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Posts Tagged "SEO"
Perhaps you’ve thought about digital marketing and wondered whether this would be beneficial to your company. The Internet has definitely changed the way the world does business and it’s an exciting force of nature. Is Digital Marketing Really Worth the Expense? Did you know that there are thousands of people online looking for your products and/or services each week? But how to reach those folks with your message…that’s the big question. You want every dollar you spend on marketing to count! You want to make sure those dollars are being spent effectively, right? Below, Javier Loya CEO of OTC Global Holdings explains more thoroughly. How Does Digital Marketing Work? Digital marketing is now using smartphones quite a bit more. In the U.S. alone, 230 million people own a smartphone. A large percentage of those users find products and services on their phones. A new survey shows that 79 percent of those users will make a purchase using their phone. This has become an exciting new area for digital marketing experts. Sell Around the World Business owners can now sell their products and services to just about anyone around the globe. Let’s say for instance that your company sells printing and a man in Hong Kong will need some brochures printed in English for his upcoming convention. Utilizing Digital marketing, you can easily reach this potential customer. He sees your ad online and clicks on a hyperlink and within moments he is searching through your products and price list. Your entire transaction can be handled via email with very little phone calling. This offers you an opportunity to not only make a sale but also develop business relationships outside the United States. An Untapped Resource Javier Loya recently commented, saying, “Digital Marketing is an untapped resource for many business owners. It might be one of the best investments you can make. It can turn your small or medium sized company into an international production. It can give your sales that extra boost they’ve so desperately...
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Google combined the naming structure for the rich snippets, rich cards, and enriched results and will now call all such results “Rich Results.” Here is a short primer on everything an SEO should know about these Rich Snippets: How does Google obtain rich results? If you want the data from your site in the rich results, you will need to enable some form of structured data to the search engine spiders. There is no guarantee that the data from your site will show as a rich result, although doing so increases the likelihood. WordPress users only need to install a plugin to enable schema.org structures for their site data. What is the preferred format? The reason sites like Google insist on using structured data for displaying these results is because they allow a site to provide structure to spiders while keeping the display of the data the same for users. Google supports JSON-LD, Microdata, and RDFa, but prefers JSON-LD. Will I rank better? The markup or even appearing in the rich results will not change your ranking for other terms or even the term that appears on the page. Google shows relevant rich results for the search from any of the top 10 results on the page. How do I know if it will work? Any webmaster can use the testing tool by Google to check if the structured markup is correct. Here is an excerpt from the Google Webmaster blog: “The new tool provides a more accurate reflection of the page’s appearance on Search and includes improved handling for Structured Data found on dynamically loaded content. The tests for Recipes, Jobs, Movies, and Courses are currently supported — but this is just a first step, we plan on expanding over...
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Personal assistant search optimization is the phrase coined to the new art of optimizing and marketing for the new crop of voice activated digital personal assistants. Most analysts firmly believe that this is the future of SEO. This is not too surprising, if you think about where assistants like Goole Home and Siri get their information. SEO will eventually morph into optimization for voice based personal assistants. Here is what you need to know about PASO: Portability Although these personal assistants still need a lot of work, their primary draw is portability. The assistants exist on smartphones, tablets, and other computing device you carry around. Once the platform matures, typing in queries will seem like an antiquated notion. Personal Another reason that personal assistants are the future of SEO is the tailoring of results to the user. The portability provides context to the queries. Add some AI and machine learning and you have contextual responses tailored to the individual. For example a query for “where to have lunch” would return a list of restaurants in the area, ordered by price and rating with your favourite cuisine first. Results The results returned from a personal assistant are limited. Unlike the million or so results you get from Google, a typical assistant returns one to four at maximum. This has resulted in much higher click through rates than normal search. As a result, being one of the top four results is more important than...
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There are a lot of changes we can expect in 2018 with Google Search and as a result, in the world of SEO. Here are some of the main changes we can expect: Machine Learning The biggest change we can expect is more use of machine learning and artificial intelligence in Search. Google uses machine learning in RankBrain, Cloud Vision, etc. When Google first announced RainBrain, the technology only affected 15% of search queries. Today, RankBrain affects all search queries. We can expect that machine learning will take over more and more components of the search algorithm. Voice Search Google sold millions of Google Assistant enabled devices during the last holiday season. Today, one in five queries are from voice search. With so many new Google Assistant devices in the market, we can expect the majority of queries to slowly switch over to voice. Google will surely increase the proliferation of Featured Snippets, as they are the source of information for Assistant devices. Linkless Mentions Microsoft’s Bing search engine uses a method of tracking mentions that do not involve a backlink and provide credit for the attribution. Google looks to be doing the same, based on a recent patent filing. Once again, Google will use machine learning to find, identify, and track these linkless mentions. Fake News Google will activate Knowledge-Based Trust (KBT), its new system to evaluate the quality of the page based on the accuracy of the content. It will be difficult for anyone to measure the success of the system outside of Google, but it shows that accuracy and truthfulness will become a part of ranking...
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At a presentation by Marcus Tober on new ranking factors for 2017 and beyond, there were some noteworthy changes to how Google’s algorithm is changing. Here are some highlights from the presentation. There are three general trends according to the presentation: Page load times are dropping across the board. Both HTTPS and page load speed are new (and public) ranking signals that require little effort on the part of the site owners to implement. Google’s grasp of the meaning and intention behind the content is increasing, and the data shows that more and more pages that rank at the top do not have the keyword phrase in the title. Bigger is better by the looks it as higher ranking correlates quite highly with content length, with the top three positions as much as 45% longer than lower ranked content. Also, there seems to be a tendency to weigh ranking factors differently by industry: The study examined the difference between the weights of ranking factors from one industry to another. For example, Finance sites get a higher boost from HTTPS than a gaming site. On the other hand, larger and better images boost travel sites but show no difference for finance sites. The ranking factors also change for niche sites. Recipe sites get more of a boost when using schema than others. SEO is changing, and Google is getting better and better at identifying good content that matches both the site and the user’s intention. The changes are positive in that they encourage and promote the creation quality content that has value to the...
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