Bharati Ahuja

Social Media Sharing Policy To Put Your Best Foot Forward For Search

Since social media especially Twitter, Facebook, Google+ are now integrated in a big way in the search engines and have the offshoot benefit on rankings and search presence, its high time that there is a policy for what should be shared via the company and personal social media accounts.

Common examples of social media include blogs; social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and micro-blogging sites like Twitter; media-sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr; etc.

Social media signals can leverage the search presence of a web entity and add to the digital assets for web presence but at the same time it also has an equal and opposite potential of becoming a liability and also affect the search presence adversely.

Image credit: http://goo.gl/iAUDT

Google continuously works on improving the quality of search results and combating the spam on the web is the primary task of the web spam team at Google headed by @mattcutts . Google since last year has been working continuously working on the content spam and has been clearing the web of the content clutter by the series of Panda Updates and also has been working on eradicating the link spam on the web which gives wrong signals to search and manipulate search results.

In real life you are what your thoughts are, online you are what you share and publish.

Similarly, social signals in the long run have the same potential to pollute the web by spam if the companies do not follow a code of conduct for social sharing or do not formulate social media sharing policies.

Many times this task of optimization and social media management is outsourced to a third party so it is assumed that the third party is responsible for all the actions but after all it is the reputation of the company which is at stake. Hence, one can delegate the task but not the entire responsibility and answerability.

As the search and social signals integration is still at the initial stages and the search engines are themselves exploring and experimenting with the search and social data , it is the right time for companies having a corporate social media policy which should be followed to avoid the spam and have a good online reputation.

In online social networks, the lines between public and private, personal and professional are blurred the need for clarity of identity is vital. It is essential that when one shares on behalf of the company on social media he or she clearly states how they are connected with the company and own up for the content that one shares.

IMO Sooner or later Google will see through the social media spam too and start penalizing the accounts which may not be genuine or maybe sharing just to boost a certain listing.

Hence, a social media policy will help the company to avoid such disastrous outcomes.

Some of the points which the policy should include to avoid spammy behavior resulting in bad online reputation are:

Follow authority accounts and accounts which have quality posts related to your industry
Identify the purpose for the social media presence Read more about this on:
http://blog.webpro.in/2011/07/setting-purpose-of-your-social-media.html
Define your audience
Add value with each post and tweet
Be consistent
Share only if you like the content and want others to know about it not just because you know that person.
Do not keep sharing posts of some accounts only. Have a varied mix and see that you connect with more and more relevant accounts over a period of time.
The posts should gradually add to the trust and the authority factor of the company’s online presence.
The quantity does not matter hence do not buy likes or +1s, they will end up adversely affecting the social scene just like the paid links.
Let the friends, followers and the circles increase naturally due to quality postings.
Build the brand along with the online persona of the people who share on the social media.
Do not be boisterous by only saying what you want to say, listen, reply, engage.
Accept negative comments with grace and clarify if necessary
Build blog communities and discuss the posts from all perspectives. Do not end up just creating mutual admiration groups which in the long run deprive you of valuable UGC .
Do not take anything personally.
Just as you keep your personal and professional lives separate in the real world, following the same thumb rule will surely be the best way to balance both the worlds.

All these points are applicable if you want the social presence have a direct and positive correlation to your search presence. For personal accounts these may not matter as for personal and professional personas the rules maybe different.

This infographic from Seo Smarty provides a handy one-page resource as to how each of the major social networks defines spam, what sort of spam you can expect and their position therein.

social media spam infographic

Is Your Website Markup Enriched To Support The Rich Snippets Updated By Google?

Author : Bharati Ahuja

The latest buzz in the SEO world has the surround sound on the topic of “Semantic Web and Semantic Search”. This is the next step of the ever evolving SEO and it brings in an era where SEO’s have to give importance to microformats, schemas and go beyond the word to word mapping and focus on the meaning of the content of the website and try to correlate it with the meaning of the query being searched on the search engine.

The search engines have been working on semantic search since the advent of web 2.0. Google also has been supporting and promoting content by displaying the Rich Snippets in the search results.

Some of the type of content given priority by Google for Rich Snippets display in SERPs is:

Reviews
People
Businesses and organizations
Recipes
Events
Video

Yesterday , Google has announced the Product Rich Snippets too. The Rich Snippets Tool which verifies the structured data markup has been upgraded to support HTML Input also.

Rich snippets help you to:

Attract potential buyers while they are searching for items to buy on Google.
Submit your product listings for free.
Control your product information. You can maintain the accuracy and freshness of your product information, so your customers find the relevant, current items they're looking for.

If you're a merchant, you can give Google detailed product information we can use to display rich snippets (for example, price, availability, and review ratings) right on our search results pages. (Right now, shopping rich snippets appear on search results pages only in the US—but we're working hard to make them available everywhere.)

Rich Snippets: Product Search

Product markup allows you to provide Google with specific information about the products on your site. Information about price, availability, reviews and more may be used in search results to help users more quickly and accurately identify relevant content. Visit http://www.schema.org/Product for more details.

More details on the Product Rich Snippets on http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=146750

A Product can include an Offer or Offer-aggregate; or an Offer or Offer-aggregate can include one or more Products. Use the structure that works best for your content.

A Product snippet should have details about :

Name Of The Product
The Image Of The Product
The Brand Of The Product
The Category Of The Product
Review About The Product
Identifier Which Includes Brand and Product Identification
Offer Details

Rich snippets add the logical meaning to the data and support semantic search but, just because the content on the page is expressed in mark up which supports the rich snippets and has been verified by the snippets tool, it is not certain to rank in the SERPs unless it is inter-linked by various quality signals from the social and the meta web.

Hence the SEOs now apart from the other on-page factors have to ensure that that atleast the content related to products, reviews, people, recipies, Address (using hCard) video, business and organizations are represented in the correct markup which has a potential to generate a rich snippet in SERPs and search visibility on various search options.

Schemas / SEO - 04/17/2012

Forget The Keywords And Focus On The Keyness Factor Of The Content

Author : Bharati Ahuja

Yes, we all want our websites on the numero uno position of Google where people can find us easily and reach us. All internet marketing efforts focus all the attention to reach that position on search, social and all over the web and try to be found where people will be searching for their products and services.

We keep on saying that an overall presence is necessary to achieve good visibility on the search engines but let us understand why this is necessary by understanding the meaning of each layer of the evolutionary semantic web.

Everyone wants the magical formula to achieve the above said target. Is there any secret formula ? No there is no single or an instant formula to achieve that. The fact is that , this kind of presence and magically being found everywhere on the digital front is a result of logically building the presence step by step.

Some of the quality factors influencing search presence are:

Content
Connectivity
Relevance
Correlation
Authority
Security
Trust

The web is shifting from the web of documents to the web of data. Hence in such a web the majority of the content is in RDFs or in the database

Websemantic (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As you can see in the image above, we have URI and Unicode as the basis of the web. I would like to call it the first step which adds the keyness to the webpage and the content of that page that you want to promote organically on search engines or on the web.

The second and the third layer have the XML and RDF content. The content that we mostly have in this format is the RSS feeds and sitemaps which are in XML and the contact details, videos, reviews, events,etc now are being represented more and more in the RDF format. RDF has an XML syntax.

–Every Description element describes a resource

– Every attribute or nested element inside a Description is a property of that Resource

The URLs, titles and the descriptions are of the utmost importance in the XML files like the RSS feeds and sitemaps. If we focus on the keyness factor and try to cater to correlate to a wide range of keyword data rather than focusing on the keywords alone in the URLs, titles and descriptions it gets passed on to the next layer of the emerging web making the pages pass on more correlation and relevance and also syncs the on page signals with the off page signals which get directly indexed in the search engines in the form of feeds and sitemaps. Titles are not merely summaries, but are interpretative guidelines.

Now , from the URI, XML, RDFs we move to the ontology layer. The adoption of standards such as XML or RDF allows interoperability in principle, but does not solve the problem of the production, identification and evolution of knowledge. Ontologies reduce language to a nomenclature which describes neither textual structures nor the considerable variation of genres.

In general, an ontology provides a mechanism to capture information about the objects and the relationships that hold between them in some domain of interest.

According to Wikipedia: In computer science and information science, an ontology formally represents knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain, and the relationships between those concepts. It can be used to reason about the entities within that domain and may be used to describe the domain. An ontology renders shared vocabulary and taxonomy which models a domain with the definition of objects and/or concepts and their properties and relations. Ontologies are the structural frameworks for organizing information and are used in artificial intelligence and the Semantic Web

Ontologies help take the direction of the web from information to knowledge. Ontologies are considered as meta language descriptions of documents, conditioning access to them. Metadata are to be found in the document header, while the data themselves form the body of the text, or more precisely the intratext. From the “Web of Documents”, the transition is thus made to the “Web of Data”, and then even to the “Web of Metadata”: this is the conception currently in force with the Semantic Web.

The URI layer adds text, the RDF layer adds data, the ontology layer adds the relevance, correlation, logic and connections but the security and the encryption pillar is the pillar which is the backbone of such an evolutionary web. If your website has a presence on all these layers or is built keeping in mind the outcome of each layer then your site can have the potential of having a quality web presence and a good visibility factor and gain the trust factor which is like the icing on the cake and can be achieved after a period of time after your web presence has passed the quality test of each layer.

Search is moving from word to word mapping to content relevance and correlation. Its high time we moved on from quantitative metrics to qualitative metrics. .This can be done by moving our focus from the keywords to the keyness of the content.

For that we have to focus on the following metrics rather than rankings alone to judge if are web presence is passing the test of each layer

Content Keywords - Which give and idea of keyword variance in the index and relevance
Search Queries – Which give an idea about correlation
No. Of Impressions – Which give an idea about how well the search engine is able to combine and sync the on page signals with the off page signals.
Landing Pages – This gives us an idea about how well each URL is getting indexed along with proper relevance and the correlation factor.
Click Thru Rate – This indicates the success factor of the on-page titles and descriptions of the landing page for that relevant search query.

Also increasing visibility in more and more search options , rich snippets being displayed with the landing page, decreasing crawl errors and increasing no. of pages being indexed from the XML sitemaps are all quality indicators.

As SEOs let us focus on these quality factors and carve a special niche for SEO and establish the true meaning of SEO rather than ranting about the “Not Provided” data, suggesting a new term for SEO or start the age old story about how SEO is dying.

SEO is very much alive and has a quality dimension to it like never before. Thanks to Google for all the changes made in the algorithms , adding the encryption layer and also for giving more importance to rich snippets and social signals and thereby proving its constant endeavor to make search more qualitative.

SEO - 04/06/2012

Content + Connectivity = Branding. Is Your Content Contagious Enough To Create Or Promote Your Brand?

Author : Bharati Ahuja

The digital world has changed the way a brand image is created in the minds of the people. People today are creating an image about your company by going through the company website, reading the buzz on social media and reading what you post on your blog and the company social media profiles.

Many times by the time your potential customer reaches your online store or real time shop to buy the product he already has a lot of information about you, your company, products and services. This information does not only come from the content that you post on the web but also from the content which others post about your company , products and services.

Armed with so much of info. and a platform to discuss about the brand openly the customer is more confident of taking a decision but at the same time has very high expectations depending on what impressions he has created about the brand in his mind.

In such a situation it is very important that the sales staff or the online buying procedure on the site clarifies each and every expectation realistically.

So, basically it is the content, which is creating the brand. Content in all forms images, text, videos, audio, news, PR Releases, etc. and also the content on social media which gets linked because of the connectivity and all this thus leads to a brand image.

Content + Connectivity = Brand

If your content is directly related to the image of the brand then having a content strategy is a must. Hence, it is not only about adding blogposts, videos and images to your website or go on a posting spree on the social media sites.

Having a content strategy is the first step. The strategy has to come before the technology you select to host and promote it.

A Content Strategy should define:

· The audience for whom the content is created

· What type of content is right for which type of message

· It has to be on a regular basis with the quality improving over time

· It should preferably in a continuous , engaging, interactive story form.

· It should encourage and make people add to the existing content via comments, social media posts and discussions
The ultimate goal of all this content creation should be the conversion of this digital content to a digital asset. As acquisition and maintenance of any asset requires investment, content creation and promotion also requires strategic investment and planning.

Hence, investing in a right team to create , correlate and promote content is one of the important online marketing decisions.

The following video puts forward this idea very creatively.

Coca Cola Content 2020 : We will move from creative excellence to content excellence. The purpose of content excellence is to create ideas so contagious that they cannot be controlled….

Is your content contagious enough to create or promote your brand?

SEO / Social Media - 03/29/2012

How The Semantic Web, HTML5, Microformats And SEO Are Inter-Linked

Author : Bharati Ahuja

The only constant (K) on the World Wide Web and the SEO world is change. SEO and the web are constantly evolving .Google’s constant endeavor for improving the quality of search results is a known fact. Google introduced the PageRank technology to deal with the keyword spam that was prevalent in the mid 2000. But this innovation brought with itself the link building spam as an off shoot.

It also recently came up with the Panda Update to control the content spam and improve the quality of search results further. But this focus on content has already started an exodus of content in all forms on the web. How Google is going to determine the grain from the chaff is going to be the next big challenge now.

The following 4 quadrants explain the information and social connectivity very effectively.

Photo credit: http://www.novaspivack.com/

created by Sebastian Faubel with Inkscape Vector Illustrator. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The next big evolution is the semantic search which is a much wider and deeper concept based on the science of semantics which has the potential to improve search accuracy by understanding searcher intent and the contextual meaning of terms as they appear in the web eco system or within a closed system like the search engine index, to generate more relevant results.

The Semantic Web is a set of technologies which are designed to enable a particular vision for the future of the Web – a future in which all knowledge exists on the Web in a format that software applications can understand and reason about. By making knowledge more accessible to software, software will essentially become able to understand knowledge, think about knowledge, and create new knowledge. In other words, software will be able to be more intelligent – not as intelligent as humans perhaps, but more intelligent than say, your word processor is today.

Semantics adds extra information to help you with the meaning of the information.

The Semantic Web does not only exist on Web pages.Web 3.0 works inside of applications and databases, not just on Web pages. Calling it a "Web" is a misnomer of sorts — it's not just about the Web, it's about all information, data and applications.

Data is the foundation on which such a web and search world can exist. Data in itself is meaningless but when data gets linked because of its relationships with various data sets available on the web, it becomes useful and meaningful and solves the purpose for which it was being searched as data becomes contextual due to the inter-connected relationships . The more it is connected the more powerful it becomes and gives more related information. Google Plus has that secret unlocked potential of correlating, connecting and linking all the data related to a profile and then integrating it with search with its data about people, places and pages.

Web 1.0 was about static pages linked together,

Web2.0 can be defined as the emergence of the web since the last boom of the .com’s (new web based sites/applications/technology- i.e.,Adsense, Wikipedia, Blogging), and the dynamic websites designed/programmed in terms of user interaction and web-based interaction .

The classic example of the Web 2.0 era is the “mash-up” — for example, connecting a rental-housing Web site with Google Maps to create a new, more useful service that automatically shows the location of each rental listing.

Web 3.0 works inside of applications and databases, not just on Web pages. Calling it a "Web" is a misnomer of sorts — it's not just about the Web, it's about all information, data and applications.

For such a semantic web, HTML5 which is a collection of features, technologies, and APIs brings the power of the desktop and the vibrancy of multimedia experience to the web and amplifies the web’s core strengths of user interaction and connectivity.

HTML5 includes the fifth revision of the HTML markup language, CSS3, and a series of JavaScript APIs. Together, these technologies enable you to create complex applications that previously could be created only for desktop platforms.

This is where Microdata comes in and it’s going to fundamentally change the way we discover and consume content on the web.

Microdata is a component of HTML5 aimed at adding more semantics and contextual information to existing content on a page. By doing so, Microdata provides others, like search engines or browsers, with more information about the contents of a page.

Microdata is an attempt to provide a simpler way of annotating HTML elements with machine readable tags than the similar approaches of using RDFa and Microformats.

Microdata vocabularies provide the semantics, or meaning of an Item. Web developers can design a custom vocabulary or use vocabularies available on the web. A collection of commonly used (and Google Supported) Microdata vocabularies located at http://data-vocabulary.org which include: Person, Event,Organization, Product, Review, Review-aggregate, Breadcrumb, Offer, Offer-aggregate. Other markup vocabularies are provided by Schema.org schemas. Major search engines rely on this markup to improve search results.Content expressed as microdata on the web page gets correlated easily to the data vocabulary it is giving information about making it easy for the search engine find relevance and connectivity.

Google has stated they only support a handful of these Microdata types which include: reviews, people, products, businesses and organizations, recipes, events, music, and video content. If your website has any of these types of content, you’re eligible for a Microdata implementation.

In one of our previous posts we have explained how to use the hCard microformat on http://blog.webpro.in/2010/05/what-is-hcard-integration.html and it can be seen clearly that if you express the contact address on the web page in an hCard format it becomes data having specified fields for street address, city, country, etc. which makes the content more co-related and meaningful.

The semantic web adds more meaning to the query for a search rather than just mapping words during the search process.

As an SEO I think it is high time we started incorporating microformats wherever possible . Some of the content which can be represented as microformats or as data are as follows:

Reviews

People

Products

Businesses and organizations

Recipes

Events

Video

To check your markup, use the rich snippets testing tool.

More details about microformats on http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=146897

Panda or no Panda content has been king since the first web page was published on the web. It is Google who has become capable in picking quality content in 2012 and hence wants to reward sites with quality content with more visibility. But just adding content is not enough what has to be focused is how well the content is inter-connected to establish relevance.

More than the no. of inbound links it is important how well your web page gets inter-linked on the web as a whole. Sharing the links on social media and adding websites to Google web master tools and Bing web master tools help us achieve that purpose to a great extent but it is the representation of content in the form of data which ensures relationships and adds context will be the main task for an SEO in future.

The on-page SEO factors (used optimally, avoiding the over optimization) + The inter-linked connectivity of the aspects mentioned in the 4 quadrants above will determine the success of SEO campaigns in future.

Microformats / Semantic web / SEO - 03/24/2012

My Views On The WSJ Post “Google Gives Search A Refresh” – Semantic Search, Google And Bing

Author : Bharati Ahuja

Lately The Wall Street Journal Post is dominating the social scene among the search marketers and anyone interested in a search presence or rather a presence on Google.

Search has been the Google domain ever since they started the company. Since then Google has been working on the quality of the overall search experience from the search engine and the user perspective.

First and foremost let me mention that as a search marketer or rather a SEO (As there is a lot of confusion nowadays related to this term I better be very clear, yes I am an SEO and I am proud of it) I am very happy about all the changes that Google has made to its algorithm in 2011 and the updates seem to continue on a good pace in 2012 too.

I think all these changes are drawing a clear, distinct line between organic search campaigns and paid campaigns. All of these developments will make SEOs and website owners think beyond rankings and keywords, because the true meaning of SEO is to ensure quality search engine presence on maximum search options by focusing on overall quality web presence — enhancing the quality aspects of the website and reaching out to netizens via various modes of social media.

Finally the search industry has matured and is qualitatively marching ahead. But, this has not happened overnight the search engines (Google And Bing) have been constantly working to improve the quality and display of search results by giving more and more search options over a period of time. The study of the user behavior being at the base of all the decisions as the user behavior is also constantly evolving over the years.

The WSJ Post says:

Amit Singhal, a top Google search executive, said in a recent interview that the search engine will better match search queries with a database containing hundreds of millions of "entities"—people, places and things—which the company has quietly amassed in the past two years. Semantic search can help associate different words with one another, such as a company (Google) with its founders ( Larry Page and Sergey Brin).I don’t know which interview they are referring to, as there is no link to the interview. But, Amit Singhal has been discussing and announcing the updates about the Google Algorithm since 2 years all excited like a kid in a candy store and Google has been working on Semantic Search for quite some time now and the launch of SPYW is the first step towards it which just has the social dimension to the relevance factor.The semantic search is a much wider and deeper concept based on the science of semantics which has the potential to improve search accuracy by understanding searcher intent and the contextual meaning of terms as they appear in the web eco system or within a closed system like the search engine index, to generate more relevant results.

Currently Google focuses on the Keyword-Search System. The WSJ article clearly mentions that… …“ Google isn't replacing its current keyword-search system, which determines the importance of a website based on the words it contains, how often other sites link to it, and dozens of other measures.”

But it is also mentioned in the post that ….” Google is aiming to provide more relevant results by incorporating technology called "semantic search," which refers to the process of understanding the actual meaning of words.”

Of course the real impact and implementation of this kind of update on SERPs can be judged only when Google blogs about it on its official blog and starts rolling out such semantic search results.

According to me if your site has a lot of relevant content and the content is kept fresh by updating it with the latest happenings and developments and the links are widely shared on social media and have a good amplification factor along with the possibility and potential of that content being inter-linked on the web then one need not worry about the SERPs or the search traffic for that site to be affected adversely.

If at all Google in the near future starts rolling out semantic search the relevance to the logic of the intent, the keyword mapping in the query and the freshness of the content will all matter collectively. The search engines have been working on semantic search since the advent of web 2.0 and the following PPT which was created for the first SEO Training conducted by me in 2007 where I spoke about web 3.0 and Semantic Search has an example.

(Slide 90 to 93) explains an example of Semantic Search which seems to be becoming a reality in 2012.The slides explain Semantic Search as follows:
n The Semantic Web is a set of technologies which
are designed to enable a particular vision for the future of the Web – a future
in which all knowledge exists on the Web in a format that software applications
can understand and reason about. By making knowledge more accessible to
software, software will essentially become able to understand knowledge, think
about knowledge, and create new knowledge. In other words, software will be
able to be more intelligent – not as intelligent as humans perhaps, but more intelligent
than say, your word processor is today.

n The classic example of the Web 2.0 era is the
“mash-up” — for example, connecting a rental-housing Web site with Google Maps
to create a new, more useful service that automatically shows the location of
each rental listing.

n In contrast,
the challenge for developers of the semantic Web is to build a system
that can give a reasonable and complete response to a simple question like:
“I’m looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $6,000. Oh,
and I have an 11-year-old child.”

n The Semantic Web does not only exist on Web
pages.Web 3.0 works inside of applications and databases, not just on Web
pages. Calling it a "Web" is a misnomer of sorts — it's not just about
the Web, it's about all information, data and applications.

SEO Training -WebPro Technologies

View more PowerPoint from WebProtech

Bing too has been working on semantic search since a long
time. The following 2009 video of Webpronews.com says it all where Javed Panjwani, the Business Development Executive at Wolfram Alpha , explained, a traditional search engine creates a Web of documents and essentially generalizes what a user is looking for. A computation engine, on the other hand, personalizes the search results, where the reference was to Semantic Search Results.

More WebProNews Videos

As an SEO I feel more than happy and look forward for all the coming updates (if any in the near future hopefully), because when the search is based on the relevance of content, social mentions , outreach and amplification and the logic of the query rather than only the word by word mapping of the query adds quality to the whole search process.

With this kind of the basis for search SEO will gain more meaning and the SEO industry will gain more respect and authority as the prime edifice on which SEO in this kind of search model will be based on content, intent , social graph and the trust factor rather than link graph.

As Matt Cutts has made it very clear in all his SEO videos that SEO is all about putting your best foot forward and SEO is not spam. One of our past guest posts also points out the sentiment behind this that SEO is not magic but pure logic and hard work.

I have not got a chance to see the SPYW results as they have not yet been rolled out universally but according to my experience and what I have read on the search blogs I think SEOs should not rant about it but indulge themselves in research and rejoice at the fact that it is the true growth of the search industry and finally search has come of age and matured. Of course only Google can tell us when this will become a reality.Waiting for the next Google blog post to shed some more light on this and let us know when the changes mentioned in the WSJ post will become a reality.

SEO - 03/16/2012

What Is Content Strategy And Why Do We Need One?

Author : Bharati Ahuja

If you have a website and you are serious about its web presence then I am sure you must have heard the clichéd line “Content Is King”.

After the Panda update we see many people claiming themselves to be content writers and offering content writing services. I am saying this as the no. of emails that I used to receive for link requests which were nothing but requests for spammy link exchanges are now decreasing and the no. of emails from companies introducing themselves as content writers is on the rise.

Content has been king since the day the first web page was published but now its importance by Google as a ranking factor has made content the most discussed aspect of web presence.

In Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville write, "We define content broadly as 'the stuff in your Web site.' This may include documents, data, applications, e-services, images, audio and video files, personal Web pages, archived e-mail messages, and more. And we include future stuff as well as present stuff."

In today’s context the definition of content has a much broader connotation as along with the stuff on your website it also include the opinions that you share across the social media platforms , comments that you posts on other blogs and also the guest posts that you write, etc.

For such a broad spectrum for content creation, definitely one needs planning and a strategy to implement it successfully.

Usually, people start by publishing blog posts on their blog and think that the bit regarding content creation is taken care of but in fact that is just the first step and then it has to go a long way to reach out to the targeted audience and invite their opinions to add on to the content and make it more qualitative.

The basic questions to ask before creating content are:

·What content do we want to put on the web?
·Why do we want to do publish that content?
·People ask question on search engines. To which questions we can provide answers for?
·How can we give more detailed information regarding the products and services we offer?
·What will be the best medium for that content (Text, video, infographic,etc)?

The content on your site and associated to your persona on the web which is inter-linked on the web via a ripple effect which establishes your expertise. If there is consistency in the content created and shared, if the content is contextual and if your blog has developed a good community along with a good readership list then an authority is established.Hence, quality content contribute to the trust and authority factor.

One of our previous blog posts on http://blog.webpro.in/2011/10/after-link-building-spammers-it-is.html
answers the following related to content creation and content strategy?

Q1) Why do we need more quality content ?
Q2) What is quality content?
Q3) Can borrowed content or content written just for the sake of adding words to your site work in your favour?
Q4) How to come up with quality content regularly?

Along with the regular content on the blog, posting comments on authority blogs, discussing on relevant topics on social media, uploading related videos are some other ways of adding on to the content correlated to your web presence.

In recent times the methodology of creating content has become very simple but to come up with the right strategy to accrue the maximum benefit from the quality content created is the major challenge.

Last but not the least creating fresh content is a constant and a continuous endeavor which does not reap immediate results. It takes years to establish an authority and an identity on the web hence keep going and do not quit.

I’ll share a poem I had read long ago but do not know the name of the author.

This proves the unique content you create may be remembered by generations and may outlive you so please make use of the Authorship markup by Google so that your content does not get published as “Anonymous” in future on the web like the poem below:

"Don't Quit," Author Unknown

When things go wrong as they sometimes will;

When the road you're trudging seems all uphill;

When the funds are low, and the debts are high

And you want to smile, but have to sigh;

When care is pressing you down a bit-

Rest if you must, but do not quit.

Success is failure turned inside out;

The silver tint of the clouds of doubt;

And you can never tell how close you are

It may be near when it seems so far;

So stick to the fight when you're hardest hit-

It's when things go wrong that you must not quit.

SEO - 03/06/2012

SEO Or SEO Not - Do We Really Need To Redefine Or Rename SEO ?

Author : Bharati Ahuja

The SEO blogosphere every year is bombarded with posts about “SEO IS DEAD” but from Jan. 2012 and infact from the last quarter of 2011 there is a new trend of acknowledging the fact that “SEO IS VERY MUCH ALIVE” but is packaged with a message about :

How it is different ?
Why it is called as the NEW SEO ?
How SEO is facing an identity crisis ?
What are the new awesome metrics to measure SEO success ?
Why it needs to renamed as something else ?
Why Content Marketing is the main mantra ?

Image via Wikipedia

I think this is because people who have invested in SEO campaigns are expecting results which accrue as a result of an all round web presence over a period of time. Without an ounce of doubt an over all quality web presence if planned and executed well in the long run has the potential of rewarding the business with an influx of the exponential online opportunities available on the web.

An over all web presence can be attained by an over all online marketing campaign.What is an overall online marketing campaign? Assuming that you have a reasonably well designed website ensuring a good UX thenAn Overall online marketing campaign = SEO + Blogging + Social Media + PPC (At the right stages of the website journey and purpose) + Content Creation + A/B Testing for effective landing pages + The Study of Analytics for regular analysis and improvementEvery website is different and has to be also analyzed and assessed, as per its purpose and the potential it has for it to be successful. Usually people hire SEO services and think that they will win the online market by just ranking high for the targeted terms. But, the reality is that your SEO may be working on the many ranking factors and may be successful in achieving the high rankings for your site but just ranking is not enough , once you rank high the next step is to assure that the ranking gets the click, once it gets the click then the conversion or the execution of the call to action of that page has to be the metric which needs to be looked into, once the conversion takes place only then the calculation of the ROI is possible.

If we analyze the whole cycle above each and every step is inter-related and when all the people involved at various steps work in coordination , understanding for each others’ scope of work and communicate effectively only then the true success can be achieved.

Every journey starts with some destination in mind and by selecting the mode of transport to reach there. Once you decide to create an online presence for your business and tread on the virtual sands of the web world focus on what you want to achieve with the website you already have. Hence, Putting the the right team in place to achieve the goals of your web presence is the first and foremost task.

Business owners usually appoint an SEO company or a PPC company and wait for the results to accrue. But, it is very important to have a strategy and a basic plan in place with the scope of work for each party clearly chalked out.

If your agency has a proper team of web designers, developers, social media experts, content writers, landing page A/B testing experts, Analytics experts,etc. then the company may be able to justice to the job . But with such a high end team the charges also for such a campaign will be sky rocketing which only companies with very high budgets can afford.

For SMEs who have small and limited budgets usually appoint individual SEOs who comparatively charge less because of their low cost of operation. But, they need a lot of support from clients for any all round campaign.

Panda or no Panda CONTENT IS KING since the day the first web page was published on the WWW. It is Google who has become capable in picking quality content in 2012 and hence wants to reward sites with quality content with more visibility.

Today the public opinion is also woven into the social fabric which adds to the quality factor which Google is giving importance to.For the social media signals and content marketing to accrue SEO benefit to the site the overall online presence is necessary, it is this correlation which has set the inter-connectivity between SEO , Social media and content marketing.Yes, as we said above “SEO IS VERY MUCH ALIVE “ and I think it cannot die as long as people are using search engines to find information on the web. SEO does not need a new name and is definitely not facing an identity crisis. Just like the on-page factors and the off-page factors which have been responsible for ranking , the social media signals and the freshness of content (On site and UGC) have been added to the list of ranking factors and the SEO needs to have a strategy for ensuring that the right and strong signals are generated via these platforms for the site.Content marketing and social media presence are not the new SEO or are replacing search ,they are supplementing SEO along with all the other on-page and off-page factors on which we have been working on till date.Every marketing campaign is about results and returns, but SEO is a part of the whole online marketing puzzle and to complete the full picture every piece needs to be placed in the correct place and the correct order.

SEO - 02/22/2012

Integrating The Print Media, Mobile And The Online Media With QR Codes

Author : Bharati Ahuja

The user is always at the nucleus of any online marketing campaign. The user wants the most relevant information at the most easily accessible option which involves the least navigation and search activity in the whole process of finding the relevant information.

The challenge today is to reach out to more and more people via all the available options possible. We talk about integrated marketing and also integrating search and social but integrating print and online media via mobiles is something which has an easy accessibility and one can reach out to the targeted segment more effectively.

QR (Quick Response) as the name goes it can generate a quick response and is very cost effective. The use of the QR code can enhance the print media by empowering it with the digital dimension. QR Codes can be added to the newspaper Advertisements, coupons, visiting cards, leaflets which one distributes, etc. so that people can add the contact info or view your site readily from their smart phones without any delay and at their convenience.

For example below is the newspaper advertisement of a garment store and under the QR Code they make it very clear by mentioning how to use it and the reader can directly go to the latest collection on their website.

Key Points To Keep In Mind While Using The QR Codes:

· See that the reader reaches the most relevant landing page as per the content on the print media

· The landing page should have the call to action like a form, a buy button, contact details, subscribe button or whatever is the purpose of the page

· One can easily track the ROI from such a campaign as the page can be easily tracked and monitored via analytics and one can even create a special landing page for such a campaign to calculate the ROI and study the response to the Ad.

This is gaining popularity and soon becoming the norm for integrating the print media with the digital media for easy accessibility and a wider outreach.