How to Go Beyond Social Networking Websites

Most of the businesses which invest in internet marketing are giving an increased importance to social media too. A lot of marketers are incorporating social media in their marketing strategies. As a matter of fact, companies that use Twitter have 2x more leads as compared to those which do not have Twitter profiles.

There are many ways in which you can leverage social media. If your social media marketing team is limited to social networking websites, you are missing out on a great deal of opportunities. Here, we have mentioned a few methods to increase the power of your social media campaign.

• If you want to increase your social media presence, you will need to increase your reach. With a greater reach, you have more opportunity to reach potential customers. One of the greatest ways to do this is to add social follow buttons to your website. You can include these buttons on various parts of your website, such as the homepage, about us section, blog, contact us page, etc.
• You can extend the reach of your content by using social sharing buttons. Including social sharing buttons ensures that the readers of the content on your websites share it with their network of friends and colleagues. Thus, you can reach those people who may not have heard of your company and your content.
• You can include social media components in your email marketing messages. Including social sharing and follow buttons in your email marketing messages widens the reach of your email messages.
• Twitter has launched a feature that allows you to embed tweets on your website. You can use this feature, which allows you to use this popular social network directly on your website and add embeddable tweets on your website.
• Facebook offers many social plugins. You can choose the plugins which suit the nature of your business, from the large variety offered by Facebook. For a Facebook business page, you can install the Like box on your website.
• Make sure that your existing customers are following you on the social networks. This will help you to share content to a larger audience and generate new leads and customers.
• Email is not the only way to nurture leads. You can nurture leads through social media too. You can use some lead management software to gather information about your leads.
• Social media is useful even after you pass on the leads to the sales team. You can train the sales team to use social media in their sales process.

Webmarketing123 can help you leverage Social Media to help you Convert Online visibility into Measurable Results

Search Results for Brands Embed Google+ Pages

The launch of Google+ Pages has received a great response from the world’s top 100 brands. 77 brands out of the top 100 have created their Google+ Pages to communicate with fans, the number shooting up from 61 brands last month. The number of users adding these brands to circles has increased by almost 50 percent in the past one month.
A comparative study of the top 100 brands’ Google+ Pages and Facebook Fan Pages revealed that Google+ has 148,000 fans whereas Facebook has 300 million fans for the same brand. Popular brands like Google, IBM and Vodafone have created a Google+ Page but do not have an official Facebook Page. The fan base for Pepsi is 20,000 on Google+. Though it is a small number as compared to 6.84 million fans on Facebook, Google+ is still in the initial phase and as a start this number is quite an achievement.
Google+ Pages is a move to merge search marketing position with social media marketing and most of the brands have realized it. If a brand wants to extend its social presence on the web, Google+ offers the best opportunity to do so. Google also allows brands to include one of their Pages as a part of their search and social strategy. Primary search results include a brand’s Google+ Page, along with its official website.
Some people consider that the above move could lead anti-trust woes for Google. Two US senators have asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Google further with regards to this. They feel that Google is seeking advantage of its dominant market position. They believe that a thorough investigation by the FTC will decide if Google’s practices abide by the laws or not.
Including Google+ Pages on the search engine result page is a smart move by Google; especially because 34 percent of Facebook Fan Pages referrals are driven by Google, Yahoo and Bing. However, if Google is abusing its dominant position in the market is not known clearly. There are numerous opposing views regarding this question but no matter what no one can deny the influence that Google has on internet users.

Basics of Goal Setup in Google Analytics

Understanding Google Analytics can be a very tough task . However, once you get the gist of Google Analytics, analyzing data will be a lot simpler. To begin with, you should learn how to make Google Analytics work for you through Goal setup and configuration.

Your first step after login is to find where to set up goals. You can find most of the setup in Google Analytics behind the sprocket on the upper right hand corner of the page. Once you click on the sprocket, the page will display ‘Goals’ tab, where you have to choose the profile. You can choose 5 sets of goals with 5 goals in each set. However, please be careful while choosing goals as you cannot delete a goal. There are certain ways to setup a goal so that you can see a lot of information in one goal.

Let us consider the example of an e-commerce website. The 3 main questions to setups goals for an e-commerce website are: did the visitor search for something, did they add it to their cart and did they buy it. Though shopping cart is not used for all types of websites, it is a valuable resource to understand user behavior. Your first goal is to find how many people complete a quick search. After that, you will need to set up a goal for conversions.

After you set the goal to ‘active’ and give it a goal type, you need to enter the ultimate URL under ‘Goal Details.’ If your URLs are case sensitive, please check the box which asks for this information. If you run a lead-generation site and not an e-commerce website, you can set a value for every user that completes the goal. However, it is not recommended in the initial phase as goal setup can get confusing. You then have to check a box if you want to set the goal funnel. Here, you get to copy steps a user is likely to take to reach the goal. You can see each execution of that goal if you do not check the ‘required step’ box. Once you feel that you have mentioned all the essentials in the goal setup, click on save and witness the results.

If you follow the simple setup steps, you will automatically pave way to find important details of your website, the buying cycle and the selling process. It will also help you find areas of improvement on your website.

Changes in Google’s Algorithm

Of late, Google’s constantly changing algorithm has had numerous updates. Google is always working to make their algorithm more user-friendly. Here, we have enlisted the improvements made by Google to provide better search results to its users.

• Cross-language information retrieval update: Queries in certain languages have limited web content available. The new update will translate the relevant English pages and display the translated titles below the English titles in the search results. This feature was previously available at the bottom of a page in Korean. When a user clicks on translated titles, he will be guided to a page translated into the query language.
• Snippets with more page content, less header content: This feature enables Google to pick text from the actual page content rather than using the text that it is a part of the header.
• Better page titles on SERP: Google intends to generate page titles by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors and emphasizing less on boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text. This will result in content relevant titles.
• Rich Snippets for applications: This will sport details like cost and user reviews in the search result and will be beneficial for users who are searching for software applications.
• Retiring a signal in image search: Google has decided to retire a signal in Image Search related to images that have references from multiple documents on the web. This will stop Google from revisiting signals launched in the past which no longer have a significant impact.
• Fresh results: This change, announced recently claims to impact 35% of total searches. Google aims at ranking content based on its freshness.
• Refining official page detection: Google tries to provide the most relevant results to its users. This change will help Google to determine which pages are official and rank official websites higher on the SERP.
• Due-date restricted queries: There is an improvement in due-date restricted queries to ensure that the users get the most relevant search results as per the date range specified by them.
• Improvement in handling IME queries: This change improves how Autocomplete handles IME queries, which contain non-Latin characters.

These are some of the improvements in Google’s search algorithm; however, there are hundreds of more updates from Google on a regular basis. So, you need to keep reading to keep yourself updated about Google’s search algorithm changes.

Google’s New Algorithm Adds Freshness to Faster Results

Google’s search algorithm is going through a new change which aims at providing ‘fresher’ search results. Apart from displaying fresher results, Google intends to change results for about 35% of all searches. Google moved over to the caffeine infrastructure last year, which helped Google index and crawl faster; thus providing faster search results. Now, it plans to add freshness to its fast search results.

The Google Panda update affected 12% of the searches conducted and this new update expects to impact 35% of the searches. The search results that are likely to be affected are the recent events, regularly recurring events and frequent updates. If you search for recent events or hot topics, Google will display the most recent news, which is only about a minute old.

Certain events happen regularly on a periodic basis, like conferences and seminars. If you are looking for information about conferences, the latest conference details will be displayed on the Google’s result page, instead of a conference which took place 50 years ago. Some products are constantly updated, and newer versions are launched frequently. If you are searching for the best car or camera in the market, Google will present to you the most up to date information regarding the same.

Presenting fresh content to Google users is not a new concept for Google. Its content ranking factor based on freshness dates back to the year 2007. The only difference is that the freshness will impact one out of three results now. Google says that the change is providing ‘fresh’ content for twice as many queries as before. It means that the impact of the new algorithm is double the previous figure.

It is uncertain how the new algorithm defines freshness. Experts say that it can call for unwanted spamming as webmasters may post the same content on a new page every two days, just to give it a fresh boost. It is said that the relevancy may decrease if freshness is rewarded. Google responded by saying that freshness is not the only factor that is going to affect the ranking, it is just one component. The content, topicality and quality will equally influence the search results.

The freshness announcement by Google did not reveal any details about the situation with Twitter. Since July, Google has been unable to crawl Twitter fast, as Twitter shut down its ‘fire hose’ of tweet data. This has affected Google’s real-time search service, but a solution to this problem is not yet announced by Google. It has only introduced a ranking change, and not an indexing change.

It was assumed by many that Google Panda update’s 12% impact would create 12% improvement, but it did not. 35% impact does not necessarily indicate 35% improved results. It is not an improvement metric, so it is better not to make presumptions.

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Make Your Website Google Panda Proof

Google periodically makes changes to its search algorithm, and the most recent update was that of Google Panda. The Panda update is Google’s attempt to provide relevant search results to its users.

Google’s search algorithm is affected by several factors, which include number of back links to a website, source of back links, page loading time, on-site optimization factors, etc. The search team’s job is to track all the changing factors and tweak them to provide accurate search results. Google Panda belongs to the set of tweaks that Google has made for their search algorithm, so that the search results are devoid of spam and low quality websites.

You can find if your website has been affected by the Panda Update or not, by checking your Google Analytics Dashboard around the date February 22nd, 2011. Several websites noticed a drop in traffic but some webmasters noted an increase in traffic.

If you want to make your website Google Panda proof, you need to focus on certain factors so that the Panda does not hamper your website traffic.

Keep in mind that this new update is a site wide penalty. It means that if a single page on your website is identified to have duplicate content, your whole website will be penalized. The Panda update is more human centric, meaning that, Google will love and prefer your website, if it is readable and appealing to a real human.

We have enlisted some simple steps to make your website Panda proof. Firstly, ask an old person to scroll through your website. Check if he finds your website user friendly or does he face problems to find information on your website. Then, reduce the number of duplicate content pages on your website. If content on two different pages on your website is overlapping, merge them and delete the irrelevant content to avoid being penalized for duplicate content. Lastly, it is not the quantity of the content but the quality which matters to the Panda.

The Google Panda update is a major update to Google’s search engine algorithm. In order to make your website Panda proof, you not only need to impress Google’s spider but also need to make it more user friendly.

 

 

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High exit rate: Are they always such a bad thing?

Exit Rate reflects the percentage of people who left your website altogether from a certain page – meaning the last page a person viewed before leaving the website. Everyone who comes to your website has to leave at some point. If someone came, made a purchase and left, that’s an ideal situation to have. Similarly, if you blog daily and people come, read your post and leave, this too is an ideal state of situation. The conclusion then stands that exit rates are a reflection of percentage people exiting your website from a particular page, with or without fulfilling a purpose.

In a website where people have to go through more than one page to complete a task, say on an online retail website, exit rate can be very helpful in understanding where people are getting lost in the process. By knowing where people are getting lost in the conversion process, exit rate can help you fix those pages to increase conversion and decrease the exit rate on those pages. Consider this. If your multi-page website is designed in a head and tail style, it can be assumed that the tail piece (say 5^th) is the one which will have the higher exit rate. But what if your website’s head piece (say the 1^st page) has a higher exit rate? In such a situation a high exit rate points to a buckle in your website’s head and suggests that the link bait is a poor match for subsequent pages and needs SEO diagnosis.

A glitch, however, in exit rate metrics is that it is sometimes quite useless. What if someone came looking for particular information to your website, found it on a page and then left from the same spot.  Ideally this is what web publisher want. You may want them to stay longer, look around the website and provide attractive links to the same, but since your goal of satisfying a visitor’s need was met through a page, the exit rate of that page stands no purpose then. It does not give a picture of what you ought to improve on such a page.

In such a situation, an alternative metric is often used by web publishers – the Bounce Rate. Bounce rate is the percentage of people who landed on a page and immediately left without clicking anywhere else on that page. Bounce rate accounts for one page sessions. A high bounce rate is usually an indicator of a problem on a specific page, most of which can be taken care of by proper SEO measures.

Webmarketing123 – Now a ‘Marin Software Certified Agency’

Webmaketing123, the leading digital marketing agency from Bay Area, California, has been accorded with the title of being a Marin Software Certified Agency. With this recognition, Webmarketing123 stands to leverage its services with improved campaign performance and financial returns that Marin Software’s leading online ad management platform helps to provide.

Webmarketing123 is one of the foremost digital marketing agencies, with the objective of helping clients convert online visibility into measurable results. It is known to apply an approach which is customizable to bring together the power of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay-per-Click (PPC), and Social Media Marketing (SMM) into an integrated whole that leads to creation of remarkable, results-driven online marketing programs. Webmarketing123’s approach is powered by a deep expertise in increasing online visibility, creating and executing effective online advertising campaigns, and delivering measurable results. In an effort to improve the performance of their customers’ campaigns, Webmarketing123 brought into force Marin Software – one of industry’s leading integrated platform for managing search, display, and social media marketing. After undergoing rigorous training and certification process to join the Marin Software Certified Agency Program, Webmarketing123 is now accredited with the program honor that ensures Webmarketing123’s clients benefit from the full campaign optimization capabilities that stem from Webmarketing123’s industry skills in accord with Marin Software.  It will also drive focus on the strategic growth of an ad program.

Webmarketing123 has augmented its standing to an escalated level following Marin’s accreditation to become a brusquer, linear and a broad-scoped digital marketing firm. Its strategic acumen coined with improved efficiencies and financial lift from Marin Software will ensure clients enhanced campaign results and a more comprehensive view of campaign activities. Webmarketing123 has seen an immediate financial boost to its clients’ bottom line after enabling Marin’s advanced bidding algorithms. Furthermore, the ability to track, report, and manage multiple channels has been largely simplified to help clients gauge the campaign activities better and with ease.

On-Page Auditing: An Aid to SEO for Optimal Page Visibility

Major SEO’s fail to attract target traffic because they often neglect On-Page auditing. On-Page auditing can be done using any of the following 3 methods: manual editing, semi-automatic software and fully automated SEO platform. Of these, the fully automated SEO platform is the quickest and less time-consuming as compared to manual editing.

46 SEO professionals were surveyed to check how often they conducted on-page audits and their opinion about its usefulness. More than 50 percent of these professionals scrutinized their pages less than two times per month.

More than 11000 web pages were examined to get a fair idea of the relation between the number of times they were edited and the audit frequency. The audit frequency is very low, and if it is increases it will certainly turn the tables for their website’s optimization.

Manual auditing requires more man hours and man power. If 500 pages need to be examined manually, it will require almost 4 full-time resources to handle the job. The outcome is not cost efficient. The same applies for semi-automatic auditing, which can result in a narrower view of the on-page landscape. Even while using semi-automated software, 35 to 45 percent of auditing needs to be done manually.

87 percent of the surveyed SEO professionals believe that an automated SEO platform for on-page auditing will be more productive. 28 percent feel that they lack the tools to conduct audits on a regular basis. They said that they would conduct audits more frequently if they had the tools. More than three-fourth of the surveyed pros audit their pages less than once a week. If you want to visibly increase your page’s ranking, SEO’s should conduct on-page auditing frequently.

Webmarketing123

Paul Taylor - CEO Webmarketing123

Founded in 2004 by Paul Taylor (CEO), Webmarketing123 is an internet marketing firm that delivers comprehensive services of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay-per-Click (PPC) advertising and Social Media Marketing (SMM) in an integrated manner.

Webmarketing123’s approach begins with diving deeply into a business and its goals, integrating the strategies and delivering bottom line results in the form of increased ROI; all the while keeping a close eye on the industry and competition.

Analysis, Integration, Education and Bottom Line results are the four key elements that drive all actions of Webmarketing123. While the Analysis process seeks to scrutinize every little nuance of a client’s website and its functionality, it also aims to understand the best way to convert a website’s visitors into customers.This end can be effectively achieved through the integration of the SEO, PPC and Social Media marketing strategies.  Further, itis a long drawn virtue at Webmarketing123 to lead by educating both the team and the client to help them understand and buy into theseprocesses. Webmarketing123 has beenacknowledged for hosting many knowledge oriented and informative webinars related to the field of online marketing on a regular basis. The company has conducted webinars on various topics, such as ‘4 Secrets to SEO Copywriting done right’, ‘Converting SEM into quality leads, ‘Why your competitors are Outranking you’, ‘Powerful Link Building Strategies that Work’ and ‘Social Influence on SEO’.

A ‘BBB’ accredited internet marketing firm with an A rating, allotted in the year 2007, the reviews for Webmarketing123 reflect its principal commitment to converting a client’s online visibility into measurable results. By staying on top of the changes in the algorithms and processes to give their client’s a competitive edge, Webmarketing123 consistently analyzes and improves upon every SEO, PPC and Social Media Marketing effort. Recognizing the shift in internet marketing patters, the ability to inculcate changes adroitly and execute timely results is at the heart of Webmarketing123’s efforts.