SEO and Marketing
Find the best ways to increase your traffic and earnings with solid SEO ( Search Engine Optimization ) and marketing techniques.
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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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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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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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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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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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Site speed is an important factor for SEO and conversion, but do we really understand its impact? There is increased online competition and a decreased attention span that makes it hard for a site to convert visits into sales, or even to increase traffic. Site speed can significantly affect a user’s decision on whether a visit to a page should be prolonged (or repeated) and this cannot be overlooked by any site owner. In fact, a page’s load time affects several key areas: Sales It’s no surprise that 79% of customers are less likely to buy again from a site that lacks a speed optimised performance. As everything gets faster, you cannot afford to stay still. …
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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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By presenting an animated gif of everybody screaming and crying? By turning off its search engine (and by extension the entire internet) so everyone can just be with their loved ones and not think about the world post 9th November? Or by just hosting some classic re-runs of The Simpsons (circa 91 – 98) in order to keep everyone’s blood pressure at a healthy, non-panic attack triggering level. Close… Google will in fact be presenting the results of the US election in a real-time count built right into the first search results page. You’ll also be able to see detailed updates and results of the Presidential, Senatorial, Congressional, Gubernatorial races as w…
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Influencer marketing saw a huge bump in popularity in 2016, and it’s expected to grow even more in 2017. The social media marketing industry is evolving faster than ever, which is why it’s important to stay on top of the industry changes coming in the New Year. This is how your brand or agency will stay ahead of the curve to be better prepared for your influencer marketing strategy: Marketers are investing more in influencer marketing Recent “60 Minutes” reports show that influencer marketing is rapidly inserting itself into the mainstream conversation and is becoming more familiar to average consumers. As a result, marketers are investing more in influencer marke…
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The 2016 US election features a presidential candidate like no other. Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, has more than 30 million followers across all of the social channels he’s active on, and on Twitter, his most prolific channel, he has over 10 million, approximately two million more than his opponent, Hillary Clinton. What’s more: he’s besting Clinton in engagement, generating double the number of retweets and three times the number of likes. Trump’s willingness to speak his mind, online and offline, has arguably been both a blessing and a curse, but one thing is for certain: it has attracted a lot of attention. How much? By some estimates, Trump has a…
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What do you imagine is the future of search? Voice… for sure. Machine learning alogrithms… certainly. Super-intelligent personal assistants that know your next move before you make it… probably. But what about search powered by your own brainwaves? Surprisingly, that may not be as far-fetched as it sounds. I recently caught up with Scott Rummler the creator of the world’s first web-based brainwave application, ESPforMe. It allows a user with an EEG headset to perform basic search functions remotely over the web, which he claims is a “major milestone, offering a completely unique mode of interaction that uses thoughts alone.” Understandably, I had a few…
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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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We are living in a video-first world, where moving images are at the heart of all apps and services. Facebook recorded an increase of 800% in video consumption from 2015 to 2016, jumping from 1 billion views to 8 billion views in just a year. During Social Media Week, Ian Crocombe, Regional Head of Facebook’s Creative Shop presented all the opportunities that video content may offer, both for publishers and advertisers on Facebook. Moving from TV to social media Video ads on Facebook are different from the ones we knew on TV, and they also lead to a different behaviour from the audience. Moreover, users have a shorter attention span when using their mobil…
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Last week we published the third instalment of our complete guide to Google ranking signals. It concentrated on the rather nebulous term ‘quality content’ and the practical signals you can provide Google to prove the text on your webpage is worthwhile. This week we continue diving into on-page content factors, with content freshness. Freshness How recently your webpage was published is a ranking signal. However different searches have different freshness needs. (Source: Google Inside search post) Google checks content for freshness by monitoring the following types of searches… Recent events or hot topics: Anything that begins trending on the web, that se…
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We’ve written an awful lot about Google’s open source accelerated mobile pages project (better know as Google AMP) over that last 12 months. AMPs implications are far reaching, for marketers, for publishers (big and small) and for ecommerce. Implementing faster mobile web pages mainly benefits users, who are increasingly frustrated with slow loading times. The latest Google research shows that 53% of people will leave a site that fails to load in three seconds or less. But AMP will soon be a key battleground in search, as AMP listings are now spreading throughout organic mobile results. Publishers and organisations may find the need for AMP implementation will r…
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Google has begun experimenting with a cleaner, whiter, brighter user interface. As reported by Barry Schwartz over at SER today, this new layout test appears to offer a more spacious, desktop experience. Here’s the tweet that revealed the possible change… #Google Rolling New SERP Layout | Change in Search Bar | Space b/w Results @rustybrick @AbhaySaxena87 pic.twitter.com/CHsIu0GcFj — AbhisheK Kasaudhan (@abhikasaudhan) September 16, 2016 As you can see the top bar is less grey and larger, covering the tabs below the search box now,and the search button has been changed from a blue button to a white button with a blue magnifying glass. Here’s Barr…
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It’s search, Jim, but not as we know it. In a search industry where most of the major players are focused on machine learning, artificial intelligence and developing increasingly sophisticated algorithms, it’s unusual to come across a company which sets out to do the exact opposite. Enter Digle, the ‘people-powered’ search platform. One part Yahoo Answers, one part classifieds, and two parts gamified search engine, Digle has set out to buck the system of search and SEO by putting the power into the hands of people, not machines, to find and deliver results. In a way, it makes a lot of sense. Search engines have definitely been developing in a direction which mean…
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As if you haven’t experienced enough turbulence in the last few months, what with the release of Penguin 4.0 and the proliferation of AMP through organic SERPs, Google has announced that it will soon be splitting its index between mobile and desktop. Speaking at Pubcon last week, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes stated that Google will create a separate mobile index within the next few months. Furthermore, this mobile index will become the primary Google index. The newly separated desktop index will not be kept as up-to-date as the mobile one. This is completely in line with not only everything Google has been building towards over the past few years…
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