Tag Archive for: Search Engine Journal

No Shortcuts for True Social Media Success

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Social media has exploded over the past five years, especially for the marketing of businesses. Why? The simple answer is because it’s free. But, while it is free to use, in order to be successful on social media, you have to invest a lot of your own time and effort.

There are opportunities for you to get all of those ‘Likes’ and followers you desire overnight though. Ellen Gipko, at Search Engine Journal, discovered multiple freelance job postings in search of, or offering, ‘Likes’ or followers for a price.

While having more ‘Likes’ than the competition may initially draw people in, they aren’t sticking around if your page is a ghost town. And what good are 500 Twitter followers if they don’t interact with you and create an interesting, entertaining forum?

There seems to be no evidence that having a boat-load of “REAL USA LIKES” on your Facebook page improves your SEO rankings either.

So while you may be jealous that your main competitor’s profile boasts more ‘Likes’ than yours, remember that old saying: C.R.E.A.M. or Content Rules Everything Around Me. If you put in the leg, er finger work, you’ll get the ‘Likes’ and followers and have a reputation to grow on your success.

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SEO is More Than Keyword Targeting, Some Learn the Hard Way

Many SEO companies know that sometimes their clients have in mind that they must rank for a specific keyword. No other options are acceptable for them. And even though you try to tell them that ranking for that keyword will take a great amount of time and effort because of their competition or that ranking for that keyword isn’t worth the effort they think it is, they do not budge.

It can be intensely frustrating (check out this story at Search Engine Journal for a good example) and even if you accept the request by the client, sometimes they are not happy with the results produced even if/when you satisfy their needs. What can be learned from this?

If you need SEO for your site, realize that keyword targeting is still important but is not the ONLY thing SEO does. SEO is about generation of quality traffic. If you focus only on ranking for keywords, you’re missing a lot. When you show up for keywords on the SERPs it’s good as a testament to the work that you’ve done, but are you getting quality traffic for those positions and those keywords?

In many cases the keywords you get better traffic from may not be the keywords you’re actively checking. The best way to find these are to check your Analytics tools to see what people are finding you with on the search engines.

Real SEO brings quality traffic to the site in many different ways, not purely from specific keywords you might be targeting. This has changed especially since the Panda and Penguin updates – overoptimization of specific keywords is penalized even more readily now. So if you’re focusing on just one keyword, that runs a big risk of making all of your rankings worse than they were before, even using what used to be fully functional SEO tactics.

If you do hire a professional SEO team, keep in mind that they should be doing work beyond just trying to rank for specific keywords, and if they don’t, be cautious. And don’t expect rankings to be the only positive results from this work – you should want to get some quality traffic from the work being done. Good rankings is just extra gravy on top that you can look at and be happy about.

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How To Evaluate SEO Efforts

Trying to show the results of SEO is not just doing a search on your targeted keywords and viewing the latest position.  It’s more than just that. Read more

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How Do Breadcrumbs and SEO Mix?

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You may have noticed on Google lately that some of the listings are starting to show slightly different details on the results.  They’re putting breadcrumbs in, to help people see exactly what categories those results fit into.  How can you tell?  Instead of showing the blatant web site address, they’re putting greater than signs (“>”) between categories in that space.  That way, you know what site the page belongs to, but you don’t know the specific address, you know the categories the subpage that has shown belongs to.

This is one way Google has adjusted their algorithm to help users navigate the search engine results pages, but how else can you use breadcrumbs, in your own site?  One of my favorite internet marketers Ann Smarty has a detailed explanation on Search Engine Journal.  The key is to make sure you use them to help the user, not to help the search engines (a good rule to follow in general).

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