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Showing posts from May, 2017

What Is PPC? Learn the Basics of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Marketing

Whether you’ve heard a little about PPC marketing and are curious to learn more, or you already know that you want to use PPC to market your business, but aren’t sure where to start, you’ve come to the right place! This is the first lesson in PPC University, a set of three guided courses that will teach you everything you need to know about PPC and how to make it work for you. First, we’ll need to define PPC and establish a basic understanding of how PPC advertising works. Let’s go! What is PPC? PPC stands for pay-per-click, a model of internet marketing in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. Essentially, it’s a way of buying visits to your site, rather than attempting to “earn” those visits organically. Search engine advertising is one of the most popular forms of PPC. It allows advertisers to bid for ad placement in a search engine's sponsored links when someone searches on a keyword that is related to their business offering. For example, i...

7 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO)

For years now, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for websites has been honed into a fine art with entire companies devoting considerable effort to defining best practices and touting the value of SEO for raising a site's performance on organic search listings. While I believe in the power of SEO, there is a new offering we have started providing to clients which we call Social Media Optimization (SMO). The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs. Here are 5 rules we use to help guide our thinking with conducting an SMO for a client's website: 1) Increase your linkability – This is the first and most important priority for websites. Many sites are "static" – meaning they are rarely updated and used simply for a storefront. To optimize ...

9 INGREDIENTS FOR A SUCCESSFUL SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY

The power of social media, with its ability to produce high brand exposure and ROI, has made it a dominant portion of many business’s marketing budgets and strategies. If you’ve never done any social media marketing it can be overwhelming, and many people simply don’t know where to start. To help you get started on your social media strategy, here are 9 vital components you can’t afford to neglect: 1. Clear, Realistic, Measurable Marketing Goals and Objectives Posting content on every social media platform out there may seem economical, but it won’t give you the results you’re looking for. In fact, without goals and objectives, you’ll never know the significance of the results, or whether your social media efforts helped your business or stayed stagnant. The value of a social media strategy, has no value if it was implemented without a goal or objective – no matter how many platforms you’re posting to. With goals and objectives, you can assess whether your social media plan and str...

HOW TO BUILD A SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGN FROM SCRATCH

Your company has decided to take the social media plunge and you’re tasked with creating a social media campaign. The only thing is that you’ve never formulated a social media strategy for your company before. Sure, your business has a Facebook and Twitter account that it occasionally posts on with an interesting industry article or to get the word out about a promotion, but that’s about the extent of it. You hear how your company needs to be present on social media, but you aren’t seeing the results that are everyone keeps claiming are yours for the taking. Effectively posting on social media requires a well-thought-out strategy that must be continually tweaked and re-implemented. The occasional posting about company news or promotions will no longer cut it. How do you start a social media strategy? There are so many social media channels out there, which ones should you post on? What kind of content should you post to get the most engagement? Should you pay to promote your posts? ...

SEO Career path and Opportunities in SEO field in India

SEO career is part of Digital Marketing field. Career in SEO is becoming popular in India and If you see the history and recent advertisements on popular job portals, you will find that need for well-trained SEO professionals in India is growing everyday. Almost every small or big businesses who have website is now investing in SEO to get top ranking in Google. I am getting almost 3 to 5 emails every week from various companies and digital marketing agencies who are looking for SEO professionals and many such common questions from students who are considering SEO as their next career. Why should I choose SEO as career and what is the future of SEO? What is difference between SEO Career and Career in Digital marketing? Which is better? Digital Marketing or SEO? How much salary can I get as SEO fresher? What is qualification required to learn SEO? What is SEO career path in India? It’s perfectly OK to ask such questions before you start your career in SEO or any other field. It’s very ...

7 Simple SEO Tricks & Tips That Still Bring Improvements in 2017

2017 brought a whole new set of changes in the way businesses market their products and services, marketers try to improve their ranking with search engine optimization (SEO), the way people surf the web and a lot more. But there are also trends that proved effective for 2016 strategies and will continue to work in 2017. According to hubspot.com, in the U.S. alone, an average of 12 billion web searches are conducted each month. SEO will gain importance more than anything else as it helps you drive quality traffic, get visibility, boost your brand and lend your business the credibility it needs to succeed. After all, what is the point of creating so much content and graphics if it is not visible to the audience when they run search query. In 2015 also, marketers realized the value of SEO, aligning their content for customers’ needs and mobile optimization for better results. After all, 50% of all mobile searches are conducted in the hope of finding local results, and 61% of those sea...

7 Ways to Stop Flailing with Your Content Marketing in 2017

Be better. This simple mantra always plays in the back of my head when it comes to what we publish, but it’s becoming louder and louder these days – as the noise around content marketing becomes louder as well. I love content marketing, and I truly believe that – when it’s done well – it’s great for your customers and a fantastic way to build and grow a business. But, I’m also tired. Tired of similar advice. Tired of marketers dialing it in to check a box. Tired of too much me-too or meh content. Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not coming from a place of having all of the answers – and I’m fighting with several of these issues, too. But to grow as marketers – and to really move the business forward with content (which is why we are doing this anyway, right?) – we all can benefit from thinking beyond the usual platitudes and ideas. What’s going wrong – and what can we do? Note: I am not going to restate many of the issues we talk about often (but, I still believe these are issues – a...

One Dead Simple Tactic for Better Rankings in Google Local

This post is short and easy to follow, just like the tactic it recommends. Most everyone who optimizes for Google Local (aka Google Maps) is familar with David Mihm's excellent and oft-referenced Local Search Ranking Factors . In that document, and in many places where local results are analyzed, it's clear that getting your business/website into more listings, in a consistent fashion is a very good thing. Yet, somehow, this obvious tactic has gone missing from many GG Local optimization recommendations. Either that or it's so obvious that no one feels the need to mention it. Whatever the case, it's available now :-) Step 1: Do Lots of Searches Related to Your Business & Region Let's say you're working on local SEO for a Thai restaurant in Seattle, WA. Searches you might perform include: Best Skin Hospital  best Beautysalon in lucknow Best Summer Institute In Lucknow You're seeking results that show competing or closely related businesses, so get...

WHY IS YOUR WEBSITE LOADING SO SLOW, AND WHAT CAN YOU DO ABOUT IT?

The internet is no place for a slow website. The average Google user (i.e. your customers) just won’t put up with websites that take too long to load. Naturally, this sort of behavior is what led the search engine to include site speed as a ranking factor ever since 2010. Of course, Google has always been good at the “carrot and stick” approach. In this case, the carrot was some simple encouragement to work on site speed (“Hey, we really want websites to be a better experience for users and you should totally work on that.), which then turned into a stick when things weren’t changing fast enough (Your site’s still too slow! Looks like new penalties for you!). This ranking factor then also started to have an impact on the mobile algorithm, too. And yet, despite the seven years or so that site speed has officially been a ranking factor, many websites still struggle with it. The thing is, there are a lot of factors that act as a type of speedbump on your path to internet success. And a l...

A 5 Minute Crash Course on Becoming an SEO Professional

It takes years of study and practice to be an authority in any subject, but with a good crash course you can at least know the basics of what you’re talking about. This is good, because it keeps you from looking like an idiot or betraying the fact that you have no basic understanding of how the world works. SEO is not an every-day profession for most people. Most people, in fact, go through life without ever thinking about how Facebook sorts their posts or how Google determines what results to show you. The thought that it can be influenced at all is foreign to many. What I’ve compiled here is not going to make you a professional. You won’t be able to go out and start a business. Instead, I’ve covered all the basic concepts of SEO and how it all works, with links to further reading. Take it at your own pace, learn as much as you can or need to, and come back when you’re hungry for more. What is SEO? SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization , which is the art and th...

Digital Marketing Jobs & Career Opportunities in India

Digital marketing is becoming mainstream in India. Until 2010, many businesses did not take digital marketing seriously. They were not ready to change and were stuck with traditional marketing practices. However market forces have made sure that you either start doing digital marketing or fail. Because compared to digital marketing, traditional marketing is extremely inefficient. In fact, if you do not have a digital marketing strategy and an online presence, customers are bound to shy away from you and buy from a competitor. Before digital marketing became mainstream, freelancers and entrepreneurs were able to get the first mover advantage. People who did good content marketing and search engine marketing were able to scale up the business very fast. Traditional companies did not even know what digital marketing was. Everyday more companies are waking up to the fact that digital marketing is very important and is not an optional strategy in marketing anymore. They are catching up l...