Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing in less than 40 words

Building external links

External links

 How do I get links pointing back to my site when I don't have control over other websites out there? The good news is that links come in different forms and can be generated from different tactics. 

Building External Links

A very common way of generating links is to submit your website or business to different web directories. But keep in mind that you are going to want to be extremely selective about the directories you submit to.

There are lots of spamming directories out there and there are very few that are actually trustworthy. A good guideline to follow is whether or not the directory conducts some form of editorial process that reviews each link and only accepts relevant and trusted websites themselves. If a directory is willing to publish any link without any review it's probably not a reliable directory.

If you have industry specific directories and listing services that are trusted and unique to your market, those are good places to go next. Another way of building links is to encourage other websites to link to your content. The key factor here is that you need to have quality content that people are willing to link to. In a search engine's perfect world, someone reads a piece of content and says, wow, that is so great that I have to link to it. Sometimes great content attracts links naturally as a result of people discovering it and sharing it around.

There are other times when you may have to do a little outreach to get people to discover your content. Leveraging your social connections to share content that you have posted. Try to find other websites that you feel have the same audience. For example, there may be a professor at a university that's doing research in your field and publishes their own blog about topics that are very relevant to yours. Reaching out to that professor and letting them know that you have content that their own readers would find interesting and useful might just earn you a very relevant and very trustworthy link.

It is crucial to gain links from social media sharing. People are social beings and very eager to share content we find interesting with our friends and colleagues. To search engines, this is a signal that tells them what content people actually like and what real people are actually interested in. So use those sharing buttons on your content pages and use your own social influence on the networks you participate in to get links to your content out there and passed around.

Don't trade links with perfect strangers that have absolutely no relevance to your business or your content and don't put yourself on listings or directories that exist solely to get you more links.

As long as your link building tactics keep those key elements in mind, you'll always have an opportunity to build new quality links. 

Steve Steinberger

www.klicktwice.com

561-281-8330

Pin It for SEO

Pin it for SEO

To send traffic to your site, you must interact with your audience! How about "Repins" with Pinterest. With Pinterest.com you can create pins, comment and like others pins.

Building relationships over Pinterest will in turn, create an engaged following willing to share your content to others. After all, at the end of the day your fans are the best tool in your marketing toolkit.

Here are some ways you can share your pins and Pin Boards.

1. Make it easy for people to pin from your website with a Pin It button.

2. Below is  a Board Widget. Here you can select the pin board that you want to show. It will show the latest 30 pins. Seo and Pinterest | See it in action. 

The code to add to your site is similar to the code below. Just put the code where you want the board to appear on your web page. The board widget will display the top 30 boards from your favorite board.

<!-- code starts here --------------------------------------------------------->

<a data-pin-do="embedBoard" href="http://www.pinterest.com/klicktwice/klick-twice-technologies-inc/"></a>

<!-- Please call pinit.js only once per page -->

<script type="text/javascript" async src="//assets.pinterest.com/js/pinit.js"></script>

<!-- code ends here ----------------------------------------------------------->

3. Below is  a widget to display your profile. The profile widget will display your top 30 pins from all boards.

More Link building with Pinterest 

Steve Steinberger
www.klicktwice.com
561-281-8330

Mobile Marketing | Smart Device Marketing

Mobile Marketing | Smart Device Marketing

Klick Twice Technologies, Inc.: Are you Mobile?

Klick Twice Technologies, Inc.: Are you Mobile?: One-Third of US Organic Search Traffic Said to be Mobile July, 2014 by http://www.marketingcharts.com Mobile Search devices accoun...

Is reciprocal linking worth the trouble?

Reciprocal Links, good or bad?

Reciprocal linking at one point was an important link technique.  Many people still use it and seem to think it's what linking is all about. What is reciprocal linking? It is linking with reciprocation. If you put a link to my website on your site, I will put a link to your website on one of my pages. Sometimes it is referred to as Link Exchange. You sometimes see links that simply say links, useful links, resources, or partners.

When you click those links you will see pages and pages of links to other websites. For a long time, reciprocal linking was a very powerful way to rank a website. It really did work and it worked very well. There used to be hundreds of companies providing reciprocal linking services and software that helped automate the process. Even now we get a few reciprocal link requests by email every week.

Over the years the search engines have devalued reciprocal linking to the degree that in most cases it doesn't work. The problem with basic reciprocal linking from a search engine standpoint is that the links have no real value (real-web-links-and-artificial-web-links). The only reason they are there is to convince the search engines that the reference sites should rank well. Despite the fact that the reciprocal link companies always used to claim that reciprocal linking was about providing useful links to site visitors not manipulating search results.

That was nonsense of course. Over the years as the search engines reduce the value of reciprocal linking these companies have mostly disappeared. You may also hear however that reciprocal linking is actually dangerous, that doing it can get you penalized. In most cases that simply isn't true. Most reciprocal linking won't do any harm. It just won't do any good.

So when can reciprocal linking work? This type of linking may work if you are using it gain additional traffic. It is still a link to your site that someone might click on. For SEO purposes do not put a lot of faith in it.

What are the two characteristics of typical reciprocal linking? First of all, site A links to site B, and site B links back to site A. And the links typically appear in pages containing long list of links. So, what if site A links to B then B links to C and C links to A. Or maybe site A links to B, B to C, C to D and D back to A. And what if those links were scattered around a site rather than in a big list of links? This form of reciprocal linking is known as three way linking or one way linking. Because your links goes one way without a second link back. This strategy can work and many people use it.

In general, you'll probably want to avoid reciprocal linking. It's simply a waste of time. But if you run into some kind of multi-site link exchange in which you don't do A to B to A linking and in which you don't create big list of links, then go ahead. It could be helpful. A reciprocal link may not help with SEO but it may be seen by a potential new customer and provide additional traffic to your site.

Steve Steinberger

www.klicktwice.com
561-281-8330

Ecommerce Architecture

Exploring ecommerce information architecture

Just like any other kind of website, search engines need to understand how your ecommerce content is organized. With a well-organized structure your content pages, ecommerce specific pages, and the products themselves will be clearly recognizable and identifiable to search engines as they crawl the pages of your site.

Exploring ecommerce information architecture

Remember that internal linking is crucial for helping search engines understand the structure of your website. When you walk into a store in the offline world it's organized into different sections to help visitors head in the right direction before they actually start looking for specific products on the shelves.

Websites should be built with the same concept in mind using your linking to set up that structure. At the highest level of your hierarchy you can identify the different categories of products that you sell and within those category pages you can link to the next level of subcategories or products.

When a searcher is looking for a certain type of shoes, you want them to end up on your subcategory page for that particular type of shoe. If they're typing in model numbers and specific products, you want the appropriate product pages being returned.

When we get to the actual product pages themselves there are a few things to remember. First, each and every product should have its own unique page and on each of those pages you'll need to include content around the product. That means including things like the product name, properly tagged images, unique product descriptions, product colors, sizes and other options, prices, whether or not it's in stock and a host of other attributes that are associated with ecommerce products.

Over and above the page content, we even have the ability to identify other attributes even more clearly to the search engines by adding special metadata to your code. Do not forget to make sure that you're including your category, subcategory and product pages in your XML site maps.

The more you can help search engines with identifying the details of your ecommerce product information through your site structure, internal links and metadata the more they will trust your site with providing a quality shopping experience for users and all other things equal the more likely they are to return your pages over the competition.

Steve Steinberger

www.klicktwice.com

561-281-8330

Klick Twice Technologies, Inc.: 5 data aggregators local search depends on

Klick Twice Technologies, Inc.: 5 data aggregators local search depends on: Local Search , Claimed Listing and Local Search Visibility 5 Data Aggregators local search depends on. Are you listed with them? I...

Local search and Map

Submitting to the map sites.

There is more to localizing a site than just putting location keywords into your pages. You need to make sure that you are properly represented in the local search indexes. Local search results actually come from a totally different index. So even if your web site is in the organic index, you still need to be in the local index. All three major search engines have local indexes. There is Google Maps of course, Google Places, Bing Local and Yahoo Local. 

Local Search | Local Search Maps

These local listings are incredibly important. Within many searches, the local listings dominate the search results. Here is what you need to do. First, go to Google, Bing and Yahoo and search. See if your business is already listed.

You can review your listing here:
http://www.google.com/business
https://www.bingplaces.com
https://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/local-listings

If you can't find your listing then you'll have to create one. You should create a listing for each location. If you have five locations, make sure you have five listings. When you create or modify your listing, we recommend that you add as much information as possible. That way the search engines will be able to associate the web site with the business of the specific location. Make sure the address you use matches your listings exactly. Add as many pictures as possible, images of your location and staff. If you have video add that. Add as much text information as possible and of course the important keywords. You'll have to verify your business listing using either phone or postcard verification.

You might also try to get a few of your customers to post glowing reviews about your business. Reviews alone are not enough to get you to rank highly in local search results but they certainly can't hurt. One critical factor in how well you rank is geographic location. If you serve a city area but your geographic location is on the outskirts of the city you're at a disadvantage. Depending on the size of the city and the competition you may find yourself completely blocked out of the local listings for that city. Some businesses have decided this is such a big problem that they found locations closer to the center of the areas they serve.

How else can you get your listing to rank well in the local results? Creating links and web citations to your web site is important as the search engines use that to rank not only your site in the organic listings but also your business entry in the local listings.

Many businesses focus on their web sites and ignore their local listings, but that's a huge mistake that could cost you dearly.

Steve Steinberger

www.klicktwice.com

561-281-8330

Its 4th and 20 from 21 yard line

The fear of website analytics

Its 4^th and 20 from the opposing team’s 21 yard line. There are 3 seconds to go in the game and you are down by 2. If you weren’t paying attention to the analytics (the game clock, the down, yard line) you might try and run for the touchdown when the analytics say just kick the field goal.   

Regardless of whether you are an ecommerce, lead generation, publisher or any other type of site, website analytics are built to satisfy each one of these business types.

Website Analytics

It comes down to two options: are you doing analytics? Or are you reporting information? If you are an analytics focused business and is part of your integrated marketing plan then what you have is an insight into the business. Insights as to what you can do to improve your website and improve the calls to action that you're asking users to take.

Insights lead to action. You have things that you know you can improve right away because the data backs up the assumption. You can make comparisons. You can make comparisons among different segments of people, between two pages, between two offers. And you can ultimately make judgments on those comparisons.

If you're not focusing on analytics with specific goals then what you're doing is focusing on reporting. As a result it gets repetitive and there's no clear action. There's no clear purpose to what you're trying accomplish. Many people have a fear of analytics because they are not sure what the potential is. The potential is having an idea of where and what marketing channels are returning the best ROI.

How do you know if your marketing is effective? How do you know if your search engine optimization program is profitable? Value answers the big questions. Because value helps you understand how you can make your search engine optimization your social media, your pay per click, your email or your display campaigns profitable. Analytics can tell you what is working and why. The data backs up the assumptions and gives you a clearer path to make ongoing business decisions.

Steve Steinberger

www.klicktwice.com
561-281-8330