Successful Blog

Make the Most of SEO in Adobe Muse

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Anita Brady

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The recent release of Adobe Muse in May 2012 has many print designers scrambling to figure out just how to take advantage of this powerful new software. Adobe has created a product that allows almost anyone (assuming you have a marginal amount of design experience) to create websites with little or zero knowledge of web development or HTML code. Although there are quite a few limitations (and some heavy industry criticism;), using the right knowledge and a little help from third-party apps, you can get the most in terms of functionality and SEO from this new software.

Make the Most of SEO in Adobe Muse

With the proper considerations and a little bit of leg-work, you can easily create a functional and interactive site with all the Search Engine Optimization necessary to rank well in searches. However this is not a set requirement for new sites, and will only happen if you take the initiative to add descriptions and tags in the right places. Here are a few tips to help you optimize your first build with Adobe Muse.

Include Extensive Metadata

In Muse (and with any web design platform), including extensive Metadata is a sure-fire way to help your site rank well on searches. Include not just a description of your site and business (which will be directly under your search results), but include details like locations, zip codes, phone numbers, and employee names to boost your site to the top of search engines on less germane topics.

Tags

Be sure to add tags to every relevant object within your new site. A tag is a keyword or term that is assigned to a specific item within a website. These keywords help describe the item and allow, specifically, images to be found again by browsing or searching. You can even add Geotags (or geographical identification metadata) to various media such as photographs and smart objects, which will allow users to find your site just because of your geographic location – cool!

Social Media Plugins

Most likely, social media will be a big part of your marketing campaign. Take the time to sign up for popular social media like Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ and then create extensive descriptions (including keywords) within each. The more back-linked content you can create on the web for your site, the better. Consider including an RSS feed signup for new content on your page, or add a Facebook widget on Muse to direct traffic across platforms and increase your search engine appeal.

Searchable, Useful, and Relevant Content and Adobe Muse

Of course, there is no substitute for building a high-quality site with high-quality content. Be sure to include persuasive, original copy on your main pages and all subpages. SEO tags and metadata tricks cannot replace the value of a legitimate, content-heavy site, and ultimately it is the search engine’s job to rank the most relevant sites at the top, regardless of how much SEO went into your design. So keep this in mind and strive to create a site that not only searches well, but also is genuinely useful and relevant to your potential customers.

Despite the inherent limitations and controversy surrounding Adobe Muse, it’s likely that this new software will be a success in the world of digital design. Muse can be a great tool for competent designers who are not ready to leap into CSS or PHP programming. Although it will never replace a database driven or serious hand-coded site made by a professional web developer, for most small, static sites, Muse has everything you need. Be sure to consider adding extensive SEO and third-party apps to help you get the most out of your new site. Good luck and have fun designing!

Author’s Bio:
Anita Brady leads the team at www.123Print.com – customizable print products for business and life situations. The website offers everything needed to make your own business cards and to design other promotional items that combine high quality and customization with an affordable price.

How to Choose an SEO Agency for Your Business

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Brian Taylor

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How to Choose an SEO Agency for Your Business

Well-optimized, effective websites aren’t just for Fortune 500 companies and tech companies anymore. Now more than ever, it’s important for small business owners to fully understand just how beneficial a successfully executed website can be for them as well.

In order to make your website successful, you need to make sure it’s fully search engine optimized and unless you’re an SEO expert yourself, you’ll no doubt want to hire a team of experts to help you get the job done right. Here’s how to make sure the experience goes as pleasantly as possible.

Have Faith in the Professionals You Choose

As is the case with hiring any other team of professionals to help you with your business, trust is an extremely important factor in your relationship with your SEO team. Once you’ve chosen the right professionals for the job, it’s important to have faith in their ability to do the job right and deliver you the results they promised. Avoid micromanaging and nagging at all costs.

Be Patient

Even once a given SEO strategy has been formulated and officially set in motion, it still takes time for the changes to yield results. Rome wasn’t built in a day, after all! The SEO agency you’re working with most likely gave you an estimate as far as how long it would take for you to start to notice results. Definitely give it that much time to work and take root.

Treat Your SEO Agency as a Partner

When working with any SEO agency, it’s of the utmost importance that you treat them as the partners they are. These are trained experts who know their craft just as well as you know yours, so they should be treated as equals working toward a common goal. Be professional in your communications and realistic in your expectations. Definitely address questions or concerns politely and with respect.

Pay for Quality Work

The SEO agency you hire to help you make the most of your website is made up of qualified business professionals that are doing what they do for the same reasons you are – because it’s their profession. As such, they expect to collect payment for services rendered according to their terms of service. Respect and adhere to the company’s business terms and be sure to pay them promptly for good services rendered. Always be sure to hold up your end of your business contract in every way, shape, and form as well.

Teaming up with an SEO agency in order to get results that deliver for you is simple when you follow a few simple guidelines.

Author’s Bio:
Brian Taylor is the VP, Business Development at Forix SEO in Portland, OR. a team of crack SEO experts with an impressive record when it comes to results, experience, and expertise. Forix offers affordable and ethical SEO services in Portland helping small businesses with their Internet marketing needs.

Analyze Social with Google Analytics Today

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Franklyn Stephen

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Social media reporting in Google analytics

Google analytics provides a reporting which would make you understand little bit easier that efforts you put in social media marketing are worth the investment. Also it gives you in-depth analysis about which social channel gives value to your business and which plans are most effectual.

Business metrics with Social Media

These new reports are framed in a way to span the gap between business metrics and social media. Using these reports, you can assess the traffic/clicks comes to your site from different social channels and how they leads to conversions, future conversions, and where the users navigate within your website and many social activities that are going on and off the website which enables to do in-depth analysis and take further actions in social media for the growth of your business.

If you are unaware of these updates, check through as you log in next time. Here are few things that you can keep an eye.

By the above overview report, we can have a quick look at how much conversions has been produced by social channels. Also it gives you comparison between the money invested and profit obtained from all your goal completions obtained through social referrals.

Social Channel Conversions

We can evaluate the conversion rates of each social channel whereby it allows marketers to measure the value of each social network that drives profit and supports your business. This conversion report gives influence of the social content whether it may be from facebook conversion post, or Google plus post or stumble upon post or new video.

Social Plugins Report

Social plugins report gives good insight of how the article pages of website is influenced by the social media through the social buttons (like facebook, Google plus, twitter) being clicked on the article page to share them. By this, clear picture can be availed of which articles are most engaged, interesting among the users and how the users are following socially with your content on and off your site.

Activity stream: What is going on outside of your website?

All other reports would depict the social content as how it is being engaged inside the website, While this activity stream report will present the activities that are carried out in the social content off the website across the social web.

Social content shared publicly as how it is shared, where it is shared (through facebook, twitter, Google plus, stumble upon etc), what people have commented and URLs of all these sources can be seen. Presently activities are covered for Google+ and the list of social data hub partners is growing which includes Meetup, Badoo, Hatena, Echo, etc…These new reports can be availed through standard reporting tab.

Sources of Social visits

This report gives visits received to the site through different social referrals and how users behave in the site, as shown in the parallel comparative picture . The in-depth details of conversion metrics of each social network and how the content is engaged and interacted among the people is depicted. This report turned out to be handy, because whether visitors are getting the desired outcome in the website can be examined here, which is essentially and really you want to know.

Focus on Content

Recently, Google analytics has brought few updates which enable the users to get adept understanding about their social impact. For the long time this was lagging being unable to find how much the content was socialized. But now Google analytics is able to measure the social reach of content/website/product/services. Notwithstanding the availability of tools on hands, social reach is all about how the content is being used and shared. Keeping all these in track, Google has released few updates designed in its analytics tool. Two significant new updates are centered on assisting the users to get clear understanding on how the content is socializing online and how it’s being viewed across different devices.

Content Experiments

Users can experiment content to test and improvise the website. Site owners can create different versions of a page say A, B, and C experiments to measure how effectively each versions get the visitors to convert. Google analytics already have this facility called website optimizer. It is now called as ‘content experiments’ and incorporated into analytics. Website optimizer isn’t a standalone product any more from August 01_2012. Content experiments assists to hone toward the goals that have already set in the Google analytics which will help to find out which page design and content is most effectual.

To start up with these content experiments, open Standard Reporting of Google analytics, and in the Content section, click Experiments.

Here you have to go through four steps to complete the set up wizard.

Browser-Size Analysis

The visible portion of a web page is very smaller than the actual screen resolution for the users who are accessing through mobile platforms due to many toolbars and welters. Essential factors for conversion rates are items that are above the fold on a web page. To find the percentage of visitors for whom the page items displays below or above the fold is really baffling. Therefore Google analytics facilitates users by creating a visualization to ascertain which parts of page are viewable to which percent of visitors.

Go to the Content section of Google Analytics, and click In-Page Analytics. Then click on the browser-size to see the shaded portions of the web page that are underneath the fold. Now click in at any place of the screen to find how much percent of visitors can view it or just hold the threshold percentage by using the slider.

Clicking on show-percentiles will display the summary visualization of several percentiles. This depiction will help to get the clear picture of how the browser sizes are dispersed among different devices. For instance, if you select to compare all the visitors of mobile device traffic, solid difference can be noted.

Concentrating on the good content and where the content flows is so essential to the sound health of any website as well as the experiences it gives to users. Thus far, web analytics focused on page clicks/visits and traffic sources to get the picture of what is working and what not is working in the website. Although it is significant, it is also as important as to perceive how content in the each page of the website impress the user’s/visitors. With this new website optimization tool, more mystification comes into picture!

Conclusion

These new reporting styles will significantly and ultimately help the marketers to generate the desired results who want to produce solid numbers and assist them in furthering their marketing efforts. Nevertheless, it is important for the company to set the fair and sensible goals which would really convert them into indispensable and worthwhile.

Author’s Bio:
Franklyn Stephen Issac.J is a webmaster having substantial four years of experience in analytics, Search engine optimization, social media marketing, SEM and PPC. His achieved results will highlight his profile as one having great passion for analytics and ecommerce solutions. More than 50 keywords ranked prove his strong insight knowledge on keyword research and analysis.

Guest Blogging Tips for Attracting More Traffic to Your Site

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Subodh

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Guest blogging is a great way to attract people to your website. By guest blogging, you can link your products, services or ideas to new audiences via other websites. Those links also provide more credibility for your own website, which makes it easier for you to improve your chances of getting a better ranking on a search engine.

Effective Guest Blogging Tips to Attract More Traffic

Whether you guest blog for yourself or use a service to help, here are some effective guest blogging tips you might pursue. Use them sensibly to get the best possible results.

Work with Blogs on Your Niche

You need to make sure that your links are of the best possible quality. This includes finding links that are relevant to your site. You must make sure that any guest blog posts you write are on blogs that relate in some way to the site that you run.

This is needed for the best search engine results. You can get better SEO results if the links to your site are relevant to it.

Express Your Knowledge

Another of the guest blogging tips to use is to demonstrate your knowledge of something. You need to express your knowledge so you can show people that you have an interest in whatever it is you are writing about. People are more likely to take your site seriously if they see that you know about your topic.

Avoid Going Big

Start small when trying to get your work onto more blogs. A good tip would be to start off with smaller blogs instead of using the larger ones when you start out. This might help you out because you will have an easier chance of potentially getting more traffic onto your site.

In fact, you are more likely to get exposure on a smaller blog than if you were on a larger one. A smaller blog will be easier to communicate to people in because you’ll have more of a focus on your own post. A larger blog might be cluttered with too many people who are trying to get their ideas out all at the same time.

Keep Links Under Control

You need to make sure all links on your guest posts are controlled well. A good idea is to use them in your resource box or author information box. This is often found at the end of a post.

Of course, you could use links within the body of what you are writing. This works provided that the links are not blatant advertisements and that they directly relate to what you are writing about.

Use these guest blogging tips if you want to get your website more power on search engines. These should not only make it easier for you to get more links on your site but to also express your knowledge of items to a greater audience. It makes it easier for you to get the most out of your site.

Author’s Bio:

Subodh is a SEO expert with over 6 years of experience under her belt. He provide guest posting service at www.seocreations.com

The 5 Pillars Of Successful List Building

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Gerald Gigerl

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Marketing and List Building Online

Today I will introduce you to the 5 pillars of successful list building, the main factors that can make or break your wealth.

It has to be mentioned that most online marketers have a wrong idea about what marketing online really means. Marketing is war, marketing is testing and marketing is about being the best.

To be good in list building you have to put in at least hundreds of hours to become good at driving traffic, split testing, creating products and writing email campaigns.

There are no shortcuts in making this work and as long as you are not trying to find a way around the hard work, you are not getting into any trouble.

The 5 Pillars Of Successful List Building

Let’s have a look at the 5 pillars of successful list building.

Pillar #1: Niche Selection

Unbelievable but true, I think there are way too many people who get into a niche that they don’t like and are comfortable with. Your goal is to spend enough time researching a market that is big enough and has substantial equity to making your business worthwhile.

Never enter a market that you are not passionate about because in most cases you will “quit” before you ever realize success. When things are tough, the only thing that keeps you going is your drive, passion and goals.

Pay attention to what kind of market you enter as well as how much demand there is. It’s easier to succeed in an already booming market than it is to achieve substantial results in a developing market. It takes more money, energy and time to reach breakthrough success in a “fresh market”.

Pillar #2: Business Model

Your business model is the single most important success factor for your chosen market/niche. As for pretty much everything else there are two options: You choose to create your own business model or you decide to go with an already successful business model.

What is actually meant by creating or following a business model? Basically, you have a very clear plan on how you do everything such as what kind of products you promote, what kind of bonuses you offer, what kind of OTOs (One Time Offers) you offer, optimizing squeeze pages, running split tests using Google Analytics/Experiments, creating email campaigns and much more.

While this might be exactly what you are doing for “planning”, all these skills can only be learned in the process of DOING. Yes, you have to have a plan on how to drive traffic and market your products, but without a strict discipline of doing exactly that, you are just wasting your efforts for planning.

It takes insane amounts of sweat to make anything work. The best you can do to reach your list building goal is to work as hard and smart as you possibly can.

Pillar #3: Squeeze Page Optimization

This is the step where you start making real money really soon if you are putting in consistent effort to make it work.

A squeeze page is a page where a person leaves the email address to get a free gift. The main goal is to drive as much targeted traffic to your squeeze page as possible and convert the traffic as good as possible.

The opt-in rate is mainly determined on how persuasive your sales page is, meaning how people perceive the value you are offering. To get the highest opt-in rate possible, you have to test titles, value proposition, colors, free products and much more.

The only way you can really test all those factors is by driving ongoing, highly targeted traffic to your squeeze page(s).

IMPORTANT NOTE: The message you spread on your squeeze page for your free information product should be consistent. Don’t give people information that is not accurate just to make them subscribe to your email list. The information on your squeeze page must be in congruence with your product.

If your message is providing wrong information, you will get a higher unsubscribe rate than you ever thought possible before. Therefore, your message (value proposition) needs to be consistent to attract targeted customers to your products.

Pillar #4: Traffic Generation

Traffic generation is something that you should never get sick of. There is unimaginable amount of equity in driving traffic to your squeeze page(s). The more ongoing traffic you are able to drive to your capture pages, the more possibilities you have to split test.

Some typical traffic generation methods include forum marketing, free product offers, SEO, PPC, social media, video marketing, article marketing, ad swaps, solo ads, JV giveaways and webinars.

You should never get stuck with one traffic generation method but focus on more techniques to drive high quality traffic.

Pillar #5: Email Marketing

Under email marketing goes everything that you do within your autoresponder. You have got to learn how to set up email campaigns, write newsletters, promote products and much more.

If you decide to market the best-selling products from an affiliate network like ClickBank, many vendors will have email campaigns ready for the promotion of their product. All you need to do is to simple copy and paste their prewritten email campaigns into your autoresponder follow up emails.

If you are promoting your own products you will always have to write your own email campaigns.

No matter what product you decide to promote make sure to keep a stable relationship between your list and you. Don’t bombard your list by sending several emails a day promoting different products all the time.

You want to build and sustain trust.. The best way to do that is by giving your list immense value in the form of free products, free reports, free articles and so on.

Now that you know the 5 pillars of successful list building, you can start producing amazing results for your business!

Author’s Bio:
Gerald Gigerl is a product creator, lead generation and affiliate marketing expert. Gerald creates information products on how to drive massive traffic to your website and generate up to 75 “product hungry” leads a day! If you are really serious about making massive amounts of money online you can learn more about Gerald here: The Affiliate Traffic Pro .

How to Rebuild Rankings after the Penguin Update

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B. Lyttle

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The Penguin Update by Google came into effect on April 24th, 2012. Although it received its fair share of contradictory criticism and appreciation, it made one thing very clear – the webmasters trying to trick Google by finding loopholes in the system and indulging in spam will constantly be weeded out, sooner or later, with every algorithm update.

How to Rebuild Rankings after the Penguin Update

If you’re a webmaster who’s still trying to figure out ways to rebuild a new SEO strategy after the Penguin update, these tips will help you recover your site from the oblivious pages to the top rankings that receive all the limelight once again:

1. Remove Irrelevant Links – Sure guest posting is a great way to get some free content while adding value to your site and giving your readers a fresh perspective on things. But if yours is a sports website accepting guest posts related to a completely different niche like cooking or finance, you’re only paving way for your website to sink in murky waters. Get rid of all such links on your site that are not relevant to your niche.

2. Provide Quality Content on Your Website and Contribute Guest Posts to Relevant Sites – Buying backlinks is a quite popular SEO tactic and is gaining huge momentum these days but it doesn’t always pay. Instead, it can lead to a lot of trouble for you when these paid links are automated links. If you have any such links or have any spam websites linking to you, contact the webmasters of these websites immediately and politely request them to remove these links.

It is best that you earn backlinks only from the sites that are relevant to your niche. The best way to do this is, by providing good quality content on your website that encourages natural link building of your website, as well as contributing guest posts to other established blogs in your relevant niche.

3. Vary Anchor Texts – If your SEO strategy was using your 2-3 main keywords as your anchor texts, there’s no way your site could come through clean in the Penguin update because this clearly indicates spam links. And, Google’s Penguin update’s aim is to eliminate all spam.

While it is important that you are ranked for your main keyword, it’s very important that your linking strategy should look absolutely natural, according to SEO experts at Click Consult. Avoiding any kind of pattern, especially in the anchor texts can take you a long way in SEO and in restoring the rankings of your website.

Make your anchor texts look natural by varying your main keywords, using brand names as anchor texts and others. For example, a main keyword like “Halloween Costumes” can be made to look natural by using anchor texts, like “90s Halloween costumes”, “Halloween costumes for plus size men” and others.

Restoring your rankings after the Penguin update is not as difficult as it was at the time of Panda update. Though the Penguin update dropped the axe on a lot of companies, creating a spam-free site with quality and relevant content will help you climb the ranking ladder again.

Author’s Bio:
B. Lyttle is a SEO expert with over 5 years of experience under her belt. She’s a contributor for the site, Click Consult.com, the #1 SEO Company in UK.