Google's URL/Content Removal Tool Now A Wizard

Google has updated their URL removal tool to make it easier and smarter to remove content specifically from third-party web sites.

Google told us at Search Engine Land specifically that the tool is smarter by analyzing the content of the URL you submitted and letting you know what options you have based on the details of the cache result, search results and the actual live page.

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Google News Cheat: Refreshing Article Titles

In 2009, Google News began reindexing and refreshing stories after they were initially indexed, to make sure to pick up on story corrections. This was a good thing.

But recently, there has been an uptick of abuse around this. One disgruntled Google News subscriber posted in the Google News Help forums that one site is refreshing their article titles several times a day in order to keep their stories up at the top of the Google News landing pages.

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Google Continues Work On Promoting Topic Authorities

Back in May, we covered how Google is planning on releasing an algorithm to promote subject authorities in the search results. Some call this the "good guy algorithm" and some call it the "author authority algorithm," while others may have some other names for it.

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Google December 19th Ranking Fluctuations Reported

So Google confirmed they reduced the authorship snippets from showing in the results. We know that. Matt Cutts strongly implied that there was no update on December 17th, despite all the tracking tools lighting up on that date.



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All About The New Google Hummingbird Algorithm

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Google has a new search algorithm, the system it uses to sort through all the information it has when you search and come back with answers. It’s called “Hummingbird” and below, what we know about it so far.

What’s a “search algorithm?”

That’s a technical term for what you can think of as a recipe that Google uses to sort through the billions of web pages and other information it has, in order to return what it believes are the best answers.

What’s “Hummingbird?”

It’s the name of the new search algorithm that Google is using, one that Google says should return better results.

So that “PageRank” algorithm is dead?

No. PageRank is one of over 200 major “ingredients” that go into the Hummingbird recipe. Hummingbird looks at PageRank — how important links to a page are deemed to be — along with other factors like whether Google believes a page is of good quality, the words used on it and many other things (see our Periodic Table Of SEO Success Factors for a better sense of some of these).

Why is it called Hummingbird?

Google told us the name come from being “precise and fast.”

When did Hummingbird start? Today?

Google started using Hummingbird about a month ago, it said. Google only announced the change today.

What does it mean that Hummingbird is now being used?

Think of a car built in the 1950s. It might have a great engine, but it might also be an engine that lacks things like fuel injection or be unable to use unleaded fuel. When Google switched to Hummingbird, it’s as if it dropped the old engine out of a car and put in a new one. It also did this so quickly that no one really noticed the switch.

When’s the last time Google replaced its algorithm this way?

Google struggled to recall when any type of major change like this last happened. In 2010, the “Caffeine Update” was a huge change. But that was also a change mostly meant to help Google better gather information (indexing) rather than sorting through the information. Google search chief Amit Singhal told me that perhaps 2001, when he first joined the company, was the last time the algorithm was so dramatically rewritten.

What about all these Penguin, Panda and other “updates” — haven’t those been changes to the algorithm?

Panda, Penguin and other updates were changes to parts of the old algorithm, but not an entire replacement of the whole. Think of it again like an engine. Those things were as if the engine received a new oil filter or had an improved pump put in. Hummingbird is a brand new engine, though it continues to use some of the same parts of the old, like Penguin and Panda

The new engine is using old parts?

Yes. And no. Some of the parts are perfectly good, so there was no reason to toss them out. Other parts are constantly being replaced. In general, Hummingbird — Google says — is a new engine built on both existing and new parts, organized in a way to especially serve the search demands of today, rather than one created for the needs of ten years ago, with the technologies back then.

What type of “new” search activity does Hummingbird help?

“Conversational search” is one of the biggest examples Google gave. People, when speaking searches, may find it more useful to have a conversation.

“What’s the closest place to buy the iPhone 5s to my home?” A traditional search engine might focus on finding matches for words — finding a page that says “buy” and “iPhone 5s,” for example.

Hummingbird should better focus on the meaning behind the words. It may better understand the actual location of your home, if you’ve shared that with Google. It might understand that “place” means you want a brick-and-mortar store. It might get that “iPhone 5s” is a particular type of electronic device carried by certain stores. Knowing all these meanings may help Google go beyond just finding pages with matching words.

In particular, Google said that Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query — the whole sentence or conversation or meaning — is taken into account, rather than particular words. The goal is that pages matching the meaning do better, rather than pages matching just a few words.

I thought Google did this conversational search stuff already!

It does (see Google’s Impressive “Conversational Search” Goes Live On Chrome), but it had only been doing it really within its Knowledge Graph answers. Hummingbird is designed to apply the meaning technology to billions of pages from across the web, in addition to Knowledge Graph facts, which may bring back better results.

Does it really work? Any before-and-afters?

We don’t know. There’s no way to do a “before-and-after” ourselves, now. Pretty much, we only have Google’s word that Hummingbird is improving things. However, Google did offer some before-and-after examples of its own, that it says shows Hummingbird improvements.

A search for “acid reflux prescription” used to list a lot of drugs (such as this, Google said), which might not be necessarily be the best way to treat the disease. Now, Google says results have information about treatment in general, including whether you even need drugs, such asthis as one of the listings.

A search for “pay your bills through citizens bank and trust bank” used to bring up the homepage for Citizens Bank but now should return the specific page about paying bills

A search for “pizza hut calories per slice” used to list an answer like this, Google said, but not one from Pizza Hut. Now, it lists this answer directly from Pizza Hut itself, Google says.

Could it be making Google worse?

Almost certainly not. While we can’t say that Google’s gotten better, we do know that Hummingbird — if it has indeed been used for the past month — hasn’t sparked any wave of consumers complaining that Google’s results suddenly got bad. People complain when things get worse; they generally don’t notice when things improve.

Does this mean SEO is dead?

No, SEO is not yet again dead. In fact, Google’s saying there’s nothing new or different SEOs or publishers need to worry about. Guidance remains the same, it says: have original, high-quality content. Signals that have been important in the past remain important; Hummingbird just allows Google to process them in new and hopefully better ways.

Does this mean I’m going to lose traffic from Google?

If you haven’t in the past month, well, you came through Hummingbird unscathed. After all, it went live about a month ago. If you were going to have problems with it, you would have known by now.

By and large, there’s been no major outcry among publishers that they’ve lost rankings. This seems to support Google saying this is very much a query-by-query effect, one that may improve particular searches — particularly complex ones — rather than something that hits “head” terms that can, in turn, cause major traffic shifts.

But I did lose traffic!

Perhaps it was due to Hummingbird, but Google stressed that it could also be due to some of the other parts of its algorithm, which are always being changed, tweaked or improved. There’s no way to know.

How do you know all this stuff?

Google shared some of it at its press event today, and then I talked with two of Google’s top search execs, Amit Singhal and Ben Gomes, after the event for more details. I also hope to do a more formal look at the changes from those conversations in the near future. But for now, hopefully you’ve found this quick FAQ based on those conversations to be helpful.

By the way, another term for the “meaning” connections that Hummingbird does is “entity search,” and we have an entire panel on that at our SMX East search marketing show in New York City, next week. The Coming “Entity Search” Revolution session is part of an entire “Semantic Search” track that also gets into ways search engines are discovering meanings behind words. Learn more about the track and the entire show on the agenda page.

Postscript: See our follow-up story, Google’s Hummingbird Takes Flight: SEOs Give Insight On Google’s New Algorithm.


ARTICLE RESOURCE : http://searchengineland.com/google-hummingbird-172816

Google Penguin 2.1 Update Live on 4th October 2013-MattCutts

Yesterday late night Google’s Web spam head MattCutts has official announced a new update for penguin i.e. Penguin 2.1 in one of his tweet. After the latest HUMMINGBIRD update announced on 26th September 2013, now it’s the penguin update affecting 1% of search quires. The last penguin update was on May 22nd 2013 (Google Penguin 2.0) that affected 2.3% of English-US search quires.

Penguin 2.1 launching today. Affects ~1% of searches to a noticeable degree. More info on Penguin: http://t.co/4YSh4sfZQj

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) October 4, 2013

I have personally found few changes in the rankings but still I think we could see more fluctuations in the coming week. Yet the webmaster forums and threads are not active on this update, but I feel many webmasters have noticed this change and will share their experience in coming days.

I will personally look into this and share more updates on this new update in the next week. If you have also seen any major drops in rankings and traffic to your website feel free to share you experience in the below comment box.

Article Resource: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html

8 SEO Cleanse & Recharge Ideas For Fall 2013

Whether you mark it by Labor Day or the Autumnal (Fall) Equinox, summer is coming to an end — which makes this a great time to give your website an SEO cleanse and recharge the old batteries. Here are 8 things you can do to strengthen quality.

1. Fix Errors Listed In Webmaster Tools
Both Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools provide diagnostic reports listing errors on your website. Both search engines alert you to technical issues that they monitor which might diminish visibility.




Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools provides a list of server and page indexing errors.
Visit: Google Webmaster Tools > Crawl > Crawl Errors


Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing Webmaster Tools provides a list of crawl errors plus other useful information.
Visit: Bing Webmaster Tools > Reports & Data > Crawl Reports


Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing Webmaster Tools provides a list of HTML suggestions.
Visit: Bing Webmaster Tools > Reports & Data > SEO Reports


Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools provides a list of HTML improvements to make.
Visit: Google Webmaster Toos > Search Appearance > HTML Improvements
Just an FYI: Bing takes this seriously. In my conversations with Bing engineers, they emphasize the importance of technical quality. Google tends to telegraph that as long as it can crawl your content, their algorithms will sort out what’s important and what should count. (As an example, Matt Cutts recently said not to worry about duplicate content unless it’s spammy.)

My advice is this: Don’t assume a bot is smarter than you. Do everything in your power to clean up all crawl and HTML errors, and be sure to fix content issues like duplicate pages either by removing pages or adding canonical tags.

2. Update Your CMS, Plugins/Modules & Templates
Is your content management system up to date? Are you using current search engine tags and structured data?

Begin by updating your content management system (CMS) and plugins. Review each update to determine if it adds SEO functionality and figure out whether or not you need to provide additional information. For example, if an update adds Google Author Tags, you will likely have to provide links to each writer’s Google+ profile.

Updating the CMS and plugins or modules is not solely beneficial for SEO. As people discover security vulnerabilities, the CMS publishers patch these and include them in their updates. Not updating your CMS may leave your website open to hacking.

If a plugin has not been updated in six months, visit its CMS listing or webpage to see if it is still under development. Plugin authors tend to be less fastidious than CMS publishers, so it’s important to keep tabs on them. If a plugin discontinues or appears abandoned, it may be time to find an alternative. Yes, this can be a pain. Then again, if no one updates your plugin, who is watching for and fixing security vulnerabilities?

Update Your Content Management System
Update your content management system and plugins.
Getting back to SEO: Look for plugins or modules that manage SEO data and inject optimization into your CMS generated content. For WordPress users, an excellent example is the Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin. What gets managed by the CMS and what requires a plugin or module varies from CMS to CMS, but SEO managed from plugins typically includes:

301 redirects
Canonical URLs
Caching and minifying
Formatting title tags (ex. adding the company name to the end of all titles)
Authorship markup
Social media links and voting buttons
Facebook Open Graph tags
Twitter Cards
Short codes to inject standardized content such as schema.org formatted addresses
Running a search for your CMS name plus “SEO plugins list” or “SEO modules list” should help you find what is available for your content management system. Hint: Limit your search to documents within the last year or you my get overwhelmed with outdated results.

If your site uses CMS templates, make sure they utilize the newest SEO features your CMS offers. While your CMS may include some of the newer tags automatically (provided they have the data to insert), other SEO tags or markup might require adding a CMS hook into one or more templates.

A hook is a snippet of code that the CMS recognizes and replaces with data. For example, [date:yyyy-mm-dd] might become 2013-09-01. Similarly, [authorship] might become <a href=”https://plus.google.com/109412257237874861202? rel=author”>Google</a>.

Alternatively, you may need to add some markup into your template, such as the new Schema.org markup for organization logos:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization">
<a itemprop="url" href="http://www.example.com/">Home</a>
<img itemprop="logo" src="http://www.example.com/logo.png" />
</div>
Because it is impossible to list all the updates for every CMS:

Review the update documentation for your CMS to determine what SEO enhancements and updates were made and what you need to do to implement them.
Review your SEO plugins’ or modules’ updates and documentation.
Search for SEO plugins or modules specific to your CMS that you should be using. Run a query for your CMS name plus “SEO plugins list” or “SEO modules list” and limit your search to the last year.
Keep in mind that some markup must be done at the page- or content-level. Include Schema.org markup on your contact page and provide reusable HTML/machine readable markup templates to writers of applicable content (like job listings).

3. Social Media Links
Do your pages link to your important social media profiles? Are the links prominent? Are they embedded in your website and (if you have them) applications or tools?

Without implying a direct path, high rankings are partially attributed to social media.

SEO Ranking Factors
SEO ranking factors as observed by 128 experts. Via Moz.
An active social media audience is more likely to like, share and tweet your content, which in turn can lead to traditional offsite SEO signals like links. An active social media presence can also get noticed by the media and reporters. As a result, your business becomes more likely to get coverage (along with high authority links) when you have actual news, such as a product launch or major release.

My suggestion is to add important social media links where appropriate, including:

Facebook
Google+
LinkedIn
Pinterest
YouTube
Link prominently where website visitors will see, at the top of your pages or sidebar. Use familiar icons to keep the necessary page space concise. There are lots of beautiful, free icon sets available on the web.

Social Media Icons
Social Media Icons by Zee Que as found in Google Images.

I am in favor of prominent visibility, rather than placing the links at the bottom of the page. My belief is that people looking for content on your site will stay on your site. The people who click on those links, and thereby leave your site, will already be fans or have interest in your brand. They’ll be back.

4. Page Speed
Run a page speed audit. A search for Page Speed Test Tools will reveal lots of ways to do this. (I especially like Google’s tool.) The Yahoo! Developer Network has an excellent list of best practices for speeding up your website.

One of the frequent culprits I run across is bloated image size. Going through your website, page by page, checking and then optimizing each image one by one is admittedly daunting. Kraken.io can do most of the work for you. They have terrific Chrome and Firefox extensions. Or, run a crawl of your site with Screaming Frog, export the image URLs, then paste them into Kraken.io. Download the results as a zip file then upload them into your website, replacing the old files. (I suggest doing this in small batches — and always preview the results before you replace published images.)

Yahoo! Developer Network has a similar tool called Smush.it; however, it has severe rate limit and seems to be down much of the time. WordPress users can try the Smush.it plugin.

Also for WordPress users, Michael Gray just wrote a nice piece on speeding up your website.

5. Update & Accelerate Your Content Plan
There is a reason Content Marketing is all the rage. Google and Bing want to present searchers with high quality content that satisfies their queries.

Many of the business pages you want to rank are not particularly link worthy. Publishing a regular stream of link worthy content will grow your brand awareness, site traffic and links. Those links will increase your site’s domain authority and make it easier for less link worthy pages to rank.

Google says:

Give visitors the information they’re looking for.
Provide high-quality content on your pages, especially your homepage. This is the single most important thing to do. If your pages contain useful information, their content will attract many visitors and entice webmasters to link to your site. In creating a helpful, information-rich site, write pages that clearly and accurately describe your topic. Think about the words users would type to find your pages and include those words on your site.

When it comes to creating compelling content, the best piece of advice I can offer to most businesses is to write less about your products and services and write more about the things your customers want to accomplish. Focus on the upper levels of the marketing funnel: awareness and trust. This is where the opportunity to build search engine authority is greatest.

Review Google’s list of what makes good content.

If you want to learn more about content marketing I suggest:

The Advanced Guide to Content Mareting by Neil Patel and Kathryn Aragon
Content Marketing – How to Build an Audience that Builds Your Business by Copy Blogger (free sign-up then check out the eBooks)
6. Organize Link & Social Partners
According to Moz’s study (see chart above), link building efforts are still perceived to be one of the strongest factors influencing search engine rankings.

One of the best ways to get links on blogs and social media is to form a link posse. A link posse is a group of content creators that seek genuine opportunities to use and link to each others’ content.

How do you organize a link posse? The easiest way is to begin with natural relationships. Do you belong to a local membership chapter like the Association of Fundraising Professionals, International Association of Business Communicators, or Public Relations Society of America? If your startup is funded, what companies share the same investment sources? What local companies or professionals are on Biznik? Who are your business customers or suppliers that blog? With a little brainstorming, I bet you can come up with a great list of candidates.

The rules are straightforward. Follow each other on social media sites. Create and monitor a Twitter list. When posse members post about new content, such as blog articles and resources, like, +1, share and retweet. It’s okay to be liberal on social media as long as it does not appear spammy to your own audience. If you are about to promote content that you would want an influencer to share, email the posse and ask them to tweet, like, +1 and share.

When it comes to cross linking, do not engage in blatant reciprocal linking. Do not link to each other’s home page and don’t link to every blog post created by every member of your posse. A smart link posse keeps track of each others’ content then references and links to other members’ articles or pages when it makes sense to do so, naturally, within context.

Finally, use each other’s content to inspire new content on your own sites that can intelligently reference and link to other posse members’ content. This is not about manipulating search engine rankings. It is about thoughtful content building and collaboration.

7. Review SEO Tools
Make certain you’re getting the most of your SEO and analytics tools.
Review your reports and tracking. Update or recreate as appropriate.
Are you familiar with all the upgrades and changes on the SEO tools you use?
Have you checked out the other SEO tools on the market?
Each year, SEO and analytics tools die, change and join the market. This is a good time to review what is out there and update your arsenal. For example, Majestic, Moz and Raven all released major upgrades during the last two quarters. Google replaced its keyword tool with Keyword Planner. (Check out Search Engine Land’s 2013 Guide to Enterprise SEO Tools for some ideas.)

Tools change. So should you. Do not fall into the trap of keeping the exact same reports for the sake of consistency. What is more important: comparing against the past, or planning for the future? Update reports in ways that make them more useful. Chances are that any commercially available tool has changed the way it collects and measures data many times over its lifetime, so those historical charts and graphs are inaccurate anyway. Be like the Internet — dynamic.

Double check the obvious. Are your goals and tracking set-up properly? Are they current? Did you exclude your company IP address?

8. Domain Registration
One last thing: check your domain registration and max it out. Every year some big brand surprises itself, and gets reported on throughout Internet marketing blogs, because it let its domain expire. Don’t be that company.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Source from the link:  http://searchengineland.com/8-fall-2013-seo-cleanse-recharge-ideas-171376

The Ultimate Pinterest SEO Guide

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You’ve optimized every part of your website – but have you checked your Pinterest SEO potential? Learn how to use Pinterest to increase your search ranking and drive traffic to your site.

It’s no secret that SEO is an extremely important part of any marketing mix.  The right keywords, linking to the right content, shared to the right sites, help your domain rank higher in search. However, there’s probably a valuable tool for traffic that you haven’t thought of – Pinterest SEO. By applying a few tweaks to your Pinterest profile, pins and website, you can easily take advantage of Pinterest’s viral nature and recieve the SEO bump you’ve been looking for.

Your Profile

• The key to Pinterest SEO value starts above your entire profile – in the URL. Choosing the right username is much like choosing the right website domain; it should be straightforward, but it’s not.  Not only do you have to beware of other users who have potentially stolen your company name, you also must beware of the 15 charater limit imposed on usernames.  If your company name is already taken – or if your name is too long – HubSpot suggests choosing a memorable, easy-to-spell keyword related to your business.  For example, Martha Stewart Weddings in the Middle Eastused “MSWeddingsME” for their username so they could include the valuable keyword, “weddings,” in the name while differentiating themselves from the other Martha Stewart accounts.
• Although you have more freedom with your profile name, it’s still important to keep it simple.  Don’t try and be cute; just stick with your company name! Using the CEO’s name, marketing manager name or any other person’s name makes it nearly impossible for users to find you via search.
• You have 200 characters in the about me section, so use them wisely.  Check out your Google Analytics to see what drives people to your site to decide what keywords and phrases should be used. Just make sure to keep it easy to read and not overly “keyword-y.”.
• Do you now the name of the file used for your profile picture? If it reads something like “logo3.png,”, then it’s time to update! Even though it’s not visible to the typical consumer, the file name of your profile image affects alt text and image search results.  Rename the file to your company name, company slogan or anything else descriptive of your company.
• Are you a local business? No problem. Pinterest is still a great SEO opportunity for you. Use the location place on your profile to show where you are, (avoiding less-known abbreviations for your town is a good idea here). Using some of those 200 characters in the “About me” section for local keywords wouldn’t hurt, either.  For instance, since PinLeague is based in Oklahoma City, we could include “Okie” “Thunder” “OKC”, etc. in our description to find local traffic.

Your Boards and Pins

• Pinterest provides you with some basic board names when you sign up, like “My Style” or “Places & Spaces”, but who’s going to search for that?  Using keywords relevant to your company, create boards with unique, relevant titles under 20 characters. Each board has its own 500 character description available where you can write a keyword-rich narrative about the board topic. Having boards related to topics of interest to your audience helps both current and future fans find you in search.
• Pinterest categories can be your best friend when it comes to promoting your boards.  During the board creation process, there is an option to select which Pinterest category the board belongs in. Once a category is selected, pins pinned to your board have the opportunity to show up on those category pages, allowing them to be seen and shared by any Pinterest user.
• Your pins are yet another opportunity to squeeze in some relevant keywords. When pinning from your own site, it’s good to include the full link (shortened links may be considered spam), as well as relevant keywords in the description. Also, don’t think you can slack when repinning content! By throwing in a few keywords relevant to your company, you can potentially attract your target user through search.

Your Website

• First off – VERIFY YOUR WEBSITE! It’s a super easy, super powerful way to help boost your profile in search results.  Verification also tells users that it is you, not an impostor.  Learn how to easily verify your website from the Pinterest blog.
• Another easy, but powerful, tool to utilize in growing your traffic from Pinterest is to include Pin It buttons on all your images.  These buttons provide automatic links back to your site as soon as they’re used. The easier you make it on the user, the more links you will receive.
• Just like with your profile picture, you need to pay attention to your image file names on your website. Make sure they’re relevant and keyword-rich, so when a user pins from your site you receive all the benefits from the shared link.
• Perhaps the most important thing you can do to optimize your website is understanding what resonates with your Pinterest audience.  Through tools like PinLeague’s Pinterest Analytics Suite, you can see which pins are trending, what phrases are most often used in descriptions and how many pins have occurred from your site, among many other valuable site features. By paying attention to what your fans love, you can build related content to drive traffic back to your website.

Your Interactions

• Connecting your Facebook and Twitter accounts to your Pinterest account is a great way to cross-promote your brand following. By simply posting on Twitter or Facebook about your Pinterest presence, users who are already fans of your brand know to follow you on Pinterest as well. Having a strong social presence connected to your website signifies to Google that you’re a trusted source of information, giving you a nice SEO bump.
• To send traffic to your site, you must interact with your audience! Repin, comment and like others pins. Building relationships over Pinterest will, in turn, create an engaged following willing to share your content to others. After all, at the end of the day, your fans are the best tool in your marketing toolkit.

What social media SEO tips have worked for you? 

This post was originally featured on the PinLeague Blog as a The Ultimate Pinterest SEO Guide.

Source Article URL:

http://pinleague.com/pinterest-seo/

How to Search Engine Optimize Your Pinterest Page

I’ve noticed that Pinterest isn’t just dominating the social media scene, but it’s starting to dominate quite a few of Google’s search engine results.

Many brands and online marketers are missing the opportunity to rank high forlong-tail keywords through the use of Pinterest.

What are long tail keywords? I’m going borrow the definition of a long tail keyword from an article from Search Engine Watch:

Essentially, long-tail keywords are less popular keywords because they have less search volume and less competition to rank for. Consider the following two examples: “home remedies for bed bugs” or “how to get rid of depression.” These are each considered long-tail keywords as compared to trying to rank for the much more competitive search terms “bed bugs” or “depression”.

Why would you want to use Pinterest to rank higher for keywords?

Some long tail keywords may have low competition but your website may be new and find it hard to compete for them still. The good news is that you can piggy back off of Pinterest since it is a strong domain authority site.

A strong domain authority allows for pages to show up higher on search results for relevant searches. This gives your business more visibility and higher chances of people clicking on your Pinterest. If you have some great visual content on that particular board, then it will help drive web traffic to your business website or e-commerce site.

How do you exactly use Pinterest to rank higher for the keywords you want? Here are three tactics for marketers that want to get their Pinterest page, and boards, to rank higher in search engine results.

1) Name Your Boards with Long Tail Keywords

If there’s a long tail keyword that you would like to rank well for in Google, consider naming your board with that particular keyword without sacrificing the brand.

For example the keyword, funny advertisements, has an estimated global search on Google of about 2,900 times a month for that exact term. When I type in that keyword on Google, there is only one Pinterest board specifically titled as “Funny Advertisements” that shows up on the first page of results. At the time of this writing, it was the only Pinterest board that uses that exact keyword, which is why it ranked so high. There was no competition from other pinners.

The exact url of that board looks like this:

pinterest.com/appltncre8ve/funny-advertisements

With the board containing the keyword and also having low competition, that specific Pinterest board is on the first page of Google. When I searched for it, it was ranked number 6 in the first page of results. And yes that’s my article on 17 Funny Advertisements that’s ranked number 4.

Pinterest allows you to create up to 350 boards, though I don’t recommend you maxing the number of boards for the sake of SEO. I would suggest no more than 20 to start off since it can be time consuming to manage all. This allows you to compete in Google for 20 + additional keywords that may be harder for your own website to compete with.

2) Ensure Your Board Descriptions are Keyword Rich

One of the biggest pet peeves I have about brands that use Pinterest is their sheer laziness to fill in the description of their Pinterest boards.

This is one of the Pinterset boards from Starbucks titled, “Real Food.” From an SEO perspective, titling the board Real Food isn’t the best since most people are not searching up the term for real food. However, the name of the board needs to be aligned with a company’s brand, and it’s understandable they titled it Real Food.

What’s an absolutely travesty is that the description of the board is left blank. This can easily be corrected when you click on the edit button on the board, and to fill out the description with keywords. To help with their search engine optimization, Starbucks could have stated in the description:

“Delicious Starbucks pastries, sandwiches, and food that we love. Our board also contains some of our favourite foods and pastries that we would love to try and eat.”

This would have helped their Pinterest board be found for keywords such as Starbucks pastries, Starbucks sandwiches, and Starbucks foods on Google and other search engines.

Starbucks isn’t the only one that’s guilty of this, many social media blogs tout how great Whole Foods is using their Pinterest page, which they are when it comes to posting visual content, but when I clicked on four random boards of theirs, not one single one of them had their descriptions filled in.

Always fill in the descriptions of your Pinterest boards with keywords that your business wants to rank for.

3)Put Keywords Into Pin Descriptions

This technique most likely isn’t going to get you anywhere close to the first page of Google results for keywords, though it is possible depending on the search term, but it is still an excellent practice as it can help your Pinterest boards show up on the second and third page of Google search results for keywords.

Ensure that keywords that you want to rank for are in the pin’s description, as Google search engines do crawl the descriptions of pins, and takes it into consideration for search results. The website that shows up in the search engines for those pin descriptions will not lead directly to that specific pin’s address, instead it will be list the Pinterest Board’s url on which the pin is located.

A specific pin’s url will look like this:
http://pinterest.com/pin/246290673344396313/

And a board address looks like this:
http://pinterest.com/mcngmarketing/pinterest-tips/

Here’s an example of how this works. I typed into Google the following words, “Funny pins on Pinterest.”

Here are the first six results that showed up for my search:

The determining factor that the Pinterset board, 1000 repins, showed up on the first page of the results because of a single pin’s description. The actual board name doesn’t contain any of the search words, nor the actual description of the board itself, but because one of the pins had contained the words “Funny” in it, it was able to show up as result number 6 for the search words “Funny pins on Pinterest.”

In order to maximize your Pinterest page and boards on Google, ensure that your social media marketing team isn’t taking short cuts. Have the boards titled after long tail keywords that your organization wants to rank well for, as well as ensuring that descriptions are keyword rich.

Do you have any suggestions or tips on how to rank your Pinterest page higher in search engines?

GE

Business benefits of Facebook apps

With time facebook has become more of a marketing platform where brand managers create their brand’s identity and in turn derive great insights about the product/service with a correspondent increase in sales as well. Facebook is the epicentre of all social media marketing strategies; it has worked tremendously well and in favour of a large number of brands.

In such a scenario the most important task is done by the applications available on Facebook. These act as the most essential and functional tool for survival of a brand.

 1.      Building awareness

There are a large number of Facebook apps that are deployed to help a brand grow and stabilise itself in the market. Facebook apps are used by brand managers to initially help in establishing a brand and creating its awareness. The initial seeding phases are very important because they lay the initial framework on which all the marketing strategies depend.  Building awareness about a product is the first step before any activity can be done for its promotion. Applications like ‘My Yelp Reviews’, Tweets tab, Google+ tab all help in bringing traffic to a page and help in creating a valuable existence of a brand on the social networking platform.

 2.      Generates Traffic

Once the initial seeding and framework is done then comes the stage where in brand managers wish to generate as much traffic that is possible. For this very reason facebook applications are used, which prove to be beneficial to the brand as a whole. Applications like Photo Contests, Video Contests, Polls tab etc bring users to a particular page which increases the number of followers a page has. It is for the manager to ensure that the users who once come to the page are retained on the page.

3.      Reputation management

Once the brand is well known in the market and users have been converted into followers there is a need for the brand to manage its reputation in the market and in front of its competitors. By now a brand has already exposed itself to a long list of its customers and it is important that a stand of the brand is maintained in front of them as well. Facebook pages are the best means of communication between brand owners and its users.

4.      User Engagement

Applications like Multi-Videos tab, Instagram tab, Essay Contest tab, Welcome tab, Top fans tab all help a great deal in engaging users with the facebook page of a brand. These applications are such that they can keep users bound to them for long and in turn provide better results to brand managers. Users generally like applications that provide them with some returns. In such cases if a brand manager declares the name of the top fan of the page with his picture and updates it as the page’s facebook status the user is happy and continues to interact in the future. Others seeing the post are also intrigued and thereby interact.

 5.      Affects sales and profits

In the 21st century people are more technologically advanced. Online portal sites are doing very well today, if a brand owns a portal site then that acts as an added advantage for the brand.  Using the e-commerce tab a brand can promote his online portal as well which will affect the sales positively and eventually increase the ratio of profits largely.

How to make a post go viral?

Social Media is bombarded with brand pages; every brand small or big is creating its identity on influential social networking websites. These pages bring laurels to the brands in the form of traffic and a substantial increase in the number of followers. Marketing activities are taking a sharp turn and are being concentrated on the social media only. As such all brands are targeting platforms like Facebook, Twitter Google plus etc to form their niche to promote products effectively.

The weapons used in marketing range from normal posts to efficient marketing campaigns. The most commonly used feature that is used is frequent and regular updates on the brand pages. Now the biggest challenge faced by brand managers is to promote that post and make it viral such that it reaches out to a large number of people. To help brand managers, following are tips to make a post go viral.

 1.   High Quality

There are brand pages on the web pertaining to nearly every possible field. As such there is so much information and updates about social media marketing that it is not possible for users to like each and every page and each and every post. If brand managers post relevant content that relates directly to the brand and the post is of good quality generally users like it. It is normally seen that the posts that have some valuable information to pass on and make sense are the ones that go viral. It is good to be different but it is also important to stick to posting high quality good content.

2.   Market it well

In the present times nothing sells until it is marketed and promoted well enough. Just posting good quality content does not solve the purpose the post also needs to be promoted well and marketed for people to see it and eventually come in terms with it. In the presence of so many brands and even more posts, a post will not go viral until a brand manager takes extra care of that.

 3.   Hover around recent events

Brand managers are often confused about what should be posted, what should be the contents of the post. It is advised that posts should be such that they are in relevance to the ongoing events in the world. This helps in making the post a trend and chances of its going viral increases manifold.

 4.   Smart and short content

Too long posts and those that have no relevance with the brand or are totally out of context are majorly disliked by users. The posts that are short yet are able to express and carry a message go viral on their own. Everybody on the social media likes to read influential posts that have the capability of leaving them to ponder upon certain thoughts. Thus short and smart posts are preferred in the social media domain.

5.   Link all pages

To make all pages and all posts go viral the brand pages on all platforms should be linked together. Once linked together the posts automatically carry a high viral strength and easily become the most viewed and liked posts on the web.