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.

Photo credit: Stuck in Customs / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA

Social media is defined as “the interaction among people in which they create, share, and/or exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks”, most usually through the internet. It has been around since the 90’s and has consistently evolved into what it is now, a super-fast highway of information, used by many people around the world to communicate and interact.

As social media evolves, certain trends also develop due to the changes brought about by this evolution. When new social media technology is introduced, it is quite likely that a new social media trend will follow suit.

For 2013 and 2014, here are some of the significant social media trends that many should keep their eyes on:

Photo credit: Thom Watson / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA

1. Social Content is King: Content has become a foundation on which social media marketing efforts are built on. With the Google+ platform, content becomes even more important in archiving and indexing search results.

2. Social Media Content Management is Costly: Digital marketers are beginning to realize that even if social networks are free, the resources needed for social media management are wide in scope and expensive. Researching and developing content, publishing and managing, consume so much time and require skills that cannot be found anywhere so easily.

Photo credit: Matt Hamm / Foter.com / CC BY-NC

3. Twitter will soon be cooler: Twitter has already penetrated the minds of many a youth and is no longer a mysterious social networking tool. Brands will definitely be looking into focusing more on how twitter will be extending their reach.

Photo credit: Poster Boy NYC / Foter.com / CC BY

4. Facebook will still have its Grip on Social Networking: And will still continue its strong growth and dominance as the basic social network of choice since it has already established itself for mobile ads and integrated itself with different apps and platforms. Even with Google+, it still has the potential to thrive since platforms usually complement each other, than compete with each other.

Photo credit: Cаt / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA

5. Visuals are the Key to getting Attention: For example, Pinterest has transformed from a way to share images into a way to refer sales for online stores. It has even surpassed Facebook in some cases, as a platform that creates revenue.

Though visual social media trends are still young, it is rapidly evolving and impacting the interphases and designs of many platforms. Make sure to always consider using high resolution images in designing and creating your content.

Photo credit: http://johnpolacek.github.io

6. Responsive is now a Standard: When developing social mobile web content, always take into consideration that the users will also be using their tablets and/ or smartphones. Responsive web technology is now the norm with many new websites.

These trends may seem intimidating and confusing to many, but they can actually be turned into opportunities for starting or even old companies. Just make sure that you are up to date, since the fast pace of technology is bringing about more changes in the web’s social media trends.

To know more about social media trends and how your company can be up-to-date, contact Viiworks or by calling at +63 02 846 8844 for inquiries.