Six SEO Tips & Rules for 2016

The rules for effective SEO have shifted seismically over the past few years. Experts offer tips on the current state of SEO and how you can use it to maximize your investment in content in 2016.

Marketers are beefing up their investments in content, but to leverage those investments, they’ll also have to put some time and effort into learning the new rules for SEO. The days of driving traffic to your site by packing headlines with keywords are long gone, experts say, and the new SEO strategy revolves around another big-money marketing focus: experience.

“Historically, the recommendations around SEO have been … to focus on keywords,” says Martin Laetsch, director of online marketing , Ore.-based marketing automation company . “The reality is search engines are getting much smarter. The content creator is having a lot less control over how their pages are showing up and what words they’re showing up for.”

According to an August 2015 study on the future of SEO by Moz Inc.,a Seattle-based SEO consulting company, the most important factors for SEO impact next year will be mobile-friendliness, which will increase in impact by 88%; analysis of a page’s perceived value (up 81%); usage data such as dwell time (up 67%); and readability and design (up 67%). SEO factors that the study reported will decrease in impact are the effectiveness of paid links (down 55%) and the influence of anchor text (down 49%).

Here, experts offer six tips on how to use SEO to maximize your content marketing investments.

Intention is everything

You no longer need an exact keyword to offer a relevant search result, says Cyrus Shepard, director of audience development at Moz. “In the old days, it was about getting the click. Now search engines are seeing how people are interacting with your website: Are they going back and clicking on results, or are they finding the answers they’re looking for when they’re on your site? Today it’s about the post-click activity. Not only do you have to get the clicks, but you have to satisfy user intent.”

Keywords aren’t the be-all and end-all

Including keywords in headlines is becoming less important, Shepard says. “Google has gotten better about interpreting meaning. It used to be that if you wanted to rank for ‘best restaurants,’ you had to say ‘best restaurants’ three or four times. It’s still helpful to mention ‘best restaurants,’ but the semantic meaning is becoming much more important. Now you can just talk about great dining experiences, and the search engines will pick up on it.”

Adds Laetsch: “Historically, we wanted to get a keyword in the body copy or in the meta description. Now that’s all gone out the window. As the search engines get smarter, they start to think about other words that you expect to be in that article, what will signal that this is an authoritative article on the topic. If you were writing an article about the Apple Watch, you might have the words ‘Apple,’ ‘iPhone,’ ‘Watch,’ ‘apps’ and ‘time.’ If those are in the body copy, it sends signals to the search engines that this is a pretty good article.” 

Seventy-five percent of search queries are between three and five words long, so you should write headlines accordingly, he adds. “The search engines are figuring out that if people search for the word ‘marketing,’ or any one- or two-word query, they don’t get the results they want. To get quality results that are most likely to answer their question, they have to go to three-, four- or five-word queries. As content creators, when you’re thinking about optimization, you have to think about that.”

Focus on the user experience

Thus, original content is becoming more important than ever, “The more original content that you can produce - whether it’s an image or a video, or long-form content, anything you can put together that’s going to justify someone wanting to read it or share it—the better.”

While articles with a “top five” list format often are clickable, Create an editorial calendar to appeal to your customers’ interests, Your content has to be original and targeted to your audience. If you curate content, take a paragraph from another article or site, and give them full credit and add an attribution, but add a paragraph or two in your own voice: ‘Here’s why I think it’s relevant.’ You’re adding a journalistic voice and making it your own.”

Size matters

Longer articles, between 1,200 to 1,500 words, perform better in search, on average, Laetsch says. “It’s significantly different than it was two or three years ago, when 300 words was a pretty long page. Longer articles are getting more traffic, and they’re ranking higher in SEO, especially for competitive terms. The changes that Google is making, and the reason they’re making these changes, is to make sure they’re sending traffic to pages that delight humans.” He suggests breaking up long-form content with subheads, bullet points and images throughout the copy to make it easy for readers to more quickly scan and digest it.

Longer articles perform better in search results because there are more words and images to rank on the page, Shepard says. “People are sharing longer articles on social media more, and linking to them and citing them more. Shorter articles do well sometimes, but on average, longer articles tend to perform better.”

Optimize for mobile

More people are reading news on their smartphones, so it’s important to ensure that your content is searchable there, says Derek Edmond, managing partner and director of SEO and social media strategies at KoMarketing Associates, a Boston-based B-to-B SEO and social media marketing consultancy. “Making sure Google can understand the content that’s found within a mobile app, and leveraging the marketing of the app with respect to SEO, is an opportunity on the consumer and B-to-B marketing side.”

Use unique images

While images aren’t as big of a referral source in Google as they used to be, having unique images on your site is valuable, Shepard says. “The same image can show up in hundreds of places around the Web, but having unique content around those images is what makes it stand out. I’m not opposed to using stock images to illustrate a point, but any time you can create something that’s custom or use unique photography, that will pay off more in the long run.”

The most important SEO tip for 2016 is to focus on your audience, Shepard says. “In the past, it was about marketers trying to promote what they wanted people to see. Today it’s about delivering what people actually want to see that will give you an SEO ranking boost.”

Adds Laetsch: “The reason we’re doing optimization and want to show up in Google, Bing or Yahoo is not because we make money because we show up No. 1 or No. 2. The reason we want to rank well in the search engine is so that our audience, the people we’re trying to reach, have a great experience. It doesn’t matter how high you rank if your target audience goes to your site and they’re not happy.”

This article was originally published in the November 2015 issue of Marketing News.

White hat SEO

White Hat SEO refers to the usage of optimization strategies, techniques and tactics that focus on a human audience.To be more precise - a website that is optimized for search engines, yet focuses on relevancy and organic ranking is considered to be optimized using White Hat SEO practices. White Hat SEO / Ethical SEO. is more frequently used by those who intend to make a long-term investment on their website. Some examples of White Hat SEO techniques include using keywords and keyword analysis, backlinking, link building to improve link popularity, and writing content for human readers.

These tactics stay within the bounds as defined by Google. Examples include:

• Offering quality content and services
• Using descriptive, keyword-rich meta tags
• Making your site easy to navigate

Implement White Hat SEO Methods

Implementing White Hat SEO practices is the best way to create an ethical, sustainably successful website and business. 

keywords

Keywords still hold value but must be used correctly. Many SEO professionals don’t bother putting keywords in the Meta information as Google doesn’t look at them anymore.  See the video below for Google’s Matt Cutt’s reasoning on why keywords in meta information are more or less ignored by the search engine now:

Keyword ‘stuffing’ used to be a very common practice and was a black hat method intended to ensure that the word associated with a company was picked up. We’ve all seen those articles which are barely legible as every other word is a keyword. Many good SEO content writers now refuse to write content where a client may ask them for a keyword density of 7%, as it lessens the quality of the piece considerably.

However, keywords do still have their place for use with site content, including blogs, images and video and PPC/Adwords. These days, it’s better practice to use similar words throughout a piece of writing as well as the main keyword. Key phrases are also good practice and should be used. It’s also important that these are used in Titles and sub-headers as well as throughout the text.

Content – ascended from King

Have you heard the phrase ‘content is king’? This is no longer true, content is everything (well, pretty much). It’s no longer enough to stick a poorly written blog up once a month – or worse, use text spinners to rejig old content.

Content must be:

• Original and not infringe on the intellectual property rights of others
• Highly relevant and useful to your industry and audience
• Very well written with good grammar and spelling
• For image and video should include a title, ALT tag and description and if appropriate, give credit to original artist (if using creative commons licensed images for example)
• Point to the source of research and quotes where applicable

Adding value to your audience

The best possible way you can perform best in the search is by giving value to your audience and preferably, your industry too.

Grey Hat SEO : Should You Use ?

Gray Hat SEO is difficult to define. In the words of SEO Consultant, John Andrews, Gray Hat SEO is not something between Black Hat and White Hat, but rather "the practice of tactics/techniques which remain ill-defined by published material coming out of Google, and for which reasonable people could disagree on how the tactics support or contrast with the spirit of Google’s published guidelines."  But is what its name suggests .

It’s somewhere in the middle of white and black and if used by a professional, can still be effective. However, it’s safe to say that taking a grey hat approach is playing with fire if you’re not 100% sure of what you’re doing and since we’re predominantly content-led now, it’s not something is recommended.

Grey hat consists of :

• Cloaking
• Purchasing old domains
• Duplicate content
• Link buying
• Social media automation
• Purchasing followers

What does all this mean?

Some SEO companies use grey hat tactics, but the best ones don’t. The short-term advantage, much like black hat (and many of these tactics overlap into black hat) don’t make for a long-term business. Whilst grey hat might gain you some traffic initially, it won’t last, especially if you get caught out.

In essence, with modern content marketing and SEO, white hat wins out. The web is highly competitive, we all know that and so in order to ‘beat the system’, the best way is to work with it and invest in the future of your site.

Like anything in life, taking shortcuts to get you where you want to be right now is often the path to failure. Great SEO, good content and a well-planned out business, that’s what will give your site the competitive edge in the end.

Showcase Shopping Ads from Google: Major Change to PLAs for Broad Product queries

As sellers are starting to prep their holiday campaigns, Google announced several new updates to Shopping Campaigns on Tuesday (which also happens to be Amazon Prime Day), including a whole new look for generic product queries.

Showcase Shopping Ads for broad queries

The biggest announcement is a new ad format for broad, non-brand product searches like “women’s dresses” or “patio furniture”. Google says 40 percent of product queries are for these kinds of broad terms. Where in the past Google has often either not shown any product listing ads on broad queries or shown individual products (“patio furniture”, for example, might yield a mix of individual dining and lounge sets), going forward Google will show what it’s calling Showcase Shopping Ads. Ads appear with a main image and two smaller side images related to the product search. At the bottom of the ad is space for a promotional message or distance to the location for Local Inventory advertisers.

Google's "Showcase Shopping" ads, unveiled today to a small group of reporters in New York, are meant to help people find what they're looking for even when the search query they entered is quite vague. According to Google, more than 40 percent of shopping-related queries on Google are for broad terms, such as "summer dress," "women's athletic clothing," or "living room furniture."

With the new format, a retailer can choose to have a certain series of images appear in search results related to various search queries and keywords. If a user clicks an image, they'll be brought to another page with additional information about the products. According to Google, 44 percent of people mentioned using images to find ideas while shopping online, illustrating the role that images play in online shopping. Showcase Shopping ads will be available in the coming weeks to all merchants running campaigns in the U.S., U.K. and Australia.

"This is a different ad format for shopping that will put the retailer first and really help people explore and discover what they want to buy and where to buy it," said Jonathan Alferness, Google's vp of shopping and travel.

Mobile research and mobile shopping both continue to grow in prominence. According to Google, shopping and travel searches are up 30 percent year-over-year, and mobile search related to finding the "best" product has increased more than 50 percent.

Along with the Showcase Shopping ads, Google is also updating its TrueView ads. The format, which was first unveiled last spring, will soon allow marketers to include a banner companion next to a video ad so that users can scroll through product images and information while a video is playing. The latest updates will also let advertisers decide which products they want to highlight as a part of the campaign.

According to Alferness, the number of advertisers using the TrueView product has increased by 50 percent from January 2015 to January 2016, with one in three advertisers using the product on a weekly basis. While he wouldn't provide a benchmark for the growth, Alferness said Google is seeing "really, really great momentum."

"We're trying to find ways to better infuse the unique aspects of the retailer into the ad formats to really help that retailer come first to the consumer as a choice," he said.

Mobile is also playing an increasing role in travel research and booking. According to Google, visits to mobile travel sites comprised around 40 percent of all traffic to those websites during the first quarter of 2016. Mobile conversions have also grown, rising 10 percent. And now, nearly half of all referrals from Google Hotel Ads come from smartphones, growing nearly 2.4 times year-over-year. Brands like La Quinta are seeing mobile web traffic account for a third of all traffic to its website, with mobile bookings increasing by a factor of four in three years.

Because of this, Google is adding features related to booking hotels and flights. For example, through the company's Hotel Smart Filters, users will be able to filter based on prices, ratings or preferences like whether a hotel is "pet-friendly."

Google also is adding features related to finding deals to point out when a hotel's price is lower than normal or when a hotel is running a discounted rate. It's also adding tips for when prices are lower -much like it already does with flights.

Speaking of flights, price tracking also is getting an update and will now allow consumers to skip checking back all the time for the latest prices and instead opt in to track fares for specific routes and dates.

All about the new Google RankBrain algorithm

Recently, news emerged that Google was using a machine-learning artificial intelligence system called “RankBrain” to help sort through its search results. Wondering how that works and fits in with Google’s overall ranking system? Here’s what we know about RankBrain.

The information covered below comes from three original sources and has been updated over time, with notes where updates have happened. Here are those sources:

First is the Bloomberg story that broke the news about RankBrain yesterday (See also our write-up of it). Second, additional information that Google has now provided directly to Search Engine Land. Third, our own knowledge and best assumptions in places where Google isn’t providing answers. We’ll make clear where these sources are used, when deemed necessary, apart from general background information.

What is RankBrain?

RankBrain is a machine learning artificial intelligence system, the use of which by Google was confirmed on 26 October 2015. It helps Google to process search results and provide more relevant search results for users.

What is machine learning?

Machine learning is where a computer teaches itself how to do something, rather than being taught by humans or following detailed programming.

What is artificial intelligence?

True artificial intelligence, or AI for short, is where a computer can be as smart as a human being, at least in the sense of acquiring knowledge both from being taught and from building on what it knows and making new connections.

True AI exists only in science fiction novels, of course. In practice, AI is used to refer to computer systems that are designed to learn and make connections.

How’s AI different from machine learning? In terms of RankBrain, it seems to us they’re fairly synonymous. You may hear them both used interchangeably, or you may hear machine learning used to describe the type of artificial intelligence approach being employed.

So RankBrain is the new way Google ranks search results?

No. RankBrain is part of Google’s overall search “algorithm,” a computer program that’s used to sort through the billions of pages it knows about and find the ones deemed most relevant for particular queries.

So RankBrain is part of Google’s Hummingbird search algorithm?

That’s our understanding. Hummingbird is the overall search algorithm, just like a car has an overall engine in it. The engine itself may be made up of various parts, such as an oil filter, a fuel pump, a radiator and so on. In the same way, Hummingbird encompasses various parts, with RankBrain being one of the newest.

In particular, we know RankBrain is part of the overall Hummingbird algorithm because the Bloomberg article makes clear that RankBrain doesn’t handle all searches, as only the overall algorithm would.

Hummingbird also contains other parts with names familiar to those in the SEO space, such as Panda, Penguin and Payday designed to fight spam, Pigeon designed to improve local results, Top Heavy designed to demote ad-heavy pages, Mobile Friendly designed to reward mobile-friendly pages and Pirate designed to fight copyright infringement.

RankBrain is the third-most important signal?

That’s right. From out of nowhere, this new system has become what Google says is the third-most important factor for ranking webpages. From the Bloomberg article:RankBrain is one of the “hundreds” of signals that go into an algorithm that determines what results appear on a Google search page and where they are ranked, Corrado said. In the few months it has been deployed, RankBrain has become the third-most important signal contributing to the result of a search query, he said.

What exactly does RankBrain do?

Used as a way to interpret the searches that people submit to find pages that might not have the exact words that were searched for.

Didn’t Google already have ways to find pages beyond the exact query entered?

Yes, Google has found pages beyond the exact terms someone enters for a very long time. For example, years and years ago, if you’d entered something like “shoe,” Google might not have found pages that said “shoes,” because those are technically two different words. But “stemming” allowed Google to get smarter, to understand that shoes is a variation of shoe, just like “running” is a variation of “run.”

Google also got synonym smarts, so that if you searched for “sneakers,” it might understand that you also meant “running shoes.” It even gained some conceptual smarts, to understand that there are pages about “Apple” the technology company versus “apple” the fruit.

How’s RankBrain helping refine queries?

The methods Google already uses to refine queries generally all flow back to some human being somewhere doing work, either having created stemming lists or synonym lists or making database connections between things. Sure, there’s some automation involved. But largely, it depends on human work.

The problem is that Google processes three billion searches per day. In 2007, Google said that 20 percent to 25 percent of those queries had never been seen before. In 2013, it brought that number down to 15 percent, which was used again in yesterday’s Bloomberg article and which Google reconfirmed to us. But 15 percent of three billion is still a huge number of queries never entered by any human searcher - 450 million per day.

Among those can be complex, multi-word queries, also called “long-tail” queries. RankBrain is designed to help better interpret those queries and effectively translate them, behind the scenes in a way, to find the best pages for the searcher.

As Google told us, it can see patterns between seemingly unconnected complex searches to understand how they’re actually similar to each other. This learning, in turn, allows it to better understand future complex searches and whether they’re related to particular topics. Most important, from what Google told us, it can then associate these groups of searches with results that it thinks searchers will like the most.

Google didn’t provide examples of groups of searches or give details on how RankBrain guesses at what are the best pages. But the latter is probably because if it can translate an ambiguous search into something more specific, it can then bring back better answers.

Does RankBrain really help?

Despite my two examples above being less than compelling as testimony to the greatness of RankBrain, I really do believe that it probably is making a big impact, as Google is claiming. The company is fairly conservative with what goes into its ranking algorithm. It does small tests all the time. But it only launches big changes when it has a great degree of confidence.

Integrating RankBrain, to the degree that it’s supposedly the third-most important signal, is a huge change. It’s not one that I think Google would do unless it really believed it was helping.

When Did RankBrain start?

Google told us that there was a gradual rollout of RankBrain in early 2015 and that it’s been fully live and global for a few months now.

What queries are impacted?

In October 2015, Google told Bloomberg that a “very large fraction” of the 15 percent of queries it normally never sees before were processed by RankBrain. In short, 15 percent or less.

In June 2016, news emerged that RankBrain was being used for every query that Google handles.

NOTE: This story has been revised from when it was originally published in October 2015 to reflect the latest information.(Here on Blog its published for reference only)

SEO is Not Search Engine Manipulation” that Google will ban you for

SEO not equivalent to “search engine manipulation” 

Google is currently at a legal fight against a publisher that was banned from its search results because of “search engine manipulation” which should not be misconstrued as SEO being as bad, as spam, as something you could get banned for. 

Instead Google has explicitly mentioned that “search engine manipulation” is something the company fights against, might ban anyone for and, importantly, is defined pretty much how many people might define SEO.

Google: SEO is not spam

Given that, “Is Google Trying To Kill SEO,” as the headline of the Entrepreneur article asks? Almost certainly not, as I’ll explain. But let’s start with Google’s official statement that it gave Search Engine Land on this:

While we can’t comment on ongoing litigation, in general, Google supports and encourages SEO practices that are within our guidelines and don’t consider that spam.

Got it? SEO - commonly accepted best practices - isn’t spam. And anyone encountering the newfangled term of “search engine manipulation” should view that, in my opinion, as equating with spam and not SEO.

What is the story behind the term “search engine manipulation” 

The recent legal suit is between Google and e-ventures sites. A statement by Brandon Falls, the Google search quality analyst introduces the term “search engine manipulation” for the first time.

From Falls’ declaration, the first reference to “search engine manipulation” is as follows:

 An important part of providing valuable search results to users is Google’s protection of the integrity of its search results from those who seek to manipulate them for their own gain.

As noted, efforts to subvert or game the process by which search engines rank the relevance of websites are called “webspam” in the search industry.

Such search engine manipulation harms what is most valuable to users about search: the quality (i.e. relevance) of our search results for users.

Accordingly, Google considers search engine manipulation to be extremely serious and expends substantial resources to try to identify and eliminate it. These actions are critical to retain users’ trust in Google’s search results.

The highlighted points above opens with the Google saying the it tries to protect its search results from those who “seek to manipulate them for their own gain.” Now the problem with the above statement is that Google is trying to convey that Anyone doing commonly accepted SEO is doing so in hopes of manipulating the search results for their own gain.In short, Google actively encourages and instructs publishers on how to “manipulate” its search results. While the newly emerged term that Google calls search engine manipulation” is equivalent to spam  does not include accepted SEO.

Now read the next statement by Google that  “Google’s online Webmaster Guidelines include a discussion of “Quality Guidelines.” The Quality Guidelines enumerate numerous manipulation techniques that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.”

In this statement, Google is inherently acknowledging that there are many search engine manipulation techniques but only some violate its guidelines. In other words, not all manipulation is bad and an actionable offense. SEO manipulation, that which is done within its guidelines, should be OK. Outside the guidelines — that’s spam and potentially gets you in trouble.

It’s a pity Google wasn’t much clearer and didn’t stay with the commonly used industry terms out there. As a result, it’s possible for anyone to fear monger or fear that doing accepted SEO might be a bannable offense.

But still I would like to convey that in reality, anyone who stays within Google’s guidelines really should have nothing further to fear, as Google’s own statement today says. In particular, it’s important to note that this declaration introducing “search engine manipulation” as a term was made back in November 2014. It was only just noticed now

This update was first appeared on SEL. 

Embrace the new king of Marketing

Content creators ruled and reigned over the marketing and advertising circles for years. But the growth of new media platforms is shifting the power and ad dollars away from content creators to content platform owners. After all, the real value lies in reaching the consumer through the medium and form of his choice. All hail the new king set to reign in the new digital age.

Traditional models of content monetisation such as subscriptions, ticket sales, and license fees used by media companies have been disrupted forever with consumers moving online and demanding access to free online content. While the movement of ad spend from print to online channels has subsidised content costs and helped monetise content, it is yet again threatened with content consumption moving from traditional online media to newer channels offered by internet companies. Ad dollars are following suit proving to be both the biggest disruptor and an opportunity for the industry.

Decelerating content driven growth

“Build it and they come” was the mantra of most media companies in providing good quality content as they expected customers to buy tickets to see movies, subscribe to TV shows, pay affiliate fees to show content, or advertise on the content. This model has stood the test of time and proved to be greatly beneficial to customers over the past few decades in providing quality content at lower and lower costs. As long as ad revenues continued to flow in, media companies could afford to reduce their prices by subsidising it with ad revenues. As long as “content was king”, the advertising spend would follow and continue to fill their coffers up until the new-age customer started viewing content on different media platforms – apps, social media, and peer-to-peer sharing networks. The ad dollars too began shifting to where these customers spend their time and consequently, consume content – the likes of Google, Facebook and their spin offs. The coffers are now running dry.

The numbers speak for themselves:

The ad revenues generated by Google and Facebook already exceed the entire ad spend on TV – and this is without the internet behemoths activating their entire portfolio of media channels (WhatsApp being a case in point).

So why is this happening? And what are media companies doing about it?

Well, not much! Some media companies are imposing punitive price increases on customers who are moving to internet media channels and others are introducing data limits on content consumed. But both these measures are proving to be counter-productive as they drive customers, eventually in greater numbers into the arms of more “flexible” media channels such as apps and social media.

A case in point are the Indian online retailers who realised that they had huge unpaid advertising bills from advertisers who were just not paying up for ads placed on their site. The lack of prepaid ads for smaller advertisers or software to run large ad accounts (like Amazon) led to these gaping holes in their ad revenues. It is this gap that a Google can easily bridge – by providing publishers a safe reliable ad service to receive ads, advertisers an easy-to-use platform to launch their ads, and consumers access to content at a low cost. Media companies are severely restricted by their inability to control these new-age platforms from which customers are now consuming their content. As we now know, the new-age customer spends increasingly larger amounts of time online and demands his content online as well. With 43 percent of his time online spent on search (21 percent) and social media (22 percent), it makes sense for advertisers to spend their ad dollars on Google and Facebook to capture this piece of the customer’s time.

With the above kind of consumer mind share, we foresee that internet companies will morph into advertising firms raking in the ad dollars on different online channels while media companies will struggle with selling content to these internet channel providers.

A new reign and a new strategy

The future of advertising will certainly move online and into the realm of the internet companies. While media companies will continue to be the primary creators and custodians of content, it will certainly not be the king, as most of the media firms are competing for space on the new internet channels by pitching lower quotes. All will need to bow to the new emperor on the block – the internet marketeers. And with the dethroning of content, a new strategy that factors the shift in power and its impact on bottom line will be needed. Being good at creating content is no longer enough, rather how to distribute it on the web.

Credit : This post is first appeared on Forbes Blog

7 Common Hreflang Mistakes

The Purpose of Hreflang

Hreflang annotations are meant to cross-reference pages that are similar in content, but target different audiences. You can target different audiences with hreflang according to their language and/or their country. This ensures that the correct pages will be shown to the correct users when they search on the versions of Google search that you are targeting.

Here is an example of two hreflang tags that target English speakers in the USA and English speakers in Canada:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us" href="http://www.example.com/usa/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-ca" href="http://www.example.com/ca/" />

Both of these tags would appear on both pages. This would ensure that Canadians searching on google.ca would find the page targeting Canadians, and Americans searching on google.com would find the page targeting Americans.

So that’s the purpose of hreflang, but often I come across mistakes and misconceptions about how to implement hreflang. Here are some of the most common:

Common Mistakes in Implementing Hreflang

Return Tag Errors

“Return Tag Errors” are the result of hreflang annotations that don’t cross-reference each other. These can be found within Google Search Console under the International Targeting tab. If your website has hreflang annotations, either via the page tagging method or the xml sitemaps method, there will be data reported on how many hreflang tags were found, and how many hreflang errors were found. If there are errors, often times those errors are “return tag errors.” Here’s an example of a site that has 412 hreflang tags with errors – all due to “no return tags”):

Hreflang 

Your annotations must be confirmed from the other pages. If page A links to page B, page B must link  back to page A, otherwise, your annotations may not be interpreted correctly.

Often times, the “missing link” is because the hreflang tags do not include a reference to the page itself. Your annotations should be self-referential. Page A should use rel-alternate-hreflang annotation linking to itself.

Using the Wrong Country or Language Codes

When you are adding hreflang codes to your webpages, you need to be absolutely sure that you are using the correct country and language codes. According to Google, “The value of the hreflang attribute must be in ISO 639-1 format for the language, and in ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format for the region. Specifying only the region is not supported.”

One of the most common mistakes is using “en-uk” to specify English speakers in the United Kingdom. However, the correct hreflang tag for the UK is actually “en-gb.”

You can use hreflang generator tools like this one to figure out which values you should be using.

Combining Hreflang Sitemaps and Page Tagging Methods

There is no need to use multiple methods for hreflang implementation. Google recommends against it, since it would be redundant. You certainly can use both methods, and there is no clear advantage of one method over the other. Here are some considerations for when you are deciding whether to use the xml sitemaps or page tagging methods:

• Hreflang xml sitemaps can be difficult to create and update. You can use online tools or create it in Excel, but it is difficult to automate the process. If you have xml sitemaps that your CMS updates for you automatically, it would be better to continue to use those rather than create separate, static hreflang xml sitemaps.
• Page tagging leads to code bloat, especially when you are targeting several countries/languages. That can mean an additional 10+ lines of code to each geo-targeted page.
• Some content management systems, such as WordPress and Drupal, offer automatic hreflang page tagging solutions.

Believing That hreflang Annotations Will Consolidate Link Authority

This is another common misconception that can trip up even advanced SEO experts. There have been articles published that seem to show that, once hreflang is correctly implemented across multiple top-level domains or sub-domains, the most authoritative domain gains in link authority. This has not been verified with other international SEO experts, and I have no evidence to believe this is the case either.

The best way to build link authority and consolidate it across your geo-targeted web pages is to keep your content all on one domain. Use a generic, top-level domain such as a .com, and use the sub-folder method to create your country- or language-targeted content. Here is a snapshot of a conversation I had with Gianluca Fiorelli and Martin Kura about this subject:

Fixing Duplicate Content Issues

This is another tricky subject that deserves some nuance. Duplicate content itself is often misunderstood, and throwing hreflang into the mix makes it even more difficult to understand. Hreflang does not “fix” duplicate content issues, per se. For example, when you add hreflang tags to your site, they will appear in the International Targeting tab of Google Search Console (so Google does indeed recognize and understand them), but you will still continue to see Duplicate Title Tags and Duplicate Meta Description warnings in the HTML Improvements tab (if you have pages with duplicate titles and descriptions across your geo-targeted webpages). So if you have two pages in the same language targeting different regions, such as English in the USA and Canada, the content of those two pages may be so similar that they are considered duplicates. Adding hreflang tags will not change that. It is still possible that your American page may outrank your Canadian page, if the American page has significantly more link authority, and especially if it has links from Canadian sources.

However, hreflang tags will help to alleviate this issue. This is why hreflang tags are not enough. They provide a technical structure that helps Google sort out and understand your content, but to have a full-fledged international site(s), you need a holistic international marketing strategy that includes building link authority to your site(s) from the relevant countries/languages that you are targeting.

Hreflang is very effective at handling cross-annotations among different languages, but when it comes to same language, different regions, you can get mixed results.

Not Using Canonical Tags and Hreflang Tags Together Correctly

The hreflang tag also can be used along with rel="canonical" annotations, but hreflang tags need to referenceself-referential,canonical URLs. For example, page A should have a canonical tag pointing to page A, page B should have a canonical tag pointing to page B, and page C should have a canonical tag pointing to page C. All three pages should have hreflang tags that mention all three of the pages in the group. You do NOT want to canonicalize only one version of a page in a page grouping, as that would interfere with hreflang annotations.

Example:

On this page, http://www.example.com/usa/ the hreflang tags might say:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us" href="http://www.example.com/usa/" />

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-ca" href="http://www.example.com/ca/" />

So in this case, the canonical tag for this page would be:

<link rel="Canonical" href="http://www.example.com/usa/" />

And on the Canadian page, the hreflang tags would remain the same, but the canonical tag would be:

<link rel="Canonical" href="http://www.example.com/CA/" />

Not Using Absolute URLs

This one is a heart-breaker because often everything is correct except for the simple fact that the hreflang link referenced is relative rather than absolute. There really is no margin for error with hreflang tags so make sure you are always using absolute URLs. For example, here is what NOT to do:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us" href="/usa/" />

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-ca" href="/ca/" />

Google wants to be able to crawl the entire URL path, especially since many times hreflang tags reference separate ccTLDs or sub-domains.

Content Credit : Kaitlin McMichael

"Content Is King " - Celebrating Twenty Years of Being True

You've heard the phrase, of course, “content is king.” Bill Gates first wrote those words in 1996 in an essay of the same title.

Here is the the essay in it’s entirety here

Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting.

The television revolution that began half a century ago spawned a number of industries, including the manufacturing of TV sets, but the long-term winners were those who used the medium to deliver information and entertainment.

When it comes to an interactive network such as the Internet, the definition of “content” becomes very wide. For example, computer software is a form of content-an extremely important one, and the one that for Microsoft will remain by far the most important.

But the broad opportunities for most companies involve supplying information or entertainment. No company is too small to participate.

One of the exciting things about the Internet is that anyone with a PC and a modem can publish whatever content they can create. In a sense, the Internet is the multimedia equivalent of the photocopier. It allows material to be duplicated at low cost, no matter the size of the audience.

The Internet also allows information to be distributed worldwide at basically zero marginal cost to the publisher. Opportunities are remarkable, and many companies are laying plans to create content for the Internet.

For example, the television network NBC and Microsoft recently agreed to enter the interactive news business together. Our companies will jointly own a cable news network, MSNBC, and an interactive news service on the Internet. NBC will maintain editorial control over the joint venture.

I expect societies will see intense competition-and ample failure as well as success-in all categories of popular content-not just software and news, but also games, entertainment, sports programming, directories, classified advertising, and on-line communities devoted to major interests.

Printed magazines have readerships that share common interests. It’s easy to imagine these communities being served by electronic online editions.

But to be successful online, a magazine can’t just take what it has in print and move it to the electronic realm. There isn’t enough depth or interactivity in print content to overcome the drawbacks of the online medium.

If people are to be expected to put up with turning on a computer to read a screen, they must be rewarded with deep and extremely up-to-date information that they can explore at will. They need to have audio, and possibly video. They need an opportunity for personal involvement that goes far beyond that offered through the letters-to-the-editor pages of print magazines.

A question on many minds is how often the same company that serves an interest group in print will succeed in serving it online. Even the very future of certain printed magazines is called into question by the Internet.

For example, the Internet is already revolutionizing the exchange of specialized scientific information. Printed scientific journals tend to have small circulations, making them high-priced. University libraries are a big part of the market. It’s been an awkward, slow, expensive way to distribute information to a specialized audience, but there hasn’t been an alternative.

Now some researchers are beginning to use the Internet to publish scientific findings. The practice challenges the future of some venerable printed journals.

Over time, the breadth of information on the Internet will be enormous, which will make it compelling. Although the gold rush atmosphere today is primarily confined to the United States, I expect it to sweep the world as communications costs come down and a critical mass of localized content becomes available in different countries.

For the Internet to thrive, content providers must be paid for their work. The long-term prospects are good, but I expect a lot of disappointment in the short-term as content companies struggle to make money through advertising or subscriptions. It isn’t working yet, and it may not for some time.

So far, at least, most of the money and effort put into interactive publishing is little more than a labor of love, or an effort to help promote products sold in the non-electronic world. Often these efforts are based on the belief that over time someone will figure out how to get revenue.

In the long run, advertising is promising. An advantage of interactive advertising is that an initial message needs only to attract attention rather than convey much information. A user can click on the ad to get additional information-and an advertiser can measure whether people are doing so.

But today the amount of subscription revenue or advertising revenue realized on the Internet is near zero-maybe $20 million or $30 million in total. Advertisers are always a little reluctant about a new medium, and the Internet is certainly new and different.

Some reluctance on the part of advertisers may be justified, because many Internet users are less-than-thrilled about seeing advertising. One reason is that many advertisers use big images that take a long time to download across a telephone dial-up connection. A magazine ad takes up space too, but a reader can flip a printed page rapidly.

As connections to the Internet get faster, the annoyance of waiting for an advertisement to load will diminish and then disappear. But that’s a few years off.

Some content companies are experimenting with subscriptions, often with the lure of some free content. It’s tricky, though, because as soon as an electronic community charges a subscription, the number of people who visit the site drops dramatically, reducing the value proposition to advertisers.

A major reason paying for content doesn’t work very well yet is that it’s not practical to charge small amounts. The cost and hassle of electronic transactions makes it impractical to charge less than a fairly high subscription rate.

But within a year the mechanisms will be in place that allow content providers to charge just a cent or a few cents for information. If you decide to visit a page that costs a nickel, you won’t be writing a check or getting a bill in the mail for a nickel. You’ll just click on what you want, knowing you’ll be charged a nickel on an aggregated basis.

This technology will liberate publishers to charge small amounts of money, in the hope of attracting wide audiences.

Those who succeed will propel the Internet forward as a marketplace of ideas, experiences, and products-a marketplace of content.

This essay is copyright © 2001 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Test your Website Mobile-friendliness & page speed in one Place - Google

In a bid to test your website’s mobile-friendliness and page speed for desktop and mobile under one roof,Google has introduced a new tool/ landing page. It is intended for small businesses to test their sites,instead of going to a specific mobile-friendly testing tool and/or page speed testing tool. It was revealed via a blog post on ‘Google Small Business Blog’.

The new tool, available over here, will test this all at the same time. The unique aspects of this tool are:

1. Get all three scores on one page.
2. Google will email you a more comprehensive report for you to share with your web Team.
3. Google will now give you a 0 out of a 100 score for how mobile-friendly your website is, as opposed to if it is mobile-friendly or not.

Here is what the scores say:

• Mobile-friendliness: This is the quality of the experience customers have when they’re browsing your site on their phones. To be mobile-friendly, your site should have tappable buttons, be easy to navigate from a small screen and have the most important information up front and centre.
• Mobile speed: This is how long it takes your site to load on mobile devices. If customers are kept waiting for too long, they’ll move on to the next site.
• Desktop speed: This is how long it takes your site to load on desktop computers. It’s not just the strength of your customers’ web connection that determines speed, but also the elements of your website.

Here is a screen shot of the report of one of the this site:

You can see it is a pretty overview, much better than the more webmaster/developer-focused options Google has given us in the past. As you scroll down, you get more details on how to make your site more mobile-friendly or faster on desktop or mobile browsers.

Why Images (Visual) Are a important in Social Media

social media has become coveted real estate for brands. It’s a crowded space where consumers spend an inordinate amount of time. Getting heard among the noise can be challenging, and brands looking to differentiate themselves not only need a compelling message, but also - and more importantly -visual content that resonates.

More than a random stock image, employing visual social media - and doing it well - is a deliberative ,thoughtful process. Here are four tips to help you more effectively improve your social strategy with visual marketing.

Make it a Thoughtful Process

As stated above, choosing the perfect image is a careful, deliberative process. Explore how you want your audience to feel when looking at your imagery and think through the factors involved in creating a visual campaign that resonates with your audience. Some questions to ask when collecting images:

• Who is my target audience?
• What is the message that I am trying to get across to them through the image?
• How can this image help them experience this feeling?
• What are their needs?

As a brand, if you push something out to the consumer that’s not aligned with who you claim to be, they feel it. And they’re quick to recognize the separation between what was depicted and what was delivered. Keep it thoughtful and planned.

Forge a Consistent Visual Identity Across Platforms

When most people think of visual social media, Pinterest and Instagram come to mind. These social platforms paved the way for an important movement toward rich social-media images, but it’s important to extend your visual campaign beyond the basics to forge a consistent identity across platforms. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and others are also aligning to the idea of visual as a leading force. Video is on the rise, and brands have started using images to create short, engaging video clips as content for use on social channels. Keep your visual story consistent across platforms, and you’ll bolster your brand’s visual social identity.

Use Imagery — Not as a Supporting Asset but as the Message Itself

Great brands understand that the image is the message, particularly with how social platforms distribute visual content and how people consume it. Imagery is no longer a supporting asset but core messaging. Consider Apple’s visual campaign for the iPhone 6. The campaign focused on a series of images — photographs taken by an iPhone. The point of the campaign was to showcase the quality of the picture and nothing more. In this case, a single image was stronger than a brand name or pointing directly to the new features the phone provides.

Tie Visuals to Core Values and Mission

Influential brands use visual social media to personalize their companies. Visuals can provide a glimpse into company culture and personality, showcasing not only who you are as a brand, but also the persona of loyal fans and customers. Tying visual content to core values — and the sentiment that coincides with those values — makes it easy to tell your brand story. The key is to know your audience well and be clear about what you stand for and how you want to be perceived.

Content Credit : Heidi Besik

The 9 Most Common Local SEO Myths of Local SEO

1.Deleting your listing in Google My Business actually removes the listing from Google.

Business owners will often question how they can get rid of duplicate listings on Google. One of the more common things people try is claiming the duplicate and then deleting it from the Google My Business Dashboard. When you go to delete a listing, you receive a scary message asking if you're sure you want to do this

The truth is, removing a listing from Google My Business (GMB) just makes the listing unverified. It still exists on Google Maps and will often still rank, provided you didn’t clear out all the categories/details before you deleted it. The only time you’d really want to delete a listing via GMB is if you no longer want to manage the listing.

Google confirms this in their help center article:

When you delete a local page, the corresponding listing will be unverified and you will no longer be able to manage it. Google may still retain business information from the page and may continue to show information about the business on Maps, Search, and other Google properties, including marking the business as permanently closed, moved, or open, depending on the information that’s known about the business.

2. Failure to claim your page means your business won’t rank anywhere.

I’m sure most of you have received those annoying phone calls that say: “Your business is not currently verified and will vanish on Google unless you claim it now!”

First of all, consider the authority of the people who are calling you. I can say with certainty they are not experts in this industry, or they wouldn’t resort to robo-calling to make sales.

The Moz Local Search Ranking Factors does list verifying your listing as #13 for making an impact on ranking in the 3-pack, but this is often because business owners add more data to the listing when they verify it. If they left the listing exactly how it was before verifying, the verification “status” would not likely impact the ranking much at all. We often see unverified pages outranking verified ones in really competitive markets.

3. "Professional/Practitioner" listings on Google are considered duplicates and can be removed.

Google often creates listings for the actual public-facing professionals in an office (lawyers, doctors, dentists, realtors, etc), and the owner of the practice usually wants them to disappear. Google will get rid of the listing for the professional in two different cases:

• The professional is not public-facing. Support staff, like hygienists or paralegals for example, don’t qualify for a listing and Google will remove them if they exist.
• The business only has one public-facing individual. For example, if you have a law firm with only one lawyer, Google considers this to be a “Solo Practitioner” and will merge the listing for the professional with the listing for the office. Their guidelines state to “create a single page, named using the following format: [brand/company]: [practitioner name].”

In the case that the professional has left your office, you can have the listing marked as moved if the professional has retired or is no longer working in the industry. This will cause it to vanish from the search results, but it will still exist in Google’s back-end. If the professional has moved to a different company, you should have them claim the listing and update the address/phone number to list their new contact information.

4. Posting on G+ helps improve your ranking.

Phil Rozek explains this best: “It’s nearly impossible for people to see your Google+ posts unless they search for your business by name. Google doesn’t include a link to your 'Plus' page in the local pack. Google doesn’t even call it a 'Plus' page anymore. Do you still believe being active on Google+ is a local ranking factor?”

No, posting on G+ will not cause your ranking to skyrocket, despite what the Google My Business phone support team told you.

5. "Maps SEO" is something that can be effectively worked on separately from "Organic SEO."

I often get small business owners calling me saying something along the lines of this: "Hey, Joy. I have an SEO company and they’re doing an awesome job with my site organically, but I don’t show up anywhere in the local pack. Can I hire you to do Google Maps optimization and have them do Organic SEO?"

My answer is, generally, no. “Maps Optimization” is not a thing that can be separated from organic. At Local U in Williamsburg, Mike Ramsey shared that 75% of ranking local listings also rank organically on the first page. The two are directly connected — a change that you make to your site can have a huge influence on where you rank locally.

If you're a local business, it's in your better interests to have an SEO company that understands Google Maps and how the 3-pack works. At the company I work for, we've always made it a goal to get the business ranked both organically and locally, since it’s almost impossible to get in the 3-pack without a strong organic ranking and a website with strong local signals.

6. Google employees are the highest authority on which ranking signals you should pay attention to.

Google employees are great; I love reading what they come out with and the insight they provides. However, as David Mihm pointed out at Local U, those employees have absolutely no incentive to divulge any top-secret tips for getting your website to rank well. Here are some recent examples of advice given from Google employees that should be ignored:

• Duplicate listings will fix themselves over time.
• Posting on Google+ will help your ranking (advice given from phone support reps).
• If you want to rank well in the 3-pack, just alter your business description.

Instead of trusting this advice, I always suggest that people make sure what they're doing matches up with what the pros are saying in big surveys and case studies.

7. Setting a huge service area means you’ll rank in all kinds of additional towns.

Google allows service-area businesses to set a radius around their business address to demonstrate how far they're willing to travel to the customer. People often set this radius really large because they believe it will help them rank in more towns. It doesn’t. You will still most likely only rank in the town you're using for your business address.

8. When your business relocates, you want to mark the listing for the old location as closed.

The Google My Business & Google MapMaker rules don’t agree on this one. Anyone on the Google MapMaker side would tell a business to mark a listing as "closed" when they move. This will cause a business listing to have a big, ugly, red "permanently closed" label when anyone searches your business name.

If your listing is verified through Google My Business, all you need to do is edit the address inside your dashboard when you move. If there's an unverified duplicate listing that exists at your old address, you want to make sure you get it marked as "Moved."

9. Google displays whatever is listed in your GMB dashboard.

Google gives business owners the ability to edit information on their listing by verifying it via Google My Business. However, whatever data the owner inputs is just one of many sources that Google will get information from. Google updates verified listings all the time by scraping data from the business website, inputs from edits made on Google Maps/MapMaker, and third-party data sources. A recent case I’ve seen is one where Google repeatedly updated an owner-verified listing with incorrect business hours due to not being able to properly read the business hours listed on their website.

Content Credit : JoyHawkins

Impact of Content Delivery Networks on SEO

What is a Content Delivery Network?

Contact Delivery Networks (CDNs) are a system of servers distributed throughout the world delivering web pages, and other web content (like video streaming) based on the users geographical location. This means that large amounts of content can be delivered quickly and without any interruptions.

For instance, if your website is based in Los Angeles, the people who are accessing it in San Francisco will receive the content faster than people accessing it from Shanghai. The farther away the person accessing the website or application is, the longer the load time and the more frustrating the user experience becomes.

CDNs have been a hot topic for businesses wanting to expand by reaching Internet users globally. It gives businesses the opportunity to reach out to millions of web users anywhere in the world in just seconds. Being able to put your company out in front of as many people as possible and quickly should be a priority for any business looking to grow, and when it comes to SEO, it must be a priority.

How do CDNs Work?

CDNs are made up of a network of servers referred to as “points of presence” or POPs. Each one of these servers (POPs) are spread out in locations all over the world. The CDN server that is located closest to where the user accesses it is called an “edge server.” When a user requests content from a website or application through a CDN, they will be connected to the closest edge server. This ensures the user will receive the best experience possible.

According to Incapsula, some of the benefits of using a CDN include:

• Faster load times for content on your site (this is especially useful for increasing performance of your mobile site)
• Image compression improves performance by reducing the size of images sent to the user
• Session optimization reduces the number of open connections to your web server
• Scaling quickly when there is increased or heavy traffic to your website
• Ensuring the stability of your website by minimizing the risk of traffic spikes at point of origin
• Better site performance and customer experience

CDNs allow you to cache (temporarily store) your websites content on a CDN so it is delivered from an edge server to the user faster than if it were to be delivered from the origin. This allows the content requested to travel from the nearest POP and back, instead of having to travel all the way from the website’s origin server and back.

Another benefit of using a CDN is that CDNs will remove and update (purge) your content regularly, to ensure the most relevant and current content is being delivered, even if the website content is cached. This process is referred to as content invalidation.

How do CDNs Help SEO?

CDNs improve the speed and quality of content that is delivered to the user. CDNs should be seen as part of the solution for search ranking as it is applied to page speed and efficient content delivery, but it is not the only thing that needs to be done to increase search ranking. Think of CDNs as a way to improve upon the technical ranking factors for SEO.

For instance, CDNs help to ensure each version of your website across several servers and locations are identical. CDNs use caching algorithms and canonical headers to help enhance SEO of your website by combatting duplicate content creation issues. Remember, as CDNs purge content so the most recent and relevant content loads first, they must do this across every cached version of a site.

How CDNs Make Your Site Safer?

Having the site load from several servers and from several locations will not only improve your site’s health, but again it is a huge benefit for SEO by increasing the load time of your website.

The risk of attack on your site will also decrease, because of the multiple servers located in multiple geographical locations. Having multiple servers will also help prevent your website from crashing by dividing the load time up among the various servers.

Should You be Using a CDN?

CDNs can benefit anyone with a website or mobile application that could be requested by multiple users at a time. CDNs are especially useful for websites that have a lot of content and varying content types, and complex websites with users from multiple geographical locations. Most importantly, CDNs will increase site load speed, which will increase your search ranking.

On the other hand, if you are going to implement a CDN, make sure that you implement it correctly. Contact a professional to help you implement your CDN, because an incorrectly implemented CDN can compromise your site’s SEO and usability.

Original Source : Adobe

Micro-Conversion vs. Macro-Conversion

• The Personalization Gap Is Wide

It indicates that consumers would welcome real-time offers in stores and online. Yet, very few marketers are using technology to achieve micro-level personalization, with almost one-third saying that they do not personalize at all. The result? Most consumers find that the personalization they do see is superficial and annoying. They want to use technology to solve problems and find services quickly, but many organizations are falling short.

The stakes are high. Companies that can deliver the right experience to the right person will become the go-to brands, leaving other brands far behind.

• The Right People + the Right Data = the Right Experience Design

A key element in an engaging customer experience is continuity across devices and platforms. Often, a fragmented customer experience is a reflection of the structure within an organization. Different platforms within a company present a challenge - they may only be able to optimize pieces of the whole experience, and they use different KPIs (key performance indicators) to do so, leading to multiple personas for the same customer, competing offers on different channels, and other poor experiences.

Integrated data systems, where the same solutions that harness all of the data are used to optimize and personalize the experience, will help marketers understand how their customers experience their brands as a whole. A unified platform makes it easier for all team members to see the same data and analysis and to work together to create a focused, optimized experience.

The best experiences will be forged when people are able to listen to the data and, from it, understand how the customer thinks and feels about the brand. The skillsets needed are an intersection of business, science, and liberal arts skills. Only 10 percent of companies have established customer-experience teams - people who combine the art of design with the science of optimization to create personalized experiences that drive engagement and revenue. Companies that invest in agile and efficient technologies - and the right people to use them - will become the competitive leaders of the future.

• Personalization Is a Process, Not an Event

Leading personalized experiences are evolved with an iterative process. They begin by bringing data together to map customer behaviors and identifying top-performing areas and bottlenecks. A prototype experience is developed from this initial map.

Most companies would stop here, but significant gains are realized by continued analysis of performance and revisions to the experience. From there, one can move on to automate the experience. This is necessary to achieve personalization at the micro-scale needed to reach every customer on all of their channels and devices.

• The Internet of Things Will Widen the Gap

In just a few short years, the mushrooming number of devices on the Internet of Things will create new data streams and a torrent of new information. This data can potentially give an even clearer view of customers lives, if marketers can meet the challenge of making sense of this massive amount of data. These new devices will compound today’s marketing problems and make it critical to implement strategies now before the avalanche begins. Today’s integrated technology supports these new levels of data analytics, content management, testing, and optimization and will allow scaling of personalized experiences at the new levels of data input that are coming soon.

Higher Ranking Factors Revealed By Google

Google made very interesting announcements about SEO recently..

#1: Links and content are Google's #1 and #2 ranking factors

As you may know, Google uses over 200 ranking factors to rank websites.And SEO pros have long known that backlinks make up a good chunk of these 200 factors.

For example, three of Google's most well-known ranking factors are link-related: 1. the number of links pointing to your site, 2. the anchor text of those links and 3. the authority of those links.

That's why any SEO agency worth their salt tells their clients that link building is the KEY to first page Google rankings.

So it was refreshing to hear Google confirm that links and content were Google's two most important ranking signals.

When a Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google (Andrey Lipattsev) was asked what the top two ranking factors were, he answered:

"I can tell you what they are. It is content. And it’s links pointing to your site."

So the next time you see an alarmist "link building is dead!" article, you can chuckle to yourself...
...and then get back to the important task of link building.

Key Takeaway: Despite the buzz about social signals, backlinks remain the core of Google's algorithm. If you want to build more white hat links to your site, I highly recommend watching this step-by-step video case study.

Announcement #2: Google uses CTR and user experience in their algorithm

Yes, links are still king today...and will likely remain Google's top ranking signal for years to come.

That said, Google is consistently adding new ranking signals into the mix.And in a recent talk, Google engineer Paul Haahr revealed some of these new signals.Specifically, Paul revealed that:

1. Google runs A/B tests with the SERPs. So if you drop or go up 1-2 spots, it may have nothing to do with links, on-page SEO, etc. It could be a test.

2. Google definitely uses click-through-rate (CTR) data as a ranking signal.
This shouldn't come as a huge surprise.

After all, if a site ranks #2 in Google -- and hardly anyone clicks on that result -- it probably means the page is irrelevant.

And if they DO click on it -- but hit their "back" button after 2 seconds -- it tells Google that it's a low-quality result.

On the other hand...

If your page gets an above-average amount of clicks -- and people stick to your page like superglue -- this tells Google that people like your page.And it's likely to get a rankings bump.

Key Takeaway:Google pays attention to how searchers interact with your site. A high CTR and time on page may boost your rankings.

And for a bunch of super-practical strategies that you can use to optimize for CTR and time on page.

Is it Time for Growth Hacking to Rebrand?

“Well, the one thing that never quite sat right with me is the word hacking. There are a number of things implied by that word that don’t align with the intended growth hacking definition. I argue that we must replace the word hacking with something more appropriate.My rationale is as follows.”-Andy Ramnn

1. Hacking implies shortcuts and quick fixes.

Anyone obsessed with business growth knows that sustained growth is only achieved through a dedication to understanding and maintaining maximum relevance and appeal to a target audience. Doing so requires the disciplined and relentless application of specific methodologies to drive engagement, conversion and loyalty. Furthermore, additional methodologies must be deployed to detect and adapt to changes in the needs and orientations of that audience.

Great copywriting is not a quick fix. Disciplined A/B testing is not a quick fix. White hat SEO is not a quick fix. Focusing on the customer to optimize engagement and drive down is not a quick fix. And, this applies to all companies, not just startups.

This is a deep process. A long(er) term strategy. This is not hacking.

2. Hacking implies nefarious methods.Being highly relevant and accessible to your target audience doesn’t come from gaming the system. Black hat SEO techniques to artificially boost page rank are dying off fast as viable means to drive sustainable growth. Real growth hacking strategies not only create better, more relevant content and offerings for customers, they make the web better as a whole. And as more companies engage in a process of continuous optimization (improvement), the entire web improves.

Growth hacking techniques are not shady, deceitful, or ill meaning. They require creativity, analytical thinking, and social prowess to achieve a singular goal.

This is not hacking.

3. The term hacking causes confusion and adoption of false principles.

The term is misunderstood, which means the benefits of growth hacking becoming widespread, or even universally adopted, is slowed unnecessarily.

If the perception among company leaders and marketing generalists is that growth hacking involves quick-fix and black hat methodologies, then the adoption of real techniques to drive customer-oriented optimization stalls. If growth hacking makes for a better web as a whole – as I argued previously – then slowing the adoption of its true methods is bad for the web.

This is the point where I confess that I don’t know if I have anything better in mind. I have no quarrels with growth engineering as a term of art. Growth marketing is also somewhat apt, though less complete in terms of what it encompasses.

In the end, growth hacking may stick. I can probably live with that. Do you know a growth hacker who would prefer to be called a growth engineer? You’re at a party. You introduce yourself to someone. You tell your new companion that you’re a growth hacker. What you do is witchcraft, unknowable to ordinary mortals. You are the James Bond of the deep web. You are mysterious, and important.

Or, you say that you’re a growth engineer. You’re the nerd in the marketing department.

See the difference?

The point is to continuously make the web a better place. This happens when companies focus on being more relevant, more accessible and more frictionless. If this is the true collective ethos of growth hacking, then perhaps it’s time to redefine the word hacking, rather than rebrand our discipline.

About Author: Andy is the President & General Manager of Alexa.

Google pulls Gmail mic drop April fool joke after ruining many lives

Looks like the joke's on Google, or is it? The search engine giant -- known for inserting jokes and hoaxes into its products ceremoniously on every April fool's Day -- was caught foot in mouth on Friday when an ill-conceived joke backfired, ruining many lives in the aftermath. The prank: a mic drop option added to Gmail that automatically affixed a gif of a minion tossing away a microphone when you hit send. The problem: it led to more headaches than laughs.

Google has acknowledged the 'joke wasn't funny' and pulled the plug on it now, but the damage has already been done.

"Well, it looks like we pranked ourselves this year. Due to a bug, the Mic Drop feature inadvertently caused more headaches than laughs. We're truly sorry. The feature has been turned off. If you are still seeing it, please reload your Gmail page," said Google on its official blog .

So what's the fuss all about, you ask? Well, Google silently replaced Gmail's 'send and archive' option with a 'send and mic drop' option this morning. Typing in an email (or possibly replying to one) and quickly hitting on it attached a gif to your email (a minion dropping the mic) inadvertently letting the receiver to know, 'hey, this conversation' just ended.

"Gmail is making it easier to have the last word on any email with Mic Drop. Simply reply to any email using the new 'Send + Mic Drop' button. Everyone will get your message, but that's the last you'll ever hear about it. Yes, even if folks try to respond, you won't see it," Google said while announcing the feature earlier in the day.

But, people ended up sending those emails to bosses and other people who might not really appreciate the joke.

"Thanks to Mic Drop I just lost my job. I am a writer and had a deadline to meet. I sent my articles to my boss and never heard back from her. I inadvertently sent the email using the "Mic Drop" send button.There were corrections that needed to be made on my articles and I never received her replies. My boss took offense to the Mic Drop animation and assumed that I didn't reply to her because I thought her input was petty (hence the Mic Drop). I just woke up to a very angry voicemail from her which is how I found out about this "hilarious" prank,"said one user .

"Yes, it's a funny April fools joke, but not when it's actually screwing up my important email correspondences," wrote another user .

Source India Today