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SEO Is Dead! Long Live the Latest Trend! SEO is not dead, despite what a lot of people have been saying recently.
You still need to ensure that you're using best on-site SEO practices. If your competitors are optimizing their Web pages effectively through strategic use of keywords, internal linking, and image optimization—and you aren't—then you'll perform poorly in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
A Few Major Google Algorithm Updates
Those recent major Google algorithm updates all indicate that Google wants you to create an interesting website that is both relevant to your target audience's search terms and has a natural-looking link profile.So how do you achieve those requirements?
Content Isn't King. Customers Are!If you read any SEO blog you'll likely find someone claiming that content is king. That you should start a blog with interesting things to say about your sector. That you should strive to become a thought leader. And that by doing so the links will start to flow naturally.
All that may be relatively easy to do if you're writing about SEO: There's always something new and interesting to talk about, after all. But not all of us sell SEO software or SEO services...
If, for example, your business is e-commerce and you sell several products (or even just one product), then "content marketing," as most people talk about it, may not be for you.
There are alternatives, however. If you manage an e-commerce website, then your products and your customer are your content, and you can use them to succeed in the search rankings.
How? You make them happy
How to Make Your Customers HappyThe best way to make your customers happy is to engage with them and make them think that they matter (and they should... they are your customers after all!).
That allows you to start building a relationship, which is the key factor in transforming your customers into your brand's advocates.
Why Brand Advocates MatterBrand advocates take the message of your company and products and deliver it for you—online and offline. They'll tell their friends, colleagues, and family about how great you are.
Informing their social circles can come in many forms, but for SEO the one that matters is links. Luckily, brand advocates are more likely than anyone else to link to your website and give you the SEO boost you need.
How Do You Engage Customers to Convert Them to Brand Advocates?Traditionally, people trying to create brand advocates have used social media to engage their customer base. Doing so can be very effective, but it has limitations.
Social media is temporary. Updates and tweets are fleeting. They vanish quickly into people's social media timelines and news feeds. Which means while you're building a relationship with one person, others can't see how great you are.
Also, social media targets only those who are already engaged: If someone is following you on social media, they are already on the road to becoming a brand advocate. If you're engaging only with those people, you're missing on reaching others.
There are other ways to reach out—beyond your social media following. One of the best is to use a review platform.
Why Reviews and Review Platforms?Like social networks, review platforms allow you to listen to, respond to, and act on what your customers are saying.
These platforms are independent, neutral, third parties; accordingly, reviews posted on your profile page on those platforms are far more valuable to shoppers than undated, unverifiable testimonials on your website. (Although, not all review communities allow anyone to make their voice heard, and some fail to crack down on fake reviews, or reviews from people who didn't actually buy the product.)
Unlike social media, review platforms offer a permanent legacy of your interactions, and reviews can be used to talk to all your potential customers, not just social media followers. Moreover, you have an easily accessible historical record of interactions with all of the customers who have reviewed you.
Furthermore, by strategically placing reviews across your site (via widgets or otherwise) you can start to build a relationship with customers before they even make a purchase. You'll show that you're one step ahead of your competition in valuing and caring about what your customers have to say.
Positive reviews can increase the chance of someone's making a purchase by as much as 58%, research has shown.
By strategically placing reviews on key pages of your site, such as the checkout, you can provide the customer with the social proof and security they need to make the purchase.
Moreover, Google uses review platforms' rating systems to calculate the Google Seller Ratings of websites you see in the SERPs, and those ratings can drive more traffic to your website.
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Friday, February 20, 2015
The Evolution of SEO? Customer Experiences as Content
Why screen size matters for enterprise applications
Opinion One size definitely does not fit all when it comes to enterprise applications.
With the invasion of mobile devices into the enterprise, enterprise applications are being stretched to the limit by workers trying to access apps designed for a 24 inch screen on a 5 inch smartphone. To get a sense for how enterprise applications need to evolve to meet the needs of the rapidly growing mobile workforce, consider the evolution of Web technology and early ecommerce sites.
In the late 1990s when the first websites started appearing, they were primarily informational. They presented information that had previously been delivered in printed materials. It wasn’t until Web designers stopped trying to imitate print catalogues or brick-and-mortar experiences and instead started creating new Internet-based ecommerce experiences that websites really became fast and easy to navigate and transformed the way we transact business.
Business workflows and applications are overdue for a similar transformation and evolution to fully take advantage of mobile technology. While the first wave of mobile apps designed from the ground up for mobile devices exist, the majority are designed for consumer use. When it comes to enterprise mobile apps, mobile workers are in most cases still forced to connect to an internal network and navigate interfaces designed for desktop computers with 13 or 24-inch screens.
A mobile-first design approach for enterprise applications acknowledges that users will be working on small screens, and that tapping and swiping gestures are preferable to typing.
Recent research from Gartner shows that the time people spend on different sized screens varies dramatically. For instance, on a laptop the average user session lasts for 36 minutes, while on a smartphone the average session is only 1.2 minutes. However, the number of sessions per day is much higher, with only 4 on average for a laptop, but 19 per day on a smartphone.
Obviously people are using smartphones in different ways that traditional computers, and applications need to be designed to optimise the user experience for both the size of the screen, as well as the length of usage. Employees are ready and waiting for the next wave of enterprise mobile applications designed for the mobile era.
Google Cloud offers security scanning for customer apps
Google Cloud offers security scanning for customer apps
The Google Cloud Security Scanner can ferret out XSS and mixed-use vulnerabilities
Google has released a
security scanner to help its cloud customers guard against attacks on their Web
applications.Google Cloud Security Scanner, now available as a free beta for
Google App Engine users, is designed to overcome a number of limitations often
found in commercial Web application security scanners, noted Google security
engineering manager Rob Mann in a blog post announcing the new service.
Commercials scanners can
be difficult to set up. They can over-report issues, leading to too many false
positives. They are designed more for security professionals than developers.
Google's scanner was designed to be easier to
use, Mann said. The service is designed to spot errors in code that could be
exploited through XSS (cross side scripting) or mixed content attacks, two
common attack methods.
The scanner inspects a Web application in
multiple steps. First, it quickly reviews the application's HTML code, which
renders the front-end interface for users. Then it digs more deeply into the
JavaScript code that runs the business logic for the site.
XSS attacks occur in sites that allow users to
submit their own content, such as a discussion forum. If the Web server does
not properly vet the submitted materials, attackers can add
malicious code that executes when other users visit the site.
Mixed content attacks take advantage of
sites that mix secure HTTPS pages with unsecured regular HTTP pages. Such sites
can fool users into thinking that
data is secure, when in fact it is not.
The scanning service does not cover all types of
vulnerabilities, so Mann recommended customers still get manual security
reviews by professionals. As time goes on, Google will expand the service to
cover a wider range of vulnerabilities.
Google is not charging for
the scanner, though its use may incur fees on the Google App Engine services
deployed by the Web application being scanned.Google Cloud Platform competitor
Amazon Web Services does not offer a security scanning service for its
customers, though a number of third-party companies offer scanning
services on the Amazon marketplace.
Thursday, February 19, 2015
Mobile gaming in public markets: Let’s take stock
Obsessed with mobile growth? Join us February 23-24 when we reveal the best technologies and strategies to help your company grow on mobile. It all takes place at our 5th annual Mobile Summit at the scenic Cavallo Point Resort in Sausalito, CA. See if you qualify here.
Content creation industries are always barbell-shaped
Consolidation was driven by the opportunity to save on SG&A costs, scale balance sheets, and to diversify content portfolios. A broader set of bets on new content is, on average, more predictable. A deeper catalog on average creates a bigger annuity income stream. More scale means that the risks of a new investment not paying off are more readily absorbable. Scale also creates barriers to entry when content is stored and transported physically — as owning and managing inventory is a logistical exercise in its own right. Scale also creates the opportunity to bundle content together and leverage package pricing.
Scale also matters in gaming
Consolidation was driven by the opportunity to save on SG&A costs, scale balance sheets, and to diversify content portfolios. A broader set of bets on new content is, on average, more predictable. A deeper catalog on average creates a bigger annuity income stream. More scale means that the risks of a new investment not paying off are more readily absorbable. Scale also creates barriers to entry when content is stored and transported physically — as owning and managing inventory is a logistical exercise in its own right. Scale also creates the opportunity to bundle content together and leverage package pricing.
Scale also matters in gaming
- Scale balance sheets
- Diversify content portfolios
- Increase the size of the catalog
The CEO of any company controls the fundamental performance of their firm — revenues, costs, and hence, profitability. We work to grow our firms with a balance of upside and downside risk that we hope is optimal for our investor base’s risk-return profile. Much less in a CEO’s control, however, is what public market investors are willing to pay to own a piece of the firm’s equity.
Current public-company sentiment and in turn valuations are volatile and cyclical — particularly in the macro-environment we find ourselves. King, Zynga, and Glu have all experienced some investor skepticism thus far.
As Glu did navigating from feature-phone to smartphone revenues, Zynga is undergoing a platform transition from Web to mobile. Now that its mobile revenues are approximately the same size as its web revenues, I believe that it will be able to more easily deliver overall top-line growth. King’s top-line, by comparison, is dominated by the enormous success of one engine. To the extent that renewed top-line vigor occurs for both companies, an upward re-rating of their equity should be expected.
Public market investors typically understand that the overall macro-environment in which mobile gaming operates is a strong one:
1.Rising smartphone penetration worldwide
2.A growing middle class in emerging markets
3. Increasing time spent by consumers on mobile devices
4. An expanding share of disposable income going to gaming
They often, however, find two elements of mobile gaming companies’ business models difficult to fully value:
1.Rising smartphone penetration worldwide
2.A growing middle class in emerging markets
3. Increasing time spent by consumers on mobile devices
4. An expanding share of disposable income going to gaming
They often, however, find two elements of mobile gaming companies’ business models difficult to fully value:
1.The predictability of new title launch performance
2. The longevity of existing titles
Due to uncertainty over “when the next hit is” and “the catalog,” public mobile gaming companies do not currently enjoy valuations on par with a range of other, often far less profitable — but more predictable — technology companies. I am highly optimistic this will change over the coming years due to a combination of:
1.Elongating operating history
2.Portfolio diversification
3.Scaling 4.Market share gains
I anticipate that King will indeed prove that it can sustain impressive profitability in 2015 and beyond. With an enormous active user base, I believe that its longevity and ultimate growth potential is presently underestimated by public market investors.
Modern book publishers, record labels, and film studios have been operating for nearer 100 than 10 years in their current organizational forms. Consolidation in each of these sectors created giants and minnows — “majors and indies.”
The digital revolution is in fact about:1. A changing format
2.Elimination of physical inventory3.Changing distribution mechanisms
Gaming, on the other hand, is a much younger content creation segment. It is nearer to 10 years old than 100. It has progressed from physical distribution enjoyed primarily in the living room, to most of its daily consumers interacting with digitally distributed content on their mobile device. The business model has evolved from “pay upfront regardless of whether you know you will like it” to “pay if you wish to progress faster in this title that you know you enjoy.”
I believe that free-to-play is the more efficient business model because it enables consumers to decide how they wish to trade off their time versus disposable income. We as developers use data to constantly optimize average underlying metrics such as retention, conversion, and lifetime value of paying users. Unlike other content creation sectors, the majority of our life cycle costs for a successful title typically occurs post-launch — through software updates and digital marketing spend. Our overall project risk can be calibrated on an ongoing basis by monthly, weekly, and even daily revenue trends.
No longer needing to buy and store a physical good has reduced the friction and barriers for consumers to enjoy a game. It has as such driven an explosion in the breadth and depth of choices. Instead of (at peak) hundreds of console games to choose from, they now have hundreds of thousands of mobile games to sample. More choice has led to more precise matching between what a player is looking for and what they find. As channels and choices have increased, the overall video content sector has grown its annual revenue significantly.
2. The longevity of existing titles
Due to uncertainty over “when the next hit is” and “the catalog,” public mobile gaming companies do not currently enjoy valuations on par with a range of other, often far less profitable — but more predictable — technology companies. I am highly optimistic this will change over the coming years due to a combination of:
1.Elongating operating history
2.Portfolio diversification
3.Scaling 4.Market share gains
I anticipate that King will indeed prove that it can sustain impressive profitability in 2015 and beyond. With an enormous active user base, I believe that its longevity and ultimate growth potential is presently underestimated by public market investors.
Modern book publishers, record labels, and film studios have been operating for nearer 100 than 10 years in their current organizational forms. Consolidation in each of these sectors created giants and minnows — “majors and indies.”
The digital revolution is in fact about:1. A changing format
2.Elimination of physical inventory3.Changing distribution mechanisms
Gaming, on the other hand, is a much younger content creation segment. It is nearer to 10 years old than 100. It has progressed from physical distribution enjoyed primarily in the living room, to most of its daily consumers interacting with digitally distributed content on their mobile device. The business model has evolved from “pay upfront regardless of whether you know you will like it” to “pay if you wish to progress faster in this title that you know you enjoy.”
I believe that free-to-play is the more efficient business model because it enables consumers to decide how they wish to trade off their time versus disposable income. We as developers use data to constantly optimize average underlying metrics such as retention, conversion, and lifetime value of paying users. Unlike other content creation sectors, the majority of our life cycle costs for a successful title typically occurs post-launch — through software updates and digital marketing spend. Our overall project risk can be calibrated on an ongoing basis by monthly, weekly, and even daily revenue trends.
No longer needing to buy and store a physical good has reduced the friction and barriers for consumers to enjoy a game. It has as such driven an explosion in the breadth and depth of choices. Instead of (at peak) hundreds of console games to choose from, they now have hundreds of thousands of mobile games to sample. More choice has led to more precise matching between what a player is looking for and what they find. As channels and choices have increased, the overall video content sector has grown its annual revenue significantly.
Free-to-play is the business model of choice. Pricing cannot go any lower — it is effectively on sale every day. Content is already unbundled — you download the precise game you want and only that. Distribution power never existed for mobile gaming content creators. At first it resided with mobile telecoms operators in the feature-phone era. Now it is with mega-platforms who keep 30 percent of revenues for providing billing, distribution, and hosting services. In short, mobile gaming is an industry built around endpoints.
While the mega-platforms have been established and are here to stay, I believe it is still early for the mobile gaming industry. Approximately two dozen public companies around the world have significant portion of their business in mobile gaming content creation: King, Zynga, Glu, and EA listed in the U.S.; Colopl, DeNa, Gree, Nexon, Klab, DreCom, Mixi, and Gung-Ho in Japan; Gamevil, Kakao, Com2Us in Korea; Tencent, KongZhong, Perfect World, Giant, NetDragon, Boyaa, Forgame, OurPalm, and ZQGames in China. Upcoming potential IPOs include Line in Korea, Kabam in the U.S., and Gumi in Japan.
Our industry has yet to create even one global multigenre free-to-play mobile giant. The advantages of scale for mobile gaming players include the same ones enjoyed by traditional content creators other than those tied to physical distribution. Being at “the top of the barbell” creates value through opportunities to:
Rationalize SG&A costs
I believe that as soon as the first global player is created with strength in all of the major gaming markets — U.S., China, Japan, Korea — there will be an acceleration of consolidation pressure to create the second and third. Ultimately, I believe that there will be a handful of ‘majors’ in the mobile gaming space — with diversified product portfolios and catalogs.
At Glu we are keenly aware of the need to increase the predictability of our product pipeline of new launches, as well as the depth of our catalogue annuity. Over the five years of my tenure, we have operated with a constancy of purpose to build world-class prowess in multiple genres, with IP and engines working with synergy to make our revenue streams more predictable.
Our priorities for each project Glu undertakes are always centered on identifying and nurturing upside while simultaneously working to minimize downside probability and magnitude Be it a new title in an existing studio, organic studio expansion, an acqui-hire, or outright acquisition, we are always looking for potentially outsized reward situations with disproportionately small amounts of downside. Consistently accumulating advantages for the past 19 quarters has allowed us to grow non-GAAP revenues from $66.9m in 2010 to $241.8m in 2014.
www.pixotritechnologies.com
Our industry has yet to create even one global multigenre free-to-play mobile giant. The advantages of scale for mobile gaming players include the same ones enjoyed by traditional content creators other than those tied to physical distribution. Being at “the top of the barbell” creates value through opportunities to:
Rationalize SG&A costs
I believe that as soon as the first global player is created with strength in all of the major gaming markets — U.S., China, Japan, Korea — there will be an acceleration of consolidation pressure to create the second and third. Ultimately, I believe that there will be a handful of ‘majors’ in the mobile gaming space — with diversified product portfolios and catalogs.
At Glu we are keenly aware of the need to increase the predictability of our product pipeline of new launches, as well as the depth of our catalogue annuity. Over the five years of my tenure, we have operated with a constancy of purpose to build world-class prowess in multiple genres, with IP and engines working with synergy to make our revenue streams more predictable.
Our priorities for each project Glu undertakes are always centered on identifying and nurturing upside while simultaneously working to minimize downside probability and magnitude Be it a new title in an existing studio, organic studio expansion, an acqui-hire, or outright acquisition, we are always looking for potentially outsized reward situations with disproportionately small amounts of downside. Consistently accumulating advantages for the past 19 quarters has allowed us to grow non-GAAP revenues from $66.9m in 2010 to $241.8m in 2014.
www.pixotritechnologies.com
APImetrics raises cash to help track and monitor Web applications
APImetrics, a Seattle startup
that helps developers track the performance of Web services from
LinkedIn, Amazon, Facebook and others, has pulled in $500,000 in fresh
capital from Bain Capital Ventures.
It marks the first investment from Bain Capital Ventures’
newly-formed seed program, with Salil Deshpande of Bain noting that
APImetrics “redefines the way that the enterprise views and values its
API resources.”
APIs — application programming interfaces — are critical “pipes” that help the Internet function properly.
“We provide a tool that measures the amount of stuff flowing through
the pipes — how fast it is flowing and how many leaks there are,” said
APImetrics co-founder David O’Neill in an interview with GeekWire last year.
In the past year, APImetrics has been able to quickly identify issues at
Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft Azure and others. The company makes money
by charging developers to schedule and run tests on APIs, charging from
$10 per month to more than $150 per month. In June, the company said
that it had run more than five million tests since the service started,
“Today’s IT managers need not just visibility into APIs across
complex platforms, but the analytics that deliver actionable
intelligence to back API performance,” said O’Neill, who previously led the Seattle startup Viafo.
APImetrics uses an authentication abstraction technology to run
structured testing against APIs, with companies like Microsoft, AT&T
and TIBCO now using the service.
The landscape for APIs is changing dramatically, growing from a
handful just a few years ago to more than 10,000 today. The tools
developed by APImetrics are designed to help developers model various
API scenarios and provide real-time monitoring and alerts for when
things break down.
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
The Two Sides of SEO for Book Publishers
Here’s a scenario: A reader hears about a book you publish from someone
they trust. They decide they want to buy it and read it. So how do they
find it? It’s possible they go directly to their favorite bookseller
(let’s assume this is all happening online), find it there and buy it.
Awesome, you just sold a book.
However, many other readers will go to their favorite search engine and search for the title, the author’s name or both. The question I have for you is this: Where does your book page show up in the search results when that happens?
Go ahead and search for a couple of your books before reading any further. I’ll wait.
Does your book page show up in the search results at all? What about your author’s page, assuming you have one on your site? Any other pages from your site? If they do show up, how high do they rank? Are they on the first page of the search results?
If links to your pages aren’t in the first couple of positions on the first page of the search results, the chances of someone clicking on them are pretty slim. And if you’re not on the first page, you have basically zero chance of getting the click. (Remember the old joke: Where’s the best place to hide a dead body? On the second page of the search results, because nobody ever looks there.)
I’ve heard publishers say it’s impossible to compete with the bigger sites whose pages come up at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) in book searches—like those belonging to Amazon, Goodreads and Barnes & Noble. I’ve heard that they are just too big and popular. I’ve heard that their search engine optimization (SEO) is just too good, if not perfect. And I’ve heard these things lots of times.
But none of that is true. You can compete with the bigger sites. They are not too big or too popular. And contrary to perhaps the biggest misconception of all, their SEO is far from perfect. (In fact, I’ve yet to find any site in the publishing industry that couldn’t use a little improvement.)
So let’s talk about SEO a little.
SEO has two sides to it: what I call the ‘mechanicals’—on-site elements that search engines look for—and the ‘content envelope’—all the available off-site content about your site and your products, like book reviews, blog posts, videos, social media posts and all the other content that envelopes your site.
You don’t have full control of the content envelope. If you had a really outstanding content generation and social media program you might gain a little more. But you really can’t control everything that happens outside of your site.
On the other hand, you have complete control over your site—after all, it’s yours.
That means you can shape the mechanicals entirely as you wish. Search engines are fairly explicit about what they are looking for when they crawl and index your site. Of course, they don’t tell us everything, but we know enough to be able to ensure your site itself is highly optimized. And just by focusing a little effort on the mechanicals you can start showing up at the top of the search results. Above Amazon, above Goodreads and above Barnes & Noble.
By adding in a great content generation program and creating a real content envelope around your site, you can then own the SERPs—which happens to be a key component in the first step of a direct-to-consumer program that makes books “easy to find and easy to buy.” As I’ve written before, that can be achieved even by the smallest of publishers. You just need to understand a little bit more about what the search engines are looking for and, at a minimum, adjust your site appropriately. You will probably need to get your web developer involved, but I promise you, it will be worth it.
In future posts I’ll going to go into more specifics about both optimizing your site’s mechanicals and creating a great content envelope.
In the meantime, let me know in the comments below how well your books showed up when you searched for them by their titles.
www.pixotritechnologies.com
However, many other readers will go to their favorite search engine and search for the title, the author’s name or both. The question I have for you is this: Where does your book page show up in the search results when that happens?
Go ahead and search for a couple of your books before reading any further. I’ll wait.
Does your book page show up in the search results at all? What about your author’s page, assuming you have one on your site? Any other pages from your site? If they do show up, how high do they rank? Are they on the first page of the search results?
If links to your pages aren’t in the first couple of positions on the first page of the search results, the chances of someone clicking on them are pretty slim. And if you’re not on the first page, you have basically zero chance of getting the click. (Remember the old joke: Where’s the best place to hide a dead body? On the second page of the search results, because nobody ever looks there.)
I’ve heard publishers say it’s impossible to compete with the bigger sites whose pages come up at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) in book searches—like those belonging to Amazon, Goodreads and Barnes & Noble. I’ve heard that they are just too big and popular. I’ve heard that their search engine optimization (SEO) is just too good, if not perfect. And I’ve heard these things lots of times.
But none of that is true. You can compete with the bigger sites. They are not too big or too popular. And contrary to perhaps the biggest misconception of all, their SEO is far from perfect. (In fact, I’ve yet to find any site in the publishing industry that couldn’t use a little improvement.)
So let’s talk about SEO a little.
SEO has two sides to it: what I call the ‘mechanicals’—on-site elements that search engines look for—and the ‘content envelope’—all the available off-site content about your site and your products, like book reviews, blog posts, videos, social media posts and all the other content that envelopes your site.
You don’t have full control of the content envelope. If you had a really outstanding content generation and social media program you might gain a little more. But you really can’t control everything that happens outside of your site.
On the other hand, you have complete control over your site—after all, it’s yours.
That means you can shape the mechanicals entirely as you wish. Search engines are fairly explicit about what they are looking for when they crawl and index your site. Of course, they don’t tell us everything, but we know enough to be able to ensure your site itself is highly optimized. And just by focusing a little effort on the mechanicals you can start showing up at the top of the search results. Above Amazon, above Goodreads and above Barnes & Noble.
By adding in a great content generation program and creating a real content envelope around your site, you can then own the SERPs—which happens to be a key component in the first step of a direct-to-consumer program that makes books “easy to find and easy to buy.” As I’ve written before, that can be achieved even by the smallest of publishers. You just need to understand a little bit more about what the search engines are looking for and, at a minimum, adjust your site appropriately. You will probably need to get your web developer involved, but I promise you, it will be worth it.
In future posts I’ll going to go into more specifics about both optimizing your site’s mechanicals and creating a great content envelope.
In the meantime, let me know in the comments below how well your books showed up when you searched for them by their titles.
www.pixotritechnologies.com
Use Hashtags to Generate Greater Brand Engagement
The hashtag has become the new “like” — and that’s not a good thing. Just as marketers used to (and some sorry folks still do) obsess over how many Facebook likes they accumulate, many are now plastering hashtags on their communications and adding up the times they’re used.
The problem is the use of a hashtag can be about as meaningless as a like if it doesn’t affect the brand positively. Few companies use hashtags to generate greater brand engagement. Take the hashtag used by Avocados from Mexico during the Super Bowl a couple of weeks ago. The spot imagined what “the first draft ever” might have looked like back four billion years ago. In the concluding frames, the hashtag #FirstDraftEver appeared under the brand logo.
The brief appearance was enough to spark approximately 25,000 mentions in the first 24 hours after the ad ran, according to Hootsuite Analytics. Twitter TWTR -0.97% users talked about how much they liked the ad and cracked jokes about the various animals and countries. The only problem is that many of the early Tweets didn’t mention the Avocados from Mexico. And it’s really no surprise — the concept of the ad was far more interesting than a piece of produce as it was portrayed. For a small brand that likely blew their entire ad budget on its Super Bowl campaign in the hopes of creating brand awareness, those missed opportunities are very costly.
Then there was the much-criticized Nationwide ad about children dying in preventable accidents. The brand had hoped its hashtag #MakeSafeHappen would start a dialogue about safety for children. Instead, most of the conversation ended up ridiculing and otherwise criticizing the ad. Twitter audiences reflected the general critical sentiment about the commercial — of the over 301K mentions, negative comments appeared six times more than did positive ones.
Super Bowl advertisers have learned that, in order to maximize the value of their ad investment, they need to prompt engagement beyond their 30 seconds of fame. But it seems many thought just putting a hashtag in their ads would be enough. Across all the Super Bowl ads, the average time a hashtag was on screen was less than one second. If people blinked, they probably missed it.
And Super Bowl advertisers aren’t the only ones guilty of worshiping the holy hashtag. Of the brands on the Inter brand 100 list that posted a tweet in Q4 of 2014, 97% included a hashtag. Corporate marketing departments now staff people whose primary function is to create hashtags and track their usage; agencies dedicated to hashtag campaigns are popping up.
But hashtags — like likes — are only as valuable as the engagement they produce. And just because someone uses your hashtag in a tweet or post doesn’t mean they are engaged with your brand. Hashtags should be used less as a message and more as a call to action that leads to greater brand engagement.
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
Why Google Recommends Responsive Web Design
Google often offers advice to web
designers and developers so that they can optimize their websites for
the search engine’s algorithms and for SEO purposes. Recently, Google finally took a stance on a hot topic: Responsive Web Design (RWD).
But what is Responsive Web Design? Wikipedia defines it as “an approach to web design aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones).” The main advantage of RWD is that it allows for one URL and single content source. An RWD website can serve any device or screen size, so you do not need to design separate websites for mobile, tablet, and desktop devices.
To put this into more basic language, Google recommends the use of media queries, which form part of the backbone of RWD. Media queries allow websites to adapt to any screen size. So, a basic translation of this quotation is that Google believes it to be a best practice to use RWD.
A dynamic serving website “uses the same URL regardless of device, but generates a different version of HTML for different device types based on what the server knows about the user’s browser.”
Separate URL configuration refers to designing two completely separate websites—one for desktop and one for mobile. In a separate URL configuration, the system (ideally) automatically detects which device the user is using and then redirects him or her to the either the desktop version or mobile version.
Although RWD, dynamic serving websites, and separate URLs represent three potential approaches to mobile design, RWD is the most pain free. Admittedly, RWD requires a lot of up-front planning and costs can run higher initially, but after the design strategy is set, maintenance is usually far less resource intensive compared to having separate URLS or a dynamic serving URL. With RWD, you have a single URL for ALL content, providing a streamlined user experience, flexible orientation, and no redirects.
Dynamic serving websites are slightly faster loading and still have a single URL, but you still have to maintain multiple custom pages and multiple sets of the same content. With RWD, you only need to be concerned about one page and one set of content, which makes things more efficient and simpler for you.
Aside from the three mobile design options listed above, the last option that Google lists is creating an entirely separate mobile website, where the system detects mobile visitors and redirects them to a discrete, mobile-optimized website. Only mobile users will see this site; tablet users will still see the original desktop site.
According to Google, the principal upside of opting for a separate mobile/desktop website configuration is that it allows you to create a custom user experience and make easy changes. The downside is that you have to carefully manage multiple URLs, redirects, and other integrations between your mobile and non-mobile websites. In addition, similar to the cons of a dynamic serving URL, keeping two sets of content on two different web pages can make data management complex and difficult.
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But what is Responsive Web Design? Wikipedia defines it as “an approach to web design aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones).” The main advantage of RWD is that it allows for one URL and single content source. An RWD website can serve any device or screen size, so you do not need to design separate websites for mobile, tablet, and desktop devices.
WHY GOOGLE WANTS WHAT GOOGLE WANTS
Now that you know why RWD is important, I’ll go into more detail about why RWD is important to Google. Google recommends that “webmasters follow the industry best practice of using web design, namely serving the same HTML for all devices, using media queries to decide rendering on each device.”To put this into more basic language, Google recommends the use of media queries, which form part of the backbone of RWD. Media queries allow websites to adapt to any screen size. So, a basic translation of this quotation is that Google believes it to be a best practice to use RWD.
THREE DIFFERENT MOBILE DESIGNS
Although Google explicitly notes that RWD is its preferred design option, it also notes that there are two other approaches to mobile design, including using separate URLS as well as a dynamic serving website.A dynamic serving website “uses the same URL regardless of device, but generates a different version of HTML for different device types based on what the server knows about the user’s browser.”
Separate URL configuration refers to designing two completely separate websites—one for desktop and one for mobile. In a separate URL configuration, the system (ideally) automatically detects which device the user is using and then redirects him or her to the either the desktop version or mobile version.
Although RWD, dynamic serving websites, and separate URLs represent three potential approaches to mobile design, RWD is the most pain free. Admittedly, RWD requires a lot of up-front planning and costs can run higher initially, but after the design strategy is set, maintenance is usually far less resource intensive compared to having separate URLS or a dynamic serving URL. With RWD, you have a single URL for ALL content, providing a streamlined user experience, flexible orientation, and no redirects.
Dynamic serving websites are slightly faster loading and still have a single URL, but you still have to maintain multiple custom pages and multiple sets of the same content. With RWD, you only need to be concerned about one page and one set of content, which makes things more efficient and simpler for you.
Aside from the three mobile design options listed above, the last option that Google lists is creating an entirely separate mobile website, where the system detects mobile visitors and redirects them to a discrete, mobile-optimized website. Only mobile users will see this site; tablet users will still see the original desktop site.
According to Google, the principal upside of opting for a separate mobile/desktop website configuration is that it allows you to create a custom user experience and make easy changes. The downside is that you have to carefully manage multiple URLs, redirects, and other integrations between your mobile and non-mobile websites. In addition, similar to the cons of a dynamic serving URL, keeping two sets of content on two different web pages can make data management complex and difficult.
RWD IS KING
Ultimately, you can choose to optimize for mobile using any of the three design styles described in this blog; however, if your aim is to minimize hassle, extra work, and frustration, then RWD is probably the right choice for you. While the start-up costs of a RWD website can sometimes run higher than the creation of a dynamic serving URL or a separate mobile website, RWD often proves far less work and trouble in the long run.www.pixotritechnologies.com
7 SEO Tips To Improve Google Ranking Of Your Website
Search engine optimization is widely
adopted by growing websites to gain online visibility and popularity.
Even though SEO is effective, it is not easy now. The regular search
engine updates have made it essential to optimize various aspects of a
website to make it rank higher.
There are seven major SEO signals which will help improve your Google ranking:
1.Keyword Research
Keywords
are the most important factor for any website to rank well on search
engines. Keyword research is a vital aspect in an SEO campaign as it
gives an idea of which keywords are being used by internet users to look
for your website. You should try to figure out keywords that have a
high search volume but low competition as this will help rank better.
These are limited as competitors also make use of similar ones. The best
option is to include long tail keywords as these are specific to your
page improving the chances of getting listed for relevant search.
2.Optimize Technically
- Your website should be technically optimized so that Google is able to read your website’s text and code.
- The URL structure should be kept below hundred characters long, use dashes instead of underscores and skip special characters.
- Frame a unique title tag which includes basic keywords in the beginning of the title.
- You should have a distinct meta description page for each page consisting of one or two sentences describing the page.
- Duplicate content is something which should be kept track of and solved to avoid confusion for search engines.
- An XML site-map is essential for the website and should be submitted to Google webmaster tools to get the content checked. Updating and re-submitting it is required every time new content is added.
3.Ease Of Use
No
matter how good the content and the design of your website is, if it is
not easy for users to find what they are looking for, it does not make
sense. Emphasis has to be laid on usability of the website.
Labeling content is important for users to easily find what they are looking for.
Easy and smooth navigation should be focused on so that users can access other pages apart from the home page.
Including good quality content with relevant keywords and crisp information will retain the interest of visitors.
4. Quality Content
The
prime focus of SEO is good quality content which is why it is
significant to invest money for updating your website with fresh and
engaging information.
Uploading new content in the company blog can help gain quality links and also increase the authority of the website.
Promoting e-books properly can bring in new links.
Focusing on visual content like info-graphics and charts attracts visitors easily.
5. Use Social Media
Working
on and implementing a good social media strategy is sure to work in
your favor. For this, you need to first understand your target audience
and make use of few specific social media channels where they are most
active.
Try to connect to people who have many followers in social media as information will be shared quickly.
6. Link Building Exercise
Adhering to link building exercises is important to improve the credibility of the website. One effective way is guest blogging.
7. Create Responsive Website
Having
a responsive website is a key essential as this makes it compatible on
mobile devices, tablets, and laptops. This is sure to bring about better
visibility and popularity, slowly increasing page rankings.
Sunday, February 15, 2015
Our SEO Experts Use Killer Strategies to Crush the Competition and Take You All the Way to the Top!
Pixotri Technologies is an ISO 9001:2008 certified US based SEO
company with development center in India. With more than 2500+ satisfied
clients, we offer a large variety of services and promise to deliver
result-oriented, affordable SEO services in India to help you generate
high quality, targeted traffic that converts like wildfire. Housing a
dedicated team of certified SEO professionals, we offer guaranteed
search engine rankings on Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines.
We provide SEO services in India to enhance the visibility of your
website, thereby increasing rankings and assuring highly targeted
traffic in the major Search Engines.
In the era of modern digital computing where fierce competition
dominates the market, it is quite certainly agreeable that the companies
serious about succeeding in their respective markets should focus on
improving their online presence. Websites today are targets of the
Google Dance – the unexpected SERP results and ever-changing positions
of the SE rankings due to the aggressive nature of online promotion. The
companies that want to climb the ladder of success need to make the
good use of the search engines and attain a robust, global web presence.
Working on several global projects, we have fully functional
dedicated teams for each step in the SEO process – SEO, Link Building,
SEM, SMO, ORM, and Analytics. Our vast experience and multiple projects
have made many firms achieve their business objectives in a multitude of
ways.
Do You Need To Hire An SEO?
Google continues to get better at evaluating external clues to determine the value of a website and thus its relevancy to searchers. Small business owners can control a lot of these things themselves by having an active social media presence, providing exceptional service and encouraging customers to leave reviews online, hosting or participating in community events, and writing for publications in their industry. Does that mean that the role of an SEO is diminishing or, dare I say it, no longer necessary to achieve first page rankings on the SERPs?
No, it doesn’t.
First of all, the practices mentioned previously are becoming more important but there’s an increasing number of ways to maximize their value. Here are a few examples:
Community Events – Hosting a community event can be a great way to get your business some exposure, but without appropriate marketing, it won’t get the attendance that attracts press. An SEO can help promote your event in such a way that you earn links, gain traffic to your site, and create social conversation around your brand.
Publishing Articles – Getting an article published online can drive traffic and create awareness on its own, but a dedicated SEO could amplify it through social media like Facebook and LinkedIn, give it visibility on your website and through email marketing to your leads, use it to connect with prominent industry influencers through Twitter or email, and potentially even find ways to repurpose it (as an infographic or by compiling it with other articles to make an e-book, for instance) to give it a new audience.
Review Management – Getting reviews is just one piece of the puzzle. SEOs can leverage reviews to make sure they show up with your website in the SERPs, building confidence in searchers and boosting click-through. There are also strategies for managing reviews, particularly when it comes to responding to negative reviews, that can help your brand gain even more value from them.
It’s also important to remember that some of the most important aspects of SEO are related to technical aspects of a website that most small business owners don’t understand or don’t have the time to learn. Here’s a bit of what I mean:
On-page Optimization – The core of technical SEO, this refers to the authoring of title tags, meta descriptions, and image alt tags, appropriate organization of heading tags, and URL optimization, all with a keyword strategy that has been researched to target high volume keywords with relatively low competition. Without this, the search engines may struggle to understand what your website is about, which can doom your chances of getting on the first page of results.
HTML Markup – Related to on-page optimization, HTML markup is a method of coding certain parts of your site to communicate directly to the search engines. Most commonly for local businesses, this means marking up your address, phone number, and business name. This helps the search engines know that you’re local and gives you increased odds of ranking when a searcher is near your business.
Website Optimization – Google is giving more and more weight to certain aspects of website design. For example, websites built with responsive design that function just as well on mobile devices as desktops get a boost in the rankings. There is also site speed to consider – websites that load slowly are less likely to get top rankings, but good SEOs know the tools and tricks to increase load speeds.
In addition to these, a quality SEO will monitor ranking performance, stays on top of Google’s many algorithm changes, and research competitors for link-building opportunities. Things can change quickly in the world of SEO and small business owners are often too wrapped up in running their business (understandably) to put much time into keeping themselves informed.
The truth is, small business owners should be doing everything mentioned in the first paragraph while their SEO manages everything else. You’re pretty much guaranteed to see an increase in your rankings and a resulting bump in organic traffic to your site, which can make a huge difference in the number of leads and clients. The investment is almost always worthwhile.
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