Websites are designed to attract people and the Googlebot scans the Internet just like humans do, but with a much more finely tuned system.  The system is predicated on an algorithm that is continually changing and on occasion drives SEO specialists mad trying to discern the new intricacies of the formula.  Additionally, the process of crawling begins with a list of URLs which were created by a previous crawl and as the bot searches the site, new links are provided from the existing page to others in which the bot will search, adding to it’s ‘web.’

This presents the following question: how does the bot find your page?  Well, the more quality links you have citing your website the better.  Every time the bot notices a quality ‘citation’ for your website, your backlink inventory will grow and so will your notoriety with the Googlebot, hopefully resulting in higher SERP rankings.

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The search industry has been dramatically affected by the increase in mobile usage. A recent study from April 2013 shows that consumers used their tablets and smartphones for 25% of their online searches, compared to 20% at the beginning of 2013!

Today, local business owners need to have a local search presence and recognize the fact that their website needs to be optimized for mobile devices. Google, Bing & Yahoo are continually tweaking their results to favor relevant answers that are within a specific proximity of the searcher. This means more results for local businesses, giving yet another reason to having an optimized mobile website that is user-friendly.

It’s pretty simple, when users find what they are looking for, they are more likely to become quality leads. Below are two vital reasons why a mobile website is important for SEO and branding:

1. Gives users the information they want from a mobile device in an easy organized manner. Bad experiences will hurt a business brand. The number one goal is to always create value for your user. According to a study by Google, some of the most important things you need to include on your mobile website are location, operating hours, and contact information. Google’s study states that 74% of survey respondents are more likely to visit mobile-friendly sites when searching on their smartphone.

2. Provide more keywords. We all know keywords are big for SEO. Having a mobile website gives you the chance to put your keywords to more use! However, remember to not just throw a bunch of keywords in your website. Be sure that it makes sense and provides value for your users! The value is what will help create positive branding and eventually, higher rankings.

The post Perks to Having a Mobile Website appeared first on Clix.

How would the social media department ever take over for HR, well I was thinking about this the other day and the answer is relatively simple.  LinkedIn and Skype can turn any company small or big, into a player on the global market.  Companies can go after the exact employee they want and then do an online face to face interview within a couple of hours or days depending on everyone’s schedule.  LinkedIn has over 160 million members, and professionals are joining the network at a rate of 2 per second.  That’s 170,000 professionals every 24 hours joining a professional network.

These people joining are from every industry and many times are the best in their industry.  Other times they are new college graduates looking for a fresh start in their respective industry.   Still today 50% of people say they were hired from a personal connection and through networking.  We need to look at LinkedIn as a personal connection at a distance.  One cool feature of LinkedIn is it will tell you how many degrees of separation you are from that person.  You can almost always find someone who knows that person, and get a personal reference right away.

As of January of 2012 Skype had 31 Million users, but of course I simply used Skype as an example.  The interview could be conducted on several different platforms, such as Google+, or even face time on an iPhone or iPad.  This gives the social media department the ability to overstep the HR department, creating a one-to-one personal connection with virtually anyone.  Again this will give basically any business the ability to operate nationally or globally.

Maybe I am wrong and we will always need an HR department and I was just having a moment thinking how cool it would be for social media to take over another part of the world.  But, I do think there is something to be said for the power of LinkedIn when it comes to finding new talent and even new business.  It is personal connections and networking 2.0, but added together with a platform like Skype, I do believe some really great things could happen.

The post Could LinkedIn plus Skype Mean no More HR Department? appeared first on Clix.

We use the latest SEO tools to help your company.

Let’s take that Wikipedia definition and put it into other words, let’s say that SEO is the process of making your website more visible to your potential customers for your chosen product or service.  Now does it make a little more sense and are you seeing the potential benefits from SEO?  So you have a great product or service and want your brand to be seen by the public.  One of the first and most important parts of SEO is to make sure you build a great website with tons of unique content.

Now you have a great website, which is your online shop front, you would love to use this site to sell your products, interact with your clients and spread the word of your brand.  But, how can you do that if your website or storefront isn’t visible?  If you sell nylon nightgowns and mother’s day is coming up, I bet you would like to at least be on the first page of Google when people are searching for that particular keyword.  That’s where SEO comes in and why it’s important to make yourself visible.

If your potential customers are searching for your products, but you are nowhere to be found, then what’s the point of you even having that virtual storefront?  Sure your site looks great, but you are lost on page 10 of Google, because you don’t have a good SEO plan in place for your store, you are not easy to spot.  You need to make sure that your website is showing up in your marketplace.  Because your marketplace is going to be full of potential customers browsing, you need to be seen amongst the other companies that will be in place selling their own products or services.

Again, this is a very simple concept, if your potential customers can’t locate your online store easily, they will not stop by and check out your products.  You may have the best-designed site, but if nobody can find you, what’s the point?  Think about having a great store, but it’s down a dark side alley that nobody walks through.  Your potential customers will simply walk past your store.  Now imagine your store being right in the middle of Main Street where all of the traffic is, SEO is the practice of taking your online store and making sure that it is in the middle of Main Street.  This will make it easy to find by anyone searching for it.

Make sure you are on the Google Map!

SEO will drive traffic to your website, and this traffic will most likely be relevant visitors.  So if your company sells men’s fur coats, SEO’s aim is to make sure that men who are actively searching for fur coats will find you.  This is done by using a variety of tried and tested SEO technique, so that the right people notice your company.  SEO experts will make sure your site is optimized to ensure your online presence is more visible in places such as Google and Bing, and it will be targeted to people searching in your niche.

How do we know what keywords to target for your website and what your target market is?  There are several steps that make the process work well for SEO experts.  Here is a brief overview:

1. Competitive Intelligence & analysis – This is as simple as it sounds, know your competitors, analyze where their links are and know what they are doing socially.
2. Keyword Analysis and Selection – Do research on what keywords people are searching for and select ones that you can compete for to drive traffic to your site.
3. Onsite Optimization – This involves title tags, meta tags, making sure your pages URL matches the content.
4. Content Creation – Creating unique fresh content that is easily optimized for the keywords that you are attacking, this is both onsite and offsite.
5. Linking – Using the correct words in anchor text and knowing the right percentage of links to have on a given page.
6. Analysis and Reporting – Being able to read your sites analytics and make adjustments accordingly.
7. Market Intelligence – This is knowing your target market, knowing what they want and how to reach them.

The post Why is SEO Important to your Company? appeared first on Clix.

So your site was hit and you have no idea why, it could be that you paid for text links matching an exact anchor text, maybe you engaged in comment spam, or did some guest blog posts on questionable sites.  Did you do some work on article marketing sites, or even link back to your site from “dangerous” sites?  In reality these are all things that Google has always said is a big no-no, but Mr. Penguin is more likely to catch up to these tactics.  If you did partake in these tactics, then shame on you and it’s probably best that the penguin caught you.

My question is pretty simple: Why did some sites get hit while others are perfectly fine?  I am hearing from person after person that they had almost the exact marketing plan for different websites, yet some are doing better than ever and others are wiped off the map.  Is this just an indication that the new update is taking a while to catch up with certain sites, or is it an indication that this new update is not as good as we are lead to believe.   Could it even be the topic that the website is about, maybe Google looks at certain sites with more leniency depending on the subject matter?  Of course this is just speculation, but if that is the case, is that fair?

It seems like everyone is confused and caught in the vicious circle that is the ever-changing Google algorithm.  So what are you supposed to do to get your rankings back if you were affected by the penguin update?  The short answer is who knows.  It’s obviously time to go in and clean up your website, go out there and clean up your links, make sure you don’t have any spammy links pointing back to you, start creating fresh content, make sure you don’t have too many ads, and without a doubt make sure your business is on Google+.  Again these are guesses on my part and I have no idea if they will help you regain your rankings.

I believe it’s time to devise a strategy that doesn’t rely so heavily on Google, this way your not going to take a major hit or have to worry about a hit every time Google changes their algorithm.  Which seems to be very often these days, did you know there was a Panda update just 7 days before the Penguin came splashing through the web world?

How do you devise a plan that doesn’t rely on Google?  You can start with a solid e-mail marketing campaign; try to partner with other companies that will send e-mails on your behalf.  Look towards Google’s competitors such as Bing and new search engines such as Blekko or DuckDuckGo.  And please diversify your tactics; don’t just focus on one blog network or backlink building tool.  Use videos, social networks, e-mails, and guest blogging, all with good unique content.  The last thing I would say is to be patient, let Google work things out with their algorithm and your rankings might just come back naturally.

I know this blog seems a little schizophrenic, however that’s how I feel about Google right now.  I guess the good thing is that all of us so called SEO experts are on this rollercoaster ride together.  All we can do is hold on tight and wait for the big drop that hopefully never comes!

The post Life after the Google Penguin. appeared first on Clix.

The reason these thoughts are on my mind is because on Friday Matt Cutts from Google went on his Google+ page in order to address an issue in Google’s search algorithm.  Apparently they mistakenly classified some domains as “parked” and guess what they were not parked at all.  For those of you who don’t know what a parked domain is; it’s a URL that might have been purchased for future use or to possibly engage in cybersquatting.  The point is the site lacks useful information.  Cutts went on Google+ to say, “this was caused by an error that has since been resolved”.

My issue isn’t with Google having a policy in which they do not include parked domains in their search rankings, this most certainly makes sense and is fair.  However the problem is this most recent “mistake” left many sites misclassified as parked and therefore they were removed from the SERPs.  With Google making changes, making mistakes, and doing what it is that Google does, how is someone working in the SEO industry ever supposed to know what’s really going on.

Cutts’ recently made comments at the SXSW festival in Austin regarding a potential algorithm change that is going to focus on punishing sites that give most of their attention to search engine optimization rather than providing quality content to users.  So, Internet marketers patiently wait for this update, left not knowing if or when Google plans to make this change.  This most recent error that Google made with their algorithm, led some to believe the change had been made, however Cutts insists this was just an oversight.  He said, “I apologize for this; it looks like the issue is fixed now.”

Others went on to say that companies need to start looking to adjust their websites to avoid issues related to “over-optimization” penalties and to focus on creation of original content as an organic way to drive search visibility.  Isn’t this what we as Internet marketers have been expected to do from the beginning?  The question is how can we be punished for doing what Google has been telling us to do for so many years.  When 92% of marketers say content creation is effective for SEO, it seems that this is already widely known and practiced.   Does this mean that Google is making the change for the 8% of people who don’t believe this, which means all other marketers will be hurt when the change really does come?

I say the takeaway from this is that Google will do whatever it is they want to do and all of us in the SEO world will just have to take a wait and see attitude.  In the meantime continue to make unique quality content and hope Google sees your content as quality as you do.

The post Lost in the SEO Abyss appeared first on Clix.

Here is a letter that Google has recently been sending out:

Dear site owner or webmaster of (X website),

We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes. We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.

If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.

If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team

My initial questions are what does this mean?  What do I need to change?  What is going to happen to my website.  Oh and I am probably going to have a few expletives for Google.  After reading through the letter again, it becomes clear that Google is cracking down on manipulative SEO practices.  Google loves content and if your site has good content, then other sites or blogs will naturally want to have a link to your content.  The issue is that people are using unnatural link-building methods, such as using blog networks.  Basically this is using a network of blogs that are usually unreadable and have unrelated topics, simply to create anchor-text links back to your website.  These blogs seem to be public enemy #1 to Google at the moment.  Again I see this as a good thing.

Google says they are trying to make their GoogleBot smarter, they want to penalize those that abuse it, and want to reward those sites that have great content.  So what can you do to make sure your site is ready for the changes that Google is in the process of making?  Here are some basic things to make sure your site is ready.

Create good content.  This has been and most likely always will be important, we have all heard it before and I’ll say it again “content is king”.  Create well-written unique content that is relevant and users will find valuable.  Add your own photographs, this will help with SEO and it will help engage your users.  Another thing to think about are videos, because users love to watch videos and Google loves videos as well.

Your site also needs to go social.  Your site needs to have a presence on social media, and an authoritative presence is even better.  It’s good to be visible and interact with users on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube at the least.  Pinterest is also becoming important in the social media world.  This will all take time and effort, however it is very important, because it’s where the conversation is happening.  Again you need good content here that will engage your users, this way they share your content and it will help you see rankings in Google.

Obviously link building is still very important, however it has to be done on the up and up.  Sites that use “black hat” techniques such as the blog networks will be penalized.  However, if your site is creating good well-written content, which your users will benefit from, you will gain links naturally from your users.  Again content is king and building relationships with other web-masters in your niche will help you get these natural links.

Lastly make sure your site and social networks create some sort of positive user experience.  As most of us know search engines follow people, this seems to be proven in most cases.  You can get users to your site several different ways, including social media campaigns, press releases, offline marketing, and many other techniques.  If you can get users to your site and interact, you will see a positive impact from the search engines.

So make a site that is useful, interesting, compelling, and relevant, and people will naturally interact, stay on your site longer and have an overall increased user experience.  Once this happens everything else should fall into place for your site.

In the end this is why I believe that, much like all of the Facebook changes, the changes Google are making to its algorithm will have a positive impact on everyone’s search experience, and it will force site owners and SEO experts to create better websites with great content.  Eventually people will forget what it used to be like, just like they do with the Facebook Changes.

The post Google SEO Evolution appeared first on Clix.

This year the candidates are all on social media and they all have a lot of followers, so does that mean everyone is even?  Is social media not going to play a big part in this election, because everyone is doing it and there is nothing new or innovative this time around?  It looks like the Obama campaign might have another trick up their sleeve when it comes to engaging people with their campaign online.

The Obama campaign has recently released a 17-minute video on his own YouTube page.  The video is narrated by Tom Hanks and called “The Road We’ve Traveled”.  This video is going to appear on a new YouTube platform that enables the Obama campaign to turn the passive experience of watching a video into a great organizing and fund-raising tool.  This technology is going to allow viewers of this video to post campaign content to their Facebook pages, volunteer, and donate to the campaign.  They are going to be able to do this all from President Obama’s YouTube page.

This is a step above simply putting out a video, as the YouTube platform will give the Obama campaign the ability to get visitors to share the content, or pledge their support.  This is the one-click approach that campaigns see as an integral part of their online strategy.  This type of video being released shows the importance that political campaigns are starting to put on web-video.  The online video is now being seen as a valid tool for proactive electioneering.

The Obama campaign is thinking that video will be the primary way they communicate with undecided voters, because it offers them a way to spread their messages into online communities, where friends and family members will discuss and debate.  This helps the video look more like dialogue and a constructive discussion, rather than political propaganda.  This provides a level of interaction that a TV advertisement cannot provide.

The idea is to get these videos into the hands of trusted people in the different networks.  If people start to share the videos, it will add a degree of credibility because a friend or family member is endorsing it.  This is taken more serious than a traditional TV commercial.  The major change with the videos being released is that they give people something to act on.  The Obama campaign wants to bring their engagement tools to their supporters.

The Obama campaign already has a head start with that, since his Facebook page has over 25 million likes.  Do you think it’s possible for social media to change minds or convince an undecided voter one way or another?

The post Obama Using Videos and Social Media in Campaign. appeared first on Clix.

So why has the most shared video of 2012 completely gone against conventional wisdom?  KONY 2012 is 29 minutes long and isn’t funny at all, yet it has been seen more than any other video so far this year, at last count it was viewed 73,999,551 times since being uploaded on March 5^th.  It has also been shared more than 7.6 million times on Facebook and embedded in more than 6,200 blogs.  There have been nearly 5,000 news sources that have written about “KONY 2012”.

There is a recent study that was done by the University of South Australia.  The study identified the emotions that are most likely to be shared across the social web.  They found that most videos are amusing or boring, and most of them don’t go viral.  They found that videos, which evoke marked physiological responses, such as laughter, anger, crying, or shock are most likely to be shared.  So if you laugh or cry, you are more likely to share than if you smile or frown.  Videos that evoke positive emotions such as exhilaration, hilarity, astonishment, happiness, and inspiration are more likely to be shared than negative emotions such as anger, disgust, sadness, shock or frustration.

What does this mean for video marketers?  Knowing the emotions that people respond to and are most likely to share is a great indicator of how to make content in the future.  One lesson learned is that laughter is not the only way to get people to share your video, although hilarity is easily the most likely emotion to get your video shared.

The “KONY 2012” video shows us that the stronger the emotion, the more likely a video will get shared.  This says pick the emotion you are aiming for and then crank it up.  Being positive is a much safer bet when doing this as anger can lead to users becoming irritated and cause a backlash.

Of course this data doesn’t tell the full story, there can be things happening offline, the possibility of you having used the product before, and if the video is being promoted in one way or another.  Also you might find a video hilarious that I find disgusting or vice versa.  The main takeaway is we never know which video will catch on, however the stronger the emotion that video evokes, the more likely it will be shared.  Humor is no longer the only factor when making a viral video.

Here is the “KONY 2012” video in case you haven’t seen it and a funny marketing video about shaving.

KONY 2012

DollarShaveClub.com

Which one do you like more, is one more effective than the other?  Tell us what you think, how can this affect SEO, or Social Media?

The post Viral videos are changing marketing tactics. appeared first on Clix.

First of all why is any of this even important?  It’s important because people are on the Internet and you can feed them relevant information, if you know how to do it.  It’s not about writing a few status updates and asking people to click your link.  Sure that might work for a couple of people, but it’s not going to rank you any higher on Google or Bing.  Let me tell you a quick story.  A couple of years ago my friend asked me for a phone number, I stated, “I don’t know use the phone book”.  He looked me dead in the eye and was 100% serious when he exclaimed “WHAT IS A PHONE BOOK?”  The world is changing, and it’s the Internet they are moving to.

Let me start by telling you I have a Masters degree in Internet marketing and have been doing it for over 5 years and with all of the constant changes, new technology, and new ways of doing things I still do not know a magic bullet. I know that it takes a big team and a lot of hard work, just like old-fashioned media marketing.  If you think a crash coarse or quick read of a book is going to get your website ranked then you are very mistaken. I am not trying to be harsh; I am just stating facts about SEO.

Consider this for a second, there are several different search engines, including Google, Bing, and Yahoo, each one has a different algorithm when it comes to rankings.  All of these search engines send out crawlers to index your site.  What is it looking for exactly; nobody except those companies is 100% sure.  But let’s assume they are looking for good content, and when I say good content I mean good SEO content.  I bet your book can teach you about that.  Of course this content is going to need to be quality and it needs to be released on a regular basis.

Moving on to Social Media, which is a part of SEO, you are going to want to engage your users on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, Last.fm, Digg, Reddit, flickr, Path, Instagram, Pinterest, shall I go on, probably not, because the list would take all day to complete.  Going along with content and social media, you will need to blog on a regular basis, again using quality content.  This is starting to sound like a daunting task for one person.  Or for people who aren’t sure what they are doing.

Let’s not forget about things such as advertising, PPC campaigns, banner advertising on networks and many different websites such as Facebook or Google.  You’re going to want to make sure that all of your information is up to date and always accurate.  I will just throw this out there, you will need to create a massive buckling campaign in order to get your sites in order to start ranking.  But, that book should teach you how to do that.  Let’s not forget about mobile marketing and mobile websites, but I don’t even have time to get into that.

With all of that said you have to make sure your website is well structured and user friendly, this can take a professional weeks if not months depending on how big your website is.  But, I think you could learn it from a book or maybe a seminar.

The point of this blog was to let everyone out there know that SEO and everything that goes along with it is a daunting task to simply get one keyword ranked and it does in fact require a team of people working hard.  No, it’s not rocket science, but you will also not learn how to do it overnight, or even in a year.  If you start getting into doing your own SEO, you will most likely hurt your rankings and end up in a worse position than before.

*Note, I didn’t even scratch the surface with everything that goes into an SEO campaign, this blog post was just an example of how ludicrous it is to expect to learn SEO from a seminar or a how-to book.*

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