26 Tips for Using Pinterest for Business Are you wondering how your business could use Pinterest? To say there’s been a lot of buzz about Pinterest in recent months would be putting it mildly! Pinterest’s ease of use for visually bookmarking, organizing and sharing things you love has made it a hit among individuals and businesses alike. What follows are 26 tips, an A-Z guide for creating a business presence on Pinterest. #1: Add a Pinterest “Follow” and/or “Pin It” Button One important way to let your clients and prospects know about your presence on Pinterest is to add a Pinterest button. Follow buttons are a great way to let users know you’re on Pinterest. #2: Brands and Pinterest While Pinterest hasn’t yet created a distinction between a personal profile and brand page (like Facebook), early adopting brands are making good use of their Pinterest presences and the pins and boards they’re sharing. *Note: Pinterest is one of the 60 new open graph websites and apps that allow a tighter integration with Facebook’s Timeline. #26: Zine
Link Juice Explained Link juice is the currency of Google. In other words, it's the secret sauce that allows you to beat your competitors for rankings in Google. Sure, there are some other factors that Google uses to calculate rankings (see Search Engine Optimization), but link juice is by far the most important aspect of dominating Google and in order to understand Google, you have to understand link juice. Google looks at how sites link to each other to figure out which ones are the best. Google is going to take a look at links to determine which of these two sites is likely the best. Site A now looks better to Google and will outrank Site B. Now they both look the same to Google, who will now have to look at another ranking factor to determine which one is the best. Let's add two new sites into the mix to further illustrate different scenarios that can happen: Tienda Online Rentable “575″ height=”168″ /> In the above example, we now have Site D linking to Site A and Site E linking to Site B. zp8497586rq
Advancing from SEO to CRO: Using AB Testing to Maximize Conversions This entry is a guest post by Nick Eubanks, the VP of Digital Strategy at W.L. Snook and Associates, Inc. You can follow him on Twitter: @nick_eubanks. SEO moves fast. I realize this contradicts the fact that SEO is a marathon and not a sprint, however I’m not talking about the process or the results, but the industry… In a recent post by Matt Beswick he compares SEO to “trying to build a house in a fault zone,” and specifically that “by the time you have laid down the foundation, the gound underneath may have shifted.” I know often times SEO’s focus on the on-page factors before jumping into link building, but there is usually a lot of money conversion left on the table. Even when you have maxed out your on-page optimization efforts, there is always room to improve the experience and the focus of your content to drive more conversions. Optimizing For Conversion I have always been a firm believer that the job of the SEO is to acquire targeted traffic to the right pages via search engines.
Predatory Thinking and Robots – Brighton SEO September 2012 Friday 14th September kicked off another great BrightonSEO event which was just as full of antics and inspiring presentations as last April’s. Remote control cars, scooters and shooting NERF nail guns at cut outs of Justin Bieber! A big shout out to Kelvin, the sponsors, the speakers, attendees and everyone else involved in the event! Here is my recap of the best from the Brighton Dome. Dave Trott @davetrott – Predatory Thinking In hindsight Dave kicked off with my personal favourite presentation of the day. £18.3 Billion was spent last year in the UK on ads, with 89% not remembered, 4% remembered positively and 7% negatively. He breaks advertising down into 3 simple steps; impact, communication and persuasion and stresses the importance of impact. He gives a few examples of upstream thinking. Dave has his own book out entitled “Creative Mischief”, so check it out! Antony Mayfield of @brilliantnoise – Do You Speak Brand? Stephanie Troeth @sniffles – Speaking your User’s Language
WordPress Google SEO Tips 2012 WordPress Google SEO Tips 2012 Branding Social Media: One of the big changes to hit 2012 will be the focus on branding. Make sure your business stands out from the crowd and has its own identity. At the very least, this relates to weeding out the duplicate content on your site, but more so it means working on your content to fit within your brand. The more unique you sound, the better this will be towards your own identity and hence you will stand out from your competitors. Regular posting schedules: The more content you publish, the better chance Google will pick up on it and it also enables more crawling of your site. Unique Content: Nothing new here, right? Add multimedia to your blogs: Now more than ever does Google want to see video and high quality images added to your content releases. Add more video: Take interviews, add real life footage of products or services Update Poor Content: Specifically, check for duplicate content. Create content for backlinks: Don’t copy or duplicate!
Google's EMD Update: the numbers - HP Group Blog Only got 5 minutes? skip to the bottom for the TL;DR version. Just over a week ago now (September 28 to be exact), Google released what is being called the “EMD Update“. You can follow that link for a bit more background, but in essence this update was the long-awaited solution to the apparent problem of low quality Exact Match Domains ranking in the SERPs. The EMD ‘problem’ has been around a long time. I won’t get into my views on the EMD issue right now, but here’s a great post by Martin MacDonald that is close to my opinion: Why EMDs should stay. From looking at the Mozcast EMD Influence chart above you would be forgiven for thinking that this had a massive impact on SERPs, but in truth most search terms witnessed very little overall movement, as can be seen on SERPmetrics Flux on the day: The Real Impact of the EMD Update Now – mozcast is awesome, but it only tracks 1000 keywords each day and so the EMD influence might not quite represent what we see in our daily SERPs. TL;DR / Summary
How to Grow a Targeted Twitter Following If you’re like me, you might be a little wary of automated solutions that allow you to grow your Twitter list exponentially, but also have the potential of getting your account shut down. So instead, I thought I would share with you my simple strategy for slowly and steadily growing your Twitter followers. This isn’t about getting a huge number of just any Twitter followers, but a smaller concentration of Twitter followers that will be interested in your content. Tweet Links with Author’s Twitter Handle If you read and tweet blog posts a lot, chances are you are using the Tweet button on the post or an app like Buffer to schedule your tweets. The people who might notice your tweets, however, are the authors of those posts. There, you will find a link to their Twitter profile. When you tweet the post, be sure to include the author’s Twitter handle in the tweet and also follow the author. Does this work all of the time? Follow People Who Tweet Your Posts Follow People You Converse With
The Hidden Cost Of Cheap SEO & Social Media Labor Fact: All businesses, large or small, want to save money wherever they can. I understand this. I sympathize with this. What I don’t understand, however, is why so many businesses try to take the cheap route and cut corners in their online strategy— and then are dumbfounded when they get scammed/receive terrible results/get blocked by Google. I know how devastatingly costly it can be to launch, maintain, and grow a business. So why would you trust your website and your online reputation— the very first introduction your customers will have with your business — to an inexperienced amateur or a too-cheap scammer? In life and online, you get what you pay for. Still not buying it? Image Credit: ByronShell via Flickr What Happens When You Try to Take the Cheap Route 1. What You Get: Google Penguin. Google hates link spam. Buying links is the overt way to take the cheap-and-easy route in linkbuilding (and scheming link builders abound), but it’s not the only one. Don’t buy your links. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Online Ads Hit New Record: $2.83 Billion a Month Internet advertising is having a banner year — its best ever, in fact. We already saw a record first quarter for the industry. Now, according to a biannual report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, online ad revenues climbed to an astonishing $17 billion in the first half of 2012, or around $2.83 billion every month. That represents 14% growth compared to the first half of 2011. It's not quite as good as that number's 23% growth, but impressive in a still-shaky economy nonetheless. Search advertising such as AdWords — traditionally the strongest sector — is still in the lead, accounting for 48% of all online ad sales. Banner ads (21%) and Craigslist-style classifieds (8%) are slipping slightly, while video ads are holding steady at 7% of the total spend. And the much-touted mobile advertising market? How big can the online ad business get?