Ages ago (pre-Internet critical mass, sometime in the 1990s), if a customer had a complaint about a company or service, they called the company and complained. If they were lucky, they were apologized to and given a coupon to save the next time they bought. If they didn’t get the answer they wanted, maybe the customer would call the BBB. Today, if a customer complains, the first place they normally turn is the Internet. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, blog posts and comments make it easy for a customer to vent their frustrations and share their experiences with the world. With the explosive growth of user generated content (UGC), companies must use a variety of tools to monitor their brand and keep their online reputation clean. For this example, let’s look at the online backup service, SugarSync. Find New Content Google Alerts is the easiest way to start monitoring online content for a brand name or other term. Simply enter the search query – Read the full article
We stand in a society incessantly connected to each other through virtual networks. One may wonder why virtual (Web-based) platforms are popular and the reason solely lies in the fact that they offer a variety of applications that help people share and connect with one another, which has always been the core needs of society. With greater technology, speed and living standards, the social networking sites help cater to newer demands and go beyond physical get-togethers. It is this platform that unites people and hence, has immense potential for online marketing and advertising. A brand is a brand because of the support – and recognition – it gets from people. Social Media Interaction and Competition One of the latest methods adopted by marketers is to engage audiences in contests and interactive competitions, giving away their commodities for free. Or, alternatively, these contests may engage people by giving away various other articles, trial offers, commodities, etc. These are becoming increasingly popular – Read the full article
All website owners aim to land on the first few pages of search engine results, and that’s why various search engine optimization strategies are being implemented. After all, SEO is designed to enhance the search rank position of a business or a brand. Last year, however, website owners and SEO professionals received some serious beating no thanks to the Google Panda update. The search engine giant began changing the algorithms that determined a site’s page rank and search performance. The aim was to promote websites with original high-quality content; it also reduced the effectiveness of content farming, thus giving low preference to websites with low-quality content. A number of legitimate, well-meaning sites, however, were also adversely affected by this update. These changes made by Google have made it difficult for website owners to determine which SEO strategy to adopt – or drop – to make their SEO strategies and campaigns successful. But adjust we must, and move forward to align – Read the full article
Quality backlinks play a very important role in the search engine optimization of any site. Backlinks refer to links on other websites pointing to yours. So how do you go about getting them? The Natural Way If your web content is good, people are likely to begin linking to it. The more backlinks your site has, the better. However, it does not always follow that if you have great content, people will always want to link to you. This means that you might not be able to promote your website successfully through the natural way of building backlinks. You will then have to figure out alternative ways of getting quality backlinks. And even if you get many backlinks through the natural way, you could always use additional backlinks. Some of the acceptable methods of building links are through posting in forums, article directories, and blogs. The unacceptable methods (at least to Google’s eyes) include linking to link farms, buying links – Read the full article
When you try and use Internet marketing and blogging to bring in more business, it is essential to think about each word that you publish. Each page of your website needs to have a goal and each blog post must be aimed at achieving the following: Providing readers with information regarding your business and industry Creating a call for action Encouraging sales Working on optimizing the website Providing customer service Building brand recognition Installing trust Fitting all that into a blog post of around 300 to 500 words may seem like a lot but with the help of SEO copywriters, each of your blog posts can achieve all of those goals for you. Working on Web Copy Your website will no doubt be split up into different sections; what they are will depend upon the services and products that you provide. Most websites will have the obligatory Welcome page, About Us page, and the Contact page. These need to be – Read the full article
There is a multitude of WordPress plugins that can make your site more SEO friendly and the same ones are repeatedly recommended with little variation. If you have not installed WordPress’s All-in-One SEO Pack, W3 Total Cache, Google XML Sitemaps, SEO Slugs, Trackable Social Share, or similar SEO plugins, go do that right now. If you have already addressed your SEO needs with these handy dandy helpers, then you might want to think about installing these less frequently lauded but still awesome plugins. After all, good SEO is about solid, engaging content, and these plugins will provide the opportunity to connect with your users in different ways. BuddyPress BuddyPress elevates your site by enabling you to construct your own social network on your WordPress site. When installed, it will make your site more interactive and encourage users to build upon what you have started. This powerful plugin provides a whole host of social networking components including activity streams, fully editable extended profiles, and extensible groups – Read the full article
If you are the proud owner of a new website, then you know how confusing and downright difficult the process of designing and building a website can be. It’s not uncommon to go through the trouble of finding a hosting service and choosing a domain name, only to get stuck when it comes to actually putting a site together and making it presentable for viewers. Fortunately, there are some very basic things, even for newbies, that can make the process much easier. Here are some simple web design tips for new website owners: Templates. One of the fastest and easiest ways to design an effective website is to choose a customizable template. Customizable templates are easy to find. Simply search online, load them to your site, and make whatever changes you want to make the design your own. If you use a blog hosting service like WordPress to build your website, you will be pleased to find that you automatically have – Read the full article
For your site to be noticed and to get traffic, it should have a good position in search, so that it will always land on the first page of popular search results at search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Achieving this is no miracle and is not something that can be done overnight: it takes an effective SEO strategy to move your website to the top of search engine results. In order for an SEO strategy to be successful, a website owner should monitor the different metrics of their site on a daily or weekly basis to gauge if the strategy that they are implementing is working. Here are a few metrics that any website owner should watch out for, to know if they are on the right track and if the strategy that they are implementing is improving their website’s ranking: SEO Metrics Traffic Metrics. Web traffic is the number of visitors that your site is getting. This – Read the full article
