• 60% of internet traffic came from mobile devices as of July 8, 2014 (Small Business Trends).
• 65% of all internet searches start on a smartphone (Google Multi-screen Behavior Study).
• 78% of local mobile searches leads to an offline purchase (Search Engine Land).

In short, if your website is not optimized for mobile, not only are you missing out on an enormous business opportunity, now Google will make sure that a mobile search will result in other sites being shown before your unfriendly site. So what does this mean for your web traffic? How do you know if you are ready? If you are not ready, what can you do about it?

Mobile Search Traffic Impact

Review the data above: 65% of all internet searches begin on a smartphone. Note, this means that many of those searches (approximately 60% according to the same study) will move from the smartphone to the laptop. If your site is not mobile friendly, this is likely how you’ve managed to get away with not updating. Say, for instance, you find you are getting much mobile search traffic, but few of those searches lead to conversion. However, at the same time, you get much direct traffic on PC (people typing in your URL) and those tend to convert incredibly well. This should be taken as a sign that people are likely finding your website on their phone, and finishing business on their desktop.

Now, in this scenario you may have long thought that you don’t need to update for mobile: after all, it is not as if mobile is converting for you and people are willing to move to their PCs, so why bother? Well, disregarding those who use mobile exclusively for search (46% of users according to Search Engine Watch in an article published in 2013, so it is likely that number is higher), and aren’t switching over to their PC, you must consider the impact on those who do start the search on smartphone. Let’s consider a hypothetical scenario:

Approximately 1000 of your visits per month come from mobile search, and 1200 of your visits are on PC. Now, given the data from above, it is probable that half of your PC traffic started on mobile. Now, let’s say that mobile gets you a 2% conversion rate (so 20 out of 1000), but PC gets you a 15% conversion rate (180 out of 1200). Google mobile search update goes live, and your site is not mobile friendly. As a consequence, you get pushed to the 2^nd, 3^rd, or later pages in Google’s mobile search results. Suddenly those 1000 mobile visits per month become zero, and with them the PC visits that started from a mobile device. Assuming your conversion rates remain the same, this means you’ve lost the 20 conversions a month from mobile search, 90 conversions a month from PC, for a total of 110 out of 200 conversions. Your numbers may vary, but keep the percentages above in mind. Remember that marketing does not concern itself only with the conversion, it concerns itself with every part of the funnel from that first impression to the final sale. You can see here how neglecting the top of the funnel can cost you half your business.

This would be the part where most articles would say that we are not trying to scare you, but that would be a lie. We ARE trying to scare you, because we have seen it happen time and time again: an update is coming, a website needs to make an upgrade to not lose favor in Google rankings but doesn’t, and the owner’s business tanks as a consequence. We see it happen, and don’t like to see it happen, and if fear is needed to motivate action then fear is what we will deploy (and Machiavelli we shall read). Now more than ever, mobile friendliness is crucial. Without that critical piece, you may find yourself bumped off the hard-won first page of mobile search results. True: PC search results are not impacted, so whether becoming mobile friendly or not is worth it depends on what percentage of your traffic is from mobile search. However, if you are interested in getting mobile traffic, or if your business depends on it (again, remembering that many of your PC conversions started on mobile), then read on.

Am I Ready?

Now that you are probably better informed and maybe a little scared, your next question is: am I ready for the mobile search update? There are a number of very easy ways to check. The first place to go is direct to the source. Google has set up a mobile friendliness test to help webmasters determine if their sites are considered mobile optimized and if they would be penalized in a mobile search. You can find the test at this website: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/. If your website shows up as green through this search tool, then you do not have to worry about the mobile search update.

Just as a general precautionary measure though: we have encountered cases where the tool will clear a site that has display issues on mobile. As such, it is recommended that you take the time to review your site on a mobile device just to be certain you are ready for the update. This is a good practice in general due to the popularity of mobile search. Remember that the future of SEO is not just in appeasing search engines, it is about appealing to the end user as well.

Note for Rank Executives clients: we have already contacted those whose websites will be negatively impacted by this update. If we have not contacted you and told you your site needs to be optimized for mobile, then you are covered.

What if I am not Ready?

After running the test above, it may be revealed that your website is not mobile-friendly. This means you have two and a half weeks before the mobile search algorithm goes live. However, all is not lost even then: it takes time for Google to index all the websites on the internet, and fluctuation will occur for both friendly and unfriendly websites for several weeks after the rollout. That does not mean you can afford to delay, it just means that you have time to act.

Obviously, the first step is to find a developer. I will shamelessly plug our services in web development (every single website we make is mobile friendly), but I will not say we are the only service out there. Beyond technical firms, a number of freelance developers can be found on websites like Elance, and tech schools have been cropping up training web developers in languages like HTML + CSS, Java, PHP, and more.

While some articles will mention how you can do separate domain hosting for mobile sites, I will recommend a mobile responsive design. This saves the user time from redirects or a glitch that causes them to get caught on the wrong site. These other options are available, but mobile responsiveness loads up the full site and adapts to the size of the screen, allowing it to work for smartphones of various sizes, tablets, AND computers.

Web development projects can take several weeks to see fruition, but it varies according to your site and how it is coded, along with any CMS you may be using. After the project details have been hammered out, give your developer a chance to look at your website as it is now today. Once the developer has a chance to go over the code, he will be able to give you an estimate of how long it will take. There is nothing wrong with getting multiple estimates, but I recommend starting now. Remember: the mobile search update begins on April 21, and every day after that is a potential loss in revenue. Do not delay, don’t procrastinate, get started today. You can spend the weekend compiling a list of candidates and start making calls on Monday. Don’t let the mobile search update ruin your business.

If you want more information about the mobile search, and have an hour of time, you can watch this Q+A session Google held to address common concerns about the update.

The post Google Mobile Search Update and How it Affects You appeared first on Rank Executives.

How Likely am I to be Targeted?

The first question to ask yourself is “How likely am I to become a target for negative SEO?” Businesses who have found a market that isn’t especially competitive or where there isn’t much money changing hands do not need to be as concerned. Positive SEO efforts on your site are usually more cost-effective than attempting to run a negative SEO campaign on a competitor, and thus your competition would rather invest in that than an attack. Rank Executives provides SEO services to dozens of domains, and thus far only two have suffered attacks – one a negative SEO attack after starting with us and another that we discovered was hacked before they signed on. Given that we deal with a wide variety of industries ranging from health and safety regulation to automotive, including highly competitive fields such as civil law, most of whom rank on the front page for their keywords, it should be comforting that only one has suffered an attack.

Part of the reason for the rarity of attacks is that most negative SEO campaigns are not effective. We’ll go into more details about some of the tactics employed and how effective they are later, but the major take-away from this is “be not afraid”. That being said, just as some people learn martial arts for defense, even though the odds of them needing it are low, it is important to know how to defend yourself just in case.

Defense Tactics

Recognizing the Attack

The first step in defending yourself against a negative SEO campaign is to recognize when you are actually under assault. This is one of the major reasons why SEO is a full-time job, it requires regular monitoring of Google Analytics to spot any fluctuations that may be damaging to your site. However, even these fluctuations might not be your competitors. There is a great article on Moz that was published six months ago that provides a fantastic breakdown of how to recognize an SEO attack.

A good way to tell what is going on is by figuring out where the links are coming from. A site-wide link from a domain, for example, could show up as tens-of-thousands of links, something that will look like an attack but is, in fact, perfectly natural and won’t result in a Google penalty. Some red flags to look for are things like exact-match anchor text (that is: keywords showing up in the anchor text of the links being built to your site), tens of thousands of new links showing up per week from multiple domains, and low quality, indecipherable content surrounding the link (like a website whose top post was discussing “the scud missile from Mt. Rushmore selling parkas”).

Disavow, Disavow, Disavow

This is a time-intensive tactic, but ultimately it is your best defense against links you do not want affiliated with your website. Among the webmaster tools that Google provides is the disavow tool, which allows you to let Google know that you did not authorize the link and could not get it taken down. The big problem with disavowing links is the amount of time it can take. When thousands of spammy links are being built to your website per month, the disavow process alone can take away time that would be dedicated towards other SEO efforts.

Keep Your Nose Clean

Google has repeatedly claimed that most negative SEO attacks are ineffective, and there is a reason for that. Their algorithm and web spam team do not consider solely the way things are, but also look at history. Thousands upon thousands of new backlinks showing up in a vacuum will not damage your site. However, if you have a history of spam or employing other black-hat tactics, you are more likely to suffer from a negative SEO campaign. This is because if you did it before and it happens again, what else would a third-party observer think except that you are up to your old tricks? That is the key to any SEO campaign, positive or negative, remembering that Google is merely an observer who tells users about the things they ask about. If string of robberies were happening on your block, for example, who would you be more likely to suspect? The man who admits he used to be a burglar but turned his life around, or your friendly but klutzy neighbor?

Vigilance

Ultimately, the best defense against negative SEO is constant vigilance. Even if your website probably won’t fall victim to an attack, it pays to do regular audits of your link profile. If you have already hired an SEO agency (like us), keep an eye on the links that they are building to your site to know whether the new links popping up are a result of their efforts or an attack by a competitor. Obviously though, a good SEO company will let you know if they believe an attack is taking place on your site, and like any other reputable service provider will endeavor to be transparent about what they’re doing.

Negative SEO Tactics

Ultimately, the best defense against any attack is knowing what form the attack would take. While I loathe providing possible tips to black-hat search engine marketers, the fact is that dozens of blogs have already given the information out. Furthermore, the benefits of people knowing what to expect far outweigh the costs of possibly arming the enemy. I’ll also go into strategies for defending against these specific tactics, note that in some cases I’ll repeat some of the points above since those general strategies do work against most of these tactics.

Spammy Link Building

This is one of the most common, easily recognized, and least effective negative SEO tactics. It involves hiring a company that engages in black-hat tactics and asking them to build thousands of links to a competitor’s website. Over a long span of time, it may result in a negative impact on rankings, but this is where judicious use of the disavow tool comes into play. As mentioned above, it will take time to disavow all of those links, particularly when they come at you in the thousands to tens of thousands, but ultimately that is usually the most damaging effect.

There are exceptions of course: some websites might find themselves decimated by this sort of attack. Websites that deal with high volumes of money (payday loan sites are a perfect example) are especially vulnerable to the link spam attack. Domains with a history of black-hat SEO tactics are also vulnerable.

Earned Link Removal

This one is a little more insidious. It requires a bit of social engineering on the part of your competitor and involves emailing webmasters and asking them to take down links to your site, pretending to be you. This exploits the paranoia over Google algorithms and the fact that many firms do not build close relationships with the webmasters who promote their content. Furthermore, in an industry that is driven by results and velocity, it is easy to forget links already built. However, SEO is like war: the only secure ground is the ground you are standing on.

To counter, keep track of every link you’ve built. Furthermore, establish ties with webmasters, make it so they know you. This way, if they receive a sudden e-mail asking them to take down a link, they can alert you. Ultimately, vigilance is your best defense against this strategy.

Good bye links!

Direct Site Hack

Yes, a website hack can also be used to hamper your SEO efforts and ruin your site’s positioning. More overt signs of a hack include altering your robots.txt to block your site, effectively de-indexing your homepage from google. Another possible option is a code injection on your site that attaches your site to a spammy webpage. In either event, your best defense is security. Make sure your CMS is fully up-to-date, and don’t use any plugins that are vulnerable to an attack.

If your best efforts at securing your site fail, there are a number of signs and symptoms that warn you that something has happened. The first alert should be if your web site begins ranking for keywords that are irrelevant to your site such as “Viagra” or “short-term lending” (unless your website provides Viagra or short-term lending). Also, be sure to check your robots.txt to make sure there were no unauthorized alterations.

CTR Attack

This is another method of manipulating Google’s algorithm that is relatively new exploits the end-game of all major search engines: giving the user what they want. Click-Through-Rate (or CTR) is a signal used to indicate what people are looking for. If most people searching for a given term click on a specific site, then it is natural to think that the site has what those people are looking for and increase its rankings. However, what if, instead, nobody clicked on their links? What if a competitor created a bot that clicked on every single link except yours? This CTR Attack can cripple your rankings, and the only hint is a sudden, sharp decline on your Analytics.

This is a more difficult tactic to counter, as the only way to counter to draw more clicks to your website. You can try to compensate with a click bot of your own, but this is a dangerous tactic and NOT recommended as if you are pushed too far down in SERPs, or worse onto the second page, then using your click-bot will look unnatural and may result in a penalty to your site.

In Conclusion…

Ultimately, most people don’t have to worry about negative SEO attacks, but it’s just like any other rare event: you do not assume it will never happen, but simply prepare just in case it does happen. Your website was a massive investment, and your position in search engine results in factors into your livelihood, so you cannot take any chances. Ultimately, the trick is to stay vigilant, and check your analytics on a regular basis. Look for unusual trends and, when they appear, learn how to adapt. It is something we do here for all of our clients, and a practice I highly recommend you adopt.

The post How Concerned Should You Be About Negative SEO? appeared first on Rank Executives.

As we all know, Google has been and continues to be the premier search engine.  In 2013 they controlled over 69% of the search market, and haven’t really given up much of that share in the past several years.  Due to this incredible market domination, SEO has primarily been focused on obtaining results specifically with Google in mind, and for good reason.  But, as a child gains more knowledge while it grows and experiences more, so does Google and its search engine algorithm.  We have seen some very impactful updates over the past 3 years; from Panda to Penguin and Hummingbird and hundreds of unnamed updates in between.  In fact, some people believe that Google makes updates to their algorithm on a daily basis, which wouldn’t surprise most of us.  So, lets see if we can draw from the past to help better understand the future.

Panda

Before we can adequately understand why the Panda updated occurred, we have to go back in time to just before it was released.  In January 2011, Google handed down some severe penalties to both Overstock.com and JCPenney.com for shady or ‘Black Hat’ SEO practices.  During this point in time a large number of websites and companies from big to small were taking advantage of the immature nature of the Google algorithm, which valued sites higher who had more backlinks pointing to their domain.  In the case of Overstock, the penalty they incurred stemmed from the fact that they were encouraging websites of universities and colleges to backlink to Overstock in exchange for discounts on purchases made on their online store.  In this case, the backlinks created that were pointing to Overstock were from an .edu extension, which has historically been given more value by Google.  The result was that Overstock.com was raking near the top of thousands of search results ranging from ‘microwaves’ to ‘vacuum cleaners’.  Once Google was tipped off about this practice they immediately penalized Overstock.com, resulting in their rankings falling from the top three to between 40 and 70.

Next came JCPenney.  This penalty was more to use JCPenney as an example than it was to penalize practices that the company directly had a hand in.  JCPenney had hired an outsourced SEO company to help rank them better for keywords most associated with their business (which is probably just as many as Overstock.com).  Google wanted to send the message to other companies who were considering spending money on Black Hat SEO services that this was not an acceptable practice.  All in all, any type of effort to ‘manipulate PageRank’ was looked down upon and would be dealt with accordingly.

This is where we get to Panda.  Panda (aka Farmer) was the algorithm update that Google had been planning on releasing, even before the incidents with JCPenney and Overstock.com.  This major algorithm update came in the wake of the previous scandals and affected up to a whopping 12% of search results.  The results were absolutely devastating for many online retailers, causing many to lose all of their sales and others to go completely bankrupt.  The aim of this update was to reward those who were practicing ‘White Hat SEO’ (or proper outreach and link building) and penalize those that were buying thousands of backlinks at a time, had too many ads on their site as opposed to actually content, or who simply did not have enough relevant content on their site to begin with. The direct effect this update had to those who relied on the Internet for their livelihood begs the question – is Google too powerful, too omnipresent, too dominating?  The fact that one corporation, in one fell swoop, could affect so many thousands of people in a direct, financial way really makes one think whether or not this is the way the Internet was meant to be.

As a result of all the tens of thousands of negative effects that Panda had on Internet sellers and consumers, Google subsequently released another update almost twice a month or more for the next 10 months.  This practice seemed to set a precedent – Google now releases various updates MUCH more frequently, with each updating seemingly having a lesser impact at one time than Panda did.  That is, until we got to Penguin.

Penguin

As the practice of building backlinks on a massive scale was penalized with the Panda update, Google then set its sites on reigning in and controlling various spam activities being utilized as a replacement to building backlinks.  After Panda, many companies shifted their practices to building higher quality links with ‘exact match anchor text’.  What this essentially meant was that SEO companies were writing content to have posted on guest blogging sites with good ranking factors.  When they submitted the article to one of these sites, somewhere in the content would be an exact match link to something the company was hoping to rank for.  For example, if you were the owner of an AC repair company, you would submit an article to a guest blog and have a link built from the exact words ‘AC repair’ to your website.

These practices eventually culminated in the creation of a link profile for that particular company to become too heavily focused on these exact match anchor text.  Most of the links pointing to their site would be tied to exactly what that site wanted to rank for. Additionally, many SEO companies also visited the article that they wrote once it was published and left more links to their clients as comments about the blog post. As Google continued to grow and change, they became aware of these tactics and immediately set out to address it.

Because this update was for Google’s entire search results, no website could ask for a reconsideration to this update.  If you are manually penalized for practices that go against the Google Webmaster Guidelines, you can usually contact Google directly and ask for them to review your site after you have removed what they penalized you for.  Many webmasters were up in arms about this due to the massive effect it had, just like Panda, on the search results for many companies.  The only solution to this update was to try and go through yourself and manually delete or un-follow all of the ‘spam’ links that were built to your site.  This could prove to be tedious or even an insurmountable amount of work.  Many web masters were forced to buy completely new domains and start from scratch!

What Does The Future Hold?

What can we pull from all the information provided above?  Simply put: Google is an ever changing, mutating company that aims to provide the most relevant search results to its users.  What does this mean to website owners who are looking into SEO?  Be VERY careful how to decide to pursue your SEO going forward.  As we have seen, practices that are acceptable today can lead to utter disaster tomorrow.  These update are immediate and can affect over 10% of all the search results that Google returns.  Make sure that you find a company that only practices White Hat SEO, and is future oriented.  There were some companies, such as Rank Executives, that did not practice any of these ‘spam’ tactics in the past and thus their client base that they serve did not experience the impact that these updates had on other websites.  We anticipated the changes coming and made sure that our tactics going forward would only compliment your website and link profile.

Matt Cutts, director of anti-spam at Google, recently came out with some comments that caused quite the stir in the Search Engine Optimization community.  One of the more safe practices in the past for building a link profile has been to offer guest posts on various blogs.  Cutts came out not even a month ago and said that ‘you should probably stop’ if you are using guest blogging as a means to acquire links in 2014.  As usual, Cutts did not speak in absolutes, but we can expect a change in the way guest blogs are valued by Google in the near future.  For now, the practice remains fairly safe, as long as you aren’t writing awful content, laden with grammatical errors and sending back links to you or your client’s site with this poor material.  Google is looking for high quality, well-written content and will likely start to penalize guest blogs it views as being ‘spammy’.  While banning all guest posting as a means to gather new links will likely not lose all of its value, you should move forward as if any guest post could eventually be analyzed and deemed as poor quality content, thus resulting in a penalty for your backlink.

As we can clearly see, the world of Search Engine Optimization is one that is always mutating into another monster, day after day, month after month and year after year.  It is best to try and keep foresight in mind when building and accepting links early this year.  A change is coming, and as we have seen before, those who are on the receiving end are likely not to be happy campers.

Brenton Squires
COO Rank Executives

The post The Ever-Changing Landscape of Search Engine Optimization appeared first on Rank Executives.

SEO Checker: How Many Indexed Pages Does Your Site Have

Do you want to know the best way to find out how many pages in your site Google is indexing? Ask Google! Simply visit Google and type into the search bar site:yoursitename.com. This is the first SEO checker tactic I recommend,  use Google to gauge how many pages are ranking. For this example, I used Workfloworlando.com. This makes for a perfect example because the site was only built in October of 2012 and has not yet began any SEO efforts. The image below details what will display:

Right underneath the search bar it reads: “About 14 results.” This means that this domain has 14 different pages that can rank in Google. Try it on your site, you should want all of your content pages to rank. A common question my clients ask is, “Should all of my pages show up?” The answer to that question varies. In some cases, not every page of content will rank, for example if you have any pages that are password protected or require a login to access – these pages will not show up in the SERPS. Typically you want all of your pages to show up. This means the Google crawlers can access your site properly.

What If I A Substantial Amount Of Pages Are Not Being Indexed?

Uh oh! You’re ship has sunk, hang up the towel. Call it quits! Just kidding – this is quite a common problem with multiple solutions. Lets dive into the most common error that could cause this to happen.

Robots.txt file is blocking pages

The Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) is a group of web standards that regulate Web robot behavior and search engine indexing. The way its configured may prohibit access to the directory in which this URL is located; or it might restrict crawling to the URL specifically. Robots.txt file can list the directory or the files that need to be restricted from crawling. Carefully check that the robots file does not contain any important page entry that should be crawled and ranked in search engines. How do I do this? Go into the root folder of your website and check the robots.txt file. Make sure its placed in the top level directory.

Anything with User-agent: * Disallow means Google is not crawling. Change to: user-agent:* Allow

If this seems a bit too complicated – no worries! It never hurts to consult a professional to assist you in these matters. Properly configuring the crawl structure of a website can be rather complicated. This is just a simple suggestion to remedy a very common flaw.

SEO Checker: Manually Check Your On-Page Content

Another great do it yourself SEO Checker I recommend is check your on-page content! Oftentimes the content on the page to totally irrelevant to what you are trying to rank for, in other cases it is totally overstuffed with the keyword. From my experiences, its always one of the two polar opposites. I wrote a program to simulate Google’s indexing and retrival system, best known as LSI – Latent Semantic Indexing. Basically, it goes through and analyzes the semantic structure of words in the body and extracts the meaning on its own. For my clients, I run this program on each page and mathematically craft each article to rank higher. But there are still other basic guidelines and principles you  can follow that will get you very close to a fully optimized page!

My Suggestions:

• Make the 7th-10th word in each paragraph your main keyword
• Use an H2 that contains a variation of your main keyword
• Set your Title Tag to this format “Main Keyword for Page | Description of Page – Site Name”
• You can use your main keyword about 4-5 times per 500 words, and 8-10 variations of that keyword.
• No more than 2 keywords you want to rank for per page
• Spread the keywords evenly throughout the article
• Somewhere in the first 5 words of your last sentence, you should put your keyword
• Images help! Just make sure they are properly tagged.

Conclusion

In a digital age, we should never fear a little manual labor. Yes, there are countless amounts tools and software and using them can indeed be very beneficial. It’s important to remember the Rank Executives SEO Checker when assessing the SEO of your domain. Follow these actionable tips to systematically go through and check your site, and you will be one step closer to achieving the goal – dominating the search engines! Building a higher Google ranking will increase your sites visibility both locally and nationally, the more and more people know about your product, your brand name will only grow bigger and bigger.

Special Thanks to Work Flow Employer Services

A shout out to WorkFlowOrlando. Thanks for allowing me to use the domain as an example. They offer same-day appointments for DOT Physicals, Pre and Post Offer Physicals  Drug Screening both random and employer ordered, and workers compensation care. Visit their site at Workfloworlando.com

Special Thanks To Lakewood Ranch Acupuncture and Wellness

Their mission is empower others to achieve greater health. They provide support and inspire them to maintain their health in a harmonious and balanced way. Their services include homeopathy, chinese medicine,  bradenton acupuncture, and more. Visit their site here

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Social Bookmarking

The term “social bookmarking” refers to the method of organization and storage of resources by internet users. Through these social bookmarking platforms, files themselves are not shared, just the bookmarks that reference them. A common form of social bookmarking would be some program that allows users to save specific links to web pages that they want to go back to, or share with others. Popular social bookmarking sites of today include StumbleUpon, Digg, Chime.in, and Delicious.

StumbleUpon

As one of the most popular social bookmarking sites, StumbleUpon is a rather simple idea that has exploded in usage over the past two years. As long as you have the toolbar installed on your computer, you can submit any site to the StumbleUpon database. There is no way to submit directly from the website without the toolbar, though. Pages submitted on to StumbleUpon get classified to certain categories and potentially can reach thousands of people. If your site does particularly well amongst the interest group it enters, and if it receives many likes, it will spread across other interests and be seen even more. Submitting your sites to StumbleUpon will give them the opportunity to be seen, liked, and shared at no cost to you.

Digg

Although Digg’s influence has slightly fallen off recently, the links received are still powerful. By consistently submitting your content to Digg, you might strike the gold mine and get on the homepage. This chance is extremely slim, though. Still, by making several accounts and giving your site some “Diggs,” its authority will slowly aggregate and you have an opportunity to get your page off the ground and in to the eyes and computer screens of many other internet users.

Chime.in

Not a very well known site, Chime.in integrates all different parts of the social networking experience in to one single site. Everything on the site is made public, and media can be inserted into every post. Community pages are huge on Chime.in and can help the founders with site promotion or even monetize the page with ads. With a Google PageRank of 8, this site is great for getting pages indexed in to Google. Although the usage of the site pales monstrously in comparison to sites like StumbleUpon and Digg, Chime.in offers a lot of potential if you are willing to look in to it.

Delicious

Not nearly as large as it once was, Delicious still claims several million users globally, and is one of the early social bookmarking sites. Operating off of a categorical submission system, Delicious is extremely easy to submit to, and will help boost the crawl rate of your site. Similarly with Digg, your site (if popular enough) has the opportunity to make the “hotlist” on the site’s homepage, which can help drive natural traffic back to your site. Although its popularity has not seen much increase in recent years, Delicious is still one of the bigger social bookmarking sites currently in use on the web. Since all bookmarks posted to Delicious are publicly viewable, posting pages of your site to it can sort of force Google to crawl it faster and more often.

Social Networking

Social Networking sites have become the most widely used form of website on the internet (besides Google, of course) and have become an integral part in how people of today manage their social lives. It is a weird topic to discuss, but social networks like Facebook infiltrate all age groups, and have slowly become a preferred form of communication amongst most people. The scope and reach of social networking sites is so monstrous, as it allows certain things to spread virally through millions of people in a matter of minutes. News of a catastrophic incident like the shooting massacre in Colorado this past week can spread out from the source and into the eyes of millions within the first 30 minutes. Capitalizing on this extreme connectivity will help your site rank higher in Google, as well as drive real, interested people to your site. The most popular social networking sites today include Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.

Facebook

Ah, Facebook. The crown jewel of modern social networking, Facebook dominates the networking world with an active user estimate of nearly 850 million individuals. This number is staggering when you think that nearly one-seventh of the people alive on the earth use this single website to manage their social lives. The creation of “social shares” on Facebook allow websites or any other information, picture, media, etc., to be spread easily on a large scale around the web. Google claims they do not include social shares directly in their algorithm, but there is no doubt that having some social shares is an SEO goldmine. By posting the Share Button API on your site, visitors can share your pages around the web, giving you natural backlinks at no cost to you. Even beyond the links you gain from this, the shares you get from visitors will help direct traffic to your site, you otherwise would go without.

Twitter

Quite a bit different from Facebook and Google Plus, Twitter’s style of social networking focuses more on the quick relaying of information between people. Google admits to using data collected from tweets; however, there is sort of a twist in how to manipulate Twitter for your SEO needs. Simply creating ten thousand accounts and tweeting a link to your site will get you nowhere. Google only counts re-tweets from powerful followers in their ranking process. This means that in order to make use of Twitter for SEO purposes, you must have genuinely interesting things to say, or a loyal group of powerful followers in order to make a difference. The potential for increasing site rank is definitely there, though. By gaining even a small amount of social recognition through re-tweets about your site, you will always have a flow of new visitors just based on the amount of people each individual re-tweet reaches.

Google+

Google+, not as big as Google’s social networking team had hoped for, however, for SEO purposes there is a lot of valuable stuff to gain from using this site. There slightly new approach to social networking puts your friends, family, work buddies, etc., in different “circles” to which you can share things. Its like having a file cabinet with everyone you know perfectly organized neatly in to little manila folders. Like with all other social sites, gaining some recognition and following through Google+ would obviously be helpful, however, the real SEO gold comes from somewhere else. This site is Google’s own house! Obviously the data contracted from this site will be skewed in importance compared to competitors sites. When using Google+, Google will auto-ping your domain, helping you get indexed faster and rise in the rankings quicker. Google values this data very highly, so creating Google+ pages will definitely help you out in your quest for a higher rank.

Social Sharing

Imagine taking social bookmarking sites and social networking sites and throwing them in a martini mixer with a bunch of ice cubes and a tooth-pick speared olive, shake the living hell out of it and viola, you get Social Sharing sites. These sites are sort of a new breed in the overall social networking world, but have more potential for site rank than most people and SEO’s simply pass over. Social sharing sites take the link sharing of social bookmarking and the social outreach of social networks, and join them together in the search engine optimization treasure chest everyone in the SEO industry searches for. The most popular social sharing sites surging in use as of now include Visual.ly, Reddit, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Youtube.

Visual.ly

Although most people have not heard of this site, Visual.ly’s creators designed this social platform as a way to spread the billions of pieces of unique content we make daily. This site is perfect for data graphs and even more importantly, infographics. Making a short graphic for your site and posting it on Visual.ly will earn you a very powerful backlink and the possibility for social recognition.

Reddit

One of the pickiest and most selective social sharing websites on the web, Reddit has around 35 million users and receives around 1.8 billion monthly page views. The large scale of this site is perfect for releasing links to your site’s pages. However, the community of “Redditors” are notoriously picky in what they want to see or read about, so sharing a couple real posts before you seed your own content would be recommended. The moderators of the site, as well as the whole community is very keen on picking out spam, so try to keep all of your content natural.

Instagram

Launched officially towards the end of 2010, Instagram is a free photosharing program that allows for users to take photos, apply digital filters, and share the image on an array of social networking sites. The app really started to gain popularity in the beginning of the year 2011, and has only grown out to a larger audience since then. With a count of approximately 50 million users worldwide, Instagram’s most significant potential lies in the massive outreach it has among all different social platforms. As of today, there is not much true SEO value to the program; however, it is soon to be bought out by Facebook in the coming months, so there is no harm in starting some sort of following with your site.

Tumblr

The teenage girl’s favorite media style blog, this social sharing site can be very powerful in ranking a site. Tumblr’s format and target audience might not be the best one to delve in for a 50 year old man; however, the availability of natural backlinks and social recognition is definitely there. By posting soe uniquely natural content first, before posting your own site’s things will give your links added value. Tumblr is different from other social sharing sites like Reddit because it deals primarily with media posts, such as pictures, videos, and gifs.

Pinterest

This social sharing site has enormous potential for search engine optimization of a site. All good SEO’s know this and use Pinterest to virally seed content and gain strong backlinks as well as traffic to their site. Pinterest’s format acts as a virtual bulletin board, as users can “pin” interesting content to their own pages, whether it’s pictures, texts, graphics, etc., and be seen by fellow users all around the world. The viral potential of Pinterest makes it a necessary site to use for optimizing your site. Google has figured out how to detect spam re-pins of content, so in order to make use of the power of Pinterest, try to gain good, natural re-pins. The easiest way to do this is to create infographics about things either related to your site, or stuff you can host on your site.

Just to reiterate, THEY HAVE TO BE GOOD. Pinterest is a game changer in the SEO world if you know how to properly utilize its sharing potential. Content posted for the purpose of gaining re-pins won’t get them if its boring, spammy, or unoriginal. The key to breaking open this chest of gold is to create original content that has the versatility to be shared amongst all users. Given, that is much easier said than done, and only the best can make viral content on a regular basis. Either way, Pinterest is great even if you only get a few re-pins, as the authority you gain will be worth it in the long run.

Youtube

Perhaps one of the most widely used sites on the web, Youtube houses billions of unique videos, many of which reach large audiences quickly. Like Google+, Youtube is Google’s own house, and they surely use the data gained from Youtube when ranking sites. Youtube has potential to spread your specific product or website if the videos are original and interesting. Although it might be hard to create videos for a site, any webmaster should look in to the benefits of using Youtube to gain traffic and links.

Conclusion

Social media dominates the global communication and information share of today’s society. The world we all live in now is so intertwined with the internet and social networks, that in order for your site, business, or company to thrive, you need to be well represented on all platforms of the social sphere. By joining the social spheres of the above sites, you can boost your site’s crawl rate and index time, allowing your site to be indexed faster by Google and begin the ranking climb you are looking for. They also provide organic traffic whether you believe it or not. Regardless of the site you own, your site will gain some natural traffic by internet users. Whether it is about mousepads or fire extinguishers, there are people on the web who will go to your site. These people will help share your content and gain you natural links back to your site. There is no doubt about it—social media sites will give you an edge in search engine optimizing.

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The importance and widespread notoriety of social media clearly shows it’s reach and value. Social media has leaked its way into virtually every television advertisement or radio commercial. “Like us on Facebook” has become one of the most common phrases heard on television today. Social media has also leaked its way into our phones with the advent of smartphones and apps. Every social network has an accompanying app for smartphone users, putting the power of social media in the pocket of every user. Smartphone users have the capability to use social media at any time and see everything that is happening in their social network.

Brand Management

In the technologically advanced world of today a strong internet presence is the key to success. Creating a good reputation for your brand name is very important in the success of any business. A great way to create an online presence is through social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Every brand name has a social media pages that promote their brand name because it is such a vital part of business.

Online business reviews have become a huge factor in the market for consumers. Many people view these reviews and comments on the internet and take them as fact, but the fact is that many times these reviews come from competitors or biased opinions. It is vital to make sure the internet correctly portrays your company for what it is and not what other companies want others to think. Creating your very own online presence is the only way to avoid other companies from slandering your image and name.

Social Media in the Google Algorithm

Google rarely divulges it’s secrets of their ranking algorithm. They vehemently deny that they use social media shares as way to rank pages on Google, but contrary to their statements there are many case studies that show a strong correlation between social media shares and Google rank. The Google algorithm is designed to give you the best search results by finding the sites with the most notoriety and value and social shares are a good indicator of a valuable website. Adding social share icons to your site not only directly lifts your pages rankings but also helps it gain attention and attract natural links. These are two critical factors that play a huge role in the ranking algorithm.

Services We Offer

Here at Rank Executives we understand the importance of social media and how to manage social media for a business to increase interest and brand name. Our professional team of social media experts will create and run social media pages for your company on all of the leading social media sites. Our experts are trained to manage your brand and portray a positive image for your company. We will post updates to help gain followers and depict the values your business would like to convey. Depending on what your business desires our experts will taylor your social media pages to your liking, but our expert advice is key to running and keeping it afloat in the social networking world. Social networkers are on top of their game 24/7 so it is important that pages see constant activity and don’t remain stagnant or boring; at Rank Executives we will make sure your page is filled with new and exciting media at all times and will never go unnoticed.

Creating Viral Content

The viral nature of the internet is the phenomenon that brings it such value and prosperity. Viral content can reach the homes of millions in a matter of seconds in the hands of the internet. Social media pages thrive off of this viral content. Here at Rank Executives our team of experts is specialized in creating original viral content such as videos, articles, images, and infographics. Viral content is one of the best ways to gain followers and promote your brand. The extreme outreach of viral content makes it a must for all businesses who are ahead of the times and want to build an internet presence.

Content Makes the SEO World Go Round

Promoting content in press releases on social media sites is a vital key to building your business. One of the largest growth areas in online marketing is the business of content creation, optimizing, and promoting content. Brands are becoming publishers of content, which isn’t a new phenomenon, but it is becoming much more common.

Tracking Your Results With Analytics

To properly track and measure the success of your social media efforts it is important to use social media monitoring tools. These tools will tell you important information about your social media page such as data on user activity and number of users. You can use this data to understand how well your social campaign is working and how to optimize your social media page for the best outcomes. Without these analyzing tools, knowing the right decisions to make would be much harder, but with these tools we can effectively ease the decision process.

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White Hat SEO is Safe and Future Proof

In the world of internet marketing and search engine optimization, there are two distinct realms in which people can operate. At one end of the spectrum lies the realm of Black Hat SEO, where no rules apply to the methods and processes used to rank sites. These shady tactics stem from SEO agencies that are relentless in their low, bottom feeding methods of building links. On the other end sits White Hat SEO, where the push for site ranking is generated naturally. White Hat SEO’s diverge completely from Black Hats in their link building styles and their overall strategy for ranking sites. Websites that practice White Hat tactics avoid all of the sketchiness and risk that their reciprocal counterparts embrace. RankExecutives.com proudly practices White Hat tactics for each and every client.

Internet Marketing Evolution and Development of Search Engines

In recent years, the processes used for site ranking have developed and become insanely complex. This evolution of site rank, accelerated and master-minded by Google, unintentionally spawned two separate but powerful realms of site rank practice. Search Engine Optimization became a necessity for all websites, old and new. As this development of SEO took place, the market for online shops and other websites exploded simultaneously. Websites ranked in the first page of Google saw drastic increases in sales compared to fellow sites ranked lower. Slowly but surely, online marketing became a multimillion dollar industry and the dependance of internet users on the Google search engine created a massive demand for SEO work for all websites.

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The Schism: Black Hat vs. White Hat SEO

As the SEO industry exploded in popularity, the way in which these SEO agencies operated split off in to two reciprocal directions. Companies who practiced Black Hat tactics seemed like the most profitable option to site owners looking for immediately high rankings. The methods Black Hat SEO’s used included tactics like spam link building, which provided thousands of backlinks to a site through bots and other low quality link webs. These mass link building efforts did well for a while, and companies who used them saw great increases in site rank as well as profits; however, all good things would come to an end. Google is more than just a site—Google is a billion dollar company with the resources and intelligence to crush anyone operating against the grain. After a short while of success Black Hat tactics, Google’s ranking team created improved algorithms which eliminated and heavily penalized sites operating under the Black Hat flag.

As this roller coaster ride of small successes and utter failure for Black Hat SEO’s took its ups and downs, sites utilizing White Hat strategies continued on a steady path to the top. Through the creation of natural content, websites gained trustworthy links to other authoritative sites. Beyond this natural relationship between good content and relevant linking, White Hat SEO’s expanded their strategies to other forms of natural rank increasing. Through methods like press releases and news coverage, new sites gained quality promotion from real, interested people rather than spam backlinks from irrelevant and shady websites. Even as Google changed and complicated their ranking algorithm, White Hat SEO tactics still payed off, and even became more powerful. Black Hat methods still had some successes, but the risk of getting your site completely expelled from Google over a handful of dirty links simply outweighed the small chance of success that it aimed for. Currently, Black Hat and White Hat optimization strategies are used widely, yet the split between the two has grown bigger as Google has modified their ranking processes.

What We Do – Only White Hat SEO

Here at RankExecutives, our staff stays dedicated to understanding the Google ranking algorithm. Through our research and case studies, we have concluded that the most effective way to rank sites long term is to practice a variety of White Hat SEO tactics. Unlike Black Hat SEO agencies, we provide our clients with a list of our link building methods. We work hands on with website owners to develop target strategies specific to each site. Through viral seeding and social media promotion, we help get websites natural notoriety by targeting the unique interest groups they relate to. Using techniques such as infographic production and fan page creation, we can help your site gain direct traffic that has an increased aptitude for purchasing your product or simply interacting with your site. Our content writers can generate natural content specific to the keywords you want to target, and fill your site with intriguing articles that can gain natural links just based off of quality. Unlike Black Hat tactic of spam link building, we practice guest blog posting which allows us to build a large web of authoritative links based off of well written articles centered on a link to your site. This natural process gets our client’s sites solid links that will continuously provide authority to the site, as well as drive real traffic too.

List of our White-Hat SEO Tactics:

• Guest Posting
• Infographics
• Viral Seeding
• Content Creation
• Press Releases
• Directory Submission
• Webmaster Outreach
• Natural Link Bait
• Spread News & Gain Links
• Manual Forum Comments

Besides natural link building strategies, RankExecutives extends our White Hat SEO practices into other surefire areas of rank increasing. Using webmaster outreach, we help our clients get in touch with fellow website owners who can put up relevant links back to the site, as well as provide real promotion within the niche. Other methods such as directory submission puts our client’s sites on Google’s radar, and will get them indexed in several search engines. Natural forum comments and other forms of online promotion involved in the site’s specific niche can help drive interested people to the site, and possibly even help gain more links to the site.

Does White Hat SEO Actually Work?

A lot of times, clients ask us, “Why not just use Black Hat agencies?”, “They rank faster”. It seems like a quick an easy solution to site ranking; however, there are several insurmountable flaws that can and will bring down sites. The crucial factor that makes White Hat SEO the best investment lies in its longevity. Sites that use White Hat SEO tactics are future proof.

Google aims to devalue and penalize Black Hat sites. They have an entire staff of people, armed with algorithms specifically designed to find Black Hat sites. Google has a goal to take them all down. It might take a week, a month or longer. Eventually, sites centered around Black Hat ranking techniques will get discovered and dropped drastically from the SERPs. The links built to sites using these slimy tactics are low quality and unnatural, and they require a constant stream of them to even slightly increase your site. This is why Black Hat firms will tell clients, “Once you stop doing SEO, your sites will drop.” When you are utilizing Black Hat methods, sites must be pumped with thousands of poor spam links in order to stay indexed. Once you stop paying for these shady links, there will be no other anchors to keep your site in the spot it is ranked, and that is even if your site makes it through Google’s indexing process without getting banned.

These terrible risks and poor long term effects are what makes White Hat SEO agencies like RankExecutives the best choice for your SEO needs. Our methods will bring you to the top, and keep you there—the links don’t stop once your SEO service stops. We set you up to keep earning natural links through social media and your established authority. The links we help you build are long lasting and natural, thus they have zero risk of hurting your site. All of our clients get a free rank tracker to see how their traffic and rankings improve over time. Even after your service with our agency runs out, you will have learned enough to continue the strategy we laid out for you. These will keep you on pace to maintaining the rank we achieved you.

White Hat SEO should be the only form of SEO. Contact us for more information.

July 26th – An Update on White Hat SEO

Google Announces another Update

Two Days ago, Google announced a new update via twitter. This algorithm refresh is another update to their Panda Algorithm. Although on the surface a 1% update of search results does not seem extremely significant, it shows that they are taking further steps to reward white hat practices. Google is making a point to prove that White Hat SEO is the only form of search engine optimization. Keep honest and transparent practices for all your marketing efforts. As long as you fill your sites with natural, non-spun content, and care about good user experience, you will be fine.

We have been doing white hat seo for over 2 years, consistently for every client. Testing against sties that use black hat tactics, our results were more sustainable and long term.

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How does google analyze time on site?

Google does not gather the data from analytics or tracking code. Google simply checks to see how long a user takes to return back to the results page. If a user clicks a link in the results, then instantly returns back to Google, chances are, that user did not find what they were looking for. On the other hand, if a user clicks a result in Google, and that user takes 30 minutes to return back to Google, it is safe to assume that the result was high quality.

How can you boost time on site?

Content. Quality content is key to increasing the amount of time spent on web pages. One of the most simplest forms of content is images. By increasing the number of images, graphics, and viewable content on a page, users tend to stay a bit longer. However, you need quality infographics, well written and informative content, and material that naturally boosts users interests.

How much does time on site impact rankings?

We feel that the effects from a poor time on site can drastically hurt rankings. Google probably analyzes time on site in comparison to competitors. If a link is 3rd in the SERPS page, but the time on site is 5 minutes, that URL may soon move above the second place result if his time on site is only 1 minute, regardless of overall authority.

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