SEO & Social Media

Tired of researching about too many SEO tricks? Frustrated on which advice will work on your website from hundreds (and even thousands) of blogs and authority websites to find little gems of information? To help ease your burden, see the best 10 SEO secrets below.

1. Create an incentive for web-content-creating audience.

It is stated everywhere that to create quality web content you MUST focus on the value your content will give to a select group of users who own websites (e.g. bloggers, small business owners, media, etc.) and can give links to YOUR content.

Why?

Getting content, finding the right keywords, fixing website structures are fairly easy compared to getting good links.

"The content is merely a tool. The real goal for any brand is relationships of value." –@jeffjarvis #ContentlySummit

— Contently (@contently) June 18, 2014

2. Hire the Right Resources

If you have time in your hands, you can research all day about SEO and digital marketing, which others had spent a decade to become good at. If you are patient to learn on your own and don’t mind not having good ROI for quite some time, then go for it.

But I doubt you do.

You want to get top placement as fast (and safe and legal) as possible. You want to claim the massive opportunity the web could provide you despite the too many things to learn about digital marketing.

So start pooling the right resources. You can rely on their digital marketing expertise and they’ll do the dirty work for you so you can concentrate on other business aspects.

3. Use the Right Tools and Software

Many will state this is rubbish from the danger of acquiring too many non-quality backlinks.

In truth, it’s not the software’s fault if they were all powerful in their functions. The software relies on its user to drive quality results. These softwares when used correctly, can make you a God of online market research, be an engagement guru, and the all-knowing expert in your industry.

Below are some recommended SEO softwares are below. These tools will help you achieve remarkable results:

* Raven Tools is a powerful internet marketing platform for agencies and professionals offering SEO, social media and online advertising tools as one package.
* Radian6 allows you to quickly and efficiently track, monitor, and react to comments, questions, and complaints as they happen.
* Hitwise delivers daily insights from the world’s largest sample of online consumer behaviour to help marketers increase the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns.
* Compete helps you to monitor your online competition, benchmark your performance against your industry, and discover new business opportunities.

4. Interlinking

Let’s say you have a blog. On the web post’s sidebar, you have a widget (a small area) listing 20 of related articles. Each item list links to their own pages, and each page have their own sidebar of other 20 related articles within your website. Repeat until you have crawled all your articles.

There are 3 reasons why interlinking is very helpful to SEO:

1. It provides user further reading options and suggestions, which are hopefully helpful to them
2. It increases visitor length and pageview, which Google really loves
3. Interlinking with old articles helps increase rank of internal pages and helps building relevancy to a page

If you need a visual representation of how interlinking happens, check image below.

5. Start with an Old Trusted Domain

If you can acquire an old trusted domain, get it. Old domains rank much better in general.

Otherwise, if you can integrate a keyword you are aiming for within your domain, do so.

6. Google has developed an aesthetic sense

Not in the pre-conceived “artsy” sense. Google tends to like websites better if they have the following elements. Google depends on how clean and accessible your content (and code) is to its algorithm and to your site visitors.

6.1 Site navigation
Your site navigation needs to have a clear hierarchy and include text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

6.2 Include a site map
Your site needs a site map, which needs to be submitted to Google once your website is completed. Your site map helps Google learn about the structure of your website and to increase the coverage of the pages of content on your site. If you don’t know how to do a sitemap, ask your web developer to help you.

6.3 Links matter, but be reasonable
Links are very important but make sure that they are of quality value and they came in “organically” (you didn’t do any blackhat SEO to get links). Suspicious spammy looking links are troublesome in Google’s eyes, especially when they come in massive quantities.

6.4 Create a site that’s useful
A website is NOT an online brochure of your business. It is important to look good but if your websites does not provide the information your users need, you are doing it wrong. Each page of content must do its part to tell your story.

Remember, a pretty and cute design might be fun. Making money is MORE fun.

Use each page of your site to serve up content that benefits the people who are searching for what you do and for the search engines to index your content.

6.5 Keyword research: Do your homework first
Keyword research is the new market research. Knowing words and phrases that people use to find your business, your service or product offerings, and your website is a key component of website effectiveness.

6.6 Use text, not images
Images are very important but Google can’t ‘read’ those images. This is the reason images aren’t used as replacement to actual content in a website.

In using images, tell the search engine as much as you can what the images are about by using “ALT tags”.

6.7 Check load times
The faster your website loads, the more Google likes it and the happier your customers and prospects are. The goal of your website is to provide relevant results with great user experience as fast as possible.

You can try to check the speed of your website with PageSpeed or WebPagetest.

7. Embrace Video, Podcast and other Multimedia Output

Video and audio add flavor to a content. It also adds “trustworthiness” when a user sees a video of the product or service moreso, when they see an actual person talking to them. There are many successful web stories of people earning a hefty sum of money from being web celebrities on their own websites.

8. Social enable your Website

Create profiles across the social web to promote your content. This does not entail you to have accounts to ALL available social media channels out there. Instead, focus on those you think will provide the biggest reach to your market.

It is conceived Social Media is different from SEO but they work hand-in-hand to promote your content to the world.

Also do appropriate market research on when is the best time to post your content to reach your market at their most convenient time.

9. Use Smart Anchor Texts

Many web owners get lazy using anchor texts for inbound and outbound links.

Anchor texts are very beneficial for cross-promotional efforts especially with other web owners. The more detailed your inbound and outbound anchor texts, the more search engines learns about your content.

If you can request a blogger or web owner to use a descriptive anchor text when hyperlinking your website, do so.

10. Repurpose your Content

Use slideshare, quora, docstoc, etc. Make an ebook collating all your previous content. Use bits of your content as scheduled tweets. Refer your content on a forum discussion, etc. There are so many ways to recycle content. Make the most of the content that you have to reach more people in your market.

Conclusion

These are only some of SEO tips and tricks to help you in making the search engines “like” your website for increase online visibility. If you have any questions or information to add to this article, don’t hesitate to contact us or reply to this article.

The website is currently one of the most important tools business owners use to run their companies; be it as a marketing tool, a source of information or a simple way of communicating to stakeholders. Right now, two of the more popular ways of handling business on the internet is through social media, specifically Facebook, and/ or a website.

Ever since Facebook’s introduction in 2004, people have developed different uses for it in their lives: to form groups, promote parties/ events, or as an online platform for businesses. It really has its advantages, it’s free, it has a billion users and very simple to use.

Photo credit: _Untitled-1 / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

So how does the website even begin to compare to it?

Here are 4 reasons why the website is still and will always be more important than Facebook:

The website is yours and Facebook is not – Remember social media sites like Friendster and MySpace? What are they now? If Facebook disappears, your business disappears with it. A website will not do that, though. It will stay for good, as long as you are maintaining it, and it grows in value, as long as you are taking care of it.
People look for your website – Because this isn’t how social media works. Many people believe that Facebook is currently “the place to be”, but this may also lie on what type of business you have. Other forms of social media may be more effective, like Linkedin or Pinterest. A well-marketed website, on the other hand, makes your target audience look for YOU.
Your Website does not stop working – With so many people using Facebook, it is very difficult to get through all the noise. Sometimes, you actually have to time it properly. An efficiently working website though, is around 24/7. A customer/ client researching about your products and services at 1AM? With a website, no problem.
Selling through your website might be easier – because people using Facebook generally have a different mindset. A pitch through a PM won’t work. Maybe to provide customer support or as a communication tool, Facebook can be effective. But many businesses have still been struggling with this.

Don’t get this article wrong though, social media presence is still very important. There are still many features in a social media tool that is more effective than a website. BUT, a website is still MORE important than any social media tool, including Facebook, because above anything else, it is your own piece of property in the vast world of the internet.

At the end of the day it is not an “either-or” concern, but actually an “and” solution. It is somehow better to have both a website AND social media presence for better online success.

To learn more about this and developing your own website, you can reach us via Viiworks website or call us at +632-846-8844 or email us at info@viiworks.com.