Category: SEO

Explore our library of search engine optimization articles and discover the SEO tips you need to boost organic rankings and traffic.

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SEO Social Media

Organic Search and Social Networking – The Great Crossover

Not long ago, there was a clear separation between organic search results and social media channels. Recently, that has changed dramatically. The line that used to separate these two online elements has become blurred.

Google’s very advanced algorithms are picking up on what we call “Social Signals” and those signals are impacting organic search results and rankings.

This all started with Google + and has now bled into Facebook, Twitter and various other social media channels. The basic theory is this:

If your friends like something, you will probably like it too – makes sense right?

At Sachs Marketing Group, we do our best to capitalize on this concept and we wanted to share with our clients and site visitors what we have been doing that seems to be working well:

1. We conduct detailed research into our clients’ audience – the people who are listening. We learn who they are, where they are and why they are listening. If we can determine what they like, we are better able to give it to them!

2. We identify the people who are influencing the topics in our clients’ industries and follow them on social media channels. We also follow the people who follow these influencers. Finally, we follow the people whom these influencers are following. We do our best to get all of these people to follow us.

3. We design and implement apps on Facebook. These apps are designed to engage our clients’ fan-base. Our apps provide a platform for us to run contests, sweepstakes, group coupons and other incentive-type elements that encourage people to share our content on their personal social media platforms. We also share white papers, informative lists and other content that we believe our clients’ audience will find useful, interesting and relevant.

4. We integrate a social media analytics platform into our administration of social networking campaigns for our clients. This allows us to determine how often our Facebook posts and Twitter “tweets” are being shared, re-posted, liked, favorited and clicked. We use Bufferapp.com for this process. We track our progress and try to capitalize on any trends that become evident to us.

All of these efforts are aimed at leveraging the tremendous power of social networking, sharing and social signals.

 

Categories
Digital Marketing SEO

Are search engines being fair to e-commerce websites?

Curated content

There is a very unique consideration specific to e-commerce websites that could dramatically impact their ability to rank well in search engine result pages:  Curated Content.

Lets say you have an e-commerce website and you sell a particular line of clothing as an authorized re-seller.  The clothing manufacturer will almost always provide you their approved product images and product descriptions to use on your website.

The Problem:

In many cases, the product descriptions provided are the exact same product descriptions that appear on thousands of other websites in the same market.  All of the other authorized re-sellers (your competitors) use the exact same content provided by the clothing manufacturer.  In fact, assuming the clothing manufacturer has a retail website of their own, they themselves are using the exact same product descriptions on their site.  As a result, there tends to be TONS of duplicated content on the web in the form of product descriptions that have been “curated” from the manufacturer.  There is a universally accepted assumption that search engines do not want duplicated content in their index.  In some cases, search engines even consider duplicate content a form of plagiarism (it’s an ugly word).

The Solution:

To avoid having this issue negatively impact your organic rankings, we suggest you re-write ALL of the product descriptions on your website.  The product descriptions need to be original content written by someone who knows the products intimately.  Depending on the number of products offered this might be a very large job.  We believe that if you elect to implement this change, you should enjoy some very tangible benefits:

1.  Once the new content is posted, your organic rankings should improve considerably.  Once the search engines crawl and index the new product descriptions, they should remove any penalties they may currently be imposing.  We believe you should see a jump in rankings once this is indexing process has occurred.

2.  There is a concept in marketing (all marketing) referred to as “noise.”  Noise can be defined as a lack of differentiation in a saturated market.  Doing something other than what the vast majority of your competitors are doing will help your website to standout and be noticed.  Re-writing your product descriptions in a way that differentiates your company from all the other e-commerce sites that are selling the same products, should help you to build name recognition, build your brand and convert more visitors to sales.

Please feel free to comment on this post and share with our visitors how re-writing your product descriptions have impacted your organic rankings.

Categories
SEO

seo tip 3

You do not need to submit your website to Google to get it indexed. Google’s bots are continually crawling the web and a new website will typically get indexed within about a week. If you site has been live for many weeks and is not yet indexed by Google, make sure you don’t have any robots.txt files in your site’s code that are preventing your website from being indexed by search engines.

Categories
SEO

SEO Tips 2

Commenting on blogs or forums is not an effective link-building effort. Most blogs will add the nofollow HTML tag which blocks the passage of trustrank. Google likely de-emphasizes comment links because non-moderated comments are not under the direct control of the website owner – they are created by the same people who are hoping to gain from their existence! Comment linking is essentially comment spamming. Steer clear of SEO companies offering comment links.

Categories
Digital Marketing SEO

Do Exit Pops Hurt SEO?

The question has come up, more than a few times: Do exit pops hurt SEO efforts?

As far as we know, there are basically two different types of exit pops:

1. Javascript exit pops that trigger when a visitor closes a window or tab. The Java traps the window and prevents the visitor from going back or doing whatever they intended to do. Google frowns on this method because they consider it manipulation of bounce rate. Since Google has manual reviewers (live people who visit websites) as well as bots that checks the code on websites, you run the risk of being “dinged” organically while running an exit pop.

2. A lightbox window exit pop. This window comes up when a visitor mouses-over a hidden, 1px line at the top of the browser’s window, just under the toolbar. This code captures the visitors intent to click the back button or close the tab or window as they move their mouse over the toolbar. This type of exit pop garners the same result as the Javascript method but doesn’t take control of the visitor’s browser – they can still click the back button if they don’t like whatever you are offering in your lightbox window.

The 2nd method above is safer from an SEO perspective. The fact is, exit pops were never meant to compliment SEO and probably hurt more than they help.

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