Being invisible is only good if you’re a super hero…

Social Bookmarking vs … Social Networking vs … Social Sharing

Buying social bookmarks and twitter followers isn’t working to help increase site ranking like yesteryear. However, spreading your site across a variety of social mediums can help your site authority as well as gain natural traffic. Since social media has become a vital part of today’s information sharing, creating pages across multiple platforms can boost outreach to all corners of the web.

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Social Bookmarking

The term “social bookmarking” refers to the method of organization and storage of resources by internet users. Through these social bookmarking platforms files are not shared, just the bookmarks that reference them. A common form of social bookmarking would be a program that allows users to save specific links to web pages that they want to go back to or share with others. Popular social bookmarking sites of today include StumbleUpon, Digg, and Delicious.

StumbleUpon

As one of the most popular social bookmarking sites, StumbleUpon is a rather simple idea that has exploded in usage over the past two years. As long as you have the toolbar installed on your computer, you can submit any site to the StumbleUpon database. There is no way to submit directly from the website without the toolbar. Pages submitted on to StumbleUpon get classified to certain categories and potentially can reach thousands of people. If your site does particularly well amongst the interest group it enters and if it receives many likes, it will spread across other interests and be seen even more. Submitting your sites to StumbleUpon will give you the opportunity to be seen, liked and shared at no cost to you.

Digg

Although Digg’s influence has slightly fallen off recently, the links received are still powerful. By consistently submitting your content to Digg, you might strike gold and end up on the homepage. By making several accounts and giving your site some “Diggs,” its authority will slowly aggregate and you have an opportunity to get your page off the ground and in to the eyes and computer screens of many other internet users.

Delicious

Not nearly as large as it once was, Delicious still claims several million users globally and is one of the early social bookmarking sites. Operating off of a categorical submission system Delicious is extremely easy to submit to. Similarly with Digg, your site (if popular enough) has the opportunity to make the “hotlist” on the site’s homepage, which can help drive natural traffic back to your site. Although its popularity has not seen much increase in recent years, Delicious is still one of the bigger social bookmarking sites currently in use on the web. Since all bookmarks posted to Delicious are publicly viewable, posting pages of your site to it can engage Google to crawl it faster and more often.

Social Networking

Social Networking sites have become the most widely used form of website on the internet and have become an integral part in how people manage their social lives. Social networks like Facebook infiltrate all age groups and have slowly become a preferred form of communication amongst most people. The scope and reach of social networking sites is so ginormous it allows certain things to spread virally through millions of people in a matter of minutes. News of a catastrophic incident can spread out from the source and into the eyes of millions within the first 30 minutes. Capitalizing on this extreme connectivity will help your site rank higher in Google and Yahoo as well as drive real interested people to your site. The most popular social networking sites today include Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.

Facebook

The crème de la crème of modern social networking is Facebook. Facebook dominates the networking world with an active user base of nearly 1 Billion people. This number is staggering when you think that nearly one-seventh of the people alive on the earth use this single website to manage their social lives. The creation of “social shares” on Facebook allow websites or any other information, picture, media, etc., to be spread easily on a large scale around the web. By posting the Share Button API on your site, visitors can share your pages around the web giving you natural backlinks at no cost to you. Even beyond the links you gain from this, the shares you get from visitors will help direct traffic to your site you otherwise would go without.

Twitter

Quite a bit different from Facebook and Google Plus, Twitter’s style of social networking focuses more on the quick relaying of information between people. Google admits to using data collected from tweets. There is sort of a twist in how to manipulate Twitter for your SEO needs. Google only counts re-tweets from powerful followers in their ranking process. This means that in order to make use of Twitter for SEO purposes, you must have genuinely interesting things to say or a loyal group of powerful followers in order to make a difference. The potential for increasing site rank is definitely there. By gaining even a small amount of social recognition through re-tweets about your site you will always have a flow of new visitors just based on the amount of people each individual re-tweet reaches.

Google+

Google+, for SEO purposes there is a lot of valuable stuff to gain from using this site. There slightly new approach to social networking puts your friends, family, work buddies, etc., in different “circles” to which you can share things. It’s like having a file cabinet with everyone you know perfectly organized neatly in to little manila folders. As in all other social sites gaining some recognition and following through Google+ would obviously be helpful. This site is a Google’s property. That being said the data contracted from this site will be skewed in importance compared to competitor’s sites. Google+ will auto-ping your domain helping you get indexed faster and rise in the rankings quicker. Google values this data very highly so creating Google+ pages will definitely help you out in your quest for a higher rank.

Social Sharing

These sites are a sort of a new breed in the overall social networking world and have potential for more site rank than most people think. These should not be passed over in the SEO process. Social sharing sites take the link sharing of social bookmarking and the social outreach of social networks and join them together in the search engine optimization treasure chest everyone in the SEO industry searches for. The most popular social sharing sites surging in use as of now include  Reddit, Instagram, Pinterest, and Youtube.

Reddit

One of the pickiest and most selective social sharing websites on the web, Reddit has around 35 million users and receives around 1.8 billion monthly page views. The large scale of this site is perfect for releasing links to your site’s pages. However, the community of “Redditors” are notoriously picky in what they want to see or read about. The moderators of the site as well as the whole community is very keen on picking out spam so try to keep all of your content natural.

Instagram

The official launch was towards the end of 2010. Instagram is a free photo sharing program that allows for users to take photos, apply digital filters and share the image on an array of social networking sites. The app really started to gain popularity in the beginning of the 2011 and has only grown out to a larger audience since then. With a count of approximately 60 million users worldwide, Instagram’s most significant potential lies in the massive outreach it has among all different social platforms.

Pinterest

All good SEO’s know this and use Pinterest to virally seed content and gain strong backlinks as well as traffic to their site. Pinterest’s format acts as a virtual bulletin board, as users can “pin” interesting content to their own pages. The viral potential of Pinterest makes it a necessary site to use for optimizing your site. Google has figured out how to detect spam re-pins of content so in order to make use of the power of Pinterest try to gain good natural re-pins. The easiest way to do this is to create infographics about things either related to your site or stuff you can host on your site.

Pinterest is a game changer in the SEO world if you know how to properly utilize its sharing potential. Pinterest is great even if you only get a few re-pins as the authority you gain will be worth it in the long run.

Youtube

Perhaps one of the most widely used sites on the web Youtube houses billions of unique videos. Many of which reach large audiences quickly. Like Google+, Youtube is a Google property and they surely use the data gained from Youtube when ranking sites. Youtube has potential to spread your specific product or website if the videos are original and interesting. Although it might be hard to create videos for a site any webmaster should look in to the benefits of using Youtube to gain traffic and links.

Social media dominates the global communication and information share of today’s society. The world we all live in now is so intertwined with the internet and social networks that in order for your site business or company to thrive you need to be well represented on all platforms of the social sphere. By joining the social you can boost your site’s crawl rate and index time allowing your site to be indexed faster by Google and begin the ranking climb you are looking for. They also provide organic traffic whether you believe it or not. There is no doubt about it—social media sites will give you an edge in search engine optimizing.

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

Klick Twice Technologies

Klick Twice Technologies

Keyword analysis tools

There are quite a few tools out there to help us analyze keywords. The one that gets the most use is the Google Keyword Tool. Not only does this tool provide a good measure on search volume, but improvements on keyword suggestion has made it a more favorable keyword research tool in the SEO community. And it's free. While you don't need to be an AdWords advertiser to use this tool, if you do have an AdWords account, you'll get access to all the bells and whistles of the Keyword Tool.

You can choose to see data for the entire world or just the countries you select, and you can also choose the language of your keyword results. Another important selection is the devices that people are searching on.

Keyword analysis tools |  Keyword analysis

The kinds of keywords people type into their mobile phones are often different than the ones that they type into desktops or laptops, and you can see the differences by using this selection as you do your research. Last, you can choose to filter your results for things like certain levels of competition or search volumes.

Try a keyword search like "canvas shoe design" and click Search. From this one term, we start to discover that people are also searching for things like designer shoes, cheap shoes, canvas or leather shoes, boat shoes, etc.

While Global Monthly Searches includes the entire world, if you specified a country in your settings, the Local Monthly Searches will only show data for the countries you've selected. You'll also want to make sure that competition is checked, and the Local Search Trends column can give you some interesting insights into seasonality. Right from this tool you can select the keywords that you want to potentially include in your keyword list, and you can download a list of the raw data in CSV format, where you can work with the data offline in a tool like Excel.

Two other great tools from Google are Google Insights for Search and Google Trends, which can be found at google.com/insights/search and www.google.com/trends/. These tools lets you type in different keywords and see all kinds of information about how that keyword is being typed into Google searches overtime.

With trends and insights we can see exactly when demand picked up, and we can see that more people are typing in the singular version than the plural. We can see state by state interest through the heat map, which we can get even more keyword ideas in the Top and Rising Searches section. Putting some of these back into the Keyword Tool can start a whole new iteration of research. Using tools like the Google Keyword Tool, Google Insights and Google Trends for Search allows us to discover new keywords and understand just what people are typing into search engines.

This exploration and data collection is the backbone of our keyword research process, and can provide us with wonderful insights and ideas around which keywords we'll focus on as part of our SEO strategy.

Steve Steinberger

www.klicktwice.com

561-281-8330

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Optimizing non-text components

Optimizing non-text

components of a web page

Search engines are generally very good at analyzing and understanding the text content on web pages. But they have more difficult time with other forms of content, like images, videos, and audio clips. Let's take a look at a few different ways we can go about optimizing these kinds of content for our target keywords. One simple best practice is to use the text surrounding the non-text elements to describe what it's all about. This makes perfect sense if you think about it. Having a paragraph of text describing a particular video right next to the video itself is a very common practice.

And images embedded in line with text often have text titles under them, and they're typically very relevant to the text on the page. Image slideshows or carousels often contain a textual title and description of each photo. And an audio clip typically has a description, and may even have a complete transcription as well. Search engines do analyze the text that is in close proximity to the non-text components, making the assumption that there is some topical correlation between those elements

Optimizing non-text |  schema.org

At the bottom of this page is our logo KlickTwice Technologies, it’s an image, and even though those pixels are arranged in such a way that humans can read 'Klick Twice ' and see that it's a logo, remember that search engines can NOT. While the search engine will look at the image file name and the alt text, it will also look at the text nearby.  Aside from using the text that's near the non-text elements, there's also some code that we can use to help the search engines out.

Remember to name the image file and put in the ‘alt text’ to help the serach engines.  Another way we can optimize code for non-text elements is to use micro-formatting from schema.org. This allows us to mark up our code with some very relevant, very specific metadata, specific to a certain type of content. Here you can find some of the properties that you can define for an image object. There are microformat specifications for audio and video clips as well.

When a video is embedded into a webpage you can see that there's some code that embeds the video, but not much that can tell a search engine about the contents of that video. By adding in some special markup, we can provide search engines with all kinds of rich metadata, and this will help them really understand what this content is all about. When a searcher types in something like ‘canvas shoe design’, we've positioned ourselves for this page or even this video to pop up in the search results. Take a look through schema.org and you can see all of the different properties and elements that you can define for non-text data.

Making sure to provide as much information as you can to the search engines can only help your overall search engine visibility. 

For video content, you can also make use of a video site map file. XML site maps are just files that use a special syntax to provide search engines with a listing of all the pages and content found on your website, along with some attributes that describe the content. There are different formats for different types of content, and video site maps give us a way to inform search engines exactly where our video content is, along with what it's about, using things like title and description attributes.

Using a mix of content types in your pages can be a great way to engage with your visitors, and help them down the conversion path. And just because a piece of content doesn't use words, doesn't mean we can't help the search engine understand just what it's all about. Through surrounding text, some code elements, and site maps, you can open up all of your content to search engines, and be well on your way to attracting new traffic to your pages.

Steve Steinberger

www.klicktwice.com

561-281-8330

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Backlink Building Opportunities

Finding backlink building opportunities

Search engines rely on links to determine whether your web pages are trustworthy and authoritative. And to earn and uphold that status, it's important to always be on the lookout for new linkbuilding opportunities that you can take advantage of. One simple way to find new opportunities is to analyze the backlinks of other websites' ranking for a target keyword phrase. 

The logic here is pretty straightforward. If a web page is ranking well for the keywords you're targeting, then they must have some good backlinks. By examining their links, we might find some that we'd like to go after as well to help out our own rankings.

 Backlink Building Opportunities

Let's say we want to find new linkbuilding opportunities for the phrase "canvas shoe design." The first thing to do is head over to Google, and do a search for that term. The top results here are ranking high in part because of their on-page optimization, but another strong reason they rank so well is because they have a lot of good links pointing to those pages. What we want to do is analyze who is linking to those pages, determine how they got those links, and create a link outreach strategy to emulate those efforts.

One tool we use to examine competitive links is WebCEO. There are others that can be used to help with your linking research. Once you have identified each of these links on your competitors web site you can formulate a strategies to contact those site for a linking strategy of your own. 

Your goal here is to gain an understanding of whether or not the link would be a good fit for you, and if so, what will be your link outreach strategy. One thing to remember is that you want to build strong, quality links to your own site. So try to focus on backlinks with a high page authority or a domain authority. You will want to be on the lookout for a few different kinds of opportunities as you go through these lists, and one thing you may discover are additional directories that you can submit your site to.

Have you thought of these places for backlinks?

1.       Audio Sharing Sites:

2.      Directories:

3.      HARO (Help a Reporter Out)

4.      Edu Resource Backlinks

5.      Website Feedback Sites

6.      Blog Aggregators

7.      Scoop it

8.     Infographics

 There are many more strategies that can be uncovered from competitor backlink analysis, and the key is to spend the time analyzing what opportunities are out there, and how you can take advantage of them.

And remember to repeat this process with a handful of top ranking pages for each of the keywords that you want to rank for.

Steve Steinberger

www.klicktwice.com

561-281-8330