How Social Signals Impact Search Engine Rankings

Courtesy of: Quick Sprout

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5 Essential Elements For Mobile SEO Success in 2014

SEO or Search Engine Optimization seems to be the buzzword of the moment and all leading business houses and entrepreneurs have very well realized how important SEO is in today’s time when almost an entire generation is living off the internet.

There is a plethora of varied ways in which SEO aids the promotion and growth of a business and with every passing year new ways have been making there presence felt in the center stage.  The year of 2014 seems to be that of Mobile SEO and businesses which want to make it big in this era of digitalization and mobile phones needs to adhere to Mobile SEO without a shred of doubt. At the end of last year, several SEO pundits have outlined a few essential elements which will be the key to Mobile SEO success this year. These elements are as follows:

1. Emphasis on mobile user experience- for a successful Mobile SEO strategy it is of crucial importance that the experience of the mobile user is enhanced. It is important to engage a visitor in order to heighten the conversion rate and a visitor will only be engaged if superior user experience is offered.
2. Mobile friendly website- for the success of Mobile SEO strategy it is extremely necessary to have a website which is mobile friendly. If a business wants to keep their visitors engaged even while they are on the go then it is important to have a responsive or dedicated website that can be easily viewed on mobile phones.
3. Increasing page loading speed- According to Google, average loading of mobile website pages take 7 seconds and this hampers the experience of the mobile users. Google has said that to offer optimal experience to the users, the loading of a page should take 1 second or less. So, businesses while designing their mobile websites should ensure that the pages load in a jiffy.
4. Clean designs with emphasis on usability- The design of a website and how easily are users able to navigate through it plays an important role in determining whether it will be able to engage the visitors or not. So, the website should have a clean and soothing-to-the-eye design with pages offering information in simple and intuitive format. Clear calls-to action and big buttons are a must and design elements which are unnecessary should be eliminated. It should always be ‘usability trumps designs’ when it comes to mobile websites.
5. Understanding mobile user intent- Now that Google has introduced the Hummingbird algorithm, it is important for entrepreneurs to understand the intent of mobile users, voice search and conversational search queries to outline a successful Mobile SEO strategy.  Understanding the intent of the mobile users will help the businesses to enhance their conversion rates.

Check the video by MOZ on this TOPIC:

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Best Way to Build Links for your Website in 2014

A chaos is in SEO WORLD after the recent updates by Google where they have penalized those website which didn't followed their guidelines and were engaged in manipulative Link Schemes

Some of the webmaster thinks that Link building is Dead whereas some are using the same old tactics of Link Building which were used before the Panda. Well, I would say that Link building is NOT dead and is more active then it was earlier. The difference same down in the process of link building , after each and every update Google checks some websites and links and removes them from SERPs , but this time they have launched a very well dimensional Algorithm which crack down several activities and gives worth and rankings to those website which caters to users requirements and is free from all type of link schemes.

Currently , I have also observed that some webmasters are using the same old process of posting blogs on free websites for the sake of generating link but gone are the days where search engines were only acting for the no. of back links generated. Presently, what more plays into role is the quality and in context the link is coming. The art of Link Building is now more unique and highly specialized.

Brief : Link Building is still one of the most important factor to get more visibility on Search Engines. Social Media and authorship may impact SERPs in future but not significantly in 2014

Safest Way to Build Links:

• Focus on Links from the Editorial Sections 
• Few and Quality links from Trust worthy sites
• The links should come from the same topic related website
• The keyword linked should be related to the topic on the page
• The goal should be to increase the Traffic, leads and revenue
• Should be active on Social Media for Human Intervene 
• Make video- highlight the problems and solutions of the subject of the website
• Try to get links from difficult sources like dMoz, New York Times. The links which are difficult to get are incredibly ideal
• Check out the link Profiles of the competitors
• Create High quality content for your website

Avoid the Following Link Building Ways:

• Check out the Google Link Schemes for details

Conclusion : The most important thing in SEO now is Human Intervene and Google gives the rankings and value according to it , so we should focus on USER FRIENDLY , CONTENT RICH and INFORMATIONAL Websites and build NATURAL LINKS.

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The Basics of link building in 2014

So you must be thinking that if SEO is DEAD then what is the use of Link Building? But,is it so ? What I had observed is that SEO is now more active and more powerful than previous years.

Now we have to agree that the art of Link building is not mere a job of SPAMMERS and those who just do linking to other websites, make new blogs on various free blogging websites etc. for the sake of getting links. Gone are the days for such link building tactics . Let's face it Link building isn't Fun or Sexy now!

Neither SEO nor Link building is DEAD. The reality is that Link building is the best way to improve the visibility in SERPs in 2014. Google's own Matt Cutts confirmed the same in an interview 
Eric Enge: There are people who think link building is illegal now. Is link building illegal?
Matt Cutts: No, link building is not illegal.
Eric Enge: Really?
Matt Cutts: It’s funny because there are some types of link building that are illegal, but it’s very clear-cut: hacking blogs, that sort of thing is illegal.
Eric Enge: Of course, people are using the term illegal in an imprecise way. So don’t be literal as an engineer with me now. They’re thinking that Google says all link building is bad.

“No, not all link building is bad.”

Matt Cutts: No, not all link building is bad. The philosophy that we’ve always had is if you make something that’s compelling then it would be much easier to get people to write about it and to link to it. And so a lot of people approach it from a direction that’s backwards. They try to get the links first and then they want to be grandfathered in or think they will be a successful website as a result.
Their goal should really be to make a fantastic website that people love and tell their friends about and link to and want to experience. As a result, your website starts to become stronger and stronger in the rankings.
Eric Enge: I always liken this to doing marketing the way it used to be done, right? Businesses always tried to create the best product, the best value, of the best something. Then they would find a way to promote it. Then promotion becomes easy. For example, you can even do a press release and it may well attract attention and cause people to write about it.
Matt Cutts: Right. So the link from a press release will probably not count, but if that press release convinces an editor or a reporter to write a story about it, and that’s an editorial decision, then if that newspaper links to your website as a result of that editorial decision to write a story, it doesn’t matter whether it started or was sparked by a press release or it was started by an email that you sent. It’s still someone making a decision to cover it.

“… it is true that a lot of SEO is now circling back around to good old fashioned marketing.”

Going back to something that you said before we started the interview, a lot of SEO has been focused on technical matters and very highly specific ways to configure your website and stuff like that. There are best practices, and you need to make sure you get the basics right, but it is true that a lot of SEO is now circling back around to good old fashioned marketing.
There are lots of ways to do marketing and do it well; there are lots of different ways to get peoples’ attention and to get traction. And the more creative you are or the better the experience is with your website, the more likely you are to be successful. But in a lot of ways, if you think like a good marketer and think about what will appeal to people, you will find your job as an SEO and getting links or trying to build your links will be easier as well.
Eric Enge: One great way to build links in my vision is to build strong Twitter, Facebook, Google+ presences. Build strong, engaged, followings and then create great content and you push that out and then that audience will likely share it, and start doing other things that cause visibility and help it rank. That’s a cool way to do link building.

Matt Cutts: Absolutely, I completely agree. If you take that big picture view in which you’re really doing marketing, one of the ways to get the word out is to have a devoted following. Musicians could have a mailing list or people could follow you on Twitter or Facebook or Google+ or any social outlet.
I firmly support the idea that people should have a diversified way of reaching their audience. So if you rely only on Google, that might not be as strong of an approach compared to having a wide variety of different avenues by which you can reach people and drive them to your website or whatever your objective is.
Eric Enge: Yes, and as you said in our last interview before this one:

“By doing things that help build your own reputation, you are focusing on the right types of activity. Those are the signals we want to find and value the most anyway.”

You can argue about how good Google is about detecting a particular signal today, or whether a given signal is noisy or not, but over time Google’s capabilities in these areas will continue to get better and better.

“There are certainly people who are widely known on the web, who have a great reputation, who are experts, who are authorities, who everybody listens to or trusts.”

Matt Cutts: It’s definitely the case that we will improve over time at assessing the authority and reputation and all those characteristics of authors and people in general and people on the web. There are certainly people who are widely known on the web, who have a great reputation, who are experts, who are authorities, who everybody listens to or trusts.
Somebody like Nate Silver for example who talks about elections. If he talks about elections, you want to take what he says seriously. You might disagree with him, but you’ll probably pay attention to it.
There’s the same sort of thing with, for example Danny Sullivan on search engines. You want to be one of those people because that’s useful in and of itself, and over time you can certainly expect that search engines will try and do a better job of saying this person or this website is an authority on this topic and therefore when they write about it, it’s something that users are more likely to be interested in.
Eric Enge: Another concept is the notion of syndicating great content. There are many different ways to do that. You can take content that you’ve published on your own website, and you can distribute that, which has its own issues. Some businesses have really strong fundamental reasons for doing that.
I know one business that has a massive content syndication deal with Yahoo! for example and they get more traffic from their syndication than they do from search. But it turns out they have the same content on their site as well.

This notion of syndicating great content seems to be another very valid way of building links, particularly if you’re getting on authoritative sites.
Matt Cutts: Syndication can be a valid way to either increase your reputation or to drive traffic and potentially to get more links. The main caution that I would add is that there are some mechanical things that you should pay attention to and try to make sure that you get right.

“So if you are also publishing the article on your site, you want to try and do these mechanical things so you are still seen as the original author.”

Things like rel=canonical help. Embedding a link within the text of the article itself never hurts. Ideally, you’d want to insist on some sort of attribution on the syndicated page. You can use authorship markup. So if you are also publishing the article on your site, you want to try and do these mechanical things so you are still seen as the original author.
Or, see if you can make sure that the article publishes first on your website. Give it a few hours or days or however much of a window you can, and then syndicate it onto another site. If you think about it, search engines are not psychic. They have to use signals and heuristics to make their best guess about what the best website is or who wrote content in the first place.

“The more signals or hints or indications you can give us, the easier job it will be for search engines to make sure that the attribution and the reputation flow in the correct direction so that you enjoy the benefits of syndication but you also do well on search.”

The more signals or hints or indications you can give us, the easier job it will be for search engines to make sure that the attribution and the reputation flow in the correct direction so that you enjoy the benefits of syndication but you also do well on search.
Eric Enge: Right. Of course, a much cleaner way of dealing with this, is to create content for syndication and not publish it on your own site. You can have a simple one page piece of content that lists key resources for people looking for information on a specific topic.
Another very popular tactic that people like to use is guest posting. Frankly though, more often than not, when I see guest posting, it’s actually not good stuff. But, I would say that creating a very high-quality article and getting it published on a truly authoritative site that has a lot of editorial judgment is still a good thing.
Matt Cutts: Those are certainly good criteria to keep in mind. The challenge with guest posting is that people have different conceptions about what it means. And so for a lot of people, a guest post is something that a fantastic author has thought deeply about, labored over, polished, put a lot of work into and then publishes on a highly reputable domain name.
Posts like that can be a great way to get your name out there, to build your reputation, to make yourself more well-known, potentially build links or traffic or help with your SEO.
The problem is that if we look at the overall volume of guest posting we see a large number of people who are offering guest blogs or guest blog articles where they are writing the same article and producing multiple copies of it and emailing out of the blue and they will create the same low quality types of articles that people used to put on article directory or article bank sites.

paper writings

“If people just move away from doing article banks or article directories or article marketing to guest blogging and they don’t raise their quality thresholds for the content, then that can cause problems.”

If people just move away from doing article banks or article directories or article marketing to guest blogging and they don’t raise their quality thresholds for the content, then that can cause problems. On one hand, it’s an opportunity. On the other hand, we don’t want people to think guest blogging is the panacea that will solve all their problems.
Eric Enge: In the opposite direction, when I advise people on how to accept a guest post, I give very simple criteria. First, I want them to really only work with people who have really strong social presences because it’s a measure of what they’ve done to build their authority.
And then the metric that I give them is if you have to ask them to share it on their social sites, then you don’t want the article, because that means they’re there to trade on your authority rather than they gave you their best stuff.
Matt Cutts: That’s a good way to look at it. There might be other criteria too, but certainly if someone is proud to share it, that’s a big difference than if you’re pushing them to share it.
Eric Enge: Of course, it is important to look at this in the other direction in guest posting. You should only submit articles where the quality is high enough, and the site it is going on is authoritative enough that you would be proud to share it on your own social media accounts.
There’s also the notion of giving and getting interviews. If you are able to interview people with recognized authority and publish that on your own site, that’s good content. It’s also great if you can get interviewed by people, and have that published on their site with a link back to yours. Those would seem like very good signals as well. Of course, the quality of the content matters, and where it is published counts for a lot here too.

“… interviews can be a fantastic way to build awareness of your brand and to generate and distribute insights.”

Matt Cutts: Yes, absolutely. It’s interesting that you mentioned that because interviews can be a fantastic way to build awareness of your brand and to generate and distribute insights. It’s funny because if you think about it, the entire podcasting industry is often based around this idea of doing interviews or even just people in conversations.
Somebody like Kevin Smith has something he calls the SModcast which is just him talking with friends. He has been able to more or less make a living at just doing tours where he goes around and does his SModcast in an auditorium.
Criteria that come to mind are, “who are you talking to?”, or “how interesting is the conversation”? The beauty of an interview or a podcast for something like that is if you’re not interesting, people won’t tune in. Or they might tune in at first but they’ll tune out. It’s a self-limiting phenomenon. You can’t just do interviews with everybody forever if you’re always giving or getting boring interviews.

There’s a little bit of reinforcement that helps force you to either be interesting or say interesting things or think hard about how to make something compelling.
Eric Enge: You’ve had rel=author tagging for a while and people talk a lot about author rank or author authority. You made a comment back in October that:

“I think if you look further out in the future and look at something that we call social signals or authorship or whatever you want to call it, in ten years, I think knowing that a really reputable guy – if Dan has written an article, whether it’s a comment on a forum or on a blog – I would still want to see that. So that’s the long-term trend.”

Similarly Eric Schmidt said in the New Digital Age:

“Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.”

Basically, as an author you should think about how you develop and build your authority. You should measure things to see how you are doing. Some ideas for this are:

• How much engagement does your content get?
• Try to develop relationships so you can post on authoritative sites.
• The inverse is true too, don’t publish on crappy sites.

Where you write, and who you’re trying to address, I would argue, is as important as what content you contribute.

“… you make a very good point that the outlets and the responsiveness of those outlets is a good way to get an idea of how other people think about you.”

Matt Cutts: While it remains the case that you always want to think about what you’re saying and make sure that that’s interesting and of use to people, you make a very good point that the outlets and the responsiveness of those outlets is a good way to get an idea of how other people think about you.
Just to switch to an analogy from email, Google has something called a priority inbox and we look at things like how often you reply to people and how fast you reply, versus do you always archive something, an email that somebody sent, or never even read it.
The priority inbox can start to get an idea of what is important to you. It might not know that this person is your boss, but it sees that you always respond within 5 minutes. It takes some of those signals and ends up with a pretty good assessment of which emails really matter.
You really want to think about, how do I make sure that in an SEO sense, I’m in somebody’s priority inbox? That I matter to them? That I’m relevant to them? That I can give them something of use? That they find me of value?
If those are the sorts of things you’re thinking about, that will be really useful because you’ll tend not to bore people or be pushing for favors when people are a little leery of doing that. That can be a good attitude to approaching life in general. How can you add value to anybody else’s life?
Eric Enge: Do you still believe that these types of considerations, i.e. the authority that people demonstrate online, will become a ranking factor?
Matt Cutts: I would concentrate on the stuff that people write, the utility that people find in it, and the amount of times that people link to it. All of those are ways that implicitly measure how relevant or important somebody is to someone else.

“Links are still the best way that we’ve found to discover that, and maybe over time social or authorship or other types of markup will give us a lot more information about that.”

Links are still the best way that we’ve found to discover that, and maybe over time social or authorship or other types of markup will give us a lot more information about that.
We’ll always keep chasing after the ideal world in which the search engines do what you would intuitively expect and bring you the best answer, whether it be from someone who is a friend of yours or someone who is an expert in the field or some completely different serendipitous author or person that you didn’t know about before, but they can really help with the information you need at that moment.
Eric Enge: Right. So as always we could speculate until we’re blue in the face as to what signals are driving ranking at the moment, but you shouldn’t necessarily get so wrapped up in that as monitoring the signals yourself to see whether or not you’re getting good reinforcement for what you’re doing.
Matt Cutts: Yes. If your emails are getting replies, if people are replying to you on Twitter or Facebook, if you’re getting good traction on your endeavors, that usually means you’re moving in the right direction. If people suddenly go radio silent or you’re not getting traction, that’s a good time to step back and do an assessment and see if there’s something that’s missing in your approach or something that you could hone in order to resonate with your audience.
Eric Enge: Right. So even if you are currently tracking signals that matter not at all to Google, but they’re really strong signals of the degree that you matter to people, you’re probably also sending off the signals that Google does take into consideration.
Matt Cutts: That’s a reasonable way to look at it. If you’re always trying new things, whatever your criteria is, and if you’re making forward progress on those goals, you’re often showing the signs of making progress in other areas well. It wouldn’t surprise me if in the process of setting and making progress on and achieving your goals you end up also getting traction, reputation as a person, as an individual, as an author, as an expert, as someone on the web and potentially someone in search engines as well.
Eric Enge: Thank you, Matt.
Matt Cutts: Always fun to talk.

About Matt

Matt Cutts joined Google as a Software Engineer in January 2000. Before Google, he was working on his Ph.D. in computer graphics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has an M.S. from UNC-Chapel Hill, and B.S. degrees in both mathematics and computer science from the University of Kentucky.
Matt wrote SafeSearch, which is Google’s family filter. In addition to his experience at Google, Matt held a top-secret clearance while working for the Department of Defense, and he’s also worked at a game engine company. He claims that Google is the most fun by far.
Matt currently heads up the Webspam team for Google. Matt talks about webmaster-related issues on his blog.

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The recap of 2013 – in Social Media

The year 2013 passed by and has left behind many issues in social media.

Let us look at the different changes that have happened in the arena of social media during the year 2013

There are various things that happened are:

• Google and Face Book’s offer was turned down by Snap Chat. The offer was about $4 Billion
• The annoyances regarding updates in were solved by the rolling out of I0S7 by Apple
• Oxford dictionary announced Selfie as an official word
• Out of 5 people 1 people have a smart phone in 2013.
• Face Book changed its algorithm which helped to display more links in articles, which helped Face Book to get high quality
• Face Book allowed consumers to embed Face Book posts into their own sites and blogs 
• Twitter launched Vine which gave access to users to create videos of 6 seconds
• Facebook on the other hand launched Instagram which will allow users to develop videos of 10 seconds
• Google finally merged YouTube and Google Plus

These are the features that happened in the field of social media during 2013. These changes brought us to a new horizon in the beginning of 2014. So, we can expect various things to happen in 2014 like:

• Social media will become a necessity for all. As users of Face Book and mobiles increases so does the importance of social media. 
• People who have websites need to configure it in such a way that it is mobile friendly. If not those will be missed around 20% of visitors, who are the objectives of websites

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2014: Make way for the Effective Content Marketer

A content marketer is entrusted with the responsibility of creating content that is targeted at the right audience, and that helps in making the right noises thereby translating into successful and favorable customer action. It differs from regular marketing primarily in terms of the reaction or action it elicits from customers.

Since it has very successfully helped in elucidating a particular topic by providing information that is at the same time relevant and valuable, this form of marketing is always met with a favorable response from prospective customers. In fact, to put it bluntly, the year 2013 witnessed a complete whitewash of all other forms of marketing and it is for this very reason that marketing pundits aver that content marketing will dictate over all forms of marketing in the days to come and it is definitely here to stay.

The year that was: 2013

There were some definite trends that came into play in the content marketing space in the year gone by. The year 2013 witnessed a sharp increase in the number of tactics used to attract the target audience. There was also a definite swing towards community driven content that's found pride of place in almost all social networking sites. But most importantly, it saw an increase in the budget allocated to content marketing, which only goes on to show that the year 2013 was a watershed year for content marketing and content marketers. With content marketers adopting newer and better techniques to lure in customers, the year ahead looks pretty promising too.

The year that will be: 2014

• Market watchers predict that the year 2014 will see unprecedented development in the content marketing front with some analysts even going so far as to predict that in 2014, large organizations will devote entire departments to content development and marketing
• Furthermore, since content marketing is aimed at attracting the attention of information hungry consumers and for providing instant gratification, the coming year will place more importance on ROI from content marketers than ever before.

Content marketing has been always about what the audience wanted but now it is about what the search engines are looking for. Give your content a touch of quality, dash of personality and most importantly the ability to engage the customers.

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State of Social Media in 2013

The State of Social Media 2013 by Infographic Promotion

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