How Google +1 Will Affect SEO
( The Best Web Hosting Service )- With Google +1 having been officially introduced to the public on a global scale, both SEO experts and Webmasters alike are asking the question of how it will affect SEO now, and in the future. As case studies and experiments as to its impact are being conducted on a daily basis, the picture of how it is immediately affected SEO is starting to get a little clearer. Google +1 is certainly influencing search engine results, and its full impact may have yet to be seen.
Google has already come out and explicitly stated that the more +1s a website receives, the better its results will be in a Google search. Thus, with a greater amount of +1s, your website will bring in more organic traffic, as Google will see it as an approved authority. It will gain authority status because it is believed that recommended content is generally more relevant than its counterpart. In a sense, Google is stating that +1s are similar to backlinks in that each serves as a means of recommending content, and the more that you have of each, the higher your website will rank.
Both case studies, and Google itself have, in fact, confirmed that SEO is, and will continue to be affected by Google +1. However, the question still remains as to how Google +1 will affect SEO. In order to provide an answer to that question, we’ve outlined a few areas that could provide the reasoning that you need. These areas include personalization, social authority influence, competition, longevity, and aggregation services.
Personalization
The gaining importance of both Twitter and Facebook on search engine rankings is clear evidence that Google is taking personalization very seriously with respect to its algorithm. It should come as no surprise then that Google +1 will further increase the significance and influence of personalization in SEO. Pages that have been tweeted, re-tweeted, and liked are seeing the greatest increases in search engine prominence. Google +1, even in its infancy, is adding to the mix. One only need to look at SEOMoz’s case study, as it showed that personalization is a force to be reckoned. The results of the case study saw pages reaching the top result for their respective keywords with just tweets, re-tweets, and +1s alone.
Social Authority Influence
With +1s, re-tweets, and likes being used to determine content relevancy, it should be obvious that social networking is gaining strength as a major component of Google’s algorithm. While the average user can have an influence by liking, or +1ing a website, one has to wonder just how much social authority will be affecting the process. Those with tens of thousands of Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ friends have even further influence as to what websites will reach the top of the rankings. Basically, these social authority figures may have the power to control what you see when you search via Google. The more friends and followers you have, the stronger your influence as to how a website will rank for its keyword. While an individual’s +1 may not be more powerful than another’s, their overall expansive audience reach may contribute to an abundance of +1s.
Competition
Google +1s may present a unique twist on analyzing your competition for targeted keywords. In the past, many Webmasters have been able to get a glimpse into the SEO methods of their competition in order to devise a plan to surpass them. With +1s making an impact on search engine results, you’ll be able to see why you are ranked below your competition. However, you won’t be able to see how they are getting their +1s, making competition analysis a bit tougher.
Longevity
Longevity will be a major factor as to how Google +1 affects SEO for a multitude of reasons. Aged domains have always influenced search engine rankings. With Google +1, the aged domain factor may still play a slight role, but it is likely that it may be neutralized. Newer domains and websites may actually overtake aged domains depending on who adapts +1 first. Furthermore, a newer website may provide fresher content that attracts more +1s from its visitors.
Longevity also plays a role with respect to just how long Google +1 will last. Google has tried various social networking ideas in the past, though none have ever garnered fanfare. Google +1 seems to be an exception at this point, but there are still many questions as to whether it will stand the test of time. The truth impact that Google +1 might have on SEO largely depends on how long the concept lasts. If it fizzles, the effect will be minimal. On the other hand, if its popularity soars, it could have a tremendous influence on the way we approach SEO.
Aggregation Services
Aggregation services have played a significant role in the way Twitter, and other social media has influenced search engine rankings. With the help of social aggregating services, a simple tweet could lead to a webpage reaching the top of Google for its targeted keyword. One has to wonder if, and how, social aggregation services will respond to Google +1. It would not come as a surprise for aggregation services to surface that highlight the websites with the most +1s. If that does happen, it could be even more of an SEO game changer.
Whether Webmasters and SEO experts like it or not, Google +1 is affecting the way that we approach SEO. Depending on how each of these factors discussed comes into play, Google +1 may be the next dominant component of the Google algorithm. It is definitely affecting SEO now, but just how much it will affect it in the future has yet to be seen.
All in One SEO Pack – WordPress Plugin
( The Best Web Hosting Service )- WordPress has been the main tool for website creation, and is by far the easiest way to incorporate SEO management. While WordPress already allows you to manage SEO easier, adding a plugin like All in One SEO pack can even make this task easier and yield better results.
Along with other themes like Thesis and Headway that are SEO-ready firsthand, the All in One SEO Pack plugin shows you key areas of your site for you to be able to add the right keywords that could attract visitors to your site. SEO is a long and bloody task, that’s why one can utilize any help it could get to make the process easier.
After installing and activating this plugin, you can configure the plugin within the Options page. The configuration page will let you put the right keywords right where they needed to be. The areas that you will need to fill with keywords would be:
Page Title: Apparently, the page title is the most important area for optimization. Your page title will reflect the whole site’s keyword – meaning it is where the bots and people would know what your site is all about. So it’s definitely not a place to miss optimizing!
Meta descriptions – This is also another important place to optimize. Pages rank according to their keywords within page titles most of the time, but this description that appears after the page titles is actually what convinces people to go to your site instead of another having the same keyword.
Meta keywords – These are basically codes and keywords hidden or not published within your site’s pages but are descriptions of what your site is all about. This helps the search bots determine the site relevance to the keywords searched.
The good thing about this plugin is that once it is configured, it automatically does the site optimization for you, faster than doing everything manually. Also, it also generates meta tags automatically based on the posts and topics, especially useful if you are a beginner. SEO will work just like that for you. If you are an advanced user, this plugin pack can also let you individually tweak keywords for each page and posts.
Given all of these help, this is a must-have plugin for an effective SEO. But still remember, no matter how good you optimize your site for SEO, having a good and useful content on your site is still the best way to succeed. At the end of the day, sites will still be deemed useful by people, not by bots.
Click here to go the All in One SEO Pack plugin page.
Viral Facebook Marketing: Social Network Optimization is the Future
( The Best Web Hosting Service )- It’s amazing how simple ideas could turn into grand innovations that make equally enormous impact and change in people’s life. For all his visionary but somewhat oddball concept (or so it seemed at the time), I’m betting Mark Zuckerberg surprised even himself at how Facebook has grown so colossal. And it probably didn’t occur to him either that he was laying the ground work for a phenomenal transformation to the meaning of social media/network. But this article is not here to discuss how Facebook has made Zuckerberg rich beyond anybody’s imagination; rather how Facebook impact the business world and its marketing trend.
The Social Media Marketing Revolution
Experts believe that social media has tremendous power, not only to connect but also to influence people; creating a new approach that brings word-of-mouth marketing to a whole new different level. This stems from the principle that once your brand image is embedded deeply on someone, there’s a significant inclination to share it among their circle. You guessed it right; this new marketing revolution that capitalizes on social media as a viable channel is known as viral marketing.
Viral Marketing is loosely defined as “a marketing strategy that makes use of contemporary social networks to spawn increases in heightened and responsive brand awareness, applying the theory or self-replicating viral process, comparable to the proliferation of pathological or computer viruses.”
Viral Marketing on Facebook: How does it work and how effective is it?
Nobody can argue that Facebook is the most powerful social networking platform today; drawing in diverse users, from tweens to seniors, cutting across all demographic segments. With this, the propagation of Facebook Social Networking as a marketing tool consistently expands like wildfire.
Facebook touches consumers where they live and intermingle; acting and working together for the most part. It permeates into entire networks of incalculable consumers; giving way to a perfect venue for building awareness and interest. Most important of all, it spurs people into action and moves them from just being mere spectators to actual customers that buy products and/or services. For serious businesses, Facebook is the ultimate powerful tool to create viral marketing effort that can be implemented in the simplest way.
Getting the Most out of Viral Facebook Marketing: How to optimize your marketing strategies
Running true to its original concept of simplicity, Facebook was crafted using simple platform in its early beginnings. Needless to say, there was very minimal opportunity for businesses to utilize it as an advertising medium to reach their target audience. Today, however, the dynamics of Facebook is changing so rapidly that it is now capable of or providing quite a number of viral marketing strategies to help businesses disseminate their messages. Let’s take a look at some of the popular ones…
Facebook Applications
With this new capability, software developers are permitted by Facebook to develop interactive applications for the site; which allow users to share video, play games, send virtual gifts, and a lot more. Businesses can either create their own application or sponsor a third party developer. What are its potentials? Application gets prominent posting on personal profiles and users can also invite other friends (friends of friends) to become involved. Here’s an overview of some basic features that will most likely send your application into viral level. It’s not an exhaustive list by any means, but it includes some of the mainstream tricks that are prevalently used these days.
- Newsfeed is unquestionably the most potent aspect of Facebook. Period. There’s no need to elaborate on that. However, there are two methods that your application can leverage the Newsfeed. One, it is naturally built-in. In almost all cases, your application is displayed on your friends’ Newsfeeds as soon as you add it. Although it isn’t always guaranteed that it will appear on everyone else’s Newsfeed (there are several factors that prevent this), Newsfeed may be your best bet in setting off your application to go viral. Nothing spectacular; but hardly something that you can just dismiss as trivial. The other way to optimize Newsfeed is through leverage of the Newsfeed API calls provided by Facebook. This enables regular posting of news items to the mini feed within your friends’ profile. This is extremely limited, though, and there’s only a slight chance/percentage that the items you post will even end up on their other friends’ (Friend of Friends) Newsfeed. Then again, you should aim for any form of exposure you can obtain for your application. Remember to keep your posts within reason.
- One-on-One is a technique that when used alone may not provide the upshot you expect. If you combine it with other methods, however, this can produce astonishing results. Nothing is more straightforward than reaching out to individuals that you think might be interested in your application. It is much more effective to use for more targeted applications rather than generic ones.
- Invite after Action is still a useful form of marketing, although Facebook has recently put a cap to the number of friends an application user can invite per day. To tackle this limitation, make sure that you provide your application with an efficient means of allowing users to invite others.
- Giveaways and Referrals is the latest form of Facebook Viral Marketing. It’s kind of clever in that you encourage the users to market your application for you. This is usually done on messages to friends, Facebook Walls, blogs, forums, websites, and so on. Giveaways are typically integrated to provide incentive so that users are induced to promote your application. The great thing about this is that your applications users end up getting more aggressive than you with the marketing. The downside to this is it might make your application look a bit cheap.
Facebook Groups
Creating a group provides opportunity for user to kick off conversations among peers. It’s an ideal venue to update and catch up on other members’ goings-on; express common interests and form new connections. You can post pictures and videos as well as make comments on the profile page of the group. It is indeed an effective technique of creating buzz and uniting fans of a product, brand, television show and band, among other things. On the positive side, a larger network can be created as people that join a group usually invite friends to also become members. There are drawbacks, however; since Facebook is not basically a business-oriented social networking site, business owners or employees need to create a personal page first to be able to form a group. Also, it doesn’t get as much recognition as the more recent components of Facebook since “Groups” is one of the older features of the site.
Facebook Fan/Business Pages
Facebook pages are among the hottest Facebook additions. Any organization or business can institute themselves without being required to create a personal account. Though it has similarities to “Groups”, the Facebook page has a more customizable layout/format. Because it is run by the company rather than the members, invites or requests to join is not possible. Members can instead “Share” the page with their friends; which has a definite advantage as it is normally displayed more prominently on a personal profile for other people to see. Large-scale products have already started taking advantage of this gateway for brand awareness, but local and small-scale businesses have yet catch up. Facebook Fan pages are effective tools to connect directly to a product’s exiting consumers as well as the potential ones. The number of Facebook fans has become a huge indicator in determining the “power” of the brand. Every time someone becomes a fan of a particular product, it appears on their status, so it is visible and noticeable to every person that connects with them.
To sum it up…
While it is true that these strategies can yield diverse results, creating a viral effect remains the ultimate goal, which is why Facebook holds so much allure at the moment. With millions of Facebook users, you can quickly get your brand message across a sizable fraction of that quantity, which could translate to hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of individuals in less time at nominal cost. This massive numbers of users make Facebook the most promising social media for viral marketing.
The Recent Google Panda Update
( The Best Web Hosting Service )- The past few months have made a huge blow to most people living through SEO and website management. Though you may not be directly impacted by it, you may have noticed that dramatic decrease in spam sites whenever you search something on Google. What’s the culprit? Google Panda.
Simply put, Google Panda Update is the name of the most recent project Google undertook to clean up the mess in the Internet. Before that update, searching for a good and quality source of information in Google had been become troublesome, as there were lots of spamming sites, link sites, scraper sites, and other AdSense sites which clogged up the results list page. These sites are actually not a valuable source of information and not reliable either, as most had just been filled with lots of advertisements and little content. What Google did was to devalue and remove these sites from the top search results, leaving us with the useful and quality links to search from.
While the whole update did sound great for all of us Google search users, it has not been received with a mixed reaction by different SEO geeks, both professionals and aspiring newbies.
Clearly, it affected negatively those sites who are not worthy of being on the top of the results page. So it means that the sites that belong to these have been already removed. If your page is actually just an invaluable site with numerous ads, expect no traffic to come to you anymore.
However, it has created better traffic for those who had useful contents on their sites. This caused higher positions in the search results page, therefore higher chances for sales and earnings. Remember that this is one of the things we were told to remember when we first started our site – to be sure it is a creative site with rich content. And indeed Google made sure that it gives the right credit to those who deserve them.
There are times though that even some sites which really had original articles and valuable contents dropped off the list, but these were very minimal. In these cases, the major contributor to its removal may have been that your website failed to follow some guidelines of Google or it may have been linked to lots of low-quality sites that were initially removed. So it appears that you should also make sure that these sites be removed on your inbound links to ensure you won’t be dropping along with them.
The update struck websites made for USA first, and this was apparent for those who used Google Webmaster Tools, as results were dramatically seen in their dashboards. After striking the USA, the rest of the world was also affected.
This latest update in search algorithm showed us the main basis we should follow to be able to do SEO in an effective way – make sure we have useful, rich, high-quality, and unique content in our sites, as well as backlinks to the same sites too. Now, page ranks don’t matter that much anymore. It will take a lot of time to master this new system for now, but if this will let us have more good quality sites, then why not?
Server Geographical Location: Does It Affect Google Rankings?
( The Best Web Hosting Service )- As mentioned in many web hosting articles and discussions, there are many aspects to consider when it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Result Page (SERP). Among the questions frequently asked is about the importance of server location and how it impacts on your website rankings. Does it really matter where your web hosting servers are to be found? If so, in what way does it affect Google Rankings?
What Difference Does It Make?
The value of server geographic location vis-à-vis Google ranking is largely underrated and a lot of website owners simply don’t have any idea or often not even interested to know where the server is physically situated. In fact, it’s very common for a large number of hosting companies to purchase the cheapest servers, if possible; not really caring where in the globe it is located, so long as they make huge profits. Server location may not be a top priority aspect of SEO and search engine results but it does have a significant bearing.
Google is concerned about showing the most relevant results for searchers; hence search results are mostly tailored to the needs of the users to make their search experience as proficient, efficacious and convenient as possible. Google places a lot of weight on local search to carry out this objective. It is not surprising, therefore, that some search engine results are filtered by the geographic location of the host servers. What has that got to do with your website’s page ranking?
Remember that one of the primary aspects to factor in, when thinking about developing a business website, is the location of your target market. Are you going to market your products/services to other countries; or are you specifically aiming to attract customers on the country where your business is located?
For businesses that only target a specific location, local search is critically significant and the actual physical/geographical location of your web hosting company’s servers can influence whether or not your site will become visible within Google’s local search results. In short, your business website should be hosted on servers that are geographically relevant to your target area, if you want to make it to “front page”.
There’s such a thing as GeoTargeting…
Search engines use GeoTargeting to list sites according to the visitor’s IP/country – what’s relevant and of interest to the searcher. Below is a list of the top elements according to the order of importance, which can make significant impact in identifying your site’s location to index it for the most appropriate audience.
- Domain Name and use of country-specific Top Level Domain. In Canada, for example, a site with a .ca TLD will rank higher than a .com TLD.
- The geographical location/IP address of the site’s web server. Since search engines usually rank local sites based on servers within that geographical area, having a local web server is especially crucial for a website to get higher ranking. This is particularly true if the website doesn’t have a country specific Top Level Domain.
- The language used in the domain name and text in website pages and defined in related META tags. Search engines utilize language to detect and rate the website’s locality. This key element is a prime consideration in gauging the site’s relevance and a significant factor to boost ranking.
- The location of and language used by third party links to the website. The same measure is implemented on the strength and relevance of third-party links to local markets, which can be very influential in enhancing the site’s authority and presence.
As you can very well see, your website server’s location is indeed one of the most crucial factors in ranking. Put simply, if you want to target the UK market, for example; having a server geographically situated in UK will be of utmost importance and primary value to Google.
Give Your Website the Search Advantage
Let’s face it; Google is by far, the largest search engine; and when it comes to SEO it all boils down to making Google happy for your site to rank high and send an abundance of organic search engine traffic to your business. Here are some important tips to remember while you aim for higher ranking…
- Believe it: Google does use server location when ranking and providing local search results; which is not only country-specific but can also be area-specific. Keep this in mind when looking for a web hosting provider and make the right choice, if you want to appear in search results.
- Google assumes that websites hosted with servers in the same geographical location are likely to provide the most relevant content for that specific area.
- Servers in the same locality are preferred for location-based queries and searches; thus, can influence how a website positions itself in the local search ranking.
- Google now claims that one out of five searches is location-based search query.
- Google is likely to detect the location of your website through its IP address/web server location, rather than just refer to the Top Level Domain (TLD). Here’s the thing, though…If you use a generic Top Level Domain (.com, .net, .org, etc.) the server location will identify your geo-location. However, if you use a country-code Top Level Domain (ccTLD), the server location may not matter at all, as major search engines will base your geo-location on your website’s country-specific domain name.
Conclusion
Identifying your target market is a foremost requirement if you want to optimize and boost your search engine ranking, so “localize” your content to get a better aim at your visitors. Come up with a domain name that has a suitable Top Level Domain. More importantly, make sure your host web server is in the same geographical location as your site or is geographically located in your target market area. Google is sure to look at your site with favor and count you in when indexing relevant pages.
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