How to explain to family and friends what you do for a living!

March 26 2013

Everything starts with the Search!

The web search engine is a system or software code that is designed to search for information on (indexing) the World Wide Web. The results for a search are usually offered in a line of results referred as Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s). The story of the first SE – Archie began 23 years ago back in 1990 and because of the amount of data on the sites at that point on the web it was easy searchable manually and there was no need for indexing the content.

Nowadays the most widely used search engine on the World Wide Web is Google with hundreds of millions of queries per day.As the evolution of search has grown to a level that every answer is served to the user exactly by the searched query, then we can freely state that Google has the biggest mission of them all – bringing together the worlds of information and making them universally accessible as well as useful to every single user out-there. In simple words the Google Search Engine has the duty to crawl and index the web in just seconds so it can display and serve the most relevant search result found, whenever and wherever a search query is submitted. Fact: Thousands of processors and computers in Google are involved in processing a single search query.

Displaying the most relevant search result is made by the SE secret software weapon called crawler or spider or Googlebot as is the case with Google) – and the algorithm which helps the search engines to turn all of the useful information on the web into a valuable and relevant search. On the other the search engines crawl the Web not only to serve the crawled results to the user but also to look at particular site items in order to get an idea what precisely the site is about.

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When you own a web site – search results matter!

One of the interesting facts about website ranking is that Google uses over 300 factors to rank websites which includes PageRank. The order on the SERP’s whenever a search query is submitted to Google is based particularly on a patented algorithm or priority rank called “Page Rank”. Larry Page & Sergey Brin were the developers who established for the first time this feature (as part of a research project about a new kind of search engine) for the Google Search which provides to the searchers information based on the available HTML, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PDF documents, Flash SWF, plain text files and others within the memory of the web servers. In regards to the page rank many of the webmasters nowadays use the Google toolbar – an internet browser toolbar that is available by Google which displays the PageRank of the user’s visited page as a number from 0 to 10. For example the http://www.usa.gov has page rank 10, a fact which shows how much is this site “popular”, and therefore the least popular sites have PageRank 0. Also, on the Google Search the users have the option to choose the “safe search“(a powerful search tool that filters search results to enhance your children safe search experience). I’m Feeling Lucky search is another option that whenever clicked will take the user to the first search result, by passing the SE results page. So if you don’t want to bother with many options to choose from, you can click this one. Smart ha!

Being on Google it means that you are on the Web!

The other day I was reading a post by a technological geek, with a headline: Google, “The Search Engine King”- it made me think about it. After a research I discovered that this is completely true. Since the year of its creation – 1999 the year when the Google company has entered the big door and until present time Google has become the leading Search Engine on the Web with several competitors like Chinese Baidu and Soso.com – the number one in South Korea according to Alexa.com, Yandex in Russia, Seznam in the Czech Republic, Yahoo in Japan and Bing worldwide.

Besides the main feature of searching for a text query, Google Search has more than 22 “special features” that can be activated by entering any trigger word while searching. (Weather, stock quotes, time, area code and others) One of the other search features of the google search is the “instant search” – suggested results while the searcher types the query, introduced by Google in 2010 and from day one the search engine marketers were speculating that this search will have a big impact on organic and paid search. The difference between these two is the following: the search results offered to the user in paid search are paid by the advertiser (online marketing expert) or the opposite are presented and offered naturally by the web crawlers and called organic search results.

One of the other search features of the google search is the “instant search” – suggested results while the searcher types the query, introduced by Google in 2010 and from day one the search engine marketers were speculating that this search will have a big impact on organic and paid search. The difference between these two is the following:  the search results offered to the user in paid search are paid by the advertiser (online marketing expert) or the opposite are presented and offered naturally by the web crawlers and called organic search results.

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Since I believe that this explanation of how the search engines work is enough for the newbies next is the introduction to the SEO process and trying on the simplest way to explain what I do for a living.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation!

Search engine optimisation is the process of gaining traffic from free, unpaid, natural or organic listings on the search engines, with no difference if the SE is the one of Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu or other and the web sites with significant content such as text, videos or local listings are shown based on what the search engine considers most relevant for the users.

As the SE are getting more and more used by the searchers daily, the website owners are trying to find new ways to make their websites shown on higher position in the search results as this will affect their outcome and economic profit . An Interesting fact contributing to this is the statistic that 75% of the web users never view the second page of the search results, with over 1.4 billion searches of the common search terms – keywords are conducted every hour, this is a big number and highly significant detail to ignore.

The birth of the new process on the web called SEO was a result of all of this, the Search Engines, the growth of the web data, the new websites, the users and their intent to click on various staff therefore visiting the links that are on the top of the offered list by the SE as they are the most relevant results from their search. If you are wondering yourself why some of these results come first in the list then the answer is simple and it is all of the SEO techniques being implemented on those web sites, the design and popularity of the site itself. As we already mentioned the search engines perform activities in order to deliver search results to the users – crawling the web, indexing content, processing it , calculating relevancy by keyword density, links, or metatags, and retrieving the search results or summarizing the results in endless pages that are sorted from the most relevant to the least relevant sites and search results. It is probably the best moment to mention that all search engines, (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) change their algorithms regularly and if you want to stay on the top of the list, you must follow the latest trends and algorithmic changes (Panda, Penguin etc.) and in addition adapt the website to the latest updates. Nevertheless for various Search engines various techniques are needed; as all of the SE’s have different factors of influence for higher rankings.

Search Engine Optimisation isn’t a one-time event!

Being an SEO expert or just a simple online marketing beginner you will hear a lot about: Traffic & PageRank’s, domain age, keyword density, title, description and H1 or H2 tags as the most relevant headings of your sites, sitemaps, robots txt, fresh content, backlinking, interlinking, reciprocal, rankjuice, redirects, smart URL’s, www vs non-www, Google Analytics & Webmaster tools, social media sites and lots of other “white hat” techniques suitable by the Search Engines, as practices that are demanded for better performance of your site in their listings and your SEO skills.

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When you are in this industry as the one that is offering its services or represent a company, you will often have clients saying: What is the best and fastest way to gain traffic? What can we do to increase the page ranking and position in the SE? How can I get position number one in Google? What’s…?

A professional online marketer will give the best answer but cannot promise number-one-position on the SE. If you are the client do not let anyone fool you. The SEO isn’t a one-time event; it is a bonding and difficult process, therefore no one can promise the best results in no-time, but can promise to do his/her best for a high quality web site and performance in the SERP’s. As conclusion to this I will only add this: investing time and resources in SEO can actually make sales.

Therefore if you are just a family or a friend of an SEO guru No Worries, you will get a lot of help when needed by a person who knows much about Google, on the other if you are a beginner in the field then you have a lot of learning to do from SEO webinars, SEO videos from specialists like this one, must do a lot of blogging, many hours spent on social media sites, learn how to use many SEO tools, onsite and offsite techniques and become the best SEO expert you can. Never forget to commit to the SEO process, as the Search Engine’s algorithms are updated regularly, the SEO tactics that worked best the previous month might not work this month.

It is one of the processes that require a long-term outlook and learning-new-skills attitude. In conclusion, using the words that users search for, putting them in the important and relevant places on the site and on other web places, getting links that will show to the SE the importance of the web site pages is probably the shortest explanation for the SEO.

For better understanding of the Search Engines, the SEO techniques, facts and details about How to do SEO read more on this awesome & extraordinary blog post by Jon Cooper.

If you liked this one then I’m looking forward to your thoughts in the comments, and I’d love it if you passed this along.

Click on the below image to see the full version of it.

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Thanks for your time reading, Congrats if you learned something about the SEO from this post and do not forget to follow us on Facebook, Google+ and other social media.

Advertise your business with AdWords

March 15 2013

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The widespread use of the Internet has revolutionised the way marketing is conducted. As a result, marketing a product or a service is increasingly done online. Online marketing encompasses marketing on desktop and laptop computers as well as mobile devices such as mobile phones, tablets etc. I am not saying that the traditional ways of advertising such as TV or radio are totally abandoned or replaced by online marketing, but that online marketing is indispensable if you want your business to succeed. Not being present online can seriously undermine your business efforts.In this regard, nowadays it is unimaginable for a business not to have its own website. This is the first step in becoming visible in the online world. After you have created your own website which will present your products or services to the world, you can go one step further by marketing these products and services to your customers.

Since Google accounts for around 80 percent of the worldwide searches online it can be concluded that Google has an enormous reach. I am not saying that Google is the only way you can advertise online. You can also advertise by using other search engines such as Bing or Yahoo, or advertise through third party sites on the display network such as Facebook. If you decide to advertise your business through Google you can achieve this by Google’s advertising product- AdWords.

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What is AdWords?

Adwords is Google’s advertising platform. By using AdWords you can advertise on the Google search network and the Google display network. Before going any further, let me explain the difference between the two. The Google search network consists of the google.com and other Google search partners. The Google display network consists of other sites that have partnered with Google such as YouTube, Gmail, blogger etc. The Google search network works by keywords and allows only text ads, while the display network works by both keywords and placements and in addition to text ads also allows image ads, videos and rich media ads. In the Google search network, the ads appear when a user conducts a search by typing a product or service he/she is interested in. This is called a search query or a search term which triggers the ads that are most relevant to the user’s search. The ads appear alongside, above and below the organic search results. On the Display network, users don’t directly search for a product or a service, but they browse the net. As they read or browse through certain sites, they see ads related to their interests.

 

Create an account and start using AdWords

In order to create an AdWords account you need to have a Gmail account. AdWords is a complex program with many features and tools and if you feel that it takes a long time to train someone to use it in-house, you can always hire a professional to manage your AdWords account.

After you created the account, follow these steps in order to create your first campaign:

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  1. Define your advertising goals – What do you want to achieve with your campaign? More sales, leads, sign-ups, or increase people’s awareness of your product (branding)?
  2. Create a campaign by choosing your network (Search, Display or both), devices on which you want your ads to appear and daily budget.
  3. Create separate ad groups within the campaign- Ad groups are tightly themed groups usually around your products or services you offer.
  4. Writing your ads- Ads should follow certain guidelines which concern the allowed number of characters, punctuation, content and links. Write more than one ad per ad group allowing several variations of an ad to compete against each other and see which one is more successful.
  5. Monitor your performance-An important feature of AdWords is its measurability. You can track the success of your individual keywords, placements, ads and campaign by closely following the data that AdWords gathers and calculates for you.
  6. Make adjustments and decisions based on the gathered data.

Payment options:

First you decide on a daily budget which is calculated by dividing your monthly advertising budget by 30.4 days a month. In this regard, it is important to note that there is no minimum spend. When using AdWords, you are charged by using the following payment options (also called bidding options).

CPC (cost-per-click) – By using the CPC option you are charged only when someone clicks your ad. The amount charged for a click can be either automatically set by AdWords or you can manually add the maximum CPC you are willing to pay. CPC can be set at the campaign, ad group or keyword level. Use this option if your business is concerned with getting traffic to your page and you want to send your potential customers to a particular page of your website.

CPM (cost-per-mille or cost per thousand impressions) – By using this model, you are charged for 1000 impressions of your ad. It is an option available only for the display network. With this bidding model you are more concerned with making your business visible and increase people’s awareness of your brand.
CPA (cost per conversion) – With CPA bidding, you are charged for each conversion you make. This selection is available only if you have enabled conversion tracking. CPA is a good option if your goal is to have conversions rather than clicks or impressions.

 

Advantages of AdWords

AdWords as one form of online marketing is faster and cheaper to produce compared to TV or radio commercials. If you have experience in using TV or radio commercials you will know that their production requires a lot of time, money and human resources. For instance, shooting a TV commercial involves writing a script, having an audition for actors, finding make-up artists and director, shooting the commercial and finally editing it. After that, you need to buy and wait for an available advertising space on your chosen TV or radio station.

With AdWords, advertising is fairly simple as you can produce and have the ad ready to show in several hours. Another advantage of AdWords is that it has a wider reach and can be shown worldwide in a couple of minutes. This is very important if your business is international in nature. Also, traditional forms of advertisings are shown to the general public, while AdWords is targeted as it shows the ads only to those who are actively searching for certain products or services.

Moreover, with AdWords you are in total control of how much you spend since you can measure the effects of your advertising. Through the use of tools such as conversion tracking or Google analytics you can calculate the ratio of your costs and profits and thus your ROI (return on investment). This can help you make informed decisions about what works and what doesn’t work for you.

Social media a Must-Place-to-Be & Content Marketing an Emerging Trend in 2013

March 6 2013

Social media marketing is the action of developing or growth of website traffic through social media sites. On the other social media sites are the web sites that accumulate various social actions from the users and visitors such as sharing short messages (Twitter) statuses, photos (Facebook) business locations, hangouts, events etc (Google +) videos (YouTube)
Social media is an online presence tool that can help in increasing the link building of a site and perform better SEM.

Content marketing is the new social media marketing

This kind of marketing represents any publicizing format that involves creation and sharing of media and online content in order to gain more clearly defined customers and understood target audience. Once created, the content must be published with the objective of driving profitable customer action.
The general intent for online sharing is attracting more and more visitors and connecting the content with its audience. Basically the content marketing is a technique of distributing previously created valuable and quality content- and represents unique art of being interactive with your customers without selling. Being a leading company that offers Marketing solutions you must distribute quality content. It is impossible to sell marketing without great content.

By my opinion, more and more businesses are realizing that unless they recognize and adopt content marketing soon they can lose the top position in the industry on the Search engines. According to Wikipedia:  over 90% of Business-to-Business (B2B) and 86% of Business-to-Consumer (B2C) marketers use the methods of Content Marketing, meaning that they use the social media, eNewsletters, eBooks, articles, blog-posts on a company website and other similar. With these facts to be the latest trends, the Web developed in a very popular and easy-publishing place to be, anyone can create content, source and share it online therefore the diversity of quality content is very large. Also, another form of content sharing that is becoming popular it’s the so called “Curation” – selected content taken from one place and sourced to other place online. Many are the platforms used to achieve the marketing media goals: Such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest… Here are a few predictions and facts about social media in the year of 2013.

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Facebook offering better tools for Facebook pages

From it very beginnings of Facebook (theFacebook) being just a simple university experiment lot of advance changes were made on this social media service, with the latest rankings of this site in 2009 as the most used social networking service by worldwide monthly active users, nowadays Facebook gets around a trillion pageviews every month according to Google’s own data. The business purpose of Facebook is as we know creating a Facebook page that helps businesses, organizations and brands share their stories while connecting with people and the places where you can share your marketing content, have an unlimited number of likes and subscribers. The page can also be customized by adding new features – third-party apps in a form of Tab icons on a page. This has brought additional functionality – building custom apps and the development of the third-party “Social marketing suites”
The fastest growing social networks in the year 2013 will be Facebook and Google+ and LinkedIn. LinkedIn being a business social network will be less used for content marketing and on the other from the beginning of 2013 Facebook powerfully presents their own original content creation techniques and strategies to drive further visitors engagement and increase sponsored-content opportunities.

Google+ Circles, Hangouts and Communities

Many are the points about Google+ which I think will be the leading one in 2013 and the future. Since Google+ is becoming integrated into the entire Google experience then networking on Google+ means you are on Google and Google is the Web.
Google plus communities recently implemented a feature on this social site is the ultimatum for your brand and content distribution. The Google+ platform is intended to be a layer on top of all other Google products. This social media is strongly incorporated into Google Apps and every single user is able to restrict conversations from sharing outside of the domain. This makes it more private and friendlier for business usage.

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Using this media you can be found on the web more easily, with the Google plus circles where you can follow and be followed by other users , the Google plus places (read more about this in my colleague’s recent post) by creating Hangouts or participating in the google plus communities. Additionally you can add social actions to your Adsense ads and you can add +1 buttons to your ads and link those to your Business Google+ page.
But as Google+, Twitter, Facebook and other growing social media platforms continue to expand in user’s acceptance and visitor’s engagement; the daily active users will have to decide where to spend their quality time and share relevant content. There’s only little time in a day, and the noise is getting louder and louder.

Improving your SEO & SEM with You Tube

In the new age of the social media and online marketing, YouTube is one of the or probably the only and most popular video platforms ever created. It is the channel where 72 hours of video gets uploaded on YouTube every minute and over 4 billion videos are watched every day. The third most visited website by the Alexa.com , the most popular video is the PSY – GANGNAM STYLE (강남스타일) M/V with 1,368,727,627 views (at the moment), you can watch it in 61 languages and is localized in 53 countries.
In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views or around 140 views for every person on Earth “500 years of YouTube video” are watched on Facebook every single day, 700 YouTube videos are shared on Twitter each minute according to the official you tube press page, it gets around 800 million unique visitors every month, Millions of subscriptions happen each day…

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You can now insert live hyperlinks to any of your external websites inside YouTube videos with the help of video annotations, Link your website with your YouTube channel thought google webmasters and can add the you tube subscribe widget to your website.
The future number one places to invest in predicted by the marketers are the social media. The power of social media is in what it lets us do and whom it lets us connect with. The story isn’t that You Tube has 1 trillion views until moment the story is that you now have the ability to connect with more than 1 billion people online and share your content becoming the content marketing guru. Thanks to Facebook, Google +, Twitter and other anyone with a story to tell can broadcast it to the whole world…
We hope you’ll join us by broadening link building into a brand-building effort while using the contemporary social media sites. I am looking forward to your opinions and comments and I’d love it if you passed this content along. Thanks for your attention & reading, and do not forget you can always find us on Facebook, Google +, Twitter and other social media. Be there!

Google+ Page For Your Business

February 22 2013

Before I tell you why and how to create your Google+ business page let me explain briefly what Google plus is.

Google Plus

Google+ is Google’s most recently developed social network site. Many consider it as an attempt of Google to compete with the domination of Facebook on the social media scene. It was launched in June 2011, at first on an invitation only basis, and in September 2011 it was made accessible to everyone. Just like the other social networks, it is free to use and everyone can create a personal profile, a business page or both. Since its launch, Google+ sparked much interest amongst Google users and by now it has around 343 million active users. Since it is a relatively young network site, its potentials remain to be seen as Google announced that many new features are yet to be developed.

What are the benefits of creating a business page on Google+?

If you are a business, probably you already have pages on the other social networks such as Facebook, Twitter etc. Creating a Google+ business page too will help you increase your online presence even more since potential clients can have additional site to access you from. Other important benefits from creating your business page on Google+ are the following:

First of all, it has new features unavailable on the other social network sites. One of these is the option named Circles. This means that you can target your updates or messages to specific people within your followers. For instance you can create separate circles for your employees, customers, VIP clients, partners, users by specific location etc.

Google’s+ option for video chats though the hangout option is also a new great feature which allows you to establish a more direct interaction with your clients.

And finally your business Google + page will make your business more visible on the Google search results. Now, the existence of Google+ account is considered as another ranking factor that the Google search engine uses. This in turn will lead to increased traffic to your website and increased click through rate (CTR). In other words, if you don’t have Google+ account, your Google search ranking may decrease.

How to create your Goggle+ business page

In order to create a business page, first you need to have a personal profile on Google+ which is created from an accessible Gmail account. From the personal profile page, you click on more/pages on the left hand side and then click create page. After you click on create page, pick your business category:

  • Local business or place
  • Product or brand
  • Company, institution or organization
  • Arts, Entertainment or Sports
  • Other

Google Plus Page

Within these main categories, you can choose a subcategory which describes your business more specifically.

Add Your Business

Afterwards, just follow the steps and add your business name, website, subcategory and content age level.

Create Google+ Page

Next, you can enter your profile photo and additional contact information about your business. For businesses, it is advisable to put their logo as their profile picture in order for users to be able to recognise you.

Google Plus Page

Then connect your Google+ page with your website. One last thing is to make sure you use the Google+ 1 button in order to allow users to share and recommend your website to their followers.

After you are done with creating and editing your page and you are satisfied with the way it looks, you can share it in the updates feed and let the world know about it.

Google recognizes brand associations – Co-Citation – The Future Link building Technique

February 9 2013

Websites, new or old ones and especially the small start-up businesses may need to work harder on self-promotion in order to increase their visibility. How to achieve that? Well this is a bit difficult to answer at first. Having many aggressive companies to compete with, companies that perform SEO for other businesses, the market nowadays have grown in a struggle arena and a very difficult place for prosperity and success.

The first thing used as the tool number one in the best SEOs practices, was and is the anchor text.

For those who do not know what the anchor text is, a simple explanation follows: link on a page presented with a text instead with a web address (example: Web Design Sydney as an anchor text link and the https://www.webski.com.au/web-design/ is a url link. Usually the text is a keyword that you target the most or you aim at for your business purposes, used as an anchor text, with which you are telling Google or to other Search engines that you are targeting for that particular keyword , and that the page you are linking to has much to do with the phrase used as an anchor text.

All of this process has helped in developing a new industry in the lines of the SEO techniques – the link building.

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As explained on the Wikipedia, the Link building in the SEO process is a process of affecting the visibility of a web-page in the Search Engines results, on the other it means building quality, relevant links to your website, which in return helps your website achieve higher rankings in the search engines and drive larger traffic to your site. Or even simpler: getting as many links from reputable -high PR sites, and links from sites that are in your keyword range or are highly relevant to your business. That’s what traditional link-building is all about.

Nowadays, Google has got even cleverer and some of till- now circumstances have changed for good. The new era is here – Google algorithmic or other updates and changes have one purpose: vanishing of all the not quality web sites and blogs (created for the intention to include links that will point to other No or Low quality web sites) in order to drive traffic, next is the barring of the signal that helps ranking growth from pages –not –worth –reading, online articles, blog comments, forums, social media posts and other low quality web where an anchor text can be placed in order to drive traffic or increase rankings.

Introduction to co-citation techniques and mention-based co-citation data

Alternatively Google has found the answer and it is simple: They are getting much smarter about this subject, and although it is a traffic generator technique the co-citation is used to purify and intensify the search engine rankings and creating more targeted traffic.

If you are one of the web masters that use “white art” SEO techniques than you’ve probably heard about the latest predictions of Rand Fishkin, SEOMOZ’s leading gurus about: the anchor text diminishing as a signal and google replacing it with something else called co-occurrence or co-siltation.

With fewer words the co –citation is a habit of using of terms and phrases (keywords) along with a brand or a link while you are backlinking or doing inbound link campaigns for your site. Simple – the co-citations are mentions of your business name or brand and the products that you offer to the audience and clients.

Co-occurrence is something that should happen naturally if your content and page ranking strategies are in place, by this you contribute to the Google goal – eliminating the urgent-fix SEO’s who want to rank fast by doing some basic backlinking or practice the reciprocal or paid links. Therefore as much as you have content that speaks your brand and the keyword phrase without linking to your page then you are contributing for a more meaningful and smart web and for the powerful keen changes that follow in the future & the basics to the Google’s next changes.

In fact the simple explanation of the method called co-citation or the co –occurrence is a parallel measure used to establish a subject similarity between the sites or their pages. If company One and company Two are both linked together by company Three then it may be said that they are related – even though they do not link to each other. Without these sites having their best targeted keywords used in any SEO anchor techniques such as: keywords in the HTML title tag, headings or not even in the home page, other anchor text, on-page text or other.

So even if it doesn’t turn your co-citation to be the best way to increase the ranking you have nothing to lose, you are focusing on the marketing, building brand strategies for your business by distributing high quality content that is referenced and deriving for the audience. This way you are contributing, sharing with the right people and distributing your brand across the web.

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Make people write about your brand on high authority sites!

As Rand Fishkin discusses in his November post and he is signifying something arriving on a big entrance in the future SEO: “You can see a lot of articles on the web that mention cell phone ratings and reviews and mention Consumer Reports. They don’t necessarily link to the page that sells cell phones. But many of them will do exactly this. If you look at a text snippet on the page, it’ll say, “Cell phones as rated by Consumer Reports.” This doesn’t even link. It’s not even pointing to their website or to that specific web page. But Google sees the words “cell phone”, the word “rated,” and the “Consumer Reports.” They put two and two together and say, “It seems like lots of people on the Internet seem to think that Consumer Reports and cell phone ratings go together.” – This is his explanation about the prediction for the anchor text and the co-citation replacing it and one of the future looking element of how are we going to do SEO. At this point it’s good to mention that Google recognizes brands and not only, they support every brand association or the effort of people writing about this brand without linking to it by only using competitive keyword phrases.

This behavior of co-citation and brand association is founded on content analysis with one goal- sourcing context, in order for the most relevant to rank as highly as it can. In fact the simple explanation of the new method called co-citation or the co –occurrence is a matching measure used to establish a theme connection between two websites or their pages.

If company One and company Two are both linked together by company Three then it may be said that they are related – even though they do not link to each other. Without these sites having their best targeted keywords used in any SEO techniques such as: title tag, or other meta tags, headings or not even on the home page. How do they rank well and is the co-citation the reason for that? The answer will be yes! If you see a site ranking well without the standard SEO techniques then you should know that the co-occurrence or the co-citation is causing that. Google isn’t just looking anymore for links or quality content; they’re looking for Context and co-occurrence is probably a part of the newest Penguin updates, principally when trying to understand what a relevant link is.

Further, if you are an SEO master this is what you should be recognized for rather than using low-quality tactics and on-page factors. Make sure you always target to relevant competitive keywords and prior to linking make research about the site you intent to co-site, if it is a reputable and high ranked site. Doing SEO the right way, placing links on the right places on the web, for you site or others, means only one: You will be prepared for the next big update and Google changes, shutting down the anchor text signals and introducing the co-citation techniques and mention-based co-citation data as the “white hat” SEO leading techniques that contribute to a smarter web and high ranking positions.

A final tip for closure: Use any of these types of associations (keyword & brand or keyword & website or keyword & URL) and they may accompany a good content text placed on high authority web sites on the way of high SEPR’s positions. Mentioning your company brand, website url with the key phrase of your products and services on other relevant web pages will keep you among the top businesses in your industry.

Attract Your Customers With Good Web Design

February 1 2013

A whole new world is open in today’s business thanks to the various tools of online marketing. There is big difference between traditional marketing and online marketing. Each has its own way of a marketing impact. Traditional way is not changing that fast like the online way of marketing. There are a lot of different (nontraditional) techniques included in this area like E-newsletters, micro sites, webinars, SEO, SEM, PPC and social media. The main tendency that should be kept is to ensure that the online marketing efforts are directly strong tied to your business objectives and goals, but at the same time tracking and improving the bottom line ROI from your internet marketing efforts.

In order to have a successful internet impact, every company first must have its own website. That’s the basic internet tool which helps you bring your potential customers closer to the company’s products. That’s a base that every serious company needs to focus on when it comes to marketing in general.

Web Design Sydnye

Depending on your desire and your philosophy of your marketing strategy your website can consist flashy animations and dynamic content or you prefer more static design in order to serve your purposes. Your business has its own nature and according to that you should probably know and have an experience with the customer’s taste. That will help you give the right answer to the question: Do the customers you wish to attract respond to splashy effects or a cleaner simpler design? The web designer has to determine how your web presence can serve you in the very best possible way.

The esthetic is one of the crucial things for the whole image of the company, that’s why the designer should focus on examination of your client base very carefully. An educated and informed customer appreciates the quality of your product. Let your website present your company’s image in a best way, but also enable easy attraction for new potential customers. Glance in the future perspectives by following the directions of the new age.

If you want a website with professional web design call us now on +61 2 9146 6190. Our Web Design Sydney Company team will provide you with the best services.

To see our full portfolio please visit Web Design Sydney Portfolio.

Unnatural link penalties, Penguin Updates & the Webmasters Disavow Tool

January 26 2013

Strategic ways of using it for the purpose it was meant to!

In the past 2012 anyone that has been doing SEO probably was reading and hearing a lot about the latest ranking drops on the SEPR’s of many websites on the net. General reasons for these changes can be found in the latest Penguin updates and Google’s algorithmic changes. Webmasters got worried because their sites were manually or Penguin penalized for not respecting the Google’s guidelines or for not using their back-link techniques on the proper way. As the quality links are the basics of Page Ranking and one of the most well-known signals that Google uses to order Search results and determine relevancy, you will agree that high-quality links to a site is the part which mostly contributes to the page rank of the site. Therefore by implementing the Penguin and by manual penalizing websites (using unnatural link building techniques) Google wanted to punish webmasters and their websites by dropping the Page Ranking in the Google or other Search Engines. How to diagnose if a site- ranking drops is due to the Penguin hit or the “artificial” paid, spammy linking?

Well, this is easy to answer: If your site’s rankings dropped drastically after April 24th 2012 (the date of when Penguin 1.0 was launched) then you are a victim of the newest algorithmic Penguin updates and the strategy of Google’s targeting the aggressive link-building tactics and the unnatural anchor text on the web. On the other hand if you received bad links warning message in Google Webmasters Tools account this was a direct signal from Google that they have problem with your link profile and have penalized your site manually. With such warnings from Google you can be 100 % sure that you have received a link-based penalty and here is how the message looks like.

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The Google message and the Penguin Update that made many webmasters and site-owners take actions on removing any “bad” or “unnatural” links was pretty clear that any site using spam backlink techniques will be penalized and their impact will be big – losing the majority of the site’s traffic. As we all know Google works very hard to make sure that actions on third-party sites do not negatively impact a website, and because the incoming links can affect the Google’s opinion of a site or a page they had to take control over the situation and penalize sites that use paid links or other link methods that violate theirs quality guidelines.

Unfortunately if you have received this type of message you know what I am talking about. You are already familiar with the new Disavow tool on the Webmasters (announced in mid-October by Matt Cutts ), therefore Grab your site and do some bad-link research. Do not just sit; you will need months of time to full recover from this type of penalty whether it is from the manual web spam team or the Penguin.

Locating and Isolating the bad links – How easy is it?

The more you look for unnatural links the better it will be to effectively target the sites treatment without damaging the site in this process. By damaging I mean that you surely do not want to remove the “good” links from your site that bring the most ranking and attract the majority of traffic. So, you need to distinguish and target links with suspicious anchor text placed on irrelevant low quality link-directories, low quality articles syndicated all over the web, blogspam, postspam, forums spam-comments or similar.

In situations, if you haven’t used any techniques of spam linking to insignificant link directories or blog posts, or you haven’t hired some SEO to build bad links to your site, then you can be certain that your site is a target of link attack, (someone else is doing it on purpose). In such cases the disavow tool is your ally. Firstly, locate the bad links use the Webmaster Tools select the site you want, navigate to Traffic > Links to Your Site > Who links the most > Download. You will get link results and can see all of the links to your site but additionally you can use some of the online tools such as backlinks history from MajesticSeo, OpenSiteExplorer.org or other sites that offer such online tools paid or free of charge. Be very, very careful, because most links even low- rate links, can still help your rankings, and on the other there are links that may not even be counted by Google( for example links with the rel=”nofollow” tag don’t help or harm your rankings)

These and similar are the tools that will help you identify which links to remove, they also assist in finding contact data for sending link removal emails to the sites webmasters and owners, and help tracking your data in worksheet forms, subsequently helping you remove spamlinks from the web and gain back rankings. Even if you have used the best known techniques to you and best efforts, and you haven’t been able to get a few backlinks taken down, that’s a good time to rock and roll the Disavow Links tool.

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Using the webmasters Disavow tool is your best choice, for sites that have heaps of backlinks to clean up. It will help you clean all of the links that have made the damage and all of the fractions of bad links that have been left behind and cannot be removed manually. Do not consider this tool as the answer to all of your problems! In Matt’s you tube video he separates the important points of using the Disavow tool :

• Be careful. Don’t use this tool unless you are sure you need to use it.

• Remove all links from the web that you can.

• Upload a text file, one url per line, of links to ignore

• Use domain: to ignore domain links

• Treat as a strong suggestion

• Most sites shouldn’t use this tool

• And last but not least : “ you can disavow links, backlinks if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial or low-quality links pointing to your site!

The basic usage instructions are the following: After downloading all of the pages linking to your site, create text file with the links you want to disavow – http://spam.example.com/stuff/content.htm You’ll then be driven to upload a file with the links you want to disavow

You’ll then be driven to upload a file with the links you want to disavow

webski-blog-submit-disavow.png

All you need is a text file with one URL per line of the links you want to be ignored, and freely you can place some comments, Google will ignore them:

# from spamdomain2.com removed most links, but missed these
http://www.spamdomain2.com/contentA.html

http://www.spamdomain2.com/contentB.html

In cases you want all the domain links to be ignored add the following to the text file: domain:spamdomain1.com

Next you upload the file (regardless of the name of the file) and click submit but before that be certain that the websites you submit for disavowing are actually the guilty party. Using the Disavow tool by the words of Cutts is the same as using the “nofollow” attribute, which lets sites to link to third party sites without passing ranking.

Give Google what it wants -a quick loading website with responsive web design, unique content and fresh blogposts on the same domain, on a consistent server and work on gaining links from relevant, high quality websites. Spend time working on Your website – It is the biggest client that you will ever have! Wait for some time to let the disavowed links make their way to the Google web spam team: (“We need to recrawl and reindex the URLs you disavowed before your disavowals show outcome, which can take multiple weeks.”) Finally, submit a reconsideration request so Google can check if your sites linking profile is within their quality guidelines in order to remove the penalty actions from your site.

Grab the Opportunity to Ask Matt Cutts A Question

January 17 2013

If you are a webmaster you definitely know about WebmasterToolsHelp YouTube Channel.

In order to have continuous communication with webmasters and to reach more people, in 2009 Google introduced the Webmaster Central YouTube Channel. The videos posted on this channel show step-by-step instructions on how to use Webmaster Tools features, the latest updates from Google, answered questions by Matt Cuts and other useful information and tools to help you better understand and improve your site in Google Search.

Webmaster Tools YouTube Channel

Post Your Question and Get Answers Directly From Matt Cuts

My favorite videos from this channel are those from Matt Cutts where he answers questions posted by webmasters and other people who want to create great sites and want to perform well in Google Search Results. From these videos you may hear very useful information and they will help you learn and understand the right way to improve the visibility of your site on Google Search Results, to follow and understand different metrics and to make the right strategy which will bring you more customers, leads and traffic.

In order to get answers directly from Google’s Distinguished Engineer and head of web spam – Matt Cutts, visit Google Moderator Page and submit your question. Matt, takes questions from webmasters about various Google behaviors and uploads responses to WebmasterToolHelp YouTube Channel. Sometime his answers are longer and in depth, and sometimes they are quick and to the point. If your question is not answered don’t be disappointed because there are so many people and so many questions posted on Google Moderator Page and if you walk through the videos maybe you will find your answer, or maybe Matt will answer you in context on another question. Also you can read some of the questions that are already posted, check out the Moderator page and upvote the questions you think are the best.

Ask Matt Cutts Question

To be in touch with the latest Webmaster Tools videos subscribe on Google Webmaster Tools YouTube Channel and enjoy in learning from the best.

The Business Purpose of Twitter – Relevant and Vital for your Daily Business Operations – Volume Two

January 11 2013

One of the primary goals of using Twitter in every day’s communication is to network online for both personal or business use or just simply sharing your work/ hobby. One of the most prospective business usages of Twitter is to meet potential customers and leads the same way you would do if you were organizing a network event.

 

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As I previously mentioned with the blog post about the latest Twitter marketing instructions, 42 % of Twitter users follow brands, this is a reason more if you don’t have a Twitter account yet, get one, create it and get visible. Become one of the many that are followed on this social media and use some of the tips below to strengthen your online presence and become successful. Target your business audience and everything will seam as easy as it is with twitter. Twitter users are hungry for new ideas, opportunities, information, services, products and new or traditional brands. In order to connect the right way so that you can become one of the recognizable brands online and on social media such as twitter you should follow some simple steps to a successful online business and focus target the exact subscribers that will help you reach the top.

Get recognizable & Connect to the right followers- the number one must!

Follow this six relevant and vital steps for your daily operations and best busness Twitter practice and represent the company you own on the best way you can and know.

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#1- Put a face to the name!- In order to succeed in the business goals that you aim at, you must customize and make more your personal company business profile. Create an account and before you start following people or other businesses it is smart to brand the profile, the header image or to create a custom background design that will help you convey your brand and a positive first impression. Put your logo or photo next to the company name. Add a website if you have one, it is a great way to attract visitors to your site, and if you don’t have one add links to your Facebook, LinkedIn Company Page, or your Tumblr account and present and represent the company you own with the best way you can.

#2- Promote your brand on the right way and by that convince people to follow you– this is the best advice that I can give you at this moment. Which is the right way- well this is a matter of knowledge rather than taste. Use the whole knowledge and imagination that you can and have and be twitter active as much as you can. Use every way to promote yourself and your business- Just Be There! This way you can promote online your brand 24/7 and contribute to your online presence to your business in a way that will provide faster and better ROI.

#3- Start Tweeting unique and beneficial content- Tweet about non-business, post interesting tweets, advices, photos or comments on others tweets, share links of the things going on at your company or webinars that you are hosting or attending, make questions and get opinions from the people you follow or retweet others interesting stuff. When you talk about your company provide useful information, share the social side of the company not only the business, the products, or the services you provide, share photos from events or gatherings that your company has. The social media in general contributes to the value of human connections and as for that Twitter is an online social media that is worth bothering, hence by giving potential followers these information about you, you allow them to make the right decision about following you. It also lets them know that you are doing business on Twitter, you understand their needs, and provide the right information they need.

#4- Make sure you don’t miss anything important organize your follow list.Make sure that you follow the right people- Is this possible? Hmm, as the number of users you follow grows, your Twitter social network grows and the noise gets louder, so hearing the messages that are intended for you is much more difficult. This is a reason that the Twitter follow list needs to contain users such as customers, providers, similar businesses and competitors and people in professional organizations and similar industries. Avoid bots because they are not human.

webski-blog-tweetvite-logo.png#5 – Use the Tweetvite invitation service. Offer a Twitter-special. Organize an event by creating a custom made or designed invitations for the event with the Tweetvite that you will host and give discount or offer a twitter special deal. This Twitter widget can be used for your business purposes and can vary from discounts for Twitter followers on some of your products or services to a gathering, a tradeshow or social event that you will host. Click on the “publish your invitation” and do not forget – post your Tweetup invitation to any social network using the “Share” button, or use the RSVP widget and add the Tweetup to the sidebar of your blog. This is a great tool if you want to expand the Twitter conversation to your blog and share your Twitter conversation. Use the embedded tweets that will allow you to take a tweet or a conversation and post it to your website or in a blog post.

#6- Update your consumers about products or services. Keep them engaged by informing them about news and any updates about your brand or share comments and thoughts while live events are on, online gatherings or webinars that you attend or host. Interact directly with private massages not viewable in the Public Twitter stream but never associate this type of communication with your subscribers with the Customer service or the direct mail service.

Use some of these tips and tricks – you will make NO mistake. You can accomplish your goals very fast, connect to the proper followers that will tweet about your brand and product and in no time your products and services will become a necessary must. Get social and use twitter for your business purposes.

Do not forget Follow Webski, network with us and be the first to know the news!

Get Familiar With The Latest Google Update – Data Highlighter for Event Data

December 21 2012

The reach snippets in search results are very important to Google. If your site contains an event listing and you have Google Webmaster Tool account you will have the opportunity to use the latest update from Google – Data Highlighter for event data. What is a Data Highlighter? If you visit Google Webmaster Tool Learning Centre you will read that Data Highlighter is a webmaster tool for teaching Google about the pattern of event-related data on your website. This means that you will use this tool in order to highlight parts of your website through Google Webmaster Tools simply with your mouse and without having to change any of the code on your website.Great tool, isn’t it?

google-data-highlighter

How it works?

In order to start using this tool, first you must log in into your Webmaster Tools account or sign in if you don’t have one. If your site is added and verified then select your site, click the “Optimization” link in the left sidebar and click “Data Highlighter”. The link will drive you on a page where you can learn more about this tool. After reading all the information you can click on Start Highlighting button and that you need to enter the URL of a typical event page on your site.

Data Highlighter for event data can extract data about your events, such as concerts, festivals, shows, sport events, business conferences etc. See below how Google search results display a rich snippet from a multiple events.

google-data-highlighter-sydney-events

Before you start using this tool note that Data Highlighter can access only on the pages that have been crawled by Google recently. You cannot use this tool for pages that Google hasn’t crawled or can’t crawl particular page/s.

Search for: