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…)
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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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.
Anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock in recent days will be aware that GoDaddy recently suffered an outage that left millions of its client’s websites inaccessible. While this sort of downtime will obviously affect a site’s traffic and therefore revenue, many people are asking whether it will have an effect on their SEO.
The short answer to that question is no, probably not. Google generally isn’t happy when they find a site has disappeared from their index. However, they know problems happen. As long as these problems aren’t regular, a site’s SERP ranking likely won’t drop. Reliability is important. Therefore, a site that is often down will be ranked lower. But a short period of unavailability is unusual. It’s not a useful signal of a negative trend. (more…)
There’s been a fair bit of chatter in recent months about the value of nofollow links for SEO. Google considers nofollow links a naturalness signal when evaluating backlink profiles. Truth aside, every SEO should understand nofollow links. The key question: Are nofollow backlinks actually worth pursuing? (more…)
In the weeks following Facebook’s IPO, the Zuckerberg-led social network faced intense scrutiny. Many people expressed doubts about the financial viability of Facebook’s revenue model. This was especially true regarding its advertising service. For example, GM pulled their Facebook marketing campaign.
Additionally, the music industry e-commerce startup Limited Run made an impact. They claimed that 80% of the clicks for their ads were (details omitted). Whether that complaint is accurate is still a matter of debate. Furthermore, a study from the Advertising Research Council made a claim. It stated that “blank” ads with no content were performing only 0.1% less well than regular ads.
While this news is not good for Facebook’s future revenue, and businesses should think hard before spending their advertising budgets on Facebook’s paid ad platform, the real value of Facebook and social media generally was never through paid ads anyway
It’s becoming increasingly clear that traditional advertising is not creating the levels of engagement that marketers might hope for. Consumers are conditioned to barely see banner advertising — assuming they haven’t installed an ad-blocker — and they are very sensitive and averse to content which they perceive to be biased towards selling.
Content marketing is an alternative or complementary marketing method that aims to generate conversions in the long term by fostering brand loyalty and awareness, and demonstrating competence within a particular niche.
Which simply providing content, be it text, audio, video, or even apps, that is of value to clients and customers. Content marketing makes businesses into publishers. This blog post is an example of content marketing.
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Google didn’t release their usual algorithm update news last month, so this week we have a plethora of juicy updates to look at.
Recently, Google has focused on three key SERP improvements:
Cleaning up search result pages
Enhancing Panda’s high-quality content detection
Displaying more answers directly on results (reducing clicks to websites)
A couple of weeks ago we looked at negative SEO and what you can do to protect your site. One of the techniques we mentioned was hacking. Competitors, upon gaining access to a site, may alter the content or add malware to pages in the hope that Google will delist or penalize a site. Hackers may also simply attempt to use a site to spread their malware without any particular intentions regarding SEO.
We gave a number of suggestions for dealing such an intrusion, but often, after having received a warning from Google, it can be difficult to determine exactly what the Googlebot crawler is seeing.
Hackers are adept at making a site appear perfectly normal to those who go directly to a page, while serving malware or undesirable keywords and hidden links to search engine crawlers and those who arrive at a site from a search engine. What you see when you visit a site is not necessarily what Googlebot is seeing.
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One of the major psychological foundations for the purported effectiveness of social media marketing is social proof.
The idea is fairly simple: people are more likely to find a product or service appealing if there is evidence that other people find it desirable. Robert B. Cialdini, in his very popular Influence: Science and Practice, describes social proof as
(more…)an important means that people use to decide what to believe or how to act in a situation by looking at what other people are believing or doing.