Webmasters Corner
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Is your website mobile-friendly? 2016 marks the first year that mobile traffic surpassed desktop traffic, yet many businesses have still neglected to take mobile devices into account. Their websites aren’t optimized for mobile search, and simply don’t look good on phones and tablets. Not only does this cause frustrated users to leave the site, it’s a big problem for your SEO as well. As of April 21, 2015, Google unleashed “mobilegeddon” which punishes websites that aren’t mobile-friendly, and announced that mobile-friendliness is now one of their most important ranking signals. How do you know if your site is mobile friendly? The first step is to check Google’s …
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If a post is well written and makes a good point, but falls short somehow � if the idea isn�t closed up tightly and all objections addressed � it can leave readers dissatisfied. Here�s why you need to create content that will delight your readers. Source: Search Engine Watch
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Bing�s Top Searches list is out and reads like a compendium of everything that is wrong with America. The iPhone 5 beat out the 2012 election in news, while Kim Kardashian, Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus were the most searched people of the year. Source: Search Engine Watch
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Have you ever spent what seems like hours roaming around a large parking lot searching for your car? With the click of a button, a new Google Now update (for Android users only) can save the location of your car as a handy card. Source: Search Engine Watch
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If you’re looking to build brand advocates, integrate your CRM and social data to ensure you don’t overlook great customers who may have small followings. Building beyond social media marketing and marketing engagement? As you build your social media platform, consider how CRM fits into your plans. I’m not talking about “social CRM,” per se, though elements of it are certainly present. Rather, I’m referring to aligning your social engagement process with all other tracked engagements, in order to create a unified customer experience. A unified customer experience is, of course, more than saying the same thing or using the same language or tone at every touchpoin…
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SEO is plagued by myths, misconceptions, and mistaken beliefs. Think you know blog optimization tips and guidelines that are important for long-term search engine visibility and website usability? Take this short quiz and find out. Source: Search Engine Watch
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Learn why those calling social media marketing � and Twitter, in particular � a fail based on Black Friday statistics that show it drove 0% of sales are completely missing the mark and, more importantly, how you should really be looking at social. Source: Search Engine Watch
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Checking the Internet archive, doing some Google and Bing searches, and asking the seller for specific analytics or Google Webmasters data can help ensure that you're either starting with a clean domain, or discover potential problems. Source: Search Engine Watch
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During your career, you�ll likely connect with many other marketers. Whether through social media, meet-ups, or conferences, expect to meet some interesting characters � the oversharers, the over-reactors, the mad scientists, the egos, and more! Source: Search Engine Watch
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Between the long-awaited rollout of Penguin 4.0, a strengthening of Google’s mobile-friendly ranking signal and the ‘Possum’ algorithm update impacting local search, 2016 was an interesting year for Google algorithm changes. And with an upcoming move to a mobile-first search index already on the cards, as well as a penalty for intrusive mobile interstitials coming into effect on the 10th, 2017 promises to be just as eventful. Looking back at 2016, which algorithm changes were the most impactful for marketers in the industry? And how can brands best prepare themselves for what might be around the corner? I spoke to Sastry Rachakonda and Ajay Rama of digital marketing…
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Google's Bradley Horowitz took the opportunity in an onstage interview to slam Facebook Ads, claiming they are intrusive and �pissing off users.� Google doesn�t need to jam ads in users� faces to make next week�s payroll, he said. Hilarity ensue Source: Search Engine Watch
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Last week we published the ninth instalment of our complete guide to Google ranking factors. It concentrated on outbound links and how and why these affect your site’s ranking. This week, we tackle backlinks. What is a backlink? A backlink is link from a third party website, back to your own. These can also be called ‘inbound’ or ‘incoming’ links. Why are backlinks important? As revealed by Andrey Lipattsev, the Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google Ireland, earlier this year, links pointing to your website are one of the top three Google ranking factors. Backlinks are a vote of confidence that someone outside of your own web property trusts your …
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Recent stats suggest that the mobile web has the edge over apps in terms of m-commerce sales, but this doesn’t mean retailers should dismiss apps. Five to ten years ago, after the release of the first iPhone and before the widespread adoption of responsive design, there was a genuine decision to be made between apps and mobile web for retailers. For a time, before Apple’s rivals got their acts together, mobile web essentially meant iPhones. In turn, this meant that having a mobile commerce app was a real alternative to a mobile website, and could deliver a better user experience in many cases. Now things are different, and few would argue that an app should be a…
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Last week we published the fourth instalment of our complete guide to Google ranking signals. It concentrated on ‘content freshness’ and the practical ways you can ensure your webpages are recognised by Google as being relevant and up-to-date. This week we continue diving into on-page content factors, with duplicate content and syndication. What is duplicate content? Duplicate content refers to a webpage’s content that appears in more than one place on the internet. Let’s say you write an article on all the animals discovered and named after Frank Zappa. Then someone else copies and pastes your exact text into a new webpage on their own website. Then you’re b…
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Hashtags certainly aren’t new on social platforms, but do you really know how to maximise their effectiveness? It’s not easy to apply a hashtag strategy for all social networks, as each one has its own rules. However, you can still analyse what works for each platform and adapt your habits for the future posts. Trackmaven analysed more than 65,000 posts on social media, offering useful insights on how the use of hashtags changes on each platform. Let’s see their impact on the biggest social networks. Facebook: one hashtag can increase the engagement Facebook may not be the most popular platform to use hashtags, but they still seem to increase the audience’s e…
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Early in 2016, we promised that this would be the year that influencer marketing would become mainstream. We wrote about the progress that influencer marketing made in 2016, but as a marketer, you always need to be looking forward to be prepared for what the future holds. So what direction can we expect influencer marketing to take in 2017? We’ve seen the tactic grow, but we’ll see it explode in 2017. Here are a few things that we expect to see in the New Year: Less is more Influencer marketing’s growth across each individual network can largely be credited to the growth of the big player “celeb” influencers. The Logan Paul’s and Andrew Bachelor’s of the social …
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55% of searchers don’t know which links in the SERPs are PPC ads, according to a new survey. I covered this topic back in April, using data from an Ofcom report which found that up to 50% of users shown a SERP screenshot could not identify paid ads. The article also mentioned data from Varn, which found that, of the 1,010 UK internet users who were asked the question below, 50.6% couldn’t identify which links were ads: The survey above is from February this year, but there have been a few changes to the SERPs since then, so Varn repeated the survey… The new one found that almost 55% now don’t know which links are paid ads and which are organic. The…
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One of the most efficient types of targeting in Facebook (second to retargeting, of course) is lookalike audience targeting. Lookalike targeting is basically a targeting type that allows you to use first party data (e.g. customer lists, remarketing lists, etc.) as a seed audience to find new users with very similar characteristics, behaviors, and traits. It’s applicable for all business models (B2B, B2C, EDU, etc.), but in this post, we’ll lock in on best practices for ecommerce. When using lookalike targeting, the audience you select as your seed audience is extremely important. Essentially, you want to make sure you are developing audience lists from your best…
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Last week we published the first instalment of our complete guide to Google ranking signals. It featured on-page-factors such as title tags, H1 tags and meta descriptions. This week we continue diving into on-page factors, with the use of keywords in your page content. Keywords In our previous article we mentioned that any keywords you wish to rank for need to be placed in the title tag, with the closer it is to the start the better. Keywords should also appear in the H1 tag and meta description. But where else should you keywords appear, how often and in what form? Page content 1) Make sure your keyword or phrase appears in the first 100 words of your pa…
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Last week we published the eighth instalment of our complete guide to Google ranking factors. It concentrated on internal links, as well as the best way to use anchor text and hub page or category optimisation. This week, outbound links! 1) An outbound link is a ‘vote of confidence’ to the site you’re linking to, and you will be passing along some of your own site’s ranking power. However try to avoid using anchor text such as ‘here’ as this is worthless to you and the site you’re linking to. 2) Sticking to the website name is a safe bet when choosing anchor text, especially if it’s ‘example company conducted a study’. That way usability and transparency is im…
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