As a business owner you’ve worked hard to brand yourself and create a website. You’ve added all the bells and whistles you desired. Now what? Now that your website is up and running you’re looking to focus on providing your customers with kick-butt customer service. But where are your customers? Here is your answer….Social SEO!!
Remember the days when investigating a purchase meant picking up your local yellow pages? Well, my friends, those days are long gone! Enter the Age of Social Shopping Plenty of research exists on the shopping habits of consumers and most have come to the same conclusion: the “New Consumer” investigates their purchases for Products or Services.
8 Months is a Long Time! In 8 months one can lose 50 pounds, a baby can learn to sit up and crawl or take a hiatus from blogging and focus on your business…that’s what we did! Over these last 8 months (since our last blog post), we worked with a few clients.
It’s been referred to as Google’s “sandbox”, age deflation, and plain old website spam filtering. Whatever you call it, the results are usually the same. Oh and by the way, it’s not a good thing. What Is It? The article on Wikipedia refers to the sandbox effect as: a phenomenon.
For those of you who don’t know, when it comes to proving your website’s relevance to the various search engines, content is king. To rank well against a particular search term or keyword, your site needs to have just the right amount of that keyword embedded within its content. The more prominent that keyword is, the more likely your site is to be included in those search results.
Let’s say your company specializes in online gaming market and You’re the best company and you know it. Now you want the rest of the world to know https://casinouzmani77.com/ every time they search for the phrase “online gaming”. That’s great, but how does a search engine like Google know that you’re the best?
There are several strategies a good SEO firm will use to improve the findability of your website. The most important of those should be improving the quality of your website content. The page you’re hoping to attract visitors to must have the right amount of search terms/phrases within it. Going back to our example, if I’m authoring a page that I want Google to return in its listing of search results, I better make sure that my page speaks to the phrase “ski wicket”.
Once your page is crawled and indexed by one of the search engines, the search engine maintains several key bits of information. Among other things, it’s looking for the prominance of certain words – how often they appear and where within your page content. Once it crawls your site and gathers the information it’s looking for, it’s gone. Just as fast as it came.
If you’re a small business with a relatively small website (fewer than 50 pages) that search engine may not be back to pay your page a visit for several days, weeks, or even months. For that reason, it is very important to ensure that the content on your page is well crafted, relevant to the topic at hand, and contains the right amount of the keyword or phrase you’re hoping to target.
Before you start thinking that you’ve come across this great secret to better search engine ranking, let me provide a word of caution. If I try to get crafty by including the phrase “ski wicket” 1000 times on my page, I can actually be penalized by the search engines and hurt my search ranking. Your page/website needs to be designed for human beings, not search engines. If Google lets say, crawls your page and notices that the phrase “ski wicket” appears 1000 times, it probably won’t think you’re the authority on the ski wicket, but that you’re trying to manipulate your way to a better search ranking. It’s true, and it does happen.
How have you networked lately? Do you belong to several Networking groups for Social or Business purposes? Then hopefully Twitter has been part of your networking system.
Twitter is a real time – powerful networking tool for people and businesses. Networking in 140 characters…impossible you say? Join the conversation and see!
One of the reasons why Twitter is so powerful is the ability to network quickly and productively with potentially thousands of people or more in an instant…if you do it right! And always remember that people are nosy (you know you are too!)…they want to know what is going on in your life and your business. If you are smart and savvy with your tweets, people will want to listen in to your conversation – just like the Nosy Rosy sitting beside you on the Go Train!
Twitter reaches out to everyone – women, men, moms, dads, entrepreneurs, small businesses and large corporations to mention a few! Each of these people network in the community in different ways but all can use Twitter to network from home…in their pajamas if they choose to do so! Once you establish relationships on Twitter, meeting a potential friend or client in person is a cinch…that initial dialogue has already started and the connection is already established. Just imagine how a business could benefit from this!
– Follow the right people – related to your personal likes, your type of business or your location.
– Have the right people follow you – appeal to those you want to follow you and search for them.
– Don’t spam – multiple accounts sending the same tweets at the same time, selling or asking people to constantly check out your site or what you offer will lose your followers very quickly!
– Follow those who follow those you follow (do you follow?) – look at your followers and follow their followers.
– If someone follows you, follow them back out of courtesy – unless they have a suspicious picture, non-existent bio or no followers but are following hundreds of people!
– #FollowFridays – Your time to give back to your network – tweet a user name and reason why others should follow them. What goes around comes around
– Retweet others as you want to be retweeted!
So, if you are not on Twitter go on and join the conversation! The most important tip to remember – HAVE FUN! (even if you are wearing your pajamas!)
And if you are confused or want some more tips, give me a call! I am always here to help!
Google has been working on several additions recently to its core search offering and there have been countless blog posts and reviews popping up all over the web. We will begin exploring some of the more newsworthy improvements in the days and weeks to come. More specifically, how they relate to SEO and your website’s findability online.
We’ve been asked recently by a few prospective clients about “Personalized Search” so we’re going to tackle that one first.
Google defines “Personalized Search” as the ability to use the search history you’ve been building to get better more relevant results . Over time, Google will persist this information and use it to provide you with search results it thinks you want to see.
What kind of information? Things like search requests (topics and keywords) and click-thru results for a given website. For example, whether you clicked on any of its results and which ones in particular.
The first phase of the Personalized Search rollout worked well, however, there was a catch. The catch being that you must first have a Google account (Gmail). Second, you must be logged into that account for Google to begin persisting your search history. I don’t know about you, but I rarely if ever log into my Gmail account before googling something.
Your “personalized” search results may be ranked differently from someone else performing the same exact search based on your previous click-thru behavior. Phase One has been around for approximately four years now and hasn’t really changed the SEO landscape all that much.
The second phase of the Personalized Search rollout is a bit more intrusive. Released earlier this month, this version does not require web searchers be logged into their Google account and is enabled for all users. Google takes advantage of a browser cookie to store relevant information related to your search habits. As with phase one, there is a catch. The catch in this case being that your search history only persists for 180 days. After that point your web history is cleared.
Again in this case, your “personalized” search results may be ranked differently from someone else performing the same exact search based on your previous click-thru behavior. As this second phase was only released very recently, the long-term effects are still unknown. That being said, I have noticed that Google just doesn’t do a great job unless I log into my Gmail account. I do a lot of searching and I just haven’t noticed very many “personalized” results where Google has actually customized something for me.
There are a lot of discussions around the web that this second incarnation of Personalized Search is an SEO killer. I’m not alone when I say that is justnot the case. Here’s why:
Yesterday Google unveiled a major update to their Social Search feature. MG Siegler over at TechCrunch did a nice job of breaking down the changes but I thought I would talk about the impact (if any) on your website getting found.
The size of your social network is about to play an even bigger role in the search results you see. Google has now begun ranking search results in order of your social reach, to some degree. Links to pages that have been tweeted or re-tweeted by someone in your social circle will now be moved to the top of the search results page. Google has a deal with Twitter to allow the search giant access to the full stream of tweets.
Until this latest improvement was announced, Social Search results (introduced in October of 2009) were results that appeared towards the bottom of the page. Links to blog posts or websites shared by your friends, or friends of friends would *only* appear at the bottom of the search results page. No impact on search rankings.
You might be asking the question: “2009, why haven’t I seen any social search results until now?”. Like many of the features released out of Google Labs, you must be signed into your Google account before performing a search. Think of it as an opt-in feature. Visitors to Google that never sign into their Google account will not see social search results.
Google has upped the anti with this new incarnation. Links to blog posts or websites shared by your social circle may now appear above other websites in the search results page. This is huge! The role social networks like Twitter play in the findability of your website or blog is increasingly becoming more of a factor. The more your website or blog is shared online, the more likely your page is to appear in someone else’s search.
All that being said, this is still an opt-in type of feature. Unless you are signed into your Google account you will never have social results mixed in with regular results. You now have to go one step further; Google requires you to link your Google profile with your Twitter account, for example. You must add your social network account to your Google profile before this feature can be used. See screen shot below. Also, this only applies to visitors of Google.com. Those of us using Google.ca or other locale-specific search sites will not have access to this yet.
As MG Siegler points out, none of this applies to your Facebook network. Google hasn’t tapped into the effect of a Facebook “Like” on your website or post. Not yet anyway!
As I mentioned earlier, the size of your social network as a business or blogger, is playing a bigger role in how your website or blog ranks among other search results. The larger your network, the greater your reach.
What’s your take on this? How many of you actually log into your Google account before running a search? That seems to be the one factor that prevents social search from completely obliterating a well optimized website. People just don’t go that extra step and log into their account before searching. If they are already logged into Google, how many of those users will go that extra step and link their Google profile with a social network like Twitter? I guess that remains to be seen.
In late 2009 we started our business choosing to offer Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services. As we started working with our clients, we began to hear a common theme: Small to medium-sized businesses felt helpless when it came to managing their own website. About a year into running our business we decided to expand our service offerings and began building websites with the idea of enabling our customers to better manage their own sites. Those websites were, and continue to be, tailored to our client’s needs – a highly usable website interface that the client can feel comfortable managing.
During this time we were also working on Social Media and attempting to get businesses to buy into its’ importance. Looking at the widespread use of Social Media marketing today, we’re overjoyed to see how far things have come. Building on our own struggles and discoveries, we developed several trainings and strategies in the hope it would make the Social transition easier for our own clients.
Then the world became Mobile! And so did we! Our clients have often expressed to us a desire for their business to be accessible on multiple platforms in order to reach a wider audience. And so the mobile division of Findability Solutions was born! We now offer a wide range of custom mobile application development services to meet your needs.
To mark this milestone we decided our own website could use a bit of an update. For fun (and a way to archive a bit of history) below is a screen shot of what we used to look like. We like to remember where we came from around these parts.
We are super excited to unveil our new website and we hope you like it too! Please take a minute and share it using your favourite social networking site below. Feel free to leave a comment and let us know what you think. Any ideas or suggestions? We’d love to hear them!!! Go ahead, poke around and have some fun!
The Team at Findability Solutions, Inc.
According to a 2011 report by research firm IDC, more U.S. Internet users will access the web via mobile devices than through PCs or other wired devices by the year 2015. The report stated that the number of mobile Internet users would increase at a rate of 16.6% between 2010 and 2015. IDC also reported that global business-to-consumer e-commerce spending will grow from $708 million to $1.285 billion in 2015, a growth rate of 12.7 percent. Will your business be ready?
Over the next four blog posts we’ll be discussing various strategies for “going mobile”. Our goal is to provide businesses with information that should help them make an informed decision when considering a mobile strategy. Your website is the hub of all your online marketing activity and mobile-friendly or not, it is a representation of your company’s presence online.
1. The Traditional Website
Until a few years ago, when deciding on your company’s website in most cases you either went with a pure HTML/CSS-based site or a CMS solution like WordPress or Joomla (there definitely were others). Flash was and continues to be used heavily to bring sound, animation, and video to a website. Until smartphones entered the picture (specifically Apple devices) this wasn’t a problem and in fact was standard practice for most large companies.
Accessing the web via a PC or other wired device is still the preferred method in 2012 according to IDC. With that in mind businesses need to make sure their website is compatible across multiple web browsers. Cross-browser compatibility is one of the most important design considerations today. If something looks great in the Firefox web browser, it doesn’t necessarily mean it will look and behave the same in Internet Explorer. PC screens are large and screen resolutions are higher than they have ever been so there is lots of room to be creative.
2. The Mobile Compatible Website
As soon as Apple’s iPhone hit the market in 2007, the smartphone revolution was kicked into overdrive. Fast forward a few years and when designing a website, businesses must consider visitors accessing the web from mobile smartphones. Smartphones running Google Android or Apple iOS come equipped with a web browser that allows visitors to access your website while on the go.
Just as cross-browser compatibility is a concern when designing a traditional website, use of web browser plugins like Flash are a concern when designing a mobile compatible website. Remember how Flash was a great technology for bringing sound, animation, and video to a website? Well, Flash is not supported on the most popular smartphone of them all – Apple’s iPhone. It’s a long story however, having a website built entirely on Flash is a missed business opportunity as your mobile visitor will be left with a very bad experience.
A mobile compatible website will likely contain the same material as a traditional website but uses only technologies compatible with today’s smartphones. When building a new website today it should be mobile compatible at the very least.
3. The Mobile Website
Depth. A mobile website is an opportunity for businesses to provide depth of information to visitors on the go. According to Forrester, when considering mobile (websites and apps) think Immediacy, Simplicity, and Context.
When creating your mobile strategy, the mobile website is not necessarily a clone of your traditional website for mobile devices. The information on your site should be quickly accessible (Immediacy). That same information should be easy to access and navigate (Simplicity). Lastly, when determining which pages of your traditional website are relevant for the mobile web, choose the most pertinent information. A good rule is to select the sections of your website most frequently visited (Context).
4. The Mobile App
Utility. A mobile app should serve a purpose and if possible provide a utility to make life easier for your customers. For a business, the mobile app you create should help your customer do something better.
Before even considering which mobile platform to target, your business needs to have a vision – what do you want to accomplish with your mobile app? Is your app purely informational, are you providing a feature that complements your website and business function? These are just some of the questions you should consider when creating your mobile strategy.
In the next installment of our series on “Going Mobile”, we’ll be discussing what a mobile strategy is and what a successful strategy looks like. If you’d like to speak with someone further to discuss your current mobile strategy or if you need help creating one, contact us here.
