October 2012 | Outsource Force

How to Optimize Facebook Posts

Posted on October 29, 2012 by jon

Social media marketing is an important part of any online marketing campaign for businesses aimed at increasing traffic to its site and improving overall business activities. With the huge market offered by social media sites and networks, many website owners are pushing their efforts towards social media marketing.

But social media marketing also needs SEO. Online marketing outsourcing experts are aware that interaction on social media sites is very dynamic and as such providing continuous flow of new and updated content is extremely important. Blogs or posts need to have the necessary optimization elements in order to achieve the desired results for the business. Some of the time-tested optimization techniques are listed below:

Facebook users consume content fast. They are always looking for new information and content. This should be considered when posting social content. Timing is critical. You should be able to hit the target customer at exactly the right time – the time that Facebook users are in the right mood to go through your social contents of posts, and when they are in the right mood to respond to it.
Focus on refining high quality content (taking in SEO elements like keywords, links, etc.) and post it across the social media community.
Engage with Facebook users. They are also social consumers. Create content which will get the interest and attention of the Facebook community. It is important to listen, learn and engage.
Less is more. For those involved in internet marketing outsourcing, this cannot be overemphasized. Pushing marketing efforts in tens of thousands Facebook followers who are not engaging with your post (brand) is a total waste. It is better to have a thousand active and engaging followers than 10, 000 who are not giving your content any attention.
Offer unsolicited help or advice. Facebook communities do take note of and appreciate those that make sincere attempts to help each other. Provide useful and helpful tips. The effort will pay off some time. Invest in helping others to reap rewards.
Pay attention to what the Facebook communities have to say about your content; about other’s content. This will help you determine what they are interested in, or what they are looking for, etc. You can then cater your campaign to such information.
Use Facebook to support customer initiatives. This is a good way to engage your Facebook community. If there is a new trend in social media, encourage the community to try the new trend together. The resulting exchange of information about such an event is sure to go viral.
Your Facebook community might include industry partners or business affiliates. Encourage and politely request them to talk about your brand, product or services within the Facebook community. This is a very effective and powerful way to sound off your marketing messaging.
Get the attention of Facebook users by using interesting and eye-catching images. Photo posting at Facebook will get the users to pause for a while to check what the image or photo is all about.
Set target specifics. Now, Facebook came up with target specifics like gender, age, location, interests, education, status and even language. A more defined audience can see your page posts if your post is not for the general public’s view. Setting your specifics on each post reaches a more targeted audience who are likely to read and talk about your post.

If you truly want to leverage on your social media campaigns, you have to make some tweaks on your posts to be sure that the right audience will see your posts at the right time. Doing so will increase user engagement and would create interactivity amongst users and page administrators. Thus, a relationship was already established between consumers and producers.

The Uses of Robots.txt

Posted on October 21, 2012 by jon

Website owners and webmasters would be ecstatic if their website is frequently visited by search engines and contents are indexed by search engine spiders. This is what SEO is all about – getting a high rank with search engines. However, there are parts of a website which you wouldn’t want spiders to include in their indexing activities

The best way to inform search engines to keep their spiders ‘off-limits’ to specific areas of the website is by using a robots.txt file.

Robots.txt is a text file and not html, put on your site to tell search engine robots which pages you would like them not to crawl or index. This is not to be confused as a way of preventing search engines from crawling your site. It is more of a notification for search engines not to enter certain areas of the websites for specific reasons. The file is placed in the main directory of a website where spiders can easily read it.

A better understanding of the different uses of this robots.txt file may be necessary in order to appreciate its importance for the website and the search engines.

Saving Your Bandwidth. Checking your website’s statistics will show you that there are many requests for the robots.txt file by the different search engine spiders. Search engines try to recover the robots.txt file the website is indexed to check on any special instructions for the spiders. Without the special instructions, it will cause the search engine spider to use up more of the site’s bandwidth resulting from the repeated retrieval of say, a large 404 error file, which should not be accessed by the spiders in the first place. By using the robots.txt file, the site’s bandwidth is reserved for more important pages required by the searchers. You can also use this file to ban spiders from indexing graphic files.

Keeping the Sensitive Information Hidden. This is one of the more important reasons for using the robots.txt file. As there are websites holding a database of confidential information, obtained through the interactive features of the site such as client’s registration form, special instructions are given to spiders not to crawl and index the pages containing the confidential information. If there is no special instruction for the spiders, these delicate information including credit card details can become accessible and available to anyone searching the web. The robots.txt file will be used to hide the database from the search engines.

Avoiding Canonicalization Problems. This also refers to duplicate content problems which occur on a website where multiple pages have the same content. An example would be a product page that has a “print” version and another page for browsing. Spiders will find it difficult to identify the canonical version. Using robots.txt, the secondary or “print” version need not be crawled by the spiders.

Avoiding Wastage of Server Resources. Most websites have scripts or computer programs built within the site. Examples would be contact forms or search engine within the site, etc. Such scripts or programs are intended for human use and not for spiders so it would be better to block the spiders from the directories containing the scripts. This will reduce the load on the web server every time scripts are called in by the search engine spiders.

Robots.txt is very useful in hiding web contents that are not for public viewing especially for electronic commerce websites. This serves as security for private data wherein only website administrators should be given access to. Also, robots.txt aid spiders in crawling pages which were intended to be duplicated to not be crawled as duplicate content which could decrease website ranking.

In creating a website, especially if you will be hiring an outsourced web design company; having clear understanding on robots.txt inclusion must be set before running the website live to avoid spider or robot confusion on data that will be shown to internet users. It must be clear that certain pages must not be shown in public for client protection and it must also be of tight security to avoid spammers having an easy access to confidential data.

How Can Content Marketing Improve Your SEO Ranking

Posted on October 15, 2012 by jon

Without any doubt, web users are content hungry. They are always looking for information, be it new or old. It is therefore important that the internet marketing companies charged to handle the online marketing activities of their client’s website deliver compelling content, relevant and well-crafted for the full consumption of the web readers. Contents can engage customers and make them revisit the sites as many times as they need to. Outsource online marketing experts are aware of this, that’s why they continuously update their sites with the latest and accurate informational content relevant to the needs of the readers.

Webmasters capitalize on content in their optimization strategies to improve the site’s SEO ranking. With the growing demand for compelling and quality content, optimization experts are directing their efforts in creating and marketing the content in demand. Content marketing improves SEO rankings and traffic, in addition to the quantifiable response derived from these marketing campaigns.

How then can content marketing improve your SEO ranking?

1. Write Guest Blog Posts for Authoritative Sites. By doing this, you are establishing your authority in the industry. By writing contents for other sites, you can be considered as a thought leader in the industry. People who have read your posts will see you as an authority in the industry with valuable information to share. Your site tends to gain in this by having the customers of that site you wrote for visit your site through the links you have integrated into the guest post. If your guest post is compelling enough, your new visitors can link back to your site for some pertinent information or detail.

There is a catch in doing guest posting nowadays. Google is smart enough to know that you are guest posting your blogs just to acquire backlinks from authority sites. To eliminate the chances of getting hit by updates, be sure that you don’t just do guest blogging for the sake of acquiring quality backlinks. Before anything else, it is your target audience who will be reading your posts. Always put your audience first in writing any content be it on your own website or blog site or when guest posting. Stop thinking of spiders and other ranking factors but your audience.

2. Build Links to your Site with Original, High Quality Content. The best way to get organic and quality links is by producing interesting and highly relevant content that drives people to link and share your content. A content has no use if it is not being shared by people. This boils down to having great content so people will find it useful and informational. In doing so, not so much effort will be done by you in marketing your content for it is the people who read your post will be the ones marketing your content for you. Such links created by you and the people who shared your content will be detected by search engine spiders and will be considered when they rank your site.

3. Measure then Optimize Again. As in any SEO technique, proper monitoring, measurement of the optimization techniques are in order, to determine the effectiveness of the campaign. If you have written a guest post, be sure that you answer back whenever a comment was posted. Be polite to the website owner where you guest posted a blog entry. From there on, you can measure user engagement. You can also get insights from the comments you get from your readers. Most of the time, comments are instant feedback on how well you did in a specific post which you could use in establishing a more powerful marketing technique.

Google seemed to have successfully convinced many webmasters and website owners about the important role content marketing plays on SEO ranking. With its recent algorithm updates, Google gave more weight on content than all the other SEO elements in relation to page ranking. Spiders are crawling pages with great content and use that as a basis for page ranking. With these changes, focus and attention are directed to creating and distributing quality and compelling content.

With more relevant and updated content published and distributed across the online communities, the more likely it is for your site to be found by users or readers who need the information that you have on your site or on social media sites. The more users visit your site for the information desired, the higher the chance of getting high ranks with search engines.

The SEO Value of Internal Linking

Posted on October 08, 2012 by jon

Link building is an integral component of search engine optimization – attaining high ranking in search engines results page. But there is one aspect of linking which is most often ignored, overlooked, or neglected – and that is the power of internal links. Perhaps, not many search marketers are aware of the SEO value derived from internal links placed on important pages on the website. The SEO value may even be equal to the value derived from inbound links.

Internal linking is building links between the pages of a website. This allows the webmaster or the SEO expert to make use of strategic channeling of link juice to target landing pages. It also pulls the deep pages higher up in the site structure, improving user usability. Internal links also allow search engines crawlers to find the content easily. Internal linking may also be used to promote previous articles that a user or reader may find helpful in searching for relevant answers.

Developing and implementing an internal linking strategy should be done during the initial design or redesign of a website. This is because effective internal linking can prove to be costly if implemented on a live website. The following are some internal link building techniques:

Distribute the Flow of Link Juice. This is done by tapping the most linked-to pages or most authoritative pages of a site. Drop links on those pages to the pages specifically targeted for organic traffic (SEO landing pages). Distributing the link juice from these pages is what is aimed with this technique.
All Target SEO Landing Pages should be Linked. This is a good way to scale your link building efforts. Every time an inbound link is made to one SEO landing page, that link subsequently flows to your other SEO landing pages. This means one link is multiplied. The easiest way to interlink SEO landing pages is by adding a list of “Related Links” in a sidebar or at the end of the page.
Links on the Home Page. This is the most linked to page on a website. Hence, it is a good target for tapping and distributing the link juice. Search engines will place high value on home pages which are linked to internally, as they signify a strong trust and authority indication to the search engine crawlers.
Links on Unconventional Places. Aside from the home page and SEO landing pages, good link equity would be from pages where you find “company leaders”, “privacy policy”, “terms of service”, “contact us”, “frequently asked question”, etc. These pages are high in information architecture and they are often link-free. This means there is not much competition in terms of other internal links found on these pages.
Use Breadcrumbs. While breadcrumbs are great navigational tool for users, they are also useful for internal linking purposes. With breadcrumbs, you can also use anchor text to send a relevant signal to search engine crawlers.
Use Blogs. It is important not to overlook the blogs when doing the internal linking. Blog contents are excellent source of link equity. You can use related post plugins, top post widgets in the sidebar, categories, breadcrumbs and better pagination.

While some SEO believe that internal links do not count as much as external links, they are still very important in search engine algorithms. Especially now that algorithm changes are frequently made, search engine spiders would find more value in a website if they can see relevancy in pages or posts. Robots can interpret it to be highly informational, thus, giving it high value and trust rating.

In the past months, internal linking has been a vital search engine optimization technique since internal linking is a tactic that have been long forgotten by many online marketing companies. Since there have been updates that may penalize a website for its unethical practices i.e., use of black hat and gray hat techniques, internal linking is one of the many ways of preventing penalty for it shows strong relevancy and friendly user navigation inside the website.

The SEO Benefits of Social Media

Posted on October 02, 2012 by jon

While there are millions of internet users turning to search engines for every piece of information they need, an equal number of users visit various social media networks as part of their daily routine – whether for personal use or for business. Social media platforms are indeed a great tool to distribute information which can eventually create brand recognition for some businesses.

More recently, social media signals has been influencing search engine optimization campaigns. The importance of social media for online businesses cannot be ignored. This is why many website owners have focused their efforts in this undertaking – making their presence grow strong in social circles. With benefits listed below, why wouldn’t they?

Zero Initial Cost. For those who are on tight budget, social media marketing may be set-up for free initially. You can set up accounts with the major social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ at absolutely no cost. The only investment you have to put in is time and creativity to build the right impression.

Blogs. One of the easiest and best ways to start your social media campaign is through blogging. You can either set up a blog on your website or create a stand-alone blog. Blogs allow you to create content with targeted keywords for your site. People are given opportunity to interact through comments, opinions and feedbacks. And considering the enormous number of people viewing blogs each month, blog sites can really be a powerful SEO tool.

Faster Results than Traditional Website. With a compelling content posted in social media networks, it is possible to go viral – thousands of visitors will visit your blog and because it is social media, friends of friends, or followers of followers can easily access the posted content.

Recognized by SERPs. All blogs or contents, and profiles posted on social media networks are opportunities for search engines to notice and detect your site.

Video Presentations vs 500-word article. Expectedly, more people will watch a 3-minute video over reading a full page content of an article. This gives a higher probability for the company’s message to reach out to more viewers. The possibility of going viral with an interesting video clip is also present.

Higher Ranking. On social media platforms, a content shared by others equate to a backlink. The more quality backlinks your page has, the higher the PageRank ranking will be. This could establish your site to be an authority site. And if you have the quantity and quality of backlinks, the higher the chances of PageRank ranking.

Users Become Focus Groups. From the social media sites, you can learn the current trends or the main discussion points being tossed around. This information will give you an idea of what keywords you can integrate in your own posts and other SEO activities. Discussions on social media sites can help you identify the topics that will keep them engaged and interacting.

Customer Engagement and Involvement. A lot of people find satisfaction when they are given the opportunity to express their opinion in public about certain products and services. This kind of engagement can help SEO companies and business owners to customize their strategies according to the desires of their customers. Surveys, contests, feedback and opinion or comment section in blogs are some of the effective ways in engaging the customers to provide you with valuable information.

Overall, marketing using social media sites is an essential part of website optimization for it is proven to bring quite a chunk of website traffic. Success will not be achieved by merely focusing on social media marketing. It should take into account all valuable elements of SEO to run a smooth campaign and for it to be successful.