seo tips and tricks of august 2013

Facebook has succeeded in maintaining a good reputation as a social networking platform since it went viral for the first time.  Billions of people connect with one another at this social network and share their videos, photos and thoughts. On seeing this, many opportunist businessmen have already started to use Facebook for advertisement. This social network has many powerful tools and features that support in advertising your products and services to the target audience. However, do you know that you can drive huge traffic to your business websites from Facebook without even spending a penny?

If your answer is no,Web Design, Mobile Application and Content Writing firms in order to get traffic. These are our tried and tested methods that have always shown superb results in tapping traffic from Facebook.

Get a solid presence on Facebook

You should start with building a strong Facebook profile. Write a powerful description of your business and use precise words to describe yourself. Select a dominant profile picture and choose a very motivating profile cover photo. While selecting content for sharing, concentrate on videos, photos and messages that mostly get an automatic response from readers.

Improve Your Visibility To Search Engines

We have already discussed that a powerful description of your business is highly essential if your aim is to look like professionals. This description can provide you many new fans if you put it into words what most people use in search to find the related pages. 

Send Requests To Facebook Users To Like Your Page

Facebook administration has been improving the search capabilities ofthis social network. However, you cannot leave everything to the searchengine. You should try to find the right type of users on your own as well. Most people already know this, but there is a big mistake what they do that they send a message to different people along with a link to their page requesting them to like it.

Well, even if the person may be willing to know about you, he will rarely visit your page for he does not know anything about what he is going to see on the page. That’s why you should explain what is on your page in a professional’s way in the message.

What To Do Next?

You have built a powerful Facebook profile and got many likes of your fan page. Now, you can think about promoting activity on your business website. These are the most effective ways for this purpose.

1. You should regularly update your blog in the first step. You can focus on important news of industry. You can even pass your opinion about the latest events. The fans should be told about everything that happens at your blog. This can motivate them to read the blog, and thus they will visit your website.

2. Although it is a bit expensive and complicated task, but if your budget permits you can think about launching contests on Facebook. You will do an even better job if a decent prize for the winner is also announced. You need to ask the fans for visiting the website in order to get complete details.

3. You should deliver what you promise for the contest winners. You should award them with prizes in special ceremonies and update fans through your Facebook status. In this way, more people will know about you, and they will think about participating in your next contest.

Social Media Marketing Trends In 2014

Social media will continue to play a central role in marketers´ day-to-day work over the course of this year. But many of them are pondering over the development of social marketing over the next months. Kristin Brewe, the IAB´s director of marketing and communications and chair of the Social Media Council, is just the right person to offer an insight into the matter.

Writing in a blog post on IAB´s website, Brewe noted a few key trends that social media marketing is likely to follow in 2013. Measurement will remain a key focus for businesses, as many have so far found performance and ROI measurement quite elusive. A recent poll from the IAB showed that more than a quarter of respondents had no clue how their organisations measured social performance, with only 17% of those interviewed measuring ROI on social sites activity.

As news and messages in general travel at the speed of sound on social media, it is becoming nearly impossible to hide the truth. Brands need to be more truthful than ever because social media makes their business transparent and exposed like never before. Communicating honestly with customers and being open to criticism is the right approach, Brewe claimed.

While the majority of brands are playing it safe by creating brand pages on big, well-established platforms, the alternative is also worth giving it a thought. Brands willing to take a risk might venture into creating their own platforms, with their own community, as this will undoubtedly make them stand out from the crowd.

The bottom line is that the social media outlook is very good despite the challenges brands face. It gives unrivalled opportunities for creating valuable relationships between brands and consumers, Brewe concluded.

SEO Industry Trends: A Look at What’s Ahead for SEO in 2014

Now that most of us have our footing back after Penguin 2.0, what’s ahead for SEO and social media marketing in the year to come? It’s clear that Google’s focus is on eliminating spam and enhancing the user experience through better content. Evidence has shown that both site quality and link relevancy are going to be big players in the next twelve months. But comments from Google and forecasting from a number of different SEO experts suggest that other changes are on the horizon.
Here’s my best guess of where we can expect SEO to go for the rest of 2013 and throughout 2014 – and my top tips on how to prepare. Just to add a standard disclaimer: prediction posts are at best guesses. I’ll be updating this post periodically as more information becomes available, and look forward to your thoughts and insights as well.

1. Content continues to be important, but requires more depth and detail
The days when you could publish 500-word pieces on your blog a couple times a week and achieve authority status are fading away. While high quality, shorter pieces still have value, I predict we’ll see a migration toward “super articles.” Longer pieces that are a minimum of 1,000 words and more likely upwards of 2,000 will become increasingly valuable.
It’s what Neil Patel has called “epic content.” There’s several ways to approach this. If the best articles in your niche offer 50 ideas, your round-ups could offer 100. You could get access to experts, develop detailed tutorials, or supplement your content with high quality videos or images. The key is going to be to follow an approach that sets you apart from the most basic content in your space, and grabs people’s interest for the long-term. The focus is on depth, quality, and ultimate value to the reader.

2. Different kinds of content help you get traction
Whether you’re looking at creating video, developing infographics, or launching interactive quizzes, thinking beyond blog posts and free reports will give you a distinct advantage. As buzzwords like guest posting and content strategy become more and more ubiquitous, it’s important that you do whatever you can to rise above the noise. In addition to committing to do what it takes to write sticky, authoritative content, another strategy will be diversifying the type of content that you publish.
Of course, this connects to your ability to disseminate content in creative ways. There’s only so many ways to share a blog post. But a video can be syndicated to dozens of different sites, added to a branded channel on YouTube, embedded on Pinterest, and more.
Another important factor is your ability to appear in different verticals of search — for example, videos or images — as overall search architecture moves in that direction. A more diverse content base will help you rank more effectively for your target terms.

3. Author authority matters
It’s not just the quality of a single piece of content that matters, but rather your entire body of work. By using Google Authorship and other behind-the-scenes techniques, Google is developing better mechanisms for learning about everything you write. This develops an overall picture of what you’ve accomplished, and what subjects you’re qualified to speak on.
The overall number of social signals your content is generating, how frequently you’re posting, and the quality of sites you’re connected to, this will impact the rankings of the content that you post going forward. To establish your authority, make sure you’re leveraging Google Authorship not only with your regular core content, but also with guest posts that you contribute to other sites in your industry.

4. Links remain critical, but the bar for quality keeps going up
In a video in May, Matt Cutts suggested that Google’s continuing to develop more sophisticated adjustments to the algorithm to measure link quality and thwart link spammers. This evokes the idea of link wheels – creating networks of hub and spoke sites, along with many levels of intermediary sites, in order to build links. The idea is that if they’re dispersed and deep enough, that the connections between them will be masked. It a nutshell, these approaches aren’t effective anymore and will become less so moving forward.
While Google’s already focused on this, ever more sophisticated versions of this approach – from paid advertorials to private blog networks – will continue to be important targets in the war of spam. Not only will we all be taking a retrospective look at our link profiles, but strategizing how to build links in the future will require more ingenuity and planning. Link building is moving in the direction of a relationship-based process.

5. Diversifying link text is ongoing
One of the areas t hit by Penguin 2.0 was sites where anchor text was too optimized. Experts estimated that if more than 30% of your anchor text was identical, it was easy to see that you were actively building links in a way that might be manipulative. Instead, now and going forward, it’s more important to think about linking from an organic perspective.
For example, say your site is currently focused on the topic of Twitter marketing. People discussing your site and linking to it are likely to use a variety of terms: Twitter marketing, marketing on Twitter, Twitter for business, social media marketing on Twitter, and more. There are a number of terms that are all within the realm of a reasonable anchor text choice.
It’s important to develop campaigns that help you post links with a range of different anchor text. Diversifying your link text takes time, especially if you have a significant body of links to your site. I anticipate that we’ll see many website owners working on this in the year ahead.  For an overview on proper anchor text strategy in a post-Penguin 2.0 environment,

6. Great design matters
Great design is a key piece of the user experience. Top-quality design helps overcome the trust barrier that comes up when people first visit your site. If your site looks professional, they’re more likely to believe that your business is legitimate and give you the time and money you’re working hard to earn. Another key factor is driving conversions. Good design helps drive users in whatever direction you want them to go – signing up for your email list, buying your products, or reading and sharing your content.
Design is also a very effective tool for helping build both your authority and your epic content backlog. Is your picture on your website? Do people associate your name and face with high quality content? If so, you’re on the right track. Is design supporting the quality of your tutorials? You can instantly upgrade people’s perceptions of your work by integrating screen shots, videos, and more. It’s a simple way to increase the value of your content.

7. Guest posting comes under increasing scrutiny
One of the most popular means of building links right now is guest posting. It’s a great way to build links, cultivate relationships with other thinkers in your field, and get your material in front of new audiences. The challenge with guest posting is when it’s treated as the “new method of article marketing.” I think we can expect increasing scrutiny from Google on guest posts.
What this means for writers and website owners is that it’s important to pay attention to the quality of the sites where you post. PageRank and Domain authority are two metrics to measure quality. Another is to look and see if these sites have the kind of human signals that make a reputable site – an engaged audience, social shares, and links from other high quality sites. When you do guest post, it’ll be important to put an extra emphasis on developing valuable contributions that really resonate with the target audience.

8. Social continues to exert a powerful influence
Social media isn’t going anywhere. In fact, it’s gaining a great deal of traction. With the introduction of Google Plus two years ago, it was easy to see that social signals were becoming more important to search. As one expert said, “human rank is hard to game.” By increasing the influence of social media signals, the search engines are essentially outsourcing the manual evaluation process of content to a large extent.
For companies working to rank their content, it’ll be important to ensure they have branded accounts for their sites. Plugins or other mechanisms need to be used in order to make content easily sharable, and to measure social shares. Social media promotion needs to be a front-line priority in your individual content promotion plans, and overall innovative approaches (for example, experimenting with exclusive social content or competitions) used to increase your social reach and influence.

9. Mobile performance and compatibility matter
During an interview with Search Engine Journal, Matt Cutts noted the importance of having a lean mobile site that loaded quickly. Building on that, mobile is no longer optional. Half of all people in the U.S. own a smartphone; one third of internet users own a tablet. Soon, more people will routinely access the Internet via a mobile device than the number of people who do so via a desktop computer.
Having a mobile compatible site is the new minimum threshold. Important aspects include cross-device compatibility and optimizing your designs for mobile conversions. Thinking about mobile productively requires a mindset shift. Mobile isn’t just about making sales. Instead, it’s about a broader set of potential conversions – visits, gathering information for in-store visits, signing up for more information – that require you to focus on the mobile channel.
Besides mobile-ready design, website speed is becoming more important. As the average internet user expects faster speeds, they have less patience. Frustration over slow-loading websites leads to a poorer user experience, which is why website load speed is one of the growing factors in Google’s ranking algorithm. Cloud CDN (content delivery network) hosting solutions are seeing a rise in popularity due to this trend, and for good reason.

10. SEO is less tactics, more strategy
It’s fair to say that this has been the direction of SEO for a long time now, but it’s becoming increasingly true. Tactics – specific ways to build links or to write code – are becoming less and less valuable. Instead, the focus is shifting to your long-term strategy. What’s your content strategy? What’s your link building strategy? What’s your authority strategy? What’s your social strategy? These individual pieces all link together to create the foundation a successful site presence is built on.
It doesn’t mean that tactics don’t matter. After all, tactical moves are how you implement a strategy. Your choices between different kinds of tactics, such as white hat link building or black hat link building, can make all the difference. But if tactics aren’t driven by an overall strategy that’s implementing multiple approaches at the same time, they’re less likely to work. Approaches to SEO need to be cohesive.

Conclusion
I’m sure that there are critical trends that I’ve missed. I’d love to hear from you. What’s working for you right now, and where are you focusing your efforts in the next year? Let me know in the comments below!

Top 21 SEO Tips and Tricks to Follow in 2014

Google says on the record, “Don’t write for Search Engines, Write for your readers/audience/users.” While this may sound ridiculous, there are plenty of reasons to follow the advice. More often, newbie falls in the trap and often gets confused where to start from. Don’t sound to be too harsh, but do not always listen to almighty Google.
We (bloggers & web entrepreneurs) are mere small creatures and we must write for our readers/users while keeping search engine behavior at the corner of our brain! Producing great content that reader’s love is something not everyone’s cup of team. So how would you start your venture in 2013? What are the best SEO practices that you should follow? Without further ado, let me present you top 20 SEO Tips for 2013.
Excellent SEO Tips To Follow in 2013
I have used an adjective here – Special. These tips are special not because they are something that you have never heard of, but they are special as you have not understood these basic ones quite effectively!

Keyword Analysis inclusive of Competition Analysis

1. Determine Strategy for Keywords

This must be your first and foremost step. You should be clear with your goals that what keywords you want to play around with. This depends on what you want to gain by your online presence and venture. The question in the previous sentence can be answered with information regarding your target audience.
It may look like a flow chart or catch 22 for you, don’t worry, you are right and it is so. We have solutions for it. You can use certain keyword tools like www.keywordspy.com, www.spyfu.com, www.ispionage.com and www.compete.com. In order to get complete market scenario you must look at your competitor’s website. You can enter that website’s URL to any of the mentioned tools and get an estimation of competition.

2. List The Potential Keywords

You have now, different results from different tools as all of them use different methodology. You can collaborate all the results depending on your common analytical sense and list out 50-100 potential keywords. Create an MS Excel sheet for these Keywords.

3. Check Competition of Keywords

Keyword competition is something most newbies/expert ignores. While sorting out bunch of keywords from Google adword keywords tool is the first step to follow, people often forget that the checking Keyword competition is equally important. There are plenty of tools available out there, but we recommend to try out tools like Traffictravis first.
Later, you can go for the premium tools like SEOMoz keyword difficulty and SERPIQ keyword competition analysis tool. Both the tools delivers the great result and cut down considerable work required in doing competition analysis as well as keyword competition analysis.

On Page SEO Tips

4. HTML

Use a content management service such as WordPress, Blogger or Drupal and optimize your HTML tags with the keywords. Make sure you also maintain text to HTML ratio. Always try to keep the ratio high so that Google can understand your content better.

5. Title

Keep the character count under 70 and preferably under 66. Use various plugins available for various content management platforms for SEO. The WordPress beginners should start with WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast to make on page SEO as much better as they can. There are also many third-party paid options available in the market, but we do not recommend using them.

6. Meta Tags & Description

Your keyword must be there in your Meta tag and description. Your meta description must be in the vicinity of 157 characters. This is most important as Search Engines read meta description for understanding the post content.

7. URL and/or Permalinks

Your page URL must contain your key word or keyword phrase. If it is a phrase, words must be separated by hyphens. Use some plugins to remove stop words from the URL/permalinks. It’s always good to minimize the use of STOP word in the permalink

8. First Paragraph

While this is not necessary a big factor in ranking, try to include important keyword in first paragraph, so Google can clearly understand what the topic is about. While there is no hard and fast rule, make sure you include primary keyword within first few words of the article.

9. Content Length

As per Guidelines provide by Google, the length of your content must be more than 300 words. We advise you to write content with word count above 500 words. (It will help to protect you from “Animal Hit”). However, we recommend to go over 600-700 mark whenever possible. Instead of writing a simple post without proper information, you should focus your energy to provide quality content with necessary bullet point and images to back-up what you say.

10. Content Quality

Your content must be unique. Thinly copied contents are also getting Panda Hit nowadays so stay away from copy and plagiarism. Make sure you follow proper internal linking strategy without over optimizing anchor text.

11. Keyword Density

Keyword density must be between 2-4%. It means your keyword must not be repeated more than twice or thrice in each 100 words block so if your are writing a 500 words post your keyword count must not exceed 10-15 repetitions. If it does, then Google will count it as over optimization.

12. Image Optimization

Optimize Image ALT tag with your keyword. It is always a good idea to save the image name with the keyword and upload them on the server with the same name. Also attach necessary ALT tag to the image, so Google can understand what the image depicts. Remember, Google is blind, and you need to supply information to Google to understand the image. Moreover, try to provide a wrap up text to explain what the image is all about. This will increase the relevancy as well.

Sitemap

13. Sitemap Submission

Submit your site to the major search engines. Create an XML site map and make sure the search engines can find your site map. Use Google’s webmaster’s tools to verify your sitemap is being read correctly: http://www.google.com/webmasters/

14. HTML Sitemap

Creating an HTML sitemap is an essential part of your SEO endeavors. This confirms you that search engine crawlers are crawling the site properly.

Back-End

15. Avoid DHTML and Excessive HTML

Search Engines can’t read DHTML menus quite easily, so avoid them in your menu. Also, try to maintain HTML to text ratio. Having too many HTML makes the ratio high which is often undesired. Make sure you provided meaningful insight in each and every paragraph and/or article by providing more text.

16. Avoid Major Content in PDF or Flash

Publish your content in HTML format instead of Adobe PDF and Flash. Valuable content that is locked in these formats cannot be easily crawled and indexed.

17. Robots.txt

Make sure your robots.txt file is configured correctly to include and exclude the appropriate directories and files on your website. This file instructs search engines that which portion of your site is not accessible to search engines. Often people misunderstands this concepts which results in duplicate content or the description is unavailable due to robots.txt configuration.

Off Page Optimization

18. Use Social Media Effectively

Market your content on various social networks and media. Try various titles and descriptions that can engage users with your online venture. Initially, target twitter, Facebook, Google+, Stumble Upon, LinkedIn and Reddit. Google is now giving more importance to social media signals to rank website. Now is the time to utilize social media platform and turn the tale in your favor.

19. Generate Quality Backlinks

There are various techniques to generate backlinks. Guest post on other high authority site from same niche, Commenting on the posts related to your site content, Forum Posting and many more techniques are there which should be used moderetly to gain more trust. Well, backlink is itself a big chapter and can cover tons of pages, but we do not want to go that route for the moment.
Please note that Google introduced an update called Penguin to penalize the overly optimized sites, which means that those sites which are having spam backlinks and using black hat backlink techniques.  I will explain you in detail  how it will identify the spammers, see if there is a site on Diabetes (Health Niche) and the site site owner purchased a bulk of backlinks for the anchor text “diabetes symptoms in children” to rank for that keyword.
This can get a red flag and can get  penalty because if that is a genuine quality site/article then there should be lot of variations in the anchor test linking to that particular page, because it is a common sense that not everybody in the world will link to the exact anchor text right ?  … Yes, that is not at all possible because they may link to that via various anchor texts like

• diabetes signs and symptoms in children
• diabetes in children
• children and diabetes : signs and symptoms
• what are the symptoms in children with type 2 diabetes
• type 1 diabetes symptoms in children and adults

People (SEOs) even identified alternatives for this as well to spam Google which I am not interested in discussing publicly and if you are interested in knowing them then you can contact me

Analysis

20. Use Google Analytics

Install Google Analytics on your website.( http://www.google.com/analytics/ )If you’ve already done this, use the data from: Traffic Sources > Keywords to find additional keywords you may want to optimize.

21. Keyword tracking

Tracking your major campaign and keywords in the Google will give you a clear information about your efforts. It’s therefore very necessary to keep track of all your keyword ranking. For this purpose, you can use free and paid tools available online. Even, you can manually track the keyword in the Google. We recommend to use “whatsmyserp.com” or similar service to check your keyword ranking.
Hopefully, the above SEO tips will help you to start your venture in 2013. Make sure you follow each and every one of them closely.

Off-Page SEO Techniques

Off-page SEO is a set of techniques that drives traffic to your site and increase your Page Rank (PR). The purpose of off page SEO is to supplement your pages SEO efforts with Google juice. Links, likes, shares, pins, wins, bows, cufflinks, blings and all that is out there, all play a role in your off-page SEO efforts. Here are the techniques that can help your off-page SEO begin refining your current efforts, or just give you some ideas. I will vote these techniques using something that just happened: the GJS (Scale Google Juice). Scale classifies these techniques Google juice off page SEO of 1-10 (1 = OK 10 = Super).

Off-Page SEO Techniques (by my scale of Google Juice)

Blogging

Blogging is the best way to build brand awareness and to attract visitors to your site. Not all blogs are created equal and you may have to spend some time to make sure your content is of quality. Quality takes readers back. "Write what you read and I will!" Having a blog is great because you can get your ideas 'out there' and at the same time, make a name for your brand! The best friend of the blog, as well as readers, is Social Media.

Social networks

Some of the most popular are Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google, MySpace (just kidding), you can also look not well known, as CafeMom (which receives visitors from ~ 1 m / month). There is a flavor for everyone and not a target for each brand. Any page that has some kind of network capabilities is a page that can increase brand awareness and potentially increase your PR.

Marketing Blog and Forum

Read other blogs of interest and participation in forums is a great practice. Find something in line with your industry and start reading and commenting. Bloggers heartening when other industry experts who drop a note in their posts. So how is that you can benefit from this? In each blog and a forum where you can register, you get a profile. In most cases, this profile will have a place to add a website. In the forums, you can add a web site and brand to another forum signature. Potentially, each and every comment response can become a link!

Directory Submission

Online directories have been around since the availability of the Internet. They are a bit dated (as my wife would say), but I think they still have real value. To maximize exposure and effectiveness of your ad, try a niche directory related to your industry.

Photo Sharing

Share photos can be a fun way to build brand awareness. If you are in another industry or visually demanding design, you know what I mean. Flickr, Picasa, Photo Bucket, Pitch-a-Pic, Snap-Shot, etc, are great places to share their photos and get links up. Do not check the last two, I did the above.

Article Submission

As mentioned earlier, blogging is one of the best ways to generate off-page SEO, but it takes time to build a following. Suppose you need to get some traction immediately. Fortunately, there are some nice places out there that already have a good score PR, (about 6 onwards) that allow you to submit your own editorial content. Ezine is a website that will give you a good start, and you may want to stick with it as long-term off-page SEO technique. These techniques will keep you busy for a while and give positive results, although some faster than others. Note that an effective off-page SEO strategy contains a combination of techniques.

SEO Tips For a Stream of Constant and Free Traffic

There are tons of free SEO tips present in various sources online. Freelance article writers and SEO specialists have taken these tips in consideration when they create web content, articles, blogs and other associated materials. For many Online marketers, these free SEO tips will help them achieve the rank that is sought in popular search engines.

To begin, SEO keeps growing in the web and rules do change often. Many companies used SEO as a medium to attract potential customers as well as create awareness to the business. Realistically, there is no definite response to what are the strategies of SEO algorithm. However, you will find free SEO tips that are able to provide answers to this question.

When creating a do-it-yourself SEO contents for your website, it is important to keep your readers in mind. At the end of the day, they are still the one that will browse the content not the various search engines. A fresh and informative content always sell. Within the freelancing world, the phrase "content is king" is exemplified. Think about Internet as real estate, how far will you go to sell a house? If you don't know much about SEO writing, then you can read free SEO tips found all around the web.

Content is fantastic way to build content for the website. Important valuable is the fact that fact that they can be listed in article directory sites which supplies links back to your website. The hyperlinks may last for years. Hiring freelance article writers to make articles and publish them on article directory sites is a great proceed to generate traffic for the website.

You may even participate to article exchanges. This is another free SEO tip that builds quality content to your site. These are effective for firms that sells specialized product. The operation is relatively simple; another writer will publish articles inside your site having a link to their website, and you will publish an article for their site together with links together with your site. This can be a win-win situation for parties. Lots of freelancers do this method due to the high-traffic created.

Free SEO tips can also be found in freelancers sites or online discussion boards. These pointers are given by SEO experts to new writers. Learning the fundamentals of seo is one thing. If you are using these tips to your advantage, you are able to lead those in SEO marketing. SEO is not just about optimizing keywords, its also about beating your competitors. Impressing the future prospect with engaging contents will make them conscious of the website even more.

For some niches, SEO can be quite easy but for popular and specific topics it can be very difficult. Requesting assistance from SEO experts is an excellent choice. It may cost you additional but at least you achieve your marketing goals. Nevertheless, if you want to create your own SEO contents, then you woll not have difficulty searching for free SEO tips in the Internet.