Author: Daniel Page

  • The Pros and Cons of Social Log-in Buttons

    The Pros and Cons of Social Log-in Buttons

    Facebook Social Login Button
    (Attrib: Flickr/Rob Enslin)

    When it comes to website design, speed and simplicity are key. It doesn’t take much for users to become confused or frustrated and abandon their intended action.

    This is especially true for user registration. If you ask users to enter a lot of data, they might leave. Even asking for a little data in a confusing way can make users abandon the process. For websites, this abandonment means lost conversions.

    Social logins offer a method of drastically simplifying this process.

    Social logins use your existing social media login information. This allows for a single sign-on. The user picks a social network. They choose which network to link to their new account. Then, they approve the login using that network. That’s the basic process. (This doesn’t include times when specific data needs to be collected.) As a result, social logins can make registration much easier.

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  • Guest Blogging: Boost Your SEO or Waste of Time?

    Guest Blogging: Boost Your SEO or Waste of Time?

    Guest blogging took off in a big way this year. It’s an increasingly popular way to spread brand awareness and an excellent adjunct to other inbound marketing strategies.

    That said, the answer to the question in the headline is ‘No’. You should not be guest blogging.

    That is, you shouldn’t be guest blogging if you think that any of the following are true:

    • Article banks are a great source of guest blog content.
    • Guest blogs don’t need to be of the same quality as the content on your own blog.
    • The same article, or a spun version, can be used for multiple blogs.
    • Guest blogging is a cheap way to get inbound links.

    Take a look at this video from the estimable Matt Cutts if you’re curious why we have such a downer on guest blogging.

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  • Content Curation: Unleash Powerful Tools to Dominate

    Content Curation: Unleash Powerful Tools to Dominate

    (Attrib:Flickr/cambodia4kidsorg)

    Content curation is the collection and sharing of interesting, informative, or entertaining content from within a particular niche. It’s a great way of establishing a reputation as an authority and gathering followers with a particular set of interests.

    For businesses, content curation helps demonstrate expertise, is less expensive than content creation, and perhaps most importantly, contributes towards cultivating relationships with potential clients, customers, vendors, and partners.

    In an age where social media and content marketing are blossoming, the sheer amount of content out there — of vastly variable quality — makes finding just the right material to share a potentially time-consuming endeavor. (more…)

  • Buying Social Media Followers: Pros and Cons

    Buying Social Media Followers: Pros and Cons

    Social media is an important part of modern marketing. Facebook has over a billion users; Twitter has become many people’s platform of choice for communication with companies; Pinterest has just become one of the thirty most visited sites on the web.

    Businesses who have no social media presence are ignoring a powerful and cost-effective marketing and customer relationship resource, especially if they are selling or providing services online.

    Unfortunately, establishing that presence and kick-starting engagement has a cost. It is difficult for a business new to social media to attract followers without a substantial investment of both time and money. For many businesses, they won’t make that investment, and so they feel tempted to manufacture a follower count.

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  • New Google Tool Lets Webmasters Disavow Unwanted Links

    New Google Tool Lets Webmasters Disavow Unwanted Links

    Cut the Links?

    Since the Penguin algorithm changes, SEOs have been worried about a couple of things in particular. Firstly, they are concerned that all the illicit link-building tactics that their client’s previous SEOs engaged in (because, of course, they would never do such things themselves) are now going to have a negative consequence on a site’s ranking. The second major concern is that competitors can take advantage of Google’s scrutinizing of backlink profiles to deliberately create “bad links” and incur a penalty.

    To allay some of those fears Google have released a tool

    that will allow webmasters to disavow those incoming links that might be causing their sites to be flagged by Google as engaging in bad link-building practices. (more…)

  • October SEO & Blogging: Must-Read Stories & Insights

    October SEO & Blogging: Must-Read Stories & Insights

    October has been a interesting month for SEOs and webmasters. Google’s Disavow Links tool caused quite a stir. As always, the Internet was abuzz with chatter about SEO, marketing, conversion rates, and design.

    Consequently, we bravely ventured out into the wilds of the Web. Ultimately, we brought back 20 of the most interesting articles we came across for your education and enjoyment.

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  • Should You Worry About Your Site’s Layout?

    Should You Worry About Your Site’s Layout?

    That wily fox Matt Cutts once again set about the clucking SEOs this month with a Twitter announcement that Google were making changes to their algorithm focusing on page layout.

    Google uses aspects of page layout as one of the signals that determines SERP ranking. They are especially concerned that, all else being equal, they don’t rank pages highly when the ‘above the fold’ portion of the page does not contain useful content for visitors. What that generally means is that they would rather web site owners didn’t fill the part of the page that first appears to visitors with adverts and bury the content further down the page.

    Unfortunately, Google, with their usual lack of clarity, has failed to stipulate exactly what constitutes good content ‘above the fold’, but the common sense approach is usually best. Google tend to attempt to put themselves in the place of their users, and ask what is that user likely to find most useful. They may get that wrong fairly frequently, but absent any better data, this is probably the best approach for website owners too.

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  • Google Introduces Free Tag Management Service

    Google Introduces Free Tag Management Service

    Google have introduced a new tag management service that allows website owners to streamline the process of managing analytics, advertising, and conversion tags on their site.

    Anyone working in online marketing knows the challenges of managing code snippets needed for site performance tracking. These tags often require frequent tweaks or changes, and coordination between marketers and webmasters is not always smooth. (more…)

  • Avoiding Duplicate Content with Canonical Links.

    Avoiding Duplicate Content with Canonical Links.

    Duplicate content is a problem for search engines, and that makes it a problem for SEOs. Google  strongly dislikes including the same content more than once in search results, and if content exists in more than one place on a site, search engine algorithms have trouble determining which version they should include or exclude.

    They also have difficulty knowing where to assign link juice and authority. This confusion can lead to sites experiencing a loss of traffic and reduced SERP rankings. Therefore, the “rel=canonical” element intends to help search engines. It does this by telling them which page is “the page” for specific content.

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  • Resource Round-up: The SEO Stories You Need to Read in September

    Resource Round-up: The SEO Stories You Need to Read in September

    Keeping abreast of everything that’s happening in a vibrant and dynamic industries like SEO and inbound marketing is no easy task. So, this week, we’re pleased to offer our visitors the first of our monthly roundups of what you need to be reading in SEO, social media, hosting and web design.

    We hope you learn as much from reading it as we did when we compiled it.

    SEO and Inbound Marketing

    •  I see so many SEO guides floating around that advocate manually collecting all kinds of information, from contact information to broken links, and they almost always consist of digging around the internet for the information and copying and pasting…and copying and pasting…and copying and pasting.
    •  If you take some time to decode some of these fancy looking SEO acronyms, you may find that understanding internet marketing lingo isn’t as difficult as you think.
    • Author Rank: A Step-by-Step Guide to Dominating Search with Content Marketing – If you are a content marketer, blogger or writer, you’ll be happy to hear that there have been five recent SEO changes that will play to your strengths.
    • Blog Headline Writing Lessons from Mega-traffic Sites – What’s one of the most simple traffic building tools that even most top bloggers don’t use? Surprisingly, few bloggers take advantage of the ability to target a separate headline for people browsing the site and people searching via Google, Bing, etc.
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