customers.

Blog

Start your own blog and also write guest posts for other blogs within your niche. It is important to choose a relevant niche. You can enjoy several benefits by blogging. Therefore, include it as one of your key tasks. Though blogging is seen as an SEO strategy, it’s basically a marketing effort. Build links to your website and your social networking pages through the blogs.

These are some of the efforts you can make to make your digital marketing successful. Not all strategies work for all businesses. Therefore, measure results regularly and stick to what works best for your business.

Andrea Walters, a freelance writer for www.satellitesales.com – The Lowest-Priced Satellite TV in America. Click here

What to Know About Facebook's New Local Search

Local search capabilities throughout social networks started out small but have gained more and more attention throughout the year. With the growing popularity of mobile utilization in many markets, there is a new emphasis on keeping local search even more widespread as we go into 2013.

In fact, Facebook just updated both their iOS and Android apps to improve on the “Nearby” feature that many have already become familiar with. The update just happened this week, and it is now allowing users to look into businesses that are close by based on a number of different factors. Users have long been used to being able to see who has been checking in among their friends, but there has never been quite an elaborate level of suggestion making. 

According to Search Engine Land, the metrics that these recommendations run off sound be crowd-sourced. Combining factors such as check-ins, ratings, Likes and others will determine what recommendations the user sees.

Based on some screenshots of the iOS update, users should have access to many subsets of local services. Users can look for nearby coffee shops, bars, arts-related venues, shopping and more. Each of these categories break off into more specific subjects. Businesses that are looked up will come with a profile that highlights how many of the users friends have been there, including a brief synopsis of their experience. An overall rating of the location can also be seen. 

If you are a business owner and weren't quite up to the times to create a Facebook page, then you're going to be out of luck with showing up “Nearby”. That doesn't mean that it is too late either though – simply get a page created with clear information that indicates your type of business, as well as any other type of contact information that you can supply. 

Changing the Game in Local Search

Some might think that Facebook is a little too late in the game of joining local search, especially with other social networks like Yelp and Foursquare already taking the lead. However, Tech Crunch reported today that Yelp's stock has already taken a little dive with the news of Facebook's mobile updates. 

This is a pretty significant occurrence being that the update hasn't even been made completely available just yet. There's no saying just how well-protected Facebook's program could be against spam. However, those who use Yelp and others know that it is pretty dependable. Seeing where your own friends go and recommend on Facebook could be a big winning ticket for Facebook, and others have pointed this out as well.

Having this sort of more relatable connection could be a big driver for Facebook Nearby, especially given the natural tendency to float towards Facebook in the first place. 

As stated, the update should be made available this week on both Android and iOS.

Author Bio – Being the principle writer of DX3, Ezra Melino writes extensively on the happening in social media, Google and of the vanguard of technology. Get in touch with Ezra @DX3tech or in the comment section below.

5 Biggest Trends in SEO for 2013

The internet and SEO are always changing as Google and SEO workers quickly adapt and dance back and forth as Google looks to promote real websites and content while SEO analysts look to maximize the advantages of Google’s updates and changes.

Here are five trends that will have a big impact on SEO in 2013. Keep up and stay ahead:

5). Local Reviews

Many customers are relying on yahoo, yelp, and online reviews when they make choices and purchases. For that reason, it’s essential to target your SEO practices towards local audiences. Work to optimize your pages within local searches to make your sites more accessible.

For this purpose it’s valuable to use software that reveals your rankings in different locations. Build pages tailored to different locations and searches to achieve higher visibility within those areas.

4). Personalized search functions

Now that Google generates hits for users based on their search history, brand building and keyword research are all the more valuable in tailoring your sites to the preferred searches of your target audience.

If you are successful in drawing traffic, search personalization will dramatically boost your site’s rankings. Those who effectively use SEO will find this to give them a huge advantage over competitors.

3). Mobile-friendly

The internet is becoming more and more personalized for individuals and adapting to meet unique requirements. Sites that fail to address the growing usage of mobile devices to conduct searches will fall by the wayside.

People use mobiles for searches that occur to them on the fly, to find directions or sites in an hour of specific need, and to kill time. As an example, for a restaurant it’s essential that their site be easily downloaded and accessed on a mobile device in order for them to draw mobile users looking up a place to eat on the road away from their home computers.

“Responsive web design” is a growing strategy to meet the growing demand for mobile-friendly sites that’s geared towards creating one website design that can fit virtually any screen size or type of mobile device. This can prevent users from having to type “M” before the URL to draw the mobile-friendly version of the site and to cater your site towards the shift.

Some people believe that by 2014 most web traffic will be on mobile devices. It’s better to make wholesale adaptations now rather than quick fixes that will fail to meet eventual demand for sites easily accessed by mobile devices.

2). Google+

Google is placing a higher priority on author ranking, drawing traffic to sites with content by writers who are deemed authoritative on their topics. To create “authoritative” authors, it’s necessary to use Google Plus and create author profiles that list the sites that the authors provide content for and links to their content. Focus an author on one particular topic and you can increase the value of their links.

Long articles stacked with keywords are now less valuable than quality content with authority provided by multiple links within the same topics.

It’s no accident that Google wants to make Google products more important to SEO practices in order to build their company, make sure to be ready to integrate Google products like Google+ profiles in order to work with them and not against them.

1). Video Optimization

The number two search engine in the world behind Google is now YouTube. As heavily consumed as articles are, visuals trump all and video optimization is now an important part of SEO. By creating video content and promoting it through Social Networking sites is a growing factor in building page ranks and drawing traffic.

Youtube channels allow 1 backlink to a site which can be extremely valuable, and proper tagging will help your videos rank well on searches. Ours is a visual culture and it’s important to take advantage of the growing video marketing to tap into traffic and audiences that aren’t reached as easily through articles and word content.

Keep up with these growing trends and you’ll find the modern web searcher drawn to your sites in 2013 and beyond.

Author Bio: IanB writes for US Reports weekly, a source for news on all modern topics.

Basic SEO Tips for ASP.NET Websites

When running an online business, majority of our focus is on the design, architecture of the website and how efficiently it displays our product. These are not the only things that are required to target the infinite Internet audience. One need to keep in mind that the main source of audience come from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing and others. So the application or the website should be able to follow simple rules and handle your business efficiently. ASP.NET application is spreading rapidly and if you are using an ASP.NET website few simple guidelines has to be considered. The below mentioned points need to be implemented:

Page Titles

Page titles between tags is one important thing that many fail to practice in SEO. When a search is made in Google, these titles show up as links in the result. So that explains its importance. The common mistake among website owners is giving the same title for all pages. Page titles drive traffic to your site, hence it is important to have a proper title to attract visitors. Adding titles is not as hard as you imagine. If you have a product catalog use your product name as title. You can also choose to give a different title that is related to your product.

Meaningful URL

URLs that are long with query parameters do not look neat and it is difficult for the visitor to remember. Instead use formatted URLs for your static pages. URL which has a meaning explains the content in your website. Although experts agree with using an URL that has query parameters, it is better to have a meaningful URL. Components like UrlRewritingNet can be used for this purpose. Mapping support in URL is offered by IIS7 which has plenty of features.

Structure of the Content

Content without a structure is not possible.  You will have titles, headings, sub headings, paragraphs and others. How would you emphasize some quotes or important points in your content? If you follow the below mentioned steps, the structure of your content will be semantically correct.

·         Divide long stories or parts using headings. Short paragraphs make more sense to the readers. Use tags to bring beauty to your content.

·         If you want to emphasize an important point or quote, place them between tags.

Visitors can create structured content if you use FCKEditor and the like. Integrating these to your website is not complex.

Clean the Source Code

Don’t panic, it is advisable to clean up the source code and minimize the number of codes. The following simple steps will assist you in cleaning the source code: You can use

·         External stylesheets and not inline CSS

·         -js files instead of inline JavaScript

·         HTML comments is not encouraged

·         Avoid massive line breaking

·         Avoid using viewstate when not required

The relation between the content and the code (JavaScript, HTML, CSS) determines the ranking of your website. Smaller source codes help build a strong relation.

Crawlable Site

Do not use

·         Silver or flash light for menus or to highlight information

·         Menus based on JavaScript

·         Menus based on buttons

·         Intro-pages

Do use

·         Simple tags wherever possible

·         Sitemap

·         “Alt” for images

·         RSS

Test the Site

What happens to the requests that are sent when the site is slow? Sometimes requests are sent by robots and if they are unable to connect to your site continuously, they drop the site from their index. Enable your site to respond fast to requests even during peak hours. Moreover, visitors don’t like to visit slow sites. Use the various tools available and conduct the stress test for your site. Perform this and locate all the weak parts of the site. Fix them so that your site gets indexed. 

Test the AJAX site

Spiders can only run a few parts of your AJAX website because they don’t run JavaScripts. Spiders can only analyze the data and hence they remain invisible to robots. The AJAX sites do not get indexed which does not help in search engine optimization. To make the site spider friendly, try and keep away from initial content loading into the JavaScript. You can also follow this only for pages that you like to index.  Make it easy for robots so that they can navigate. Try this simple trick to see how your AJAX site will appear to the robots. Disable JavaScript from the browser and visit your AJAX site. You can view the pages which robots will index.

This article has been brought to you by Roy Fernandez of acquiweb.com a site that offers savings and current information on Comcast cable and internet. We have the best and most affordable Comcast internet rates as well as comcast cable rates.

Using Google for Online Marketing

Google has several online marketing tools which help to promote, advertise, set goals, target customers of a business online.

Check this following presentation for more details

Google for Online Marketing from Mainak Roy

Best Marketing Techniques for Your Business

Internet marketing boosts your business. It not only promotes your products and services but also helps you in building a strong relationship with your customers. Your website is the only thing which can express your brand to create a good identity. The invention of the internet has brought tremendous changes in the field of marketing. Internet marketing has moved a long way in boosting business and generating the traffic for websites. These internet marketing techniques may cost you but they provide you with good results. So invest on internet marketing to boost up your business.  Below are the top 3 internet marketing tips which boost your business.

Effective email marketing

Email marketing is a desirable internet marketing technique. Focus on the very first part of the email. The subject line must be attractive and interesting otherwise the readers will delete it even without reading it. The subject line is the one that captures the reader’s interest, therefore write your subject line in a humorous/effective way that will encourage your readers to open the email. Ensure that the prospect is all about what you desire them to do. Always personalise your emails with the first name of your prospect. Whenever the reader sees that they feel that you are addressing them personally and tend to open the mail to read it. 

Search engine optimisation

SEO is both cost effective and result effective. SEO is the best way to enhance your brand visibility. There are various ways to optimise your site according to search engines. The main thing is content. Focus on your content and try to produce high-quality, creative and informative content. Link building is another way to boost your business. You can insert a link back to your site in the articles and do guest posting. Find quality sites to exchange your links with.  

Social media marketing

Social media marketing is another better way to boost up your business. Stay active on social networking sites. Create your business a profile on social networking sites and start connecting with your target audience. You can post upcoming events and products of yours on these pages. You can also post the links of your latest blog posts on these pages so that the readers can easily click on the link to view your post. Always stay active on social networking sites and respond to the concerns and questions of your customers.

Author Bio:
This guest post was written by Shopie, a tech writer from UK who is into Finance. Catch her @financeport. Same day cash loans are instant loans which are helpful when you run short of funds.

Latest On-page Optimization Strategy

On-page optimization is one of the most crucial aspects of your SEO strategy. If done in the right way, it can do wonders for your website’s standing within search engines. In fact, I don’t even have to tell you how important on-page optimization is; it’s something that has been marked and measured time and again. The key, however, lies in getting it done in the right way.

To take a step closer towards the ‘Right Way’, let’s go back in time. Back to the time of Classic SEO, the real old-school stuff. The classic on-page SEO had a lot to do with keyword usage. The whole idea revolved around having as much keyword instances or keyword phrase instances in and around the content that Google would start to relate with the page and rank it for the targeted keyword.

Things like placing the keyword one to two times in the page title, preferably at the start, so that Google understands it is important. Try and incorporate instances of keywords in meta descriptions and meta keywords tags. Things like placing exact match keywords a couple of times in the content body preferably in the top paragraph. Then there were other on-page elements like page headings, images and anchor text links; using the keyword instances in image ‘alt’ attributes and link ‘title’ attributes.

All the things I mentioned above, I am not saying they don’t work anymore or they are completely de-valued. But, they are not the only things that are going to help you. More precisely, on-page SEO has expanded just like everything else in SEO.

User Intent

First and foremost, really understand what you should rank for. Get your keywords right and stop optimizing for keywords, but for users. Understand what the user is looking for using a search query and what your page is delivering. Once user intent is clear, design your page to satisfy that intent. It’s very important to understand that it’s not about having instances of the user’s keyword on your page but answering their question. Treat every search query as a question and formulate web pages with the sole intent of answering the question.

Content Keyword Optimization

Having instances of the exact match keyword in the content. In a way is important, but lately, Google has been really strict about exact match keyword optimization, and there are examples of this doing more harm than good.

Modern day on-page optimization needs to focus less on keyword instances and more on keyword theme building. This means your content needs to touch up on concepts closely related to your target theme. We need to incorporate appropriate keyword variations. Not just variations, try to incorporate synonyms, long tails, semantically connected terms etc. All these things are going to provide proper signals to Google helping it understand that your page is most relevant and value adding for a targeted keyword.

To understand better, let’s take an example. Consider your page is about guitars and you want to optimize for the term ‘Guitars’. Instead of focusing efforts on having the instances of the keyword ‘Guitars’, we need to incorporate content that covers related topics and helps answer all possible questions related to guitars.

We need to incorporate content that talks about types of guitars. Acoustic guitars, electric guitars, bass guitars etc. popular guitar brands, brief about tuning a guitar or even touch upon the kinds of music that is closely associated with guitars like Rock or Blues.

Optimize Search Listings

At times, ranking on number one is not enough. People abandon search results solely for the reason that the SERP listing is not enticing enough. As mentioned before, in today’s Web search environment the listing has to sell itself. It’s not about having the keyword you searched for only being present in the SERP. Think about the SERP listing as an advertisement! Everything you see in the SERP—the title, the URL, the description—all these things need to be useful, shareable, and value adding.

That’s not all, there are a lot of other things that can help improve your search engine listing. Things like Microdata markup (Schema.org), authorship markup, and video XML sitemaps can really help create that beautiful, informative listing which can entice the users to click on.

Branding

When we are creating these great SERP listings, we also need to take up the opportunity to showcase our brand. Think of it this way, when a user comes across your listing and finds it interesting, he goes ahead and clicks on it to visit the page. Let’s say he likes the page content, at this point he might make a note of your brand. In the future, he searches for something similar. Among the results that are in front of him if he sees your brand clearly mentioned in the SERP title or description, there is a high probability that he will click on your listing even if it is not ranking on #1.

Along with strong brand mentions, it would also help to use special symbols like ‘®’ (Copyright) and ‘™’ wherever applicable. This will help improve the authenticity of your content in the eyes of users as well as search engines.

Make it Shareable

So, let’s say you take care of all the above things and come up with great content. Don’t stop there, make it socially shareable. If people visit your webpage and really like what they see, give them the ability to share it with others. Lately we have been reading a lot how social is affecting the search and social signals being considered important by search engines, this is where it starts. Your content is not going to go viral if you don’t allow it.

Page Speed

In Google’s quest for superior user experience, it announced ‘Page Speed’ as a ranking factor. Even though this signal does not carry as much weight as relevancy, it is still something that cannot be neglected. This is when techniques like compression and responsive design come into picture. It all boils down to keeping the user happy. If your page takes a lot of time to load, could be because of heavy images or lack of server side compressing or 301 redirect chains, people are not going to stick around.

It has become imperative to ensure your page does not take a lot of time to load. Take out time to look at tools like:

• Google PageSpeed Insights
• YSlow
• WebPagetest
• GTmetrix
• Google Webmaster Tools > Site Performance

These tools provide great insights in pinpointing the pain areas of your site with respect to page speed.

Conclusion

So, these things discussed above … are they the only things to do? Do we stop respecting the Classic form of SEO? NO! Lot of the classic stuff is really important. What needs to change is the way we do it and incorporate new stuff that has evolved in on-page front. Aspects such as usability, social, search—they are not individual entities anymore. These entities need to work together in an effort to make the Web a better place. (Source: www.searchenginejournal.com)

Google Tag Manager is introduced to handle tagging needs

Google Tag Manager is built to handle your tagging needs, and it works with Google and non-Google website tags. We’ve packed in lots of great features, including:

• Asynchronous tag loading—so your tags can fire faster without getting in each other's way, and without slowing down the user-visible part of the page
• Easy-to-use tag templates, so marketers can quickly add tags with our web interface, as well as support for custom tags
• Error-prevention tools like Preview mode (so you can see proposed changes before implementing them), the Debug Console, and Version History to ensure that new tags won’t break your site
• User permissions and multi-account functionality to make it easy for large teams and agencies and clients to work together with appropriate levels of access
• Plus we have exciting plans to add great new features over the next several months

Optimize Video Metadata to Improve Your SEO in Google

Video is one of the most important ways to improve SEO score. This is very important after Google released it Penguin algorithm update. So, making a video is not enough now. Even sharing videos to multiple sites (www.startcut.com) isn’t as effective as it could be if you don’t employ one concentrated metadata strategy to improve your companies SEO.

So what is metadata? Metadata is all the things that describe what your video. Metadata includes in this are the title of the video, description, tags and category. Many people or businesses that have paid good money in order to create a video fill out this information with without thought or even leave this information blank without understanding the importance of it.

Search engines (including YouTube and other video sites) can’t hear what you are saying and therefore rely on your title, description and tags in order to figure out if your video is a good fit for the search terms someone is using. Therefore it is important to pepper your description with key search terms in order for you to rank higher on the Google searches. Your title not only needs to encourage people to click on the video but it also should use some of the key terms people are using when searching for your product.

FYI...How can you figure out what terms are popular in searches? First of all, you can check out the frequency of different searches in Google by registering for Google Adwords. In Adwords they have a tool that allows you to see how many monthly searches there are of different words you put in the search box. Once you have done that try out all the different search terms yourself in Google and see what comes up. Is it only huge corporations with established website and a large following? You better steer clear of those search terms since you will have a small chance of competing with them. Do you see small to medium sized businesses? These searches you can compete with, even if they are searched less often than other search terms. Filling out metadata correctly is a sure way to bring in organic traffic, improve your SEO and help your bottom line.

6 Changes Every SEO Should Make Before the Over Optimization Penalty Hits

Having overly optimized web pages could soon get your websites in some hot water with Google and their search results. It has recently been announced that Google will start to penalize websites that engage in over-optimization practices.

Here is some information and changes that you should be making to your SEO practices in order to avoid this type of penalization.

[Source: http://goo.gl/F8NRe]

How to Create Quality Content for an Running Website

Establishing a comprehensive content strategy for existing pages on your website is a key piece of the search engine optimization (SEO) puzzle, especially considering Google’s ongoing Panda quality updates.

From a strictly on-page optimization perspective, it’s important to make sure that you have content dedicated to the primary and secondary keywords with the highest search volume in your space.

Let’s look at one strategy you can use to both Panda-proof and better optimize your site to grab more of the long tail traffic in your space. Who doesn't like that?

Eliminate Bloat Pages

Before starting to look at where you need content, critically evaluate your site and see if there are unnecessary pages being indexed. Some common examples of this extra fluff that bloats your Google pages indexed are paginated product pages, indexed internal search result pages, and sort options for product pages.

Although solutions for bloat pages are beyond the scope of this post, eliminating these is a must prior to creating a great content strategy. The easiest way find what bloat pages are getting indexed is to run a simple site search (e.g., [site:example.com]) command in Google and explore.

Keyword Research Blueprint for Content Optimization & Content Creation

Keyword research is the blueprint of any content strategy. Although much of the methodology you will use will be determined by the size of your site, here's one good method for small to mid-sized sites.

Keyword Research for Your Strongest Subpages

Assuming that you've fixed any internal duplicate content issues on your site and removed unneeded pages, it is time to beef up existing pages.

Since you're making an investment in content for your site, you want to make sure that pages are well optimized for both relevant and valuable primary keywords. You also want to make sure that you include important variations and synonymous keywords as part of the content strategy for existing pages.

The natural starting point for this kind of research are ranking based keyword tools. Some popular paid tools for this information include SEMRush, SpyFu, and Ahrefs. These tools provide keywords for your site and your competitors, which you can export into a nice spreadsheet. They are great for giving you a good idea of what the valuable keywords for pages across your site are and identifying gaps in your content strategy. You'd be surprised how common it is for pages not to even include the powerful keywords that they rank for in the copy.

Once you vet the data a little bit, you can get a good idea of the powerful keywords that are already bringing traffic to your site. If you have some budget constraints and can’t use a paid tool, you can attempt some of this research using analytics and the Google AdWords Keyword Tool.

One thing you'll find when you do ranking based keyword research is that there are a lot of pages and keywords missing. This means that it’s time to start your exploratory keyword research, which is how you fill in the blanks in your spreadsheet. Although there are many great paid options, Google AdWords Keyword Tool is a nice free solution for this purpose – just make sure to log in to see the full data!

It's a good idea to run at least a couple iterations of your exploratory keyword tool of choice to identify valuable keywords that you don't yet rank for. During this research, not only will you find keywords for existing pages that you may have missed but you will also find whole keyword groups which you'd want brand new pages for.

On a side note, by this point it’s a good idea to break out your keyword list into one primary and a bunch secondary phrases for each page. This can be done using simple highlighting or some other method. Your call.

Keyword Research For Your Thin Deep Pages

Adding content to your deep pages is a funny thing because if you have a large site, there is definitely a cost associated with it. If adding unique content to a large number of pages falls outside your given budget, consider going back to see what additional pages can be done away with in the index.

Depending on the nature of your products and the amount of SKU's you have, SEO based keyword research strategy will vary dramatically. However, let's assume that a given site has a couple hundred or couple thousand SKU's, there are several things to look at for sites of this scope.

First, check that all of the given pages are cached. That may seem like a 'duh!' proposition to some of you, but you'd be surprised how often this is overlooked.

Second, check if there are relevant high value phrases that you can pair with your thin non-ranking pages. It is hard to speak generally on this because so much of this level of keyword research ties into your specific space and how people 'talk' about your kind of products online. One general method that can be used is throwing large swaths of product names into a keyword tool and 'sampling' to see what gets search for and deserves deeper inquiry but this method is not ideal.

Competitor Based Keyword Research

Once you’ve exhausted keyword research for existing pages and exploratory keyword research, it’s time to go gem hunting on your competitors keywords. Use the tools mentioned above for doing this by running keyword reports for all of your competitors and comparing them against your own list and filling it in with keywords that make sense for your site.

Another great thing to look at, if you're not doing PPC already, is what keywords competitors are bidding on that you can consider incorporating into your organic strategy, if you already have not.

Now that you're done with the hard part, you're ready to start actionably using your keyword research for implementing your content strategy and keyword optimization for your pages. In a word, you have your master keyword list for organic search.

Tips for Content Creation

Once your site is cleaned up of all unnecessary pages and you have a plan for the rest of the pages on your site, it’s time to get the pages optimized and the content created. Here are some general pointers:

Keep word count varying from page to page: Try not to have the exact same non-linked word count from page to page. This will make your content look more natural. Make sure that there is a good saturation of synonymous phrases: Google is getting very good at understanding synonymy and they’re working hard to decipher language meaning. Inclusion of secondary phrases is an important part of any keyword strategy. Add value on your pages: See if there is anything that you can add to your pages to make them more interesting. Consider adding widgets to pages or looking at competitors to see how you can improve the value of individual pages or templates on your site. [Source: searchenginewatch.com]