5 Expert SEO Tips for 2012

In 2011, there were major changes made to Google’s algorithm that has paved the way for a new emphasis on ‘original’ content. Regardless of the year, content will always reign as king in the SEO world. If you’re wondering about SEO tips for 2012, you’re not alone. There are many entrepreneurs and business owners who are curious about the latest SEO trends. The following are a few tips to help you achieve good results for the upcoming New Year.

1. Content Will Still Reign as King in 2012

In 2011, there were major changes made to Google’s algorithm that has paved the way for a new emphasis on ‘original’ content. Regardless of the year, content will always reign as king in the SEO world.

In 2012, you should have a balance of human friendly content and search engine friendly content. After all, your potential customers (or contacts) will be the one’s purchasing your products or services.

Gone are the days when website owners used to squeak by with poorly written content from basement content writers. If you want to get noticed in the search engines, having quality content will be the key to your online success in 2012.

2. Web Content Should be Scannable for Mobile Users

Remember, a percentage of your web users will be searching the Web from their iPad and mobile device. If you post content that takes too long to get to the point, people will get bored and move on to your competitor’s website.

Make sure you include a clear Call to Action on each page of your website. Consider hiring a good SEO copywriter to create fresh content for your website, blog and social media sites. You’ll be one step ahead of the game with a professional SEO copywriter. SEO copywriters are specialists who are trained to write marketable content that helps in converting readers into paying customers.

3. Is your SEO Consultant Wasting your Time and Money?

If the answer is ‘yes’ or ‘not sure’, that’s a sign it may be the perfect time to ditch your SEO consultant. In 2012, savvy entrepreneurs and business owners are nickel and diming every aspect of their business. People are investing their money more wisely than ever before. They are less likely to choose an SEO consultant based on price and they are focusing on SEO experts that have proven track records.

If you’re in the market for a new SEO consultant, make sure you ask him or her to provide you with proof. In other words, ask to see proven results from ‘current’ customers that they have been with for more than just a couple of months. Internet marketing experts suggest that people choose SEO consultants that have a solid client base of at least 1-2 years (or more) old.

4. Add Original Photos & Videos

If you want to make your website more interactive, consider adding original photos and interesting videos to your website. When Google crawls web pages, they look for content that’s diverse. Don’t forget to optimize your videos and photos for SEO purposes. Check out our previous article: Using Google Image Search as Fuel for SEO

5. Share Web Content via Facebook, Twitter & Google+

If you want to generate more traffic in 2012, share your content with your social media networks. Make sure you optimize your web pages for social sharing to help attract more traffic. For example, Facebook allows you to make your pages more social media friendly by optimizing your titles and Meta tags by using Facebook Open Graph. When one of your friends shares one of your web pages, this automatically improves the conversion rate of your website.

Lastly, when sharing content through social media, don’t forget to include a back link to your website. Social media provides an excellent opportunity to engage with people who ‘like’ or ‘follow’ you online. Although SEO rules are constantly evolving, the tips above will give you a good head start on the race to online success in 2012.

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Various Search Engine's and their Crawlers

List of Search Engines along with their Crawler's name

-Googlebot





- Yahoo Slurp





- MSNBot


- Scooter


- Teoma


- Twiceler (New Search Engine)

- MantraAgent

- Slurp

- ia_archiver

- Lycos_Spider_(T-Rex)

10 Steps to Better Content Marketing & SEO

How would you rate your content marketing efforts? How well are you incorporating SEO and Social Media? If you’re not sure or need to improve, read on.

We’re big fans of content marketing as you probably know and there’s a presentation on Content Marketing Optimization that I’ve been doing at search conferences lately (SES SF, SES CHI, Pubcon and soon SES London) that has evolved each time I give it. See the bottom of this post for an embedded copy of the latest version from Pubcon.

While there are an increasing number of definitions of what content marketing is, I tend to prefer:

While the primary platforms for our application of this definition are online and more specifically, through search, social, online PR, email and certain kinds of advertising, I think a timelessly relevant definition needs to be general.

Content Connects - Consumer buying experiences increasingly involve interactions with content. Sales cycles are longer as consumers perform searches, read reviews, ask social network contacts for suggestions and eventually buy. Content in that scenario is created by marketers, fans & social contacts as well as by consumers as they ask public questions and even share purchasing decisions or reviews of products they’ve purchased.

For example: Imagine a consumer searching Google for “light bulbs” and finding an article, “5 Ways to Save Money with Light Bulbs” written by XYZ light bulbs. The consumer moves on the reviews written by other consumers and moves on to purchase. After the purchase, she shares on Facebook and/or Twitter that she’s found a great place to buy bulk, energy efficient light bulbs. It’s easy to see how content connects the consumer with the merchant as well as other customers in this scenario.

The importance of the role of content in marketing and PR cannot be over-estimated. Marketing and Public Relations organizations whether consultant or internal, will need to not only become better content creators, but content curators, optimizers and promoters in the months and year ahead.

In order to be more effective at Content Marketing that incorporates SEO and Social Media, here are 10 steps:

• Goals - You can’t score if you don’t have a goal. Numerous business problems can be solved in part, through content marketing (besides increasing sales). This includes everything from recruiting to public relations to customer service.
• Buyer Personas - What characterizes the customers you’re trying to reach? Who are you trying to engage? Empathize with customer needs and think about how to meet them while meeting your own as the brand.
• Keywords - What search and social media keywords best represent demand for your products and services?
• Content & Assets – Inventory the content and digital assets you currently have available for keyword optimization and social promotion. Map keywords to content so there’s accountability for keyword performance of content in search.
• Editorial Plan – Your brand is now a publisher and that means an editorial calendar for content creation, optimization, promotion and measurement. If you understand how newsrooms work, you have an advantage here.
• Operationalize SEO - Whoever is responsible or capable of content creation for the brand should have keyword glossaries available as well as SEO training on how to use them. SEO should be part of the content creation and publishing process.
• Develop Off-Site Content - You’ve likely seen the hub and spoke publishing model we promote. Create content off of your web site to extend your reach and engage customers where they are.
• Socialize - Connect with others and grow the social networks that will extend your reach and ability to engage.
• Promote - Make it part of the editorial plan and content marketing process to promote content on the social networks and off site content destinations that you’ve created.
• Measure & Refine - Identify the key performance indicators that represent progress in engagement and reach. Track what’s working and what’s not, testing and making iterative improvements.

There are many dimensions beyond these tips, especially when it comes to content curation and the planning of repurposing content.

If you’re a B2B Marketer, how have you implemented content marketing in your online marketing mix? What challenges have you encountered trying to implement SEO and Social Media?

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The List of 20 New SEO terms of 2011

503

Most of you probably know what a 404 code is. SEO pros use 301 redirects as well. What is a 503 though? It’s a code telling the Google bot that a site is temporarily unavailable and not broken for good.​ You need it when performing site maintenance resulting in downtime.​

A/B Testing

The process of comparing two (or more) versions of a page to find out the best performing one, i.e. the one that is yielding the highest conversion rate.​

Advanced segment​s

Advanced segments allow you to show only particular parts of your site’s traffic in a Google Analytics report. You can customize and save them to return to the same report again. If you are serious about SEO, you use them all the time.​ A common advanced segment is social media traffic, for instance.​

Citation

Citation is the equivalent of a link for local SEO, but of course it’s not really the same as a link. It’s more a mention and a link on a site that is relevant for the Google Places algorithm. In a way, citations are even harder to get than links, as only a select few sites get counted for citations.​

Content farm

A content farm is a site, often a huge one, that produces large amounts of keyword laden, low quality content to flood​ the search engines. Blekko and Google consider them to be almost as bad as webspam.​

Content marketing

Content marketing is a new term describing all the means to promote your site online, be it text, images, video or other “rich media”. Content marketing replaces, to some extent, simple copywriting.​

CRO

Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO for short, is sometimes referred to as conversion optimization, and is the art and science of streamlining traffic once it reaches your site. In other words, it’s a set of techniques to make the user do what you want them to do on your site, e.g. clicking ads, subscribing, buying.​

Deep link ratio

Any site with a natural link profile has at least some links leading to its content that is not the homepage itself. Back in the days, overzealous SEO practicioners would build hundreds or thousands of links to a website’s homepage, leading to a very low deep link ratio and thus being obviously “over optimized”.​

Editorial link​s

Editorial links are not links in the editorial but links set by site owners, bloggers or content creators within a text itself. Also, editorial links are mostly natural in that they are given ​voluntarily (in contrast to paid links). While many people talk about paid links even years after they have been discounted by Google, most SEO pundits still rarely use the term ‘editorial links’.​

Internal link hub

An internal link hub is a very important page on your site which has collected many inbound links from other sites, and thus can have a big impact on the overall distribution of your site’s authority.​

Intelligent content

The definition of intelligent content is not one you can summarize in one sentence I’m afraid. Intelligent content has many characteristics, like being available in many formats, on many platforms​ and readable on different devices.​

Jaamit

A jaamit is a very strong link, a human bond ​that results in a link on a website. A ​jaamit is a link that outlasts the link building efforts or even the link builder. A jaamit link reflects trust, friendship, mutual respect and ​overall appreciation.​

LDA

As far as I understand, LDA or “Latent Dirichlet Allocation” refers to the way a search engine might analyze word combinations or context on a page. Example: a page about the sky would also contain the words “blue”, “limit”, “high”, “reaching”, “scraper”. So Google might expect these terms to appear, while on a low quality page they wouldn’t.​ I’d be glad to find a better definition somewhere though.​

Link decay

Link decay is the process of a link losing its value over time.​

Link equity

Link equity​ is like the link budget you have on a site and the way you spend it. Do you waste it on linking to the wrong places or in the wrong way?

Micro conversion​s

While conversions ofter refer to major goals a website can have, micro-conversions can reflect any goals you choose to measure user engagement with your site – something like a lead, a sale or at least a subscription. A time on site of more than 5 minutes could be a micro-conversion, or a ​third returning visit.​

Microformats

Microformats is a term describing a set of standards to annotate web sites in order to make them machine readable. For instance, you can tell search engines what an address is using a microformat.​

Natural links

Natural links are links by people whom you haven’t asked for a link. If somebody decides to link to you out of the blue without being asked to do so, the link is natural.​

QDF

QDF stands for the Query Deserves Freshness algorithm by Google, which determines the ranking for newly important queries​. Breaking news is a good example. In many cases, a blog or news site can outrank old authority sites for a keyphrase because the QDF algo determines that they are the most current source on that subject at that moment.​

QR Code

A QR code is used to enable mobile phones to read symbols from print material. They are real life links or additional data.​

Relevant links

Relevant links are – in theory​ – links which have a topical connection to your site, e.g. a link from a travel site to a hotel. While the concept of relevant links is controversial in the SEO industry, it’s important to know that some links are more relevant than others.​

Rich snippets

Rich snippets are ​based on the RDF format or microformats mentioned above. They are machine readable codes and provide additional information​ that is displayed in Google search results.​

Sales funnel

While the idea of a sales funnel is not new, it has entered the SEO arena quite recently. The sales funnel can be tracked and influenced on websites.​ I can’t explain it in one sentence though; you have to see it to understand the idea/metaphor.​

Semantic

Semantic means “dealing with meaning”. Semantic search and SEO has been around for a while but it’s still nascent. Bing uses some semantic technologies from the semantic search engine Powerset​ which it acquired.​ Google, in contrast, doesn’t understand the meaning of a web document yet. It just analyzes the keywords contained in it.​ A semantic search engine can, for example, distinguish between spears and Britney Spears, while one that doesn’t will offer you both results.​

Shopping cart abandonment rate

You probably know the bounce rate – that is, the percentage of users leaving your site after landing on it without performing any other action on it beyond clicking an external link. On e-commerce site the SCAR leaves scars on your revenue as it’s the percentage of customers who have left in the middle of the shopping or checkout process.​

Slashtag

A slashtag is a customized vertical or niche search engine on Blekko.​

Social CRM

Social CRM refers to customer relationship management before they are customers or forging relationships beyond CRM. It uses social media for that purpose.​

User testing

User testing is a form of usability and website testing​ where you actually invite real users to test your site and watch/record what they are doing and where they fail. You improve the site based on these user testing findings.​

UX

Usability is not UX/User Experience (Design); it goes beyond it. It encompasses making the user want to use something for instance. A good example is the iPhone. While many phones might be usable, the iPhone is also desirable in the UX sense.​

Wonder wheel

The Google wonder wheel is an excellent Google search tool which allows you to overview keyword clusters which are related to a particular query. It has been around for almost two years now, but many people still don’t use or even know it.​

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6 PPC, CPM, and SEO Marketing Tips for Your Service Business

Online entrepreneurs have an incredibly wide range of marketing options available to them. While brick-and-mortar businesses are typically limited to directory marketing and direct marketing forms, online businesses have a highly valuable extra advantage: the ability to drive customers to them. Through pay-per-click advertising, cost-per-thousand advertising, and long-term SEO (search engine optimization) marketing, you can transform your online service business from a small operation into a dedicated multi-employee company.

After all, online business is all about scale. With effective scaling comes higher returns, more manageable work, and significantly greater profits. These PPC, CPM, and SEO marketing tips won’t just help you grow your service business, but help you expand and scale it strategically so that along with your total revenue, your per-hour profits significantly increase.

1. Always use negative keywords.

Although marketers are keen to point to pay-per-click platforms as a short-term marketing option, the reality is that they require just as much branding and long-term thinking as any other marketing method. The wrong keywords can and will negatively influence your business, causing you to lose customers and online influence.

When bidding on industry-specific keywords, make sure you add negative keywords into your campaigns. For example, if your company specializes in ‘website design’ and prefers to work with large-scale clients with high budgets, it’s probably best to create a negative keyword profile featuring terms like ‘cheap website design’ or ‘one-off website design’. Negative keywords can help you target your audience more specifically, all the while excluding the type of clients that you don’t want.

2. Test different PPC platforms.

The most popular pay-per-click marketing platforms are almost always attached to search engines. Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Bing Adcenter are some of the most powerful advertising services around, boasting huge audiences and the potential to dramatically change your business’s income.

Of course, there’s no reason to stick to just one advertising platform. Create a test budget and market your service business on Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Bing Adcenter. Potential clients are all over the place, and with an ultra-refined search presence it’s easy to accidentally miss some of them.

3. Advertise on other websites.

There’s no point sticking exclusively to search results. Once you’ve built up a basic advertising presence, why not expand your advertising to content-filled pages and other contextual placements. Create a list of popular websites that operate in your niche, and approach them with offers for advertising. Most popular industry blogs are interested in advertising partnerships, and with some testing and effect monitoring, it’s easy to work out which blog and website placements are effective and which aren’t.

4. Create a company blog for SEO.

When it comes to online services, particularly website design and online marketing, most websites are rather thin on content. They’ve got their service pages and occasionally a lengthy biography, but when it comes to industry-related content, most of their site is sorely lacking.

If you’re operating an online service business, an easy way to add ultra-relevant content to your website is through a company blog. Describe new projects and business information, highlight changes to your industry and niche, and give something back to readers and clients. With a twice-per-week blogging presence, your company website can easily have 100 extra keyword-heavy pages within a single year, boosting your ranking and providing real-life examples of your company’s value.

5. Write feature articles for experience and industry power.

A well-received feature article achieves two things for your business: the first is industry exposure, and the second is a potentially valuable backlink to your business website. A dedicated PR presence isn’t just worthwhile for direct media advertising and old-school exposure, but for online authority and SEO. Think about it this way – would your business value 100 useless links from self-made blogs, or several targeted links from high-authority media outlets and local newspapers? Value doesn’t just come through deliberate SEO, but dedicated online PR too.

6. Compare client acquisition costs across multiple marketing platforms.

After a few months of testing, you’ll invariably have some data to compare from your different marketing and advertising methods. From SEO to PPC, CPM advertising to direct email, there are undoubtedly going to be some major differences in the cost it takes to acquire a client, the amount of time required to process their orders, and the all-round value that they’re providing to your business.

From here on, you’ve got to do one thing: find the methods that are most effective, and eliminate all else. Focus your marketing efforts – and your marketing budget – on the platforms and strategies that bring in low-maintenance, high-value clients. Put this strategy into action and you’ll have more time to dedicate to business expansion, less stress from client acquisition, and a significantly optimized service income.

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7 Best SEO Wordpress pluggins: Ladder for High Rankings

If you owned a website or a blog at Wordpress and you are unable to optimize the same then this post will really provide you the tools to make your blog more SEO friendly.
Expert SEO Help will assist you in making your Wordpress Blog more search engine friendly. SEO expert India can provide you lots fo suggestions and tools to place you on top position of search engine.
With most of the blog sites we are facing problems to implement the SEO strategies like Meta Tags implementation, URL rewriting etc. If you are also a person suffering with the same problem then you need not to be worry I am going to provide you a list of plugins which will assist you in implementing your SEO strategies at Wordpress blog.

Below mentioned list of plugins can help you in optimizing your Blog.


All in One SEO Pack – This tool will really help you in optimizing your wordpress blog for most of the popular search engines.

SEO Title Tag – Optimize your title tag for each of your blog posts.

SEO Slugs – Optimize your file name as per the SEO strategies.

HeadSpace2 SEO – Meta data manager will provide you the facilities to manage your meta data.

SEO Friendly Images – It will automatically update the each image of your blog post with the relevant alt tags so that the blog post could be easily optimize.

SEO Post Link – Plugin ,creates links with the proper SEO shortening and removal of the unnecessary words to increase linkability.

SEO Smart Links – Adds several functions to your Wordpress blog to help with SEO needs. This plugin is very useful when integrated into your blog.

Get Rid Off from SEO Mistakes

One of the most important advantages of the Internet is access to information. Whether they are articles, tutorials, schemes, demos or classes, you can find useful information about everything. However, are also mistakes you can make, especially newbies.

For this reason, I wanted to talk to you about these mistakes. More precise, mistakes in SEO. The most frequent mistake is treat the SEO process superficially. We often forget some aspects that we think are less important, but aspects that makes the difference between a well optimized web sites and a site that will not have results. So, takes see what are the most frequent SEO mistakes a webmaster can make.

1. The lack of useful and targeted content. For a site to be able to rank well in search engines it has to contain a series a specific terms, keywords and relevant content for the users. Search engines analyzes the site at a content level and then decide if it’s targeted. If the information on the site is irrelevant, then this will be ignored by the search engines and by users as well.

Also, you need to ensure that the content on your site has correct grammar. These kind of mistakes often make the user think you are sloppy and it causes the user not to trust your web site, and also the products or services you are offering.

2. Lack of Keyword Research. For a professional SEO, it is essential that you know your market, users whom you are targeting. Starting from an analysis, it is necessary to find out what are the relevant keywords for your clients.

It’s not enough to insert in your HTML code all the keywords you find. You will find out, often too soon, that you have optimized your web site for non clients. Research and analysis of keywords is a necessary and mandatory action that should require more attention from the webmasters.

3. Irrelevant page titles. Considering the fact that the title of a page has a huge importance in establishing the relevance for search engines, picking a wrong title for your page can result in negative consequences.

In the best case, the web site will not be indexed for the most important keywords. In the worst case, the site will be banned for keyword stuffing.

4. Wrongfully use of Titles and headings ( h1, h2 ). The main search engines consider titles and headings of web sites to find information about the content of the page. Consequently, the way titles are written and the relevance of keywords that it contains are extremely important for a good web site indexing.

5. Ignoring the ALT tag for images. Images are not indexed by spiders, however ALT tags are. These tags can contain brief image descriptions in which you can include relevant keywords.

6. Using images and animation instead of text. Search engine spiders can only index text. Images or Flash animations used to improve the design of your web site do not contain the information a search engine needs, so they are irrelevant. Even if you have a lot of content on the page, if it appears as an image or Flash Animation, it will be ignored by search engines.

7. Hiding Text. By writing a piece of text using the same color as the site’s background, it can be hidden from the user. However the text won’t be hidden by spiders. This practice, used generally for inserting many keywords without the content looking odd for the users may results in penalties from search engines.

8. Using Frames. For many search engines it is difficult to index web sites that are using frames. If you really have to use frames, you can add the noframes tag and include keyword rich content. Search engines will be able to read the tags between the noframes tag of a site build with frames.

9. Using excessive Javascript code. A very used practice is the design of a web site to look more attractive. For this purpose, Javascript elements are used, especially in the site’s navigation structure. While the site becomes more attractive, the Javascript elements that includes links to other pages are not very well seen by the search engines.

10. Lack of CSS. CSS is a tool that can help you reduce the size of the web site and the time required for the site to load. It also helps you get a clean code which allows you to focus on content. CSS is a very important element because it increases a web site’s usability.

11. Using Page Cloaking. This technique makes the difference between web sites that will be indexed by search engines and those that will effectively seen by the users.The Page Cloaking procedure is often used on pages that are rich of keywords, which the search engines likes, but content that the web masters hides from the visitors and competitors.

The problem is that the search engines want to index the same pages that the users are seeing. If page cloaking is detected, your web site risks of being banned.

12. Using Splash pages. Splash pages, with big images or flash animations contain a single link that redirects a user to another page. One of the main disadvantages of splash pages is that they do not contain text and they don’t contain any keywords.

Also, they do not contain any inbound links from other pages, only outbound links.

13. Link exchanges with bad sites. It is recommended to avoid link exchanges, or to be very careful when picking web sites for link exchanges. Association with banned or suspicious sites may affect your credibility and may get your site to be penalized.

A site without proper SEO will not be seen by clients, So, even if SEO is not easy to do, it’s worth the effort because it can bring you targeted users. All the site’s elements, whether they are images or text, need to complete each other.

A little research and attention to the source code when building a web site can help to avoid the mistakes listed above, and your site will have a better chance to be successful.

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