Category Archives: Blogging

What To Do When Your Google Rankings Take A Dive

Blogging, content marketing, guest blogging, SEO, Small Business Marketing

When your Google ranking declinesIf you’re an online business or your business has an online presence then there are few worse feelings than going to check on your page 1 ranking which is bringing in most of your sites traffic, and finding that it’s now on page 5. That’s enough to make any online marketer and online business owner lose sleep. Rankings positions are hugely important if you want your business to succeed, the difference between being ranked number 1 and number 20 in Google is immense as if you’re ranked 20th you pretty much might as well not be ranked at all. When was the last time you searched for something on Google and clicked on a result on page 2 or 3? If your rankings have taken a dive all of a sudden then now is not the time to panic, it’s time to find out why and get your rankings back to where they were so let’s take a look at what you need to do.

Find Out Where You Are

If you have a search term that you have been ranking on page 1 for and all of a sudden it’s gone then the first thing you need to do is to find out where it’s gone to. Are you still in the top 20, 50, 100? If you have slipped into page 2 or 3 then it’s not so bad and it won’t be too hard getting back to where you once where but if you have fallen out of the top 100 altogether then you might have problems. There are tools you can use to tell you where you are ranking but they aren’t always reliable so I prefer to search for them manually. Just make sure to clear your browser search history and sign out of your Google account and they can distort the results.

Learn Lessons

You should use the experience of losing your good ranking positions as an opportunity to learn lessons and improve your website and your online marketing strategies. If the latest algorithm shake up by Google has hit your site in an undesirable way then you need to take their not so subtle hint that there’s something wrong with what you’re doing. This doesn’t mean that you need to pander to everything that Google wants but it provides an opportunity for you to take a look at yourself and find areas that you can improve so that your customers get the best possible experience and service when they visit your site.

What Are You Missing?

You may find that your website needs a blog so that you can regularly update it with fresh content, not just for the sake of it but to provide visitors with exciting, entertaining and educational content. That could make your site more popular as people will use it to find out about the latest news and developments in whatever industry it is that you are working in. That’s how brand reputations are built and improved.

You may find that you need to earn links from more relevant and reputable websites. Gone are the days when you could submit your website to a few online directories and see your rankings sore. Today you will need to earn links in a natural way from high quality websites within the same or at least a similar industry to yours and the only way to do that is to make the best possible website and put genuine effort into your marketing strategies.

Don’t look at a drop in rankings as the end of your SEO and online marketing efforts, instead look at it as an opportunity to create the website and online brand image that you’ve always wanted. If you put your customers first then it’s inevitable that you’ll get the links you want, the visitors, Facebook likes, Twitter followers and your rankings will improve once again.

Don’t Worry About Old Links

Lots of people waste time contacting websites that are linking to them asking them to remove there link to the site which they believe is harming their rankings. This is a waste of time as Google have acknowledged that they ignore low quality links and instead focus on the high quality ones so leave the old links and focus your efforts on earning high quality ones, not by asking for them, buying them or exchanging but by making your site a true source of knowledge, information, excitement and quality within your industry.

By Stuart Cooke an online marketer who owns Pinnacle SEO and he gets lots of clients asking him to improve their rankings after they’ve taken a dive.

6 Simple Steps To Creating Web Traffic With Chat Sites

Blogging, content marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Viral marketing

Starting your own blog is an easy thing, but how would you drive traffic to your website? Thanks to the social networks that have made easy and a success. Social chat sites can now be used for your advantage and with no or less constraints. There are few steps that you need to undertake in order to surpass traffic of other individual or company blogs. Below are the 6 Simple Steps to Creating Web Traffic with Chat sites.

Writing great profile

After creating an account with any chat sites like Facebook, Zinzzchat and twitter, spend some time to create a good profile of your site. In this case, personal issues and life should be kept away and concentrate on the dating business. The profile should be simple, interesting and genuine. This acts as the basis of creating relationships with people. It is also important to include a link to your dating sites on your profile page and that you link all your blogs and social media accounts too.

Keep interacting

In order to create traffic you need to be interactive. Write posts and join conversation and share relevant stuff. Spend some time of your day sharing of relevant information on a particular niche. Sharing of information builds trust that would lead to good results. It is not a must to share what you are an expert on, you can even post inspiring and encouraging things that people appreciate and are related to your blog.

The content written must be compelling and make use of catchy headlines. People would avoid contents posted in crappy titles.

Share your content

Share you content on a regular basis. There are great tools that would do this easier. The only thing you need to do is to encourage readers to do the same by either clicking on the ‘share’ or the ‘like’ buttons.

Use social bookmarking sites and sharing sites

You can even ask others to promote your website through social bookmarking sites such as Reddit and others. Make use of the social sharing tools on your blog. This will allow you to combine sharing options via Facebook, twitter and email all into one tool.

Optimize the content

You can optimize content for the search engines by using on page optimization strategies and relevant keywords. The content will make your site not only interesting to the followers but would also help your rankings in the search engines. Search engines do use social media to find out how well liked and popular websites are.

Start and join groups

There are many groups in the social networks like on Facebook that you can join, many as possible. You can start your own group that is related to your business site and invite other people to join the group. The advantage of starting own group is that, you are able to get the target users. For instance people who are interested in your ideas, product and services. For more traffic, you will have to read comments and participate intelligently. Commenting and responding to questions helps in adding your credibility.

Social networks are great tools to market and promote your site. In conclusion, using of social networks requires one to use his or her time wisely so as to successful.

By Jacqueline – who runs a blog site where ingredients such as authentic blogging, blogging with fluid intention and good SEO optimization is discussed. Follow @jaquelinedela.

Removing Digital Tattoos: 5 Steps to Online Reputation Management

Blogging, Reputation, SEO, Social Media Marketing, ,

7 steps to excellenceWhether you’re the owner of a small business, an artist or a freelancer, your online presence can make or break you. You want to appear on the first page of a Google search, but not because of a photograph that showcases your poor judgment one night a decade ago. You’ll want potential clients to see that you recently won an award for outstanding achievement, but you won’t want them to see pictures from the after party.

Managing your online reputation can be difficult, since nothing on the Internet ever really goes away. You may need to use an online reputation management service if you’ve made some catastrophic mistakes, but most small business owners and freelancers simply want to get their names out to potential clients. When your reputation is critical to your livelihood, it’s in your best interest to protect your name:

1. Set Up a Google Alert

After choosing a word or phrase, you’ll be notified every time a relevant match appears on the Web. For example, if you put a Google Alert on YYZ Company, you’ll receive an email on either a minute-by-minute, daily or weekly basis about any new Web content pertaining to this company. It is a great way to keep track of your online reputation, though it does nothing to alter it.

2. Buy Your Domain Name

For about $11 a year, you can buy your domain name from GoDaddy.com. Buy your name in several varieties, including JohnSmith.com, JohnSmith.net, JohnSmithblog.com. Even if you’re not planning on setting up a site or blog, this helps build your online presence. When someone searches your name on Google, one of these sites — that you control — is likely to pop up, which helps push down negative content. Plus it prevents others from purchasing and using your domain name in a negative way.

3. Join Social Networks

You may have a Facebook profile for your personal life, but you may not have a page for your professional one. Today the first impression potential clients have of you or your business is made online, according to Reputation.com. Joining Web sites like YouTube, Pinterest, Tumblr and LinkedIn will give you additional help as you strive to establish and control your online persona.

4. Don’t Share Everything

As Anthony Weiner and others have demonstrated, you can very quickly end your career if you’re not careful about what you post online. Weinergate, 2011’s favorite double entendre, shows you just how much damage you can do to your career and reputation if you share more than your should. Here’s a simple question you should ask yourself before you decide to upload something: Will someone seek out another company or freelancer because I decided to post this? If the answer is yes (or even a slightly tipsy maybe), don’t post it.

5. Cleaning Up When You Fail to Follow Tip 4

Anthony Weiner has the millions to hire a PR firm to transform his image, but you probably don’t. Even so, he’s probably never going to win another major election ever again. The fact is that there simply is no way to erase your mistakes; you can only hope to change your image, to distance yourself from these errors in judgment and to make it difficult for people to stumble upon them. If an unflattering photograph on Facebook is causing the damage, you can untag yourself. If it is a poorly worded blog post, you can delete it. Only by making it harder for others to access the troubling content will you be able to move past it.

By Peter Marino – the owner of reelWebDesign.com, a website design and digital marketing company in Westchester NY.

Keyword Vs Brand Inbound Links

Blogging, content marketing, guest blogging, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Viral marketing, , , , ,

internet marketing strategyWith Penguin 2.0 upon us you should be adjusting your inbound link campaign accordingly. Matt Cutts (Head of Google Spam) has given us plenty of warning about Penguin 2.0 and how you should tacking your link building.

You Will Not Get Ranked With Links Alone

Internet Marketing is not just about link building anymore; you need to focus on various other factors as well if you want to perform well on search results. If you take a look at the below graph, inbound marketing does play a large part in search engine rankings, but you cannot just focus on link building.

If your website has poor onsite SEO, no regular blog posts, no social signals and no brand signals, you will never rank. Every section in the above graph is as important as the other. Do not think of Internet marketing as ranking high on Google, instead think of it as earning high traffic volume as your goal.

In this article I will be only discussing about inbound links, Brand vs Keyword. I thought I would add this note and graph so website owners wouldn’t think creating backlinks alone would earn them more traffic!

How Your Links Should Be Created

For those of you that are not 100% keyed up with inbound marketing, I will quickly go over it. Do not do any of the below:

  • Pay for backlinks.
  • Waste your time adding links in headers, footers or sidebars.
  • Join any link scheme or automated service.
  • Include your link in spammy content.
  • Have your link on irrelevant, untrustworthy sites.

Basically keep your links looking natural by guest blogging quality content with your link included naturally.

Keyword Backlinks

For many years now having keyword backlinks used to play a huge role in the positioning of your website on Google, not so much today. A keyword backlink is your targeted keyword used as an anchor text and usually pointing back to your homepage.

I believe keyword backlinks are important, but something you shouldn’t focus all your attention on. You should never only focus on your homepage, you should always build links to all web pages within your website. Every page is important, not just your homepage so build links to all.

If you wasn’t already aware, you should only try and optimize 2 main keywords for each web page, anymore than 2 will start looking unnatural. From these 2 keywords you need to build a list of variants using Google Keyword Tool and Trends. If you are using the same keyword backlinks to your pages, it will start looking unnatural. This is why having a list of variants will keep your links looking natural with the added advantage of being ranked higher for more key phrases.

Brand Links

Brand backlinks are anchor links that contain your company name, website address or a company employee. Branding is huge with Internet marketing at the minute and will be for many years.

Creating brand backlinks will increase your websites traffic on search results in the long run. The key is creating the quality content surrounding your backlink. If your end goal is to get ranked for keywords along the lines of ‘Builder London’, your content should be focused around that theme. For example, you could write an article on how buildings have evolved in London over the past 100 years. This content will be high value and of interest to users, at the same time, 100% focused on your keyword. Instead of using a keyword backlink, use a brand backlink. This way Google will connect your brand and website with the theme of your article (Builder London), thus increasing your sites authority and trust, which will then lead to higher rankings for this keyword, amongst other variants.

Brand backlinks will give your site more authority over keyword backlinks as your content will be connected to all text within the article. Not around the targeted keyword link.

Maintain A Ratio

Before reevaluating your inbound link campaign, have a company generate an internet marketing strategy for your business, not only for your links, but for blogging and social signal. If you are promoting all of these sections, your site will see a return on visitors. I would suggest creating 5 brand links for every one keyword backlink. This way your inbound links stay looking natural.

By Kev Massey – Kev is the Sales Manager at SixtyMarketing and writes the majority of blog posts for SixtyMarketing giving free, useful Internet marketing & web design tips. Please follow Kev and his team on Facebook for their latest posts.