Search Engine Optimization is no longer only for websites. In order to be competitive in your niche, it is important to optimize for…

]]> http://www.eversparkinteractive.com/google-plus-fox-news-everspark/feed 0 http://www.eversparkinteractive.com/improve-effectiveness-seo-facebook http://www.eversparkinteractive.com/improve-effectiveness-seo-facebook#comments Thu, 22 Sep 2011 16:45:19 +0000 Alex Damon http://www.eversparkinteractive.com/?p=1929 Watch the Video Here!

Hey everyone, it’s Jason Hennessey from EverSpark Interactive. Recently, there has been a lot of focus on Facebook, from its rivalry with Google + to its recent changes, to the large announcement expected at today’s F8 conference in San Francisco. Facebook’s importance in our everyday lives is undeniable, and its importance in our business lives is always growing. Also, Mashable reports that large changes are in store for the social media site, saying that the upcoming announcements and changes will bring about “the evolution of social networking.” Mashable’s article also recaps the changes that have already been made by Mark Zuckerberg’s company in an effort to correct the fact that Facebook’s relationships with its users has gone stale and predicts the effects of the upcoming improvements:

“That’s why Facebook launched three recent changes: revamped Friend Lists, a real-time news ticker, and the subscribe button… But these changes are just the beginning. The changes Facebook will roll out on Thursday are designed to enhance the emotional connection its users have to each other through Facebook. These changes will make Facebook a place where nearly everything in your life is enhanced by your social graph. These changes will make it so you know your friends better than you ever thought you could.”

So in the spirit of the fact that Facebook is changing – possibly today – I thought I’d expand on a recent blog post we published, “Search Engine Optimization Tips,” which emphasizes the importance of branding to your current SEO strategy, and notes that Facebook can provide your website with good, high-quality links. Since Facebook is sure to get a lot of buzz in the coming days, weeks, and maybe even months, its important for businesses to be where the people are and be a part of the conversation. This is only one of many reasons to be on Facebook right now, and since we glossed the surface of why Facebook is so important to branding efforts in our blog post, today I’m going to go a little more in-depth and also discuss some tips for improving your Facebook page’s ability to drive links to your site and possibly improve your rankings in the SERPs. So, how do you as a business trying to improve your online presence via the 750-million user strong social media platform?

While creating good content should be the paramount object of any SEO, syndicating that content in the right places and to the right people can be just as important. What’s the point of putting good content out there if no one is going to read it, and no one is going to visit the helpful links integrated within that content? There isn’t one. So here are some tips for making your content and social media efforts improve the effectiveness of your SEO strategy:

One: First, make sure your branding stays consistent across all platforms, and make sure your pages and URLs include your company’s name. This will ensure that Google recognizes your company everywhere that you have a presence and can evaluate your footprint across the web.
Two: Once you have established your page, try to amp up the rate at which others begin to “like” your page, whether it be with Facebook’s targeted ads or by some other method. Why? Because Bing directly takes these into account when calculating rankings. A large number of likes also reflects well on your brand.
Three: Also, it’s not uncommon for businesses to use top keywords in their posts, especially in the “Info” section. While this is not a bad idea, where many companies go wrong is by stuffing their Facebook pages and their content with keywords so that people are turned-off from their pages. Strike a balance, don’t overdo it, and maintain your audience’s attention.
Four: Along those same lines, be present. Answer questions, interact in conversations, and don’t let your Facebook page become stale; if you do so, there isn’t any point in being on Facebook, because your dead page is no longer helping your business.
Five: And for the last tip, and possibly one of the more important ones, work to get inbound links to your Facebook page from both people on Facebook and people across the web; this will help you build the trust of your audience and it will also show the search engines that you are a trusted authority.

All in all, remember to keep a close eye on Facebook in the coming days and weeks following the F8 conference; for instance, just today, Facebook announced that it will allow developers to create their own actions for their sites (this also according to Mashable). Now, instead of having to “like” things online, users will have the ability to use other “Gestures” created by these developers (like “watched,” “listened,” and more). Apparently, the Facebook team did research and found that younger users were less likely to “like” things across the web because they didn’t want to look like they were endorsing them. Now, with “Gestures,” that will likely all change.

If you have any questions about social media, SEO, or anything else having to do with search marketing, please visit our blog to find daily posts with tips, best practices, and comprehensive posts about what’s going on with Google, optimization and more. For questions that are more specific to your business, give us a call at 770-481-1766, or visit our website for more information about our Atlanta SEO Agency. With that, thanks for watching and we’ll see you next time!

Related Information:

Facebook Changes Mirror Google Advantages
Local SEO is Growing According to Recent Survey
Social Networking Importance Reflected in New Survey
Search Engines Responsible for 34% of Inbound Facebook Pages Traffic
Facebook Improves Privacy, Sharing
AIMA Social SIG Event: Live Blog Coverage
Twitter and Facebook Shake it Up
How Will Google + Business Profiles Compare to Facebook Pages?
Google Launches its Social Network, Google +

Hey everyone, it’s Jason Hennessey from Atlanta SEO company EverSpark Interactive. Today, I’m going to talk a little bit about how to use keyword research to increase traffic to your website. Though we have done video blogs about both keyword research and the about defining the importance of keywords, we haven’t really yet discussed how to put the research and importance of keywords to good use for your site.

So, how do you do it?

First, let’s do a little recap of keyword research best practices. Remember, though general keywords can be helpful, using targeted – or, highly specific – keywords for your SEO campaign will help you attract potential customers who are ready to buy. Why is this? Because people who are looking to purchase products or services are likely to use more specific terms when searching online. So, when you are doing your keyword research, try to focus on more targeted keywords if you can. Also, when you’re dealing with extremely competitive keywords, try to limit the keyword phrases you use to only two per page (at most). You may even want to create two separate pages for two competitive keywords so that you are trying to rank one page for one competitive keyword. Don’t over-do it, and as always – make sure the keywords you use are relevant to the page they are on.
Your next question may be, “Where should I include my targeted keywords to best optimize my site and increase inbound traffic?” Well, first it is very important to use your keywords in your page title and title tag, which are at the very top of the page and are the very first things that Google sees when crawling your site. Further, you should put the keyword for which you want the page to rank at the very front of the title tag. Additionally, in your site’s meta-description (this is located under the title tag in the Google SERPs), use your top keywords at least once. In the code of your site, your header tags – these are your h1 and h2 tags –use your keywords and make sure they are relevant to the copy on your page.
Now, let’s discuss how to increase your site’s traffic by using keywords on your actual site pages. Try to use your targeted keywords in the first 200 characters on your page. Also, make sure you bold the keywords so that Google can more easily see them. If you have studied the Google crawling and indexing process, you may know that Google does not actually see images. This provides a great opportunity to include more keywords on the page, as you can name your images with your keywords in the Alt. text of the graphics.
How does all this improve your site traffic? These keyword best practices will help your site climb the search engine rankings, which will in turn make your website more visible to those looking for your products and services.
If you have any questions about improving your site’s keyword research strategy, our Atlanta SEO company is here to help. Visit our website or call us at (800)429-0558 for further information about search engines, SEO or anything going on in the search marketing world. Also, visit our daily blog for updates and news about interactive marketing. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you next time!

Hey everyone, it’s Jason Hennessey from Atlanta SEO agency EverSpark Interactive. Today, I’m going to talk a little bit about link building. Link building is what we call an off-page factor, which means it is something that helps your search engine ranking but doesn’t actually live on your site. If you think about it, the reason the search engines- especially Google – would value incoming links from other sites makes sense. If other sites link to yours, it indicates that they view you as an informational source, or an authority.

Being considered an authority on the web is even more important now, in light of the Panda update, than it ever was because Google wants to ensure your site is useful, valuable and most of all, high-quality. Though link-building is no longer the end-all be-all of SEO, since content has gained importance, it is still an important way to establish your website as an authority. If you are an authority in your niche, chances are you fulfill these requirements for Google as well (otherwise others wouldn’t look to you for information). So, with the importance of link building in mind, what are some good, organic link building strategies?

First, let’s talk specifics here for a minute. White hat SEO link-building tactics, which are those that help you naturally and organically climb the SERPs, include legitimate ways to achieve links. Engaging in less than white hat SEO – like mass blog commenting – can possibly get you banned and will not be good for your SEO strategy. That’s an important thing to keep in mind. We all remember what happened to JC Penney during the holiday season last year: the store’s rankings were docked (they dropped from position 1 to position 71 for many terms) in the Google SERPs for Black Hat paid linking tactics. Why were their rankings deliberately plummeted by Google? Because thousands of web sites that had nothing to do with J.C. Penney’s keywords were found to be linking to the company’s website. The SEO company representing J.C. Penney was paying for a massive amount of links in order to get the company high rankings for nearly every keyword related to the business. Paying for links that appear to be organic is against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Also, you should keep in mind that all links are not equal. The best links – and the most effective ones- are those that include the keywords for which you want your site to rank. So, say, for instance, you are a florist, and you want to rank for the keyword “Atlanta florist.” The best thing you can do is blog about flowers, linking back to the page you want to rank, hyperlinking that particular keyword.

Three Strategies for good, organic link building include blogging (and guest blogging), utilizing directories and submitting articles. If you set up a WordPress blog and add content often, you can feed the Google Spiders what they want as well as build trust with your customers. This will also help you build links almost effortlessly, as long as you include keywords in your blog posts and link them back to the specific pages you want to rank. Additionally, guest blogging and linking back to your site in a similar way will also contribute to your link building efforts because your content will send people back to your site. In a similar way, directories can also be useful when it comes to link building; If you can find the directories in your niche that have the highest Page Ranks and become a part of them, you can garner some great one-way links (which Google values).What’s another thing Google values? Content – from written text to informative videos. Another form of content that will help your site climb the SERPs is article submission. Links included in articles that are submitted to directories (like ezine) are extremely valuable; if you can build an account with article directories and syndicate original and well-written pieces through them often, you will likely drive a great deal of traffic to your site.

One of the most important things to remember is that link building takes time. You may not see results right away, but that does not mean that your efforts are not creating positive results for your website’s rankings. If you have any questions about improving your site’s link-building strategy, our Atlanta SEO agency we’re here to help. Visit our website or call us at (800)429-0558. For further information about search engines, SEO or anything going on in the search marketing world, visit our daily blog for updates and news. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you next time!

Read the full Wall Street Journal story here: Site Claims to Loosen Google ‘Death Grip’

Hey everyone, it’s Jason Hennessey from Everspark Interactive and today we are going to be addressing a recent new story that is causing some buzz in the search engine optimization community.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published a story on one website’s claim that it has been able to recover from Google’s Panda Update by dividing its large site among several sub-domains. The five-year-old site, HubPages.com, was severely affected by the update because it relied heavily on Google for its traffic. The content publishing website’s CEO, Paul Edmonson, guest blogged on Techcrunch.com about his post-Panda plight on May 5th, admitting that his open publishing platform furnishes both high quality and some low quality content. He also added that YouTube does this as well. However, in his guest post, he discusses his shock at the discovery that his entire domain was being punished by Google due to the low-quality work of certain content contributors. Back in May, Edmonson was having no luck when he was trying to reach out to Google for help or an explanation (SURPRISE SURPRISE); however, recently, the HubPages CEO’s luck changed. With a great deal of hard work, Edmonson has triumphed over Panda, and claims that HubPages is slowly moving up in the rankings since he began making one significant change. Since this is the first real solution that has been presented to the Panda co-nun-drum, I thought I’d comment on whether this could possibly be a viable solution for sites that have suffered greatly since Google’s February algorithmic change.

HubPages.com’s mix of high quality content and low quality content is probably the reason for its 50 percent rankings drop not to mention the millions of dollars in lost revenue post Panda. Though the site has made its standards stricter, and cleaned up its act, it still saw no positive results. Then, Edmonson came up with the idea of creating subdomains, where each content author on the site has his or her own site. This way, Google could distinguish between the high quality written content and the low quality stuff. Finally receiving confirmation that this was a good idea from Google’s own Matt Cutts, Edmonson began testing this method in late June and claims to have already seen pre-Panda traffic on some higher quality subdomains. Encouraged, HubPages began implementing this technique for every author on its site this week.

Essentially, by separating the good content and bad content, this site has given Google the opportunity to reward some of the sub-domains and eliminate the others that have very little to contribute to what Google wants to be a content-farm free internet. Either Google is reassessing all of the content, or the revamped HubPages has simply avoided penalty; either way, this is the first time a large website has been able to escape Panda’s “Death Grip.” Google is treating each subdomain like it is a separate website, and therefore is giving website owners the opportunity to bounce back by separating what they know to be low quality content from what is high quality.

SEOBook’s CEO Aaron Wall recently blogged about this new development commenting on the irony of the fact that as soon as Edmonson pointed out in his guest blog that Google’s own YouTube wasn’t being punished for low-quality content when other sites (including HubPages.com) were, Matt Cutts quickly responded to his queries with confirmation that sub-domains were the way to go. According to Aaron, this irony runs deeper, as he says that “everything that is now ‘the right solution’ is the exact opposite of the ‘best practices’ from last year.” He is, of course, referring to Google’s announcement in March of last year that webmasters should allow the search engine to do its job and not worry about certain pages causing a site to be penalized for duplicate or bad content (because, as Google claimed, the crawlers will recognize what is good and what is bad). Now, site owners are supposed to create sub domains so that they are not penalized for bad content on their pages because the crawlers are not going to do this job. The algorithm change did come after this advice, but the least Google could do is update their directions. Now, maybe they will.

This new development could help a lot of sites like HubPages, where so much content is being created and published that it is hard to keep track of the quality, to overcome the frustration of making all changes required by the update and still seeing no changes in their rankings. As this possible solution to Panda’s devastating effects develops, we will keep you updated. Check our blog for daily commentary on everything going on in the search engine world. Thanks for watching and we’ll see you next time!

Hey everyone, it’s Jason Hennessey from Everspark Interactive, and today we are going to give you some tips for implementing an effective PPC campaign. We talk a lot about SEO and Google around here, but we don’t want you to forget about other important ways to market your company on the internet.

PPC campaigns, or Pay-Per-Click campaigns, use targeted ads that show up in the search engine results pages to help you get traffic to your website. First, lets talk about some of the benefits of PPC campaigns. First, a PPC campaign allows you to monitor and control how much money you spend on paid search. Additionally, you are reaching a very narrow, targeted audience that is looking for whatever services you provide. It’s hard to put a price on that kind of direct marketing. Further, PPC campaigns are extremely transparent. You can monitor the direct results of your PPC budget on a daily basis, and can discern whether your campaigns are actually worth the money you are spending. You will also receive Return on Investment reports either weekly or monthly, which will indicate conversion rates for your ads. So, you will know at what rate people who click on your ads are actually purchasing your services.

Okay, now that we have established the most important benefits of implementing PPC campaigns, lets discuss some good tips for implementing them in an effective manner. Probably the most important thing to do is to use the keyword research from your SEO campaign for your PPC campaigns as well. This way, you can ensure that the ads you are paying for are reaching as targeted an audience as possible. You want your ad to show up in the top positions on the right side of the search results, so use your most effective keywords, and use them often, within the copy of your ad. If your AdCopy is not keyword rich, you may not achieve a high quality score from the search engine – and this could mean that your ad will not show up in the top positions among the paid advertisements unless you spend a lot more money.

Target geographical regions where your services are popular. For instance, if you are trying to reach potential clients in Atlanta and North Carolina, use your PPC budget for geo-targeting these areas. That way, you can be sure you are reaching only the audience that will bring you traffic and therefore business. Also, create an extensive negative list of keywords – meaning a list of words you absolutely do not want your ad to show up for – so that you are only paying to reach the people looking specifically for what you sell. Let me explain: say you sell cupcakes only. If you are implementing a PPC campaign, you don’t really want your ad to show up for “cookies,” “candy,” or “lollipops.” If your ad does show up for these other sweet queries, you are wasting money by advertising your product to those who aren’t looking for it. On the other hand, you may want your ad to show up for those searching “cake,” because they still might be open to having a cupcake instead. So, make sure that your negative list is not only comprehensive but also only covers keywords that you absolutely do not want to rank for. With a strong negative list, your conversion rates should increase, because you are really only reaching people who want cupcakes.

These are just a few of many great tips for creating using effective PPC advertising. If you are looking for more information, contact us and we will do our best to answer any and all questions you may have. For more general tips for implementing SEO or PPC campaigns, you should visit our blog on a regular basis. We update it daily with important news from search engines and prominent SEO experts. Thanks for watching and we’ll see you next time!

Hey guys, this is Jason Hennessey from EverSpark Interactive. If you keep up with SEO news or read our blog, you have been hearing for a while now that content has become increasingly important since the Panda update. When most people hear the word “content,” they think of anything that is written on a website. However, there are other important types of content, such as videos. Since we have already discussed the benefit of writing good blog posts and articles on our own blog, we have decided to talk more about how to optimize video content in the wake of the Panda update.

When you create a video, the first thing you do is put it on your site so that Google can see all the great content you have, right? Wrong. The first thing you should do is tell Google that you have posted a video; when you inform the search engine of this, you also need to explain to the Googlebots in the language they can understand exactly what the video is about. More about that in a minute.

First, let’s talk about video SEO. What’s so great about it is that the size of your company or your website really doesn’t matter when it comes to ranking your video. As a small start-up company with only a few pages on your website, you have just as much of a chance of ranking your video as a giant corporation with an extensive web presence. This is because, when it comes to video SEO, linking or any other typical SEO factors don’t really matter; all that matters is that Google indexes your video and that it understands your specific description of the content.

You might be wondering what kinds of videos you should make to best represent your business online. To create good video content, come up with original ways to draw your audience’s attention. For instance, you could hire a well-known and entertaining radio personality to interview your CEO about his job. Or, you could create a video documenting a company-wide charity effort. Make sure that your video contains something interesting, perhaps even funny, so that people will actually want to view it and share it with friends. You may even want to hire a professional to film your video to ensure that it is a quality video and therefore would be considered high-quality content by Google. The best case scenario would have your video going “viral,” meaning it is viewed by a lot of people in a short amount of time, and is widely shared across the internet.

After you create the actual video, the first thing to do when you are trying to get your video to the top of the search engine results page is submit a sitemap to Google via Google Webmaster Tools. This is how you alert Google to the fact that you have posted a video, and explain what it is to the Googlebots. You cannot just submit a page with video on it to Google and expect the video to be crawled and indexed; you have to specifically let Google know that you are submitting a video that you want to rank for certain search terms.

Beyond allowing your video to be viewed in the Google Video Search results, your video sitemap also tells Google what your video is about because they cannot view actual video. What does the sitemap specifically tell Google? Well, it provides the video’s title, which the search engine usually uses to match the video to search queries. An important tip for creating your video’s title is: Go long-tail. The longer and more specific your title, the more likely Google is to understand it and rank it high on the SERPs. For instance, if you post a video about building a house for charity, the title “Building a two-story home for charity” is more likely to get your video to the top of the rankings, whereas the title “House” might not have the same effect. If you want your video to match more than one search term, it might help you to submit the same video with different titles with different keywords. Just remember to make all titles as specific as possible.

Additionally, the site map provides Google with a description of your content and some keywords, which seem to have less bearing on how your video is matched with search queries. However, if the title tag of your page and the title of your video match, you are more likely to get your video to rank higher. By creating a detailed sitemap, you also allow Google to index your video more easily, since you are telling them exactly what your video is about and why it should rank high on the results page.

Content is so important that you simply cannot afford not to have it in this post-Panda day and age. If you still have concerns about your site’s content, visit our blog for important tips and advice for SEO after Panda. We update it daily with important news from search engines and fellow SEO experts. Thanks for watching and we’ll see you next time!

How does page speed affect my site’s ranking?

Hey everyone, it’s Jason Hennessey from Everspark Interactive. Today, I’m going to talk about something that recently came up at the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle: page speed. So, we’ve known for over a year that Google considers site speed a factor in deciding rankings, but now we can see the effects of this consideration. At the conference, it was noted that, whereas page size wasn’t found to have a noticeable correlation to ranking well, page load time definitely has a strong correlation to where your site lies in the SERPs. Let’s tackle two questions: How can I check my page speed, and why is it so important?

I think we can all agree that when we stumble upon a website that takes twenty minutes to load, we pull our hair out a little in frustration, and then make the decision not stay on the site as it takes its sweet time. We click out of the frustrating site and find another one that loads right away. Doesn’t it make sense that the less frustrating website would rank higher on the SERPs than the one that makes you want to pull your hair out? It makes sense to us, and it clearly makes sense to Google.

If you already know that your site is slower than you’d like it to be, the first thing to do is make sure that you don’t have too many images or videos on your homepage. These can slow down the loading process significantly. While you might think photos and videos would improve user experience once your page loads, chances are the majority of users won’t stick around to see what your page has to offer. We live in an internet driven, fast-paced world where we are used to getting to different sites quickly, and there is just no place for slow sites in the top rankings anymore. If you don’t have very many images or videos, it might be a hosting issue.

So, if you aren’t quite sure about how fast your page loads, then the next thing to do is find out. How can you check your page’s speed? Google has a tool just for this purpose called the page speed tool. That’s simple enough, right? Just go to pagespeed.googlelabs.com to access it and begin improving your site!

You may be wondering why page speed is so important for SEO. The number one reason for this is that Google highly values the user experience. With technology continuously advancing, we all want to be able to grab our computers and find what we are looking for immediately. Your site’s visitors, then, will be much happier if they can quickly visit and find what they are looking for.

A faster site will also give the Google crawlers more frequent access to your site, which will maintain or even improve your site’s ranking. After the Panda update and the increasing importance of content, it can’t hurt to make sure that your blog also loads quickly.
Our best advice would be to keep your site simple, yet professional. The simplicity will make it load quickly and the professionalism will make your visitors and Google happy. The search engine has recently admitted that one of its goals is to make the web faster overall. Make your contribution to a faster internet and optimize your site for Google and your users.

If you have any questions about improving your page’s speed or about what Google considers important, please visit our blog. We update it daily with important news from the search engines and from the major players in SEO. Thanks for watching, we’ll see you next time!

Be proactive

Before you do anything, make sure you know all the reasons why Google removes sites from the search results page.

After educating yourself, the first thing you should do if you feel your site was removed without reason is visit the Google Webmaster Forum. Why not go straight to the source and ask the folks at Google what you have done wrong? If they cannot find anything wrong with your site, the next thing to do is file a Reconsideration Request and wait. For more information on what to do after you have filed this request, visit our earlier post about what to do after you have corrected your webmaster violations.

Consider this

If you have gone over your website with a fine-tooth comb, are confident in your high-quality content, and feel that you have followed the Google Webmaster’s guidelines thoroughly, one thing you might want to consider looking at is your inbound links.

As you probably know, your ranking in the SERPs has a lot to do with the quantity and quality of the sites that link to your site. These sites help Google determine if others on the web view you as an authority in your field. Be sure to keep link quality in mind when building relationships with other sites. Don’t link to spammers, or have excessive link exchanges with others (at least one of those link exchanges is bound to happen with a low quality site). If you simply link build by exchanging links with others you barely know for the sake of creating inbound links, your site could be negatively impacted in the long-term.

Bottom line

After filing your Reconsideration Request, keep doing what you have been doing. Just be yourself, continue to create unique content, and let the links naturally come to your site as you build your credibility. Becoming a useful and valuable source of information is the best way to bring your site up in the rankings.