SEO & PPC. Friends or foes? And which one really is more effective in an online marketing campaign? The truth is that they are not only friends but “coworkers” as well, and one is not necessarily more effective than the other. They serve different purposes but working together they create a synergy not possible as two independent parts.

PPC is great because you can be up and running in a matter of minutes. SEO, on the other hand, is more of a long term investment that takes some time and patience to finally start paying off. When you do get good organic placement through your SEO efforts though, the return on investment can be quite remarkable. Even when you do achieve top organic rankings, this still doesn’t mean you should just drop your PPC campaign altogether. There are some real advantages to maintaining both a strong PPC and SEO campaign together as outlined below.

1. The Best Keywords

PPC can be a great testing ground for potential keywords to target in your SEO campaign. You can run multiple PPC ads and target several different keyword phrases to see which ones not only drive traffic to your site, but actually convert. With this information, you can then target only the highest converting keywords in your SEO campaign. It takes a lot of time, effort, and money to place a competitive keyword at the top of organic search results, so you want to be sure you’re targeting the best keywords possible before you embark on your SEO campaign or target new keywords in your current SEO campaign.

2. Higher Click Through Rates & Conversions

When sites eventually achieve top organic rankings, there is a tendency for the site owners to cut back on PPC spend because they feel they’ll get the click in the organic results anyways. However, studies show that the sum total is worth more than the individual parts. In other words, the additional benefits of having both PPC and organic placement more than pays for the PPC outlay.

As you can see in the example below, Hotels.com ranks #1 in organic search results for the search term “hotels”, but also pays for the top spot in the paid search results.

When your paid and organic listings show up together on the same search result page, users tend to place more trust in your site, and they will be more inclined to click on your website. And when they do, there is a higher probability that they will actually convert when on your site because you have already gained a slight boost in credibility in their eyes. They already see you as an established presence in that particular market.

3. Build Brand Recognition & Trust

When your site appears in multiple places on a search result page, you will start to build brand recognition and gain consumers’ trust.

4. Drown Out The Competition

As you start to gain a strong presence in both organic and PPC search results, your competition will struggle to get any sizeable share of the pie, and when you eventually dominate both the organic and PPC market, you may very well eventually drown out your major online competitors.

5. More Data to Analyze

If you run organic and PPC campaigns simultaneously, you will have twice the amount of data to analyze, to make educated and insightful changes, and then capitalize on.

6. Repurpose The Best Ad Copy

As you study your PPC campaign, you can determine which ads result in the best click through rate. This will help you in writing the best title tags and meta descriptions for the pages you’re targeting with your SEO campaign. The great thing about PPC ads is that you can figure out pretty quickly what ad copy works best pretty quickly.

Keep in mind that title tags are an important search engine ranking factor, so be sure to keep your key keywords phrases for a page in the title tag. Meta descriptions on the other hand have no real influence on organic rankings, so feel free to change your meta descriptions to whatever ad copy works best.

7. Improve Adwords Quality Score

A page that has been properly optimized for SEO should help improve your Adwords Quality Score for your targeted pages. This will result in better PPC placement for your ads as well as lower cost per click.

8. Maintain Site Traffic

When you launch a new site, it may take a short time for search engines to put their trust back into your new content and site. A PPC campaign can help maintain traffic to your site during this time period and help build legitimacy to your site once again. Increasing PPC spend can also help fill in for lost traffic due to a Google algorithm changes that may cause your organic rankings to drop. There may also be times when the PPC bidding for certain keyword phrases just goes too high, and when this occurs, you can start putting more emphasis on your SEO efforts for these keyword phrases while cutting back on your PPC budget for these phrases.

9. Target Competitor’s Brand Terms

If you were solely running a SEO campaign, it would not make much sense to target a competitor’s brand terms because this would require creating content focused around your competitor’s brand which in turn could benefit your competitor. However, it can make sense to target a competitor’s brand in a PPC campaign.

Just be sure your product or service really is superior to your competitor’s because if a user searched out your competitor specifically, your competitor is likely already one up on you. You’re going to have to convince them that their initial thought was wrong and that you actually have the product or service they really want.

10. Combat Negative PR

Sometimes bad things happen to even good companies. Employees do stupid things. Cars have to be recalled because of bad parts. Machinery goes bad and causes accidents. A good example of this is with the Gulf Oil Spill. During this time, BP bought several PPC ads relating to the term “oil spill” in order to address the public directly instead of relying on the press. The PPC ads help fill in until SEO efforts can place your website in a better organic position, and then together, you can properly address bad press head on.

Conclusion

To run an effective search marketing campaign and truly maximize online exposure and returns, a site should have both a good SEO and PPC campaign in place that work together to benefit the overall marketing campaign. SEO and PPC each serve different purposes, but when used together, they create a synergy that is not possible as two separate units.

What other advantages do you see for having both a SEO and PPC campaign working together?

SEO & PPC: Working Together To Maximize Returns is a post by SEO expert Shay Wright. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

This is not your parents Foursquare.

Remember the days playing this in school? Foursquare means business now!

Nor is this another rendition of Kick-The-Can!

This, ladies and gentlemen, is one of my favorite SoLoMo (Social Local Mobile) apps out there, and as a business it should be one of yours too! Let me ask you something…

Do you have a local business that thrives on needing new walk-in customers, and a business that values, more than life itself, repeat customers?

If you answered yes, and you better have, Foursquare is an application that you should deploy and use to help market your business immediately.

I keep hearing from business owners, looking for easy and inexpensive ways to get the word out about their business, and one of my go-to answers is always Foursquare.

They often look at me as if they have no clue as to what I am talking about, so I educate them on the value and opportunity, and in the end many still think it is too much work, or it may not work, or it may not be worth their time. Well, I say (shaking my fists in the air) YES it is!

Now let me ask you Mr. or Mrs. small business owner… How much real money does it cost you to run an ad on TV or radio? How about an ad in a local paper? How much are you spending on other marketing initiatives? Do you know how much Foursquare costs? Here is a hint… it’s FREE! (that’s less than air!)

The Basics of Foursquare:

Foursquare is a mobile (and desktop) application that allows patrons of your business to check-in to your location, and by doing so also alerting friends they are there. Users may also share their check-in to Facebook and Twitter, and they may leave a comment about your business and maybe even upload some photos as well. Social word of mouth does not get any better than this.

There is somewhat of a game element to Foursquare, and it all started out by allowing users to become “Mayor” of a business. I bet many of you:

• Did not know you were already on Foursquare (bet if you look will find your business)
• Did not know you probably have a Mayor of your establishment (shame, as you should treat your royalty well)
• Did not know you are ignoring this valuable platform (it’s OK, that is why I am here to help you)

At the moment, Foursquare has a lot of FREE tools they offer, and all you need to do is claim your spot, and start offering specials.

As I mentioned earlier, you may already be on the platform since Foursquare users create the locations. So get going! Claim and verify your location and you will be off to the races.

This is what the dashboard looks like for SEO.com.

Get a special at Jiffy Lube – Save some money? OK!

While we do value repeat business, we do not have walk-in traffic, so I am usually the mayor (where’s my crown?). But let’s say you are a resturaunt, a dry cleaner or a flower shop… from here, you can create specials such as:

• Discounts
• Freebies
• Loyalty Specials

Where Foursquare has hit he nail on the head is with their search capabilities. Foursquare has one of the most up-to-date local listing directories out there. Some may say it rivals Google. In fact Foursquare’s local listings power many other mobile phone applications such as Path (and many others).

Listings are first created by users. Superusers keep tabs on things like address changes, or if a business has closed, and can suggest changes be made to the listing etc. There are different ways to search:

• Best Nearby
• Specials
• Food
• Nightlife
• Coffee

But you can search for whatever you want… so let’s look at a couple of searches:

As a pure discovery engine, Foursquare is amazing. One night I may want to try a place friends rave about. And on another night I may want to try something new. Maybe it is a new pizza joint with a check-in deal to make it more enticing. And to you dear business owner, entice myself and others to try your place out and folks like me will spread the good word!

Foursquare is like having in-store Google analytics, but for humans!

Back in your admin area of Foursquare, you get some pretty cool data. You can see all sorts of visitor activity such as:

• Check-Ins at your venue
• Unique customers
• First time customers
• Top Visitors
• Recent Visitors
• People who liked your Venue
• And more

Do you get it? This is VERY valuable data! You can use this information to engage with your customers, learn what you do well, see where you can improve etc. But most of all listen, thank, and engage. If you have a great business, word will spread!

As an avid Foursquare user, I am always bummed because I do not see as many local businesses taking advantage of this platform. I am a “check-in-o-holic”, and I am always looking for a good deal, or a reason to try someplace new.

I know I may live in the Internet bubble, but I am not hearing your ads on the radio or TV, nor am I seeing them in the paper. Reach out to me where I am, where many more customers are. Build a legion of raving fans for your business, and  watch what can happen. And you can start doing that right now with Foursquare.

Now do not just claim your spot, and set up specials and call it good. Train your staff so they know to expect people coming in. Also, let current customers know you are on Foursquare. Maybe have a POP display at a table. Have staff let them know that if they check-in there is a discount. Get people engaged with your brand!

As with anything, there is no magic bullet. If you build it they will not necessarily come. Take advantage of Foursquare and other tools to help make your company more top of mind when someone says to themselves… “I want to try ___________, where should I go?”

I hope you enjoyed this post and, and I hope you now see why your business should be on Foursquare! Now get out there and start using this awesome platform.

If you have any other questions regarding Foursquare, leave them in the comments below and I will do my best to answer them for you.

You can also hit me up on all the major social networks.

Until next time…

Doc

Why Your Business Should Be On Foursquare Now! is a post by SEO expert Darin Berntson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

The title of this article could also be “How WILL Your Small Business MAKE Time for Social Media?”, but I thought I would keep it how it is to prove a point.

With social media growing exponentially and becoming more popular for businesses (and for staying in touch with your BFFs) you can’t afford not to take advantage of it as a small business owner.

Here are several reasons why you need to jump on board with social media and ways to find time for it. Trust me, if you want your business to increase and your brand awareness to jump through the roof, you will make time for it.

Social Media Stats

First of all, I want to quickly give some facts to convince you about the growth of social media and the impact it can have on your business.

• Facebook – The average person spends 1 out of every 7 minutes on Facebook (ZDNet)
• Twitter – Each and every day there are at least 340 million tweets (Twitter blog)
• LinkedIn – Financial customers on LinkedIn are more affluent than Facebook users (comScore)
• Pinterest – Predominantly used by women (All Twitter)
• Google+ – Predominantly used by men (CircleCount)

If you are a small business owner, you already understand the concept of “time=money” and may feel that there isn’t any room in the schedule or budget for social media. What if I told you there was a way to have a successful social media campaign that will make your brand more visible online without spending more time and money? Would you be on board? Well, here are some great tips that will help you squeeze in the time needed for you to benefit from the social media world.

Time to Make Time

You don’t necessarily have to cut out certain programs or work tasks to make time for social media. One of the easiest things you can do is include it while you are checking your daily emails first thing in the morning. Every business will have emails coming in and emails going out that need to be taken care of on a daily basis. Why not send out a Google+ post or like a Facebook status that someone else posted that relates to your business?

Fail to Plan, Plan to Fail

Effectively utilizing social media in your small business doesn’t have to take up a whole lot of time, especially if you take the time make a plan and stick to it. Figure out a time and schedule that works with your time and budget, while keeping in mind that it doesn’t need to be an exponential number.  You would be surprised at the results you can get from even doing an hour a week at the beginning. Effective planning, prioritizing and organization will help save time.

Consistency is Key

Well, not just consistency, but consistency while looking natural is key. It’s important to post on a consistent basis, but if you are only posting about things related to your company and posting them at the same time each day, it can look extremely unnatural to people. Even being active every other day and at varied times throughout the day will give you some great results.

Don’t Spread Yourself Too Thin

I quickly learned this lesson growing up while playing the board game “Risk”. The goal is to outsmart your opponent and conquer every country with your little armies.

I was so concerned with taking over every country in the world, that I would spread my armies out too thin and end up losing the game, getting mad, and storming out of the room (after flipping the board game over so the pieces flew everywhere of course. I hate losing to my sister).

Anyway, the point of that awesome story was to teach you that you don’t need to be active on EVERY single social media platform. Nobody has that kind of time. The smarter thing to do is to find the platforms that fit your industry niche and where you will find specific customers for your business.

The platforms you post on obviously depend on what you are selling and the audience you are trying to reach out to. So, do some investigating and you will quickly discover which social media platforms you could benefit from. Then, listen to the users in your industry and create some unique content around the things that the users want to hear/talk about.

Planning an effective content campaign is a completely separate beast on its own, but definitely start by listening to your potential customers and making lists of things you could write about.

Be Professional – Your Brand and Expertise Will Shine Through

Respond to posts, answer questions, retweet, repost, be involved in the social community, and write articles in a manner that makes you sound like you are a professional in your industry.

This will gain your users trust and will help with spreading the word about your brand. I know that I would be much more likely to share a post, status, or article from someone that I thought was a professional in that industry. Even if you are quickly responding to someone’s article, rather than saying something like, “Bro, this article was totes awesome! YOLO!” you should sound more professional like, “Gentleman and friend, this particular article has deeply touched my soul and every fiber of my being.” (It helps to have a British accent as well) Also, be sure to add any particular knowledge that you can share with people that would help you come across as a professional in your industry.

I think you get my point.

Get Started Today

The basic social media campaign can take very little time and very little effort to get started, but the benefits it can have in the long run will be well worth your time. With the recent changes and additions that Google has made, including the implementation of the rel=author/publisher tag, the heavy push towards Google+, and the consistent increase in social media, it’s safe to say that you should begin, or should have already begun, your own social media efforts for your small business.

How Your Small Business Can Find Time For Social Media is a post by SEO expert Matt Nickle. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Image optimization is an important part of running a successful eCommerce website. Since people usually begin their search for a product online, your products will have as good of a chance as any to end up in front of a customer, as long as your images are optimized.

Here are some tips for getting your images to display in Google’s image search:

1. Optimize image names

If you have hundreds (or thousands) of photos in your store, optimizing each one can be a daunting task.  There are distinct benefits to spending the time to do this, though. In the same way the right proportion of keywords in the content of a web page can help that page rank for the keyword in the search engines, the proper use of keywords in your images can help them rank as well.

Let’s take this particular photo as an example:

The file names for your product images should be descriptive, and include the right amount of keywords. Consider the:

• image file name
• image alt tag
• image name

For this product example, instead of keeping PRODUCTIMAGE22.jpg for the file name, a better choice would be to name the file: Gray-3-Button-Mens-Suit.jpg.

There are a few variations you could use to name this file, but generally it’s best to look at your web analytics to see how your customers are searching for the product. This thread on the SEOmoz Q&A section explains some best practices for image file names.

The alt tag for the image is also important, since a browser will display the alt text when the image can’t be displayed properly. Alt tags are also important for the visually impaired, as they rely on software programs to read the image alt tags to communicate what the images are.

Every image should have a corresponding alt tag. For simplicity, you can use the file name for the image’s alt tag, without the hyphens.

2. Optimize image load times

It may not seem like much, but a few extra seconds of load time on your website can cost you customers. According to Kissmetrics, most consumers wait about 5 seconds on their mobile device before they leave the website. Desktop users are even less patient, waiting 3 seconds on average.

Here’s a good rule of thumb for images: the larger the file size, the longer it will take for the page to load. To combat this problem, you can decrease the size of each image by compressing them.

If your eCommerce site has only a handful of images to compress, you can use any of these image editing tools:

• PicMonkey
• Pixlr
• Pic Resize
• Gimp
• FotoFlexer

If you have hundreds (or even thousands) of photos, compressing them one at a time is probably not a viable option.  If that’s the case for you, there are a few tools that can compress images in batches.

If your eCommerce platform runs on WordPress, download any of these plugins and run your images through:

• WP Smush.it
• Cloudinary
• EWWW Image Optimizer

There are other, similar tools and extensions for platforms like Magento and Joomla.

3. Choose optimal image file types

Different types of image files can affect the performance of a website, so it’s important to choose the right file type for the right situation.

Three of the most common image file types are:

• JPEG
• PNG
• GIF

JPEG formats typically offer a low file size and good image quality for products, while GIFs are better for smaller icons. PNGs can show more colors than JPEGs and GIFs, but file sizes can be considerably larger.

Here are examples of each type of file:

.PNG file at 195.3 KB

.JPG file at 68.7 KB

.GIF file at 51.3 KB

4. Create an image sitemap

Google says their goal with image search is to display the most relevant results to users, and that statement is no different than their goal for web search. Along with optimizing your images, you can increase the chance of having your product images indexed by creating an image sitemap, and uploading it to Google Webmaster Tools. This is especially important if your product images are served using JavaScript, and aren’t showing up in the page’s source code. You can also add images to your main sitemap.

There are a number of tools that can generate a sitemap:

• XML-Sitemaps.com
• Inspyder
• Google sitemap generator

5. Integrate social sharing into product images

Social media is an integral part of digital marketing, and social signals do play a part in search engine rankings.

There’s an opportunity for products to gain traction on bookmarking sites like Pinterest, especially if they’re products for the home and garden, or related to the beauty, fashion or food industries. The larger the net your brand casts, the greater chance your website has at attracting new visitors.

To increase the likelihood of your product pages being shared and linked to, social sharing buttons should be added to each page of the website, including product pages and product category pages.

I have always been a fan of Zappos, and they do a nice job of integrating social sharing buttons on their product pages:

“If your product images are beautiful and unique, your potential of achieving additional traffic from the [social] networks alone will be incentive enough to utilize this approach,” says SEO consultant Preston Van Dyke.

“For instance, Everlane.com takes a really unique approach to their product category pages. Check out their Oxford shirts page as an example. Rather than just laying out their shirts in the boring table, like so many eCommerce  category pages do, they take an infographic-ish approach with images. I love these pages for a lot of reasons, but they need social sharing integrated right into the experience on the category page.”

Don’t invest time in a social network that isn’t producing any fruit, however. If your customers are not using Pinterest, and Pinterest doesn’t provide any value, don’t incorporate it into your strategy. You should focus time and effort into the social networks that your customers are spending time on, and are will to share and engage with your brand.

–

With any process, greater insight comes with testing, so continually test and refine the layout and design of your product pages. Conduct interviews, commission surveys and see how customers react to changes. How can changing the angle of the product views increase revenue? Would multiple angles and colors increase conversions? How about increasing or decreasing the number of product images on a page?

Continually ask how you can bring traffic to your products through different means. While image optimization is a part of inbound marketing as a whole, you can increase the opportunity for conversions and revenue with a solid strategy behind your product images.

Image Optimization Tips For Online Stores is a post by SEO expert Andrew Johnson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Every once in a while, you come across a piece of information that revolutionizes the way you perform. I had that epiphany the other day in Google Analytics as I was experimenting with custom dashboards, and I want to share these downloads with you. Hopefully you can glean some information about the performance of your website through these custom dashboards that you otherwise wouldn’t have noticed.

What are custom dashboards?

There is so much data to be discovered in search Analytics, that it can sometimes be difficult to find the KPIs that can prove the value of an SEO campaign.

With custom dashbards, you can segment the metrics you need at a glance to understand how visitors are interacting with your site. All the important information is there in once place, and you can export that data into a PDF report to share with your company’s decision makers.

You can either set up your own custom dashboards in Google Analytics, or you can search for pre-made dashboards that will import into your Analytics profile with a few clicks.

The importance of website Analytics

For humans, introspection is an important component to being effective in life. We can’t ever begin to understand how other people view us unless we take the time for self-reflection.

The same is true for businesses and their web properties.

Analytics is all about discovering and tracking patterns in data, and how visitors interact with the pages, products and services listed on a website.

“One of the beautiful parts of using any clickstream analysis tool is the ability to segment data that provides actionable insight,” says Brian Jensen, an SEO Manager with SEO.com. “Data and metrics presented by themselves really don’t tell much of a story without some point of comparision. By providing this context we can get a better understanding of what’s really happening.”

So, without further adieu…

Here are some of my favorite Google Analytics custom dashboards:

To download these dashboards, open your Google Analytics profile, and then come back to this post, copy the URL for the download and paste it into the address bar. You can download the dashboards directly into your profile.

1. Personal blogger dashboard by DashboardJunkie.com

With this custom dashboard, you can see the basic metrics of you blog, written in plain, jargon-free English. View search terms, screen resolution, links, mobile traffic, visitor locations, visitor source, mobile metrics and popularity of content among others.

Download here >> http://www.dashboardjunkie.com/getdashboard/50

2. SEO monitoring dashboard, by Mike Meisner

Download this custom dashboard to see how well your site performs in organic search. You can view metrics related to non-branded search terms including conversions from keywords, organic visits and organic search referrals.

Download here >> https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?type=dashboard&uid=qBF59OdCT26RW9DtjiPbpg

3. Brand monitoring dashboard, by Koozai

I love this dashboard. Are you keeping track of your brand in the search engines? With this dashboard, you can see information like the number of people coming to your site through a brand name search, which social sites are sending visitors and the important hubs for your brand.

Enter your brand name into each of the widgets to track these metrics.

Download here >> https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=5naWKM71TeChQ2-lyYfseA

4. Social media dashboard, by Justin Cutroni

Track the important metrics from your social media strategy, like revenue, shared content, visitors from social, actions taken, referral traffic and more. This is a great dashboard to show how effective your efforts in social media are, and where to improve your campaign.

Download here >> http://troni.me/GASocialDash

5. Mobile Ecommerce dashboard, by Google

If you want to see how mobile users interact with your Ecommerce site, download this dashboard. You can see actions taken by visitors from social media, the bounce rate and average visit duration, mobile revenue and average order value, bounce rates for specific mobile devices and more.

Download here >> http://goo.gl/W6Wki

6. Site performance dashboard, by Google

How is page speed affecting your visitors’ experience on your site? With this dashboard, you can bring useful data to your IT team, and identify performance issues related to the website or servers.

Download here >> http://goo.gl/oJ2MU

7. [not provided] analysis dashboard, by Google

Technically, this is a custom report (not a dashboard), but is a worthwhile download. You can drill down into the data coming from [not provided] keywords in Google search, and view metrics like bounce rate, % new visits and revenue.

Download here >> http://goo.gl/x6cl5

8. PPC dashboard, by Koozai

See the effectiveness of your pay-per-click campaigns in one, single dashboard. View visits from PPC, impressions, goal completions and CTR. You can also segment the data by campaign.

Download here >> https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=Q4mOwZEzR9eNFW8Y1Dtv0A

9. Top content & searches dashboard, by Blue Riot Labs

Here’s a quick view at your top performing site content, which is great if you need to pull out some wins for a report. Includes top-visited pages, keywords and top referral sites.

Download here >> https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?type=dashboard&uid=7WuTTiykTZGHET_Srztb3Q

10 Visitor technology dashboard, by Justin Cutroni

I’ve saved the best for last! With this report, you can view visitor metrics like traffic from specific operating systems, mobile, browser popularity, screen resolutions, and conversion rates segmented by browser.

Download here >> https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=C8ug-THUTUeX-OA81X8G3w

As with any of these custom dashboards, you can rearrange the placement of the widgets, edit the data pulled within each widget, or even delete the ones you don’t need within each dashboard. All that matters is that you’re getting the information you need to prove the value of your SEO campaign, and focus on areas of your website that need attention.

What are your favorite Google Analytics custom dashboards? Share them in the comments!

Prove The Value of SEO With These Free Google Analytics Dashboards is a post by SEO expert Andrew Johnson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

If you build it they will come? False.

The online world is a competitive place. In addition to having a killer website, you also need to update your website with great content. Blog posts are the most popular and one of the easiest types of content to create. But just because you’re blogging, it’s not like teenagers are going to flock to your site like teenagers would to a Justin Beiber concert.

You need a comprehensive plan that entails more than simply posting to your blog posts to your company Facebook Page and sending out a few tweets. Here are 5 creative ways to promote your blog content that you might not have thought of:

1. Google+ Communities

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Get on Google+.

If you’re not on Google+, we have a great eBook that can help you get started. In addition to posting your blog post to your company page, you can also add your blog posts to Google+ Community Pages.

If you aren’t familiar with Google+ Community Pages, they are basically forums to share posts, ideas, questions, trends and advice with people who have similar interests. You can even set up your own Google+ Community.

I like to add posts and engage with communities from my personal Google+ account, but you can also join and engage with Communities from your business profile.

So what kinds of people are using Google+ Communities these days? All different kinds of people, from runners, to soccer enthusiasts to tech geeks and everyone in between. Some communities have thousands of followers, which means you have the potential to share your blog posts with a great number of people who have already opted-in to learn more about the topic. Here are some examples of some booming communities:

• SEO and Internet Marketing Professionals (created by SEO.com)
• Skiing and Snow Sports
• Food Lovers Guide
• Real Estate
• Home Décor

When it comes to promoting your posts on Community Boards, here are some rules I like to follow:

• Make sure you’re not just dropping a link. Actually add value to the community.
• Provide a micro-post about what the reader should expect in the post.
• Make sure you post your blogs in a relevant community.
• Make sure you add it to the right topic (Moderators will delete your post if it’s in the wrong place).
• Be friendly and respond to those who comment on your post.
• Thank people for sharing your post.
• Don’t just promote your own stuff. Comment, like and share other’s posts too!

Here is an example of how I do it:

 2. Pinterest Community Boards

Pinning blog content to Pinterest is a great way to share your content, especially if it’s an inforgraphic or micrographic. At SEO.com, we create visually appealing images for our blog posts just to fit the Pinterest platform. Below is an example of an eye catching image we will use for Pinterest for this post:

Pinterest Community boards are little different that just posting images to your own Pinterest boards. These boards allow multiple (sometimes 1,000s) people pin images about a specific designated topic. The great thing about Community Boards is that your pins can reach a large audience. For example, SEO.com has 253 followers, but because we contribute to Community Boards with thousands of followers, we’re able to amplify our reach.

The Community Board we created, Everything Marketing has a greater follower number than our regular account. (If you would like to become a contributor to our board, feel free to leave me a comment or tweet @SEOcom).

3. LinkedIn

Some might think of LinkedIn as a place they only go when they need a job. If you think like that you’re missing a huge opportunity to connect with professionals and share you content with influential people. Here are a few places you should promote your blog posts on LinkedIn:

• Linkedin Groups
• Company Page
• Personal Page

LinkedIn is a place where people go to share content that they think is valuable and makes them look smart, (unlike Facebook where people tend to share “funny” content). LinkedIn Groups are a lot like Google+ Communities and the same guidelines I wrote about above apply.

4. Quora

I recently wrote a whole post about how great Quora is, and one of those reasons is because there’s a huge opportunity on Quora to establish yourself as an expert through content marketing. Using Quora to research topic ideas for blog posts is a great strategy because you’ll be blogging about questions that potential clients might have. You’ll also have an opportunity to go back and add a link to your post blog post for more thorough information and drive traffic to your blog.

5. Guest Blogs/Internal Blogs

Blog posts ironically are a great way to promote other blog posts. Linking to older blog posts in your newer blog posts will give your posts a new life, plus it’s great for SEO.  As a rule of thumb all internal blog posts your write should link to at least one other blog post. If you’re writing guest posts, it’s a good strategy to link to blog posts because they are the deeper links on your page that show Google and other search engines that you’re website is more than just a homepage. Linking to blog posts in your guest posts is also a great way to establish authority on a certain topic, and send signals about the connection between keywords, content and your brand to the search engines.

The side benefit of writing great content is that people will naturally promote it for you and link to you. If you’re spending a lot of time on content marketing, hopefully this post gave you some ideas about how to give your content the little extra push and love it needs to get in front of the people who will find it useful, read it and share it.

What creative ways do you promote your blog posts? Feel free to leave us a comment below and join our Google+ Community and Everything Marketing Pinterest Community Board.

5 Creative Ways to Promote Your Blog Posts is a post by SEO expert Rebecca Babicz. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Content Marketing involves creating and distributing beautiful, valuable, click-worthy and share-worthy content as a means for attracting and retaining customers.

The concept of “Content Marketing” is nothing new, but the methods for delivering new and fresh types of content are evolving.

One of those methods is the idea of slide presentation, and walking the viewer through a set of instructions or process in a visually-enticing way. In simple terms, you create a slide deck with PowerPoint (which is probably the easiest and most common software platform for slides), and you can upload it to a number of websites that will display your slide deck. This approach can generate more awareness for your brand, more traffic to your website, and also some distinct SEO advantages, which we’ll talk about later.

For now, let’s discuss the process of creating a SlideShare presentation:

Plan your strategy

The most crucial step to any content marketing initiative is the planning process, and with SlideShare it’s also important to plan your presentation before you create it.

Before you begin, ask yourself these questions:

• Who is going to view my slide deck?
• What questions of theirs will I need to answer?
• Who are the key influencers in my industry that I should target?
• How will my viewers be motivated to share this slide deck?
• What are some specific calls-to-action (CTAs) that I can insert into the slide deck?

Once you have your strategy mapped out, you can create the flow and design of your slides.

Design your slide deck

A slide deck designed for a content marketing campaign is not like a PowerPoint presentation that you would run through in a meeting. Since you aren’t going to be narrating the slides for the people viewing them, it’s important to make each slide as self-explanatory as possible. Here are some things to consider:

1. Create an introductory slide

This first slide will be the only image displayed on SlideShare as people are browsing through decks, so it should be eye-catching and enticing. There are a number of sites that have a collection of free, creative commons images to use for your slide deck, including:

• http://commons.wikimedia.org
• http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/
• http://photopin.com/

Use an eye-catching color for the background, and place an image in the slide to draw people’s attentions, like this:

2. Create a call-to-action template for the rest of the slides in the deck

This is something that I have learned through trial and error. As with any content marketing strategy, one of the areas of focus should be driving relevant and qualified traffic to your website, and you can do that with calls-to-action located in key areas within your slide deck. You can either do this by including links to related blog posts or linkable assets on the last slide of the presentation, or within specific slides throughout the deck. One method that has been particularly successful for me is to segregate an area of each slide to house a clear CTA. This maintains a look of consistency throughout the deck, and ensures each slide has an equal opportunity to send traffic to your intended destination.

3. Give just enough information away to make sense and invite clicks

You’re not “giving away the farm” here, but still giving enough info to the viewer that the slides can stand on their own. For example, if you’re providing instructions on how to properly harvest a crop, provide the basics of the process, but still encourage the viewer to click your CTA to see “the rest of the story”.

4. Encourage social shares to become “hot”

How do those decks end up on the homepage of SlideShare.net? It all begins with a solid promotion strategy for your slide deck. Here are some tips:

a.) Share it on social media

According to Kissmetrics, you have a good chance at having your slide deck featured under the “Hot on Twitter” section on the home page if you get 15-30 tweets. The same goes for Facebook and LinkedIn shares, and being featured under those categories on the home page. Once your deck ends up on the home page, it has the opportunity to go viral, and gain a massive number of views and additional social shares.

b.) Embed it in a blog post

You can gain additional views for your slide deck if you embed it into a blog post on your website. Viewers also have the option to embed the deck on their own websites, so you can encourage that as well.

c.) Build links to it

The easiest way to gain visibility for your SlideShare deck is to build links to it. You can do this within your guest blog posts, your own blog posts and through social media channels.

The links in your SlideShare profile page, and the links within the slides themselves are nofollow, but there’s still a definite advantage for your SEO campaign with a popular SlideShare deck. TJ Welsh, director of SEO with SEO.com explains the value of these nofollow links:

“While they do not pass on link juice, they do create relevance for a given topic. Slideshare creates a transcript of your slides, which Google and other search engines are able to crawl. As search engines crawl the Slideshare account, they can trace the content back to your website through the Nofollow link. The Nofollow link builds an association between whatever you publish and your brand. Google also creates an association between certain keywords and your brand, so include your brand name somewhere in the presentation.”

5. Track the wins

You can gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of your SlideShare decks by tagging the URLs in your CTAs, and tracking the traffic in Google Analytics. Create the URLs in Google’s URL Builder by providing the website URL, campaign source, medium and name. Once you have the tagged URL, shorten it with goo.gl or bit.ly and place those shortened URLs in the slides.

The best KPIs in Analytics to measure the effectiveness of your SlideShare deck include:

• Total referral traffic from SlideShare
• Time on site
• Conversions
• Pages per visit
• Bounce rate

There may be other KPIs you need to measure, so be sure to map your specific goals before you publish your slide deck.

There you go! Really, the best way to discover a winning formula for SlideShare is to experiment, test theories and track your results.

Have you had success with SlideShare? Post your comments below!

How To Create An Epic Slideshare Deck is a post by SEO expert Andrew Johnson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Back when we were blazing through the Internet over a phone line, it may have actually been helpful to include the phrase “click here” in our anchor text to help people understand they could actually click on the text and be directed to another page. However, that time has long since passed, and it is now time to be much smarter about our use of anchor text.

When used properly, anchor text can really enhance user experience and entice users to actually take the action you want them to take. However, it is important to keep some basic ground rules in mind when using anchor text for optimal results.

1. Anchor text should be descriptive

Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide states that anchor text should be descriptive and generic terms such as “click here” and “page” should be avoided as anchor text.

When creating anchor text, always use good descriptive words and be straight forward so that your users will know exactly what they’ll find by clicking your link. Here is an example of some generic, non-descriptive anchor text that we should always avoid.

Here is an example of some great descriptive anchor text that lets users know what they’ll get even before they click on the link.

See how much good descriptive anchor text can improve user experience? It can really make a big difference. Wikipedia is the king of great descriptive anchor text. The site uses descriptive anchor text like no other, and we all know the success they have seen over the years.

2. Anchor text should provide information when read out of context

Users shouldn’t have to read a whole paragraph to figure out what your anchor text is about and where it will take them. The truth of the matter is that many people skim through pages looking for helpful resources, and what catches most users’ attention on a page is the anchor text. If a user is searching for a link to your newly released Pinterest eBook, will have a better user experience if you use anchor text like this:

Or, if you create anchor text that can actually be read out of context like this:

In the first example, the user has to go back and read at least part of the paragraph to figure out what “here” will lead to. In the second example, all the user has to do is skim over the anchor text to figure out what it’s about, thus providing a much better user experience.

3.  Anchor text should link to nouns when possible

It’s best to avoid linking to verbs simply because they are more abstract and vague, and users don’t always know exactly where they will end up when clicking on them.

On the other hand, a link to a good solid noun is something a user can relate to through their senses. It creates a visual picture in their minds, and they’ll know better what to expect when clicking on anchor text that is a noun.

4. Anchor text should be concise

The Google SEO Starter Guide also states that anchor text should be short, but descriptive. Anchor text containing a few words or a short phrase is perfectly acceptable, but making a full sentence or paragraph with all anchor text is strongly discouraged by Google.

5. Anchor text should stand out

CSS and other text styling methods make it possible to hide your anchor text and have it appear as if it were any other text. Google encourages site owners to make it easy for users to distinguish between anchor text and other normal text on a page. If you’re using a styling method to essentially hide your anchor text, you’re probably up to no good and creating a bad user experience along the way.

In the end, creating great anchor text comes down to user experience. You should create anchor text that will make your content better than content without links, and entice your site visitors to take the action you want them to take. Be descriptive, concise, and make your anchor text stand out on your page. If you do, I can’t guarantee you success, but I can guarantee your user experience will be enhanced and your likelihood for success will only increase. Happy anchor-texting!

What tips do you have for creating great anchor text?

5 Ways To Improve User Experience Through Better Anchor Text is a post by SEO expert Shay Wright. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

So you’ve started to invest time and money in social media.

Your followers are increasing and so is your website traffic. Your social media strategy is working, right? Well sort of. There’s no doubt that more followers, re-tweets and traffic are all good signs. But it’s easy for marketers and small business owners to walk blindly without having an actionable social media roadmap; a roadmap that tells them exactly which metrics indicate that they are getting closer to (or farther away from) their goals.

A Map to Growth

The first step to creating a social media roadmap is establishing your goals. Some common goals that companies hope to achieve through social media are:

• Increasing Brand Awareness
• Increase Leads/Sales
• Improve Online Reputation
• Retain Clients

Your goals for social media will vary depending on your industry and services. And to make sure your goals are on-point, you need to ask yourself why those are your goals, and what value they actually represent. Once you have established some good goals, you then need to set some realistic expectations.

“Social media doesn’t convert fans into customers!” Yeah, you’ve heard it before, and maybe read a post or two about it. Some of these posts are missing the point, so I created a graphic to explain how you should look at social media conversion so you’re able to set realistic expectations.

When it comes to social media, customers might jump right through the sales funnel and decide that, after they’ve had a positive buying experience with your brand, they want to opt-into your social media updates.

Social media can help people discover your product or service through a strong content marketing plan. Discovery of a service/product or company is at the very top of the conversion funnel.  This is where a lot of business owners and managers get confused. You see, just because someone likes your brand on Facebook, and RTs your content on Twitter, doesn’t mean they’re prospects; not yet anyway.  It’s a good start however, and by constantly engaging those who have already decided they want to hear what you have to say, you have a better chance of converting fans into customers.

The next steps for your social media plan should be to establish some metrics that help you understand how you are performing against your goals. We’ll call these key performance indicators (or KPIs). Here are 4 KPIs that will help you measure how successful your social media campaign is:

New Website Visitors

One of your KPIs that you should  track (using Google Analytics) is how many new visitors come to your website via social media outlets. Tracking new fans or followers is great, but tracking new website visitors is a better KPI. If new fans are taking action by clicking on your blog posts or other social content to discover more about what you have to say, it proves they are engaged. New website visitors is also a good KPI for expanding your reach, increasing brand awareness and increasing leads.

Repeat Website Visitors

Another great KPI to track using marketing automation software is repeat website visitors. Some might argue that this metric doesn’t matter if fans aren’t converting to customers. But if you take a look back at the social media conversion funnel, you’ll see that most social media activity starts at the top of the funnel, and the next step is “realization of need.” If you’re producing the right kind of content and fans are coming back to your website over and over again to consume that content, eventually (hopefully) a realization of need will occur and you’ve moved them further down the funnel.

The thing about Social media is that it doesn’t convert visitors to customers as fast as SEO does. When people are searching in Google, they know exactly what they want and already have a realization of need. They’re naturally closer to conversion than someone you acquire through social.

A great example of this for my current social patterns is HubSpot marketing software. I am not at the point in my career where I am making big company decisions about what software we should be using. But I like HubSpot’s content, I follow them on various social media platforms and I read several of their blog posts and eBooks each month. Maybe a few years down the road I might be in a position to make a decision about marketing software. Take a guess about which provider I’ll contact first?

People who continue to visit your website might simply think you’re smart and enjoy your content, but the bottom line is that repeat visitors shows you that your fans are actively engaged. And if they (or someone they know) ever needs your product or service, they’ll know where to go.

Time Spent on Website

With social media, or any form of inbound traffic it’s important that your visitors aren’t just clicking on your website and bouncing. This is a tricky metric because, if you’re website isn’t set up for conversion optimization, your visitors are likely to bounce no matter how much social traffic your bring in.

Time spent on website is an important measure to track because it will show you how well you are reaching your target audience through social media. It will also give you feedback about how effective your content marketing campaign is. If people from social sources are spending more time on your site, you’ll see how well you are integrating other parts of your inbound marketing campaign with social media.

Conversions

The last and most important KPI to measure are conversions from social media. You can track this by setting up proper conversion goals in Google Analytics. Some examples of conversions are:

• Opting into a newsletter list
• Downloading an eBook
• Downloading a Whitepaper
• Filling out a proposal
• Signing up for a free product trial (Our 14- day free trail of SEO Insight is a good example )
• Buying a product

Like I already talked about, you’re not going to have as many conversions from social media as you would from your SEO efforts, but backed with a solid content marketing plan, social media will bring in conversions.

Social media is all about engaging your followers so that when the need arises, they know exactly where to go. This need could arise a few weeks from now or take up to several years. These 4 KPIs will show you if you’re getting closer (or further away) from engaging your fans and reaching your potential of an effective social media campaign. Are there any other KPIs you would add to the list? Leave me a comment below!

How To Grow Your Business With REAL Social Media Goals and KPIs is a post by SEO expert Rebecca Babicz. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Browser extensions can make your life a whole lot easier. They’re a great way to personalize your browsing experience and make your digital marketing efforts more effective. With so many extensions available, I wanted to share five for Chrome that I use on a daily basis to increase my efficiency:

1. Clear Cache

This plug-in will quickly and completely clear your browser’s cache and cookies with a single click. The tool does allow you to customize how much information you want cleared, including form data, passwords, browser history, and also lets you select the time period for which you want this data removed (last hour, week, month, etc.).

Download here: http://goo.gl/6NPkp

2. AYIMA Redirect Path

This HTTP & redirect checker shows you the status codes and redirect path for all the URLs your browser visited before reaching your current page. This tool makes identifying all URLs in a redirect chain, as well as any temporary redirects (302s) that could be stopping the flow of juice to a webpage, a breeze.

Download here: http://goo.gl/ucHDo

SEO Tip – In a Webmaster Tools Help Video, Matt Cutts tells viewers that Googlebot probably will not follow any more that 5 redirects in a chain and also discourages using 302s and 301s together in a chain.

3. Canonical Inspector

A canonical tag is an effective way to prevent duplicate content issues by letting search engines know which version of a page is the “preferred” or “canonical” version. The canonical inspector plug-in is a big time saver for checking whether a webpage has a canonical version. It works by adding a small icon to your browser bar which disappears when no canonical tag is present, changes to gray when the canonical tag matches the canonical URL, and glows blue when the canonical tag detected on a page references another URL.

Download here: http://goo.gl/MGilE

4. Awesome Screenshot

This screen capture extension is great for capturing all or part of a webpage and makes, cropping, editing and annotating your screenshots incredibly easy. Having a visual example with notes and highlights is a great way to clearly communicate recommendations or a message by itself or in conjunction with other content.

Download here: http://goo.gl/Hl8Oz

5. Check My Links

This handy link checker tool crawls through a webpage and highlights all the broken links (404s) that it finds in red. This is a fantastic tool for any broken link or relationship building initiative. Find a broken link on a webpage? Throw it into Open Site Explorer and see where else it exists on the web for additional link building opportunities. Also, what better way to start an outreach email than by alerting a webmaster to a broken link on a page?

Download here: http://goo.gl/FhKnS

What extensions do you use on a daily basis that make your life easier?

5 Handy Chrome Extensions Any Digital Marketer Will Love is a post by SEO expert Brian Jensen. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.