02Apr/13

Social SEO is Required By Search Engines in 2013

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A good SEO campaign can no longer ignore the important social component.

All search engines have been experimenting with adding SEO to their respective algorithms  to figure out where to index your site. In years gone by this was figured out by the amount of backlinks your site had as well as other things like quality articles, anchor text, on-page SEO techniques, etc. However, this is a thing of the past.

Social SEO is now required and as long as people on the web will search for local things like car dealers, restaurants, and hair salons in their respective locations (local SEO), then they call the shots.

People engage online with the website product or services mostly because of a site’s relevant content and backlinks leading back to the main website. The content may include backlinks (anchor text) when clicked will take the user back to the landing page where the products or services are for sale. Some of these social links are great for local SEO and can be included on such social sites as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Pinterest, Google +1 and LinkedIn.

Social SEO is really about optimizing social signals to boost your SERP (search engine rankings).

 

Two of the most powerful Halifax Social Media requirement for Social SEO:

1. Optimize your site for local SEO traffic in Cape Breton

You drive traffic to your website from several channels, but without engagement from these visitors, you’re missing the opportunity to enhance your page authority. You can increase user engagement by making it easy for them by including proper social sharing buttons. Don’t use one of those catchall common widgets that clutter your website and look really tacky. Use the buttons that matter most, namely: Facebook Like, Twitter Tweet and Google +1.

These buttons allow easy sharing and should be placed within or around the content that they’re meant to share. Don’t put these buttons in your header. People in Halifax expect share buttons to be associated with the content they’re positioned around on a Web page. If you have a Like button in your header, then it may seem to be for your brand’s page or your homepage rather than the specific content being shared. And a single page that lists many pieces of content should include each piece’s associated share buttons in an intuitive way.

Facebook Likes / Fans:

• Consider whether you should use Like or Recommend. Should you include Send? Get Facebook likes for your website to boost social signals.

• Set the proper Open Graph tags on each page so that the posts to Facebook contain the appropriate information. Always include a thumbnail image with an alt tag.

Twitter Tweets:

• Set the tweet text. Use an engaging message that will describe the link and help get click-through from impressions. Get twitter followers to boost your online presence.

• Use relevant hashtags. You can set the hashtag attribute to pre-populate the tweet with a hashtag. If your content is relevant to a popular hashtag, include it to help every tweet get more exposure and add more relevancy to the link being tweeted.

• Identify yourself as the author. After the tweet, users are suggested to follow the Twitter handle. So, help them connect with you when they share your content.

• To make a secondary suggestion, fill out the Related attribute. This account will be suggested alongside the author recommendation.  Commenting is also important to engagement. Make it easy for users to comment on your content without the need to log in. If you include a login feature as well, provide multiple options.

2. Use Google+

Don’t neglect Google+ Votes. While the activity numbers may not be as impressive as Facebook’s, it has a far greater impact on search results. Whether people actively use Google+ or not, many are performing searches while logged into their Google account (and in many cases this is also their Google+ account). Organic SEO traffic from the (not provided) keyword has been increasing substantially recently, and this traffic is from people signed into Google when performing a search.

So, even if they aren’t posting to Google+, their search results will be affected and their social connections will have a big influence on those results. That means the people who are using Google+ regularly have considerable power to shift rankings.

Make sure you’re on Google+ connecting with people and sharing your content. Gain additional exposure for your brand by contributing in relevant Google+ Communities, as well.

More information:

For a more in-depth analysis of Nova Scotia Social SEO and Halifax Local SEO check out http://seoserviceshalifax.com

14Mar/13

Order Professional Facebook Fan Services

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facebook like fans service in Nova ScotiaWant to Reach Thousands of New Clients in Nova Scotia? Let our Professional Facebook Fan Service take you there!

Finally you can order facebook fans for your country or city by using our Facebook Fanpage promotional service! With this service, you are Guaranteed to get Real Facebook Fans to your fan page!

We have UNTARGETED and TARGETED facebook fan packages which will get your more facebook fans in Canada for your Nova Scotia facebook fan page.

Our facebook fan packages are very competitive so choose the one that suits your needs and let us help you grow your business today!

We are dedicated on increasing your exposure and branding with our targeted Fan services.

About FBLIKE.BIZ:

fblike.biz is a Canadian Facebook Social Media Team specializing in Social Media Solutions with Solid Strategies, Fast Results & Powerful Expert Support.

Worldwide Facebook fans are available and are usually about half price of TARGETED facebook fans. So inquire about untargeted fans if it suits your budget better. TARGETED fans are for a particular city or country and are generally better if you are looking for local facebook fans, leads, and sales of your product or service. *We cannot give fans yet according to sex, age, gender yet but are currently working on this.

With more likes, you can capture the attention of the public, certainly getting more traffic and sales you were looking for. Contact us to Order Facebook fans, Website Traffic, SEO Services, Social Marketing Services and anything else you don’t see here that you need help with.

Contact us for a FREE SEO ANALYSIS for your site. We are here 24/7 and would be happy to help you promote your business, product or service in Halifax, Cape Breton, Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver and the rest of Canada. Thank you.

For Nova Scotia Web Design Services contact support@webdesigncapebreton.com

21Feb/13

SEO and Effective Web Design Go Together

SEO, Sydney Nova Scotia Web Design, Web Design, web design nova scotia, , , , , , , , ,

SEO and effective web design go together and are important to your overall web presence. Think of them as one.

Great looking web design and SEO Services is about creating a website that fully engages the reader and gets them to take action. If the website does not follow current SEO best practices, its rankings will suffer which will in turn lessen the number of visitors that actually engage with it.

And just as important, if the focus has been on Canada SEO and pleasing the search engine spiders, the site may rank highly and get lots of search engine traffic, but once that traffic lands what will they see? Will they be engaged? Will they take action? Not if the design is poor. They must believe they will be spending time and energy getting a website for their company that will engage their client base and allow their company to look legit.

In order to be successful in today’s digital landscape, equal focus must be given to design and search engine optimization.

Doe SEO Stifle a Web Designer’s Creativity?

A great demand for “optimized design” has been placed on web designers in the last five or so years. Before this, designers had the luxury of focusing mainly on the human experience, not the “bot” experience. Designing a website was about creating big, bold headers and beautiful graphics. It was about developing not just a site and a layout, but a thoughtful experience.

Nowadays, Cape Breton web designers are not just asked to make a site look attractive, but to make sure the call to action fits “above the fold” and the site loads quickly. Breadcrumbs must be employed, smart navigational choices made, CSS must be used and JavaScript files need to be kept to a minimum. That’s a tall order, and some designers wonder if all of these new SEO rules are hurting their freedom to simply create.

There is something to be said for clean design, however, and at the end of the day, it is clean design that will help a site load faster, be easily crawled by spiders, and allow for a brand’s message to be seen by the maximum amount of eyes. So in reality, creativity and optimization do need to be able to flourish together side by side.

Sum it Up

There are some core elements that support every strategic SEO initiative and Nova Scotia web design project:

Keyword Analysis

When launching a business website, thorough keyword analysis must be conducted. In order to do this, business leaders must intimately understand their target customers and define how that demographic fits into the larger target market the business is attempting to reach. Then, proper optimization for that audience and thosekeyword phrases should be done.

Technology

Before a site can be designed, some questions first need to be answered regarding the technology that will support it, namely, which platform will the site be built on (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.), what scripts and applications will be required, and what programming language will be implemented? When a decision is made, the entire project team must be committed to that decision 100%.

Content Hierarchy is Your Friend

A well optimized website is a website that’s friendly to both humans and spiders. It’s not enough for a business to create good content, they must also strategically plan where that content resides. Effective planning means placing related content into virtual silos through the use of creative and thoughtful design and internal linking.

Think from a User’s Point of View

Typically, a lot of thought and planning goes into the navigation of every site, but the reality is that users won’t always arrive through the front door and follow the trail of rose petals you’ve left for them. The more pages or posts your site has, the more opportunities there are for people to find you, and when they land on any of those pages, you need to make sure you can help them get around easily. This means making it instantly clear where they are and allow them to get from page to page in as few clicks as possible.

Why is Strategic SEO so Important?

Unless your brand is well-known, it is usually the search engines that are responsible for most of the traffic a website receives. Beyond this, it is organic traffic, not paid, that generally receives the most profitable clicks. Strategic SEO has the power to leverage important customer data and tap into new potential income streams.

Having proper site structure and information architecture will ultimately allow businesses to offer an engaging user experience at the same time as decreasing the need for site tinkering with each new growth spurt.

Tips for SEO Web Design and Site Architecture

The following tips will help you design a site that is not only user friendly, but SEO friendly as well. Also, an excellent reference is SEO MOZ Web Development Cheat Sheet.

  • Use clean code so spiders can crawl it easily
  • Externalize the code to streamline it and allow for faster load times
  • Site design should start with content structure, keeping user experience in the forefront
  • Make navigation structure clear and easy to follow
  • Be sure Meta tags are at the beginning of the page for easier crawling
  • Site speed also depends on good server health, so check it often

For an online presence to succeed, SEO Services Cape Breton and web design Sydney Nova Scotia have to work in tandem. Designers who make an attempt to stay on top of the latest SEO best practices have a much better chance at producing a final product that does the awesome job it was designed to do.

02Feb/13

How to Value Your Website Before Selling

SEO, Sydney Nova Scotia Web Design, Web Design, web design nova scotia, , , , , , , , , ,

Are you considering selling your Nova Scotia website and want to know how much it’s worth before selling?

Has anyone made an offer yet? Have you just lost the passion for the website itself? Has the market declined? Have you lost business?

Maybe you built it up and it’s worth 10 times now than it was when you built it or purchased a few years ago.

Here are some tips that will tell you what your site is worth.

Most Nova Scotia Website buyers want to know one thing. How much is it making? You might have a few sales each month but they still want hard proof and analytics data (traffic). What you want for it and what someone else thinks it’s worth are completely separate matters.

You’ve put a lot of work into the website and want a decent return on your investment. Makes sense, right? You’ve added to the original design, you added a shopping cart, you’ve run several Halifax SEO campaigns and the site looks amazing! Time to cash in, right?

Below is a list of items that will lower the risk of a website and put more of a value on it:

  • Increasing growth
  • Stable earnings
  • Automated systems
  • Diversified traffic streams
  • Diversified income streams
  • Unique Selling Position

 

Evaluation Methods:

There are a few different types of valuation methods that buyers will use to value your Cape Breton website.

1. Revenue Multiple – You have most probably heard the statistic that most businesses sell for 2-3 times earnings. Basically a buyer will take the current net profit of the website for the past twelve months and then multiply it with an earnings multiplier to get a final valuation figure.

2. Comparable Sales – Nova Scotia Website Buyers will use this method if there is sales data available for similar websites. They will then adopt a similar valuation and make an offer based off that.

3. Asset Value – sometimes buyers will ignore the revenue of a website and instead look at the assets of the site (the customer list, or email database) and make a calculation on that instead. They do this because they may be able to leverage those assets better than the existing owner with a new product or making alterations to the system etc.

 

So What’s My Website Worth?

First you need to figure out just what your net profit is. You calculate this by taking your total sales/earnings and then subtract all your expenses from that figure, which will give you your net profit. Do this for the last twelve months earnings, known as trailing twelve months earnings (TTM).

Then you need to apply a multiplier to your TTM earnings.

Generally newer sites will sell for 1-1.5X earnings. More established sites 1.5-2.5X earnings. And high risk sites 0.5-1X earnings. Websites can sell for out of those ranges however they are normally an exception to the rule.

This data is based off over $500,000 worth of transactions over the past few years.

12Jan/13

Reputation Management – Important for SEO

local marketing, SEO, Social Marketing, Web Design, , , , , ,

Reputation Management all about branding and managing your online presence whether is be your website, social marketing campaign, facebook page or even getting a simple Google Places Ad Placement. Many companies have a budget for SEO while others have a PR budget to build an online footprint and social presence to bring traffic, leads and sales to your company’s website.

What does SEO have to do with Public Relations(PR)?

First of all, SEO is not a Social Media buy. SEO is not generally considered a branding initiative although I think it often should be part of the overall PR campaign.

Like traditional PR, SEO earns popularity by ensuring your brand is visible on search engines thru natural “organic” searches. SEO cannot be b0ught and must be earned so it it falls under the PR heading. This is why many Social Media Reputation Management companies now list SEO under earned social media.

Reputation Management:

Big brands receive thousands of “branded” organic search referrals each month from search engines such as Google. When someone searches for the keyword “Cape Breton” they are introduced to a a list of popular previously searched sites, blogs, Youtube videos, and local links. The links listed closer to the top of the first page of Google, are obviously the most popular ones back on Google indexing criteria.

Organic Traffic, Leads and Sales

Keep track of your organic referrers by search engine including sales and leads. Do this for each month individually in your sheet – not an aggregate number. You need to show the trend. SEO is PR and it’s the face of your brand. It’s the best way to stay in front of a ready made audience and ahead of your competition. Don’t ignore it but play by the rules using white hat techniques and last but not least be aggressive and win!

Contact socialfansexpert@gmail.com for more information on branding, SEO, or Reputation Management. Focus on your business and let us take care of your website, facebook page, twitter account, Youtube testimonial videos, and website traffic.

14Dec/12

Web Design Is An Important Business Decision

SEO, Social Marketing, Web Design, , , , , , , , ,

Web Design Cape Breton is a complete web solutions based in Canada, serving customers locally in Cape Breton, Halifax, and throughout the Maritimes and beyond.

Your website is one of the most important parts of  your business, if not the most important decision your company will ever make.More than that, about 75% of the people who visit your website will do an instant analysis of your business model and judge you solely on what they see on your website, and compare you to your competition.

Cape Breton Web Design offers web solutions from the website itself, with site add-ons such as Social Marketing, SEO requirements, Domain Name Registration, and Web Hosting. Please check out our pricing for more information. Think about it. The next visitor to your website could be the most valuable asset to your company this year, meaning he could be a repeat customer, and not only bring you business, but more importantly, recommend you to his friends and colleagues!

Shoot me a message to discuss your ideas for a new website or site re-design. I am looking forward to speaking with you!

Contact: ORDER@WEBDESIGNCAPEBRETON.COM

21Nov/12

SEO – Things to Avoid in Search Engine Optimization

local marketing, SEO, Web Design, , ,

SEO or search engine optimization is the action of optimizing a website to get its natural rankings in the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.  It is one of the most important ways of promoting a website online. SEO is so easy and misunderstood at the same time. The basic SEO strategies don’t require much funding and can provide your business some major benefits.

Search engines have some rules and guidelines that must be followed by an individuals and SEO companies.  SEO scams are becoming more popular now-a-days despite the fact that there are many ethical SEO firms and SEO experts.

In order to get the good position in the search engines, you need to follow the guidelines of the search engines and avoid unethical SEO tactics.  Some of the major practices that you need to avoid in SEO include the following.

  • Avoid bad neighborhood and don’t link to scam websites.
  • Avoid using the automatic linking software as your website can be banned permanently.
  • Don’t use the same titles, descriptions throughout your website.
  • Avoid keywords stuffing.  Some people use same keywords many times to increase the keywords density.  It can penalize your website from Google permanently.
  • Do not participate in the links exchanges and links farms programs.
  • Don’t use the tiny or invisible text.  Some people do it in order to get high rank showing more text to the search engines.
  • Don’t spread duplicate contents across several pages or several domains.
  • Avoid building your website entirely in Flash.
  • Don’t use irrelevant keywords in your web pages.
  • Avoid doorway pages.
  • Don’t check your ranking in Google and Yahoo every day.
  • Don’t use black hat SEO techniques.
  • Don’t hire incompetent SEO firms.
  • Don’t believe everything in SEO that you come to know through internet. You need to do research online learn as much as possible about SEO.
  • Don’t over optimize your website.
  • Don’t forget to make your website search engine friendly.
21Nov/12

Local SEO Marketing Tips

local marketing, SEO, Web Design, , , , , , , , , ,

1. Figure Out Your Target Audience
Until you know who you are targeting there is not much point in doing SEO. What words are your potential customers searching with when you want to be found? What are different modes are they in when they are searching? Are they ready to buy? Are they just doing research? Are they big spenders or are they cheapskates?

In general pick terms that match up with your service, that you think will convert well (conversion is a another five minute discussion altogether btw) and that have good search volume. To get an idea of search volume use Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool which can be found here:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Once you come up with your target keyword list…

2. Update Your Page Titles
The page title or “title tag” is perhaps the most important element of Cape Breton SEO. These are the words that appear at the top of your web browser when you are on a page. They are also the words that show up in the blue links in Google.

Put the search terms you are targeting in your page titles. In general keep the titles as brief as possible while at the same time making them appealing to searchers. No easy trick. Put the most important keywords at the beginning of the title. Don’t worry about getting this perfect the first time as these are very easy to change and Google usually reacts to these changes quickly. And if your website developer tells you these are really hard or expensive to change, get a new website developer.

3. Make Each Page Title Unique
It is also important that all of the pages on your site have unique page titles. A quick way to see if you have more than one page with the same title is to do the following search in Google:

site:yoursite.com intitle”the words in the title”

The results of this search will show all of the pages in Google that have these words in the title. Once you identify these problem pages you can update the titles to make them unique.

And make sure you add your city name to the titles as a lot of people search for your service in your city.

It also couldn’t hurt if you added some text to the actual page that uses the keywords you are targeting as well, in both the body of the text and the
h1 tag, which is typically the headline of the page. If you don’t have a page that targets the keywords you are using, add a new page that does.

You also should check the meta descriptions tags of each page to make sure those are unique as well.

4. Add a Few Internal Links
The number of links a page gets from its own site and which pages link to it matters. The home page is the most important on the site and so the pages that are linked to from the home page are also important. Figure out which pages you want to rank the most (and don’t say all of them) and add links from other pages to these pages. Make sure you use relevant keywords in the text of those links. For example if you want to rank the page for “pizza” use the word “pizza” in the text of the links that go to that page. Try not to use the exact same phrases in each link to make it look more “natural”. For example in some of the links use “best pizza” or “man that’s a helluva a pizza”.

5. Add Your Address to Every Page
Ideally every page should have your address and phone number. This is helpful for users but it also reinforces your location to the search engines. If your business has multiple locations then you may want to create a separate page for each location or at least a single page that lists all locations. Make sure you link to these pages from as many pages as possible on the site. It would probably be a good idea to list as many location names as possible on the home page too.

6. Claim Your Profile on Merchant Circle, Google Local Business Center, Yahoo Local, etc.
There are a huge number of yellow pages-like sites that allow you to update your business information for free. These sites get a lot of traffic and tend to rank well. At the least you should go to each one, claim your profile and make sure they are linking to your site.

7. Make a Video
Create a Video testimonial for your website. And I am not talking about a multimillion dollar production. Ask your kid to point the camera at you and start talking. Explain your service and try to be charming. Mention your website a lot. Then upload it to YouTube and every other free video site and title the video with your top keywords (e.g. “Best Pizza in Pleasanton”). Make sure your website is linked to from your profile. Then link to these video pages from your site with the keywords in the link text. You will be amazed at how easy it is for these pages to rank for your search terms.

8. Add a Blog To Your Site
A blog is just a simple way to add pages to your website. A good, or even bad, web developer should be able to set up a simple blog for you in a few minutes. If you don’t want it super customized it shouldn’t cost that much. Once it’s up start writing. I am not talking novels or even journalism. I am talking keywords. If you want to rank for “Pizza in Cape Breton” write a blog post called “Pizza in Cape Breton: What’s Cooking Tonight At Joe’s Pizza”. Go to http://blogsearch.google.com/ping and add your blog’s URL to Google’s blog search engine. Now every time you write something on the blog it will instantly be added to Google, and each of those posts has a chance of ranking for the term you are targeting.

9. Make Sure You Don’t Have Any Technical Issues
There are a number of technical issues that could be preventing your site from ranking. An easy way to identify them is to sign up your site to Google Webmaster Tools at www.google.com/webmasters/start. By copying a short line of code to your site you can get an idea of some of the common problems that Google is having with it. Google provides you with some detail about the problem. There is not much you yourself can likely do about these problems, but you can at least show them to your website developer or a SEO guy and ask him/her to figure it out.

10. Get Backlinks
Now none of this stuff will work very well if you don’t have any authority backlinks to your site. The big search engines look at links from other sites as a sign of quality and trust. So you should spend the remainder of your five minutes thinking about what other sites you think you can get links from. Here are some of the obvious ones:
– Chambers of commerce/local business groups
– Local business directories/Local newspaper site
– Friends who have sites (including your kid’s blog)
– Partners/Vendors

Get a Professional Backlinks Company to run a backlinks campaign to rank your site even higher on Google and other search engines.

There are hundreds of other ways to get links like writing articles for other sites, sending out press releases, adding your business info to social media sites, making a fool of yourself in public, etc.

It’s important to understand that SEO is not a one-time thing just like running a TV ad campaign is not a one-time thing. It’s a marketing tactic like any other. And as more people use the Web to find local services, SEO could become one of the more important components of your marketing plan. So get familiar with it today so you can master it tomorrow.

Half the battle of marketing is just getting your potential customers attention right?

If you have any more questions about SEO please drop me a line at order @ webdesigncapebreton.com

 

What Are The Top 10 Local Search Ranking Factors for 2012?

  1. Physical Address in City of Search on Place Page
  2. Proper Category Associations on Place Page
  3. Proximity of Address to Centroid on Place Page
  4. Domain Authority of Website
  5. Quantity of Structured Citations (IYPs, Data Aggregators)
  6. City, State in Places Landing Page Title
  7. Quantity of Native Google Places Reviews
  8. Quality/Authority of Structured Citations
  9. Local Area Code on Place Page
  10. HTML NAP Matching Place Page NAP
17Jan/12

Get Real Backlinks

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We provide guaranteed and real verified backlinks to your website. Our backlinks are proven to gain more exposure and traffic to your website easy and fast!!!

Link Building is the process of generating hypertext links both internally and externally for your website. Strategic link building works with your target market and uses the link connections to build traffic to your site. Since link building is not part of the webpage optimization process, they are considered an off-page technique.

Development of strong, relevant inbound links from related websites is absolutely crucial to developing traffic via SEO – organic traffic.

In the current search engine algorithm standard, link building is a strong technique to build search engine page rank results. Building link connections is essential to improve visibility, increase inbound traffic, which all combines to impact conversion rates.

Constant changes in the technology, search engine standards need to be balanced with your company’s needs and your target market. Keen research is required to optimize your link building campaign and to fully integrate it into your overall marketing program.

Types of inbound links

The type of link used depends on a variety of factors, and strong link building campaigns have diversity in the type of links used.

The different types of links are, but not limited to:

  • Reciprocal linking – mutual linking between two sites
  • One-way link building – the use of blogs, articles and forums to generate connections or links in one direction
  • Viral / Link bait links
  • Content driven links
  • Citations and local business listing links
  • Paid directories
  • Toplists and resources

It is very important to combine the link building with the overall strategy for your Internet Marketing, and some would say with all marketing initiatives. Link building can be a good place to add in new opportunities, reach out to new communities and expand the reach of your existing campaign.

Diversity in the links, clear connections to target markets and consistency in the branded message and strategic Internet Marketing goals and objectives are essential in creating an effective, successful link building campaign. There are complexities built into the connection process, and when you consider the search engine page rank results as part of the complexities; it is easy to see why professional management is needed to make the link building process successful.

Benefits of Link Building

Since there are many ways to make the connections happen, link building can be a good way to add additional visitors to a site. Connections allow your site to widen its appeal and increase traffic. Building new relationships and collaborations are potential benefits from a good link building.

Contact Local SEO Traffic today about generating a strong, effective link building campaign as part of a comprehensive Internet Marketing program.