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Link building in 2012: predictions and changes

Carlo Pandian — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 12:40:02 +0000

As Google gets new updates and the algorithm becomes smarter, the job of SEOs has to modify its practices in order to keep up. As my main activity is link building I am always testing new ways to deliver great results and to anticipate trends. I strongly believe that social mentions and back links have an equal weight for rankings, saying that, I have compiled these suggestions to get the most out of your link building campaigns:

When you are looking to publish a guest post for your clients or get a link, avoid evaluating your host with the old criteria: Page Rank, DA, MozRank. Nowadays it is more important if your contact has a good amount of followers and fans because you need to get tweets and likes out from your guest blogging activities.

Make a good use of Social Bookmarking tools and open themed accounts for every industry you are working for. After that remember to bookmark all your links and articles out there. If you want to be more efficient organise a community of people that bookmark your content, that will make your content attractive for the search engine and it will be indexed quickly with good social signals.

When you are doing guest blogging, maximise your effort. Tweet about a new post from the client social media account; ask the blogger to do the same and social bookmark everything.

Establish online relationships and start multiple collaborations. I have a great new idea, which is to get in touch students with businesses they are interested to work for. This way you can really set up new ways of producing great content for free.

As Google+ is definitely supporting the creation of personas (now you can connect articles to authors via G+) every business should choose a public speaker that can produce useful content for the web. It is something that was already in the sight as some companies started to use this strategy on Twitter for customer service.

If you want to talk about link building in 2012, drop me a tweet @tugagency

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Top 5 SEO tips for Mum Bloggers

Carlo Pandian — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 16:32:35 +0000

Thanks to Claire from BrightonMums, i am happy to share some SEO expertise with UK mum bloggers community. Feel free to connect with Tug, the marketing agency I am working for and learn more about how to promote your site.
Drop me a tweet @Tugagency if you have any questions!

Firstly, I would recommend you to use these suggestions carefully as you shouldn’t change your editorial style in order to be SEO friendly. Let’s get straight to the practice and see how a mom blog can meet Google standards:

1) Look at what people search with Google Keywords tool. In order to reach these users you should include some of these terms in the title tags, alt tag of images and/or in the first 100 characters of the post.

2) If you work with WordPress, our suggested platform, install any SEO pack in order to personalise meta descriptions and title tags with the keywords that people search for and that describe your article. Google XML sitemap is another great plug-in that creates a map of your site and send it to the search engine. If you don’t use WordPress, check online on how to optimize the title tag and the description of your posts and how to submit a sitemap to Google.

3) Create social media (Twitter, Facebook, Google+) and bookmarking (Reddit, Stumbleupon, Delicious and Digg) profiles for your blogs and share your content online. For Twitter remember to include related hash tags while for Facebook and G+ work include images. Sometimes ask to share your article if you feel that it can be of interest for the community. In 2012 social mentions are going to be an important ranking factor.

4) Add your blog to online free directories and write guest blogs with a link back to your one. The more links which are pointing back to you, the higher your ranking will be. Another good technique is to answer questions (Yahoo Answer and Quora) and comment other posts with useful information.

5) This is a great infograph on blog copywriting that explains how you can improve the readability of your text. I would add that you should link to other similar articles in your site if there are any.

Share this post to help build the great British mum blogger community!

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Series of Fun Facts: Part lll

rainelda — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 12:12:34 +0000

It was snowing this morning! Did you see that? Outside everything is dedicated to Christmas – the lights, the shops, the markets and now even a little bit of snow. So I decided not to do anything related to Christmas, but pull together fun stuff that is going on in the World Wide Web.

This time I wanted to look at the things that are really popular at the moment in the Twitter environment, when people are trying to have fun:

9GAG is a comedy website set in Hong Kong and hosted in the United Stated. It launched in 2008 and currently is very popular amongst people. A lot of people are sharing the images they find in 9GAG via Twitter. The site is best known for recurring use of internet memes. It is among the 500 most visited websites ranking 468 place globally. According to alexa.com the sites users tend to be under the age of 35 and they tend to be childless. Visitors to this site spend approximately 64 seconds on each pageview and a total of 13 minutes on the site during each visit. I must admit it is pretty addictive sometimes.
What internet memes do you pass over? I personally use hashtags at the moment, although I’m keeping my options open. So internet memes are basically a concept that spreads via the internet. While doing this research, I found out that the earliest usage of meme in general is in the book created by Richard Dawkins called “The Selfish Gene” – it was published in 1976. Internet meme is an idea that is propagated and spreads through the internet. A meme can be a hyperlink, video, picture, website, hashtag or just a word or phrase. One of the most popular internet memes are misspellings, such as the word “more” as “moar” or “the” as “teh” simply because misspelling is very common. Internet memes spread from person to person through various places like blogs, news sources and social networks, so no wonder Twitter is full with them. Academically, researchers model how the memes evolve and predict which memes will survive and spread throughout the Web, while commercially they are used in viral marketing where they are an inexpensive form of mass advertising.
Rage comic is an extremely popular internet meme at the moment. It is a comic made from a stock set characters, commonly known as rage faces and centre on the rage guy. It started on 4chan in 2008 and in 2009 the meme experienced an upsurge in popularity. In 2010 shirts with the rage face started to appear and were sold by Hot Topic. The comic usually focus on small moments in daily life from the perspective of a protagonist the reader can identify with. The face seems a bit creepy to me, though.

And a little discovery for the ending. The most popular Twitter hashtags in 2011 were:

#egypt
#tigerblood
#threewordstoliveby
#idontunderstandwhy
#japan
#improudtosay
#superbowl

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Series of Fun Facts: Part I

rainelda — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 12:14:41 +0000

It’s Friday, so lets tap ourselves on the shoulders for work well done this week (as I truly believe that no matter what, this week was good for everyone is one way or the other).

Do you like to find out different, interesting information? I know I do. Especially those little fun facts, that won’t crucially change your rhythm, but gives you that “Hmm, I didn’t know that – it’s interesting” feeling.

Fun Fact Nr. 1: We all know that YouTube is a video-sharing website. I personally found interesting that it was created by 3 former PayPal employees (Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim) in February 2005, so in 2012 little YouTube is going to be 7 years old. YouTube is based in San Bruno, California, but it’s early headquarters were situated above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California. According to a story that has often been repeated in the media, Hurley and Chen developed the idea for YouTube after they had experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party at Chen’s apartment. Karim didn’t attend the party and denied that it actually occurred, while Hurley commented that the idea of YouTube being found after a dinner party was probably a marketing idea to create a true and digestible story. The very first YouTube video was entitled “Me at the zoo” and shows founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo. The video is still available: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw It is 18 seconds long, was shot at 8:27PM on the 23rd April 2005 and posted live that same day.

Fun Fact Nr. 2: Did you know that you are able to express yourself in 140 characters and allow other people read it a.k.a. tweet nearly 6 years now? Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched in July 2006. Twitter gained worldwide popularity with over 300 MILLION users and generating over 300 MILLION tweets per day. Twitter’s origins lie in a brainstorming session held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. Dorsey introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group. The original project code name for the service was twttr. Work on the project started on March 21, 2006, when Dorsey published the first Twitter message at 9:50PM “just setting up my twttr”. The first Twitter prototype was used as an internal service for Odeo employees and the full version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006. Twitter spun off into its own company in April 2007.

Fun Fact Nr. 3: As a blogger I can say that personally after trying Google’s blogspot.com and wordpress. com the second option is more closer to my convenience. WordPress first appeared in 2003 as a joint effort between Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. The name WordPress itself was suggested by a friend of Mullenweg Christine Selleck. WordPress won several awards – in 2007 it won a Packt Open Source CMS Award, then in 2009 won the Packt best Open Source CMS Award. In 2010 WordPress won the Hall of Fame CMS catefory in the 2010 Open Source Awards and in 2011 won the Open Source Web App of the Year Award at the Critters. WordPress is used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet‘s top 1 million websites and as of August 2011 powers 22% of all new websites. Currently it is the most popular CMS in use on the Internet. As of February this year, the version 3.0 was downloaded 32.5 MILLION TIMES.

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How to use Twitter search and Followerwonk to reach bloggers?

Carlo Pandian — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 17:23:07 +0000

Many link builders struggle to find contacts and establish long term relationships with bloggers. In fact when you are doing the blogger outreach it is important to contact the right audience to build links in coherent content websites. If Google (you may have used the search operator to investigate your community) has been your main tool to find contacts, the introduction of Followerwonk will far expand your list of bloggers and this will result in getting more leads.

These are some suggestions you may want to use when you are planning a guest blog, organizing a competition or developing social content for you clients:

1) Identify your audience

That’s the first step and it will provide you with the characteristics of your stakeholders for example mums, sport lovers, food bloggers, geeks or more particular niches like hyper local news sites, events directories etc.. Every group has specific interests and requests so you would be better to tailor your email to their needs.

2) Followerwonk search Bios section

This social media management tool is integrated with your Twitter account and lets you search through bios, analyze and track followers, and find influencers within a specific niche. With this i have been able to easily reach different audiences. Choose 1-2 keywords that represent your target that these may have included in their bios section. Choose a particular location if you are offering something related to a specific area (for example: a book about Scotland) or a certain amount of followers if you want to generate buzz through Twitter. In particular i have noticed that including the keywords “blogger” or “blog” in the description would provide you with a list of good ones usually managed by highly participative writers that contribute constantly and are usually prepared to collaborate with you.

3) Investigate hash tags that your audience use

Some bloggers participate in online debates including hash tags in their tweets. As online marketers use #seo to highlight related posts and comments, mum bloggers that have been to the #cybermummy conference have also exchanged opinions with their peers. If you can find out some hash tags connected to your niche, this will help you to contact Twitter users that can contribute at building links.

In conclusion, it is arguable that having a look at the buzz on certain topics in Twitter and in social media is a good move to compile your link building outreach gaining precious and useful contacts. It is now up to you to find a good and creative strategy to get links from them.

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How a company blog can improve the SEO of your main website

Carlo Pandian — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 11:00:08 +0000

Internet marketers have proven that a company blog is a great tactic to establish a relationship with customers outside the typical point of sales, namely product and service pages, and the shopping cart.So why are you employing the effort of curating and writing this content for your blog when it could be a good asset for the SEO of your most important pages, the ones that convert visitors into customers!

These are 4 suggestions why it would be good to use this content in your corporate blog to boost your rankings:

1) Keywords
As you have already done the keyword research for your website, this is useful for the blog copywriting as well. You should target a specific keyword for every blog post, this means you must include this in the title and in the body (repeated 3-4 times) of the article.

2) Links
Inside the blog post you should deep link in your website with a keyword rich anchor text. An example would make this step clearer: you sell sweets online and you have just written an entry about the biggest pistachio chocolate ever made. In this case you should link to the page that shows fancy flavour bites on sales or the biggest bar you offer.

3) Social media
As soon you have produced and uploaded a great piece of content, you need readers and you want them to share the article. Use your company Twitter and Facebook profile to syndicate the content.
For the first account, you may be better crafting an appealing tweet with a shorten link to your blog post and preferably a related hash tag. For Facebook, use your fan page and invite your customers to participate into a conversation, for example ask what is the sweetest thing they have ever done.

4) Social Bookmarking
The social bookmarking services store website address and can be considered as article directories. They have the power to bring tons of visitors to your blog and consequently send positive social signals to Google. When you post is live you should bookmark it in Reddit, Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon. You may need to say to your colleges/friends to do that as well!

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Google+ Brand Pages

hannah — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 13:28:03 +0000

Google seems intent on rivalling Facebook in numerous ventures. Where previously Google+ only allowed individuals to hold profiles, they have now opened their doors to any business, group or entity. However, reactions have been mixed.

One issue arises in the fact that although it is very easy to set up a brand page, this also means it is very easy to set up a fake brand page. The biggest hurdle when setting up a fake brand page is you have to agree to Google’s Page’s Terms, which state that only users “with authority over the subject matter” can set up a Google+ Page. If these terms are then breached, Google will or take down your page.

Google has attempted to take steps to prevent this by providing verification badges to confirm authenticity of the page. Jim Prosser, a Google rep – “Verification badges are designed to help our users find what they’re looking for by ensuring that people, brands and businesses that are subject to broad-based impersonation are protected,” he says. “Because of this, it’s intended primarily for global or broadly known brands.” Such badges appear as a check the right of the brand’s name on its Google+ page; if you run your cursor over the check mark, it reads “verified name.”

Google has always previously had a lot to say about fake accounts but their current relaxed approach does not seem to reflect this. Facebook and Twitter have tighter regulations when creating pages and hopefully as Google+ grows the same will be said for them.

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What would you recommend on Twitter?

rainelda — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 10:43:32 +0000

It is not a secret that the best advertising resource is the word of mouth. And what better word of mouth could be in the internet environment than Twitter? I guess Facebook’s quick wall posts, but lets admit, they are not the same.

According to a new study by Constant Contact and Chadwick Martin Bailey, people who follow brands on Twitter say they are more likely to buy products from the brands they follow and more likely to recommend those brands to friends (a.k.a. followers).

The research discovered that among surveyed Twitter users who follow at least one brand on Twitter, fully one half (50%) say they are more likely to buy products from brands they follow on Twitter. An interesting fact is

that male brand followers are more likely to buy a brand’s products after following it on Twitter than female followers (55% vs. 45% – not a huge difference, but still 10% are pretty noticeable).

Following brands on Twitter motivates people to recommend those brands: Overall six in ten brand followers say they are likely to recommend a few (42%) or many (18%) brands to friends after following them on Twitter. Interestingly people who are under 35 are more likely to recommend the brands they follow on Twitter to their friends than people who are 35 to 49.

And would you recommend a brand you follow on Twitter to your friends?

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Why you should try Topsy?

Carlo Pandian — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 12:13:35 +0000

What’s going on in the search engine market this week? Google announced that it is going to retain keywords data from the logged in USA queries while it develops its PPC product for example the dynamic search ads. On the other hand, Bing seems to have improved its results as much as they can but still seems to look very similar to their fellow search engines! Its not finished there because MC Hammer is launching a keywords relationship based engine that has a completely different approach than the others and it is called WireDoo.

Will it be as a long-lasting success as U Can’t Touch This?

What happens if you want to search social media conversations instead of the websites? Try Topsy, a great real-time search engine for the social web. It is a great tool with functions that are useful for SEOs and marketers looking to develop a conversation inside the web. Here you can see some of the features:

-Search tweets by keywords
-Influential twitter accounts within a topic
-Visualise the mentions of a keyword for the past 30 days
-Trending in Twitter
-Search photos and videos
-Create email alert

Apart for the functionality, you can use Topsy for two tasks:

1)Produce great SEO assets, in particular articles and content

2)Link-Building

Whenever you are planning to write a series of blog posts, it is great to double check what has been said in the social web, and of course it can used to take advantage of the seasonality of some search queries . You may notice that too many people are talking about the same things but they haven’t touched on a point that you want to.

On the other hand, it is functional for link-building to find bloggers that accept guest writers or host competitions. A simple search of “guest blog” or “competition” plus your niche will help you to find out contacts that usually have higher degrees of online presence and communication. In terms of scalability this will make the process of the blogger outreach quicker and on the other hand you can contact twitter users to promote your content in a certain niche.

In conclusion, as social media is getting more attention with sharing buttons available in most of the successful sites even from bloggers and publishers, Topsy is a real tool that adds a new opportunity to build links with quality sites.

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Twitter Launches “Twitter Web Analytics”

Carlos Rabanillo — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 10:44:48 +0000

Do you want to know how much traffic your website gets from Twitter?

How many people clicked on the share button?

Until now we had to rely on external measurement services to get a rough idea, but from now on it will be Twitter itself who will provide analytics data to website owners and community managers … Which should make reporting on Twitter activity a lot easier.

Twitter presented “Twitter Web Analytics” on its official blog, its own measuring tool, which will offer website owners more data about their site’s integration with Twitter.

The new data and the tools itself are provided by BackType, the analytics company that Twitter bought last July.

The tool is free and still a beta. Only a few testers and Twitter partners will be able to try the new tool (at least for a few days), rumors are than in a couple of weeks “Twitter Web Analytics” will be available to all website owners.

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