Search Engine Optimization | SEO | Paul Vesely

Like it or not Google+ is here to stay. The latest visitor numbers released by Google and facebook show that Google+ gets 21% of the monthly unique visitors compared to facebook. So why should you bother spending your employee’s time cultivating an SEO friendly Google+ company page or creating circles and posts if the eyes of your current and potential customers/clients are still on facebook?

The reason is because of a very recent algorithm change (minor update) in Google seems to be serving results of well optimized and SEO’d Google+ company pages as high as position 3 in the search engine results page (SERP) for certain keywords. This means that if someone has correctly optimized and continually updates their Google+ company page, and friends of a searcher have added your company page to their circles, then you have a very high chance of coming up on the first page of google’s SERP.

How do you create an optimized SEO Google+ company page?

Firstly you must have a Google+ personal profile. Then create a Google+ page.

Steps for an SEO friendly Google plus page:

1. Ensure the name of your company is optimized including the industry you are in.
2. Include in your company description as many keywords as possible.
3. Ensure you continually update your company page with posts etc daily.
4. Have a Google+ page button (reddish color) on your website so people can easily add your page to their circles.

One cool feature that differentiates Google+ from facebook pages is that the 5 top images on your company’s home page can be animated gifs (meaning they can move and don’t need to be static). See red bull’s Google plus page for how cool this looks.

Conclusion:

Like it or not, Google+ is becoming more and more necessary for your company to be on. Google are utilizing all their resources to help promote this social network so that it doesn’t fail like Orkut or Buzz. This also means to beat your competitors you need to make sure that you have the correct SEO balance on your Google+ page and you have used as many search engine optimization techniques to ensure your page ranks highly in the SERPs.

To understand how to better adapt your website, your business, and your personal internet usage you can simply learn from Google’s new “How the world searched in 2011”. This well-built interactive website allows you an insight into the way the world used the most popular English search engine out there and you will be able to see the 10 most popular searches for 2011 on Google. Once you understand the major search trends in the world for 2011, you can better understand what are the major events that cause masses of searches and traffic. Then you can tailor pieces of your online marketing strategy to skillfully relate to the masses of audience that perform these searches and relate it to your product/service/blog.

By simply writing and performing on page optimization in a SEO friendly way, related to the top search topics of:

1. Rebecca Black
2. Google+
3. Ryan Dunn
4. Casey Anthony
5. Battlefield 3
6. iPhone 5
7. Adele
8. 東京 電力
9. Steve Jobs
10. iPad2

you could attract some lucrative traffic to your website. Of course you must not only attract the traffic but also convert visitors when they have arrived on your site.

Check out the Google Zeitgeist 2001 list: http://www.googlezeitgeist.com/en

As a side note Google built this website using HTML5 which is a more interactive platform which allows for moving images without the use of flash (which is not compatible with certain devices and browsers).

I particularly think the marketing video is well done (which you can view and play below). Google have integrated how their search engine, social media network Google+, Google news, YouTube, Google world etc have allowed for the major events to unfold in the world in the year 2011. Agree or not, the website is well built, interactive and informative and the video which you can play below is a nice piece of marketing.

This blog, just as many millions of blogs and websites worldwide is running off a WordPress platform. There are actually current 69.6 million WordPress blogs/websites out there today and the number is continually growing. Now WordPress have made an update 3.3 and this blog post is where you can find all the info about the WordPress update.

For those who don’t know what WordPress is: It is a content management system (CMS) that is open source (meaning anyone with basic php and html coding knowledge can change anything they want so as to create a unique and dynamic database driven website).

So what is this upgrade?

The reason why people are so excited about this WordPress 3.3 update is that it is an update of many features (both design, UI and technical) for WordPress. And of course like everything with the WordPress platform, it is free!

How to update:

Make sure you first backup all your files on your server just for safety. Then simply click on the word update that appears at the top of your homescreen when logged into your WordPress website.

New features:

• File Upload
•  WordPress have now replaced all the upload icons with just one icon that detects what kind of file you are uploading.
•  Drag-and-Drop Media Uploader
• You can now add photos or other files by dragging the file from your desktop and dropping it into the uploader. You can add one file at a time, or many at once.
• Dashboard Design
• The dashboard navigating has been sped up and repetitive clicking has been reduced with the new flyout submenus. As you hover over each main menu item in your dashboard navigation, the submenus will magically appear, providing single-click access to any dashboard screen.
• Responsive Design
• Certain dashboard screens have been updated to look better at various sizes, including improved iPad/tablet support.
• Help Menus
• When WordPress have added new features, move navigation, or do anything else with the dashboard that might throw you off in the future, they now let you know about it with new feature pointers explaining the change.
• Post-update Changelog
• When you update WordPress, you’ll be brought to a screen and also when you click on the W logo in the corner of the toolbar you access the change log to get an overview of what’s changed.
• Other Features:
  • Better Co-Editing when there are a few people logged on and changing one post at one time
  • Tumblr Importer
  • Widget Improvements for changing themes and keeping widget settings
  • Better API editor

What are the alternatives?

The alternatives to building a blog with WordPress is of course Blogger  by Google but that doesn’t give much freedoms for style and design.

I am weary of Joomla as an alternative to WordPress simply due to the statistics that there are more worldwide users of WordPress. I tend to trust a CMS platform that has more users and is more tested.

Drupal is a dismal example of a platform that was cutting edge when it came out many years ago, but it has not been developed enough to keep up with the functionality and ease of use of WordPress and Joomla.

Lastly there are a few options for more rigid CMS’s such as Wix and Weebly which are more flash based and look more beautiful in terms of design but they offer less flexibility and no open source platform for developers to totally customize.

Whatever your desire and budget one of these options above will suit your website or blogging needs and your computer literacy abilities. Each one of the above platforms is absolutely free and most even offer free hosting. It is simply a little investment of your time and walla, you have a website or blog. But if anyone will find your website is a different story, and that’s why you need SEO.

When Google makes major changes to one of its products, it usually revolutionizes the industry the product is related to. Take for example what the android platform did for mobile phones or what streetview did for Google maps. Everyone that uses the Google product holds their breath to see how the change will affect them and if it will make life better or worse. Face it, Google touches all of our lives many times a day, so when a Google product changes, it affects us down to the core.

One of the many positive effects modern technology has on human beings is not to be apprehensive of change. Being adverse to change in business leads to competition beating you, and in your personal life it can lead to isolation or doing tasks in a more time consuming way than others.

Is the new Google Analytics good or bad?

Google have been testing this new version of analytics for the last few months and giving Google Analytics users the option to switch to the new version or revert back to the old version. Now Google have announced that this new Google Analytics version 5 is going live at the start of 2012 and the old version will be inaccessible (although all your data will of course be available in the new version format).

In a nut shell the new design looks smoother, it still has that ‘clean’ Google design look about it with no overcrowding of information. All in all it’s a good looking design. But who cares about how it looks? Lets get down to the nitty gritty of each feature and how it has changed and if that is good or bad for us as webmasters.

Navigation:

Google has used a lot more tabbed navigation to seamlessly allow the user to get the specific information they require without overloading the menu bar on the left hand side. There are sometimes 3 levels of tabs on the page which can be confusing for a new user, but once the user learns where all the options are, the tabs become a benefit for navigation and not a hindrance.

They have also allowed for a totally customizable and interactive dashboard for your homescreen which I like as well. You can arrive and see the information you want straight away once you have set this up.

Page Load Speed:

All Google speak about now a days is how important page speed is for your rankings in its search engine (plus of course content is king but let’s focus on page load speed). Information about page load speed was available, in part, in the labs area of Google Webmaster Tools, but now they have integrated this information seamlessly into the Google Analytics package. The great thing about this is that all your analytics are now in one place and the page load speed information is incredible. You’ll be licking your lips when you realize you can see page load speed broken down by country (with a super cool interactive map). You can also breakdown this information per page performance and also by browser.

Real Time Analytics:

Oh yes they have! This is one of the most fun parts of the new analytics version. It allows webmasters to actually see in real time many details about current (to the split second) number and behavior of visitors on your website. You can see details like what pages are currently being looked at, current time on site and other useful details. If you want ‘in the moment’ reporting at your fingertips, now you have it.

Mobile Analytics:

Since mobile phones are the fastest growing internet usage segment it is no surprise that Google Analytics have increased the quality of the information they give webmasters. Of course like in the old analytics you can still see what mobile device and what pages they visit (and operating system – if its iOS or android etc). Now you get a deeper breakdown of the phone exact model and there is even a funky feature to get a visual image of the phone model so you can see it next to the phone model name.

Social Media:

Another trend online is that internet users are investing more time in the social side of the internet. Hence webmasters are being fed better quality information by Google Analytics on factors such as how many people are ‘socially engaged’ in your website (they use their +1 data and other factors to define this). Unfortunately there aren’t details from facebook such as likes, or any other way to see shares via blogs and news forums. This section needs to be developed more but it is a small first step in the right direction.

AdWords Campaigns:

Keeping inline with Google Analytics desire to be the one place where a webmaster can get all information, there has been an improvement in the sharing of data from Google AdWords Campaigns to Google Analytics. The depth of the data is great. You can segment and see data based on campaign, keywords or even time in day that your ads were performing best directly clicks to your website.

Search Engine Optimization Data:

The search engine optimization data is an exact copy of what webmasters are used to getting inside the ‘your site on the web’ page inside Google Webmaster Tools. It is easy to set up but must be set-up from inside Google Webmaster Tools itself and not from inside Google Analytics. SEO experts can definitely utilize this information to their benefit for creating strategies and seeing the effect of certain SEO work performed on organic results. SEO experts can also do split testing with title meta tags and other factors to see if they get higher click throughs compared to impressions.

Site Search:

For those webmasters who use Google Site Search on their site, this feature allows all the analytics data to feed straight through to your analytics account. As said, this is another proof of Google integrating all analytics data in one place making it easier for webmasters to see all information in one place – being in Google Analytics.

Goals and Funnels:

Possibly the most visually engaging and impressive new part of Google Analytics version 5 is the funnel visualization charts. They allow the webmaster to see graphically how visitors navigate through your site. It is simply beautiful to be able to see the thickness of lines and instantly see where proportionally more or less traffic goes and comes from within your site.

Conclusion:

All in all there has been a great improvement in Google Analytics version 5. For a free tool, it reports on everything you could possibly ask for in one place combining all Google products such as Google+, Site Search, Webmaster Tool and AdWords. There are still areas such as the social tab that can be developed further, but as a whole, this new version of analytics is both visually better, easier to navigate (better UI) and gives much better and deeper analytics information to webmasters. Have a play with it today and get yourself acquainted with what’s coming in early 2012 by selecting ‘new version’ when you are logged into your Google Analytics account.

Google is moving fast to adapt its Google+ social network into something that is able to be utilized commercially as are Facebook pages. Last week the Google+ team presented the ability for businesses to now make a page on Google+.

Most early adaptors have already created their business page. Looking at examples like Zappos, it seems the basic layout, images and information available are the same as their Facebook business pages but there are a few different features.

Main differences:

• On Facebook, page owners can create an html landing page that is customized and designed they want it. Google+ has yet to allow or develop this feature.
• On Facebook there are many apps that allow youtube feeds, twitter feeds etc, yet not such thing exists on Google+
• On Facebook, pages can have a branded url for easy access yet Google+ pages do not have a branded url such as: www.facebook.com/yourbusiness

So then what have Google+ done?

• On Google+ you need to add followers to your circles to activate them seeing your status updates in their news feed.
• Google+ have also developed the ‘badge’ that page owners can put on their website and it allows visitors to the website to follow the companies Google+ page without leaving the website.
• Of course Google+ will most certainly be linked with Google organic search engine results and effect your website’s results on the search engine. Google are keeping very tight lipped about this.

Do not discount the current state of Google+ pages. Even though Google+ pages only have some of the same features as Facebook and yet they do not have many other great features of Facebook pages, Google has a lot of room to grow. For example Google+ can integrate its pages with other great Google products such as: maps for businesses, google check out, blogger, Google Apps, Google calendar etc. This will give Google the competitive edge over its social rival Facebook and leave the ball firmly in the court of the development team of Facebook to innovate new features and create greater value for businesses and individual users to stay on its social network.

How to create a page:

To create a page you must have a Google+ profile and simply click on the ‘create a Google+ page’ on the right hand side icon and start filling out all the details needed. Once all of this is done I strongly suggest using the google code for a badge and placing it on your website.

What SEO benefit is there to having a Google+ business page and badge?

Firstly, Google+ is slowly taking off and there are estimates out there that it is already 20% the size of Facebook. That means that there is still a significant audience on Google+ worth your social media time and attention even though it is not as big as Facebook. If you build a Google+ business page for branding or communicating or networking with your clints/prospective clients, there is no doubt it is best to jump in now.

All this being said, Google is not leaking SEO information about the way the pages will be displayed organically in its search engine results. Nor is Google giving any indication if it will stop showing organic results from Facebook pages.

First there was MySpace, then there was Facebook and I predict soon the giant blimp of Google will overshadow its nearest rival and Google+ will become the most used social network worldwide. My only question is when.

Many people ask me about the ‘hidden world of Google’. A lot of SEO experts like myself have a clear understanding of what goes on behind the closed doors of this highly secretive and successful company because it is our field to track every change and update that Google produces.

To gain an insight into how Google is attempting to become more transparent, we can look at the process of blacklisting a website. This is a process whereby Google decides your website is spam and takes it off its search results.

The very first indication of your website being blacklisted and totally falling off Google is when you look at your analytics results and suddenly see the steady stream of traffic that Google was sending to your website disappear and reduce to zero. You could also discover that your website is blacklisted by searching for your company by name on Google, if you do not come up in the top places as you once did, then the answer is clear: BLACKLISTED. These are two ways companies used to find out (in shock and horror) that their website has been considered spam by Google and they have been blacklist.

But that is not the case anymore. The blackhole that used to be Google has now opened up a small window of clarity for webmasters who feel their site has been blacklisted as spam. This is just one of the many ways Google is trying to improve its image in the online world by giving more transparency to webmasters. The first step is that Google now email you to your Google Webmaster Tools inbox and tell you that you have violated its webmaster guidelines. I always suggest checking your webmaster inbox at least weekly (unfortunately you can not receive emails directly to your gmail). Know that if you have no webmaster tools mail, that is a good sign. The system that Google uses is that they will not communicate with you unless they have an issue with you. Hence no communication from Google is a good sign.

Your website can be blacklisted and considered spam in two ways:
1. The Goolge algorithm can decide that your website is classified as spammy and hence blacklist you (automatic).
2. Someone (usually a competitor or a Google user) can simply notify Google that your website does not comply with its webmaster guidelines and Google will perform a manual review.

Be aware that Goolge creates its own webmaster guidelines in isolation from any other body. This means that they don’t consult with ICANN or any other international or governmental body to decide what is fair or ethical in the online search world. The real test if these user guidelines are fair and coerce webmasters to create relevant and useful websites is by seeing if searchers still search using Google or if they deem Google’s’ results too limited. At the moment Google is the ‘golden boy’ of search hence the unequivocal vote is yes, Google can make up their own rules in the playground and everyone has to abide by them.

I wish to focus on what happens when Google is notified by someone that a site is spammy and they do a ‘manual review’ of your website. This is situation number 2 listed above.

Firstly Google are now trying to be more transparent with webmasters. This means Google is attempting to communicate things more to webmasters. Recently Google started sending emails to the Google Webmaster Tools inbox notifying a webmaster if their website was taken off Google due to a violation of its user guidelines. More recently Google has been testing, with success, actually giving reasons within these emails to webmasters. This allows for more clarity why a website was blacklisted and dropped from Google search results. It also gives opportunity for a counter argument that can be submitted by a webmaster to Google to encourage re-review. It also allows webmasters to fix the issue with their site and then re-submit for re-listing.

I am a big fan of Google becoming more transparent since many businesses and hence employee salaries rely on website traffic from Google. If a website is punished without due explanation, then peoples lives and business revenue are greatly effected without any clarity of why this action happened, not allowing for the issue to be rectified.

The last question most people ask themselves at this point is: “How can I make sure my website isn’t deemed as spam by Google and blacklisted?”.
The most simple answer is that your website should not use any tactics that try to ‘trick’ the Google search algorithm (known as blackhat SEO). But for a detailed idea of these tactics, simply check out Google’s webmaster guidelines.

How do you optimize your video content so it reaches the first page of search engines?

There are many SEO tricks that are white hat to get your webpage and video on the first page of search engine result pages (SERPs).

1. Have keyword optimized meta title tags and other meta tags for the page
2. Have the video transcribed so the words are on the page below the video
3. Submit a video sitemap to Google
4. Upload your video to YouTube – remember YouTube results show up highly in SERPs

Why have a Video on your website?

Videos are great to appeal to a more visual visitor and can help you convert a visitor to your website more easily. There are many amazingly creative video companies that produce videos for companies in an entertaining and yet sales oriented way. Take for example my favorite but also the most expensive and premium called Epipheo. You can play their video here and watch their style of selling an idea (in this case their video) using simply and engaging techniques. Think, could your website use a video such as an Epipheo? You can also YouTube Epipheo on YouTube to see how nearly all major brands have used this video technique to communicate a message to their target market.

Another great SEO bonus of videos is that they cause a user stay on your page for longer. Now that Google has updated their Panda algorithm which focuses on such on-page optimization factors such as amount of time users spend on a page, this is an important factor. Of course an engaging video will increase the time spent on the webpage, allowing Google to rank the page higher in its SERP because it indicates more visitor engagement. Another important point is that search engine algorithms (not just Google) including Yahoo and Bing plus others all take into account if there is ‘rich media’, such as a video, on your webpage. All search engines rank pages higher that have ‘rich media’ embedded since it is seen as a value added item on the page that creates more interaction with the visitor and the webpage.

Another major bonus for those interested in the SEO value of an on-page video is that when the video text is transcribed it creates a long tail keyword filled page of text that makes it easy for search engines to index for a variety of keywords. There are a variety of companies that perform video transcription. Don’t forget the simple fact that search engines don’t know what is said inside your video unless it is written out on the page.

My final suggestion is to ensure you don’t use a flash player on your website for your videos. JW Player is a cost effective solution and is widely used for more professional sites. Alternatively pasting in embedded code from your YouTube video is perfectly acceptable and has the same results in helping SEO your page for search engines. In fact, you should always upload your videos on YouTube anyway so as to get maximum exposure and even possibly have your video displayed in Google SERPs in its YouTube form and not only having people reach your video via your webpage.

It has been a long time coming but the 2^nd and 3^rd largest search engines are merging their operations and services more and more. Very soon I predict that Yahoo will simply morph into Bing and Yahoo will be no more. Only time will tell but there are many factors leading me to believe this. Funny enough the most recent stats from ComScore May 2011 for the US search engine usage market shows that Yahoo still commands 2^nd position with 15.9% of searches followed by Bing with 14.1% of searches. Of course Google is kingpin by far with 65.5% of all search queries in the US. The reason it is ‘funny’ because 2^nd position Yahoo is being engulfed and swallowed by Bing who is smaller (although only slightly).

Bing and Yahoo Webmaster Tools

Today (8/25/11) Bing announced that it has merged results from its search engine and Yahoo to give analytics in its Bing Webmaster Tools from both search engines. This follows the trend that Yahoo and Bing are merging since July 2009 when both Yahoo and Bing agreed to use the Bing search algorithm to display results on both search engines.

The additional results from Yahoo included in your Bing Webmaster Tools will affect your ‘traffic summary’ report and your ‘page traffic’ report. Impressions should go up due to the combined data as of today and click should also go up due to the same reason. Inside the ‘rank and traffic stats’ page in Bing Webmaster Tools you will see both Bing and Yahoo logo’s living side by side like a happy family.

Is this the start of Google’s demise?

Still it begs the question will this Bing and Yahoo merger end up posing a decent threat against Google?

Firstly Bing is the search engine of Microsoft which has the lions share of computers using its operating system Windows (as opposed to Apple’s using iOS). Microsoft has its default settings for its market leading internet browser ‘internet explorer’ also set to use Bing. Plus Bing has huge offline marketing effort such as TV commercials, billboards, and other public advertising to encourage new users to switch to it.

What are searchers looking for?

In a search engine, users simply want the best results. Google search algorithm is widely believed to produce the best results without having spamming problems causing non relevant results to show up. Google’s spiders (also known as web crawlers) index more of the web and faster than the Bing and Yahoo crawlers meaning more internet sites are listed on Google. Google also has a more complex search algorithm that is constantly updated to fight black hat and spamy seo techniques and simply let the best and most appropriate results show up first in its search engine. Bing and Yahoo’s algorithm (which is now just the Bing algorithm for both search engines) is much more easily manipulated. This is well known by SEO experts and exploited using heavy handed onpage SEO techniques like body text keyword repetition and spamy meta tagging. The Google algorithm on the other hand has strong focus on inlinks from other relevant websites (which are more difficult to get) and also puts focus on social sharing, history of domain and unique onpage engaging content.

Could the merger of Bing and Yahoo spell the downfall of Google?

Recently Google purchased Motorola to add to the variety of companies it already owns. This by no means will the last branch out of being simply a search engine. Google has branched out in the past to services like Chrome – its own browser, Android – its mobile operating system, plus a myriad of online applications like maps, earth, docs, apps, news, Gmail etc. Google has branched out into so many areas of both the online world and offline world that this super-company will by no means be wiped away – but it might be challenged by this Bing and yahoo merger in the search engine world.

Google’s core business (and its #1 revenue generator) is from its AdSense – the ‘sponsored listings’ on the side of its search engine. If Bing and Yahoo can make a dent into the market share that Google controls and convert new users into using Bing, then Google’s main revenue source will decrease setting off alarm bells.

The future

Until Bing can improve its algorithm to give better results it will be limited in the number of new users it can attract to using its search engine. Converting new users is a hard thing since there is a lot of loyalty to Google. It can be seen in the past even when the search giant messes something up like the famous privacy lawsuits when Google launched Buzz, its search engine usage was not effect (maybe just Gmail usage decreased and only by a little it was speculated). Google users are loyal and hence hard to convert to a new search engine meaning Bing will really have to deliver a better product with value added for the user.

Until Bing improves its core product being its search engine, all the changes and merges in the world for its webmaster tools will be a vain attempt to get more people to use its products.

So you want to advertise on search engines to gain more revenue on your website?

Find out how:

You have a website and you are doing all the search engine optimization (SEO) you can possibly do. You are doing everything correctly and your pages are slowly rising on the search engine results page (SERP) towards those all-important top 3 positions, but in the meantime, you want traffic to your website and you want conversions (be them purchases on your website, registers, joins, etc). How do you get more target traffic to your website quickly without the wait for all your SEO to kick-in?

The answer is Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC). All search engines have them, they call them different things from Google’s ‘AdWords’ to Bing’s ‘AdCenter’ to Yahoo’s ‘search marketing’. These are called PPC because an advertiser only pays for the ad when it is clicked on and not when placing it or each time there is an impression.

I am a big advocate of this type of online advertising and even though it is not traditionally seen as part of SEO, the bottom line is that it is simply another way to gain targeted traffic and get more conversions on your website and hence generate more revenue. I will focus only on Google’s AdWords because it it by far the most widely used serach engine, but the same concepts apply to PPC campaigns on other search engines.

PPC, when instigated in the correct way can produce instantaneous traffic to your website. Of course the Pro’s of SEO is that there is no cost each time someone clicks on your webpage result in the SERP and that it stays there for a very long time(when done correctly), whereas each time someone clicks on your PPC result in the SERP you are charged a certain amount. This charge depends on the bid you put in for a certain keyword, the bid others put in for that keywords and your quality score. Costs per click can be anywhere between $0.02 USD to hundreds of dollars, but most keywords cost around $1-$2 per click. The amount you are charged and where your result comes up in the PPC section of the SERP is what I will explain below and give you hints to gain better results for cheaper.

Firstly you will notice from the following points below, there are many similar factors to a successful PPC campaign as is with a successful SEO campaign. This is great because your efforts and time investment to optimize your website for a PPC campaign will harmonize with your efforts to get better results organically in your SEO campaign.

1. Always start with comprehensive keyword research – including looking at what keywords your competitors are using. Ensure you use the many free Google keyword tools to research as many synonyms and keyword phrases to base your PPC campaign on. I strongly suggest these 2 tools for keyword research: Google AdWords (for search volume numbers and competition statistics per keyword) and Google Insights (for comparing up to 5 keywords to each other)
2. Ensure the page is optimized for those keywords including meta tags.
3. Make clear Campaigns and ‘Ad Groups’. This means that if you sell housing furniture online you should have a campaign for lounge furniture, a separate campaign for bedroom furniture etc. Then under the campaign for bedroom furniture ensure you have well defined ‘Ad Groups’ such as Bunk Beds, Double Beds, Single Beds etc. That way each ‘Ad Groups’ can have specific keywords and text around exactly what the potential client will be searching for.
4. Set goals for conversion – Google AdWords like to see you tracking goals and using split testing on different ‘Ad Groups’ so as to constantly improve your ads and hence your results.

In the end the better and more strongly related your ad is to the searchers query, the better chance the searcher will click on your ad and also the better chance they will complete your goal and become a ‘conversion’ on your website. This means that Google wins (because they received money from you for the click through) and you win (because the searcher arrives to your website and hopefully completes exactly what you wanted them to do on your site because they were the right person). This is all about relevancy.

So how do you show up first in PPC?

Why cant people simply make bad ads, pay for them and bid the highest amount for a click and hence show up first on Google in the sponsored links section? That is because Google AdWords uses a complex paid search algorithm that takes into account “Quality Score”.

What is Quality Score?

Quality Score (QS) takes into account a myriad of factors including:

• The quality of your landing page (SEO optimization)
• How relevant your keywords are to the search term
• How relevant your keywords in your ads are to your page
• Historical click through rates (CTR) – which means the longer your campaigns are running and the better you improve them, then the better they will rate – snowball effect
• Geographic region
• Other factors (one good tip is to have a ‘privacy page’ – Google love sit and gives you a better QS

Google actually show you your QS when signed into AdWords: from within the campaign, click customize columns, select show quality score.

How do I improve my QS:

1. Improve your CTR constantly
2. Use split testing to improve your ‘Ad Groups’
3. Change onpage factors like body text, meta tags, add privacy policy
4. Create goals and tweak campaigns so that your goal conversion rate is higher each week.

You want more info?

Google have great training videos for anyone to learn how to become an expert in creating and maintaining successful PPC campaigns.

Also make sure you abide by all the Google landing page guidelines.

Every business has accepted that they need some kind of social media strategy on the internet but the question is how should you utilize facebook for your business and what are the benefits of this time investment?

Facebook’s main differentiating factor as opposed to the next largest and up and coming social network: Google+ (now that they launched “Video Calling”) is that it has a way for businesses to have a social media presence. You can use facebook pages to promote your business (yes, they are able to be found organically on search engines whereas groups and profiles can not). They also allow you to get a greater understanding of your audience and target market due to facebook insights – which is a really incredible tool that will be discussed below. This main point of differentiation from Google+ has not been lost on facebook and they have recently started promoting this difference using explanation pages and videos.

Where to start for your business

1. Set up a facebook fan page (you must have a facebook profile to do this)
2. Get over 25 likes so that you can have your business name as the subdirectory ie: www.facebook.com/yourbusiness
3. Decide on a voice for your posts (don’t be too formal – you are in a social setting)
4. Ensure you update the status of your page at least once a week with interesting posts that engages the user and makes them want to comment.
5. Always respond to people interacting to you on your wall
6. Get fun and related pictures, build a social brand for yourself
7. Interlink your website strategy with your social strategy by offering discounts/promotions for fans, special events or information just for fans etc – exclusivity for your fans

This will enable your fan page to snowball with new fans, as people see their friends interacting with your page and that coming up on their wall. This can also help you build a branding image and also find new prospective clients. But what about on your website?

On your website

Ensure you have a facebook ‘like’ or ‘recommend’ button on your website and you also add your website to Facebook Insights. This is done by adding a small amount of code to your website so as to allow Facebook to track the analytics of your webpages.

The amazing analytics information you get
It is incredible what information facebook give you about your sites when you have added your actual domain to facebook insights. You have 3 main sections that you get information for:
1. Like button – when people click the ‘like’ or ‘recommend’ button on your website
2. Send button – when people share things from your website through facebook with others
3. Organic shares – people sharing by simply copying and pasting the link of your website domain

The information you get is phenomenal. You can find out demographics about the people doing these 3 actions because Facebook has this data. The demographic information you get is a breakdown of the people’s age groups, gender, language and country. You also find out the number of impressions to clicks for these 3 actions listed above (CTR).

Conclusion
This methodical and time proven step by step blog should help you both know how to utilize facebook for your business and also why it is definitely worth your time to get such details as facebook insights. The world is going social, this does not mean that traditional onpage and offpage SEO is dead, but it does mean that SEO needs to morph its offpage optimization efforts into the social side of things as well as traditional link building exercises. Facebook is just one avenue of presenting your business online in social media but of course there are many other ways such as twitter, linked in, myspace, Google+ and many more.

If you liked this blog and found it useful, please feel free to “like” it yourself.