The 10 Dos and 10 Don’ts of a Corporate Social Media Strategy

Guides, reports and presentations can be useful tools in order to build an effective social media strategy of highly ROI. But, what if we attempt to extract the essence of the main Do’s and Don’ts that a Social Media Strategist should print and keep in a major place at office?

In this article we describe in detail what you should do and what you should avoid while designing, developing and executing your social media strategy and we provide the top of the mind list of a successful social media strategist:

10 Social Media Do`s

1. Before developing, identify the 4W: WHAT, WHO, WHEN and WHY.
2. Clear out the goal. Either you want to approach a new niche market or you want to attract younger community members, be specific so that your messages are targeted.
3. Be in consistence with the value proposition that your company offers.
4. Carefully check the content before submitting. Always think the instant word of mouth.
5. Build a community instead of audience and trusted relationships instead of campaigns.
6. Offer valuable (and even exclusive) content for the targeted audience.
7. Listen to your audience and respond immediately and wisely. Receive product feedback and integrate into your strategy.
8. Keep a coherence image and attitude in different channels.
9. Measure your achievements. Define goals and Key performance indicators. Make sure you measure and review your strategy based on the results.
10. Be different and unique.

Above all remember that social media is a great channel that can provide you with invaluable feedback. Thus try to ENGAGE and INTERACT with the members of the community!

10 Social Media Dont`s

1. Don`t build it independently of your offline strategy.
2. Don`t advertise, engage your community.
3. Don`t shout, listen to conversations.
4. Don`t execute, interact with the people.
5. Don`t focus on products perception, but on their feelings when they use your products.
6. Don`t create a circle of fans but a circle of trust.
7. Don`t dictate, be democratic and community-oriented.
8. Don`t only ask, reward with gifts and information.
9. Don`t lie, be always authentic and faithful.
10. Don`t create promotion value but added value.

Above all remember that the main target of developing a social media campaign is to generate buzz for your company. Don`t try to sell directly.

If you like the above article, don`t forget to share it on social media! 

Social SEO: The Importance Of Social Signals For Your SEO

On the first blog post we covered the  1^st part of social signals for SEO  analyzing on how social signals work with the use of a simplified diagram how social signals work on site.

This part is going to cover more extensively the off-site social SEO and how analytics can help you identify the impact of your social media channels.

Off-site Optimization

Twitter and Social SEO

Twitter is social microblogging service and it can potentially be a great source of referral traffic for your website. When a business develops sharable content on Twitter, it is most likely that the post/tweets will be dynamically shared by users throughout the social web. The number of Favorites, RTs (retweets) is only just of the signals that can be seen by search engines, such as Google (another signal is the number of lists that the business has been added by other users –indicator of authority).

It is important to highlight the fact that the nofollow attribute applies on Twitter which means that the links that point to your company website might not carry any significant value. But as Google has admitted, in certain cases of links that repeatedly are shared, from Google they do give a value on these links.

It is worth mentioning that Google calculates the fact that a link carries more weight depending on the person who tweets it.

Thus it is important it is important for your business to take advantage of the full potentials of Twitter by creating sharable content that is associated, relevant to the nature of your business.

G+ and Social SEO

G+ is a social network developed by Google.  So when you try to develop you content for Google+ try to develop it as if you would optimize a website. For example on the ‘About’ section, describe your business as thoroughly as possible, by including important info (keywords, links that point to your website). Make sure that you keep an analogy of followers/following like Twitter (for example, if you have 10 in your circles, it’s much better to be in 40 circles, than the opposite), so that you establish your position as authority. The more users have you in their circles the more trustworthy and reliable your business is. Of course to achieve this kind or outcome is a strenuous process that will take time. Ensure that you create sharable content, with images and links that will point to your website. It is highly recommended that your images are optimized, exactly as if you would do for your website.

If you manage to create sharable and appealing content through your g+ account, more +1s (equivalent to Like), shares will come up. These are social signals (+1s, comment, share) that can enhance your position and bring more referral traffic.

Linkedin and Social SEO

Depending on the type of business you are running, it’s important to have in mind that the increase of your reliability and trustworthiness can come from other influencers. Particularly from influencers that come from the same industry and they share your content.
Thus, it is important to establish your position with the creation of high quality and fresh content that will be shared by other users (via Linkedin Groups). The more fresh and sharable content you create (with links pointing to your site) which will be shared by other influencers, the more likely for the business is to establish its position in terms of rankings. The social signals will be depicted on the number of links that point to your website and these metrics will appear on the Referral Traffic (of Google Analytics).

Facebook and Social SEO

Facebook is the most popular social networking site and is in a way the ‘’motive power’’ that generates more referral traffic than any other social networking site. The number of likes, shares from users is considered to be a vote of confidence by search engines. When a business posts a Facebook post, then the user who likes that kind of post, this action will be visible other users (the users that are friends to the user that has liked the post) via Facebook Ticker.
In this way, the content of your business can increase its chances to become more viral and thus the more likes and shares it gets the more likely is to give stronger signals to search engines.

Pinterest and Social SEO

One of the highest generators of referral traffic is Pinterest. The creation of images of high quality that are re-pinned/shared by users is a strong signal indicator. A company can measure this kind of impact on its referral traffic especially if the images are clickable and point to the website. That’s why it is important for companies to invest on their social media presence on Pinterest. Repins/shares, comments are indicators that matter for search engines and thus it is important for a business to create descriptive content (including links) that will direct users to the website.

Analytics

If you want to see the efficiency of your social media channels it is strongly advised to use the Backlink Analysis of Web SEO Analytics where you can see the number of incoming links to your website.

With Google Analytics you have a powerful tool which you can use it in order to measure the performance of your social media traffic.
In order to do this, just follow the steps below:

Traffic Sources -> Sources -> Referrals 

In this way you will have a complete overview of all 3rd party sites that pointed to your website.

If you want to have only details about the social media traffic (from specific social media channels) that was brought to your site you can follow the process below:

For instance, if you want to know the traffic that came from LinkedIn, just enable the Advanced Filter On and include the term LinkedIn.
In this way, you will be able to see the number of traffic that you have brought from LinkedIn to your website.

Alternatively, if you need something more elaborate, to know for example how many visits exceeded a certain number of visits/goals that you have set for your social media channels, then you can go to:

Advanced Segments -> Custom Segments

It’s up to you to define the social networks that you want to monitor and it’s up to you to define the values that you consider as important.

The values that will be inserted into the tab should be in that form:

facebook.com|twitter.com*

*In order for your values to become accepted on Google Analytics it is absolutely essential for you, to include the slash between ”facebook” and the full-stop. Similarly for Twitter (Twitter.com)

Best Practices For Optimizing Your Website For Mobile Devices

Over the last few years, Mobile Marketing has become an essential part of the promotional strategy. As a result optimizing your website for mobile devices is now very important since more and more users tend to access the internet via their Smartphones, tablets or mobile devices. In this article we will discuss whymobile optimization is important and we will present the best practices and tips of mobile optimization so as to increase ROI, online revenue and enhance the online interactions with your targeted audience.

Mobile Browsing will soon overtake Desktop Internet Usage

With Smartphones and tablet devices turning the Internet into a beyond doubt real-time experience, mobile site optimization seems to be an imperative need for businesses to tap into new markets and catch up new trends and needs of today demanding consumers who are always on the move.

People are spending more time than ever on their mobile phones while by 2014 mobile internet is estimatedto overtake Desktop internet use. As a result mobile optimization constitutes a great opportunity yet challenge for marketers to deliver targeted direct messages and a unique online experience through mobile friendly websites.

Mobile friendly sites are not simply designed to fit into small screens but also to interact with the users in the most cost and time effective way. Below you can find the 10 best practices for optimizing your website for mobile devices:

1. Use targeted content & prioritize your Information

Content should be brief and easy to find. Specific and few direct features and information is a must to satisfy user needs. For that reason prioritizing information to lead to conversion is the key action.

2. Simplify Navigation

Visitors should find the information within 3 clicks, while scrolling should be vertical than horizontal withback to top or home indications to facilitate usability. Moreover a search box can speed things up and satisfy users.

3. Size matters

Design with a fluid layout of a minimum width at 320px and implementation of clickable elements big enough for a fingertip, ≈44px² is the best way to facilitate mobile use. Click-to-call constitutes a smart feature for immediate contact.

4. Design matters

Design should be adapted to mobile reality. The best practice indicated is a fluid layout that will adjust to any screen size. More colors or increased contrast constitute an extra assistance to design visibility.

5. Use Call to action

Concerning bid advertisements and banners have in mind that the screen fills easily and such actions are likely to delay loading significantly. For that reason, using targeted short messages upon colourful buttons is the best way to lead your audience to conversion.

6. Interactivity

Mobile reality speaks with real time marketing. For that reason, you need up to date information. Your mobile needs to display the best current offers and news to attract visitor’s eye and interest so as to convert into action.

7. Development

Avoid Flash and Java applets, minimize the use of JavaScript and use instead HTML5 & CSS3. Note that not all browsers support HTML5 features, but they will still accept the HTML5 doctype. This technology seems to be the ideal solution in developing mobile friendly sites, avoiding in that way flash display issues. Furthermore, turn off auto-scaling to ‘inform’ mobile devices that your site is mobile friendly.

8. Duplication of Content – Myth or Reality?

In the case of mobile sites versions duplication of content is a myth. You can keep the most significant points of your site’s desktop version to arouse interest and smooth the progress of finding useful instant information. Google bot-mobile crawls the mobile content to identify the fact that it is a different version. Make sure you identify users that access your website via mobile devices and redirect them to the mobile version of your website. Moreover define mobile Sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools as you would have done for the main website.

9. Testing

Always test your website’s ‘friendliness’ by viewing it with several mobile devices! Note that your website might be presented differently on old devices or on different mobile technologies.  Also it is always a good idea to Validate your XHTML on W3C by using the following free service:

http://validator.w3.org/mobile/

10. Location –Domain,  Sub domain or redirection?

It is widely believed that applying the same URL for both desktop and mobile version is the most effective and efficient way to introduce your website. However, for technical & SEO reasons it is highly recommended to use subdomains and redirect the user to the mobile version where you shall deliver different – specific mobile content to users.

In brief Mobile Site optimization needs to be smart, creative, targeted and time effective to serve real – time marketing needs and satisfy always moving consumers at any point, at any time and any case!

60 SEO Tips & Online Marketing Techniques For Ecommerce Websites

Improving the Online Marketing presence of an Ecommerce website is usually a very challenging task. This is because the Online Marketers & SEO Professionals have to optimize the website in order to achieve better rankings on Search Engines, they must improve the user experience, they have to use all the available channels to promote the Online business and above all they have to find ways to increase conversion rates & boost the sales.

Few weeks ago we published a detailed SEO Checklist with 60 essential checks that need to be done before launching a website. In this article we list 60 important SEO tips and Online Marketing techniques that can be used in order to improve the Online Marketing presence of an ecommerce website. The list touches upon several different parts of the optimization process and thus we group the various tips & techniques in 8 large categories.

Link Structure

1. Use SEO Friendly URLs which contain the important keywords of each product or category.

2. Choose carefully your categories and use a tree-like link structure.

3. Prefer the “example.com/product1” URL structure over the “example.com/cat1/procuct1” structure if you have multiple categorization. The second one can create duplicate content issues.

4. Link directly from your homepage to your best selling products.

5. Watch out for duplicate content and use canonical URLs. Don’t create multiple landing pages for minor product differences (color, size etc).

6. Eliminate all the Dangling & Broken links by using the Link Structure Tool.

On Page Optimization

7. Conduct Keyword Research and find out how people search for your products.

8. Use targeted, compelling and unique Page Titles.

9. Usually you should use singular over plural (example camera vs cameras). Check the trends in your industry to see which is more popular.

10. Don`t use generic manufacturer product descriptions to avoid duplicate content issues. Write meaningful & useful descriptions for at least the best selling products.

11. Optimize your pages for the targeted keywords and check their Keyword Rank with Keyword Analyzer tool.

12. Don`t create thin content and pages that are not needed. Panda is watching you!

13. Produce compelling SERP snippets to increase CTR.

14. Use schema.org to label the product details and prices.

15. Update your content regularly to keep it fresh.

16. Optimize your images (filenames, alts, surrounded text) to increase the traffic that you receive throughImage Search.

Link Building

17. Use targeted anchor texts by using the keywords that appear on the title of each product/category.

18. Analyze the link building campaigns of your competitors and try to acquire links from the same high quality sources.

19. Use text hyperlinks to link between your products and categories.

20. Build links that point directly to the product landing pages and don’t focus all your link building efforts only on homepage.

Design & User experience

21. Use properly the call to actions. Keep them clear and place them strategically on your pages.

22. Create a compelling, user friendly, professional design.

23. Use “security badges” (McAfee, VeriSign, Better Business Bureau or Direct Marketing Association) to gain the trust of your visitors.

24. Don`t confuse the visitor with 1 million options. Steer his/her attention to the call to action.

25. Offer all the cool features such as “Add to wishlist”, “Send Email alert when product becomes available”, “subscribe to Newsletter” etc. They are good for the users and they can help you increase conversion rates.

26. Use several images and videos featuring the best selling products.

27. Ensure that your website is cross browser.

28. Keep your check-out and payment process simple to increase your conversion rate and reduce theShopping cart abandonment rate.

29. Reduce the loading time of your website by minimizing the size of css/js/image files and by using caching mechanisms.

Website Structure & Architecture

30. Choose carefully the Ecommerce platform that you will use. Ensure that it is regularly updated, that it has lots of plugins, that it is supported by an active community or a serious company and that it is SEO Friendly. Don’t select the platform only based on its cost.

31. Create HTML & XML sitemaps and submit them to the various search engines.

32. Avoid using AJAX, Flash and other non SEO Friendly technologies for important parts of your page.

33. Ensure that the session IDs do not appear in URLs. This can create a duplicate content issue.

34. Mind Pagination and the order of the products in those pages. Ensure that the most important/best selling/popular products appear first on the list.

35. Create a product RSS feed.

36. Offer to your users the ability to search for particular products based on their name, brand, price andcharacteristics.

Social Media & Promotion

37. Add the social media buttons on a strategic place of your page.

38. Use product reviews and ratings.

39. Organize contests to generate positive Buzz for your company.

40. Create a blog within your website and write reviews for the best selling products.

41. Use PPC advertising to get highly targeted traffic.

42. Use Email Marketing campaigns and keep in touch with your loyal customers.

43. Sign up on Google Merchant Center to have your products appearing on Google Product Search.

44. Check if affiliate marketing can help you boost your sales.

45. Don’t use spammy methods to promote your website (spam mail, comment trolling, etc)!

Monitoring

46. Track user behavior and see how he/she navigates through your website.

47. Identify your good clients, request their feedback and reward them by offering discounts.

48. Identify the trends and the best selling products.

49. Focus on conversion rates and make the appropriate changes to improve your sales.

50. Use A/B and Multivariable Testing to improve user experience and sales.

Off page factors and other must-have Features

51. Decide how many languages you should support on your website and which should be the default one. Have a different URL for each language version, don’t use a cookie solution.

52. Choose the name and the TLD of your domain wisely. A .com or a country specific TLD can really make the difference.

53. Host your website on a reliable hosting company. Choose wisely the country of the server.

54. Decide on whether you should use GEO Targeting methods.

55. Offer a lighter & simpler mobile version of your website.

56. Recommend similar products to your visitors.

57. Provide various payment methods to your customers (Credit Card, PayPal, Direct Bank Transfer etc).

58. Offer different shipping methods and reach to as many countries as possible.

59. Use robots.txt to ensure that search engine spiders can’t access the various ecommerce features/functions such as Add to Basket, complete purchase, add to wishlist etc.

60. Create Special Offers & Brand Landing Pages to boost your sales.

Even though optimizing an ecommerce website is a complicated and challenging task, I believe that the above list along with the initial SEO checklist that we published recently, can cover the most important parts of the process and they can be a great starting point for the SEO professionals & Online Marketers. I wish to all of you the best of luck and I’ll be happy to hear your thoughts and suggestions.

What other tips do you have for optimizing an Ecommerce website? Leave your comments below and don’t forget to share this article if you like it. 

SEO Pagination Guide

SEO Pagination Guide: Best Practices and Advanced Methods

 

As we discussed on the previous part of this guide, pagination has both pros and cons and sometimes it can’t be avoided. Your SEO campaign can be severely affected by pagination: Segmenting pages into several parts seriously reduces their strength, it lowers the chance of achieving high rankings and it leads toduplicate content problems. In this article we will discuss the effect of Pagination on the SEO campaign, we will present the best practices and methods that one should use and we will provide tips on when and how to implement pagination.

The effects of Pagination on SEO

As we briefly explained on the first part of the guide, pagination causes several SEO problems.

Incoming Links, PageRank and other metrics

First of all when you segment a piece of content into a series of pages, you also split important Indexing Properties such as incoming links, PageRank, Anchor Text data and Social Media shares. This has a direct effect on your rankings since the strength & importance of the page is divided among the series.

Crawling and Indexing

Another major problem of Pagination is that it makes it more difficult for search engines to crawl all pages of the website. This is because the distance between the page series and the homepage is increased and the search engine robots require more steps to reach them. This affects directly the amount of pages that are indexed and thus your rankings.

Internal Link Structure

Pagination heavily affects the Internal Link Structure that you created on your initial plan. The amount oflink juice that flows from Homepage to the paginated pages is reduced significantly as you add more levels on your Tree-like Internal Link Architecture. This is directly related with the above 2 problems.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content problems are also very common when pagination is used. This is particularly true when you paginate a list of entries (such as a list of products or articles). When those pages do not contain enough content for each entry of the list (product or article), they become a source of duplicate content problems. Moreover in specific types of websites such as online stores, where advanced filtering features are used to display the products, this effect becomes stronger.

Other Side Effects

Pagination is also known to be responsible for other unexpected side effects. Sometimes internal pages of the page series appear on Search Engine Results. If they are not optimized or relevant enough to attract user’s attention they lead to a drop on CTR and to an increase on Bounce Rate.

Currently there are 2 main methods that you can use in order to resolve the problems that are caused by pagination:

a) Using View-All pages and URL canonicalization on the page series
b) Marking your page series with rel=next and rel=prev.

Note that there is a 3^rd option which is to let Search Engines detect algorithmically the Pagination. Theoretically this can be considered an “OK” option if you don’t want to make drastic changes on the structure and web development of your website (given that you don’t face major SEO problems of course). Nevertheless it is strongly recommended to provide hints to the search engines on how to handle your content especially when you are developing a site from scratch.

View-All pages & rel=”canonical”

The View-All pages contain all the information of the page series on a single document. In case you are paginating a list of products then the View-All page would be a single page that contains a list of all the products of the particular category. In case you are paginating an article then the View-All page contains all the pieces of the content on a single page.

The main idea of this technique is to provide to search engines a page that contains the complete content of the paginated series. In order to avoid duplicate content issues and to pass Indexing Properties from the page series to the View-All page, you must use rel=canonical tag. On the top of each page series you must place a rel=canonical directive pointing to the View-All page. Here is an example of how to use this technique. Say that for some reason you have split your content into 3 pages:

some-paginated-page1.html, some-paginated-page2.html and some-paginated-page3.html

In order to create the View-All page you must take the content (text, images, videos etc) from all 3 pages and add it to a new page:

some-paginated-complete.html

Finally to make this work you must edit the 3 initial pages and place on their HTML head the following tag:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/some-paginated-complete.html” />

This technique should be used when:

• The View-All pages are available/supported on your website
• The loading time of View-All pages is not too high and the navigation is simple for the users
• You want to maximize the Keyword Combinations for which your content can rank
• You don’t want individual pages from the page series to appear on SERP
• It is not a problem to drive Search Engine traffic to the View-All version of your content
• You want a relatively simple and clean implementation

rel=”next” & rel=”prev”

This technique is more advanced than the previous but it allows you to do more complicated integrations. The rel=”next” and rel=”prev” elements are added on the HTML header of the page and work just like other rel=* tags to indicate a relationship between 2 documents. More specifically the rel=”next” tag shows the URL of the next page of the series while the rel=”prev” the previous one.

Here is an example of how to use this technique. Say again that for some reason you have split your content into 3 pages:

some-paginated-page1.html, some-paginated-page2.html and some-paginated-page3.html

In order to use this technique you must edit the 3 initial pages and place on their HTML head the following tag:

some-paginated-page1.html:
<link rel=”next” href=”http://www.example.com/some-paginated-page2.html” />

some-paginated-page2.html: 
<link rel=”prev” href=”http://www.example.com/some-paginated-page1.html” />
<link rel=”next” href=”http://www.example.com/some-paginated-page3.html” />

some-paginated-page3.html: 
<link rel=”prev” href=”http://www.example.com/some-paginated-page2.html” />

Note that if your webpage is not a static HTML document but it is dynamically created and thus passes parameters on the URL, then all of the parameters must be also present on the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” URLs. For example if the following URL is the first page of the listing of the products of a particular subcategory:

http://www.example.com/category.php?catID=3&subcategory=5&page=1

Then this is how you must specify the relationship with the next page:

<link rel=”next” href=”http://www.example.com/category.php?catID=3&subcategory=5&page=2″ />

Finally if your URLs contain parameters such as Session IDs, those must also be present on the next and prev elements! For example if your page is:

http://www.example.com/category.php?catID=3&subcategory=5&page=1&sessionID=a32f1031

This is how you must specify the relationship with the next page:
<link rel=”next” href=”http://www.example.com/category.php?catID=3&subcategory=5&page=2&sessionID=a32f1031” />

Last but not least to avoid having duplicate content issues due to the sessionIDs or other unnecessary parameters, you can use in each page of the series the rel=canonical elements:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/category.php?catID=3&subcategory=5&page=X” />

Where X is the number of each page. This technique should be used when:

• The View-All pages are not available on your website
• The loading time of View-All pages is too high or the navigation very complicated
• You don’t want to drive traffic to the View-All pages
• You want individual pages from the page series to appear on SERP. In fact if your content is segmented appropriately, you can optimize each page (Title, Description, Text etc) for different keywords and try to achieve better rankings and higher CTR. (Note though that 90% of the cases the page that appears on SERP is the first page of the series).

Last but not least note that rel=next and rel=prev is considered a strong hint by Google and that they are not forced to follow this directive.

10 Tips on how to implement pagination

First of all, my advice is to not to use the above techniques if you are not tech savvy or if you don’t fully understand them. It is very easy to shoot yourself on the foot and damage your SEO campaign. If your current website works and you don’t face a lot of problems, you can leave the analysis on Google. On the other hand if you are experienced, you want to have control over how Search Engines analyze your website; especially if you are developing a new website. Below I list 10 tips that will help you decide when and how to use pagination:

1. Use pagination only when it is necessary; pagination always comes with a price.
2. Over-segmentation is annoying for the users and causes problems on Search Engines.
3. Unless you have a very important reason, avoid paginating articles and content.
4. Pagination is in 99% of the cases required when you have a list of entries.
5. Most of indexing properties, such as Links and PageRank, will be transferred by using the 2 techniques that are described on the article. Nevertheless have in mind that some of the signals mightnot be included or fully transferred.
6. The “View All” pages are good for SEO but if you support them why did you do pagination anyway? You are still driving traffic to those pages via Google. Ask yourself again, do you really need pagination?
7. View-All pages will be extremely slow for lists once the size of your website increases. Use the rel=next and rel=prev implementation to paginate lists of articles or products.
8. Implement pagination by using all the best currently available web development techniques: Use SEO friendly URLs, Canonicals and mind your link architecture etc
9. If you are experienced take control on your hands. If you are not experienced let Search Engines decide for you.
10. Pagination will not affect only your SEO campaign, but also your Web Development, the User Experience, your Marketing and as a result your Business. Make sure you understand how all of these will be affected before you decide your implementation.

The last tip is very important and it is probably what most people don’t understand. We will dedicate our last article on this and we will examine a Real Life example which will show how complicated the decision making can become. Moreover we will see how you should select the implementation that matches your needs and what parameters you should take into account.