Pinterest Introduces Pins for Articles

Pinterest has announced the roll out of article pins for businesses seeking to drive traffic to the five million plus articles pinned to its website every day.
The new look pins from media sites will carry the headline, author and story description directly on the pin, to make it as simple as possible for users to find and save stories.
In addition the social network has also used a bigger link back to the source, helping draw more ‘pinners’ to the original articles.
Amongst those already signed up for the service are The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Mashable.
Jon Parise, Pinterest software engineer, said: “Starting today, we’re rolling out a new look for article pins. Articles will now have more information — including the headline, author, story description and link — right on the pin. So, when you find articles about things you’re passionate about, such as science, travel, parenting or health, they’re easier to save and organize on Pinterest.
“You’ll start seeing the new look for article pins on the web now, and on mobile soon. Happy reading, pinners!”

New Google “Hummingbird” Algorithm

Google has a new search algorithm, the system it uses to sort through all the information it has when you search and come back with answers. It’s called “Hummingbird” and below, what we know about it so far.
What’s a “search algorithm?”
That’s a technical term for what you can think of as a recipe that Google uses to sort through the billions of web pages and other information it has, in order to return what it believes are the best answers.
What’s “Hummingbird?”
It’s the name of the new search algorithm that Google is using, one that Google says should return better results.
So that “PageRank” algorithm is dead?
No. PageRank is one of over 200 major “ingredients” that go into the Hummingbird recipe. Hummingbird looks at PageRank — how important links to a page are deemed to be — along with other factors like whether Google believes a page is of good quality, the words used on it and many other things (see our Periodic Table Of SEO Success Factors for a better sense of some of these).
Why is it called Hummingbird?
Google told us the name come from being “precise and fast.”
When did Hummingbird start? Today?
Google started using Hummingbird about a month ago, it said. Google only announced the change today.
What does it mean that Hummingbird is now being used?
Think of a car built in the 1950s. It might have a great engine, but it might also be an engine that lacks things like fuel injection or be unable to use unleaded fuel. When Google switched to Hummingbird, it’s as if it dropped the old engine out of a car and put in a new one. It also did this so quickly that no one really noticed the switch.
When’s the last time Google replaced its algorithm this way?
Google struggled to recall when any type of major change like this last happened. In 2010, the “Caffeine Update” was a huge change. But that was also a change mostly meant to help Google better gather information (indexing) rather than sorting through the information. Google search chief Amit Singhal told me that perhaps 2001, when he first joined the company, was the last time the algorithm was so dramatically rewritten.
What about all these Penguin, Panda and other “updates” — haven’t those been changes to the algorithm?
Panda, Penguin and other updates were changes to parts of the old algorithm, but not an entire replacement of the whole. Think of it again like an engine. Those things were as if the engine received a new oil filter or had an improved pump put in. Hummingbird is a brand new engine, though it continues to use some of the same parts of the old, like Penguin and Panda
The new engine is using old parts?
Yes. And no. Some of the parts are perfectly good, so there was no reason to toss them out. Other parts are constantly being replaced. In general, Hummingbird — Google says — is a new engine built on both existing and new parts, organized in a way to especially serve the search demands of today, rather than one created for the needs of ten years ago, with the technologies back then.
What type of “new” search activity does Hummingbird help?
“Conversational search” is one of the biggest examples Google gave. People, when speaking searches, may find it more useful to have a conversation.
“What’s the closest place to buy the iPhone 5s to my home?” A traditional search engine might focus on finding matches for words — finding a page that says “buy” and “iPhone 5s,” for example.
Hummingbird should better focus on the meaning behind the words. It may better understand the actual location of your home, if you’ve shared that with Google. It might understand that “place” means you want a brick-and-mortar store. It might get that “iPhone 5s” is a particular type of electronic device carried by certain stores. Knowing all these meanings may help Google go beyond just finding pages with matching words.
In particular, Google said that Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query — the whole sentence or conversation or meaning — is taken into account, rather than particular words. The goal is that pages matching the meaning do better, rather than pages matching just a few words.
I thought Google did this conversational search stuff already!
It does (see Google’s Impressive “Conversational Search” Goes Live On Chrome), but it had only been doing it really within its Knowledge Graph answers. Hummingbird is designed to apply the meaning technology to billions of pages from across the web, in addition to Knowledge Graph facts, which may bring back better results.
Does it really work? Any before-and-afters?
We don’t know. There’s no way to do a “before-and-after” ourselves, now. Pretty much, we only have Google’s word that Hummingbird is improving things. However, Google did offer some before-and-after examples of its own, that it says shows Hummingbird improvements.
A search for “acid reflux prescription” used to list a lot of drugs (such as this, Google said), which might not be necessarily be the best way to treat the disease. Now, Google says results have information about treatment in general, including whether you even need drugs, such as this as one of the listings.
A search for “pay your bills through citizens bank and trust bank” used to bring up the home page for Citizens Bank but now should return the specific page about paying bills
A search for “pizza hut calories per slice” used to list an answer like this, Google said, but not one from Pizza Hut. Now, it lists this answer directly from Pizza Hut itself, Google says.
Could it be making Google worse?
Almost certainly not. While we can’t say that Google’s gotten better, we do know that Hummingbird — if it has indeed been used for the past month — hasn’t sparked any wave of consumers complaining that Google’s results suddenly got bad. People complain when things get worse; they generally don’t notice when things improve.
Does this mean SEO is dead?
No, SEO is not yet again dead. In fact, Google’s saying there’s nothing new or different SEOs or publishers need to worry about. Guidance remains the same, it says: have original, high-quality content. Signals that have been important in the past remain important; Hummingbird just allows Google to process them in new and hopefully better ways.
Does this mean I’m going to lose traffic from Google?
If you haven’t in the past month, well, you came through Hummingbird unscathed. After all, it went live about a month ago. If you were going to have problems with it, you would have known by now.
By and large, there’s been no major outcry among publishers that they’ve lost rankings. This seems to support Google saying this is very much a query-by-query effect, one that may improve particular searches — particularly complex ones — rather than something that hits “head” terms that can, in turn, cause major traffic shifts.
But I did lose traffic!
Perhaps it was due to Hummingbird, but Google stressed that it could also be due to some of the other parts of its algorithm, which are always being changed, tweaked or improved. There’s no way to know.
How do you know all this stuff?
Google shared some of it at its press event today, and then I talked with two of Google’s top search execs, Amit Singhal and Ben Gomes, after the event for more details. I also hope to do a more formal look at the changes from those conversations in the near future. But for now, hopefully you’ve found this quick FAQ based on those conversations to be helpful.
By the way, another term for the “meaning” connections that Hummingbird does is “entity search,” and we have an entire panel on that at our SMX East search marketing show in New York City, next week. The Coming “Entity Search” Revolution session is part of an entire “Semantic Search” track that also gets into ways search engines are discovering meanings behind words. Learn more about the track and the entire show on the agenda page.

Google Launches Hashtag Search, Shows Google+ Posts On Search Results Page

Google announced that Google search will now support #Hashtags which would fetch Google+ posts on search results pages. When comparing the recent Google updates, you will know that it is an uncluttered fact that Google is synchronizing Google+ with all its assets. After the Authorship markup, there came a new era and now Google+ posts on results pages will get Google+ a massive hike.

The integration of Google+ across Google properties continues in a big way today with the launch of hashtag search. Simply put, if you search Google for a hashtag, you might see Google+ posts using that hashtag to the right of the regular search results. Google’s Zaheed Sabur announced the new feature this morning on Google+, saying that it’s available initially for English language searches on both Google.com and Google.ca. The only posts that will show up on Google searches are those that were shared publicly, or shared with you (if you’re a Google+ user). Clicking on one of the Google+ posts leads you to Google+ where the search is reproduced. By pure coincidence, a Google.com search just now for the #googleglass hashtag showed a Google+ post last night from our founding editor, Danny Sullivan, in the right column. (You can click for a larger version.) The Google+ posts...

Good bye to Keyword Data

The sun has finally set on Google AdWord's Keyword Tool and the new Keyword Planner is giving marketers mixed feelings.

The Google Keyword Tool, a staple for SEO's and PPC managers alike, has officially retired. Of course Google wouldn't leave us all empty handed and has provided the Keyword Planner in its place. While SEO and PPC experts all over the world will say goodbye to the Keyword Tool, the new Keyword Planner is being embraced with mixed sentiment.

The Keyword Planner is said to combine the functionality of the Keyword Tool and Adwords' Traffic Estimator, allowing users to find keyword ideas and the respective traffic for them. Sounds pretty similar to the Keyword Tool functionality, but there are some definite differences along with new features as well.

Points of contention

Login to AdWords - Instead of being an external tool, users now have to login to an AdWords account in order to use the tool, which can be a bit inconvenient. For PPC managers who spend most of their time logged into AdWords anyway, it probably won't make much of a difference.
No more match type data for search volume - The Keyword Traffic Tool would allow users to specify different match types, like broad match and phrase match when gathering data. The Keyword Planner on the other hand, shows data for exact match only.

No more device targeting - The late Keyword Tool revealed data for desktop by default, but would allow users to target specific devices like tablets or mobile phones as well. However, the Keyword Planner targets all devices by default, showing a broader set of data. The plus is that keyword volumes are now more accurate because it incorporates data for users across multiple devices. On the other hand, users no longer have the option to see data for any one specific device.

New Benefits

Get estimates for more keywords - With the Keyword Planner, you can get estimates for more keywords by uploading your own lists with up to 10,000 keywords. You of course still have the option to type in the keywords manually.




Multiply keyword lists - Many of you may be familiar with the concatenate feature in excel just for this purpose. Now the Keyword Planner offers a completely new feature where you can mash up different keyword lists.



More customized CPC estimates - With the Keyword Planner, you are able to get more customized estimates based on your actual budget, bids and location. This gives you a better idea for how many clicks and impressions you'll receive and at what cost. The Keyword Planner also allows you to save your keyword plans and add them directly to your current PPC campaigns.



The simplicity of the Keyword Tool was its most appealing asset, but a brief introduction with the new Keyword Planner will soon erase any uncertainty. While a few of the old features have neglected to make it into the new tool, an influx of new ones will help soften the blow. The Keyword Planner still serves the purpose of its former counterpart, and at the end of the day, that's what matters most.

If you have any questions about the Keyword Planner or how to use it, please contact us for a free consultation.

Upcoming SEO Trends in 2013 & 2014 – Predictions & Strategies

All of you have already known about latest Google penguin 2.0 (released on May 22, 2013) and Panda 26(confirmed on July 18, 2013) updates which already adversely affected many search queries in search results. Do you know only penguin 2.0 update has already noticeably affected 2.3% English search queries in SERP? Matt Cutts, Google’s Head of Web Spam, already confirmed that Google will be more strict and rolling out more updates for preventing spamming on web and for enhancing user experiences.

So it’s high time, you decided what SEO strategies you will follow to keep improving your search engine ranking or at least get rid of de-ranking in search results before rolling out next algorithm updates.

What We Have Learned from Penguin 2.0 Update:

After rolling out penguin 2.0 update, it’s now clear that:

• Google is discouraging buying and selling links (paid links) and also paying lesser weight on paid links than before.
• Google is not going to tolerate spam anymore and that’s why will deal with more harshly with spam link building
• More weight is being given on compelling contents.

Predictions about SEO Trends in 2013-2014:

SEO trends in 2013-2014 would be mostly influenced by what will be the next Panda & Penguin updates.  But it’s not possible to exactly forecast what will be the SEO trends in 2013-2014.

Though it’s quite difficult to anticipate what Google will announce in their next updates, but it’s sure that those updates will be more comprehensive and deeper targeting than the previous iteration of algorithm. Although the upcoming SEO trends can’t be exactly estimated, but here I am going to share some most probable estimates that will always be pretty effective for getting your desired outcomes, whatever the algorithm updates would be.

“Complete Content” Continues to Play an Important Role:

Unique and valuable content is a must for better ranking and this would be the same for 2013-2014 season. If you really want to attain authority value for your website and wish to rank in the 1^st position of SERP, you have to ensure that you have not only unique, but also detailed contents in your website. Your contents must be able to answer all the WH questions (what, when. Where, how, etc.) that might arise in your visitors’ mind. Otherwise visitors will go to other websites to know more about the topic. You may add expert’s opinion, testimonials, related videos and whatever else in your website to make the contents ‘complete articles’ to your audience. In a word, your contents should reflect your expertise on the topic.

Backlinks are Still Important, Though Quality Parameters are Getting More Strict:

Google has clearly mentioned that it dislikes unnatural and massive link building. This search engine giant has also confirmed that they are working on creating more effective tools for analyzing link quality. Google likes to see websites having natural backlinks from related sites. Analyzing algorithm updates of last couple of years, it seems like natural links would get more weight than paid and irrelevant links in 2013-2014.

More Focus on Diversified Contents:

Contents can be of texts, images or videos. You might already have seen that Google has different search parameters for displaying text, video and image contents. So don’t focus only on articles, but also try to use high quality videos, images and infographics (high quality in terms of usefulness, not high resolution) to get better ranking of your site.

Social Media Popularity Continue to Be Important:

Social engagement and popularity is one of the crucial ranking factors in these days and hope it would be the same in the year 2013-2014. Social media make Google believe that the contents of your website are really useful and that’s why they are being shared over social sites which help obtain better ranking in SERP. So you should concentrate on branding your site’s social media pages and groups for improving your websites social ranking in the upcoming days. Adding social media buttons in your website will make it very much easier for people to share your contents in various social media.

Diversify Keywords Used For Anchor Text:

You shouldn’t use a single keyword again and again as your anchor text while linking to your contents. The same is applicable to both internal as well as external linking. For example: if your website gets 100 backlinks using the same anchor text whether they are from different domains, Google would consider it as spamming or unnatural linking. If you are working on single keyword ‘hair oil’, for instance, you may use diversified keywords like ‘best hair oil’, ‘hair oil for men’, ‘hair oil for all’, etc. This practice will definitely work in this 2013-2014 season.

Presentation and Design to Support Your Contents:

User experience (UX) plays a vital role in better ranking of websites in these days. If your website contains unique and detailed contents but with unprofessional or bad presentation, this is not going to work anymore in these upcoming days. If you have useful informative contents, you should concentrate on having professional design and presentations too to enrich your website users’ experiences. If you do so, this will automatically work for enhancing the users’ experience of Google, you know what I mean.

Mobile Compatibility of Your Site is A Must:

Do you know that approximately 45 million people are using mobile internet in these days? According to some web researchers, more than 1.9 billion people will be accessing websites using mobile internet within next couple of years. That’s the reason why having responsive web design is a must for your website. You have to ensure that your website is accessible and perfectly viewable from various devices, whether it is tablet, smart phone or any other devices. Otherwise, your website users won’t be able to access or satisfy with your site and may leave the site which ultimately negatively affect your ranking in the upcoming days.
Yap, there are some other methods that I should discuss apart from what I already have discussed in the above section. I would like to hear from you about any other SEO strategies or techniques that you have already applied or you think should be considered. Thank you.

Just mobilize your SEO with latest tricks

Mobile SEO could be called as the lasted buzzword in the world of internet marketing. This has become more important especially when you see Google claiming that the mobile online traffic is soon going to surpass the PC web based traffic by the next year. At such junctures, the mobile internet marketing strategies are difficult to neglect. 

With the mobile marketing quickly becoming the part and parcel of the online marketing strategy, customizing your SEO practices with some of the latest tricks has become the modern day mantra of successful marketing. Hence if you fail to have a tangible kind of SEO strategy for your online marketing, you are more likely to lose your potential revenues to a great extent. Hence it’s high time you mobilize you search engine optimization with some latest tips and tricks, with few of these given below.

Try fundamental SEO best strategies
Website optimization is vital both for your mobile and computer based sites. Both follow the same types of rules especially when you deal with keywords, content, links and accessibility. As long as you are sticking to all these practices is concerned, adapting these to fit over the market of mobile shouldn’t be a big problem. 

If you are seen struggling hard with your desktop optimization efforts, you are more likely required to allocate more time in fixing them first followed by using it like a template for all your mobile optimization best techniques. Working over these strategies separately is simply going to waste your valuable time, which you invest while getting clients.

Mobilize your existing website
Though you could think of doing a couple of changes to make your current site a mobile friendly website, however, considering the need and impact about mobile marketing, having a new dedicated mobile site is always a good idea to bank with. Before you put your time and energy in creating a new dedicated mobile site, make sure you use a mobile version of your current website just to get a fair idea about its ease of use. 

With smartphones gradually replacing the old cell phones, you would like to custom your website to fit into the smartphone users’ basket. As the mobile users are more likely to see the sites, which they used previously over the desktop browser you could choose between making some changes in your current site or by having a full time mobile site. Regardless of the option you go with, better ensure a fact that your customers should be able to access your site in the same way they did over their desktop computers.

Making the keywords more mobile friendly
The keywords over the mobile environment are often 25 percent shorter than the usual desktop searches and most of the search engines usually give the mobile users the filtering choice, while they do not entirely rely on that. Yet, you need to trim the number of keywords usage simply to fit over your mobile criteria just to avoid losing out people via random search engine option.

Making your mobile content richer
As the mobile site requires fewer words and smaller spaces, hence you are supposed to convert all your 400 words descriptions into 150 word content, which speak the same thing in a more effective way to impress the mobile users. 

The mobile users always are in hurry as they check different things while being in the red light signal or during few free moments in their meetings, hence the content you produce for such people should be straight, simple and to the point. But at the same time, make sure you do not compromise on the quality of the content. Though this may pose as a challenge, but it happens to be the most vital aspects of mobilizing your website.

Updating your design layouts
Your mobile site has to be designed in such a way that the users should be able to view it should be able to fulfill their purposes. As these are smaller views, hence when you put too much stuff over the mobile designed paged, it simply makes the navigation part difficult for the users. Hence you are supposed to add better writing to express your information in a much smaller amount of words. But at the same time, you are supposed to retain the meaning unlike the desktop version.

Final word
With constant rise of mobile users accessing the web, it is important to convert your site into this new format. Adding a couple of mobilizing SEO tips as discussed above could help you in remaining in this new arena of internet marketing.

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.