5 Mind-Blowing SEO Tools Every Industry Expert Needs

The various delegates at the recently held SES conference spoke about the importance of SEO tools to improve rankings on search engines. It was evident from the discussion that the shift towards authentic SEO tools is brisk and widespread. This is especially the case with Google algorithm updates becoming an increasingly regularly feature in the industry. The shift is being adopted by the SEO community via such methods as keyword research, monitoring visitors’ behavior  back link and link profile analysis, monitoring rankings, and others.

In an endeavor to be authentic while still giving a thrust to the rankings, newer and even more innovative methods are now entering the SEO space. This post endeavors towards appraising professionals at all levels of the best ones out there:

BuzzStream

Link / Blog Prospecting and Outreach / Communication Management

Why It’s Awesome:  The first reason is because everyone is falling in love with it, put simply it is just popular. BuzzStream allows you to create your marketing campaigns with various inbound marketing channels. Users can take notice of the number of micro-influencers having conversations related to their products and services, and across a wide swath of the social web world.

Image Courtesy of buzzstream.com

Unique Factor:  There’s a two dimensional benefits to be had with BuzzStream. First, users can build strong relations with the  other influencers through via campaigns. Secondly, the user actually become easily find-able by via targeted customers, too.

Broken Link Checker

Available on Google Chrome. This is a tool that I have used for a long time.

Why It’s Awesome: It reduces your efforts of checking each webpage for broken links. In other words, you can launch the application and it will crawl through your complete webpage and look for broken links. For instance, if  have a bunch of links to check when you are in the process of editing, this tool can be a boon to save you of the laborious job of checking them manually.

Image Courtesy of chrome.google.com/

Unique Factor:  The above image reflects to you how links are represented on the screen for a quick and handy reference.  All comments are highlighted on the same page with percentage of broken links evidently on the screen.

SEO-Browser

See your site like a search engine sees it.

Why It’s awesome: Once you use the tool for the first time you’ll recognize the power behind it. When we make a website, we check for its compatibility on different browsers; however, sometimes even seasoned pros tend to forget about a site’s compatibility with the search engines.

Have you ever thought about how your site is seen by the search Google, Bing, Yahoo!, or another search platform? SEO-Browser is here to show users exactly that. It shows each part of a webpage’s content, images, and other elements exactly in terms of how they are viewed by the particular search engine.

Uniuqe Factor: This is unique because the users can know which parts of their sites are making the most impact and which ones are not being read by the search engines as desired. This is a feat that is difficult to be achieved through any manual process.

Image Courtesy of seo-browser.com

SEOMOZ Tools

All in one.

Why It’s Awesome: The most comforting thing about this toolbar is that it is provided by the SEOMOZ community, which is authorized in the search industry. This tool is designed to provide you a complete bunch of SEO metrics’ information absolutely quickly. In short, it is trustworthy and complete.

Moreover, you can also check all your site statistics by using this tool like link analysis, on-page checkpoints, site server details, keywords and rank tracker, follow-no follow links, site location, and others. As this suggests, SEOMOZ is, and should be, a “go-to” for any toolbox.

Image Courtesy of seomoz.org

Unique Factor: All the statistics are made available to you in a matter of seconds.

ifttt.com

IFTTT is a service that lets you create powerful connections with one simple statement. If you are planning to promote your site, this one is a great tool to have.

Why It’s Awesome: On offer are 57 channels where you can integrate everything you could possible need to get nearly unimaginable results. You are required to setup triggers on your specific website. As an example of Twitter where you can set triggers on the basis of such ingredients as tweet words, specific with hash tags, emails, and more.

You have to make the combination with your channels like ‘if’, ‘term’, ‘then’, ‘send me an email’, and others.  Moreover, the triggers can be activated and deactivated at any time.

Image Courtesy of ifttt.com

Unique Factor:  You can setup 57 channels for updates in a matter of seconds on events triggered.

Article Source : http://www.searchenginejournal.com/5-mind-blowing-seo-tools/54130/

SEO: Social Bookmarking As Key to Success

Social Bookmarking is no doubt an important factor doing SEO

Are you aware of a particular set of internet users who wish to dig into social bookmarking sites to grab a piece of information, than using the default search engine browsing process? Yes, people have the habit of checking these sites, with the quest of landing up at interesting bookmarks, and they finally reach your site.

Do you know that bookmarking your website link onto a website that holds a higher page rank, will eventually boost your website’s rank over search engines which in-turn attracts lots of visitors who convert into potential clients of yours. Exciting information is what…Next to banner ads and Adwords, social bookmarking websites is the main source of backlinks aiding visitors flow to a website.

The process

1. Social bookmarking is indeed time consuming and a tedious job if you do it yourself. But the resultant is priceless. So we could easily ignore the pains undertaken. Simple to say, the process is saving your bookmarks to a public website along with related keywords as tags.

2. The wise approach is to bookmark three types of links. One is to bookmark the webpages of your website, another is bookmarking the webpages that link to your website, and the final one is bookmarking topic related content from other top rated websites. The balance you maintain with the quantity of these three link types is advised to be in a 3:3:4 ratios.

3. Take for example you chose to bookmark in one of the most famous social bookmarking site – Delicious.com. Create an account and install their browser add-on for an easy access bookmarking pages.

4. Add a short description about your website and the tags you enter will be your keywords. Note that the default title that you enter should be keyword specific, since this will end-up being your anchor text. The title you enter for your website is the most crucial factor. You get clicks only if the title is catchy, or else you simply get ignored. The same applies to the description part also. Provide unique content in the “Notes” area.

5. Now go for the bookmarking part, and there is no need for you to bookmark each and every page of your website. Go for the best ones you feel worth sharing. The amount is dependent on the size of your website.

6. Next go for the other websites that link to your site. Advisable are those top rated website links that point to you. Press Release, Guestblogging, your presentation in Slideshare, YouTube videos, Pinterest, your news article been shared by most people, your brand service appreciated by your customers in their website are some among them.

7. Finally find your industry related articles published in high ranking websites. Bookmark these articles on your behalf, which requires no need for title alteration except for adding a small quick note relating the topic bookmarked and related tagging done.

8. Now when every work is done perfect, what I advise is to manually repeat the same process in other social bookmarking sites where you intend to mark presence. Never go for importing or any other automated works, and you will end-up doing a disaster to your efforts.
 

Mind for these while doing social bookmarking

Flexibility

Are you aware that you always have an option to re-bookmark your website’s pages or related articles? Yes, by doing so you can reach at a conclusion of the best title or description or keywords that attracts visitors to your site. Experiment with different forms of representing your business and showcase to people for them to show you the perfect form.

Proper category selection

Submitting your content under appropriate categories is vital. If you miss optimizing your content according to the categories your efforts will end up a waste of time. Submit one webpage to only one most apt category. Don’t do numerous bookmarking for a single page with the intent of getting more traffic. Also, if you have a moderately popular brand and when visitors to social bookmarking sites find your brand name displayed over unrelated bookmarks that will the end of them having good-will over your brand. So be careful and attentive while bookmarking your webpages into these popular sites.

No automated bookmarking

Manual bookmarking is the best approach doing social bookmarking. Don’t go for automated software available in market which does the job in the most trustful manner. Once you go for automated process, and find all wrong categorization done for your webpages, you will get frustrated and tensed when you are pushed to a situation doing manual submission as a correction process. And removing wrong categorization as a whole will be a stressful job for you.

No doing all pages

Please avoid each and every page of your website. Choose only those which have good content and avoid bookmarking pages that are thin in content. One good content page bookmarked is worth it, rather than doing all available pages, since a visitor landing on your webpage that has no necessary information may no longer pay attention to your website, even if that was the only page lacking good information. You website will gain a black mark in his perspective.

Diversify your bookmarking of pages

Don’t stop with bookmarking only the main page of your website. You ought to bookmark your websites’ subpages also, the selective and the best ones. This makes your bookmarking process more effective and worth doing.

Proper Title

Your title represents the quality of information your webpage holds. So never compromise on the quality and uniqueness of your bookmarking titles while doing the process.

Proper keywords

Keyword selection and tag assigning are also equally important. Be different while doing this. Don’t choose a general keyword for your bookmarked webpage. This pulls people to open your website and explore what it is about.

Proper Content

Bookmarking a webpage that is rich in pictures and graphics, and having no content to display or convince the visitor will be a bad practice. People may not find anything informative on your website and may bunk immediately. So always remember to bookmark a webpage that has a well-written and analyzed article of yours rich in keywords and information for the tag you have chosen.

Make your Bookmarks go viral

Optimize your website and webpages, so that your book marked pages go viral getting shared by lot many visitors who find your content to be interesting as well as useful. This way you can build up your brand name and increase turn-over out of your business.

Be patient

Never opt to do the bookmarking process in a hurry, especially on Fridays after 4pm. You are sure to mess up with the title, description and tags. Do it when you are relaxed and passionate enough to work driving traffic. Monday to Wednesday, I suggest.

Top 10 social bookmarking sites

These are the top social bookmarking sites as of now, depending on the number of visitors to these websites.

1. www.delicious.com
    
2. www.reddit.com
    
3. www.diigo.com
    
4. www.dropjack.com
    
5. www.stylehive.com
    
6. www.cloudytags.com
    
7. www.redgage.com
    
8. www.bookmarks.excite.co.uk
    
9. www.buddymarks.com
    
10. www.jeteye.com

Increase traffic, grow brand, doing social bookmarking!!!

Article Source : http://news.submitinme.com/newsdetails-289.aspx

5 ways to convince clients to be ethical on Wikipedia

PR and marketing firms are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Edit Wikipedia on behalf of your client and risk breaking the law or joining a long historyof publicly humiliated organizations.

Tell the client there is nothing that can be done, and you ignore arguably the world’smost important website, while inviting client do-it-yourselfers to add their corporate kool-aid to Wikipedia.

For many marketing professionals, there is mounting pressure from a boss or client to edit Wikipedia and seemingly no way out of a bad situation.

Here’s five ways to convince your client or boss that anonymously editing Wikipedia is not the best route.

1. It may be illegal

Wikipedia’s rule that marketing professionals disclose our “conflict of interest” and use Talk pages may also be the law. The Federal Trade Commission’s guidance asks marketing professionals to disclose our affiliation with the organization in online communications.

In Germany it was found that a CEO’s edits to Wikipedia was an illegal form of covert advertising, even though he disclosed his affiliation with the company on the Talk page. While the FTC hasn’t taken a stance on the issue yet in the US, it’s certainly legal/ethical hot water most organizations don’t want to dip their toes in.

2. Vengeful editing

Even months or years after a company posts promotional content on Wikipedia (which they may have thought was neutral) it’s routine for Wikipedia’s editorial community to add negative information (sometimes unfairly) to help “balance” the page.

Most Wikipedians aren’t excited about the prospect of spending hours culling through our content, so there’s a simple mantra: “If you do it poorly, I’ll do it poorly too.”

Once companies have already created bad blood with Wikipedians, it’s very difficult to earn that relationship back or correct the problem. In general, Wikipedians will do what it takes to discourage bad behavior in an efficient way.

3. There is an ethical way to go

Companies edit Wikipedia anonymously often because they didn’t know there was an ethical way to participate. Over-simplified media stories and a lack of general education have led to the assumption that any participation on Wikipedia is unethical and therefor must be done in-secret.

When companies learn that there is an ethical path by doing PR and content marketing with the site’s editors, rather than astroturfing the page, most companies will take the higher path.

Why would anyone put their reputations at risk, jump into legal/ethical hot water and anger Wikipedians just to take a shortcut in doing it properly?

4. Credibility

The level of credibility Wikipedia has with its readers is on a per-article basis. Some articles are well-sourced, neutrally written and high in quality; this makes them credible to readers.

On the other hand, Wikipedia’s readers routinely tell me that they can tell when they found a self-written promotional page and they are quick to dismiss it.

Companies think they have succeeded when a glowing Wikipedia page is created, but all that’s been accomplished is turning Wikipedia into another of the 200 advertising messages bombarding people every day that are largely ignored.

5. Wikipedians know you

The guardians of many company pages on Wikipedia are journalists, analysts and customers, especially in B2B or niche areas.

Companies that violate Wikipedia etiquette and do things that anger the editors on their page are often rubbing their largest customer or closest analyst the wrong way.

Because of Wikipedia’s anonymous model, the company will never know the harm they’ve done. I could name a few companies that think they’re getting away with something, but many of their users are talking about their Wiki activities.

Wikipedians don’t always take the time to point it out or do anything about it. On the other hand, doing Wikipedia well and ethically often strengthens evangelists who are excited you’ve taken an interest in their side-hobby and demonstrated exceptional character in the manner it was done.

Article Source : http://socialfresh.com/ethical-wikipedia/

Six SEO Mistakes that Prevent You From Ranking in Google

There are many marketing strategies to employ when you are trying to garner more traffic for your website. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) remains one of the most prominent promotion methods. SEO allows you, through the use of certain keywords or phrases, to increase your ranking with the search engines on the Internet. This means, when someone types in a word or series of words in a search engine, if it pertains to your topic or pages contain the correct words, your site will turn up in the search. The goal is to be among the top sites viewed so you can increase your traffic. While it is a great marketing approach, there are some SEO mistakes to avoid if you want to keep your site from falling in the rankings.

1. Optimizing One Spot Only

When you are using keywords and phrases to optimize your website, try to avoid the mistake of only optimizing one page or location. Keep in mind, your site is more than just your home page and the rest of the site needs to be optimized as well. This will help to boost all of your pages in the rankings with search engines and not just one page on your site. It greatly enhances your chances of being located if more than one page of your site is ready for search engine indexing.

2. Overusing Keywords

Some people try to cram as many keywords as possible onto their website or into their pages. This not only makes the page itself look sloppy, it makes it unreadable or too difficult to understand. Overusing the keywords can lead to many awkward sentences and to having a lot of grammar errors for the sake of getting the keywords into the space. Readers can actually be put off by this. They may believe little care or thought was put into the website due to the many errors or illegibility. This may cause them to leave the site all together because they do not want to struggle through it. Try to find a good balance of use of the keywords so that all of your sentences flow together in a coherent, correct manner.

3. Not Having Keyword Strategy

There is much more to SEO than just placing keywords all over your pages. You need to have a strategic plan of exactly what words you are going to use, how you are going to use them, where they are going to go and how often each will appear. Having a plan will make the layout of the page much more effective and it will make it read better for the users who come to your page. If you have a concentration of a small number of keywords in one area, it will be much more effective than having words scattered all over your pages. You want to use the words in a manner that you would expect the user on the other side to use them so that when they search for a word or a phrase, you stand a good chance of having exactly the phrase they have used to search.

4. Using Too Many Images on Your Site

While many believe people like to see images on your website, the fact is, too many images on your page or using images as links to other content is not something the search engines are designed to pick up, so you will get lost in the shuffle and your rankings will suffer for it. You are much better using a few strategically placed images and going with much more written content that the search engines are designed to index and find. This will improve your ranking and you will be more easily noticed by those searching the Internet.

5. Using Broken or Inactive Links

Many people include links on their website because it helps to create more back links so people will find their site. It can also help to be connected with links to bigger websites – this can help create more traffic for you and improve you search engine ranking. The problem is, many don’t bother to check the links again after putting them up on the page. Some of these links may become inactive or lead nowhere after a while even if you still have them on your site. Search engine indexes are likely to lower your ranking if it notices that many of your links go nowhere. Make it a regular practice to check the links on your site just to make sure they are all active and you can eliminate any bad or broken links.

6. Using the Same Title For All Your Pages

This is a common mistake many people make and do not give much thought to. If a search sees that all of your pages are using the same title, it will assume all of your pages have the same content as well. This will penalize you in the rankings. It is important for you to have individual titles for each of your pages to make each a unique entity of its own. You should try to incorporate keywords into your titles as well because titles are one of the first things a search engine looks at when seeking information.

Once you have learned what SEO mistakes to avoid, you can go about setting up your site so it stays constantly productive for you. The strategies you use take some work and effort on your part. SEO is not something you can just do once and leave alone, so be prepared to put work into the process if you want to get rewards from it.

Article Source : http://www.seo-news.com/six-seo-mistakes-that-prevent-you-from-ranking-in-google/

5 Secrets to YouTube Search Engine Optimization

When you think of search engine marketing, we live in a much bigger world than just Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

At the Search Engine Strategies Conference in Chicago, I sat in on sessions for YouTube and Facebook search optimization.

Answering what it means to be a search engine optimizer is more complicated than it used to be.

According to Alexa, the top three sites are:

1. Google
2. Facebook
3. YouTube

If you are looking to get the most exposure to the biggest audiences, you probably want to seriously consider some sort of campaigns with these sites.

In this column, I wanted to give you five secrets that you might not know about YouTube search engine optimization. Understanding these secrets could have a big impact on your ranking.

I got most of these from Greg Jarboe at his session on video optimization. I wanted to give credit where credit is due.

Secret #1

Get key phrase ideas from autocomplete suggestions.

These are currently searched key phrases at YouTube. If you are looking to make a video about something people are interested in, you definitely want to check out the autocomplete function at YouTube.

This is incredibly easy key phrase research to do. And you'll likely find some interesting topics to get your video making juices flowing.

Secret #2

Use the YouTube Keyword Suggestion Tool.

This is another great place to find ideas for key phrases for your video. You can also put a YouTube video ID in the tool and it will give you suggestions for key phrases to add to your video.

Secret #3

Use all the allowed space for titles, descriptions, and tags.

Titles should be about 100 characters.

Descriptions can include up to 5,000 characters, tags can be 120 characters. Make a goal to use every one of these limits for each of your videos.

From this YouTube blog post, "The more words you include in your description, the higher your chances of being discovered by searchers, which means the larger your audience can grow, and the more potential revenue you can earn."

Secret #4

Use annotations from this blog:

• Encourage viewers to subscribe with an annotated subscribe button.
• Use annotations to link to videos, playlists, channels, and more.
• Use annotations to encourage feedback.

OK. Annotations aren't specifically for search optimization. But they are a great way to get people to either subscribe to your channel or watch another one of your videos.

Secret #5

Try YouTube Promoted videos.

This is paid search for your videos. These are the steps:

• Choose one of your videos, write some promotional text, and tell us which keywords should trigger your promotion.
• Using your keywords, your video promotion will now appear next to contextually relevant search results.
• When a YouTube viewer clicks on your promotion, they see your video. You only pay when people click to see your video - not when people see your promotion.

YouTube is a huge opportunity for new traffic. Hopefully these tips will help you navigate that space in a more effective way.

Article Source : http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/1811575/secrets-youtube-search-engine-optimization

Top 10 Search Engine Ranking Factors

Search engine ranking factors are some of the most closely guarded secrets in online business. Google and other search engines don't publish exactly how they rank webpages in search results, because that would lead to massive gaming of the system and produce non-useful results.

Fortunately, you don't have to figure out how Google determines search engine rankings all by yourself. There's an entire industry of professionals who have a good handle on how search engine placement works based on their cumulative experiences. Better still, their collective wisdom has been collected and published by SEOmoz, a SEO consultancy and website. The top 37 search engine optimization ( SEO) professionals were asked to sort the 50+ factors that affect a website's search engine placement.

Here are the top 10 factors that positively affect your search engine rankings: (We go over each one in detail below.)

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Anchor Text of Inbound Links
3. Global Link Popularity of Site
4. Age of Site
5. Link Popularity within the Site's Internal Link Structure
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site
7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
8. Keyword Use in Body Text
9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
10. Topical Relationship of Linking Page

Article Source : http://onlinebusiness.about.com/od/searchengineoptimization/a/search-ranking.htm

Google Rich Snippets Tool with Fresh Look

Google Rich Snippets Tool will help to you know that "how your website will be displayed in search results". Mostly SEO's who are familiar with Micro data will use this tool to test their RDF implementation across the website. Google has improved the UI of this tool with fresh and clean look.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

We recommend to use Micro Data for your website at all possible areas which will in result helps Google to understand better about your website. E-commerce portals, Reviews websites, Business Listing directories should definitely have Micro Data for better results. Bloggers also should use author Micro Data for better visibility.

Article Source : http://www.seodailyupdates.com/2012/09/google-rich-snippets-tool-with-fresh.html