Boost your company’s brand factor with online reputation management skills

When it comes to your hard earned reputation in the society, you need to be very cautious. However, when talking about your reputation over the Internet, it’s essential to be a lot more careful or vigilant. That’s right my readers; when it comes to online brand management, the cyber world isn’t very kind to you. As a matter of fact, taking ORM or Online Reputation Management lightly could be highly devastating for your business.

The world is quickly turning into a digital box and with this comes a lot of issues that companies or individuals are experiencing. In fact, it can be said that a virtual or online existence is as essential as our real-life existence. Due to this reason, ORM or Online Reputation Management has become so essential. Today, in this cutthroat business scenario, it’s very important to reach out to your target customers, quickly and effectively. The Internet proves to be the ideal medium to fulfill your purpose.

These days, there are millions of people surfing the Internet for news and other types of information. This provides you with the golden opportunity to employ the Web space in your stride to create strong online brand recognition. Especially with the emergence of social media websites and other Web platforms, it has become absolutely necessary to make your presence recognized in the cyber world. In simple words, OPM services serve the specific requirement of handling your Web presence wisely to create a strong and positive impact on prospective customers. It’s a fact that Internet is an extremely volatile area. On one hand, you may use it as a platform for promoting your goods and services; conversely, it can be employed by Internet detractors for refusing your offers. Following are a few tips and tricks that’ll definitely help you in your online reputation management practices.

Company name optimization

Your agency’s name is the most important keyword and you need to optimize it in almost all the pages of your website. The ideal place to add your company name is in the HTML headline tag and the URL, particularly on the “contact us” and “about us” pages. The search engines should view your website as the prime authority of your agency.  Reliability or trustworthiness is one of the most important factors regarded by search engines while deciding the rank. By showcasing your organization’s name, you provide better brand recognition to your business and keep the brand name in the top position

Diversify your presence

Your prime objective should be to employ as many key phrases as possible to stay in the first page of the search engine results. The negative comments (if any) must be counterbalanced with some positive comments which are in your control.

Take help of social media platforms

In order to remain in the top ten results showcased by the search engine, consider boosting your presence in various social media websites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn and so on. That way, search engines identify your company name as the authority of that specific brand and you attain a higher rank on search engine results page.

Google

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Google SERP update – Understanding the cyber world and its challenges

Gone are those days when your business was confined to brick and mortar constructions. Thanks to the emergence of Internet and cyber world, businesses are going more global these days. Needless to say, more and more companies are laying emphasis on their websites and their search engine optimization. Getting acquainted with the Google SERP is very important for the success of your website, and your financial success depends on the online activities of your business. SERP informs you about search engine results ranking. To cut it short, how do you rise above other websites in terms of ranking? How do the details help you in the process of creating a better website? Once you know where you stand amongst the rest, you can create a benchmark for your success.

Google SERP – Where you stand :

There are scores of websites out there; if you don’t know where you stand among the million other web pages, then you’re possibly spoiling your business prospects. Once you start receiving lesser traffic for your websites, it’ll have a direct effect on your business’s profit level. Of course rank matter a lot, but it’s equally important to know where you stand in the results of a different industry. Do you hold the top position or is there a competitor out there, who is performing better than you? When you know the status of the excellence benchmark, you can start preparing for it. In the language of direct mail advertising, it’s referred to as “beating the control”. The objective of every campaign is to surpass the bestselling campaigns and reach the top position.

The purpose of competition :

So, the top rank is finally yours. Now, why is it essential to keep checking the SERP? Remember, the cyber world is an incredibly volatile marketplace. It is a field, where somebody out there is constantly striving to implement the next best technique.  Matching steps to the market competition is the trademark of a good business. You must do it on a regular basis, and once you attain the top position, you have to look for ways to retain that status. To stay on the top, you have to incessantly look for new and innovative ways to keep your visitors interested in your website and its content.

Google SERPs – Is it influenced by Ads? 

Google announces that their aim when showcasing search results is to bestow visitors with the best possible experience. Most of the individuals accept that banners or advertisements are an inextricable part of the business; they also do a relatively good job at showcasing advertisements in connection with the search query. In the SERPs of several searches, you may find a couple of advertisements at the top, together with some on the side. Again, within the organic results, you may also come across YouTube videos and Google Maps – both displayed by the search giant. According to surveys, only 13 percent of the allotted “above the fold” space is occupied by organic search results, whereas the rest is taken by Google Maps and advertisements. This issue gets worse when you’re using a cell phone for the search.

Whereas some advertisements and banners are relevant for the users, the concern is whether Google is giving enough priority to their websites. 

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Retain your search engine rank in spite of domain relocation

It takes a lot of time, effort, strategies and patience to attain higher position in search engine results page. Now, if you think of moving your website to another domain, you wouldn’t ever want to lose the rank attained in the search engine results; in short, you don’t want all your SEO efforts to go into vain. If you’re considering shifting your website to a new domain, below are a few tips that’ll prove handy in retaining your website’s position in search engine results pages.

 

• If you’re relocating your domain due to a layout or rebranding issue of your website, you may consider executing this in two stages; firstly, shift your website and secondly, start on your redesign. This helps in managing the level of change your users experience at any point in the process, and makes the procedure appear smoother. Restricting the number of adjustments at any stage makes it simpler to troubleshoot unanticipated behavior.
• Make use of a 301 Redirect to move all pages on your previous website to your new website. This informs visitors as well as search engines that your website has permanently shifted. We suggest that you move or redirect a directory or section first, and then check to ensure that the redirects are functioning properly before relocating all your content.  
• Avoid performing a single shift, redirecting all visitors from the old location to the new home page. This’ll prove handy in avoiding 404 errors; however, this isn’t a user-friendly technique. It’s a bit lengthy and laborious process, but a page-to-page redirect helps preserving your website’s position in search engines, while offering a transparent and consistent experience for your visitors. In case, your new website fails to meet the elements of your old website (1:1 match), try to ensure that each page on your previous website is redirected to a different page with similar content.
• Confirm both internal as well as external links to pages on your website. Generally, you have to contact the owner of every site that connects to yours and request them to post the links to direct to the page on your fresh domain. Nevertheless, if this doesn’t prove to be useful, make certain that all pages with inward links are directed to your new home page. You must also test the internal links on your previous website, and update them to direct to your new web page. When the content is moved to your new domain or server, make use of a link checker to verify you don’t have any broken links on your website.

When you’ve completed all these steps, make use of the webmaster tools data to confirm that everything is running correctly. However, it may take some time for search engines to crawl through your old as well as new websites. 

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404 Error Web page – The miraculous tool to increase your website traffic

So, you need visitors to your website and you’re tired of using the age-old strategies. Well, today I’m here to give you the magical wand for increasing traffic to your website. Have you ever encountered the 404 error page? Of course, you did. When surfing the Internet or looking for some information, you often misspell a website address or end up with a broken link on a site. This results in display of the 404 error web page. If you’re a typical Internet fanatic, rushing with a cup of hot coffee in hand and frantically moving the mouse, then you’re sure to land up with a 404 error page.

While this is definitely an irksome experience for the visitor, the good news is that there are different ways to turn this error page in your stride. Even though these pages generally tend to drive traffic away, you can actually use them as lucrative sales tool. Creating a customized 404 error page is a fairly simple process. This will help people in locating the information that they’re actually looking for. What’s more, it encourages them in exploring the site further. Since a 404 page is a standard HTML page, it’s possible to customize it the way you like. Here are a few helpful tips for creating an effective 404 page, which will help draw visitors to your website.

 

• Convey the message loud and clear that the page they’re searching for cannot be found. Consider using a language that’s inviting and friendly. 
• Add a warm greeting message and make your prospective consumers feel special, instead of chasing them away with a huge “error” message across the page.
• Make sure that the 404 page has the same look and feel as the other sections of your website. 
• Think of supplementing links to your most likes posts or articles, in addition to your website’s home page. 
• Consider apologizing with free gifts for the error. This could be in any form – gift cards, free reports or eBooks. Settle on a gift item that’s beneficial to you as well as your visitors.
• Redirect them to your subscription page. Make sure that you give them a reward for subscribing. Also include helpful information and important resources in your mailings. 
• Regardless of how attractive or helpful your custom 404 page is, you don’t want it to be there in search engine results. In order to stop 404 pages from being ranked by Google and other popular search engines, check that your web server gives a real 404 HTTP status code when somebody requests a missing page. 
• Consider adding something witty to the page to alleviate the mood and influence your visitors to look around for more. You may use happy, cute or funny faces to bring a smile on their face. However, remain professional in your approach and know your limits.
• Make sure that you add the essential page links to your website, so the visitors know where to go. Give brief explanations on how they’re going to benefit from that and what you have to offer.  

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Top SEO rankings – It’s time to take a look at your website speed

With Google and other search engines turning stricter, proper optimization of a website for higher SEO rankings is getting more complicated or intricate. In an attempt to defeat black hat SEO practices that pollute the search results as well as Google’s updates like Panda and Penguin. The basic objective is to make sure that only quality and user-friendly sites earn high keyword placements.

If you want to have a good search engine rank, you must do a lot of things in an efficient and tactful manner. Whereas some websites excel in certain fields, others lag behind in others. For instance, a website may have high quality content but poor technical support. Except a few of them, most websites lag behind in one field or the other.

SEO ranking – The deciding factors :

The most common things that we hear about SEO are content quality and back links. Of course, these factors are very essential, but the technical part cannot be disregarded. One of these crucial technical factors is website speed. Recently, Google announced that a faster loading website improves your Google rankings and website visibility. The search engine has clearly stated that among the 200+ factors that decide your site’s rank, website speed is possibly the most important contributor. While nobody knows what those 200 factors actually are, declarations like these must be heard loud and clear.

Website speed – Why is it so important? :

 This is actually a very simple concept. The reason why it’s so important is that it’s a deciding factor in the user-friendliness of a website. Well, this only makes sense – isn’t it? If you website takes more than six seconds to load, it’ll be a frustrating experience for the visitors. Quite naturally, most of them will leave without even taking a look at your site. Google, basically, doesn’t support this thing. All search engines attempt to provide their users with high quality websites that take a minimum amount of time to load. Quite obviously, sites that load quickly get a preference on the search engine list. Slow and listless websites are absolutely useless in the eyes of search engines

Studies have shown that somebody who waits more than six seconds for a page to load, ultimately abandons the site and moves on to another one. The same survey shows that 45 percent visitors expect a page to load in 2 seconds, and 55 percent of visitors are unlikely to make purchases from a website that’s slow or sluggish.

Slow website – Does it hurt your SEO rankings?

Well, the answer is yes. No matter how well-planned your SEO techniques are, slow website speed can drop the rankings within a short period of time. Sadly, if your website gets marked as slow and meets speed errors, chances are that it’ll affect your SEO rankings in a negative way. In short, it’s no use messing around with this SEO factor in any way. Quite obviously, poor SEO performance will have a direct effect on your business as well. Once you stop getting leads for your website, you’ll incur loss. Ultimately, your business will be at the risk of closing down. 

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Explosive social media strategies to take your business up the success ladder

By now, you’re surely aware of the fact that social media is a revolution in the field of Internet marketing. This is a big thing that transformed the way businesses promoted themselves and communicated with their customers. Today, if you think that your business can thrive without social media, then you’re possibly mistaken. Of course, businesses flourished even before the introduction of Internet, but the exposure wasn’t that huge as it is today.

 Considering the massive development in the world of Internet and social media, you can’t ignore the great potential it has for your business. Having a strong online presence, especially on social networking platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Linkdln plays an important role in creating your recognition, expanding your business, and enhancing your sales. As a growing business proprietor, you don’t want to be satisfied with mediocrity. So, make use of social media to boost the profit factor of your company

Social media strategy #1 – Cover recent topics :

Content is the lifeblood of any social media campaign. No matter how perfect you are at other fields, wrong content selection won’t lead you anywhere. Keep a track of the recent topics in your targeted niche and make sure that it keeps your readers interested throughout. That way, they’ll come back to your page over and again. The trick lies in understanding the mentality of the readers.

Social media strategy #2 – Stay focused :

The more focused or specific your submissions are to social networking websites, the more likely they are to circulate over the Internet. This is regardless of whether you share links of your own or those of other people. Here’s the simple logic to it.

People have a tendency to follow others with similar interests. People looking for new content are generally active on platforms like Yahoo, Google, Delicious, StumbleUpon and Digg. Having 10,000 connections on social networking websites is useless if you’re connected to wrong group of people. If I’m not interested in your existing business offers, it doesn’t matter how many times you ping or ask me. If it’s of no use to me, your constant advertisements and updates will be ignored or blocked totally.

Social media strategy #3 – Simple sharing :

You’ve got two things on hand – excellent content and a targeted network. So, what should be your next step? Feed them with content that’s difficult to share? No. Consider questions like – Does your content need to be in PDF format? If yes, does it have to be concealed behind an opt-in wall? Anybody linked to your business through its Twitter stream or Facebook page is automatically a part of your opt-in list. However, it would be better if they were on your email newsletter list. Choose a sharing method that your customers find it easy to go through; it’s no use making it intricate or complicated.

Remember, your business is not the only one on the dock; there are others competing in the market as well. Of course, success doesn’t come overnight, but using the right social media tactics will certainly increase your profits over time. So, be active and take the right business strategies. Happy socializing!

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Top SEO ranking factors that you’re perhaps not aware of

If your business has a physical existence like a store or office, it’s advisable to build a local SEO campaign as well. With the world developing by leaps and bounds, it’s important to get a global exposure for your business. No matter how good you are at your business dealing or services, if you don’t have a strong online presence, your business is not going anywhere. Getting sufficient traffic or leads from local searches is one of the ideal ways for business proprietors to create a regular source of income. The biggest problem with local business proprietors is that they don’t have any idea about how to get a higher position for their website in search engine results. Here are a few unidentified factors that’ll have an immense effect on your search engine rankings.

Your website’s loading time:

You may not be alert to this, but your website’s usability is taken very seriously by the search engines. If your website takes a lot of loading time, don’t expect it to have a high position on search engine pages. Search engines never prefer websites that take a decade to load. After all, who has the time to sit and wait for a website to load for more than a few seconds? In case your website takes more than 6 seconds to load, it’s advisable to take a look at the factors causing the delay. Perhaps, the graphics used on your website’s homepage are too large or outsized.

Keyword position:

For availing the maximum SEO effect for your business, you need to place your selected keywords at the most crucial areas of your website. Your keywords must be there in your Meta description, Meta title, H1 title (main heading) and anchor text links or the hyperlinked text that connects one of your web pages to another. 

The age of your website:

People often disregard this but the age of your site plays an extremely important role in deciding its overall ranking in search engine pages. In the initial phase, a newly launched website won’t have too many backlinks; thus, it won’t be considered as a good website that’s been around for many years and has high quality content and backlinks.

In case you’ve built a website recently, it can’t do much to make it appear ‘older’ to search engines; over time, as you use the right SEO tactics, your site will have a higher ranking on search engine pages. After all, success doesn’t come overnight; you’ve to wait for the right time and opportunity. However, in the meantime, continue putting in all your efforts.

Your social networking skills :

Lately, Google declared that they’re considering social media activity as a strong ranking factor. Although this makes up only a small factor of your overall SEO ranking, your social networking activities on Facebook and Twitter show how influential or prospective your business is. This, in turn, has a massive effect on your search engine rankings.

Techniques that can negatively affect your SEO attempts: 

• Multiple parameters in a website URL
• Building doorway pages
• Hidden text
• Sub domains
• Page jacking
• Duplicate content or mirrored website
• Spamdexing

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Budding SEO experts – Must read checklist at a glance

When it’s business, you have to make it big; there’s no two way about it. Today, businesses are not just limited to the brick and mortar walls of their showroom; it has slowly moved on to the big world of Internet, giving your company a global exposure. Whether it’s a big or small company, proprietors are generally alert to the importance of owning websites. On the other hand, there are a lot of people who haven’t even heard of the term SEO or search engine optimization to earn a considerable amount of money using their websites. Neglecting your online presence or SEO marketing strategies can cause a lot of loss to you as well as to your business. So, before it’s too late, consider taking a look at the SEO part of your business.

Today, more and more companies are taking the help of an established SEO company to improve their ranking in search engine results. However, if you’re new to the world of SEO and don’t know which path to tread, I’m here to help you. Here are a few basic and effective tips that’ll prove beneficial for budding SEO experts.

• The magic of effective keywords

The most important ingredient of effective SEO is the usage of correct keywords. For this, you must do thorough research and find out the most relevant keywords for your company, which will bring more traffic or leads to your website. It’s highly essential to use the chosen key phrases throughout your blogs, articles and other forms of Web marketing materials. However, if you think that you’re not successful at locating the right keywords, consider taking help of experienced SEO professionals who’ll guide you in the process. Proper content, with the right usage of keywords will definitely improve your website’s rank in the search engine pages.

• Appropriate page captions and domain names

If you wish to get high SEO rankings for your page and increase the flow of visitors, you need to place your selected key phrases in the URL or domain name and the heading tags of your pages as well. You also have the option of increasing your keywords used in the coding. With the help of a web designer’s dexterity, you can implement strong keywords in the title tags of your web page. As for the URLs, they must be selected with a bit of prudence so they’re simple as well as expressive enough of the services offered by your company.

• High content quality and graphics

A website, containing quality content, is a search engine’s darling. What’s more, it should be user-friendly and created using attractive graphics work, for example animated videos describing goods or services offered by your organization. As for the content, it must be useful, informative and have proper keyword density. A successful SEO professional can give you valuable advice on how to make your site more lucrative or profitable from the business point of view.

Remember, a successful business consists of five important elements – time, money, effort, luck and proper tactics. While most of the business entrepreneurs pay attention to the first three factors, they often end up ignoring the last aspect – business strategies. Although success doesn’t come overnight, using the right SEO tactics will surely take your business to the zenith of success

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What You Will Do When Your Content is Stolen and Ranking Goes Down.

This is a very regular and a general problem now where different site owners copies the content of the original website which is ranking high on Search Engines and uses on their website for their profit. Well In most of the cases, the infringement is intentional.

So Now what do  when our content enriched with quality is Copied or Stolen? Well, I will show you some ways as listed below:

Step- 1: Way of Finding The Infringements
Realizing that you've been effected by an update Panda and observing significant loss in traffic on some pages, We would recommend checking for contents that are duplicate and correlates to those individual page losses.

To begun, copy some lines of content from that page of your website and find in Google by putting it as "your content" ( quotes). If you find websites other than your website appearing in the search results, it’s time to find out how much of the content from our website matches the content of the copied pages .The best tool to use is Copyscape.

Compare the content in Copyscape’s Comparison tool. This tool checks the contents of both pages and shows the resemblance percentage in the two pages’ content. If the result is above 50% then it needs to be taken in notice immediately.

Step 2: Make a Log of Infringements
After finding the duplicate copies,  start logging the details in spreadsheet or Google Docs. In this detail do not forget to mention the percentage of overlap.

Step 3: Contact The Infringing Website Owners
Write a mail to the site owner alerting about issue of infringement and ask them to take down the copied pages.

To know the contact details of the site owner search for the contact information on the site alternatively you may visit the website http://www.domainwhitepages.com/ and check out the whois record. 

Well, sending mail to site owner is the best way to get the copied pages removed easily but in some cases the site owners can ignore that and in this case you may have to send a letter by postal mail or send a legal letter by taking help of an attorney

Step 4: What If Pages Are Not Removed by Site Owners  

So after doing all these if still the site owner does not removes the copied content then what we need to do NEXT? Well, Copyright infringement is an offense and violation of DMCA Act ( Digital Millennium Copyright Act). Report it to Google and they will take the down the copied content due to violation of DMCA. The form needs to be filled is : Google DMCA Form

How to Protect Your Content:

Make your copyright very clear on the pages of your website - you can use the Copyscape Logo or Copyright year and icon. Cheers and protect your content to be in top of Organic Rankings

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