Search Engine Marketing News Archives

Evolving Interactive Guest Blog Post: SEO and Social Media: Working Together, Working For You

January 10, 2013 / in Evolving Interactive News, General Marketing, Google, Local SEO, Search Engine, Search Engine Marketing News, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), social media optimization, Twitter / by admin

Social media has become an important part of pretty much all businesses, including traditional brick and mortar businesses and online businesses. However, social media has become increasingly important for people that work in SEO, since social media is being used differently by many companies to find their target audience.

Individuals that work in SEO have also seen major changes that have likely affected the way that they work, giving them even more incentive to utilize social media as an outlet for creating and getting work.

Google Algorithm Updates

Google Panda and subsequent updates have had a major impact on people that work in SEO. Recent changes to Google Penguin and Panda have been put in place to penalize companies and individuals that produce fast, low-quality content just to fit in keywords that are popular in searches and on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Many major sites labeled as content mills – sites that employed writers to write on a variety of topics based on a particular keyword – were penalized the most. However, these algorithm updates also affected bloggers and people that make their living doing SEO work for private companies.

Local SEO

Local SEO has become more and more important since Google changed its algorithm, and it has become very popular with many businesses because it allows them to find only clients or customers in their area that fit their criteria. That means more focused marketing, which can result in more business at a reduced cost for many businesses. Many businesses use SEO writers to create local content for their Facebook, Twitter or Google+ pages to help them attract clients.

While writing for social media isn’t that much different than writing for a blog, understanding what works best on sites like Facebook and Twitter – which has a letter counter restriction – can help you do your best work.

Social Media Affects Ranking

After Google algorithm changes, social media rankings have become more and more important to businesses and writers that use SEO to drive traffic to their blog or website. This is because Google put more importance on organic links and mentions of a certain keyword or brand than on many other websites. The more people are talking about your product or business on social media sites like Google+ and Facebook, the higher your ranking will be. That’s why writing for social media sites has become so popular among SEO content producers.

Social media numbers should also be viewed in conjunction with more traditional page rankings and backlinks.

Apps Are Your Friend

Apps designed to help you create quality posts for social media sites like HootSuite also allow you to monitor how your post is doing and how many people are looking at and sharing your information.

HootSuite also allows you to publish your content across various networks in a safe, secure manner that is very user friendly for most SEO content creators.

Another app that’s popular among SEO content producers is BufferApp, which allows you to create posts in advance and share them on social media sites throughout the day. BufferApp also works with your email provider so that you can share updates through your e-mail system if you’re on the go. While there are certain restrictions with BufferApp about how many posts you can create in advance, most people won’t ever reach the limit, making it a very efficient tool.

Pingraphy works sort of like BufferApp, but it’s designed for both business and personal users of Pinterest. Pingraphy allows you to disperse your pins throughout the day so that you don’t bombard your followers all at once. Using Pingraphy also allows you to post during peak hours when you know your followers will be ready to look at the items that you’re posting.

If you’re doing SEO content work on social media sites, these useful apps can make it much easier to share what you want to share, when you want to share it. They can also help you to reach more of your target audience by allowing you to create more content. Using apps also means that you don’t have to sit at your desk all day updating Twitter and Facebook.

Today’s Guest Blog Post courtesy of Marcela De Vivo:

Marcela De Vivo is a freelance writer in the Los Angeles area, specializing in articles about the best blog content, SEO, and moving blogs to WordPress.

Before Assuming Penguin / Panda Caused the Problem, Make Sure you are Following SEO Basics

November 29, 2012 / in Search Engine Marketing News, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) / by admin

Most SEOs agree that the past year and a half has been the craziest period in the history of SEO. The rankings-crushing algorithm changes known as Panda and Penguin have wreaked havoc across the industry. Many companies have seen their website traffic plummet, leaving their SEO consultants confused about how to proceed. At Evolving Interactive, we are experiencing a surge of sales leads from potential clients hoping we can reverse these penalties and return their website to its previous status. All of the uproar over Panda and Penguin is real and all of it is worth studying. However, it is important to be accurate when diagnosing any drop in rankings or traffic. Too often these days, SEOs and business leaders automatically assume that a penalty is caused by Panda and Penguin before doing a thorough analysis. I believe that it’s more important than ever to make sure that you have a firm grasp of the basics before making assumptions.

A big part of any SEOs job is to troubleshoot problems. If a client’s website is experiencing a big drop in rankings and/or traffic, it’s entirely possible, likely in fact, that their site was penalized do to Panda and Penguin. However, there are many other reasons that could contribute to the drop. There are plenty of very good articles about how to diagnose a Panda or Penguin penalty. I recommend reading Distilled’s excellent write-up about Penguin and checking out Search Engine Land’s infographic about Panda. Since Google continuously roles out new versions of Panda and Penguin, the easiest strategy would be to check your analytics to see when traffic drop occurred and then see if the date matches-up with the any of Google’s algorithm changes. But what if you’ve done your homework and determined that it wasn’t Panda and Penguin? What else could you have done to upset Google?

Long before the days of Panda and Penguin, SEOs were quite busy diagnosing problems. It’s entirely possible that you aren’t following best practices that have been around for many years, but don’t get the same level of attention today. In fact, we have found that problems like duplicate content, slow load time as well as more egregious tactics are still being attempted quite regularly.

This post was inspired by a client who was ranking very well in Yahoo and Bing, but not in Google. They came to us assuming that Google must be penalizing them as a result of Panda and Penguin. After all, that’s what everyone was talking about on all the search blogs. When we examined their analytics, there were no obvious red flags. Instead, what we found was that the company began running a blog shortly before a big drop in rankings, with scraped (i.e. copied) content from other sources. The problem wasn’t over optimization or participating in spammy link practices. It was duplicate content, an issue that’s been around for years.

What else should you be on the lookout for? Check Webmaster Tools to make sure that you don’t have any crawling or indexing issues. Do a site:yoursite.com search for your domain in Google, Yahoo and Bing to make sure that at least your most important pages are getting indexed. Amazingly we have a client that launched a new site and their developer applied a noindex, nofollow on every page. Make sure your pages load quickly and work on all browsers. Avoid flash and other programming languages that can’t be read by search engines. Avoid shortsighted tactics, like adding hidden text, doorway pages or sneaky redirects. Most importantly, make sure you know the basics. Review the Webmaster Guidelines to make sure you know all the rules to the game. You don’t have to be a professional SEO to understand what you should and should not do. Finally, don’t make assumptions just because of the buzz. SEO does change often, but I’m amazed at how the core principles have stayed the same:

• Make sites for users, not search engines
• Publish unique high quality content
• Avoid any get-links quick schemes that will doom you down the road.

If you have a good grasp of basic SEO, you can avoid the overwhelming majority of mistakes.

Google – Local Plus

May 31, 2012 / in Evolving Interactive News, General Marketing, Google, Local SEO, Search Engine Marketing News / by admin

Yesterday, Google made a pretty big change to their local business pages. That is to say, they removed them. As of this morning, all of the local pages are in transition to a new page hosted by the Google + platform. Google has several reasons for making the change, which they explain will create a simpler experience for customers. This simpler experience includes a more proficient rating system, using ratings from Zagat when applicable. Google says it will also make it easier for searchers to leave reviews and recommend businesses to the friends in their circles while logged in to their Google Plus account.

The transition seems to be fairly smooth in terms of bringing over content, though for now it is still recommended that business owners manage their listing through the Places for Business. Right now, the changes have created new plus pages for the business that you can navigate to through the maps listing. For businesses that already have created and manage a local Google Plus page, Google’s instructions is to “hold tight

3 Ways to Boost Your Facebook Followers Overnight

May 29, 2012 / in Evolving Interactive News, General Marketing, Search Engine Marketing News, social media optimization / by admin

Today on the Evolving Interactive SEO Blog, we feature a guest post about how to optimize your Facebook profile in a few easy steps. Social media management is a key element to optimizing your business for search engines, a point our guest blogger points out.

Whether you’re running a business or you’re trying to promote yourself, you need to use social networks like Facebook to reach new audiences. Here are a few tips for quickly gaining new followers on Facebook.

1. Engage your followers

Don’t be afraid to ask your readers questions or to offer prizes and contests through your Facebook page. When you make an attempt to communicate with your page’s fans, you bring a lot of positive attention to your page and increase your chances of a viral post.

When you engage your followers, make your posts short and sweet. Try to hook your audience’s attention. If you’re having a lot of trouble getting followers, you might even offer a prize to viewers who share your Facebook page with their friends.

2. Don’t self-promote too frequently

Once you have visitors coming in from shared posts, ads and links, you need to make sure that the first thing that visitors see is a page that offers some value to them. If all of your posts promote your business, band or self, you won’t win too many new followers.

Vary your posts and try to give your visitors a reason to come back. Post interesting links and invite discussion in the comments of each post. You’ll stand a much better chance of getting a viral post that can drive more attention to your page. Remember to check your Facebook page’s Insights to see whether visitors are responding well to a specific type of post.

3. Optimize your page

One of the easiest ways to get quick traffic is to make sure that your page looks impressive. Pay a professional graphic design company to make appropriately sized images for your page. Use an optimized URL by visiting the settings of your Facebook page and make sure that the new URL is easy for your visitors to remember. Delete boring or irrelevant posts and make sure that your page looks professional.

When you have a good Facebook page, you can add your URL to your email signature, put it on business cards and promote it directly, but wait to take this step until you’ve optimized every element. Eventually, growing your base of Facebook followers will be as easy as posting regular updates and including your URL wherever you can, but first you need to understand your audience to make the type of page that people follow regularly.

Guest post courtesy of Shai Atanelov, the Client Services Director for New Edge Design, a web design company in New York.

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Google Plus – How it Effects Your Search World

January 17, 2012 / in Google, Search Engine, Search Engine Marketing News, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) / by admin

Last week, Google announced that its new Social Network platform, Google Plus, will now effect search results. The buzz spread like wildfire across the SEO industry. How much of a game changer will this be? Will search engine optimization still matter if search results are now personalized instead of taking the most relevant and trustworthy sites and ranking them accordingly?

It’s no secret that Google’s main goal for the past year has been integrating their new budding social network with their search results. Anyone logged into their Google account with a Google Plus profile will see a different set of results than a searcher not logged in. Google Plus users will have the option of personal or worldwide results. There is an icon at the top right of the SERP that shows a silhouette of a person or a globe, and the Plus user can toggle between the two sets of results.

Clicking on the person icon, the top results for a search will be based on recommendations, or Plus 1’s, that you and the people in your circles have made, or info that others have shared with you. Results with reviews and pluses will have higher ranking then those without. By switching over to the globe, you will see the natural results without these social signals affecting them as directly.

Google has used social signals as a part of their algorithm for years, with personalized results getting a boost. Twitter follows, Facebook likes and shares, and Yelp reviews have factored in to results; companies have used this buzz to crawl up the rankings. Facebook and Twitter have criticized this change, citing that Google will give preferential treatment to its own social signals, a claim Google has denied.

Other features to Google Plus, like the fact that users must opt-out of the personal search and not opt-in, have led to concerns among users and SEO’s. However, it is easy enough to switch the results back to the global, impersonalized results. There is even a way to permanently remove the personalized results in the search settings. Concerns about privacy are also prevalent, as anyone with access to private information can share it publicly. It is ultimately up to the user who they share info with, but the receiver can post it at their whim, so know your circles. As with anything on the internet, it’s a good rule of thumb that if you wouldn’t want your content on the web, don’t upload it to begin with.

As Google Plus fixes the issues and bugs that are inevitable as it gains in popularity, it will be important to make the most of its features. As the social signals for sites that have “Plus 1’s

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All posts in Search Engine Marketing News

Evolving Interactive Guest Blog Post: SEO and Social Media: Working Together, Working For You

Before Assuming Penguin / Panda Caused the Problem, Make Sure you are Following SEO Basics

Google – Local Plus

3 Ways to Boost Your Facebook Followers Overnight

Google Plus – How it Effects Your Search World