A Guide to SEO Link Building Techniques

It's no secret Google uses links to measure the authority of web pages. If a web page attracts links from other pages Google's algorithm, the software it uses to rank pages and decide which page is number one for a search result, increases the importance of a page.

[caption id="attachment_3961" align="alignleft" width="300"] Anatomy of a Link[/caption]

Anatomy of a Link

The most common analogy of a link is to liken it to a vote. If page A links to page B then page A is suggesting page B is a good page, page A likes page B. The only slight complication is the nofollow tag. In a nutshell the nofollow tag allows links to be added to a page that create a click-able link to another page without the link passing a vote. These are used for text link adverts for example where they will send traffic to another page without passing a vote.

I'm not going to go into any more detail on the nofollow tag here but I'd strongly advise reading the WikiPedia page for an in depth explanation. In short if you want to link from a page on your site to a page on another site without inferring any kind of endorsement use the nofollow tag.




[caption id="attachment_3963" align="alignleft" width="300"] Buying Links[/caption]

Buying Links

here are many ways of buying links. Again you can employ a link building company but you can also buy links directly from website owners. If you buy a link and the link is not nofollowed you are in direct contravention of Google's guidelines. In short if Google discover your purchased links your site may be removed from their directory. In general they will simply remove any value from the links you have bought rather than directly penalize you, however the effect can be the same.

So who buys links? Sadly many companies buy links and as with link building in general there's a whole industry offering links for sale on some impressive websites including many high profile mainstream household names! That said buying links can be very expensive with some organizations charging many thousands of pounds a year for a single link. To further compound this most link sellers require an ongoing payment in perpetuity to maintain the links you purchase. If you go down this route you need deep pockets and you will be running the gauntlet of the search engine spam teams.

[caption id="attachment_3965" align="alignleft" width="300"] Why Links Are Important[/caption]

Why Links Are Important

Having established links are like votes it's not too hard to understand why links are important. Just like a politician wins an election by securing more votes than other candidates, web pages secure the first position in a search result by securing more votes than other pages. However, unlike a political election where all votes are equal, where search engines are concerned this isn't the case, and this is where most of the confusion arises.




[caption id="attachment_3967" align="alignleft" width="300"] How to Identify A Good Link Target[/caption]

How to Identify A Good Link Target

The term link target simply means a web page you would like a link from. Setting aside link spammers, who see all links as equal, identifying a good link target is very simple. A good link target is a web page whose readers might be interested in the content of a page on your site. That's it.

Expanding on this you could argue a good link target is a web page with authority whose readers might be interested in the content of a page on your site, however this simply introduces a whole raft of complications that will see you mired in confusion. There are so many ways of establishing a site's authority, including Google's PageRank technology, SEOMoz's MosRank technology, TrustRank, Spam Signals and any number of other metrics that you should simply consider a page based purely on the simple rule offered above, would this page's readers be interested in my page.

If you adopt this philosophy with your link building work, you will build links that will send you valuable traffic whilst at the same time building your page's authority. It's a win win technique. Of course the link spammers will argue against this suggesting it's time consuming and difficult, and they would be right. These same experts will no doubt want to sell you their amazing technique for search engine domination. They will no doubt have discovered the secrets of building long lasting and effective links with minimum effort and only a few hundred dollars. But ask yourself this. If they have indeed found a fool proof way of building valuable links why are they not simply dominating the search results themselves and making a fortune from affiliate marketing?




[caption id="attachment_3969" align="alignleft" width="300"] Why Links Are Not All Equal[/caption]

Why Links Are Not All Equal

In order to explain this further I'm going to stick with the voting analogy and expand on it. When thinking about links as votes it's useful to consider the term block vote or block voting. Most commonly associated with unions a block vote infers upon one person the voting rights of all members of an organization. Let's say there are 4 people in a room each representing one group of people.

• Mr Smith represents a group of 1000 people


• Mr Jones represents a group of 1500 people


• Ms Samson represents a group of 2000 people


• Mrs Collins represents a group of 5000 people

A proposal is put before the group and Mr Smith, Mr Jones and Ms Samson all vote in favor with Mrs Collins voting against. On the face of it that's 3 in favor 1 against and the proposal would be carried. However, Mrs Collins represents a group of 5000 people, 500 more than the number represented by Mr Smith, Mr Jones and Ms Samson so in fact, the motion isn't carried, it's defeated by 5000 votes to 4500.

This is pretty much the same as the way links work. Simply put links carry different voting rights and it's perfectly possible for a page with only 3 or 4 links to rank higher than a page with several hundred or even several thousand links. It's this aspect of link building that's so badly misunderstood and the reason there's a whole industry offering to build links on the basis of X number of links for Y number of dollars.

[caption id="attachment_3975" align="alignleft" width="275"] How To Secure the Right Kind of Links[/caption]

How To Secure the Right Kind of Links

There are some people who will argue any link is worth having, they may be right. However, given that we now understand links don't all carry the same weight it should be clear that securing links that carry a lot of weight will have a much bigger impact on your web pages than links carrying little or no weight. So how can you secure links that carry weight? Simple, create something worth linking to! The problem is this isn't simple, it's hard. It requires thought, planning, research, creativity and hard work and because of this most people revert to link spam.




[caption id="attachment_3971" align="alignleft" width="300"] Do Link Building Systems Ever Work?[/caption]

Do Link Building Systems Ever Work?

Yes. There's no doubt some people do discover methods for creating effective links fast and cheaply. There's also no doubt these methods are usually discovered by the search engines and they quickly cease to be effective. By the time you get access to these get rich quick schemes it's a safe bet the person who discovered it has made their money and are now squeezing a few more dollars out of it by selling the technique to you. As with most things in life there's no such thing as a free lunch and these schemes are best avoided.

[caption id="attachment_3973" align="alignleft" width="300"] Link Spam[/caption]

Link Spam

The vast majority of link building companies operate by creating link spam. In simple terms they create links from places such as forums, link farms, directories, blogs, hubs, social bookmarks and an ever increasing number of other ways. There are also hundreds of article directories who, unlike EzineArticles accept low quality auto spun articles in exchange for a link. If you believe all that matters is link quantity you really are spoiled for choice and there are thousands of companies who will build you a set number of links for a set fee.

In order to allow you to make an informed decision let's look at some of the more common link building techniques and discuss why they may not be worth the effort.

• Forums - The most common link building techniques using forums are to create a profile page and a signature link. Signature links allow links to be created at the bottom of posts or comments you leave in a forum. Signature links are at best very low quality and although they may send you some traffic are unlikely to have any long lasting impact on the pages you link to. This is because these links are not merit based, as is the case with all link spam methods, and it's accepted the search engines are getting better at ignoring these links and assigning them no value.


• Link farms - These are employed by many link building companies. A link farm can often have a vast number of websites and web pages within it, all under the control of the link building company. By building a link farm link building companies are able to offer a set number of links for a set fee as they have plenty of web real estate on which to build the links. The problem with link farms is they can be discovered by the search engines and when they are, the links within them will cease to have any positive impact on the sites they link to. There are a number of variations on this theme including a technique where link building companies buy pages within legitimate websites in an attempt to appear credible.


• Directories - These are useful and can create links carrying some value in the sense of attracting traffic to your website. But, in another sense, they are a form of spam; and, as with other spam techniques, links from directories are generally not merit based and as such rarely carry any weight in terms of helping to increase your ranking. There are, however, some notable exceptions such as the DMOZ directory and Yahoo.


• Hubs - These are pages created on services such as Squidoo. In theory Squidoo hub pages or lenses as they are called by this particular service are a great idea and allow people to create pages about something they care about. Sadly the spammers have also realised it's an easy way to create pages for link building so it's a fair assumption using hubs such as this won't have any lasting or hugely positive impact on your website.


• Blogs - Often referred to as SPLOGS (spam blogs) blogs are a favourite haunt of link spammers. They seek out blogs in the hope of leaving a comment and associated link to their client's website. Again these are not merit based unless the blog is actively managed by its owner and popular blog software such as Wordpress automatically nofollow links in comments anyway. This makes the links of little value other than the small amount of web traffic they can generate unless your comment is accepted on a high traffic popular blog.


• Social bookmarks - In their early days social bookmarking sites may have been a source of valuable links but the link spammers have put an end to that. Most of the credible bookmarking sites (Digg, Sphinn etc) recognised their platforms were being abused by link spammers and as a result they nofollow links to deter them.

We could go on looking at the methods and platforms used by link spammers but by now you should be building a general picture. Link spammers generally create links that are not merit based and as such the links you buy from them may work for a while but ultimately will stop working. It may take weeks for them to stop working (days in extreme cases), it may take months and occasionally it will take years but eventually they will stop working as the search engines become better at filtering out the spammy links from the merit based ones.

It may be worth employing a link building company who use the techniques outlined above but if you do you must be aware that you are potentially building your house on sand, which is seldom a good plan.

[caption id="attachment_3977" align="alignleft" width="210"] Anatomy of the Perfect Link[/caption]

Anatomy of the Perfect Link

If you are still reading this you should by now have a very clear picture of what a link is, why it's valuable, and why links are a necessary part of your on-line marketing mix. As this article concludes I want to outline the make up of a perfect link. The perfect link should:

1. Send valuable traffic to your website


2. Tell the search engines your site is an authority

Let's say there's a company called Dive Dorset Ltd. They offer diving holidays off the Dorset coast in South West England. Their holidays are unique and have featured on several TV programmes and articles about the company and their unique approach have appeared in several national newspapers. This has resulted in the company's website securing a number of top quality links, and Google often ranks them highly when people carry out diving related searches.

In Conclusion

There are two clear paths to go down with respect to link building, link spam and merit based. It should be clear link spam will require less effort but won't build long lasting links where merit based requires more effort but builds links that will stand the test of time. The path you choose will depend on many factors not least of which the resources you have available and your appetite for building a business that will stand the test of time.

The search engines are continuously trying to purge their search results of pages employing link spamming techniques although it's clear they have a less than 100% success rate. The link building methods you adopt will depend on your view of how effective the search engines will be at detecting link spam in the future. If you believe they have the resources to overcome it you are left with no option but to build merit based links. If you believe as many do, that the search engines are fighting a losing battle then you might throw your hat in the ring with the link spammers.

Hopefully now you've read this article whichever route you choose you can make an informed choice. If you take nothing else away from it you should understand that links that require minimum effort will likely bring little benefit in the long term. Link building is a cause of much frustration even for SEO specialists and it's easy to see why so many spam techniques are employed. The web is awash with poor quality content created for no other reason than to create a link to poor quality websites that can't attract links based on merit. Indeed many website owners simply can't see a way of creating anything worth linking to on their sites and resort to link spam out of desperation. This author believes there's a better way and ultimately taking this road less traveled will create a website that will stand the business it represents well for the future.

Happy link building!

Effective Social Media for Business Results

It's time to grow your brand by using social media.

To grow your business today through brand awareness and loyalty, Social Media and Content are the foundation for achieving success. A successful Social Media marketing campaign can bear fruit in the form of revenue, but only after creating a social community with engaged and motivated consumers.

Our social media consultants start by gaining a complete understanding of your business goals and current social media efforts.  Next, we  listen to the existing ‘chatter’ dealing specifically with your brand, product or service that is already happening in social media. This allows us to gather qualitative data, in the form of customer feedback, and quantitative data, in the form of measured traffic on the primary social media platforms to guide your competitive strategy.

Armed with this insight, your social media Marketing Game Plan is created and Social Media Strategies and Content Marketing are developed. This involves selecting the appropriate platforms for participation, approving messaging and creating a targeted timeline to publish relevant and engaging content.

Link Building is DEAD, Its a BIRTH of Link EARNING!!!

Did you hear that from Rand Fishkin of SEO MOZ, he has been saying these days. He has been articulating which we have been working silently over for past two years.

Gone are the days when people used to buy links, build links, get links, force links, push links, drop links.

Old-school, super old-school link building tactic was leaving links on guestbooks, forums, open comments, do follow blogs, do follow links, all that kind of stuff. They are extremely effective for getting your site banned from search algorithms.

So how should one go about EARNING LINKS?

The new way to do this is earn links directly with content. You can earn links very, very directly if you create the kind of content that you know someone wants to share, wants to link to, would embed, would write about or blog about or include in their press or their research or in something that says something nice about them.

The link earning way to do that is to get a guest post featured on picky sites and blogs. This is very important. When we say "picky," what we mean is, people who care a tremendous amount about what's being put on their sites as opposed to those who accept nearly every type of guest post or guest article.

The diagram shows how Converged Media works. The most important aspect to Earn Links is through Earned Media. So the overall strategy is to create great content and reach out to the earned media space

 

[caption id="attachment_3703" align="aligncenter" width="497"] Link Building is DEAD, Its a BIRTH of Link EARNING!!!.[/caption]

 

Top 5 Ways Your Business Can Leverage Instagram

Any business can utilize Instagram when it comes to adding photos to a blog post, but it will take a bit of work. Instagram is all about people taking pictures on their mobile phones, and sometimes your company simply doesn’t have the time or energy to do take photos. Therefore, Instagram is probably better utilized in one of the following ways:

1. Contests – This is probably the number one way businesses are utilizing the tool. If your company sells a product, ask customers to take photos of themselves using the product and then upload the photo to win some sort of prize. You can also add an element of interaction by allowing people to vote on their favorite photo.


2. Event Marketing – Asking people to take photos of an event you’re holding is a great way to leverage the tool. This will get people excited about the event and give people a layer of interaction.


3. Social Media – Always share photos of your company or your product/service via social media. Instagram allows a company to add a hashtag to the photo which will help you keep tabs on any pictures of your business via Twitter or another social network.


4. Connection – Your customers are most likely on Instagram, so this is another avenue to form connections. Even if you can’t find value in posting pictures for your particular business, urge your employees to connect with customers via this avenue.


5. Location – Instagram allows a company to add location to an image. If you can add the location of your small business, you increase the likelihood that someone will see your photos if they are new to the area. This works best for restaurants and entertainment joints.

Using Instagram along with hashtags is a great way to make sure you are getting the most out of the photos on your website. Instagram is currently all the buzz, so there is no better time than to get started now.

[tooltip text="Right now, you can only create an Instagram account using their app on your iOS (ex: iPhone) or Android device. To sign up for an Instagram account: Download the Instagram app in the App Store for your iPhone/iPad, or in Google Play for an Android device. Then Once the app is installed, tap the Instagram icon to open it. Tap Register then create a username and password and fill out your profile info (ex: email, name) Tap Done! " placement="top"]How do I sign up for Instagram?[/tooltip]

SEO Tips: 10 Search Engine Optimization Tips for Pinterest

Pinterest is the newest social media addiction- but many don’t know how it can also be used for your business.  Since Pinterest allows search engines to crawl their site and the huge amount of data users have pinned there, boards can show up in Google search results. By simply using the right SEO on your company profile, you can make sure your Pinterest page gets the attention it needs from your consumers.

Here are 10 tips to get you rocking:

1. Share your own content: Uploading your own images provides more value than solely re-pinning other’s images. To be most effective, you should do a healthy mixture of both.

2. Keyword target file names: Be sure to approach file naming from a search engine optimization prospective. “keyword-phrase.jpg” will rank better than “March2012_00011.jpg”.

3. Diversify your pinning: Pinning from a variety of different sources will make your Pinterest boards more compelling and re-pinning, liking, and commenting will definitely affect where your images appear.

4. Add a link: For every image you upload, be certain to edit the pin to add a link. The added link is “nofollow” and, therefore, shouldn’t be given weight according to standard nofollow rules, but this link allows the Pinterest user to click your image for the source. Conversely, links in the description are currently followed, so be sure to add your link to the description as well so Google can follow it and give the URL weight.

5. Description, description, description: Pinterest allots 500 characters for descriptions, and SEOs all over would be remissed if you were not taking advantage and using all 500 characters to give a keyword-dense description, commentary, or explanation of your pinned image. Note that you can edit descriptions of both images you have pinned or re-pinned.

6. Follow the leader: Take time exploring Pinterest to see what types of images catch your eye and what types of content effectively persuade you to engage with them, and then upload similar types of images and content. The more your images are shared and engaged with, the better it will be for your search engine optimization goals.

7. Don’t fall into the advertising trap: Remember that Pinterest is a social media platform. You’ve got to be involved in the conversation. Comment, like, and re-pin other user’s images to help increase your followers, because it’s likely that search algorithms will incorporate how engaging your social media platforms are in the near future.

8. Keyword target board names: This SEO tip is on the same line as keyword target file naming. Create an array of boards with keyword focused names. “Charleston beaches” will serve you better than “Places I love”.

9. Add the website buttons: Give the people what they want when they want it. Add the “Follow” and “Pin It” buttons to your website now. If the buzz around Pinterest fades and people stop using it, you can easily remove the links then instead of waiting to see if Pinterest is here to stay and missing the current opportunity.

10. Be yourself: Pin what you like and be kind to others.

How To Schedule A Future Post In WordPress

You can schedule blog posts to automatically publish themselves at any time in the future. If you want to remove an already published post and automatically republish it at a specific time/date in the future, the directions are the same (see below):

In the Publish module to the right of the post editor, click the blue Edit link next to Publish immediately.



Set the future date/time when you want the post to publish itself and click OK. To schedule a post in the PM, you will need to use the 24-hour clock. For example, 1:00 PM would read as 13:00 in the Schedule a Post module. The time will be based on your location settings in your Settings -> General page.



Instead of Publish immediately, it will now say Schedule for: followed by the date and time you specified, and the button has changed from Publish to Schedule.



Click Schedule. Scheduled posts will be triggered by the first visit to your blog on or after the exact date/time you set. If you see that the scheduled time has come and gone and your post has not published, simply log out of WordPress.com and view your blog’s front page. Your visit should cause the post to appear.

Note: Sometimes you might want to backdate a post. For example, if you’ve just come back from a long trip, you might want to write a post for each day of your travels and have the post dates match the actual days you were away. To backdate a post, simply edit the date before you clickPublish, as described above. In this case, the button will not change to Schedule.

Republishing a Post

Sometimes, you may want to republish an old post. If this is your goal, you have a few different options:

1. You can reschedule your post by editing the date and time the post was published, entering a future date and time, then clicking Schedule. When the scheduled time arrives, the post will jump from its current position in your timeline to the most recent spot on your blog and display the new date and time. The link for the post will also change to reflect the new publication date. When you reschedule a post, it will not redistribute to your email subscribers.


2. You can republish your post by changing the status of the post to Draft, clicking Update, then clicking Publish. When you do this, the post will immediately redistribute to your email subscribers. However, the publication date and time will remain the same, so the post’s link and position in your timeline will remain unchanged. If you want a republished post to show up first on your blog, you can always make it “sticky.”


3. If your goal is to redistribute a post to your email subscribers, you can also try using the Writing Helper.

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Un-scheduling a Post

If you’ve scheduled a post to be published in the future, but changed your mind and want to publish it immediately, head back to the Edit Post page for your scheduled post.

In the Publish module, click on the “Edit” link next to the date for which you’ve scheduled your post:



Then, enter today’s date and time as your scheduled post time and click on “Ok.” When finished, click Publish and your post will be published immediately.

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Troubleshooting Scheduled Posts

If your scheduled post does not appear, check the following:

• Is your timezone correct in your Settings -> General page?


• Did you save your post as a draft rather than schedule it? For the post to publish, you must click the Schedule button.


• Has no one visited your blog yet? Try logging out of WordPress.com and visiting your blog’s front page.

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Video

Watch the “Publishing your post at a later date” video from WordPress.tv.

Publishing Your Post at a Later Date

WordPress 3.6 Has Launced Today - See All The Features!

[caption id="attachment_3553" align="alignleft" width="350"] WordPress 3.6[/caption]

WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg today announced the release of the latest version, which includes “bullet-proof” autosave and post locking, a revamped revision browser, native support for audio and video embeds and improved integration with Spotify, Rdio and SoundCloud. WordPress 3.6 is available to download from WordPress.org

Dubbed “Oscar” in honor of Canadian jazz pianist and composer Oscar Peterson, WordPress 3.6 features more than just a new theme and improved revisions. Oscar includes better autosave and post locking, native support for audio and video embeds via an HTML5 media player, as well as improved integrations with Spotify, Rdio, and SoundCloud.

There are a number of user features:

• The new Twenty Thirteen theme, inspired by modern art, puts focus on your content with a colorful, single-column design made for media-rich blogging.


• Revamped revisions save every change and the new interface allows you to scroll easily through changes to see line-by-line who changed what and when.


• Post locking and augmented autosave will be a boon for sites where more than a single author is working on a post. Each author now has their own autosave stream, which stores things locally as well as on the server (so much harder to lose something) and there’s an interface for taking over editing of a post, as demonstrated beautifully by our bearded buddies in the video above.


• Built-in HTML5 media player for native audio and video embeds with no reliance on external services.


• The menu editor is now much easier to understand and use.

Developer features include:

• A new audio/video API provides access to metadata like ID3 tags.


• You can now choose HTML5 markup for things like comment and search forms, and comment lists.


• Better filters for how revisions work, so you can store a different amount of history for different post types.


• Tons more listed on the Codex, and of course you can always browse the over 700 closed tickets.

New features aside, I recommend upgrading to the latest version from a security standpoint alone. With WordPress powering almost one-fifth of the Web, it’s a very big target for attackers.

Have you downloaded WordPress 3.6? What do you think? Tell me in the comments below...

Start Converting Visitors to Leads With Landing Pages

The goal of landing pages is to convince the visitor to provide you with his or her information in exchange for a high-value offer.  They are the best way to convert a person into a lead. Most small and medium-sized businesses have very few--if any--landing pages on their sites. Research has indicated that 62% of businesses using landing pages have less than 6. Even though they’re not optimally positioned to capture contacts, these companies still have to try really hard to increase their website traffic.

This is really pointless if you don’t have the means to capture contact data.  Way too many people are concerned with their organic rankings on Google while forgetting about the sales aspect of their business.  Isn’t the point of your website to get your visitors to buy your product or service?

[caption id="attachment_3535" align="aligncenter" width="957"] Subway Landing Page Example[/caption]

Why Do I Need Landing Pages?

Obviously the ultimate goal is to have the visitor purchase immediately, but this is actually even rarer than you think--96% of first-time visitors to your website aren’t ready to buy. It’s a prime reason why you need landing pages. The next best option is to generate a lead by capturing  visitors’ contact data and adding them to your sales funnel. You will now have the opportunity to email them and nurture them down your sales funnel by continuing to market to them via email, phone calls, or social media to influence them to buy from you.  The more landing pages you have, the more opportunities to generate leads and fill your funnel.

A landing page needs a form to capture contact data for a website visitor. In most cases, you do not want to include your main navigation bar at the top of the landing page so the visitor’s only option is to complete the form. Not including the navigation bar has been shown to increase conversion rates by as much as 100%.

Creating a Landing Page

All of your content on the landing page should be contained above the fold.  This means that the visitor should not be required to scroll down to see any of the page content. Effective landing pages will also contain an image that is relevant to the call-to-action button that drove the visitor to the landing page. The text should be very direct and easy to read.

Landing Page Tips:

• Use a compelling title that is relevant to your CTA.


• Place all of your content above the fold.


• Keep your opening and closing paragraphs to 3-5 sentences.


• Use bullet points to clearly display your value propositions.


• Add a compelling image that is clearly relevant to your offer.

[caption id="attachment_3537" align="aligncenter" width="1161"] 12 Step Landing Page Theory[/caption]

How to Use Landing Pages

A landing page is typically linked to an offer. An offer can be advertised through a call-to-action button on your site, a link in your on-page text, a PPC ad, or even a QR Code on a billboard or a piece of print marketing material.  The point is, you can link to a landing page from just about anywhere and you will want to because landing pages are so effective.

The design of your landing page is extremely important and affects the conversion rate of your forms.  The look, headline, and text must all be relevant to the offer to obtain a high conversion rate.  Design does matter, but that doesn’t mean you need a graphic designer, especially if you use marketing software such as HubSpot, which allows anyone to easily create landing pages.

All too often, we see the cardinal sin of PPC when people link their campaigns to their homepage instead of a landing page.  Another benefit of using these pages, aside from  capturing the data, is that most software should capture visitor data and segment it for you, so you know the exact source of your visitors and new leads. If you are not able to track this data, you will never know how successful your campaign is and you probably need to look into a software such as HubSpot that tracks it for you.

Takeaway

Start building landing pages today and build lots of them--companies that increase their number of landing pages from 10 to 15 receive 55% more leads. Your Contact Us page is technically a landing page, but it does not qualify someone as a lead, so start creating some offers or link your ad campaigns to your newly designed landing pages.  If you need some help with this, please let us know.

Facebook Introduces Embeddable Posts

[caption id="attachment_3521" align="aligncenter" width="950"] Facebook Introduces Embeddable Posts[/caption]

In an effort to inject Facebook into more public conversations, the company on Wednesday introduced embeddable posts that will let blogs and news organizations include status updates, videos and photos in stories.

The posts work in the same way as embeds from Twitter and YouTube. Once your account is enabled, you will have the option to "Embed post." That will produce a code you can cut and paste into a blog entry or HTML file.

[caption id="attachment_3523" align="aligncenter" width="893"] Facebook Introduces Embeddable Posts[/caption]

A Marketing Cheat Sheet For Small Business Owners

[caption id="attachment_3477" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The Secret of Getting Ahead is Getting Started![/caption]

Being smart with marketing ensures the success of your business by attracting more customers, and keeping them coming back. Small business is the backbone of America's local economies — and you know you need to look after your back! Whether you own a bakery, do modeling, own a yoga studio, have a restaurant or a finance businesses, you need no-nonsense marketing strategies to secure a greater share of the market. Empower yourself to apply clever marketing plans and ideas without breaking the bank, or your back. "The Secret of Getting Ahead is Getting Started" 

Affordable Website and Social Media Design: www.defcon13.com

Making Marketing Work in Your Small Business

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to be a good marketer. But neither is there a silver bullet or one-size-fits-all solution. Every small business is different — the marketing plan and tactics for a mortgage broker are entirely different from those of a computer reseller. However, the process of building a plan, sticking to it and applying the time and resources it needs is the common secret to success in marketing.

Here are few tips to help you be brilliant at marketing:

• Get the know-how. Knowing what not to do when it comes to marketing is as important as knowing what to do. Let’s face it, the murky world of marketing can be tricky to navigate. So get the full know-how before you go jumping into building that flash website.


• Put your customers first. Understanding who your customers are, what makes them tick and what they really want and value, and of course staying in touch with them long after the sale, puts you ahead of the competition.


• Know your target market. ‘Anyone who is breathing’ is not a target market! Targeting your marketing activities fairly and squarely at the people who need and want your service or product is the secret to creating quality enquiries and getting prospects to open their wallet.


• Understand that marketing is not advertising. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that advertising and websites are the only two ways to attract more business. You can market your small business in literally hundreds of ways, so it pays to know what they are and then eliminate the ones that won’t work, or that you can’t afford, up-front.


• Set sales goals and targets. Marketing really is a numbers game. Marketing efforts that won’t directly or indirectly bring in new business have absolutely no point. Know what your goals are in terms of revenue, expenses, profit, number of enquiries and, of course, number of new sales.


• Get a handle on the four Ps of marketing. Getting your product, pricing, placement strategy (distribution) and promotional strategy humming along and working together is crucial to good marketing.

Essential Tools for Good Business Marketing

If you’re armed with the marketing essentials you can’t help but succeed in attracting new prospects and bringing in more business. Spend some time on getting your marketing toolkit in place and be prepared at all times.

Here are a few items to pack into your marketing toolkit:

• A plan and a budget: Getting a plan that will support you for years to come is essential to keep you on track. It doesn’t need to be as thick as War and Peace, but it does need to be written down, clearly communicated to your team and acted on day by day — even when business is booming.


• A great product or service: Advertising your business has no point if the customers don’t want, value or love what you have to offer. Make sure you do your research and listen to your customers before sending your product out to the market.


• A professional brand: A brand is much more than a logo. It encompasses everything people see, hear, think and feel about your business. Invest up-front in developing a brand that stands out from the crowd. It’ll save you money and heartache in the long run.


• Powerful marketing materials: Your business card, sales brochures, sales letters, website, signage, uniforms and car decal speak volumes about your business. Make sure they look professional and appealing at all times.


• An elevator pitch: In the course of marketing your business you’ll get asked thousands of times ‘What do you do?’ Don’t make the mistake of boring the poor person who asked the question. Make sure you have a fun, interesting and memorable pitch ready at all times — and be able to deliver it in the time it takes to travel a few floors in an elevator.


• A brilliant website: Your website must attract attention and give value to those who visit. Use it as a tool to retain and keep in touch with existing customers as well as for enticing new customers. The online world can be very scary to many small-business owners, but, if you don’t embrace it, you may find yourself out of business.


• A simple database: The backbone of all good marketing is about building a solid database of past, present and future customers (prospects) so you can keep in touch and communicate regularly via e-newsletters, emails and phone.

Clever Ideas to Market Your Small Business

You don’t need to spend buckets of money on marketing. Creativity and a bit of gumption to do something different from everyone else in the market can be the difference between business success and business failure. Here are just a few of hundreds of ideas to market your business:

• Attend networking events. It’s not what you know, but who you know. Get out there and network — meet and greet. You can never have too many friends in life, even if they don’t end up as customers.


• Sponsor a local event or charity. It really does make you feel good to support your community, and everyone benefits — you, your staff, your customers, the people you sponsor and, of course, the community at large.


• Manage your public relations. Getting your name up in lights on TV and radio, and in newspapers and magazines isn’t as hard as you think — if you’ve got a story worth telling!


• Use social media. Using social-networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, producing your own videos for YouTube or writing your own blog are creative methods of letting people know about you and your business. Go on, have a bit of fun.


• Host seminars and events. Hosting your own events and inviting along your best customers and some of their friends is a great way to get to know people, connect at a personal level and build deep relationships.


• Become a public speaker. If speaking isn’t your number-one fear after death, hone your skills and become a great and entertaining speaker. It’s a fabulous way to demonstrate your expertise and generate new business enquiries from the audience.

Top Marketing Tips for Businesses on a Low Budget

Most small-business owners, especially those starting out, don’t have lots of money to spend on marketing. While the old adage — you need to spend money to make money — is true, you can still generate new business without having to dole out big bucks. Try a few of these tactics for a start:

• Focus on relationship-building marketing strategies such as networking, building alliances with other businesses, and calling old customers, friends and people you once worked with.


• Find people who are prepared to help you with marketing on a commission basis or a uni student who’s studying marketing and might need some hands-on experience.


• Develop a marketing mastermind group with other small-business owners for the purpose of sharing low-cost marketing ideas and referring each other business.


• Sharpen your own online marketing skills and learn how to use Google AdWords and write blogs, and market yourself on the social media sites.


• Promote your business on free online directories and publish your articles on other websites with links to your site.

Don’t jump straight into low-cost (or no-cost) tactics without getting the basics right first — plan your marketing strategy, understand your target market and polish up your product.

GRAPH: Are You Sharing Your Posts At The RIght TIme?

When are you making your posts on social networks, make sure you are getting the most out of your awesome content and post when your target market is online! There are a number of ways to figure out when to post but as a general rule of thumb post in the times above.

Eight easy ways to promote your small business for free

[caption id="attachment_3257" align="aligncenter" width="453"] Promoting Your Brand Onlne[/caption]

Whether you think you know public relations and marketing or not, getting your business or product noticed is difficult. Even some of the best PR pros I know have a hard time marketing themselves. It just seems a bit precocious to put yourself out there. But one thing I know for sure: If you don’t market yourself, no one else will.

When I started my website design and marketing consulting business years back, I wanted to write down the basics that any organization should be doing – and most of them are free. If you get these things down – then you are ready to advertise.

No. 1: Identify your audience.

It may seem like a no-brainer, but many businesses fail to identify just who to talk to. Once you know “who” then you can go about “how” to reach them.

No. 2: Reaching out to local media

One of your audiences will invariably be the media. You can’t pitch all media outlets the same way. TV has different needs from print and radio and vice versa. But before you pitch ask yourself:

• Is your product or service the first, best or brand new?

• Is it award-winning or trendsetting?

• Does it solve a problem?

• Does it provide a unique service?

• Is it visual (TV and online mostly, but even print is getting into video)

If you don’t have anything that fits into the above categories, then you probably don’t have a news story. But you can still provide meaningful commentary by being an expert in your field.

No. 3: Social media

Let’s be honest there are a ton of different social media channels out there. My guidance is pick one or two that you think make sense for your business and master those first. You can spend hours venturing down the social media rabbit hole, but here are some general rules of thumb:

• The goal is to engage customers – be a part of the discussion in your industry and it will help you gain an audience or followers.

• Don’t be afraid to “friend” or “follow” reporters. Your ideas may spark stories for them.

• Ask for feedback from your followers. Again, engagement is the key you want them to “like” and “share” or “retweet” what you post.

My Mom is now on Facebook, so my general rule of thumb is, if I post it my Mom is going to see this.

No. 4: Free directory listings. Be sure to claim your business in online directories such as Google Places, Yelp and Yahoo.

There are also a ton of others, the Yellow Pages offers both free and paid listings. Claiming your business lets you know and respond when people have something nice or something bad to say. It will also allow you to dispute that comment.

No. 5: Your website. I’m assuming you already have one if you are reading this. But you need to make sure you are making the most of it. With the constant changes in search algorithms, you want to make sure your content is fresh. One of the best ways to do this is to have a blog. I see a lot of websites that were built a year or two ago and haven’t been touched since.

No. 6: Become and expert. Let’s face it, if you are running your own your company, you are an expert in whatever that is. The same things that make your company newsworthy are the things that make you an expert. Start a blog and talk about what you know, what you are learning along the way – challenges and successes. You can also repost articles from other people (make sure to give proper credit) or comment on them.

No. 7: Get involved in your community. Look for groups and associations that align with your priorities and beliefs. Volunteerism is a great way to network as well.

No. 8: Consistently brand your business. Chances are your company already has a logo and a name. It should be on everything – correctly formatted. Your name and logo are the image that says who you are and what you do. Make sure it reflects your business.

The above items are just a brief overview. Starting out doing all eight things may be a little overwhelming.

My advice – pick one or two and when you are comfortable move to the next one. Once you have these basics, then you are ready to advertise. Running a business means you already have a crazy schedule. Be methodical and strategic when it comes to promoting it. Don’t let it fall to the bottom of your “to-do” list.

Google's "Softened Panda Update" is Rolling Out Today

[caption id="attachment_3211" align="aligncenter" width="685"] Panda Update Rolling Out Today 2013[/caption]

"Grey Area or Border Zone Sites" Gets Additional Quality Signals

Hours before Google has confirmed that a Panda Update has been rolled out. On WebmasterWorld Forum there were a lot of real time discussions among webmasters that their sites are experiencing a lot more changes in terms of ranking & traffic and so this seems to be clearly a Panda recovery.

 As most of the sites were affected by the panda update last time, Google has formulated its algorithm in such a way to recover the ranking position of the affected websites. So this is said to be a softer update.

On the video released in May 13 by Matt Cutts, regarding “What should we expect in the next few months in terms of SEO for Google? ”

Matt Cutts answered that they are likely to soften the panda algorithm, to help webmasters, whose sites are in “grey area or border zone”.

Matt Cutts added that,

“If we can soften the affect a little bit, for those sites, that we believe have got some additional signals of quality, that will help sites that were previously affected - to some degree.”

Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Lands says that,

Google confirmed with us that a Panda update is being released and said:

"In the last few days we’ve been pushing out a new Panda update that incorporates new signals so it can be more finely targeted.”

After the SMX West, Google has clearly said that there won’t be any Official announcement of the algorithm update, because of the reason that the changes in algorithm would take place in a gradual way, that it may take several days for the update to complete.

So it’s the time to keep eye on forums and discussions to watch over what all are the impacts of the update. In few days or within months the results would be apparently out, to know to what extend Google has softened its update.

Video of Matt Cutss on Future SEO updates

For more future updates on algorithms, SEO news and tactics, subscribe to my news and follow me on my Google Plus Profile.

10 Tips to Market Your Small Business on a Shoestring Budget

[caption id="attachment_3189" align="aligncenter" width="849"] MARKETING ON A BUDGET[/caption]

Famed author Mark Twain once said, “Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.”

But advertising can be expensive, and in a tight economy, many small businesses cut their marketing budgets first because of cash flow concerns. However, when times are tough, it’s even more important to keep your business brand front and center.

During an economic downturn, clients, customers, and consumers have less money to spend. This means that when they’re ready to buy, you want your brand to be at the top of their list.

Here are ten tried and true marketing strategies that can help you market your business on a shoestring budget.

1. Craft an elevator pitch

You should be marketing all the time — wherever you are. Therefore, you need a compelling elevator pitch. Research shows the average attention span of an adult is about 6 to 8 seconds. That’s all the time you have to grab someone’s attention. If you successfully engage them, then you only have a little over a minute to really sell them on your product or service. Invest the time to craft a killer elevator pitch. The return on your investment will pay huge dividends in terms of creating business opportunities.

2. Leverage your community

You don’t have to think big when it comes to your marketing efforts. Think locally. What’s going on in your community? Sponsor a Little League team or a 5k charity walk/run. Print bookmarks and leave them at the local library. Get to know your ideal customer and think about how and where they spend their time. Then search for opportunities to get in front of your customer with your marketing message.

3. Collaborate

Put together a group of synergistic, non-competitive businesses in your area and agree to cross-promote. You can use coupons, fliers, reciprocal website links, bundled promotions or social media platforms.(Okay, I had to add a little bit of social media to the mix.) By collaborating with each other, you can expand your customer base because you’ll be reaching new people.

4. Network

I’m a huge fan of networking. I don’t think there is any better way to build a business than to get out there, shake some hands, and get to know people. Networking requires a time commitment and it doesn’t provide instant gratification, but a strong network is one of the greatest assets any business person can have.

5. Give a speech

A lot of people hate public speaking. However, there are many organizations looking for qualified, subject-matter experts who can present to their groups. Take a deep breath and volunteer. You don’t have to be a pro as long as the information you share is helpful to the audience. And the upside — the more you do it the easier it gets. Plus, it positions you as a credible authority in your field.

6. Create buzz

I started my corporate career in the field of public relations and the business has changed significantly because of technology. Today, a small business owner can accomplish a lot without hiring a professional firm. Subscribe to Help a Reporter Out  www.helpareporter.com. You can respond to reporters’ queries that are looking for story ideas and resources. Some are small media opportunities, but others are major media outlets that use this service too.

7. Ask for referrals

Don’t be shy about asking for customer referrals. The majority of people say they are willing to provide a referral if asked, but very few take the initiative to do it on their own. Referrals make it easier to get in the door with new customers. If you aren’t asking for them, you are missing opportunities.

8. Build relationships

It is a lot less expensive to keep a customer than it is to get a new one. That’s why establishing strong relationships with your customer base is crucial. One of the ways you can do that is by launching an email campaign. Make your communications informative and helpful — something your customers will look forward to receiving. Social media campaigns are another way to keep the communication channel open (and there I go again.)

9. Offer coupons

Coupons are a good way for many businesses to attract new customers. Research shows that people will go out of their way to use a coupon, proving that this method is successful in expanding your customer base. Coupons can also generate return visits. For example, if you give a customer a coupon for a discount to use on future business, there’s a high probability they’ll be back.

10. Give it away

If someone has the opportunity to experience your product or service, chances are they will want to purchase more. Don’t be afraid to give someone a free trial or a sample. In today’s economy, people are more comfortable purchasing something they have been able to experience first.

These ten, inexpensive marketing strategies will help you engage customers, build relationships, and ultimately keep your brand top-of-mind. It’s not always about the money you have to spend on marketing, it’s about the time and effort you put into it and above all, the relevance it has for your customers.

Do you have another inexpensive, successful marketing tip that has worked for you? Tell me about it below.

Calling All Local Business Owners New to SEO: Start with Google Places for Business

[caption id="attachment_3175" align="aligncenter" width="537"] Google Plus for Business[/caption]

Are you a local business owner who is eager to get into the SEO game? Good for you! Establishing a local online presence is definitely a great way to grow your business. Google Places for Business is the perfect place to start your SEO campaign — by establishing your business’ identity on Google Places, it can show up in Google searches, Google Maps and Google+ Local. The following guide will help you create your local presence.

Google Places for Business

Create an account on Places for Business and list your business’ name, address and phone number — or N.A.P. It’s free and effective!

Within Places for Business, an owner can add his business address, phone number, business category and more.

• Name: Google Quality Guidelines dictate that your business name is “exactly as it appears in the offline world.” Therefore, do not attempt to add anything else (such as keywords, marketing taglines, phone numbers, websites, etc.).


• Address: There can only be one entry per address. You must adhere to the same rules as those in the business name, i.e., no extraneous information.


• Phone Number: Google prefers businesses use a land line as opposed to a cell phone whenever possible.

After you input this data, Google will then send a postcard to the business address within two weeks. The postcard will contain a pin number that will allow you to verify you are the owner. Once you log back into your Google Places for Business account and provide the pin, your business will show up in the Local results.

In addition to your N.A.P., you can also include photos, business hours and a description (up to 4,200 characters) wherein you can link to your own site.

Learn more about the Places for Business Quality Guidelines here.

What If Your Business Isn’t Operated Out of One Location?

If you service clients from many locations, like a traveling or mobile business, you still have to register a physical address (not a P.O. box — Google does not consider P.O. boxes accurate physical locations). According to Google:

“Every business listing must have a mailing address. This is the physical address where mail can be sent to your business. If you work from home or you are a mobile-only business you can specify service areas and choose to hide your physical address later on!”

Local Results, as Seen in a Local 7-Pack

Once your business is verified with Google, it will appear in the SERP. Normally, it will appear in a Local 7-Pack. This screenshot shows the SERP after a query for “Tae Kwon Do Studio” in Simi Valley, California (the first seven results are Local results, pulled from Places for Business):

When a user mouses over a result (here, the Tigon Martial Arts is being hovered over), the rest of the business information is displayed:Local Results, as Seen in a Display Carousel

Last month, Google debuted a new look for certain Local results — currently restaurants, bars and hotels now render in a Display Carousel rather than the Local 7-pack. When conducting a search for French restaurants near Simi Valley, the following Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is rendered:

Business Photos

Whether your results show up in the Display Carousel or in the standard Local 7-pack, business owners have the option to optimize even further. Through Business Photos, you can create a 360-degree interactive tour of your location. Though there is no fee for implementing panoramic viewing in your Google listing, you are required to use a Google-approved photographer, whom you will have to pay standard photography rates.

Other Directories

The most important place to establish your business’ identity is in Google Places for Business. However, you should also establish your identity on any other notable web directories. As you begin to spread information about your business across the Internet, is absolutely essentially that you be consistent. Your business name should always appear exactly the same, as should your address and phone number.

 

5 Killer WordPress PluginsYou Must Have

[caption id="attachment_3155" align="aligncenter" width="550"] WordPress Plugins[/caption]

If there is a tool available that makes life easier for you while improving your blog’s search prowess, and is FREE, why not give it a try? Such is the case with the following handful of SEO-related plugins for WordPress that will do some work for you, while reminding you of ways to improve your site’s search engine optimization. As recommended before on IFB, check out The Beginner’s Guide to SEO for some general rules of thumb to follow to boost important keywords in posts, tags, titles, and more.

All in One SEO Pack

Pretty much every blogger I know uses this; it is essentially the gold standard SEO plugin, so if you don’t have it yet, put it at the top of your list (I’ve been told that recent versions of WordPress already come with it installed as well). What it does is deposit meta titles, meta descriptions, and keywords to search engines such as Google, to help with search and for potentially new readers out there to easily find your site.    Be sure to fill out the box toward the bottom of the post with the title, description and keywords to take the best advantage of the plugin; I found this guide helpful in explaining how to best work it to maximize the SEO benefits

WordPress SEO by Yoast

Bloggers seem to be equally devoted to this plugin, as it offers more functionality and help that can be applied to different levels of running a blog for better SEO power. It’s basically a bunch of plugins combo’ed into one package, that gives you a preview of how your content will look in search engines, makes sure your images have an alt tag containing the focus keyword, control which pages from your site go to Google, automatically makes XML sitemaps and notifies Google and Bing about them,  Facebook integration, and more.

StatCounter

We all know about Google Analytics, but I tend to really like StatCounter, as it gives you the rundown of  pageloads, unique visits, first time visits, and return visits, broken out by day, total count, and weekly average, as well as an in-depth analysis of your last 500 page views. The thing that I like best about it is that every Monday morning I get an email with all of the stats, so I don’t have to remember to click around and analyze them, I look at the posts that I put up on the days with the highest views, and make note of what the subject(s) were, keywords used so that I can learn even more about what is of most interest to my readers and perhaps further cater my content toward them in the future.

Seo Friendly Images

This one is pretty straightforward; if filling in SEO-related content in images tends to be an afterthought, or never done at all, you’ll love this plugin, as it goes ahead and assigns ALT and TITLE words to your pics so that they are more easily found via search.

Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin creates a sitemap, which is crucial because it extracts links and some text so that a variety of search engines can succinctly index your site (found in Google’s Webmaster Tools section). This plugin does that, and automatically delivers your new content to the search engine once created. You don’t have to have a Google account to use it, but just remember to register your site as your own and submit it  to Google to be sure it’s on their radar to index and rank it.

SUNDAY SEO: Internal Linking Practices in WordPress Help Page Views

[caption id="attachment_3065" align="aligncenter" width="304"] SEO Button[/caption]

Internal linking is one of the easiest SEO technique to master it,Yet one of the crucial factor of SEO. In this article I am going to show you the benefits of internal linking and how to effectively practice this SEO technique in WordPress.

What is Internal Linking

In simple words : Internal linking is a act of linking the other pages of the same domain, Similarly internal link is one that points to another page on the same website.

How internal linking can be useful

Some of the benefits of internal links

• Internal links helps to get more page views


• It can boost SEO by spreading the link Juice across the website

Some of the best live examples of internal linking are Tech blogs like Techcrunch and Mashable. Lets take this sample article from Lifehacker which is approx. 560 words in length,If we count the number of internal links in it..It ends up with whopping 19.

Thats how big boys are increasing the page views as well as doing good SEO.

Internal Linking in WordPress

First you must understand that Internal linking is not only refers to linking other pages in main content but also through other website elements like Sidebar,Footer,Menu etc.Here is a list of things you can do to build internal links

• Manual Internal linking


• Automatic internal linking using plugins


• Using Breadcrumbs


• Links to related posts using plugins


• Linking through Footer and Sidebar widgets

Lets explore it individually.

Manual Internal linking (Natural Linking)

This method is the most time consuming one but very effective than any other method.In this method you need to manually link other posts in main post content.

WordPress offers best linking tool to aid you in this process.The advanced linking option gives you the ability to search the post and link it easily.



Link only the related articles with right ancor texts and Its better not link the home page since we will be already linking through other elements like Manu,Footer etc.

Also,Dont fill the article with just links,Users may easily get irritated which will eventually cost pageviews and readership.

Automatic Internal linking using Plugins

Manual method involves lot of patient and time,Especially it is very difficult to edit old article for internal linking.In such case we can go for plugins like Ninja  affiliate or SEO Smart Links premium.

These plugins can automatically link the keyword in all posts to particular link.For example you can automatically link the keyword “WordPress Tips” to some category or post without editing each post.This can save you ample of time.

Risk of using Free version of SEO Smart Links

Well,You can get free version of SEO Smart Links but its very riskier to do it so.Since it doesn’t come with features like limiting number of links per post.

To understand the gravity of the problem lets take an example.If I link the keyword “WordPress” to some category page then imagine how many times the link appears on each post.These type of activities can get your blog penalized by search engines.

I personally use Ninja affiliate plugin for automatic keyword linking.It also comes with other features like links click count etc.If you use SEO smart links then refer this guide Smartly Interlink Your Blog Content with SEO Smart Links.

Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are simple navigation hierarchy which helps users to keep track of their current location within the website.Breadcrumbs are essential to maintain a neat hierarchy.Google officially recommends webmasters to use breadcrumbs for better SEO.

Breadcrumbs in Genesis Child Themes

All Genesis child themes comes with this feature but you need to enable it in Genesis settings page.Go to Dashboard >> Genesis >> Breadcrumbs and check the boxes appropriately.

Implementing breadcrumbs using WordPress SEO Plugin

If your theme doesn’t comes with breadcrumbs then you can easily implement it usingWordPress SEO by Yoast Plugin.After installing the plugin go to Dashboard >> SEO >>Internal links and enable the breadcrumbs option.

Add the following code in your current themes (Wherever you wish to display)

<?php if ( function_exists('yoast_breadcrumb') ) {
	yoast_breadcrumb('<p id="breadcrumbs">','</p>');
} ?>

Related Posts using Plugin

Linking the related posts under the article also helps to build inter links.YARP (Yet another related posts) Plugin is the most commonly used related posts plugin,Its very simple and highly efficient. If you care about the design then go with plugins like WP-Thumbie and nRelate.

Using Footer and Sidebars

Footer and Sidebar widgets can be used to inter link the most popular articles and links to some important pages like About  page,Contact page and Privacy policy.The links will be established throughout the website hence it will result in deep interlinking.

For live example you can look after the footer and sidebar of this blog.

Conclusion

Internal linking is the most effective SEO method when it comes to content rich websites,So implement the above methods to place yourself better in Search results.You can easily track your internal links by using services like Google Webmaster tools and Opensiteexplorer.

Thanks to another  great article provided by VivekR

Using Google Alerts for SEO Link Building - This is a MUST for SEO

[caption id="attachment_3133" align="aligncenter" width="550"] SUNDAY SEO: Internal Linking Practices in WordPress Help Page Views[/caption]

Google Alerts offers a great source of information that can be used for several purposes. It is as useful as easy to use. Automatic generated e-mails about whatever you are interested in. For instance, you want to keep updated about Real Madrid football club. Then you just type that on “Search Query” box, specify what kind of results you would be interested in (news, blogs, video, discussion, etc.) and Google will send you the alert whenever a new page with “Real Madrid” in it gets indexed.

From a marketing and business point of view, we can keep an eye on competitors and what they do. For example if we set up a search for our 3 main competitors and they go to a fair, we will be alerted by Google whenever they show up in the list of the attendees in the organization website. This will tell us that we might be willing to be there as well.

But, how could this be useful from a SEO point of view? Where does it fit in How to SEO? In this case we can use it to keep monitoring subjects where we have some to say. For example if we are a recruitment company and we have useful content in our blog it would be a good idea to keep tracking keywords like “student jobs” or “graduate jobs” specifying blogs on Result Type. This way we can comment on relevant blogs with useful information that will help us creating links back to our site. It is likely that this links are “No Follow”, this means the SEO juice from the original website is not transferred to our site, but still helps via co-citation.

Another way we can use this for SEO purposes is to find news and topics related to our business and then creating articles in our own blogs with latest news or information about the Market. We can even link to the original blogs for more relevancy. This way it will help us create useful and fresh content for visitors and for Google to keep our rankings high up.

[caption id="attachment_3123" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Using Google Alerts for SEO Link Building - This is a MUST for SEO[/caption]

How are Google Alerts good for SEO? You can:

See who’s talking about your company – and what they’re saying. This is a good way to correct misconceptions about your products, get follow-up quotes in blogs where your company was discussed, or simply ask the editor of the blog or website to provide a link to your website. Coming from a reputable website that’s relevant to your industry, that’s a link that’s worth building.

Score a guest post on someone else’s blog that has mentioned you. If a blogger likes your company, products or services enough to write about it by name, they’d probably be happy to let you submit a guest post to their blog on an industry-specific topic. You could write about breaking news relevant to your field, new technologies or trends, or tips and tricks of your trade – it depends largely on the format of the blog and what the editor is looking for. So be flexible and you could get a great opportunity for free, positive publicity as well as a backlink to your site.

Use keywords to find websites that don’t link to yours yet, but should. This is another way to get guest posts: Create a Google Alert for keywords that relate to your products, services or the problems they solve. Sometimes a website or blog will say it accepts guest posts; sometimes it won’t – it costs nothing to ask. And if you do get to submit an article or blog post that positions you as an industry leader and provides a backlink, that’s priceless. Another way to find such opportunities is to set up Google Alerts such as “bloggers wanted” <industry>, “writers wanted” <industry> or “guest post” <industry> (with your particular industry filled in, of course).

Keep up with your competitors. Find out which sites they’ve contributed content to and drop the editor a line (you already know they accept guest posts!). This is not just a good tactic for link building, it’s also great for fine-tuning the keywords you target and knowing what your competitors are up to.

Dialogue with potential customers. Find out what is being discussed and where. Robot-generated “comment spam” on forums or blogs is always a bad idea, but thoughtful and helpful replies to customer questions can certainly include a link to your website. To use Google Alerts for this, pair keywords such as your company name, product name(s) or others with words like “how,” “help” or “why.”

Setting up Google Alerts is easy. However, don’t set up too many at first or you’ll be overwhelmed with emails! Go to http://www.google.com/alerts, enter your keywords in the search query, choose the result type and frequency of emails, enter your email address, click “Create Alert” and you’re done. Then you just have to use the data to help you find the right sites to build links with.

It may not be a fast track to higher search engine rankings, but as an ongoing part of your overall SEO strategy, using Google Alerts for link building is a great idea and something you can devote a little time to each day. And you’ll be able to do a little virtual networking along the way, building relationships as well as links.

A Massive 2013 LinkedIn Marketing Guide | Expert LinedkIn Information

[caption id="attachment_3081" align="aligncenter" width="402"] 2013 Linkedin Strategy Guide[/caption]

In the last year, LinkedIn has made a lot of exciting changes to their platform for both professional profiles and company pages. LinkedIn is a great network for businesses looking to increase traffic and leads, as well as individuals looking to market their expertise for new career opportunities. In this post, let's look at everything you need to have a successful LinkedIn experience. Feel free to add me on LinkedIn if you have any questions on this article.

Setting Up Your Professional Profile

The first step in establishing your LinkedIn presence is creating your professional profile. There are many sections that you can take advantage of to fully define your professional skills. Let’s look at the ones that will help you make the best first impression.

Your Name

LinkedIn frowns upon using anything in your name field other than your name. Hence, this is not the place to try to rank for keywords.

Your Headline

Your headline is the next most important section of your LinkedIn profile because it shows up in several places throughout LinkedIn, starting with search results and employee listings on company pages…



Invitations to connect…



In messages…



In popups when someone hovers over your image…



And other areas throughout LinkedIn. This makes it the ideal place to keyword optimize your LinkedIn profile for search. Think of it as the way people will distinguish you from others when they are searching for job candidates, business partners, customers, or other professionals to connect with.

Contact Info

One of the unfortunate parts of the new LinkedIn profile design is the fact that your websites are now hidden in the Contact Info.



People looking for your contact info will still see it along with your Twitter handle, so be sure to update this section anyway with the information you want others to see.



Summary

The summary section of your LinkedIn profile allows you to enter a summary of your professional experience and expertise. You have a few paragraphs to describe yourself to a prospective employer, partner, customer, or connection.Think about what would you say to them in real life.

LinkedIn has also recently introduced options to add media to your Summary section. You can add YouTube videos, Slideshare presentations, and other media (images, videos, audio, presentations, and documents) from these service providers. Mari Smith uses her media to establish expertise and branding.



There are about 101 different ways professionals can use visual profile elements to market themselves.

• Speakers can link to presentations from Slideshare to show topics they cover and videos from YouTube to show clips from their latest speaking engagements.


• Graphic & web designers can link to Behance to show off their portfolio.


• Consultants who help businesses build traffic for websites can link to Quantcast profiles for the sites they have helped.


• Entrepreneurs can link to their Kickstarter project to encourage more funding for their ideas.


• Podcasters can link to their best podcasts.


• Photographers can link to their best portfolio photos on Pinterest.


• Authors can link to documents with writing samples.

The list is endless…

Current and Past Job Experience

Your current and past job experience is another area that LinkedIn uses to determine what keywords your profile should rank for. It also comes up in some other areas of LinkedIn like search results and employee listings on company pages. Therefore, it’s a good idea to utilize keywords that you want to rank for in the job position titles and descriptions. For example, Jason Alba wants to rank for LinkedIn. Here is one of his job experiences.



Usage of LinkedIn in this section definitely helps him rank for LinkedIn. You don’t want to go too overboard with keywords in your job experience section, however. LinkedIn highlights any keywords you search when you go to someone’s profile. You won’t want someone to find a profile that looks like this.



This profile in particular using the phrase “internet marketing” 305 times with 82 of the above shown job descriptions. Surprisingly, there are no recommendations. Yes, it worked at ranking him for internet marketing. It also tells everyone who runs into his profile that he is good at keyword stuffing and who he’s done it for.

You can also utilize the visual profile features to add media to each of your job experiences. It might be a cleaner way to add more keywords to your profile.

Others will have the chance to add recommendations to your profile based on your job experience listings. We will cover ways to boost your recommendations shortly!

Skills & Expertise

This is where you can really add some keyword boost to your profile. Add your main skills to the section to be endorsed by others. Endorsements are much easier to attain than recommendations. When people visit your profile, they will be prompted to endorse you for skills that are listed on your profile.



This is why it is crucial to add skills to your LinkedIn profile. Visitors to your profile can endorse you for multiple skills with one click! Your profile may even come up after someone endorses connections with similar skills.



Visitors then can see all of the skills that others have endorsed you for.



You will receive notifications when others endorse you, giving you the opportunity to return the favor if you so choose.



You can essentially drive up your own endorsements by giving them to others when prompted.

If you’re not sure what skills to add to your profile, you can visit the Skills & Expertise page and start typing in keywords.



Each page will have a list of related skills to the left along with professionals who have that particular skill.



You can click on the See Suggested Skills button on any of these pages to see skills that LinkedIn thinks you should add to your profile.



You can also go directly to Your Skills & Expertise page for these suggestions. Note that you can only list 50 skills, so be sure to choose them carefully. If you notice some that are not applicable or have a low endorsement rate, remove them to make room for more relevant ones.

Publications

If you have written reports, whitepapers, or books, you can add them to your publications section. This section is unique because you can include a direct link to your publications on your website, Amazon, or any other site you choose. This can help you draw attention anything you’ve written, including free ebooks you use as lead magnets for your mailing list.

Additional Sections

While the above are the most important sections, they are not the only ones. You’ll also be able to add the following to your professional profile. Any sections you haven’t taken advantage of yet will show up in the right side of your screen when you go to edit your profile.

• Education


• Projects


• Languages


• Organizations


• Honors & Awards


• Test Scores


• Courses


• Patents


• Certifications


• Volunteering & Causes

Organizing Your Sections

Want one section you have listed to go above another? When you go to edit your profile, you will see arrows at the top right of each section that you use to rearrange your sections. For example, if you have a lot of endorsements for your skills, but not an impressive job history, you can place the Skills & Expertise section first, the Summary second, and other sections before your Experience section. Authors can place Publications first, college graduates can place Education first, and so on to emphasize your best background elements up front.

Updating Your Professional Profile

You can make status updates on your professional profile similar to the way you would on Facebook and Google+. You can share links as well as tag people and companies relevant to your update.



Using the Share link beneath your status update, you can gain more exposure by also sharing the same update with the groups you belong to. We will discuss that more in the groups section.

Growing Your Network

Once you have set up your professional profile, you will want to start building your network by connecting with others. First, you will want to see who you already know on LinkedIn using your email address book.



Next, you can connect with colleagues at your current or previous companies as well as alumni from your college.



You can also use the people you may know browser to find more connections based on the people in your network.



Once you have exhausted the list of people LinkedIn thinks you know, you can branch out to others. LinkedIn encourages you to only connect with people you really know, and they will suspend your ability to connect with people if you send invitations to people who flag you as someone they do not know. So you have to be really careful about who you send invitations to.

As you go through LinkedIn, you will see different annotations by people that show your connection to them. First degree connections are those people in your network. Second degree connections are those people who are connected to people you are connected to. Third level connections are connections of those second degree connections. People who are in one of your groups are annotated as group.

The next way to connect with others is through groups. When you belong to the same group as someone you want to connect with, you just use the Groups option as how you know that member.



It’s best if you have engaged with them a little first within the group and then send a custom message letting them know that you like their posts and want to connect. You can find new people to connect with in the groups themselves by looking through active discussions or look at a list of groups your desired connection belongs to, join a group, and then connect with them.



You can also attract new connections by linking to your LinkedIn profile on your website and anywhere that allows you to connect to other social networks such as your Google+ profile. You can also occasionally do things like tweet your LinkedIn profile URL or share it on Facebook as a way to gain LinkedIn connections from those networks.

To learn more about LinkedIn’s policies and strategies to connect with others, visit their pages on Building Your Professional Network and Connecting With LinkedIn Members.

Increasing Recommendations

Your next goal once your profile is complete and you are making connections is to get recommendations for your work. These are essentially LinkedIn testimonials that are attached to a specific job experience on your professional profile.



You can visit the Recommendations section to manage the recommendations you have received and given as well as ask your connections for recommendations. While you can ask up to 200 connections at a time to recommend you for a particular job experience or school performance, you will get the best results by personalizing a recommendation request to just one contact.



Just customize the above template, changing the subject line and the body of the message. To maximize your success rate, ask for recommendations from people you have recently worked with or connected with.

I personally like to send a request outside of LinkedIn, especially to people I’m not connected with but have worked with. For example, after I highlighted several businesses I had worked with in a post I wrote, I emailed the business owners to let them know about the mention. Then I asked them for a favor – to connect with me on LinkedIn and give a recommendation. The success rate was 100%!

You can also get recommendations through the reciprocation route. Simply write a recommendation for someone you have worked with in the past. When they receive the recommendation, they will be asked if they want to write one for you in return. Most of the time, if they know you well enough, they will oblige. When others write you recommendations, you should return the favor as well if you know them and can honestly recommend their work.

Another thing to know about recommendations is that you can move them from one job experience to another, but it is a bit tricky and can be time consuming if you have a lot of recommendations. You have to delete the position that the recommendations are listed under. Once they become unassigned recommendations, you can assign them to a different job position.

Using LinkedIn Groups

Earlier, we talked about how you can use LinkedIn groups to connect with others in order to grow your professional network. You can also share status updates with your groups in order to drive traffic back to your website and your blog, although you need to be selective of which groups you share with as some are not as open to members sharing links as others. Sharing your status updates with relevant groups can turn exposure for your update from just your connections to upwards of thousands of LinkedIn members, which makes it well worth it.

The other way you can use LinkedIn groups is by creating one yourself. The value of doing this is you are essentially starting a new mailing list on LinkedIn. Group owners can send group members an announcement once a week. Assuming members have not turned off email notifications, they will receive your announcement straight to their inbox. While it’s not as valuable as having your own email list, it can still help you connect with people you may not have reached otherwise.

The key is to creating a group that your target customers would be interested in. So instead of creating a group called Your SEO Company (which not many will care about unless you are a SEOmoz in the industry), you would create a group like Small Business SEO. This way, small business owners and employees (aka, your target customer base) would join to learn more about SEO. Then you can use your group announcements to regularly email them about things like free ebook downloads, webinars, etc. that can convert your group members into your actual mailing list.

In order to successfully maintain your LinkedIn group, you will need to stay on top of moderating discussions and approving new members. This way, the group will thrive, the members will stay active, and therefore will be more receptive to your group announcement emails.

Exploring Pro Account Features

LinkedIn offers premium accounts for those looking to do more with LinknedIn. Premium accounts are geared towards recruiters, job seekers, sales professionals, and individuals who simply need more information for their business.



Pro account types and features are as follows.

• LinkedIn Premium Business Plus – Plans start at $10.95 per month and allow you to see who has viewed your profile, see full profiles of people you are not connected to, send direct messages to anyone on LinkedIn regardless of connection, get more introductions, let anyone message you, gain access to premium search filters, see more profiles in search results, create saved search alerts, and get a full list of people who can provide a reference for someone you are interested in.


• LinkedIn Premium Talent Finder – Plans start at $39.95 per month and allow you to see who has viewed your profile, give you full network visibility regardless of connection, send direct messages to anyone, and use premium search filters.


• LinkedIn Job Seeker Premium – Plans start at $19.95 and allow you to send direct messages regardless of connection, be a featured applicant when applying to jobs on LinkedIn, get a premium badge so you stand out in search results when recruiters are looking to hire, see who has viewed your profile, and get access to a job seeker group and webinar.


• LinkedIn Sales Navigator – Plans start at $15.95 per month and allow you to stay on top of leads with sales alerts, gain access to a lead builder to manage your pipeline, pinpoint leads with premium search filters, see full profiles, see who has viewed your profile, get introductions, and send direct messages to anyone regardless of connection.

For the most part, people are happy with using LinkedIn with the basic, free features. But you can always try the pro features for one month to see if you get any benefits. Be sure to switch the pricing options to monthly instead of annually if you just want to give it a test run.

Setting Up Your Company Page

Whenever you created your professional profile, you may have noticed that some of the companies you worked for popped up.



This is because these companies have created company pages. If your company did not show up as you were typing, then you may need to create a company page. To do so, you can go to Add a Company. You will need an email address at your company’s domain such as you@yourcompany.com. LinkedIn will not accept generic email addresses like yourcompany@gmail.com.

Once your company page is created, you can use it to market your business by filling out the following sections.

Overview

Basic information about your company in the company page overview section such as the name, description, company size, website, and industry are important as these are the details that will show up when someone hovers over your company name throughout LinkedIn on professional profiles, tagged mentions of your company, and the company news feed when people are following your company’s updates.



You can add additional details about your company in the overview section such as company specialties, featured groups related to the company, and page admins that you want to manage your company page.

You can also add status updates to your company page to drive engagement from your company’s followers (similar to Facebook fans).



Products and Services

The products and services section of your company page allows you to create individual listings for the things your business has to offer.



You can drive a lot of traffic back to your website from this section by adding a banner image with a call to action that links back to your website (as shown above). Within the product details themselves, you can add a link to the page on your website about your product or service, a YouTube video, contacts for people in your company that work directly with that product or service, and encourage people to leave recommendations about that product or service.



This is the most powerful section of your LinkedIn Company Page as far as generating leads and sales. You can also customize your products and services page by creating variations that target specific demographics.



These variations can help you further increase your conversions as people visiting this section of your page will feel like you are talking specifically to them.



Careers

If your company is looking to hire, LinkedIn allows you to create a robust careers section for your company page that can include a banner image that clicks through to your website, YouTube videos, and job listings.



Visitors to your company page’s career section will also be shown to people in their network that work in your company, turning those people into recruiters for your business. Potential employees can also apply directly on LinkedIn or be linked back to your website to apply. Job listing fees vary based on the location of your company.

Insights

Your company page will have public insights for visitors to your page as well as admin-only insights. Public insights will include information about your employees, companies other visitors have viewed, where employees came from, top skills and expertise, and the most recommended employees from your company.



Admin insights can be viewed when you go to your page and click the Edit button. You will then see tabs for follower insights, page insights, and employee insights.



Within these insights, you can find out your follower demographics, page visitor demographics, page views, product and service page clicks, and other relevant data.



Employee insights is similar to the public insights page with information about your employees.

Advertising with LinkedIn

Want to get more exposure for your business on LinkedIn? Then try LinkedIn Advertising. Compared to Facebook and Twitter Advertising, LinkedIn is usually more expensive. But it also allows you the most advertising options. For example, you can point advertising to your website or your company as well as have up to 15 ad variations.



The best part about LinkedIn advertising is the targeting. You can target your ad based on a LinkedIn user’s location, company, job title, school, skills, group, gender, and age.



For B2B companies, these target options mean you don’t have to spend a lot of advertising budget on the wrong audience. You can target a very specific group of people which will make your clicks more likely to convert. You can learn more about the basics of using LinkedIn Advertising in the KISSmetrics Guide to LinkedIn Ads.

Enhancing Your Website with LinkedIn

LinkedIn offers a variety of plugins to connect LinkedIn to your website. For example, you can add a LinkedIn share button to your blog content in order to get it shared on LinkedIn.
inShare392

You can also add a company follow button to encourage more people to follow your company page.


You can even add a recommendation button on your website asking people to recommend your products and services on your company page.
inRecommend1

There are also plugins that you can add to your website to highlight your professional profile, career opportunities, and more details from your company page (similar to a Facebook like box).

Analyzing Your Results

Like any online marketing strategy, you will want to make sure you are looking at your analytics to make sure LinkedIn is both driving you traffic and leading to conversions. Google Analytics Social Reports will help you track direct conversions – traffic that comes to your website from LinkedIn and, within the same visit, converts. KISSmetrics can help you track a visitor from LinkedIn who converts on your website, regardless of whether they convert on their first visit or later.

If you are using LinkedIn Advertising, be sure to use UTML parameters to specifically track the URL’s from your ads. You can view the clicks for these links under Traffic Sources > Campaigns.

Exploring the Top Tools

Want to manage your LinkedIn presence or get additional insights about your LinkedIn activity beyond what LinkedIn offers? Here are some great tools to use!

• Oktopost – Use this tool to schedule status updates to your LinkedIn profile as well as your groups. You can also get statistics about how many clicks you receive on your status updates from your profile and LinkedIn groups. This can give you great insight into which groups are sending you the most traffic.


• Jumplead – Identify visitors coming to your website from LinkedIn, manage your LinkedIn leads, and get real insights.


• Buffer – Schedule status updates for your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn profile.


• HootSuite – Publish and schedule status updates to your LinkedIn profile along with Twitter, Facebook, Google+ pages, and other networks.


• SproutSocial – Measure engagement, publish status updates, and analyze activity for your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn profiles.

In Conclusion

Congratulations if you made it through this guide! If you apply everything you’ve learned, you should have a great LinkedIn profile and be well on your way to building a targeted LinkedIn network, engaging with your audience, managing your account with terrific tools, and seeing the results of your LinkedIn activity. What else would you like to know about LinkedIn marketing? Please ask your questions in the comments and share your own great LinkedIn tips, tools, and resources.

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