The success of your website depends on a steady stream of relevant traffic to your site. Once you have the potential customers on your page, you need to keep them there for at least 2 minutes to increase your existing search results in Google. Here are some sweet and easy tips to help increase your website views.
Design each page within your website with a single goal or purpose in mind.
Have your contact information clearly posted on every page of your website.
List testimonials in a prominent location of your site.
Have clear photos of your products and services.
Post useful content every week on your blog.
Share your content on popular networks.
Learn more free marketing tips on how to increase sales on your website here.
Internet marketing is the single most important strategy a business should focus on. Most small business treat their website as if it were an online brochure, which is a huge mistake. I have put together 40 Top Marketing Tactics that -will increase the success of your website.
# 1 Sandy Rowley – Reno SEO Expert @ RenoWebDesigner.com
“Place a strong call to action on every page of your website. The ideal place to put this call to action is either top center or top right side of your website. AmericanExpress.com has a good example of a strong call to action on their site. Another good idea is to have your photo, name, phone number, address in these areas making it easy for your website viewers to get in touch with you.”
#2 Blogging Marketing Expert @ AllyssaBarnes.com
” Adding a SEARCH BAR to your website. Even the most organized sites can benefit from a search bar. While a well thought out category and tag system is essential, sometimes it’s just quicker to find what you want via a search bar. If you’re making your site visitors scan through tons of pages just to find what they want, then you’re doing it wrong. As I said earlier, people are lazy. Placing a search bar somewhere at the top of your site will allow people to quickly and easily search your site content.”
# 3 Michael Donlop – Internet Marketing Blogger at INCOME
“Facebook, Twitter & pinterest.com. Pick one and dominate it, stop sucking at all 3. Or alternatively hire someone to look after your social media and make them responsible for the outcome.”
“A Great Theme is key to a successful website. The first step to a successful website is in having a great theme. Now, with this, you can either choose to use a ‘stock’ theme and tweak it to the way you want it to look or use a professional developer to develop a theme for you.
In the past, I tended to go for option one since it was a lot cheaper as stock themes tended to be free. However, I wasted a huge amount of time trying to tweak themes and trying to learn coding in order to tweak the themes the way I wanted them to look. Long story short is that it really did not work out. Therefore, although it is going to initially cost you more to begin with, hiring a professional or buying a professional theme is the best way to go and it is the way successful websites will tend to go down too.”
# 5 Highwaymanfecitmmx D Bnonn Tennant
Te Awamutu 3800, New Zealand
“If a site omits these, it’s going to struggle:
a compelling headline,
engrossing copy,
and a clear call to action.
And if you’re considering hiring a web designer whose own site omits these, look elsewhere. You can have the most stunning visual style in the world; the slickest effects; the most user-friendly forms and who knows what else—but with the hammer falling empty on those first three chambers, your site isn’t going to be hitting anything.”
The Internet is cluttered with information overload. Online users are bombarded daily with too much information, sometimes, in a very messy way. Offering a company website that is well laid out, simple to navigate, and easy to read can go a long way in creating a positive experience for online visitors.
Jakob Nielsen, a guru on website usability, explains, “The average page visit lasts a little less than a minute. As users rush through Web pages, they have time to read only a quarter of the text on the pages they actually visit (let alone all those they don’t). So, unless your writing is extraordinarily clear and focused, little of what you say on your website will get through to customers.”
“Do you have a good giveaway? Are you building your email list? It is pointless for you to get more traffic and to be marketing a blog that doesn’t have a good giveaway. That speaks to your target market and offers them something that they actually want. The number one source of our traffic, this is a little secret, the number one source of our traffic is traffic that we own which is our email list. Now a lot of people don’t understand that because they’re constantly looking for new traffic from different places. Our number one source of traffic is our own traffic, it is the email list that we’ve built and when we do a new blog post we send it to that email list to let them know that we have a new blog post and they click it and they check it out.
In the video on my website above, I share several tips around marketing your blog and creating that profitable lead-generating website you have always wanted!”
# 8
Hi! I’m Jim Connolly and I help small business owners to make more sales, boost their profits and build amazing businesses. You can find out more here.
Offer flexible payment options
“I’m often amazed at the limited payment options offered by small businesses. A lack of flexible payment alternatives, means those businesses are leaving money on the table. Worst of all, it’s totally avoidable.
Thanks to services like PayPal, it has never been easier for small business owners to accept payment via credit card, debit card and charge cards. If you factor the payment fees into your prices correctly, all those additional transactions needn’t cost you a penny.”
Social media giveaways are great social media campaign ideas if you are looking to increase engagement and get more followers. Just make sure that what is being given away is related to your business. You want entrants to be interested in your business, so that any followers or engagers you get from the campaign can also be potential leads.
Instagram Giveaways
There are different ways to get entrants for giveaways. For example, on Instagram, users can enter by following your account and liking your post, or reposting it with a custom hashtag. Another way users can enter an Instagram giveaway is by tagging another user in the comment section of the contest photo.
Facebook Giveaways
On Facebook, you could create a post for contest to your business page, and have users enter by liking and commenting on that post. Or, you could ask a question in your post, and users could enter by answering the question in the comments.
If you are asking a question, it’s a good idea to ask a question that has something to do with your services or your audience’s preferences. This way, entries can provide you with feedback about your services or insights about your target audience.
Our job as consultants is actually simple. I use a very simple hack to better understand my job, whenever I start working on a new campaign. I just ask myself these 2 questions:
What’s the goal? – having goals make it easier to have effective and aligned action plans
What’s the problem? – knowing the problem allows you to come up with appropriate solutions
Essentially, what we do is we constantly find problems to solve. And you won’t be able to come up with the right solutions when you don’t have the knowledge. Our service heavily relies on knowledge. And that’s what’s in between the goal and the action, and the problem and the solution.
With the right knowledge, it’ll be a lot easier to determine the areas of your campaign that will yield more results (prioritization).
While “if you build it they will come” is a great line from a movie, it’s a terrible marketing plan. To succeed on the Internet today, you have to create content that ignites and engages an audience. However, if you are a new blogger, you should probably spend more time developing an audience than creating your content.
Here are three easy but overlooked tactics you can use to build an audience on Twitter, which is arguably the best platform for this.
Once you’ve been on Twitter for a while, you’ll notice people will place you on public Twitter lists. Lists are generally categorized by a special interest or geographic location. For example, I might be on lists for “marketing experts,” “bloggers” or “business educators.” Find a relevant person to follow, and then dig into his or her lists. You’ll likely find a goldmine of interesting people to follow who will hopefully follow you back.
Jodie King is the Head of Operations at SEO Traffic Lab – a digital marketing agency with the full spectrum of services from web development through to SEO, PPC, content marketing, social media management and email marketing.
Jodie received her Bachelor’s degree in English and Heritage Studies. She currently blogs for clients and also has her own fitness blog on Vertical Fitness, Gainsborough which she struggles to find enough time for.
Jodie enjoys doing boxing, pole dancing, and scuba diving whenever she gets the chance. In this interview, you’ll learn more about her, how she works, as well as some some practical content marketing advice.
Identify Business Goals
# 12 By Houssem Daoud
Every piece of your social media strategy serves the goals you set. You simply can’t move forward without knowing what you’re working toward.1
Look closely at your company’s overall needs and decide how you want to use social media to contribute to reaching them.
You’ll undoubtedly come up with several personalized goals, but there are a few that all companies should include in their strategy—increasing brand awareness, retaining customers and reducing marketing costs are relevant to everyone.
# 13 Choose Channels and Tactics
By Houssem Daoud
Many businesses create accounts on every popular social network without researching which platform will bring the most return. You can avoid wasting your time in the wrong place by using the information from your buyer personas to determine which platform is best for you.
If your prospects or customers tell you they spend 40% of their online time on Facebookand 20% on Twitter, you know which primary and secondary social networks you should focus on.
When your customers are using a specific network, that’s where you need to be—not everywhere else.
Your tactics for each social channel rely on your goals and objectives, as well as the best practices of each platform.
We’ve experimented with lots of different content marketing methods at Buffer, so I wanted to share with you 9 of the best ways we’ve found to increase engagement and improve your content strategy.
Especially after launching Buffer for Business recently, a lot of business approached us, asking which practical tips we had for them to improve their social media and content marketing.
So here are our best and most practical ways to see a big impact from your actions on social media
People have enough stuff, but they don’t have enough meaning. – Seth Godin
Once you’ve got a groundwork in place, set some goals. Why you do what you do, combined with what goals you want to achieve, will help you flesh out your strategy.
So let’s say you’re a photographer. Your goals are to hit 2,000 Instagram followers and sell 100 prints by the end of the year. If that’s the case, it probably makes sense to spend a lot more time on Instagram, rather than posting up flyers around town. You should spend your time writing blog posts (and great product descriptions) that tell the stories behind the images you’re selling, not buying ads on Facebook. Just being specific about what you’re trying to do will help you avoid wasting your time.
Print your best small ad on a postcard and mail it to prospects in your targeted market.
People read postcards when the message is brief. A small ad on a postcard can drive a high volume of traffic to your website and generate a flood of sales leads for a very small cost.
No single marketing effort works all the time for every business, so rotate several marketing tactics and vary your approach.
Your customers tune out after awhile if you toot only one note. Not only that, YOU get bored. Marketing can be fun, so take advantage of the thousands of opportunities available for communicating your value to customers. But don’t be arbitrary about your selection of a variety of marketing ploys. Plan carefully. Get feedback from customers and adapt your efforts accordingly.
# 16 Nelson Dias
Define Your Social Presence
There was a time when having a social presence meant signing up on all available platforms and sharing a bunch of content. Today, social media is a powerful marketing tool and customer service channel. Prospects expect you to engage with them more actively and personally, and search engines like Google tend to take notice. For best results, focus on two or three platforms and be very active.
If you follow CMI at all, you should already know that documenting your content marketing strategy is essential for success. Since SEO is a key part of that strategy, you should start your efforts by documenting your plans for using this technique, i.e., what your priorities are, what methods you work with, how you measure your performance, and what goals you want SEO to ultimately help you achieve. Depending on how far along your company is, you may need to write a basic strategy first, and then revisit it once you’ve audited and analyzed your current SEO efforts and data (more on that later!).
# 18 By Adam Heitzman
Know your target audience and their online patterns. Set objectives.
Obviously the purpose of SEO is about ranking well in the search engines to drive traffic to your website, but even that won’t mean much if your website is showing up in front of an audience that doesn’t care. The first thing you should always do is identify your target audience and learn all you can about them–demographics, search patters and preferences, geographic location, etc. A good way to do this is by diving into your Google Analytics account.
Keywords are at the heart of SEO, and selecting the right ones can make or break your SEO strategy. Compile a list of about 10 keywords associated with your product or services. Plug these keywords into Google’s Keyword Tool , and find variations that make sense for your business.
First and foremost, if you’re not already monitoring for upcoming updates, you should be.
Rumors of an impending Google Algorithm update are enough to give any SEO nightmares but tools designed to pre-empt this are plentiful.
Some even do the hard work for you. With AccuRanker’s Google Grump, you can subscribe to free alerts – filtered by country and device – that monitor ranking fluctuations that might signify an update, and send you a notification if anything unusual is happening.
SEO is a very volatile industry because of the many changes that take place in the Google algorithm within a period. The algorithm set in place this month may not be the same the next. It is an always evolving algorithm that encourages SEO specialists to stay on their toes and keep abreast with updates.
As we pass the years half way point and start to look towards 2017, it has become more important for specialists to look out for trends that can affect search rankings for their keywords in this new year.
Links are a critical component of any SEO strategy, but not everyone understands how they work or how to leverage them correctly.
Here’s how they work: Part of Google’s search algorithm determines your site’s value by counting the number of incoming links. And each link has its own value based on how many links are going to that site, too, and so on. What this means, for example, is that a link to your site from Harvard.edu is weighted much more heavily than a link from Dr. Spink at spinkdentistry.com. (Although, maybe you’re a dentist, and if you are, then a link from the Spink is just fine). But the point remains the same: There is a complex system of determining factors that make one link more valuable than another.
But don’t be fooled, if you search for “SEO link building,” you’ll see tons of companies offering seemingly easy solutions, things like:
Blog commenting
Article marketing
Press releases
Business profile creation
Directory links
These services are supposed to build you links, but unfortunately many of these solicitations are merely well-disguised hack techniques or outdated strategies that will damage your site, not help it… and they come from a combination of both known scumbag overseas companies and reputable companies alike, so stay on your toes.
Case in point: Matt Cutts (head of Google’s web spam team) flat out says press release links from syndication sites are now discounted. And to be fair, as a digital marketing agency, we used to practice this, and it was even considered a best practice at the time, but now it’s a complete waste of money to do any press releases for the sake of getting an inbound link; directories and business profiles have been devalued so long ago that I can’t even dig up a good blog post or link about it; and blog commenting is considered a link scheme in most cases and will actually get your site penalized! Since, we’ve become enlightened and have adapted and responded to the evolution of link building to help you move up in the rankings the right way instead of going backwards.
Don’t get the wool pulled over your eyes by agencies still using antiquated tactics—implement a link building strategy that is current, effective, and gets the nod from Google every time.
Content Strategy
– See more at: https://vtldesign.com/digital-marketing/seo/seo-strategy-what-marketing-agency-should-already-know/#sthash.8nWPP3m5.dpuf
Scan your competitor’s site to locate their most shared pages; a tool like Social Crawlytics can help with this. By finding your competitors’ best-performing pieces of content, you can determine which topics and content types might work well for you, too.
Ensure you include content at every level, including large scale “hero” pieces, “hub” content (like guides), as well as “hygiene” pieces, including blog posts.
Don’t Write Another Blog Post Until You’ve Conducted THOROUGH Keyword Research
Keyword research should be the starting point for any SEO or content marketing campaign.
Without researching which keywords people are actually searching for in your niche, you’ll be relying on luck, rather than data to guide your decisions.
Search engine optimization often seems like magic to newcomers.
The elements of a strong SEO strategy often aren’t obvious to an untrained eye. However, once you understand how the basics work, you can:
Dramatically increase your organic search traffic
Increase your conversion rate
Generate more leads and revenue
Despite rumors to the contrary, SEO isn’t dead. Furthermore, even the best content needs some help getting found.
That’s where these 34 SEO tips will come in handy. Whether you’re a beginner just getting started, or an expert looking for a quick refresher, this post provides a basic understanding of the most essential elements necessary for SEO success. Plus, we’ve also included an on-page SEO checklist to help you nail every blog post you write.
Your about to journey in white hat SEO territory. In 5 minutes, you will learn everything you need to master the interwebs and beyond. Are you ready?
certified organic tea, coffee, whiskey… check.
sustainable notebook and pen… check.
thinking cap on… check.
All jokes aside, search engine marketing is no laughing matter. Billions of dollars are spent each year on pay per click, SEO and web marketing services and products. Local SEO is one of the fastest ways for a small business to hop in on this huge market.
Although SEO strategies are usually guarded, I have a few tricks of the trade that are tried and true that will help increase your websites rankings within Google search.
Slow and steady wins the race. Build your relevant, useful content added to your website and other strategically selected sites and your traffic will increase. Also this builds trust with your followers and future clientele.
Don’t buy the cheap sales pitch. Seriously. Think about it. How many times have you heard of someones website being “deleted” by the search engines, almost over night? These poor souls did the ultimate NO NO in SEO. They were gullible and trusted the wrong guy, gal or company. Large SEO firms are guilty of selling super cheap SEO deals, promising the moon, forcing the small business to sign a contract, only to hope that the client forgets about the SEO work that is suppose to be done and keeps paying the small monthly fee. Just try to get out of that contract, and you will see a different side of your local sales rep. Usually a dial tone, no contact and/or some cheesy pressure sales call to make you feel like an idiot. Not fun at all. If it sounds too good to be true, well, duh, it is! Fiverr and other cheap online sites that sell “SEO” services are not affordable as you thought. The damage they can do with fake likes, reviews and poor back linking strategies could cost you the farm!
Network with other businesses in your industry and help each other out. Share content on each others websites with relevant back links pointing to your website. Use the coop strategy to reach new clients quickly. Sharing email lists and / or swapping out related services and sharing with your followers. One week is your turn, next week is the other businesses turn and so on…
PPC is your friend or frienemy. Choose wisely. Pay Per Click, if done correctly, will increase sales. whether you choose Facebook or Google PPC, you will see immediate results, often within a week or less.
SEO optimize your website, completley. Keep up to date with the latest SEO requirements that Google publicly shares.
301 A permanent server redirect – a change of address for a web page found in the htaccess file on apache servers. Also useful for dealing with canonical issues.
adwords Google Pay Per Click contextual advertisement program, very common way of basic website advertisement.
adwords site (MFA) Made For Google Adsense Advertisements – websites that are designed from the ground up as a venue for GA advertisements. This is usually, but not always a bad thing. TV programming is usually Made For Advertisement.
affiliate An affiliate site markets products or services that are actually sold by another website or business in exchange for fees or commissions.
algorithm (algo) A program used by search engines to determine what pages to suggest for a given search query.
alt text A description of a graphic, which usually isn’t displayed to the end user, unless the graphic is undeliverable, or a browser is used that doesn’t display graphics. Alt text is important because search engines can’t tell one picture from another. Alt text is the one place where it is acceptable for the spider to get different content than the human user, but only because the alt text is accessible to the user, and when properly used is an accurate description of the associated picture. Special web browsers for visually challenged people rely on the alt text to make the content of graphics accessible to the users.
analytics A program which assists in gathering and analyzing data about website usage. Google analytics is a feature rich, popular, free analytics program.
anchor text The user visible text of a link. Search engines use anchor text to indicate the relevancy of the referring site and of the link to the content on the landing page. Ideally all three will share some keywords in common.
astroturfing (the opposite of full disclosure) attempting to advance a commercial or political agenda while pretending to be an impartial grassroots participant in a social group. Participating in a user forum with the secret purpose of branding, customer recruitment, or public relations.
authority (trust, link juice, Google juice) The amount of trust that a site is credited with for a particular search query. Authority/trust is derived from related incoming links from other trusted sites.
authority site A website which has many incoming links from other related expert/hub sites. Because of this simultaneous citation from trusted hubs an authority site usually has high trust, pagerank, and search results placement. Wikipedia, is an example of an authority site.
B2B Business to Business.
B2C Business to Consumer
back link (inlink, incoming link) Any link into a page or site from any other page or site.
black hat Search engine optimization tactics that are counter to best practices such as the Google Webmaster Guidelines.
blog A website which presents content in a more or less chronological series. Content may or may not be time sensitive. Most blogs us a Content Management System such as WordPress rather than individually crafted WebPages. Because of this, the Blogger can chose to concentrate on content creation instead of arcane code.
bot (robot, spider, crawler) A program which performs a task more or less autonomously. Search engines use bots to find and add web pages to their search indexes. Spammers often use bots to “scrape” content for the purpose of plagiarizing it for exploitation by the Spammer.
bounce rate The percentage of users who enter a site and then leave it without viewing any other pages.
bread crumbs Web site navigation in a horizontal bar above the main content which helps the user to understand where they are on the site and how to get back to the root areas.
canonical issues (duplicate content) canon = legitimate or official version – It is often nearly impossible to avoid duplicate content, especially with CMSs like WordPress, but also due to the fact that www.site.com, site.com, and www.site.com/index.htm are supposedly seen as dupes by the SEs – although it’s a bit hard to believe they aren’t more sophisticated than that. However these issues can be dealt with effectively in several ways including – using the noindex meta tag in the non-canonical copies, and 301 server redirects to the canon.
click fraud Improper clicks on a PPC advertisement usually by the publisher or his minions for the purpose of undeserved profit. Click fraud is a huge issue for add agencies like Google, because it lowers advertiser confidence that they will get fair value for their add spend.
cloak The practice of delivering different content to the search engine spider than that seen by the human users. This Black Hat tactic is frowned upon by the search engines and caries a virtual death penalty of the site/domain being banned from the search engine results.
CMS Content Management System – Programs such as WordPress, which separate most of the mundane Webmaster tasks from content creation so that a publisher can be effective without acquiring or even understanding sophisticated coding skills if they so chose.
code swapping (bait and switch) Changing the content after high rankings are achieved.
comment spam Posting blog comments for the purpose of generating an inlink to another site. The reason many blogs use link condoms.
content (text, copy) The part of a web page that is intended to have value for and be of interest to the user. Advertising, navigation, branding and boilerplate are not usually considered to be content.
contextual advertisement Advertising which is related to the content.
conversion (goal) Achievement of a quantifiable goal on a website. Add clicks, sign ups, and sales are examples of conversions.
conversion rate Percentage of users who convert – see conversion.
CPC Cost Per Click – the rate that is paid per click for a Pay Per Click Advertiser
CPM (Cost Per Thousand impressions) A statistical metric used to quantify the average value / cost of Pay Per Click advertisements. M – from the Roman numeral for one thousand.
crawler (bot, spider) A program which moves through the worldwide web or a website by way of the link structure to gather data.
directory A site devoted to directory pages. The Yahoo directory is an example.
directory page A page of links to related WebPages.
doorway (gateway) A web page that is designed specifically to attract traffic from a search engine. A doorway page which redirects users (but not spiders) to another site or page is implementing cloaking. – Previous Definition revised based upon advice from Michael Martinez
duplicate content Obviously content which is similar or identical to that found on another website or page. A site may not be penalized for serving duplicate content but it will receive little if any Trust from the search engines compared to the content that the SE considers being the original.
Staff writer. Frequently covers franchise news and food trends.
This article originally ran March 14, 2016 and has since been updated.
It may only be July, but the Internet never sleeps, and neither do the social-media blunders.
From the Justice Department accidentally tweeting that CNN is the “biggest troll of them all” to Coca-Cola’s Russian map fail, these are some of the top “online oops” so far this year.
Retailer Vera Bradley launches a “girly” campaign.
Image credit: Vera Bradley | Instagram
Rewind to the 1950s and Vera Bradley’s latest campaign would have been right on target. But in today’s world, a campaign called “Why It’s Good to Be a Girl” has to hit all the right notes or face major criticism. It turned out to be the latter for Vera Bradley.
The fashion brand asked customers to share why they like being a girl. Responses were mixed. Some of the published statements, such as “That moment when a gentleman offers you his seat,” and “Being able to hang out with the boys but still be treated like a lady” did not resonate.
Vera Bradley’s efforts to connect with young girls is well-noted, but their execution flawed. Not all women want to accessorize. Not allwomen belt their favorite song lyrics. Perhaps using more caution when incorporating the hashtag #itsgoodtobeagirl in a 21st century marketing campaign would have been helpful — a strategy in which its approach seems almost … backwards.
Coca-Cola learns geography is hard.
It’s never a good thing to piss off the Russians. Leave it to Coca-Cola to do so right out of the gate this year after it sent out a tweet featuring a cartoon with a snow-covered map of the country. Seems innocent enough, right?
Taking a closer look, the map’s actually outdated, omitting Kaliningrad, which was annexed following World War II. Needless to say, Russian patriots were not happy with the company, as they posted pics pouring the soft drink into toilets with the hashtag #BanCocaCola.
DC Comics realizes some research is better than none.
Face-palm online after it posted a photo of the comic saying it was translated from Pakistan as if it were a language. Too bad the official language is Urdu.
Obviously, users were quick to point out DC’s ignorance. It’s a good reminder to do your research.
View image on Twitter
A beauty brand’s finds out it’s not color blind — just tone deaf.
In some cases you just have to stop and wonder what the heck the company’s PR team was thinking.
Seoul Secret, a beauty brand, thought the campaign “White makes you win” promoting skin-lightening cosmetics was a good idea.
It’s been a busy year already with big brands getting hit by Google penalties. First came Rap Genius, slammed so hard that you couldn’t find it for its own name. Then came Expedia’s suspected penalty that may have hurt its traffic. But these are also a familiar tune. Big brand violates Google’s rules, gets in trouble but ultimately returns to Google’s good graces with what may seem a virtual wrist-slap.
Below, in reverse chronological order, is a list of major brands that have been hit by Google penalties over the years for various reasons. Some violations weren’t even intentional.
10) Rap Genius & Links For Tweets
Rap Genius invited bloggers to add links to its lyrics content, in exchange for Rap Genius then tweeting the posts from those bloggers. After this exchange came to light on Christmas Eve 2013, the head of Google’s web spam team Matt Cutts said Google would investigate Rap Genius.
On Christmas Day, Rap Genius was penalized by Google and no longer ranking in the top page of results for its own name. Rap Genius also lost traffic for lyrics-related searches. After working to remove “unnatural links,” Rap Genius had its penalty lifted by Google after 10 days.
When: December 2013
Violation: Unnatural links
Penalty: Much of entire site degraded from ranking in the first page of results at Google; didn’t rank for its own name
Penalty Period: 10 days
9) Mozilla & UGC Spam
That’s right, Mozilla — which makes the popular open source Firefox browser — has been penalized by Google. But unlike with Rap Genius, it was an extremely specific situation — one single page of user-generated content that was considered too spammy to include.
The situation emerged after Mozilla received a manual action notice — i.e., a message from Google that some human spam reviewer decided something deserved the site getting a penalty.
Concerned about a message saying “Google has applied a manual spam action to your site,” Mozilla sought help in Google’s webmaster forums. Google quickly clarified that only one single page at Mozilla had been impacted. A similar Google penalty over UGC content happened to Sprintone month later. And somewhat related, all of Digg was dropped from Google briefly, after a mistake Google made that was meant only to impact a single page.
When: April 2013
Violation: UGC spam
Penalty: Single page apparently degraded in rankings
Penalty Period: N/A, because the page was removed
8) BBC & Mysterious “Unnatural Links”
Google penalized the respected British Broadcasting Corporation? It sure did. Similar to Mozilla, the penalty involved a single page, this time one deemed to have “unnatural links” pointing at it.
The situation came to light after the BBC received a manual action notice. Like Mozilla, the BBC sought help in Google’s webmaster forums, which lead to Google responding that the penalty impacted one article. It’s unclear how it was resolved, as the page impacted was never stated. Probably, the penalty was removed by Google in short order.
When: March 2013
Violation: Unnatural links
Penalty: Single page apparently degraded in rankings
Penalty Period: Unknown
7) Interflora & Advertorial Links?
Similar to Rap Genius, Interflora found itself penalized in Google, no longer ranking for its own name, as well as for many generic flower-related searches. Why? Google itself never gave an official reason for penalizing Interflora, as is fairly normal in penalty cases, nor did Interflora itself say.
However, Google quickly pushed a warning against “advertorial” content that doesn’t make use of nofollow or other methods so that links in such content don’t pass along ranking credit. After apparently getting some links removed, Interflora’s penalty was lifted after 11 days. Interestingly, Google didn’t severely act against a number of online florists accused of buying links two years prior.
When: February 2013
Violation: Probably paid links in advertorials and perhaps elsewhere
Penalty: Much of entire site degraded from ranking in the first page of results at Google; didn’t rank for own name
Penalty Period: 11 days
6) Overstock: Discounts For Links
Overstock hit trouble with Google after a competitor found that it was offering discounts to schools in exchange for links back to the Overstock website. The links lead to particular products, with very specific anchor text that helped Overstock rank well for terms like “vacuum cleaners” and “gift baskets.” The Wall Street Journal profiled Overstock being hit by the penalty, probably tipped by the same competitor that reported Overstock to Google.
Overstock was so happy to have its penalty lifted two months later that it issued a press release about the news. Overstock said the impact might hit revenues by 5% and filed a statement for investors with the SEC in the weeks after it hit. It also blamed the penalty for “adversely” impacting revenue for the first and second quarter of 2011, in its annual filing.
When: February 2011
Violation: Paid links, in the form of offering discounts for linking back to the site
Penalty: Much of entire site degraded from ranking in the first page of results at Google; probably kept ranking for own name
Penalty Period: 2 months
5) JC Penney & Paid Links
A New York Times article detailed how retailer JC Penney was apparently buying links to rank better in Google. The article even contained a rare confirmation of the violation by Google. By the time the article appeared, JCP had already been penalized.
It’s not clear if JCP ever disappeared for its own name, but it did drop for many generic terms relating to products it sold. After cleaning up the paid links — and blaming the mess on its SEO firm— JCP regained many top rankings in Google after 90 days.
When: February 2011
Violation: Paid links
Penalty: Many pages degraded from ranking in the first page of Google’s results
Penalty Period: 90 days
Reno SEO, Marketing & Web Design 450 Sinclair St, Reno, NV 89501 (775) 870-0488 www.RenoWebDesigner.com
Sandy Rowley is a SEO expert in Reno Nevada that specializes in search engine optimization, web design, and digital marketing.
Her seo tips for those who want to achieve the best ranking possible include: Who’s talking about you? Who links to you? What do your customers like?
She provides web design services for small and local businesses as well as marketing campaigns for up-and-coming brands. Her social media marketing proposal includes: Social Media Marketing Strategy, Content Creation and Management (content strategy), Social Media Advertising (paid advertising) and Analytics Reporting.
The SEO expert Sandy Rowley has been providing digital marketing services to the Reno Nevada region for the past 23 years. She is an implementation specialist with extensive knowledge of SEO, web design, social media marketing and more.
Sandy Rowley is a successful website designer in Reno Nevada who specializes in web design and search engine optimization (SEO).
If you have a website, it is important to have an SEO expert take care of your content. The SEO expert in Reno Nevada Sandy Rowley can take care of various aspects that are related to SEO for your business.
They can update your website content to ensure that it is relevant and search engine-friendly. They can also help you with the proper digital marketing strategy for your business, including PPC campaigns, social media marketing, and other different forms of advertising.
Web hosting is another service offered by an SEO expert in Reno Nevada Sandy Rowley. As a web hosting provider, they provide the infrastructure for every website on the internet by storing data and providing an interface for users to interact with data on the internet. They come in three different forms: shared hosting, VPS hosting, or dedicated.
Use a call to action focused landing page for your PPC campaign ads in Google, Bing and FaceBook advertising.
Use eye catching, uncluttered background images for your products.
Clearly display shipping options.
Purchase a SSL certificate and prominently display next to product image.
List 5 star reviews within the product description area.
Show related products.
Display multiple views of the product with a zoom feature.
Offer a money back guarantee.
Post a toll free phone number at top right side of each page of your website.
Embed a live chat box feature to answer questions immediately.
Selling products online requires trust, ease of use and full details about the products sold. Keep it simple and easy for your clients and this will help increase sales on your website.
CXL has a great article that digs deeper into the wonderful world of website conversion tactics.
How to Boost Website Sales – The Complete Checklist
What if there was a method – a process even – that you could apply to boost website sales? Wouldn’t that be swell? Well, there is.
This method works across all categories, it doesn’t really matter what business you’re in. I’ve turned it into a checklist. So the way to use it is you take your website, compare it to any item on the list, make improvements, and your online sales will increase.
Start with measurable goals
Before we get started on the checklist, make sure you have actual, measurable goals in place (e.g. sell boots, get subscribers).
If you don’t have a single focus for your site, it’s very difficult to achieve results
You cannot systematically improve what you cannot measure (or won’t notice when it happens)
So start with specific goals and make sure your web analytics software is tracking those goals.
Personal opinions do not matter (much)
There’s no shortage of opinions in this world. Sadly, most of them are misguided and even incompetent. People see the world as they are, and think everybody else is like then. “But I never click on ads!”,“Nobody shares their email!”, “I think it should be blue” and so on.
You are not the world. You are not your customer. Hence you cannot make conclusions about user behavior based on your personal preferences. It’s very natural to want to, but try to resist.
SEO expert in Reno Nevada Sandy Rowley is one of the leading experts in the field. She provides digital marketing and web design services that will help your business to be found on the internet.
Website hosting is a strong starting point for all SEO efforts, as it provides a stable foundation for search engine optimization and website promotion.
Search engine optimization is a set of techniques used to improve the ranking of a website or webpage in a search engine’s unpaid results—often referred to as “natural”, “organic”, or “earned” results—which are those that do not have paid advertising associated with them. SEO differs from local search optimization, which includes only optimizations specific to regional, local, and map-based searches. In general, SEO refers to both local SEO and global search engine optimization as collectively.
The importance of SEO in today’s digital marketing cannot be understated. The landscape has changed from a time when search engines were just a starting point for consumers to find information.
In order to take advantage of the benefits that come from being found in search engines, your company needs to hire an SEO expert in Reno Nevada like Sandy Rowley who can help you make your website and business more visible and accessible.
Sandy Rowley, a Reno SEO expert, is the founder and owner of the website Design-Web-SEO. It provides comprehensive SEO services to clients including Web Design and Development, Local Search Marketing and Social Media Marketing.
Sandy has been active in the industry for more than 12 years and she is an expert in web design and development, social media marketing and search engine optimization. She has helped many businesses grow their online presence through her expertise in various fields.
Reno SEO, Marketing & Web Design 450 Sinclair St, Reno, NV 89501 (775) 870-0488 www.RenoWebDesigner.com
According to the SBA.gov, As a general rule, small businesses with revenues less than $5 million should allocate 7-8 percent of their revenues to marketing.
Marketing is the life blood of your business. Anyone in business who makes the comment, “I will put marketing money into my business once I start making some money.” clearly is going about this whole successful business thing, backwards.
What is the net amount profit needed each week to keep your business alive? Thrive? Take those numbers and budget 7-8% for your quarterly marketing spend.
The first step is optimizing your company website to rank for the keywords your customers use to find your services and products.
The next step is to add your business to Googles Snack Pack.
These first items needed for a successful SEO Campaign are affordable for most small businesses. A one time optimization starts at $299 and can greatly increase the amount of customers you can reach online.
Do a search in Google for “Reno Coworking Space” and you will see one of my SEO clients at the top of the search results. Coworking Space Reno | Fusion@Midtown is listed in Google maps as well as 4 other areas on the first page of the search results.
You are here: Home / Northern Nevada Coworking Spaces … The Generator: www.therenogenerator.com. Incline Village … Reno Collective: renocollective.com.
Sandy Rowley, an SEO expert in Reno Nevada is a well-known and respected authority on Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing. She has been providing her services to the Reno Nevada area for more than 20 years.
She has been practicing as a successful web designer and online marketing specialist since 1996. Sandy Rowley is able to provide full service digital marketing for all of your company’s needs. Including SEO, social media marketing, web hosting services, graphic design work and more!
Reno SEO Expert Sandy Rowley has been in business for over a decade, and in that time, she has helped countless businesses grow. In the past ten years, she has focused on marketing strategies to help businesses rank well in search engines.
In this section, SEO expert Sandy Rowley teaches us the basics of how to improve our website’s seo ranking. While many people assume that all we need is a pretty website and we’re done with SEO, that’s simply not accurate and it doesn’t work like that because we also need proper content marketing and social media marketing.
SEO is about building links from other websites to ours, which helps Google’s algorithm think your site is relevant or important. It also helps get more organic traffic from search through better rankings on
SEO Expert Sandy Rowley is a Reno Nevada SEO expert who’s been in the industry for over 23 years.
She focuses on helping local businesses to promote their business online by developing an effective strategy that improves their visibility in search engines, driving website traffic, and converting visitors into buyers.
Reno SEO, Marketing & Web Design 450 Sinclair St, Reno, NV 89501 (775) 870-0488 www.RenoWebDesigner.com
Top SEO Expert, Sandy Rowley, specializes in growing small business with the latest in digital marketing technologies. Her team creates AI systems for business looking to compete in Artificial intelligence . Imagine unlocking the full potential of your brand, reaching new audiences, and driving growth like never before.
You're not just running a business; you're growing a dream, and with the right marketing strategies, that dream can scale. It's time to move beyond the challenges of limited resources and expertise. By partnering with marketing professionals, you open the door to innovative ideas, expert guidance, and effective strategies tailored to your unique business needs.
Don't let your business's potential go untapped. Work with Top SEO Expert and elevate your brand and watch as your vision transforms into success. Call for marketing help today, and take the first step towards a thriving future for your business.
# 1 Sandy Rowley – Reno SEO Expert @ RenoWebDesigner.com
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It’s been a busy year already with big brands getting hit by Google penalties. First came Rap Genius, slammed so hard that you couldn’t find it for its own name. Then came Expedia’s suspected penalty that may have hurt its traffic. But these are also a familiar tune. Big brand violates Google’s rules, gets in trouble but ultimately returns to Google’s good graces with what may seem a virtual wrist-slap.
Rap Genius invited bloggers to add links to its lyrics content, in exchange for Rap Genius then tweeting the posts from those bloggers. After this exchange came to light on Christmas Eve 2013, the head of Google’s web spam team Matt Cutts said Google would investigate Rap Genius.
That’s right, Mozilla — which makes the popular open source Firefox browser — has been penalized by Google. But unlike with Rap Genius, it was an extremely specific situation — one single page of user-generated content that was considered too spammy to include.
Google penalized the respected British Broadcasting Corporation? It sure did. Similar to Mozilla, the penalty involved a single page, this time one deemed to have “unnatural links” pointing at it.
Similar to Rap Genius, Interflora found itself penalized in Google, no longer ranking for its own name, as well as for many generic flower-related searches. Why? Google itself never gave an official reason for penalizing Interflora, as is fairly normal in penalty cases, nor did Interflora itself say.
Overstock hit trouble with Google
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