Have you been noticing in your analytic reports a website called Pinterest that is referring more and more visitors to your website? Gone are the days where YouTube, LinkedIn, and MySpace drive the most traffic to your site. There is a new player in the social media sharing world.
Thanks to the infographic below, we can take a look at the different ranking signals that Google uses to determine your ranking position in their search results.
In this basic SEO Infographic, it boils down the complexity of search engine optimization into 3 simple steps. Check it out and scroll down to the bottom to read my commentary.
On November 3, Google posted a blog update on their Official blog site talking about how they have updated their ranking signals to escalate the importance of fresh and timely content in the search results. As a result of this … Read More
One of the most difficult questions I gets asked by my clients is: How can we estimate the amount of website traffic we will receive if we’re ranked #1 on Google for a particular keyword?
Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to this question. Let me walk you through a logical thought process of how to try to get this figure, but then ruin the day by showing how its about as accurate as a summer day’s weather forecast in Miami, Florida.
As mentioned in my original post the evening of the 2011 Facebook F8 conference, Mark Zuckerberg announced a major upgrade to to their Open Graph API. The keynote focused on:
Mark didn’t mention how this will affect advertisers who want to post their ads on Facebook. My opinion is that there are going to be enormous benefits to advertisers, but it will expose the additional loss of privacy that users will suffer. That is why he didn’t focus time discussing it in the keynote address.
Let’s step back and take a look at the advertising model to place ads on Facebook. The primary benefit of advertising on Facebook is that there is an unprecedented level of filters you can apply to your ad to only show it to a very targeted audience.
At the 2011 Facebook F8 Developers Conference, Mark Zuckerberg announced a major upgrade to to their Open Graph API. To most users of Facebook, this might not mean much. It probably doesn’t sound like English. But today’s techie announcement will greatly affect all Facebook users, from you to your grandmother. Let me tell you why.
A little history will help explain what is going on. In the old days (3 years ago) the only information captured about you was that you were friends with someone. Then last year, Facebook allowed you to say that you Like someone or something.
By now, I’m sure you’ve heard that Facebook provides a simple snippet of code to add to your website pages so that you can include threaded social conversations on your own website and have that content also posted on Facebook to share with friends and Fans. This functionality is called Facebook Comments.
Why is this so great? Because you now have the ability to add user-generated content to your site for free. User-generated content is the best form of keyword rich SEO content you can have on your website.
As of the of mid August 2011, Google has officially stopped supporting the Google Toolbar plugin, except for the Internet Explorer browser. So that means that your Google Toolbar for Firefox, Safari, and even Google’s own Chrome browser are no longer supported.
Many Firefox users may be mistaken that upgrading to the newest version of Firefox 6 has broken the Google Toolbar. This is not the case. As stated by Google:
First of all, we’d like to thank all of our loyal users of Google Toolbar for Firefox. We deeply appreciate all of the feedback over the years that helped to make the product so useful. As we all know, over the past few years, there has been a tremendous amount of innovation in the browser space. For Firefox users, many features that were once offered by Google Toolbar for Firefox are now already built right into the browswer. Therefore, while Google Toolbar for Firefox works on versions up to and including Firefox 4 only, it will not be supported on Firefox 5 and future versions. Please see our Help Center for additional details.
Most of us assume that Google is planning on integrating this functionality directly into their Chrome browser and therefore don’t need to support a separate plugin. In the case of Firefox and other browsers, many of the same features are available in the browser itself.
However, the Google PageRank value is missing from their support pages and lists of other tools to replicate the same functionality provided by the Google Toolbar. So is this a sign that Google may be taking steps to no longer publish their Google PR to the public? What are your thoughts?
Social Media is the hot trend of the day. Everyone wants to have more friends on Facebook, more followers on Twitter, more +1′s on Google. But at the end of the day, do these social media variables have an effect on your website? If its not all hype, then what are the best social media plugins to add to your site?
Well the interesting news is that social media activity has proven to be a good thing for companies. Google and Bing are leading the way with incorporating social media signals into their search engine ranking formulas. So now your number of friends, re-tweets, shares, recommendations, etc all will benefit your website’s rankings.
Besides SEO rankings from social media signals, social media sites definitely drive more traffic to your website. That means that you have to be very careful to control the flow of information on social media sites, so that it is congruent with the content located on your site when they get there.
Ok now that you know social media tools help your website, which ones should you use?
If you want to get more interactive, you can embed one of the Facebook or Twitter IFRAME plugins that will show recent tweets or a list of your friends who have Liked a particular page.
Learn more about social media plugins and their benefits on our site.
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