By Samuel Scott
Note: This is the first part in an ongoing series. Part two and three.
If you are using a social-media marketing strategy without a corresponding content-marketing one, you are most likely wasting your time. As different parts of the Internet increasingly affect and influence each other in marketing terms, it is also increasingly important to use an integrated strategy that incorporates these numerous factors.
By Samuel Scott
After Google unveiled first its +1 social-sharing button and then its Google+ social network last year, my colleague Daniel Goldstein predicted that the changes will eventually influence organic-search results. Google, he argued, will increasingly personalize search results based on what an individual searcher has “+1ed” in the past.
Well, that time has arrived. And if your company does not adapt, you will miss out on a tremendous amount of valuable traffic to your website.
On January 10, Google announced its “Search, plus Your World” revamp of its search-result pages:
Your website may be duplicating its own content without you even realizing it – and thereby possibly causing negative effects on your search-engine marketing performance.
Say that you are a company that sells widgets. One of your pages will list all of the widgets, say, by price in descending order while another will show them grouped by color. Most of the time, each specific widget will have its own product description – and therefore all of the product descriptions will be the same on both of the aforementioned pages. In other words, both of the pages of your website will have the same content.
Internet-marketing news breaks each day, if not each hour, so online marketers need to keep abreast of the latest headlines. Here’s what we at The Cline Group found interesting this past week.
By Samuel Scott
Keywords are the building blocks of any website whose creators – whether personal or corporate – want to attract a significant level of traffic from search engines (organic traffic, in other words). In a nutshell, if you sell widgets, then you want your website to appear high in results whenever people search for “widgets.”
Defining and implementing a keyword-based strategy, as we will see throughout this ongoing series, is crucial to building and marketing an effective website. The first step, which we will discuss here, is keyword research: For what is your target demographic searching in Google when they are looking for your company’s product or service?
Soon, your picture could be all over Google. But, do not worry: we mean that in a good way.
Hubspot recently reported that the profile pictures of people using Google’s new social-networking website – Google+ (or Google Plus) – now have the ability to appear in search-result listings for the websites, articles, and blog posts that are associated with them. It just requires a bit of new HTML coding. According to the company’s intrepid reporting, here is how to have an author’s image appear as in the image at the top of this post:
Google had never been very good at the “social” aspect of the Internet Age. After all, users of platforms including Adwords and Webmaster Tools who have questions are unable to get a customer-service person at Google on the phone. In an emergency one time, I found the number of Google’s office in Boston and gave them a call. The person who picked up told me – at least in a very polite way – that she could only direct me to the website’s FAQ and support pages.
Online search may have come down to “Like” versus “Follow” versus “+1.” Who will win?
Facebook’s “Like” feature has become well-known since its unveiling in February 2009. Twitter recently announced its “Follow” feature, which lets visitors subscribe to a website’s Twitter (through, it seems, two clicks rather than one). But the most significant release of all may have been Google’s announcement of “+1” early this week:
