Has Google Indexed Your Site? When?
Search engines have been developed to work in the most efficient ways possible. They can quickly gain you access to information on just about any subject you want to learn about. This speed is only possible because of indexing. Indexing is a way that search engines know what your site is about. Google has deployed robots, otherwise known as crawlers throughout the worldwide web. They visit web servers to examine websites, including yours, to categorize it according to your website content. These crawlers will repeatedly visit your website throughout the year to update the index. Keeping the index up to date is within Google’s best interest if it wants to provide its visitors with relevant and up to date content.
The rate at which Google crawls a website is not a routine pattern, but rather has many determining factors, many of which are not known to those outside of Google’s development team. Larger, more popular and established sites such as news websites will be crawled several times a day, but smaller businesses will have to wait. It can take up to several weeks for Google to revisit your website, this means that changes that you make to your website today, will not reflect on Google’s search, until Google crawls your site and updates their index. To find out when was the last time Google crawled your site, simply Google your entire URL. Once you find your link on the Results Page, look beneath it to find the “cached” link. Click it and you will see a snapshot of your website, with the date on which your site was last crawled. By routinely checking the results, you will be able to get a good estimate on how often Google is crawling your site. Use this information to schedule your next website update, product release, or exciting announcement. Doing so can help you see faster results and can help your visitors always find your website relevant to their search.
Find Out When Was The Last Time Google Crawled Your Website
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Deleting Your Social Media Accounts
Here at Saba, we help to promote the use of social media and web 2.0 technologies to help your business succeed. The use of social media technologies although comes at a risk. Once you have submitted information such as messages, posts, or tweets, it can be pretty difficult to take it back. Unless you delete your post seconds after you have posted it, chances are that someone will have read it by then, copied it, forwarded it, or tweeted about it. This means that once you hit the submit or send button, you are no longer in control. This can be a great opportunity for companies, allowing them to take advantage of viral marketing, but what do you do when a potentially embarrassing piece of information gets posted? Ideally, honesty is the best policy and explaining your error in full sincerity will help to maintain a personal reputation or company brand from getting dragged on the floor. In worst case scenarios, deleting your current account can be your only option. This may also be the best option to get rid of that old sophomoric account with all the embarrassing weekend party pictures of you and your friends before going to a job interview (yes, they check that stuff). Note, deleting your account will not get rid of those instances in which your info has already been copied and saved onto other servers, but will only delete the content on your account.
A new service has been made public called the Suicide Machine. This service has made it possible to delete your choice of social media account or all of your accounts with minimal time invested. Those who may take advantage of this service are those who are tired of social media, and want to just get away, those suffering from cyber stalkers, those who’s page was meant to be temporary, those who’s page has been inactive, or those who want a fresh start. This service can also be used to be sure your account has been completely deleted not just unpublished, but used with caution. Deleting your network means that all of that hard work you put into finding those connections will be lost. Meaning that friends wont be able to connect with you, or your customers will have lost access to you. If your company brand stands on the premise that you are reliable and always there….your brand may also be hurt by such actions. Deleting your account is only preferable on the rarest occasions when all other options are unavailable.
Otherwise, deleting your online accounts manually can be a difficult task. Just figuring out how to do it, can be difficult, and once you figure it out, you will likely have to fill out a lengthy questionnaire and be put on a long list for scheduled deletion. Two weeks later, your account is unpublished, not deleted. If you happen to log in within those two weeks, your cancellation will be canceled. This is only true because social media websites are not in the business of deleting accounts. They strongly discourage it, so will make it difficult for the average user.
A Time Magazine article reports that facebook is not happy with the technology, and has asked the company to stop accessing their site. Although the suicide machine has only helped slightly over 1000 people, facebook sees the potential for losing its share of the marfket.
If you want to start fresh with a new Social Media, Web 2.0 strategy that works, let Saba give you a free evaluation of your current strategy, or brand. We will research to find out what’s the best way to approach your market online. Call us today 866.937.1717.
Google VS China, and The Future of The Internet
With Google’s threat to pull out of China, all eyes are on the unfolding drama to find out what the future of the internet will look like in that part of the world. Amidst accusations of cyber attacks by the company and claims of intellectual property theft, Google has threatened to abandon all operations in that county. Cyber espionage experts claim that these attacks must be state sponsored, in an attempt to catch up and pass their western rivals technologically and militarily. Backing these claims is the speed and consistency of the attacks. Which many say can only be possible with government backing. Currently, Google cites the hacking of various gmail accounts of Chinese Political Dissidents, but it is unclear what else Chinese Hackers may have stolen with the declaration of intellectual property theft. Obviously it must have been something big for Google to threaten to leave the fastest growing economy in the world. It must have been something to threaten Google’s global operations. Speculation may lead some to think that China may have accessed Google’s algorithm, or some of Googles up and coming innovative technologies. Whatever it was, it must be worth severing further business with China.
Many companies and governments are now waiting to see what happens next. Some of these spectators are supporting Google and are showing their support against nation sponsored cyber attacks. Although it has been alleged that China has been in the business of state sponsored cyber theft for a long time, it could just be that this time, they went too far and attacked a company large enough to stand up to them. It is unclear what kind of fallout may follow, but one thing for sure, China’s unchecked internet abuse will not continue without watchful eyes on the look out.
The future of the internet in China is unclear, their communist government discourages free thought and independance, but these are the building blocks upon which innovation is fostered. Without innovation, China will never meet their goals of being a cultural, political, and military leaders. All of which can explain China’s relentless efforts of online theft. They have to resort to stealing ideas because their government discourages new ideas from emerging.
Saba is a San Diego SEO Company dedicated to bringing you great ideas for improving your website and getting it found online. In order to schedule a free consulation or to get a free website analysis call us today at 858.937.1717.
Benefits of a Website Redesign
There exists many aspects of Search Engine Optimization that can be utilized to rank higher on search engines. Unfortunately, there will exist those websites that no matter how much they are optimized, will never rank on the first page of search engines, and/or will not be working towards attracting new customers. These websites are perfect candidates for web redesign services. When redesigning a website, it is important to plan ahead of time before the design process begins to find out what the primary goals of the new design will be. Is the design process going to focus on attracting new customers or will it focus on catering to existing clients? After the goals have been set, you can begin the process of redesigning your site.
If your goals are to rank higher, you want to consider the benefits and disadvantages of different types of designs and embedded material and how it will effect your SEO. Certain “best practices” strategies can be used in creating a good SEO friendly site. One of the most effective strategies is in CSS programming. Using CSS to set up your website layout will effectively separate your HTML from each element’s style (CSS). This will make it a lot faster for Search Engines to be able to index your content because they are essentially skipping the additional code that defines the look of a site. At Saba SEO, we pride ourselves of using CSS programming whenever possible instead of resorting to convenient tables for your page’s layout. If you need a website design that is consistent and easy to edit, you may also want to consider building a website template and creating a dynamic content library. A template and library items will allow you to easily make changes to repeating parts of your site without having to make the same changes over and over to each page.
You may also want to subscribe to website design best practice standards to ensure your site meets the proven criteria for easy customer conversion, and lead generation. Upon reaching a website, it is natural for a visitor’s sight to begin on the top left hand side of a website and begin reading left or down from there in an “F” or “Z” pattern. By organizing your webpage material accordingly, you can make certain aspects of your site more prominent. A “free consultation” button on the lower right hand of the page will not be as visible as a button which falls within this “Z” or “F” pattern. Many visitors also avoid scrolling through a page, choosing to keep their cursor closer to the top of the window. For this reason, it is also recommended that all of the web pages’ important content fall above the fold (bottom of the visible page before scrolling down).
Each page of a website should also incorporate some sort of “call to action,” which will serve as an incentive to your visitors to take action. Perhaps it is to sign up for your company newsletter, or it can be a lead generating form. Either way, you want these things to be prominent so that they are not skipped. It was not uncommon in the past that these “calls to action” were mostly reserved for the website’s home page, but with “Landing Page Optimization” (a way to make each page in a website unique and draw visitors) it is possible to have your interior pages act like small catching nets, acting like mini home pages. For this reason, a call to action must be included in every page to ensure that all of your visitors are given the option of taking action. Otherwise, you will only gain leads from those pages displayig the call to action.
Other good practices also include clear navigation, and targeted content. If a visitor cannot find their way around your site or links lead to irrelevant information, your site will suffer from a high bounce rate. This means that visitors may come to your site, and quickly leave. You can avoid this by making a visit to your site a pleasant experience.
If you are in the position of gaining a competative advantage by choosing a website redesign, call us today to schedule a free consultation. 866.937.1717
Choosing Fonts For Your Website
There exists hundreds of thousands of different fonts, and the list continues to grow each day. Out of this pool of fonts, there exists the right font for your website. Choosing the right font is not as easy as it sounds, and it’s not a matter of just picking fonts from a list. A lot of thought has to go into choosing the right font based on the studies of typographers past. These faceless artists have worked hard designing type, and have established styles. Just like art, type has a history which continues to evolve. Studying type of generations past can help us to choose the right types of fonts for the work at hand…our website. This blog is a short introduction to type, and will hopefully help you in your selection.
Fonts can be placed in several different categories that have developed through time.
Font Styles Through the Centuries
Generally speaking, old style was the first determined style that developed, whose earliest influence was the handheld chisel. Ancient typographers used chisels to carve words into stone at an angle. Out of this method, the traditional serif was born, which helped finish off the stone carved letterforms. Today it is argued that the serif helps readers eye flow from one word to the other, in ancient times it is likely that it allowed the artist’s chisel a smooth transition from one shape to the next. If a modern artist wanted to evoke a sense of antiquity, or stability, or timelessness, a old style font such Bembo, Garamond, or Trajan would work best. These fonts were created with the influence of ancient stone writing and hand written letterforms of the midieval period. They are among the oldest recognized designs in type ranging from about the 1400-1500’s. By this time, artists also began experimenting and lowercase letters slowly began to emerge.
old Style vs transitional
Transitional Fonts developed after the old style in the period of enlightenment, where challenges to old thoughts and tradition were common, and are recorded in the history of the type. Transitional fonts are typically recognized by their shorter or thinner serif, the increased uniform thickness of stroke, and their increased symmetry. This began the slow reduction of influence typographers got from the handwritten forms of medieval times and was a transition for the complete elimination of human influence from later styles. Fonts from this area include Times, Baskerville, and Caslon. They too evoke a sense of tradition, but also take a step away from it in a slow regression of human style. Italic letters were also developed around this time to help distinguish shapes and to help create hierarchy between letters. The formality of these letter forms make them perfect for modern business and school writing. These may be good choices for a modern designer looking for a corporate look, that would make their website carry a feeling of history, yet not tied to it. This style of font gives a sense of flexibility, which a corporate company may be interested in portraying.
transitional vs block
Block Serif or Slab Serif fonts were developed along with continued developments in print and technology. The creation of the printing press developed a market for thicker fonts that would allow for easy legibility in a large point size. They are characterized by their square serifs, block shapes, lack of stroke modulation and have a mechanical look. This type of type design is a clear cut from all humanist letterforms and can be best understood by studying the backdrop in history at the beginning of the industrial revolution. Fonts that emerged from this era include Rockwell, Courier, and Clarendon. These fonts can be easily used by a modern designer to create a design that evokes the principles of industry that existed throughout the 1800’s including firm confidence and boldness.
block vs sans serif
San Serif or Gothic Typefaces began to emerge in ancient times but were not widely adopted into print until soon after the emergence of block serif fonts. They are in effect a reflection of the thought during the Industrial Revolution, when mathematical efficiency was prized and human’s imperfect nature was not. The serif of previous styles was the last part of type design that beared any human influence, removing it was a bold step away from humanist style, removing it was to remove the fallable. Smooth, even strokes and symmetry became the standard and san serif was born. San Serif fonts were quickly adopted as headline fonts but have increasingly found their way into text copy, despite arguments against them. Fonts which have emerged from this style include Century Gothic, Futura, Helvetica, and Arial. If a modern designer wishes to create an art piece that has a modern feel, San Serif is the way to go.
Decorative fonts Have little value for professional designers. They are a modern take on classic letterforms often so abstract that their legibility is questionable. Their usefulness is limited to headline sized text and can often be so emblazoned with decoration that thier purpose is limited to a specific design. What purpose is this I speak of?…The purpose of legibility. Type was meant to be read, and classic fonts that have lasted century are those that have allowed readers to easily read its shapes and figures to distinguish meaning. A highly decorative font will cause a loss of legibility so they are never good choices. Most often these fonts can be found for free online simply because they have no value. Avoid their use and you will begin to notice a growing sense of typographic professionalism as you notice the great amount of flexibility classic typefaces allow you when used creatively.
The use of san serif fonts for modern applications continues to grow as modern low resolution screens cannot capture the neuances of delicate serifs, specially at smaller sizes. San serif fonts have therefore made themselves the font of our current century, and their use has continued to grow. Although San Serif Fonts have better web applications than serif fonts, they too have neuances that cannot be captured on screen. In short, they have not been designed specifically for the web. They are widely used because their shape holds more true on screen than serif fonts, but neither will give you better legibility than fonts designed for online viewing. Fonts such as Verdana or Georgia should be considered when choosing a font specifically for the web. These are amongst the most modern fonts available and have been designed specifically for on screen viewing. Their shape holds true with size and shape better than any other font designed for print. A designer creating a website for the elderly or the hard of seeing may want to consider these fonts for their online design. Likewise, a font designed specifically for the internet should not be used for print material, as their purpose is not being honored. A font designed for online viewing will never give you the printed results a design made for print will give. Therefore be wise in selecting your font.
This is not to say that you cannot use any font for your website. You can use any font, but if you use an abstract font that not many people use, or a font that to others may be unavailable, your purpose in your design may be lost because someone on the opposite side of the country may not have the same font so they will be seeing a substituted font in its place. This is most common in headline fonts, where you may feel that the font Impact for example may be a great choice, as it offers great weight and draws a lot of attention. If a visitor to your site does not have the font uploaded on their computer, they will see whatever similar font you have set as an alternate. What if you didn’t set an alternate? Than their system might substitute any default font, or may not display anything at all. A way you can avoid this problem is to make your font into a graphic. This will allow any visitor to see the type in the way you intended them to see it. This will help your design stay true to its original form, but you loose a great deal of potential SEO (Search Engine Optimization) opportunities. Headlines hold a lot of weight for search engines and they use it to know what your website is about. If all of your headline text is in graphic form, your website will not easily rank on search engines, and your competitors will gain from your loss.
To play it safe with your SEO rankings. I suggest sticking to a list of commonly used, browser safe fonts. Using these fonts will increase the likelihood your visitors are seeing exactly what you intend them to see.
- Arial
- Georgia
- Times New Roman
- Verdana
- Trebuchet
- Courier
- Tahoma
- Helvetica
If you still intend on using specialty fonts for certain places such as your banners or other graphics, then make sure your type is a graphic image (jpeg, png, gif) and then insert it into your website. Good SEO knowledge suggests you save your keyword rich titles for non graphic type, but if you must use graphic type, remember to add your alternate text tag in order to still be able to communicate with search engines. Actual text carries more weight than alt text, so avoid this practice whenever possible, and make as much text in your website into editable html text to increase your Search Engine Rankings.
Elements of Typographic Style
If you want to read more into the subject of type. I suggest trying out “The Bible of Typography”: The Elements of Typographic Style, a book by Canadian typographer, poet and translator Robert Bringhurst. This book will tell you everything you need to know about typography. Be ready to take notes, it’s quite a read.
At Saba SEO in San Diego we try to provide useful information to business owners throughout the United States on how to create better websites. Our goal is to help your business grow online. With the decrease of print advertisements, purchases are being made online at an exponential rate. Be sure your company is taking advantage of this swell by allowing us to create a custom web design or by allowing us to optimize your existing site. Countless of clients agree that our services have helped to maximize online profitability. It all starts with a free website evaluation by our team. We will tell you exactly where your website can improve and we back it up with statistical data. Call us today to get started 866-937-1717.
Checking Your Blog Responses to Avoid Spam
I cannot stress the importance of checking each and every comment and their links before accepting them on your website. Spammers are tricky and will often post comments that look, and sound genuine. You may think they really took the time to read and analyze your post. But beware, sometimes these posts will be paired with a link that can hurt your ranking. If just one of your blog comments carries a link to a reported spam website, your ranks can be significantly hurt, specially in a highly competitive market. Worst case scenario is that you too may be flagged as a spam site too for your involvement. Even though your intentions are not to be a spammer, by acknowledging them, and accepting their links on your site, you too will suffer the consequences. Remember that removing yourself from a spam list is a lot harder than getting on it in the first place. So please, practice your due diligence and make sure to check each and every link first before accepting them.
A good way to check a site for spam content is to open the link in a new window, read a few sentences to see if the web page looks genuine. If you are suspicious or if you have a single doubt, don’t accept the comment or edit it to delete the link. Sometimes you will have to wait a few minutes until you begin to see the true nature of a site. It often happens that a site will look genuine, but after a while, you begin seeing the pop-ups begin to appear. A site with pop-up ads should raise a red flag that the site may be a spam site. I also check the internal structure of a website. It has happened in the past that I will check the link that redirects me to a genuine looking site, but when clicking on the links in the navigation menu, each link goes to the same page. This raised a red flag, so after further inspecting the site, and doing a background check on the url, the site was listed as a severe spam site.
Spammers are finding ways to get around the protections that we have deployed against them. Just like advances in guns have led to advances in bullet proofing, we too must remain on guard and protect our websites. I suggest to routinely check the links on your site using the backlink check tool found here.
I hear a lot of people say that they are unsure of how to deal with reporting spam. Some fear of spammer backlash, fearing that a spammer may personally identify a website and attack it in retaliation for their report. Although I believe it may be possible, and I do believe there may have been a few victims of this type of attack, the alternative is a loss of valuable time for you–if in case you have to check a large amount of links manually each day–as may be the case with more established blogs. In this case I would suggest trying out a spam filter. If your blog is hosted by a services such as word press, installing a spam filter will be easy to do. Otherwise, you may have your work cut out for you, but it should be worth your time. Using a spam filter will allow you to avoid reporting any spam, while still taking advantage of avoiding spam links on your site. You will still need to stay weary as new spammers are born each day, and they may get past your filters. If repeat offenders continue attacking your site, feel free to report them. They will likely be attacking several other sites too and will likely be expecting to be cited sooner or later anyways.
We hope this information is useful to you in your search for an optimized, high ranking website. Any other questions can be addressed here, or email us for more info. San Diego business owners, please visit our San Diego Web Design page and our San Diego SEO Homepage for more information.
How to Create an Optimized Keyword Campaign
Creating an optimized keyword campaign should be the first step in creating an internet marketing strategy. Depending on the competition, an optimized keyword campaign can be a very time consuming process. Selecting the correct keywords to shoot for has as much to do with traffic volume as it does with relevance to your business. Before you begin researching search terms, begin by first analyzing your company and services. You will need to assess what are your strengths, weaknesses and what you do different than your competitors. Write these down in 3 different lists and begin to study what trends begin to appear. You will begin to base your research on the trends that arise from these lists.
The reason for search term research is that it helps you to target the right type of traffic. By basing your keywords on your company strengths, you can begin to find out what type of visitor is ideal, what they are looking for, and what type of visitor is most likely to convert into a paying customer. Remember, it is not about how many people visit your site, it’s about how many people become customers. This area or research will help you to apply more direct keyword phrases that are most likely to help you convert customers than general terms or phrases. For example: A visitor searching for “apple Ipod 3g s cost” is most likely looking to buy an ipod as opposed to a visitor who is searching “apple ipod.” This is because the first person is already at the stage of looking for prices while the second visitor may be looking for general information.
Next, look at your second list with your company weaknesses. This will give you a choice to either try to improve on your weaknesses attracting new customers, or to avoid marketing to these customers and focus your attention elsewhere. If customers are currently turned away from your company due to your weak points, then don’t highlight them and focus on what you are good at. This train of thought will also help you to develop a profile for your “anti-client” this is the type of person you do not want to attract. They are the ones who may spend time on your site, but never convert into clients. Try to think of why this person may have stumbled upon your page and point your strategy away from this point. Sometimes finding the direction not to go, can point you to new paths. You may set up a list of keywords to avoid. These are the words your anti-client will likely search. Make sure to study these terms, and find out what nuances set these people apart. It may be that your “anti-client” may be looking for additional information that you can easily provide or they need a product that you don’t yet supply. Both of these circumstances can be fixed to increase your odds of conversion, but you must first find out if making changes to cater to these anti-clients is worth the effort and investment.
Begin your external research by looking at your competitors’ websites. Look at each page and find out what terms they are using. If a term appears more than 3 times in a page, chances are that this term is important and this is what they are shooting for. Try to build a list of these terms and study trends in between them. You can also look at the source code of the webpage directly from your browser window (In firefox, go to >view>page source). Towards the top of the code you will most likely find a <meta name = title>, <meta name=description>, and <meta name=keywords>. A well optimized site will have all 3. Read them and you can get a better idea of what keywords the website is optimizing for. Do this for all of your competitors and try Google searching some of these terms. Find out who is coming up on top and try to find out why.
Now it is time to begin your research for your own keywords. Now that you have a list of words not to use, words your competitors use, your weaknesses and your strengths, you can begin to develop a good plan. You will likely want to develop a plan that will simulate what your competitors are doing, but you want to do it better. Begin by entering a few popular keywords used by your competition into Google’s free keyword tool. This will give you the amount of people searching these terms per month, and will provide a lot of other related keywords. You can convert this list into an excel file in order to easily edit it. Repeat this process for all of your lists until you have 4 excel files. Then begin to eliminate words that are not specific to your market or are too general to be effective. Organize and lump your phrases together by similarity or subject. Then organize them by search volume. Words with a very high search volume will not work for organic optimization, but can work for your Adwords campaign. Words with very little volume may not be worth optimizing for unless they are very highly targeted for conversion, ie: “buy apple ipod 3g s”.
Now that you have a comprehensive set of lists, try to refine them more until you have about 3 key phrases per page on your website. These should be middle volume phrases that are highly targeted. These will be words that are going to be good candidates for organic search engine optimization. Remember to add the Google analytics code in your website in order to track your optimization efforts. It may take about 3 months to see organic results, and you can change out words that may not be working based on your analytics. Stick to the words on your list, and you will begin to see success. Make sure you incorporate these words into your titles, descriptions, alt tags, and headlines in addition to your content.
We hope you have found this information useful in creating your online marketing campaign. San Diego Pay Per Click Adwords clients have a great resource in Saba SEO. Be sure to follow our feed for frequent updates and for more useful information for all businesses.
San Diego Website Optimization Firm Going Strong
We wanted to take a short moment to thank our recent clients who have found success with Saba SEO. Our San Diego Search Engine Marketing Company is going strong and we are now accepting national clients in addition to the San Diego market. Although we stand in the midst of one of the worst financial crisis of our modern time, Saba SEO continues to push forward. Currently, we are well into one of our most successful quarters to date, and we are only halfway through it. This goes to show the success that is possible with internet marketing. Here at Saba, we continue to encourage San Diego and other national clients to experience the benefits that internet marketing has to offer. Internet marketing is the fastest way to grow your business period!
Don’t be left behind and begin looking forward, all businesses can benefit from some type of search engine optimization, Pay Per Click Adwords campaign, and affordable internet marketing. We offer plenty of package deals for businesses of all size and helpful information and resources for all businesses whether clients or not. We look forward to working with you on any project, large or small. Please give us a call today at 1-866-937-1717.
Protecting Your Company Brand on Social Media Websites
It seems that day to day, more and more people are using twitter and other social media websites to promote their brand and gain leverage in the marketplace. With greater volume, comes greater risks. Everyday, more and more people are falling victims of phishing and are having their accounts hijacked. Unless proper action is taken immediately to keep your social media accounts out of the hands of these identity kidnappers, your name brand can and most likely will be hurt in the process.
A company’s name brand consists of various pieces, just like a puzzle. These small pieces come together to build a whole image, the image that your market sees. Market perception is very important in a sea of competition. You have to work hard from the very start with a well defined marketing strategy that usually begins and end with branding. Every step you take for your company will have your branding strategy at top priority. This is why it is so important to understand who your market is, in order to know what message you want to put out, and what image you want to begin building for your company. After the hours and days, and weeks, and years of hard work that has come to include a good company name, logo, print collateral, commercials, videos, websites, P.R, etc; you want to protect it all from mis-management with a good security protocol, built from a solid online marketing strategy. The following are a few ideas to consider.
Social Media is a very strong tool for creating an image for your company. Once an online marketing campaign such as a twitter account is created, it should not be left as an after thought in your busy work day. Stay active by keeping your pages current with up to date information that your market wants, or can find useful. Routinely maintaining your account will allow you to easily spot any suspicious activity that may be taking place, which may be a sign that your password has been stolen.
Put someone important in charge who you trust. A social media campaign is an appendage to your company, and like a limb, it needs to be controlled by the same brain that controls the entire body. Have this person report either weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly to your management team with progress, leads, and visible trends in the market that can help upper management stay current and on top of the market. A social media campaign should not be something that is headed by your office intern. Rather, it should be headed by someone in your team with a good understanding of your company brand and has a vision for your company in the future. By keeping a long term vision in mind, you will be able to make sure your message will be leading you to the goal. A higher ranked employee will also have a higher sense of responsibility and will most likely do a better job. Ideally, it’s a good idea to have a full time marketing professional taking care of your social media. A good choice can also be to have a team work on your social media, but this will require oversight to make sure that not one individual is stepping outside of your carefully crafted marketing campaign.
Oversight of a Social Media Marketing Campaign will require the supervisor to routinely check each team member’s works, edit articles and blogs accordingly, to change passwords frequently, and a method of being alerted when something is fishy. This can be done with inter-office editing, where the members of your marketing team must approve each others’ works in a checks and balances system. A team also means more eyes that will be on the look out for potential fraud, but it also means that there are more people that can fall victim of fraud. Make sure your team knows the signs to look for.
The first sign that your accounts have been hijacked is seeing posts or comments on your account that you do not remember posting. You may also find that people in your network may tell you that there is funny business going on. You may log on to find that you have been steadily loosing friends or followers or you may not even be able to log on at all. If your network begins losing trust in you, your brand will have sustained damage, and people will begin to talk and spread negative messages about you. Scam artists are getting savy, and have been using many methods of getting your account. The most recent that I have encountered are twitter posts that entice you to click on a link, but the page will direct you to a fake login page that looks like the default log in page for your account and tells you that you need to log in again. This should be a red flag. You can believe that I deleted that person from my list. If you fall victim to this attack, change your password immediately to avoid being labeled as a spammer. Being Labeled as a Spammer can be detrimental to your image and can place you on several black list that are hard to be removed from. In the end you want to protect your brand, because it has value. Companies like Coca Cola have half of their company value in the name brand alone. You can believe they take their social media marketing seriously.
A good tool that I also recommend is to sign up for a Google alert that will send you an email when it spots your company name being mentioned somewhere online. It’s a good way of derailing attempts to discredit your brand by critics and a good way to keep your message targeted. By responding quickly to a critic’s remarks with sincerity, and taking responsibility when something potentially embarrassing is exposed, you will be seen as a transparent company with sincere regard for what your market is experiencing. By putting out the spark, you can prevent a fire.
We hope you have enjoyed these suggestions for resisting attacks on your company brand. If you want to get more useful information on helping your company grow, please check out our website Saba SEO and subscribe to our feed.
5 Tips: SEO Friendly Titles
How often do we come across websites that have the same title and descriptions on each and every page? The answer is….hardly. Although this mistake is seen all of the time by those of us who work on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for a living, those who are searching using search engines will unlikely find your site unless you are spending tons of money on your adword campaign. If you have 5 pages in your website, and each has the same title and description, you are loosing out in 80% of market visibility. Not only is variety important to attract as many potential customers as possible, adding variety to your web page is very easy and it can make your website rise in ranks. The following are 5 tips to help you add variety to your website through effective title and description implementation.
1. First things first, Google and other search engines hate repeat information. Repeat information tells search engines that your site may be a spam site since your descriptions may not coincide with the information provided in each page. You will effectively drop in ranks quickly if you do not solve this issue immediately. Remember that dropping in ranks is a lot easier than rising in them. This not only applies to your head tags such as your title and descriptions, but also affects your content as well. Look through your site and find which pages look like mirrors of each other, which pages can be deleted, and which can have more variety added to make them unique.
2. If you are working with a template, be effective in how you add your head tags. Be sure your title and descriptions are enclosed inside of an editable region, otherwise, your title and description will not only repeat throughout your site, but you will have a tough time editing them in the future without making a change in your template code, then still having to go back through each page and making the required changes.
3. Your choice of Titles and descriptions should be complimented with keyword research which you can easily do using Google’s free keyword tool. Make sure you incorporate your keywords inside of your title and description and yes….your content too. Be sure to practice good judgment when selecting keywords to make sure you don’t pick overly-competitive keywords. Although they may work well with your adword campaign, very competitive keywords should be avoided for organic results. Otherwise, ranking on the first few pages of a search engine result will be close to impossible.
4. Target a different search terms for each page. People don’t always land on your home page. This means you should consider each page in your website as a landing page and provide content accordingly. You want to give them a short overall idea of what your company is about, providing a link to your home page in case they want to read more about it, but focus the bulk of your content to the search at hand. You want to your visitor’s search relevant. If they are searching for “liposuction medical procedures,” they want to read about “liposuction medical procedures.” Adding content that they can find in other places of your site may confuse them and they may loose interest.
5. Don’t repeat your company name on your titles unless your company name utilizes searchable key terms. Your titles are amongst the most important tool used by search engines to find your site, so do not fill them with needless information. Rather choose brief statements that have your keywords incorporated, and that have an enticing marketing message that will make a reader want to click on your site. Unless you are a big, and highly recognized company, chances are that most searchers will not be searching for your company name.
We hope you find these 5 tips useful in your pursuit of an optimized website. Read through the rest of the blogs for more useful tips and remember to subscribe to our feed. If you found this useful and would like to see more useful tips and tricks, please leave us a comment or visit our San Diego SEO homepage.