Why Pinterest is a Good Piece of Social Media

For most businesses, doing social media is a daily task that most business owners, frankly don’t have the time to deal with. With Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn the way to stay relevant is to post and update pretty much every day. Blogging and podcast, well those require updates at least weekly. So how is Pinterest different?

Pinterest is the only piece of social media that continues to work for you day after day, month after month and year after year. In fact, in our test case, we didn’t add any posts to Pinterest for over a year to see what would happen. Would backlinks grow? Would we get more traffic from image posts a year later? Let’s see the data…

Pinterest is Valuable – The Data

In our test case, Pinterest, with relatively no new pins in over a year, still accounts for the 41% of all of the traffic to Daddy Got Custody blog. Also it is good to note that the bigger longer posts are doing much better than a basic 400×267 image. So creating longer 300×700 sized Pins seem to be moving the needle.

Conclusion: You absolutely positively have to have a business Pinterest account. You should create Pins for all your pages and all your blog posts, even if is only done once a year. The backlinks are incredible and have done nothing but increased since we last did this test 3½ years ago.

If you need help with this, reach out to us and we can help you get Pinterest setup, or better yet, you can outsource your social media to use for a minimal monthly fee.

Until then, keep pinning for continuous success in your small business!

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Having a SEO strategy is a must nowadays, when people are looking for products and services online. Developing your effective SEO strategy is not easy, because the online medium is always changing and reinventing itself. But with a strong set of rules in mind, you can make your own highly effective SEO strategy.

Effective SEO Strategy – Start with a SEO Map

Before you dive into the huge pool of SEO elements you need to have a clear map of what you want. Create a mind map of your strategy, which should contain your projects’ phases, objectives and team. Once you have these elements in place, link them to the central project plan. Then you can start dividing and conquering each individual element. For example, your objectives can be divided into smaller objectives and so on. The further away from the central plan, the more specific your map elements will become. There is a reason it is called mind map: it will help you create a plan and manage to think about it in all details, without being overwhelmed.

Create a Plan on Paper

An SEO strategy is a plan, which needs to be put down on paper, so you can assign tasks and track their status. The more in-depth your plan, the more things you will need to manage, so it’s a great idea to find a task manager tool and create your SEO strategy with the help of seo enterprise tools. Make sure every person involved in the project can understand the plan and know which task is assigned to whom, the timeline of the tasks and if they are recurring or not.

Effective SEO Strategy – The 3 Qs of Understanding Your Company

No matter if you are the owner of the company or you are an outsourced specialist, you need to understand the company you are making the SEO strategy for. To help you do this you have to be able to answer three main questions:

1. What makes the company unique?
2. Explain the company’s vision?
3. What are the weakest points of the company?

Get to Know Your Audience

Before you even start planning a SEO strategy you have to know your audience in detail. Use surveys, talk to them, gather as many information as you can, so you can know exactly what your customers’ needs are and what they want. Depending on how familiar they are with the industry, the level of their education and their views on digital marketing, your audience is going to respond to specific elements. The more specific your SEO strategy is, the better for your company.

Effective SEO Strategy – Set Goals and Track their Status

A successful SEO strategy has precise goals, which focus on specific elements. Your goals should involve more than increasing the profit, so you need to choose which metrics you need for your strategy. An SEO strategy does more than just increasing the profit and has long-term effects on your business. This means your metrics need to reflect all these, from rankings to authority links.

Every business can benefit from a good SEO strategy, so embrace these five steps and create your own effective strategy, making it part of your business management.

What’s your effective SEO strategy? What elements would you add?

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It is easy to get bogged down in the more complicated aspects of digital marketing by analyzing keywords and diving into pay per click strategies. But many of the most effective ways to improve conversions come from the overall design and layout of your website. Here we take a look at three aspects of web design that can make all the difference.

Get the Content Right

Every piece of content on your site needs to be there with the visitor in mind. Gear your content towards providing a solution to their problem or answering the question that brought them there in the first place.

It sounds obvious, but so many sites end up with a mass of content that does nothing. If this sounds like you, it might be time to do a content audit. In doing so, you can check that your content is relevant, useful and on-brand.

Make it Beautiful

Of course, all that great content is not going to help your cause if visitors cannot find it. Today’s websites need to be fresh, clear and intuitive, or visitors will rapidly leave and look somewhere else. As soon as your visitors arrive, they need to be greeted by engaging calls to action. Users also clear signs & headings that will encourage them to stay on your site.

Experiment with different color schemes, fonts and themes. Consider images that are keeping with your brand and your service offering. Here are two simple extreme examples: 1) a kid’s club will be looking to present a friendly, welcoming homepage with bright primary colors. 2) whereas a law firm will want to convey a more formal, professional look.

Also, remember that fashions and approaches change over time. As a general rule, websites need to be refreshed and updated every three years, so if yours is looking anything less than cutting-edge, now could be the time for a change.

Mobile First

Some say that the future is mobile, but the fact is that mobile is now. It is two years since mobile overtook desktop as the preferred platform for surfing the Internet, so if your website is not optimized for mobile platforms such as tablets and smartphones, your conversion rates will be through the floor.

A mobile first approach means ensuring that load times are acceptable, pages display properly and all buttons and calls to action work equally well across every platform.

Bonus Tip: Link to Other Beneficial Website

Part of improving sales and conversions is improving your ranking in Google. An element of this is linking to value added websites. For example, let’s say you are in the remodeling business. And one of the products you suggestion is a slimline radiator. Then you may want to link to other articles or the manufacture like this, that would support the products you recommend.

Watch your Conversions

Following the above tips will be certain to have a major impact on your conversion rates, but do not rest on your laurels. The Internet is a place of constant evolution, so keep a regular eye on your conversions through the reports on Google Analytics to ensure that you follow a process of continuous improvement and refinement.

Feature image courtesy of Aleksi Tappura.

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Using my blog, Daddy Got Custody as an experiment, I took both pages and posts and “pinned” the feature image with links back to the website. After a few months here are the results…

First Step for Pinterest to Increase Business Interest – Create Category Boards

Create a business account using the same name as your business. Next create categories of products or services that match your business or blog categories. Write about four to five sentences explaining in plain English what you do. Remember to include a link to that section of your blog. See below.

Second Step – Post Feature Image of Your Page or Post

In your website, remember all those pictures you worked hard to include or SEO for your site? How about that great feature image you have on your blog? Now is the time to use those images. In your newly created Pinterest category link to that page and “pin” that picture. See below.

Third Step for Pinterest to Increase Business Interest – Write the Title & Summary of Your Page or Post

For me, I capitalize the title in the description. See above. Then I write about two or three sentences that tease the reader to read the page. Finally I end the description with “Click Pic to Read More…”. Save and check your work.

If you have done everything correctly, the picture will now link to your website or post. Those back links are paramount to increasing your business. Do this for all the pages or post you wish to back link. For me, I add post about once a month and the traffic increase is roughly 500 or more new visitors a month and growing.

How have you used Pinterest for business? What results have you found?

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What is SEO?
In the most simple terms, SEO is a series of steps done in reference to a website that helps search engines find it easier. For example, it may be something as simple as making sure that you are using words on your pages that people are actually searching for. Another example of SEO is submitting a sitemap of your navigation to Google to make sure that they know your site exists.

Are you using an SEO plugin on your WordPress Website?

Why Use an SEO Plugin?

• Custom Meta Title
• Custom Meta Description
• Meta Keywords
• Focus Keyword Density
• 404 Monitoring

There are several free SEO plugins that you can choose from for your website.  We are huge fans of two WP SEO Plugins in particular:

Yoast SEO Plugin 
https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/

Renee’ is using the Yoast Plugin on her personal blog. She loves the focus keyword function which helps her see what her keyword density is. She says that it also helps her stay on track and not wander off topic.

SEO Ultimate

http://www.seodesignsolutions.com/wordpress-seo/

This is the plugin that FunTeam is using on their new DFW Website Designers website. The main reason that the team is using this plugin on the business site is because of the 404 monitor.

No matter which of these plugins that you choose, you will not go wrong. The key factor is to make sure that you are considering SEO when you are working on your website.

Linking
Having a good link structure is important.

Outboud: You need to be generous with your out boud links. An out bound link is when you link from one of your website pages to a web page that does not belong to you. It is what we did above with the Google Webmaster Tool. We linked out to another site.

Onsite: Make sure that you link to your other internal pages. This way you give strength from one page to another. Plus you offer up people information from one page to another that may be quite helpful to them. If you are working on a Silo Structure you will want to study the idea of onsite linking in more detail.

Sitemap
A sitemap is basically what it says. It is a list of your website pages. Go check out oursitemap here to see what we mean. If you have a Google Webmaster account for your website you can log in and submit your site map to google. We use a plug-in to create our sitemap and update Google but you can also do it manually by using the tool on this page: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/. Just doing this step alone will help Google find you better.

We hope that these tips help you with your Website and Blog efforts. Our goal is to provide you with all of the tips that we learn as we learn them. Thank you for taking the time to read this newsletter.

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She had created a few pages, not blog posts, but she was not ready for the public to see them yet. She went ahead and published the pages, though. She wanted to be able to easily review the pages; which is why she published them. She thought that because they were not added to the nav bar that no one would find them and all would be fine.

However, considering that she has really great SEO built into her site people were finding those pages. When they happened across the page, excited and ready to read; they would find blank pages or pages that were incomplete. This would confuse the reader, and the reader would promptly leave the site. As a result, her bounce rate started to increase and those readers are likely not going to return.

So the moral of this story is to leave pages and posts in draft mode until you are really ready for the public to see them. These may cause a bit of inconvenience for you but that is far better than losing readers.

Terms:

Bounce Rate:  Bounce rate is when a visitor to your website leaves after only visiting one page. If someone does not click on another page of your site then they are bouncing away.

Why is this bad?

You want visitors to be engaged and spend more time on your site. If you are a blogger you want them to read more than one posts. The goal is to engage the reader and bounce rate is a great way to measure engagement.

Website Bounce Rate Notes:

Bounce rates with a website is a bit more tricky so you must keep the goals in mind. If your main call to action and your goal is for a potential client to call you for service then you may be happy with a higher bounce rate. So imagine that you are a plumber and your goal is for people to find your website, see your phone number and call you for immediate service then you would measure your success by phone calls.

In this scenario keep in mind that you want to provide plenty of resources for people to learn more about your company and services and while some people may click thru to read more it will likely not be the norm. In the end the additional pages may just provide more SEO opportunities and more entry points for people to find your phone number. We always explain to clients that a website with more quality pages will bring you greater success.

So what has been your experience with SEO? Do you have any tips that you can share?

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link building: 1. In the field of search engine optimization, link building describes actions aimed at increasing the number and quality of inbound links to a page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_building

Now I would like to offer my definition which is a bit less technical.

Link Building: a strategy employed by a website owner to get valuable links back to your website. This means that another website has for whatever reason linked to your website. This could be in a blog post reference like above or because you filled out a form such as your website url when you left a comment on a blog post.

So now that we know what it is let’s cover a bit about their listed pitfalls.

1. Getting back links with a ‘nofollow’ attribute

Back links with nofollow attribute tells the search engines that you do not want them to consider that particular link. Google ignores the nofollow links and would not count them as a backlink for page rank.

You can read their full explanation on their site but their main point here is that it is a waste of time to comment on blog posts that you know upfront do not offer follow links. The idea is that the only reason that you would take the time to comment on a blog post is so that you can the value of a link back to your website.

I would like to take issue with this idea. If someone takes the time to write a well thought out and wonderful article such as the one that I am discussing here by Inbound Now then I would say that you can pay them back with a comment. Comments are extremely valuable to bloggers for many reasons but if for no other than to stimulate conversation. So if you read a blog post and have a thought, positive or negative, go ahead and leave a comment.

2. Having a good link but with useless anchor text

Ok so in this point they are spot on but I would like to caution that you should not always use the same anchor text. Google is actually starting to pay close attention to link bait and so I would like to recommend that you have a list of anchor text to choose from. My tip here is that when you do your initial website keyword research create yourself a spreadsheet of relevant keywords and pull from that list. Do not always use the same phrase or you may be punished.

3. Having a link from a site that has tons of links

As you will read in their original article they do not believe that you should spend time on a post that has hundreds of comments and in some ways they are right. The odds of you gaining much from commenting on a Seth Godin blog post in the terms of link juice is not very high but there are other reasons to comment.

I would suggest that you consider a completely different strategy and comment on the comments. Entire conversations can happen inside of the comments and it is amazing the connections that can be made and the ideas that can be learned. Use the comments to your advantage and if the string is big enough treat it like a networking opportunity. If I see interesting comments from someone on a blog post I will actually look that person up and bookmark their blog.

4. Place an image link in place if having a text link with keyword is not feasible

Images are a great resource and you should always link an image when it makes sense.

5. Not using ALT text, if you can only have an image link

It can seem like a lot of working remembering all of these SEO Tips and it can sure seem like a lot of work implementing them but the alt text for an image is crucial. Do not skip alt text if you are presented with the opportunity.

6. Getting backlinks from irrelevant niche sites

Yes! They said more on their blog post about this but this is just crucial. Do not get together with a group of twitter friends and randomly exchange links. If you source out a link make sure that it is relevant to your industry. I would take this a step further and say that you should actively monitor links to your site and do what you can remove ones that are not relevant.

Do you have a link building strategy? Please share any tips or ideas that would be beneficial in the comment section below.

The post SEO Link Building Mistakes to Avoid and Tips to Build Links first appeared on DFW Website Designers - 817.247.6003.

“Ranking high in Googles search results or seo can have a phenomenal impact on the success of your business. You can either engage the expertise of a Search Engine Optimisation company, or if you have the time, there are some changes you can make to your website yourself.”

In the blog post by SocialViralng: SEO MY WAY: HOW TO DO SEO YOURSELF they provide three tips on how you can get started doing your own SEO.

The first step that they cover is Keyword Research.

This is probably your most critical step and should be done above all things. There are two things that I would like to point out about this step.

#1 In today’s digital world you need to stop thinking in terms of a single keyword. Instead start thinking in terms of phrases or questions. More and more searches are happening in a mobile environment and by voice. When people are doing search by voice they do not just say a keyword such as “SEO.” Instead people say phrases like “How can I do my own SEO?”

#2 They say to write down as many keywords as you can think of and this is a great piece of advice. My suggestion here is to create yourself a google spreadsheet document. Then share this with your team that will help with keyword research. Then go to the google keyword planner tool and start researching your keywords. Do not just purely rely on what you think people are searching for. If you do that you are shooting in the dark when there is no need for it.

#3 Go to Google and start typing in your keyword. If you start tying without hitting enter Google will make suggestions for you. Pay close attention to those suggestions because they are what other people searching for. It is likely that you will want to create entire landing pages or blog post around those phrases.

Their second step covers how to arrange your content for the best possible SEO possibilities. See their notes below. 

•             Place your keywords in headings, preferably at the beginning of the heading;

•             Include keywords towards the top of the page;

•             Bold or italicize keywords where appropriate;

•             Instead of having a link to another page that says “Click here to read more”, reword it to include your keywords

The tip here that I believe gets most overlooked is the power of bold. Bolding text provides visual clues to what is important and also helps the search engines in the same way. Use the bold text command sparsely but do use it.

All in all there is some really great tips provided by Deji in the blog post. I highly recommend reading the entire post and implementing the tips and ideas. Do remember above all things that while content is king, valuable content is the king of kings. Keep your reader in mind above all things.

What are you doing for your SEO? Do you have any quick tips that you would like to share?

This image is from the portfolio of “Stuart Miles”. Please remember that you must publish a credit wherever you use this image, for example:
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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They point out it that it may be a bit strange to recommend that you should only know the minimum about SEO but the reality is, if you are a small business owner you must know a great deal about your profession, running your business, client support, purchasing, employee engagement and the list goes on. In truth most small business owners realize that they should know social media, blogging, website management, content and of course SEO. But the other hard truth is, there is just not enough brain space for more than the minimum that you MUST know.

In this post they point out that it is vital to know what it is and of course if you don’t know what it is then you do need to start there. They give their own definition:

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” 

I would like to offer an expanded more human definition or rather explanation. SEO is a process that if implemented well can help you rank better on the search engines. When I say “rank” I mean get on the first page of google. Just being found on Google does not help you. It is of no value if you are on page 109 because people rarely even get past the first page.

Doing SEO means putting a set of tactics such as updating your meta title, meta description and even meta keywords into action. 

Caution: Do not think just because you start SEO efforts that you will suddenly be on the first page of Google. It takes time, effort and yes more time and more effort.

What is a SEO Meta Title?

An SEO Meta Title is the title that people will see as a link on search engines. This title should not be more than 70 characters long. In a lot of cases it will be the same as your page or blog title but that does not have to be the case. There are times when you may want a clever page title or blog title but want to be a bit more descriptive in the meta title. I would recommend making your meta title informative first and catchy last. When people are searching for something online they want to find the answer to a question above being amused. If you manage to do both in one title the your odds of being clicked do likely increase.

What is a SEO Meta Description?

In essence, it is the description that people see on a search engine under the link. It is the description of the page that entices people to click on the page. This consist of around 150 characters and is one of the most important sentences that you will write for a web page. It will be the reason that people either click on your title link or scroll on down. In the image below the sentence in the red box is the seo meta description by Moz.

What are Meta Keywords?

Meta keywords are seo keywords that are sometimes used by the search engines to help figure out what the page is about. It is said by many that the search engines no longer use these and that you do not need to fill them out. My theory is that do it all just to be on the safe side. If the keywords serve no other purpose, they will help you make sure that you are on track with your content.

Meta keywords are words or phrases separated by a comma such as:

seo terms, search engine optimization, what you should know about seo, seo tips.

The keywords above are what I actually used in my seo for this post.

What SEO Terms confuse you? What SEO phrases would you like to better understand?

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The findings from this report do not stop there. For me one of the most interesting statistics was:

Searchers on the Yahoo! Bing Network spend 25% more than the average Internet searcher (an increase of 3 percentage points from September) and 7.7% more than Google searchers.

What this means for us is that Google is not the only game in town. Yes, I spend a great deal of my time focusing on Google but I never forget Yahoo. Consider where your audience is when you are thinking about advertising and webmastering. Have you considered placing an ad on the Bing marketplace?

Another thing to consider about Yahoo is that they have a powerful network of people that use their services during football season. They are the leaders for fantasy football. This means that a large portion of men are already on the Yahoo site so you may want to consider how you can reach them where they are.

Yahoo! follows Bing

It is important to note that Yahoo! no longer has a webmaster tools section. You can not submit your website to Yahoo!. They have joined forces with Bing and so when you submit to Bing you are by default submitting to Yahoo!

Bing Webmaster Tools

You will want to create an account with Bing here: http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster.

A Few Tips

#1 Once you setup your account you will want to submit a sitemap to Bing and Yahoo!. If you are using the Google XML Sitemap plug-in both Google and Bing will be notified each time that you update your website. This is a huge time saver.

#2 Fetch as bingbot. This can be a powerful tool in your diagnostic arsenal. You can read more about it here and I would recommend that you make this a regular part of your website SEO routine.

#3 SEO analyzer. Bing provides an analyzer tool that can help you figure out the status of your on-page SEO. So whether you are creating a brand new page or just want to see how an older page stacks up I would recommend this tool.

#4 Spend some time using Bing and Yahoo! This will help you get a feel for how the search engines work. Search for people in your own field. How do they show up? How do they look?

In conclusion the key factor is not to put all of your eggs in one basket. In the past I have had people tell me that they do not need a website because they are using social meida. This idea is very wrong and anyone who says that they only focus on Google is very wrong too unless you know that your audience is only using Google.

What search engine do you use most and why?

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