Satya Nadella's first interview as CEO of Microsoft, at the company's campus in Redmond, Wash.
He joined Microsoft 22 years ago because he saw how clearly Microsoft empowers people to do magical things and ultimately make the world a better place. Many companies, he says, “aspire to change the world.
As he says...Mobile first...Cloud first.....
Learn more about Satya athttp://msft.it/msceo
SEO in 2013 is about quality web presence, thought leadership, popularity, user generated content, company blogs , social media, guest blogging and every foot print on the web which helps you in implementing this online. SEO in 2013 has evolved to such a stage that it is a necessity and is finely woven into each and every online activity which helps you determine your search and web presence.
Social media has recently been the most rapidly growing channel which helps you get the much needed outreach whether it is B2C or B2B business.
According to a recent eMarketer survey the statistics are as follows:
As we can see above, FaceBook and Blogging (Content Creation) are the 2 main social media platforms and the major benefits accruing from these platforms are increased exposure and increased traffic.
No brand can afford to neglect the social media presence as the benefits which can get accrued via social media are multifold and again are woven into each and every online marketing activity which any brand decides to opt for.
SEO is a necessity, social media is the channel and the content creation strategy determines your online brand identity.
As we can see above the benefits from social media mentioned above are interdependent and one benefit leads to another.
Social Media presence helps you to get increased exposure , this increased exposure increases the inbound traffic, the increased traffic and content on your site helps develop loyal fans which spreads a good WOM (Word Of Mouth) and generates leads, increase business partnerships and thereby increase sales. All the footprints and social signals created in the process give a boost to the SEO which in turn again generates all these benefits via search presence.
In theory this sounds very simple and logical but when put in practice a lot of effort, insight and an eye for defined goals is needed else all the time, money and effort can just go down the drain.
Guest Post
SEO, the act of optimizing a website for search engines, can be a rewarding undertaking. It can give your site better web presence. It can improve your online visibility. It can give you an edge over competition. It helps draw traffic to your site.
However, SEO is a time-consuming and endless process consisting of multiple tasks. You need to do link building, keyword research and analysis, directory submissions, blogging, and many, many more. Then each task has sub-tasks, and doing them on a day-to-day basis can leave you exhausted and frustrated. How do you stay on top of all these?
Fortunately, SEO developers have created tools that enable webmasters to accomplish specific tasks more efficiently and quickly. These tools enable you to optimize your work and time even as you improve the traffic flow to your site. There are dozens of tools out there, but remember even if you have the best tools on your best laptop, Google is ever changing, so you need to stay updated all the time.
Here are the top 5 most useful tools:
The Google Webmaster Tools is a set of resources that gives you a solid understanding of how Google sees your site. It’s actually a keyword analysis and a diagnostic tool in one. It shows you what keywords Google sees when it visits your sites and the number of click-throughs each keyword receives. Do you see your target keywords in the list? Are you receiving the number of click-throughs you have hoped to achieve? If not, the Google Webmaster Tools also provides some tips on how you can improve the performance of your site.
The Webmaster Tools can also audit your site. You can use it to check for duplicate titles, duplicate descriptions, broken links, website speed, moved content, and malware, giving you the opportunity to correct the issues and improve your site’s performance
Backlinks are one of the criteria for how search engines rank your site. More important than quantity of backlinks for search engine is the quality. Quality is measured using three criteria: where the banklinks originate from (popular vs low-ranked or empty websites), validity of the link, and the relation of the anchor text to the destination page (e.g. if the anchor text says 'best laptop', it should point to a site about laptops and not cars or something else). Backlink Checker is a tool that helps you determine how the links leading to your site are helping (or not helping) your page ranking. It scours the web, then gives you a detailed report about the quality and the number of backlinks pointing to your site.
The keywords that you use can mean the whole difference in the outcome of your SEO campaign. The SEO Book is a keyword research tool that helps you find the most relevant keywords to your niche or post topic. It’s one of the most comprehensive free keyword research tools out there, providing you a variety of keyword variations and long tail keywords that you can use in your post. In addition to the keyword research tool, creating a free account with SEO Book also gives you unlimited access to other SEO tools, such as keyword density analyzer, PPC keyword wrapper, and AdWords ad group generator.
The Microsoft SEO Toolkit is one of the most powerful auditing software out there. It lets you check your website for SEO violations, such as broken links and missing alt tags, giving you an opportunity to correct them. Even better, it provides potential solutions to these issues and how you can improve it for better search results.
Because search engine rankings directly impact your bottom line, you need to make sure you stay on the top of the search results. The SEO Rank Tracker by SEO Moz makes it easy to keep track of your page and keyword rankings in multiple search engines. If you want to know, for instance, where your site ranks for 'best laptop', just type it into the search box. No more manual hunting for a URL buried on page 20 of search engine results pages.
There are many more amazing SEO tools out there that scale down your efforts and increase your productivity. Sound off below your favorite ones!
This post is a guest post by "Sujatha who is an engineer by profession and loves to write about technology, gadgets and the world wide web."
Kevin Phelps is an SEO consultant and the founder of GuestBlogPoster.com services. In his free time, he enjoys building websites and walking his dogs.
In a perfect world, each of your blog posts would have at least 10 Facebook Likes, 20 Tweets, 30 Google +1s, and 50-100 comments. There are so many benefits to having an engaged community on your website, including far-reaching social signals, a natural conversation around topics related to your content, and with the blog comments, a source of superb user-generated content (UCG).
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| Detail (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
The 24x7x365 moments of 2012 have flown by leaving evolutionary and historical footprints on the web for the SEO world. Its that time of the year again when on a cold wintery day its time to sit and look back and reflect ahead with the light of good and bad experiences of the past year.
After the Panda and Penguin updates by Google for penalizing spammy links and thin content the optimization took an about turn for SEOs who focused their SEO efforts and strategies on links and low quality content as they got warnings from Google via friendly emails. In response to these emails they had to go on an undoing spree and remove and disown the links created just in the name of SEO. Google also created a Disvow tool to make them confess the unethical work done by them.
I know the above words allude to spirituality and ethics but are very much correlated to SEO as these black hat activities and misconceptions led the SEO industry to a juncture where the SEOs themselves wanted to call their services by some other name and give a fresh start and meaning to their work.
But, just by addressing it by any other term does not solve the problem. We as SEOs need to spread the true meaning and scope of SEO widely rather than campaign and write posts for its rechristening.
Its not only the search engines which have upgraded their algorithms and made them smarter but the searchers and website owners too are more aware of the search scenario and have become smarter. In early 2000 when a website owner wanted to optimize his site he just thought about rankings but today when people discuss SEO projects they focus on immediate goals to be achieved to have quality search presence and these goals vary from industry to industry.
Search is not only limited to the search engines it has got integrated to the various other inbound signals like social media, blogging, comments and discussions, videos, etc. hence an SEO has to integrate the overall web presence on all these platforms and shape up an online identity for the client’s business and this is possible only with due cooperation and help extended by the client. Today each and every aspect of the business is contributing to the search presence or cutting it down depending on what footprints they are leaving on the web for their business.
Overall Aspects to Focus On for SEO 2013
1. On Page optimization as per the W3C standards
2. Have a web presence on various platforms
3. Update blog regularly
4. Co relate web presence with fresh content by blogging, commenting, discussing, sharing links on social media from your own site and blog plus from other authority sites of your industry.
5. Have YouTube video channel and share videos and embed them on site or blog.
6. Google+ as of now may not be the most widely used social media platform but it as major Google products in some way or the other converge on Google+ your Google+ account has the potential of becoming your passport to your online identity hence ignoring this platform or not having a presence on Google+ is like applying for a VISA without a passport .
7. Submit XML sitemaps for site, blog and video XML sitemaps for videos embedded on site or blog.
8. Apply for Twitter Cards and integrate them with your blog once the application is approved by Twitter.
9. Integrate FB Open Graph on blogs.
10. Integrate Authorship Markup on the blog to co relate your content with your online persona which can lead you to be a thought leader of your industry which in the long run can add to the trust factor.
11. Focus on ‘Less Is More’ instead of having 5 posts a week publish 2 posts per week but of relevant in depth information in all forms i.e text, video, infographics, podcast,etc. It’s the quality that counts not the quantity.
12. If you cannot create content regularly then curate content.
13. Use Schemas for addresses, events, people, recipes, books, ebooks,video, etc.
14. Focus on building a community and retaining their trust as your community can play a major role in helping your content go viral.
15. As in real life you are known by the friends you keep , in the online world you are known by the people that follow you and the people that you follow.
16. In the real world you are what your thoughts are and in the online world you are what you publish and share.
17. The above points help you earn links. Let the inbound links get built as a result of quality web presence rather than running after them.
18. All the above points have a direct impact on the off page optimization giving a boost to the search presence .
19. Focus on the technical SEO by working on XML sitemaps, by monitoring Google WMT , canonicalization issues, HTTP headers, rich snippets in search results which are achieved by using schemas and microformats , customized error pages, robots.txt, improving the site speed, etc.
20. Local search is as important as global search hence cannot be ignored.
21. Follow the path of hard work to develop this overall presence gradually rather than following the short cut of buying fake likes , followers and +1s . The short cuts followed today will become a penalty in future once Google upgrades its algorithm for detecting it like the Penguin Update for spammy links which made all the link builders undertake the task of undoing those same links which they ran after once.
22. Go mobile and check the accessibility of your site on hand held devices else develop Mobile Apps. For widely used services of the site.
23. Help Google to give quality search results to the users and Google will help you in return by giving you the search presence you deserve.
24. Focus on the metrics that matter in Google Analytics according to what goals and priorities you have set for yourself to improve search presence.
25. Do not put all your eggs in one basket. Have a Bing WMT account too and monitor the search presence on Bing too.
The SEO industry is at that point of the graph where its going to scale new heights and emerge as more meaningful and essential for website owners and search engines as well. Content and quality have been king since the first web page was published but it in 2012 that Google has been successful in penalizing the low quality content and help clear the content and the linked clutter on the web with its algorithmic updates.
2012 has witnessed the most evolutionary phase of the SEO industry and I think this is the most positive phase too. As these quality algorithmic updates by Google are making the SEOs and website owners think and work on the quality aspects of the website.
Google turned 14 in 2012 and like any teenager it is still trying to acquire skills to face the world with more confidence and put its best foot forward. Obviously SEO – Search Engine Optimization has a direct correlation with search engines but as the search engines become more capable and as the search algorithms evolve and become more sophisticated many in the SEO world are even contemplating to rechristen SEO with some other name.
But does calling SEO by some other term change the true meaning of SEO? As a matter of fact has the SEO process and procedures changed or as they say is actually SEO dead?
The answer is NO, NO and an emphatic NO.
As black hat SEOs first focused on keyword stuffing and then went on link building sprees now after the Panda and Penguin updates this confused lot is talking about content development and undoing all the link building they have done in the past.
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| Survival of the fittest (Photo credit: onkel_wart (thomas lieser)) |
But some of the SEO Evolution facts are:
1. SEO is not dead but has gained more life for people who understand the genuine meaning of optimization for search engines.
2. SEO has come under more scrutiny as the search engines are more capable now to detect spam and have upgraded their algorithms to penalize spammy techniques.
3. As websites moved from static websites to dynamic websites increasing the potential for regular additional content the search engines too first worked on indexing such content but this year the focus has been on penalizing thin and poor quality content to give more quality results to the users.
4. Websites penalized are the ones with poor quality non topical, spammy links and thin content.
5. Websites which catered to technical aspects of SEO and do not have low quality links and thin content were not affected by the updates.(That’s what my experience says) Its like if you have a good track record it adds up to your goodwill.
6. With social and search integrations and upgraded algorithms one needs to do more that just on-page optimization and technical SEO. One needs to focus on UGC (User generated Content) and offer a regular flow of content in the form of blog posts , videos, infographics , images, podcasts, etc. to be able to generate the UGC and share it on various social media platforms to generate the much needed social signals.
7. 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
8. The on-page and technical SEO still remain the same but as the search engines have evolved and are better equipped with advanced algorithms the completion for high rankings has increased and Darwin’s theory of “The Survival Of The Fittest” is largely applicable today on the web.
9. Where there is content there is a creator hence Google came up with the Authorship Tag and the Knowledge Graph – The next big step to qualify content and the creator.
10. If content creation is a necessity then content curation is the answer if coming up with regular content is a problem.
11. SEO is just one aspect of the whole online presence. As Scott Gardner of Bank of America had mentioned in a related discussion on SEO 2013 : Search is multifaceted. Don’t forsake any part of the pie. Make sure you don’t lose the market share you’ve gained in other areas. You need a balance.
12. When we optimize the site the focus is on factors which will retain a long term search presence and thereby generate targeted traffic .
13. Rankings are important but when we speak of SEO we work on the quality factors of the website and then earn the rankings to get targeted traffic but incase of PPC we pay for the rankings and buy the targeted traffic.
14. It is the prime duty of every SEO to educate the client about the true meaning of SEO and make them set realistic SEO expectations.
The State of Search Marketing Report is based on an online survey of nearly 900 client-side (advertisers) and agency respondents. The survey was live between March 12th and May 15th 2012. A total of 883respondents from 36 countries took part in the survey, with US-based respondents accounting for 64% of the total. The sample included 272 advertisers and 611 supply-side respondents (mainly agencies) carrying out search marketing and social media activity on behalf of clients.
Following is a brief synopsis of the survey regarding the SEO trends for 2012 :
Objectives For SEO 2012
To generate leads and drive traffic to the website is the major SEO objective for companies investing in SEO. But the objective of driving traffic to website has gone down by 8% in 2012 since last year.
The other main SEO objective is to sell products, services or content online which is the prime objective for companies investing in paid search according to the survey.
As the focus on driving traffic decreases the focus on increasing brand awareness and enhancing reputation has gone up by 6% since 2011. I think this indicates that companies investing in SEO are focusing more on quality SEO metrics and activities.
Metrics To Measure For SEO In 2012:
From the above metrics being focused on, by the companies the SEO trend will take a true turn for quality when the quality of the sales/leads will be more important that the quantity. As good SEO should drive targeted traffic not just volumes of traffic.
Secondly, it is not only about keyword rankings but about ranking for global keywords and global terms and terminology for the products and services offered by the companies. So its more about getting the site rank for correlated terms which can be achieved only by having substantial quality content and an engaging social media presence. This global keyword search presence should be a more important metric than traffic volume as the traffic volume and brand perception will follow if this has been achieved.
Though from the above objectives we can see that the companies are more open to quality SEO activities, a lot still needs to be done to educate the clients to focus on quality metrics so that the objectives can be achieved.
Budget For SEO In 2012
Though the companies having a budget of $1 to $25000 has gone down by 7% in 2012 as compared to last year , the companies allocating a budget of $25000 to $75000 has gone up by 9% in 2012. There is a 4% increase in the no. of companies allocating a budget of more than $3 million too. This again is a positive trend that companies are willing to allocate higher budgets for SEO.
This will pave the way for quality SEO activities as good content and good social media presence both are highly priced.
SEO – Inhouse v/s Hiring An SEO Specialist or Agency
Glad to see that there are more companies willing to hire SEO specialists rather than SEO agencies. This again proves that SEO is a specialized service which needs to be implemented by individuals or small close knit and like minded teams for better results.
Challenges For Managing SEO In 2012:
Measuring the ROI from SEO seems to be still at the helm for the challenges faced for managing SEO. This problem will be automatically solved when the metrics to measure SEO is decided upon by the company. This will be a continuing trend though, because the total ROI from SEO can never be measured as the ROI from SEO is an ongoing thing. This is because the brand and reputation created by SEO makes the company accrue returns in future. Many times the targeted traffic which visits the site as a result of SEO services may not take any immediate decision for buying or contacting the company but may delay the decision for various reasons.
Typical Fee Structure For SEO
40% of the companies pay a flat fee to their SEO specialists or agencies. This is again a very positive trend and I am glad to see this because we have been having this SEO flat fee structure for our annual SEO projects since 2005.
Overall SEO seems to be on the main agenda of the companies. This again proves that SEO is evolving and not dying.
The full SEMPO report is available to SEMPO members which can be downloaded from SEM Research page.
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| The SEO Cocktail |
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| knowledge remix blog as a graph (Photo credit: g.janssen) |
The Wall Street Journal Post sometime back 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.” Related to that we had posted our views on http://blog.webpro.in/2012/03/my-views-on-wsj-post-google-gives.html .
After the Panda and Penguin updates, Google on 16th May 2012 announced its Knowledge Graph on a blogpost titled , “Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings”.
In this article it is explained that :
The Knowledge Graph enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about—landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more—and instantly get information that’s relevant to your query. This is a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do.
Google’s Knowledge Graph isn’t just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. It’s also augmented at a much larger scale—because we’re focused on comprehensive breadth and depth.
This is the first step to try to convert an information based engine to a knowledge based engine. This kind of engine is solely based on data and data relationships. Whatever useful information people are searching for offers valuable data for the knowledge graph which can be helpful to others searching on the same topic later.
The search queries help Google to add and correlate data thereby enriching the knowledge based search engine results. The information based search engine takes the string of words from the search query and maps it with the content indexed in the database and displays the sites responding strongly to the ranking factors in the algorithms in the SERPs.
In case of knowledge based search engine an additional dimension of the knowledge factor is added which is determined by the correlation, the relationship and how the content of the site is inter-linked with other entities on the web. This is one way the Knowledge Graph makes Google Search more intelligent. The results are more relevant because the search engine understands these entities, and the nuances in their meaning, the way you do. This makes the search engine think more like the user.
Google says…
“We’ve always believed that the perfect search engine should understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what you want. And we can now sometimes help answer your next question before you’ve asked it, because the facts we show are informed by what other people have searched for. “
How does one optimize a site for such a knowledge based search engine?
· Have loads of relevant knowledge rich content in all forms on your site.
· Share that content all over the web so that it gets correlated to the relevant topics and the relevant industry
· Every piece of content on the web is data . How well this data gets indexed and how well It get interlinked is important.
· Represent the following content on the site as microformats or as data :
Reviews
People
Products
Businesses and organizations
Recipes
Events
Video
To check your markup, use the rich snippets testing tool.
· Aim at establishing an authority and brand on social media
· Participate in discussions to put forward your opinion
· Have an active Google+ business page presence
· Use Google+ as a blogging platform
· Do not focus on Guest blogging and blog commenting for link building but post comments and guest blog for sharing your knowledge
· Forget about keywords and focus on the keyness
· Implement the hCard Code for the address on the contact page
· Do not neglect the On Page Optimization as the knowledge quotient will be applicable only if the relevant pages respond to the basic ranking factors.
· Keep improving the Technical aspect of SEO in response to the data received from Webmaster Tools
Earlier this month Google , Bing and Yahoo in the spirit of sitemaps.org had come together to provide a shared collection of schemas that webmasters can use.
Search engines have been supporting Microformats and dealing with structured markup individually as per their algorithms but as the search engines for quite some time now . The search engines had come to a consensus on the submission of the list of URLs of a site in the form of an XML file as per www.sitemaps.org Now they have agreed to follow certain norms on data which is stored in structured HTML as per www.schema.org
A shared markup vocabulary makes easier for webmasters to decide on a markup schema and get the maximum benefit for their efforts. The no. of websites are increasing exponentially and as the sites are more focused on optimization for search engines and having a web presence on majority of the search options like videos, images, news, discussions, etc. the content embedded in HTML is increasing and the need to correlate the content to relevant search options and make it more easily available to the user on search engines a common set of schemas will surely make the web and search experience more structured and systematic for the users and the search engines .
The schemas are a set of 'types', each associated with a set of properties. The types are arranged in a hierarchy.
Browse the full hierarchy for schemas:
· Creative works: CreativeWork, Book, Movie, MusicRecording, Recipe, TVSeries ...
· Embedded non-text objects: AudioObject, ImageObject,
· Event
· Person
· Place, LocalBusiness, Restaurant ...
· Product, Offer, AggregateOffer
http://schema.org/docs/schemas.html
From the SEO perspective according to me these kind of collaborative efforts by search engines ensure the indexing as per more accurate relevance and correlation for search results and branding. I think this step of unitedly working on data formats for structured HTML will make the web experience qualitatively and quantitatively richer for the user and the search engines.
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