SEO
5 Tips For Your Foursquare Explore Social Strategy
If you haven’t claimed your foursquare profile yet, you might want to get on that asap! If the fact that the site’s database has 1.5 billion check-ins logged into the system isn’t enough of a an incentive, then perhaps knowing that foursquare has gone “search” online with their newest feature Explore with the website garnering 1 million unique visitors per day already could entice you.
By claiming your foursquare profile you can personalize it to suit your business and take advantage of integrating this platform into your social media (geo-location) strategy. In addition to checking-in, claiming badges and mayorships, now users can search for locations, deals, and places on their desktop using the Explore feature. Some people don’t like having a Foursquare account on their mobile phones and “checking-in” all the time, but would like to use this feature to see where their friends are checking-in and what they recommend. Foursquare Explore allows you to go online and search without having to use the platform as a check-in tool. It is useful for the end user to go through the 15 million tips that are gathered on the site already when deciding on where to go and what to eat… or drink!
Here are five tips to include in your strategy in order to ensure increased visits from Foursquare Explore to your company’s profile page:
- Regularly monitor your foursquare account. Review check-ins, comments, and tips to see what users are saying.
- Use QR codes to encourage check-ins, tips, and submissions.
- Promote Foursquare ads to encourage check-ins.
- Include sentiments and adjectives in your foursquare ad strategy (i.e. romantic, Friday, sweet, summer, wine list, etc…)
- Use keywords when posting deals on your foursquare account to help with search queries.
Happy searching!
Maryam
@socialmaryam
Tags: badges, explore, foursquare, geo-location, SEO, social, strategy, tips, visitors
Insights to Improving Your SEO
- When it comes to purchasing decisions, a recent study found women turn to social media for research, more than men. However, the study found search engines are the most popular resource for researching for purchasing decisions.
- New website content needs to go up, or be up on nights and weekends. Need to make sure your website is functioning at full capacity (as in: not down or slow) on nights and weekends. The reason? Spiders crawl most on weekends and nights.
- Don’t write for spiders. Write for people. A recent study showed people gauge trustworthiness of organic search results on the descriptions that appear in those results. So write for people not bots.
- General speaking, blog posts get the most uptake on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. Earlier in the morning is always best. The “Linkerati” (those who posts tons of links in social media) look early to figure out what they’re going to post.
- A blog post containing video gets more links, than blog posts with pictures. Don’t know why.. that’s just what the study found. So experiment with video in your blog.
- The more you post to your blog, the more links you get. That’s a fact.
- Conversations on your blog will not help your SEO. Links to your blog help SEO. Period.
- The optimum length of the title of a blog post, the sweet spot 40-100 characters. These get spread through social media the most. You will get better SEO results.
- The most important piece of SEO, and the hardest thing to get, is a link. The more links you can get, the better.
- Don’t worry about SEO as a tactic, think of it as a function of what you do. On that same note, Dan Zarrela said (emphatically) “Don’t hire an SEO consultant to help your SEO, hire a content producer.” You need good content more than you need a spider-tailored meta tag.
- The most linked-to words right now are:
1. recent
2. insights
3. soon
4. answers
5. analysis - The least linked-to words right now are:
1. settlements
2. franchise
3. deliverables
4. episode
5. carpet
Any surprises here for you?
Erin
3 Steps to Search Engine Optimize Your Website
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of helping search engines discover what your website is about. SEO is important because it helps a website be seen and found in search engine results.
SEO can be a complex process that involves continued refinements over time, often by SEO professionals. However, there are some simple steps anyone can take to get a website off on the right…er… foot.
- Keyword research. Build an initial list of keywords potential customers may use when searching for the product or service you offer. Input these keywords in Google’s Keyword research tool to discover more keywords. Also use the tool to identify the monthly search volume for each keyword. A keyword that has very low search volume may not be worth optimizing for the website.
- Update Website. Review the contents of your website. Identify which keywords on your list will be a natural fit for each webpage. Select 1 – 2 keywords for each webpage and incorporate these keywords in the page’s title tag, description tag and page content. It has been suggested that repeating a word should never exceed 6 times on a page… assuming the page has at least 3 paragraphs of text.
- Gather Links. Inbound links play an important role for search engine optimization. Inbound links are links on other people’s websites that link to your website. Each inbound link can be seen as a vote for your site. The more high quality inbound links you have, the better. You may be able to quickly gather your initial set of inbound links from business contacts and alliances related to your business sector.
These are the first steps to search engine optimize your website. Every little steps counts when building your overall online strategy.
Victor
Tags: keyword research, links, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, tags
Does Google Index Flash?
On November 11, Google’s Webmaster Central Blog announced its progress with indexing Adobe Flash content. A webpage is indexed when Google becomes aware of its existence and is added to Google’s database. In the past, Flash was a big problem for search engine optimization because search engines like Google, were not able to crawl (read) content within Flash files. As a result, Google was not able to understand and properly rank websites created largely in Flash.
In June 2008, Google announced significant improvements for indexing Adobe Flash files, such as the ability to index textual content and discover URLs within Flash files. Further improvements were announced in June 2009.
In the announcement on November 11, Google explained improvements with JavaScript compatibility which helps index sites that use JavaScript to embed Flash files. Video indexing technology also improved to help detect pages with videos.
Flash content and videos offer a richer medium to engage website visitors. There is always a trade-off between making a website look attractive with Flash content and making it more search engine friendly. With these improvements, the trade-off is reduced and ultimately allows website developers to improve the visitors’ experience, from finding a website to exploring it.
Victor
Tags: adobe, engagement, flash, google, index, SEO, video
Rock Classics and SEO
Photo credit: imaginepaolo
Last week, as my beloved watched a TV special featuring Ron Hawkins amidst rock legends Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins, it dawned on me that, just like classic rock tunes, some SEO guidelines never die. Yes, every once in a while Google performs one of its dreaded updates, adding some new rules into what makes sites rank first among thousands of results. However, there are some foundational principles that, though they can be considered “vintage”, should still be followed. Among them we have content, title tags and quality inbound links.
Content
As of late, Google has been improving its Flash-indexing capabilities, but it still encounters some difficulty crawling through Web sites with “special effects”. As far as Google is concerned, text is the best content you could use. Google encounters no hiccups “reading” through a page’s text when it’s plain HTML. Furthermore, when giving some thought to the copy for a Web page, remember to keep it relevant to what your visitors would expect to see, and you’re already ahead of the pack. Think of what your audience would like to read – what message would transform someone from a mere visitor to loyal customer, and use those words on your pages.
Title Tags
A Web page’s title is determined by the text displayed between the HTML tags <title> and </title> in a page’s source code. When a page is displayed on browsers, the title is rendered on the top part of the active window.
In the same way that humans refer to an article’s title to quickly decipher its topic, so does Google “read” a Web page’s title to judge what it is all about. For that reason, make the title descriptive of the subject of the page. One mistake that is commonly made is inserting only a company’s name as the title (“Acme, Inc.”, as an example), instead of what the page pertains to (for example, “Red Widget Solutions for Sustainable Turtles by Acme Inc”).
When composing a title, consider using the keyword that best describes the subject of that page. It will further help such page to rank better in search engine results (although it’s not as simple as that… otherwise, I’d be out of a job), while also increasing the user-friendliness. One caveat is to not overstuff your title tag with repeated keywords. That’s a no-no. It’s as outdated as one-hit wonders from the 90′s. And it’s not poised for a comeback anytime soon.
Inbound links
Continuing with the music hits analogy, just as a track is made popular largely because of the air-time it receives from large radio stations and MTV (or MuchMusic, here in Canada), so does a Web site’s level of success depend on the number of links that are driven to it from important, influencing sites. This has been the case for years, and that’s why professionals in the industry often talk about performing a link campaign when optimizing a Web site. The “one-hit wonder” counterpart to this would be to delve into shoddy practices just for the sake of securing links for a site – such as participating in “link farms” and getting unreputable domains to refer to yours just because of the link that they’re giving you. This will only do you harm. Don’t. Do. It.
What you’ve just read is merely a very light introduction to what makes a site successful with Google, as there are many other factors that go into play. One thing that you can count on is that “flavour of the month” SEO practices usually do fade away, and if not implemented properly, can cause your site more harm than good. Stick to the classics.
Guacira Naves
eMarketing Strategist
@OnlineStrategy
Tags: Search Engine Optimization, SEO
